A ditty from the ‘witch of Berkeley’
Last night, I saw a TV ad that adapted Pete Seeger’s 1963 hit “Little Boxes” to sell power bars — OK, it was for Luna Bars.
But rather than selling me on a White Chocolate Macadamia Luna Bar, the ad made me think about Malvina Reynolds, the archetypal nasty woman who wrote that song.
Malvina Milder was born in San Francisco in 1900 to Jewish socialist parents who had no money, but a rich love of music. They scraped together enough cash to send Malvina to violin lessons.
Because her parents opposed the First World War, Malvina was denied a high school diploma. Undaunted, she managed to go to the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
She married a carpenter/labor organizer named William “Bud” Reynolds in 1934 and had her daughter, Nancy, the following year.
Then she went back to get her doctorate, but owing to the triple threat of being Jewish, socialist and female, no college would hire her to teach.
In the ’40s, she fell in with lefty folksingers like Seeger. Yet again, she went back to school to study music theory.
Soon enough she was writing songs, many of them putting to music the progressive causes dear to her heart.
Her notable songs include “Turn Around,” a hit for Harry Belafonte and a notable Kodak commercial in the ’60s, and “What Have They Done to the Rain,” a hit for the Searchers in 1964.
She also wrote children’s songs. Perhaps her most famous is “Magic Penny,” with the line “Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more.”
Reynolds, by all accounts, refused to grow old in any predictable way — the writer Michael Rossman refers to her as the Singing Witch of Berkeley.
In later years, she still toured and even appeared on “Sesame Street.” Reynolds died in 1978.
Over the next couple of days, I think she is a good person to think about.
This essay appeared on Gray Matters. Read more at HoustonChronicle/local/ gray-matters