Forgive me for being slow on the uptake, but the inimitable Louden Wainwright III has written a song called The Paul Krugman Blues. It’s very droll: “When Paul goes on The NewsHour to talk to old Jim Lehrer/ He looks so sad and crestfallen it’s more than I can bear/ And all the other experts all seem way off base/ And I guess that I identify with that pissed off look on Paul’s face.” I love it!

Beth Lomax Hawes, folklorist, member of the great Lomax family of musical anthropologists, member of the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among others (that would be Beth in the photo below tucked into the upper right hand corner, above Pete, with Woody to her right), and most memorably, co-author of amusing song “M.T.A.”, died November 27 at the age of 88. In 1949, borrowing the tunes from two old folk songs, “The Ship That Never Returned” and “Wreck of the Old 97,”Hawes and Jacqueline Steiner wrote the song to back the mayoral campaign of the Progressive Party candidate, Walter A. O’Brien Jr. A decade later, The Kingston Trio had a major hit with the merry song, although to avoid charges that they were “glorifying a communist” (that would be Walter), they fictionalized the name of the candidate to George O’Brien. An early example turning leftism into a viable commercial brand. A couple of years ago, Boston named its commuter transit card The Charlie Card. Hawes received the National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton in 1993. My sister was a big fan of The Kingston Trio and other folk singers when she was in collegge, and although I was in grade school, I absorbed a lot of the sensibility through Rose’s interest, and “M.T.A.” was one of catchiest, funniest songs. Thanks, Beth, for your droll, amusing contribution to pop culture.

Thanks to the largesse of Radio Station 107.1 The Peak, I won tickets to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at the Paramount Theater in Peekskill last night. The very tight, nine-member band from New Orleans really swung, and the players’ virtuosity was clear even to this untutored ear. The band has been together 16 years and has recorded a number of albums; its latest, “How Big Can You Get?”, is devoted to the music of Cab Calloway. Among the numbers performed last night were “Minnie The Moocher”, “Go Daddy-O”, “Jumpin’ Jack”, “Zig Zaggity Woop Woop (Pt. 2)”, “I Wan’na Be Like You” (from Disney’s The Jungle Book), and “Swing, Swing, Swing”. Good show!

By the end of the week, we will embark on the 40th anniversary of one of the most amazingly newsworthy months of our history. July 16th, of course, is the anniversary of the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first me to walk on the moon. Two days after that, on Martha’s Vineyard, Teddy Kennedy drove off his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off the Dyke Bridge, and young Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life. Three weeks later, on the nights of August 8th and 9th, the Charles Manson and his followers brutally murdered Sharon Tate and five other people. The following week, in a small town in Sullivan County, New York, the Woodstock Festival proved to the world that the kids could have three days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music.

Four weeks, four signature, name-brand moments that serve as memorable signposts to the era. What did they have in common?

Not much, really. Maybe you could argue that they were climactic moments to long-running stories that dominated the decade: the space program never mattered as much once we reached the moon, hopes of Kennedy presidential dynasty ended that night, and the counterculture had both its triumphant flowering and cruel, most horrifying crash. But of course, this is just a lame construct built with the most ephemeral substance known to man—ideas. Not even did the people who were most tuned in at the time see connections. “In truth,’’ one friend has written to me, “1968 was so incredibly tumultuous, this seemed like a normal news flow.’’

There is one connecting element: for all four of those events, the Number One song in the country was a turgid, apocalyptic bit of melodrama called “In the Year 2525.’’ Had the Beatles delayed “Get Back’’ a few weeks, or had the Rolling Stones hurried a few weeks to release “Honky Tonk Women,’’ the honor of being the background music to a momentous event could have gone to a momentous band. Instead, the distinction fell to a one-hit wonder duo out of Nebraska called Zager and Evans, whose marketing acumen was such that their follow-up to this megahit was “Mr. Turnkey”, a song about a rapist who nails his own wrist to the jail wall. Still, with its bizarre subject matter, Evans’ quivery evangelical tenor, and a simple, propulsive riff that kept the strange brew moving, “In the Year 2525” does have its weird appeal. After all, who can resist a lyric that says ``In the year 9595/ I’m kinda wondering if man’s gonna be alive/ He’s taken everything this old earth can give/ And he ain’t put back nothing/ Wo-oh-wo.’’

Wo-oh-wo. Just so. Exactly right.