Champion Jack Dupree - Vietnam Blues

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Vietnam War blues songs: https://rateyourmusic.com/list/JBrummer/vietnam_war__the_blues/

Champion Jack Dupree - born William Thomas Dupree (c.1910-1992) in New Orleans, he played blues piano in the boogie-woogie style, mainly based in Chicago, Illinois. He lived in London and worked in Europe through most of the 1960s. He sung about drugs, drink, and jail, as well as writing many political songs about US presidents (such as FDR, Truman and Kennedy) and the civil right movement (including a composition about Martin Luther King). He recorded this album at Morgan Sound Studios, Willesden, Northwest London in 1971, and released in the UK in 1972 for Sonet (# SNTF 626). Released in the US in 1974 (GNP Crescendo Records # GNPS 10013). The 2004 CD reissue The Sonet Blues Story (Verve Records) included an alternative take of the Vietnam song. The recordings featured Peter Curtley (guitar); Paul Rowan (harmonica); Hughie Flint (drums).

The song "Vietnam Blues" took an anti-war position. Dupree felt sympathy for "the people over in Vietnam" who suffered a "lot of pain". He wanted the US government to "leave those poor people alone" and to "pull out and go home". He believed that the war would "never end" and that the Vietnamese had a lot of friends: "the Chinese...the North Koreans, the Russians...and they got me too". Dupress also sung about the pain felt by the mothers of US soldiers. It included a small line on the treatment of African-Americans in the US, saying that the Vietnamese had a problem "just like a got at home" - this coming from a man who left the US to live in Europe partly because of these issues.

"Well, I feel so sorry for the people over in Vietnam
It's a whole lot of pain, Uncle Sam don't understand
Why don't you leave Vietnam? Leave those poor
Poor people alone, they got a hell of a problem just
Like I got at home, well I know a mother, be glad to
See her son come home, yes Uncle Sam pack up
Pull out, and go home, the war in Vietnam, there's one
War that will never end, the Vietnam people, they got
A whole lot of friends, yeah they got the Japanese
They got the Chinese...the North Koreans, the Russians
The Africans too, and they got me too, when the lights
Come on all over the world again, well the people in
Vietnam will have a whole lot of friends again"