Hello morning music fans! This week, I want to do a series of songs about spirituality. It isn’t the religious kind of spirituality, but a more human focused one. You know: one that actually exists! In this regard, I’m thinking of issues like acceptance, hope, and duty. But we will see. I’m planning to figure it out as I go along.

Today we will start with an old Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) song “Moonshadow.” According to him, the song is literal: having grown up in the city, he had never seen a shadow cast by the moon until he took a trip to Spain. Regardless, the song is about hope and looking at the positive side of things. Admittedly, it has a lot of gallows humor in it. But that’s what makes it work: the contrast with the beauty and earnestness of the performance.

In order to outdo yesterday’s silly Elvis, we really must go up a quantum level. And that means we must move onto Majo Nixon. (H/T to James Fillmore for the reminder!) In 1987, Nixon released an album with Skid Roper, Bo-Day-Shus!!! And on that album was the first Mojo Nixon song I’d ever heard, “Elvis Is Everywhere.” I didn’t really discover him as an artist until 1990, Otis.

Just to be clear, the song is a celebration of Elvis. It also makes good natured fun of the cult of Elvis, but I’m sure that Mojo Nixon is, like all right thinking people, also a member of that. And the song also makes fun of Michael J Fox, although I think the actual target is the stuffy Alex P Keaton. The best line in the song is, “Elvis is in Joan Rivers, but he’s trying to get out, man!”

In Easy Come, Easy Go, Elvis an ex-navy frogman that now works as a professional diver by day and a — Wait for it! — singer by night. It includes a very nice Dolores Fuller tune, “I’ll Take Love.” But we’ve done her. Anyway, I think we may well reach the height of Elvis silliness this morning.

It still boggles my mind all the great actors that these films managed to attract. This film didn’t have the kind of cast that King Creole did. But it did have one of my favorites, Elsa Lanchester as Madame Neherina, a yoga teacher. You should know her from Bride of Frankenstein. Also, you should know her for that adorable little gap in her teeth. Anyway, she actually does a duet with Elvis, “Yoga Is as Yoga Does.” Also included is lots of yoga fun.

Not all Elvis movies are about him losing his job and having to sing at a nightclub. Sometimes there are other reasons that he must sing at a night club. For example, in King Creole, he must sing at a nightclub because he has to leave high school. It’s based upon a Harold Robbins novel. And best of all, it stars Carolyn Jones — the actor who played Morticia Addams in The Addams Family. She had such an unusual beauty — with a long nose, full lips, and huge eyes. And she’s not the only great actor in it. It also stars Vic Morrow, Paul Stewart, and Walter Matthau at “The Pig.” And it was directed by Michael Curtiz!

This morning, we listen to the title track, “King Creole,” written by Dennis Linde. He wrote what is very possibly my favorite Elvis song, “Burning Love” — Elvis’s last top 10 hit. But this one is great too. The video sucks and isn’t well synced. But it’s the music that matters.

When I was a kid, I didn’t like Disco music. But I didn’t get it. I didn’t realize that it was one of those wonderful art forms where it is just an inside joke that even most of its practitioners didn’t realize it. But really: “Disco Inferno”? That’s high comedy and brilliant music! The Elvis films and the music that went along with them definitely fall into this category. How could they not? They were all produced by sophisticated professionals. They knew that they were doing: pandering. And they had fun doing it.

One of the three films that Elvis starred in in 1964 was, Viva Las Vegas. In it, Elvis plays Lucky Jackson. He’s come to Las Vegas to enter a auto race. But he needs to replace his car’s engine. So he enters a talent show to get the money. And here he is singing the title song by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. (Factoid: both of them died of cancer in 1991.) It’s pretty great. But you may prefer the Dead Kennedys version.

I promised silly Elvis this week, and I doubt I will be able to top “Do the Clam” from Girl Happy. The song was written by the songwriting team Sid Wayne and Ben Weisman along with Dolores Fuller. You may know her, because I’ve written about her, Why Sarah Jessica Parker is a Bitch. Fuller was Ed Wood’s girlfriend and collaborator in the early days of his career.

Fuller wrote a number of songs for Elvis, starting in 1961 with “Rock-A-Hula Baby” off Blue Hawaii. She wrote for a number of other people, including Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee.

It’s a new week, and I thought I would do another series: cheesy Elvis songs. But I want to be clear: I love Elvis. He made a lot of great music. But I don’t want to focus on that. I want to focus on the silly side of The King. And that means I will probably focus on the movies. But not today.

In the 1970s, when Elvis was at the peak of his Vegas charm, he started to do the song “My Way.” I’m rather found of the song — most especially the Frank Sinatra version, which has a wonderful sadness to it. It is a great song to croon. But Elvis did it straight. There really is no pretense in his version — at least no pretense bearing in mind that it is Elvis. He shows a great deal of confidence in the strength of the song. He largely holds back. It really is a thing of beauty.

I guess we will end out this week of labor songs with “Talking Union Blues.” I love talking blues songs — they are one of the best forms for political songs. And this one is just perfect. It was written by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, and Pete Seeger. I don’t have a lot to say about it. The great thing about talking blues songs is that they speak for themselves.

This performance is by a guy who calls himself Rex Noble — but his account actually indicates “Paul” as his first name. I have no idea who he is. He’s another example of these people with prodigious talent who somehow don’t have tens of thousands of screaming fans. At the same time, I can’t seem to go anywhere without seeing the tone deaf phenom Taylor Swift. Anyway, I like his version “Talking Union Blues.” He speeds it up and he gives it a bit more of that Bob Dylan sneer than Seeger did. Take a listen. It’s really great.

Some time before World War I, the labor organizer Rose Schneiderman gave a speech that included the poetic line, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” This lead to a poem, “Bread and Roses.” And this was later turned into several songs. The most recent was in 1974, when Mimi Fariña set it to music.

That same year, Fariña set up an organization called Bread & Roses that provides free music to people in institutions. She died in 2001 of neuroendocrine cancer. But the organization lives on.

Here is Fariña and her big sister Joan Baez singing the song. As usual, I couldn’t find a video of a live performance. But this one has a nice collection of labor related images to go along with it.

Is “Maggie’s Farm” a labor song? Well, it’s a Bob Dylan song. And it certainly is calling for worker autonomy, even if that worker is only Dylan himself. Apparently, it is seen as Dylan’s complaint about the constraints of folk music. But I think that reading is all hindsight — based upon the arc of his creative life. But regardless how you see the song, it is about a man saying that he isn’t going to live his life according to others’ ideas. It is a song about self-empowerment. And that is ultimately what the labor movement is about. That’s why the current workingman’s worship of the rich is so dangerous: it is un-empowering. Just like with Christianity that tells workers to suffer now for a great future, the hope of future riches is just a lie.

I have long maintained that the true target of the capitalist class against unionization is not higher wages and better working conditions. It is solidarity. The greatest threat is that the workers will bind together. Nothing can stop the workers if they are united. And that is why it is not surprising that unionization in this country is all but dead: the power elite have managed to convince the workers that unions are the enemy, even while the power elite pick the pockets of every worker.

It also isn’t surprising that the last great hope for workers in this country comes from the weakest: the fast food workers. They have little to lose. They can see that their only option is to bind together. I am not a man of faith. But if there is faith to be had, surely it is to be found in this movement. So this morning, I offer up to you the song, “Solidarity Forever.” It is another Wobblies song — this time written to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Here it is performed by the Almanac Singers along with Pete Seeger: