The Guardian reports that the song “became an unexpected anthem in 2012 for protesters during the Occupy Wall Street movement.”
That year she also told an interviewer she was “too radical” for U.S. politics, which might have come as a surprise to many who just listened to her songs to hear stories of Rita and Eddie at the five and dime and how:
Eddie played in the barroom band
‘Til arthritis took his hands
Now he sells insurance on the side
Griffith was at her best as a storyteller, a teller of tales both fact and fiction. “The Loving Kind” fits in that tradition.
So, too, does another one of her songs. It has nothing to do with Virginia, or the South, or small towns, subjects that fascinated Griffith to the end.
However, it’s a song that resonates with us so permit us this digression. Her 2001 song “A Pearl’s Eye View” is about Georgette “Dickey” Chappelle, a photojournalist from Wisconsin who became a war correspondent during World War II, a profession she pursued over three decades — always sporting an Australian bush hat and pearl earrings, hence the title of the song.
Chappelle was with the Marines during the Battle of Iwo Jima. She was jailed for seven weeks by the communists for her coverage of the Hungarian revolution of 1956.
