The Love You Save - Jolie Holland
Originally written and released in 1966 by Southern soul singer Joe Tex as a civil rights number disguised as a song about love (see https://www.unclestylus.com/single-post/2017/02/06/the-love-you-save-may-be-your-own-joe-tex ) , Jolie Holland, appropriately as she's white, sings it as a rumination on love for mankind.
Apart from this, in her seven albums Jolie Holland has never recorded anyone' else's songs except for a Townes Van Zandt cover which is de rigeur for any self-respecting Texan singer songwriter. Her 2014 LP "Wine Dark Sea" is an album of, if not love songs, at least songs about love, and at its heart is her rendering of the Tex classic.
The notion that
"The love you save today
may very well be your own"
is as old as the hills, preached in India at least as early as the 6th century BCE, and (as last weekend was Easter) perhaps most memorably, 500 years later in what is now known as Israel and Palestine.
So it is ironic that, after centuries of tragic twists and turns, subscribers to all three of the major "Abrahamic" religions still don't seem to have learnt the lesson, and are still propagating a conflict that is claiming thousands of innocent victims including women and children as ever-mounting collateral damage.
The message that you and your descendants will "reap what you so" has clearly not yet been learnt, not only by the protagonists in Gaza, but by those nations that are funding them. Invest in love, invest in your own future.
If you want to hear Jolie Holland singing "The Love You Save" live, catch her this Sunday evening at Komedia in Brighton.
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