Larvatus Prodeo

On Tuesday 5 August, Australian country music singer-songwriter Reg Lindsay passed on, and in the ensuing few days the papers have been carrying tributes to the man and his music.

The tributes have been wrong on one point of fact.

Brisbane’s Courier-Mail stated on Wednesday that:

One of the songs [Lindsay] is best remember for is Armstrong, which was his tribute to the American astronauts and their historic moon landing and was his first big hit on the pop charts in 1971.

In similar vein, today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Age state that:

His song Armstrong, inspired by Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, was placed in a time capsule at the NASA Space Centre in Houston.

Now Reg Lindsay did indeed record the song Armstrong, which I remember well from my childhood. And it must be said that his version did justice to the song. I was a callow nine year old when the Eagle landed whilst I was walking home from school for lunch in July 1969, and my grandfather was of the view that the whole thing was a hoax being televised from the Western Australian desert (Grandpa would doubtless have been a greenhouse denialist had he lived long enough). Any popular culture artifact dealing with the Apollo XI mission made a lasting impact on my generation.

For this reason, I remember well that there were two versions of Armstrong played on Australian radio stations at that time. One was Reg Lindsay’s cover. The other was the original by the late John Stewart. As the lyrics indicate, John Stewart’s song was no mere facile tribute to the Apollo XI astronauts, but a poignant counterposition of the apex of human achievement represented by the moon landing to the quotidian reality of our species fouling its own nest on Earth.

As it happens, my childhood memory is not as flawless as I’d like to make out. Until this week, I had believed that Armstrong had originally been written and recorded by John Denver - an understandable error given that Armstrong is indeed the kind of song John Denver could have written, and similar in its themes to many that he did write. But in attempting to settle, once and for all, the question in my mind as to whether the song was written by Reg Lindsay or John Denver, I have finally established that it was the work of John Stewart.