Remember when the music was the best of what we dreamed of...

It was 23 years ago today - July 16, 1981 - that we lost Harry Chapin under still-murky circumstances on the Long Island Expressway.

These things are always tragic, of course; but it always strikes me as particularly unfair when it happens to someone who gave so much to so many. During his too-brief singing career, Chapin raised millions of dollars - and gave huge sums of his own money - to the cause of fighting hunger and malunutrition throughout the world. He was committed to the singularly unfashionable idea that we can do more to help the poor than just telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps - a belief that has been political poison in my country since just about the time he died, actually. We could certainly use a few more like him these days!

Fortunately, neither his music nor his humanitarian efforts have disappeared. Click here to learn more about World Hunger Year, the organization he founded back in the '70s which carries on his most noted cause. (By the way, George W.M.D. Bush recently cut the funding for some of the programs that help finance WHY, a fact I hope my American friends will think about on November 2). And while you're at it, if you don't already own any Chapin albums, do yourself a favor and buy this (yes, that is my review halfway down the page!), or this, or this, or, if it's in your budget, this. If you have any fondness at all for singer-songwriters and/or low-key folk-rock, you owe it to yourself to have at least a couple of his CDs.

But music was his life,
It was not his livelihood,
And it made him feel so happy
And it made him feel so whole,
He sang from his heart
And he sang from his soul,
He did not know how well he sang,
It just made him whole!