The Simple Song of Freedom

It turns out Bobby Darin had a couple of hits when I was a few years old. I had no idea who he was at the time, there was just one particular song I always remembered because I heard it playing on my mom's clock radio in the dark mornings, probably a few times before or after "Ghost Riders in the Sky," the most popular wake-up song that year. It would've been 1967. The Doors were first hitting the charts, too, the Beatles were ubiquitous, and all this related to my grandmother's second and third-shift work hours supervising floor production at Decca Records. It was a very nice song to wake up to; nearly 40 years later I just searched for it from a few lyrics. I found the song fine, but the lyrics are a little different than I remembered:

Brother Solzhenitzin,
are you busy?
If not, won't you drop this friend a line?
Tell me if the man
who is clownin' up your land
has got the war machine upon his mind.

After studying war almost all my life, I might finally be starting to get it.