Playlist: Songs for The Fool

Last week we talked about The Fool in movies, plays, and literature. This week I wanted to play with music that resonates with the card’s imagery. The more you associate each card with familiar references, the more alive the cards become, and the more you have to draw on in your readings. 

Also, music is the best thing.

I picked out some songs I love with themes like the tarot Fool's: freedom, travel, open-heartedness, innocence, beautiful outsiders, and trickstery fun. Hope you like it!

1. Little Wing - Jimi Hendrix

I get so lost in this song. It’s one of my absolute favorites.

“Well, she's walking through the clouds,
With a circus mind that's running wild,
Butterflies and Zebras,
And Moonbeams and fairy tales.
That's all she ever thinks about.
Riding with the wind.”

2. Blue Ridge Mountain - Hurray For The Riff Raff

“My heart is a Blue Ridge Mountain,
And my head an overflowing fountain.
My heart is a Blue Ridge Mountain,
But I never, never knew. I never knew.”

3. Steady Rollin’ Man - Robert Johnson

One of the greatest, most iconic, and most important blues singers in history, fabled to have sold his soul at the crossroads, Robert Johnson is the quintessential wandering musician.

“I'm a steady rollin' man. 
I roll both night and day.”


4. Free - Cat Power

“Everybody come together 
Free!”


5. Come Together - Pomplamoose

Everything about this Beatles classic screams The Fool. I love Pomplamoose’s cool and breezy take on it.

“He got hair down to his knees.
Got to be a joker, he just do what he please.”


6. Nature Boy - Grace Slick & The Great Society

Nat King Cole made this song by the eccentric and free-spirited songwriter, eden ahbez, famous in the late 1940s. Grace Slick & The Great Society give it a psychedelic 60s kick.

“There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea . . .”


7. California One/ The Youth and Beauty Brigade - The Decemberists

“And the road a-winding goes
From Golden Gate to roaring cliff-side,
And the light is softly low
As our hearts become sweetly untied
Beneath the sun of California One.”

aaaand:

“Castaways and cutouts, fill it up.
Come join the youth and beauty brigade!
Nothing will stand in our way.”

The Universal Waite Tarot.

8. Walkin’ Down The Line - Bob Dylan

“My money comes and goes
And rolls and flows and rolls and flows
Through the holes in the pockets in my clothes.
Well, I’m walkin’ down the line . . .”


9. Big Rock Candy Mountain - Harry McClintock

“I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”


10. Ramblin’ Man - Hank Williams

“Some folks might say that I'm no good
That I wouldn't settle down if I could,
But when that open road starts to callin' me
There's somethin' o'er the hill that I gotta see
Sometimes it's hard but you gotta understand
When the Lord made me, He made a Ramblin' Man”