Photo of Central Highlands mother inspires music

Created nearly 60 years ago, the photo of a Central Highlands mother and her children is associated with a very interesting story, with world-famous figures: journalist Howard Sochurek, an American photojournalist, and Paul McCartney, musician and singer of the legendary band The Beatles.

 

 

In the January 1965 issue, National Geographic Magazine published a photo with the bold caption Mountain Madonna, showing a topless woman breastfeeding a child and another child looking up at her. The photographer was journalist Howard Sochurek. At the time, Howard was a reporter for National Geographic, a prominent American magazine that had been around since 1888 and is still going strong today.

The mother in the photo is still quite young. Her face is sad and austere, but her body exudes a wild beauty with bare breasts and tanned skin. A mother breastfeeding is a familiar image, but the mountain mother with her child suckling her breast in the photo has something very special that makes the photographer not call her by the usual nouns, Mother or Woman, but call her Madonna (according to the Cambridge Dictionary, Madonna has the same meaning as the Virgin Mary).

Mountain Madonna. Photo: Howard Sochurek/National Geographic

The special impression of the photo also happened to Paul McCartney, a British musician. “She had a child and she looked very proud. I saw it like the Virgin Mary... There was a bond, that photo influenced me. I was inspired to write the song Lady Madonna, from that photo” - 49 years after the song “Lady Madonna” was born and together with the famous band The Beatles shook the world , Paul McCartney revealed the fate of the birth of that famous song.

Unexpectedly, “Lady Madonna” was shaped like an Ede mother from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A place that at that time no one seemed to know where it was. Even McCartney, when he first saw the photo in National Geographic Magazine, thought it was somewhere in Africa. The interesting story above was told by McCartney in an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic Magazine in November 2017.

According to the article, this photo was taken in Brieng village, an Ede village in the north of Buon Ma Thuot in September 1964. Today, Brieng village belongs to Ea Nam commune, Ea H'leo district, Dak Lak province. The author of the photo is Howard Sochurek, an American journalist, a war photographer in the Pacific during World War II. In 1950, he worked as a photojournalist for Life Magazine, an American magazine famous for its images. Howard came to Vietnam in 1953 to report on the Indochina War. He was the author of a series of photos of the last French soldiers withdrawing from the North at Hai Phong port on May 15, 1955, published in Life Magazine. After that, Howard Sochurek continued to return to report and take photos of the Vietnam War. During 1964 - 1965, Howard was working as a reporter for National Geographic Magazine.

In its January 1965 issue, National Geographic gave a glowing introduction to Howard Sochurek: “The history he brought back not only demonstrated the journalistic skills that earned Sochurek the Robert Capa Award in 1955 for “superlative photography that requires extraordinary courage and a capacity for risk,” but also demonstrated another essential to success: the uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.”

Journalist Howard Sochurek. Photo from LIFE magazine

“Lady Madonna, the children at your feet. I wonder how you make a living. Who finds food to help you manage. Do you think it’s a gift from above?...”. That’s the opening line of “Lady Madonna”, a song about a mother struggling to raise her children, with so many worries every day, when their way of life is always threatened. “Lady Madonna, the baby is sucking at your breast. I wonder how you feed the children that are left”. That refrain repeats over and over again like a torment.

Paul McCartney wrote this song in January 1968 and recorded it in February 1968, singing it with the legendary John Lennon. In March 1968, the song was released on the album “The Inner Light”. Immediately after its release, the song took the top spot on the music charts in the UK in late March 1968. Then, “Lady Madonna” entered the top 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in early May 1968 in the US.

The torment of “Lady Madonna” continues to attract fans around the world and has become a classic rock n'roll song of The Beatles. Many Vietnamese fans of The Beatles have been singing “Lady Madonna” for decades without knowing that the song was born from the image of a Central Highlands mother. In the book “Many Years From Now”, McCartney confided: “I think women are very strong. They endure a lot of hardships, the pain of giving birth, raising children, cooking for them. They are miserable people all their lives, so I want to honor them”. That year, 1968, Paul McCartney was only 26 years old, very young and romantic. And Howard Sochurek, the photographer, was 44 years old, already a very experienced war correspondent.

The photo of the Central Highlands mother “Mountain Madonna” is an image associated with the war, born in the middle of the war but carrying a message of love, to create a musical work praising the sacred and immortal beauty of the mother.

Source: https://baodaklak.vn/van-hoa-du-lich-van-hoc-nghe-thuat/202506/buc-anh-nguoi-me-tay-nguyen-truyen-cam-hung-cho-am-nhac-2700430/