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tree_and_leafIt never cease to amaze me how tunes and lyrics pass about, sometimes changing out of all recognition, sometimes remaining astoundingly stable.
I was listening to Johnny Cash just now - I've just discovered his later work, which is brilliant (despite the fact that I love folk music, I have been suspicious of country as degenerate and fake - which is obviously mot fait, though I can't say I can see myself ever liking the really commercial stuff), when I suddenly realised that "The Streets of Laredo" not only has virtually the same tune as The Pills of White Mercury, a cheery British folksong from the eighteenth century (probably), about a young man dying of syphillis, but the verse describing the funeral arrangements are almost identical, though the American version is much less drastic (or more sentimental, if you like). The version I have of this song is by The Old Blind Dogs; but the song itself doesn't seem to be on youTube, though there are OBD songs on there
Further more, the tune and a few lines of refrain bears a suspicious resemblance to The Green Fields of France ('beat the drums slowly/ play the pipes lowly/ sound the dead march as you bear me along') - though I think that this, an anti-war song by the Scottish-Australian Eric Bogle, is probably intended as irony, or at least as intertextuality, given the further references to The Flowers o' the Forest (which still beats it hands down for heartbreak) and the Last Post.
(This is, of course, well known stuff: the Wikipedia entry for "The Streets of Laredo" spells this all out.
Here's Johnny Cash:
And here's the Corries singing "The Green Fields of France"
Here, for completness "The Flo'ers o the Forest, or, as I was brought up to call it, the Lilting". (Oddly, one of the links searching for this pulled up seemed to be a Doctor Who fan vid, but the connection's too slow to tell. And it didn't even seem to feature the Brigadier or Jamie!)†
Also, as a bonus and so I don't lose the bookmark before I have chance to listen to it properly over a decent connection, the Man in Black singing "the Night they Drove Old Dixie Down". The video is... not good, though
(Bizarrely, there is a German-language anti-drugs song based on this, called something like "Die Nacht, als Conny Kramer starb"... Good grief, it's on youTube, too!
On a side note, why are so many of the comments on youTube so scary? They make Comment is Free look as if it's full of sane and rational people, which is tricky. (Though I did laugh at the chap who'd written the succinct comment 'Flodden: another disaster caused by a Stuart' on the Doctor Who vid. True enough...)
Also, damn it, I wanted to get an early night. Isn't it funny how, the tireder you are, the easier it is to spend inordinate amounts of time making semi-coherent posts?
† Incidentally, the funeral scene in "The Wrath of Khan" was the point where I stopped being able to believe that Scotty was actually Scots, because any Scot with anything approaching a sense of tradition would pick 'The Flo'ers o the Forest' for a military funeral. Not "Amazing Grace", anyway, which is fairly inappropriate in the circumstances.
ETA: edited to correct a rather silly typo: also, please note Grondfic's comments, as she knows much more about this sort of thing than I do.
I was listening to Johnny Cash just now - I've just discovered his later work, which is brilliant (despite the fact that I love folk music, I have been suspicious of country as degenerate and fake - which is obviously mot fait, though I can't say I can see myself ever liking the really commercial stuff), when I suddenly realised that "The Streets of Laredo" not only has virtually the same tune as The Pills of White Mercury, a cheery British folksong from the eighteenth century (probably), about a young man dying of syphillis, but the verse describing the funeral arrangements are almost identical, though the American version is much less drastic (or more sentimental, if you like). The version I have of this song is by The Old Blind Dogs; but the song itself doesn't seem to be on youTube, though there are OBD songs on there
Further more, the tune and a few lines of refrain bears a suspicious resemblance to The Green Fields of France ('beat the drums slowly/ play the pipes lowly/ sound the dead march as you bear me along') - though I think that this, an anti-war song by the Scottish-Australian Eric Bogle, is probably intended as irony, or at least as intertextuality, given the further references to The Flowers o' the Forest (which still beats it hands down for heartbreak) and the Last Post.
(This is, of course, well known stuff: the Wikipedia entry for "The Streets of Laredo" spells this all out.
Here's Johnny Cash:
And here's the Corries singing "The Green Fields of France"
Here, for completness "The Flo'ers o the Forest, or, as I was brought up to call it, the Lilting". (Oddly, one of the links searching for this pulled up seemed to be a Doctor Who fan vid, but the connection's too slow to tell. And it didn't even seem to feature the Brigadier or Jamie!)†
Also, as a bonus and so I don't lose the bookmark before I have chance to listen to it properly over a decent connection, the Man in Black singing "the Night they Drove Old Dixie Down". The video is... not good, though
(Bizarrely, there is a German-language anti-drugs song based on this, called something like "Die Nacht, als Conny Kramer starb"... Good grief, it's on youTube, too!
On a side note, why are so many of the comments on youTube so scary? They make Comment is Free look as if it's full of sane and rational people, which is tricky. (Though I did laugh at the chap who'd written the succinct comment 'Flodden: another disaster caused by a Stuart' on the Doctor Who vid. True enough...)
Also, damn it, I wanted to get an early night. Isn't it funny how, the tireder you are, the easier it is to spend inordinate amounts of time making semi-coherent posts?
† Incidentally, the funeral scene in "The Wrath of Khan" was the point where I stopped being able to believe that Scotty was actually Scots, because any Scot with anything approaching a sense of tradition would pick 'The Flo'ers o the Forest' for a military funeral. Not "Amazing Grace", anyway, which is fairly inappropriate in the circumstances.
ETA: edited to correct a rather silly typo: also, please note Grondfic's comments, as she knows much more about this sort of thing than I do.