The odd routes of the oral tradition... also, how I distracted myself from an early night.

[tree_and_leaf]

It 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.

Comments

[juno-magic.livejournal.com]

This is the perfect example of why I love my online friends so much. I compare that book of Chinese poetry I've acquired to Elvish verse, you have Johnny Cash and 18th century syphilis.

How did I survive without you and the internet?

[owl]

The song I know to the tune of 'The Streets of Laredo' is called 'The Bard of Armagh'. Similar cheerfulness level, if less on the dead reckless young men theme.

Floers of the Forest can reliably make me cry.

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

Actually the guy is called Eric BOGLE, and the song he wrote is called No Man's Land. he's quite open, I think, about referencing both the long "funeral arrangements verse" tradition in English, Irish and, later, US traditional material; and also Flowers of the Forest.

You can find his lyrics here -
http://ericbogle.net/lyrics/lyricspdf/nomansland.pdf

One of the earliest-seeming funeral verses comes in the folksong Six Dukes went a Fishing, which appears in the seminal Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (by Al L Lloyd and Ralph Vaugh-Williams). It has a really haunting tune; and this wondrous verse:

Black was their mourning,
And white were the wands,
And so yellow were the flamboys,
That they carried in their hands.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Dukes_Went_a-Fishing)

[tree_and_leaf]

Getting the name wrong is merely a function of my not being able to proof read at one in the morning (embasassing or what?), but thanks for pointing it out - and thanks for the other information, especially about the Six Dukes. Amazing, strange stuff (what are flamboys, anyway?)

[tree_and_leaf]

I ask myself that a lot, too! (Chinese poetry sounds interesting also, and the Elvish comparison seems oddly apt)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

you have Johnny Cash and 18th century syphilis

I can't help feeling that that could have been phrased better ... ;-)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Whatever they are, I never knew they appeared in another song!

[tree_and_leaf]

*googles* Yes, quite different!

There turns out to be further versions of the 'Pills of White Mercury' complex discussed here: http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~zierke/lloyd/songs/stjamesshospital.html

There's more than one version of the St James Hospital, though ( http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/St_James_Hospital.htm ) And the whole thing shouldn't be confused with the St James Infirmary Blues, which - although it has a variation on the funeral verse - is at a much greater remove from the rest of the tradition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Infirmary_Blues

One of the links brought up by googling 'St James Hospital' + song is a sales page from the Smithsonian of Pete Seeger songs, which they recommend for singing with your children.... (this is a good example of what Tolkien called the 'nursery furniture' principle at work, I think!)

Further more, as grondfic pointed out below, the 'funeral verse' turns up all over the place (one of those handy tropes of oral poetry, I suppose - for when the singer needs some lines to this metre that are vaguely appropriate!)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

The song I know to the tune of 'The Streets of Laredo' is called 'The Bard of Armagh'.

Ditto. I'm rather impressed by Pill of White Mercury, though - folk songs about syphilis, who knew!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

what are flamboys, anyway?

A question, as I recall, asked also by Lord Peter. The OED says: 1. a. A torch; esp. one made of several thick wicks dipped in wax; a lighted torch.

[tree_and_leaf]

I haven't got syphillis of any vintage, I'm pleased to say, and Johnny Cash only in the form of m4a files, which is probably just as well considereing that he's dead! ;)

[tree_and_leaf]

It's a shame I couldn't find it on youTube; it's a good song, especially in the Old Blind Dogs version.

... personally, I'd be surprised if there weren't folk songs about syphillis, given that they often get transmitted down the pub.

(er: I meant the songs get transmitted, but I suppose the same thing goes for STDs...!

[tree_and_leaf]

Ah, thank you! What would we do without the OED (which I can't get at just now, alas)?

[owl]

My mother raised us on folk and folk rock, although I think that wasn't nursery furniture, because she likes that herself.

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

FASCINATING!! I love Johnny Cash SO much. I like to attend a Johnny Cash/Hank Williams Hootenanny Jam in Park Slope, Brooklyn on the last Thursday of the month. It is an entire band of random instruments of people who just show up to play, plus a professional cover band, and anyone who wants to sing can (or let the professionals). I like to do "Jackson," "Hey, Good Lookin'," "Walk the Line," or "Get Rhythm." :D

[tree_and_leaf]

That sounds like an awful lot of fun!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I was in the middle of a long comment and then deleted it by mistake...

It looks like the Doctor Who clip isn't a fanvid at all, but the sequence from Terror of the Zygons where the Caber (who is of course really a Zygon) shoots Harry in the head (Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, with Robert Banks Stewart writing and Douglas Camfield directing, several indicators that this one is not for the squeamish); immediately cutting back to the Tullock Inn where the Doctor and Sarah are listening to Angus Lennie's character play 'Flowers of the Forest' on the bagpipes; the Doctor remarks that it is a lament for the dead.

I went up to Flodden Field when I was eleven or twelve, having grown up fifty miles or so from it; I suspect that I brought my own atmosphere.

When I was eight or nine Isla St Clair presented a children's TV series for the BBC called The Song and the Story. It was made on film and the songs were performed by Isla herself or, I think, Steeleye Span. The two sequences which remain in my mind are Isla as highwaywoman, for 'Sovay', and Isla as mill girl, for 'Poverty Knock'. This project helped raise her profile as a folk singer, as most people had first become familiar with her as the hostess of Larry Grayson's Generation Game.

I like some Johnny Cash, though I've not heard all that much of his work - I've got one of the later albums in the American Recordings series, plus a 'best of' and the prison recordings. The 'best of' album includes his duet of 'North Country Maid' with Bob Dylan, which is a variant on 'Scarborough Fair'.

[tree_and_leaf]

Ah, that explains it! Thank you (I really shouldn't attempt to comment on youTube clips when the speed of my connections means I've seen only a few momentst of them).

'The Song and the story' sounds as if it could have been a good programme.