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

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.

( Comparative Music on YouTube, cut for your convenience )

To do before Friday evening

*Finish organising word nets for section of thesis
- on a related note, work out why, exactly, wordle isn't working for my computer, and fix it (I do actually have a semi-legitimate academic use for this, it's not just playing!)
*Trail out to teacher training college, extract interesting sounding article from volume of feminist theology (and how much do I hate the local library policy of not duplicating holdings across institutions? It's one thing not buying several copies of volumes for department libraries down the hall from each other, but when you need to travel half an hour by tram to use the library of a university you're not even a member of...)
* Re-wax Grönland jacket and hat
* Give brief presentation on Barlaam and Josephaat manuscript; explain how the Buddha ended up becoming a Christian saint.
* Wash Scout uniform and sleeping bag inner
* Book flight home
* Work out what I did with those blank CDs, and burn some files
* Cancel Spiegel (which has had some headdeskily daft articles recently, anyway, including the latest Batshit Insane Theory that Goethe was having an affair with Anna Amalia rather than Charlotte von Stein†, cancel internet contract
* Sharpen knife
* Sort out tent issue, given that I now can't borrow the one I was going to
* Attempt to prevent assassination of Charidisch prince (OK, this is an RPG goal rather than a real one)

... I have the strong feeling I've forgotten something


† Because C von S wasn't intellekshul enough, apparently. I would counter (a) Goethe seems to have had a habit of wanting people to show off to (b) C v S may not have been as intellectual as Anna Amalia, but the evidence of his wife suggests that Goethe didn't primarily go for academic competence in a woman (c) assuming he'd dumped the Dowager Duchess to run off to Rome, how likely is it that he'd have been allowed back to Weimar on rather improved terms?