Unthinkable Wings

Fareweel, ye dungeons dark and strang
A lang fareweel tae thee!
MacPherson's time will no' be lang
Alow the gallows tree

( Sae rantingly, sae wantonly... )

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 )

I've recently become mildly obsessed by Andy Stewart's rendition of the utterly brilliant 'Errant Apprentice', a comic folksong by Bill Watkins. It's worthy of Gilbert, though probably not Sullivan's line of country.

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Errant_Apprentice.htm (there's a typo in the penultimate line, though: the last clause ought to read 'worth lying for'....)