If my choir is performing a song from a film or play I always like to put the piece in context, which often means that I have to wade through summaries of plots that make very little sense. Many if not most musical comedies have plots that are simply frameworks, often flimsy, to hang the song-and-dance numbers on. (It’s okay for me to end that previous sentence with a proposition since one of these song titles does that, too.) Also, sometimes the musical numbers have outlived the production for which they were written and it’s very difficult to get access to the original story.
The quartet in 1959 during the Time Out sessions. From left to right: Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright. Accessed via Wikipedia. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5988905
My brother-in-law really likes jazz, and I’ve sometimes said in his hearing that I don’t particularly care for it as it seems formless, repetitive and tuneless to me. This comment has been received about as well as you’d expect.
But sometimes I get shoved into examining music that I think I don’t like. Such has been the case with the works of Dave Brubeck, in particular his monster hit “Take Five,” which my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is performing in the choral version that includes lyrics by Iola Brubeck, Dave’s wife, with an arrangement by the prolific Kirby Shaw. A full examination of Brubeck’s career is totally beyond the scope of this post; I encourage you to follow the footnoted sources at the end of this post if you want to do some further reading.
Ho-kay. Brubeck’s origin story is truly fascinating, so let me take at least a dip into that before moving on to the piece at hand. Brubeck did the piano-lessons-at-age-four routine, but his family moved to a 45,000-acre ranch in California when Dave was 12 and he got roped into working there. His two older brothers were on track to become professional musicians due to his mother’s influence and training; his cattleman father insisted to his wife that “’this one is mine,” referring to Dave. Thus Brubeck moved from the piano bench to the saddle, but music still fascinated him:
Have to tell you that I’ve just finished doing a deep dive into the career of the composer/songwriter of “Sweet Rivers,” Shawn Kirchner, and I am exhausted. You can read his professional bio on his website1 if you’d like; just be sure you’re sitting down before you start.
Although Kirchner was classically trained, his compositions have become more and more attuned to popular music, whether folk, jazz, or bluegrass. Within those categories he’s written many sacred pieces, one of which is “Sweet Rivers,” pairing text by the itinerant preacher John Adam Granade with his own tune. Granade was an active participant in the “Great Revival in the West” that’s usually dated to 1800 and is part of the “Second Great Awakening” that swept over the Northeast and Midwest US especially, although outbreaks of religious fervor occurred all over the nation. Granade was known as “the wild man of Goose Creek” (a settlement in Tennessee) and became a prolific hymnwriter. Here’s a description of his behavior:
1919 publicity photo of Adele and Fred Astaire, accessed via Wikipedia.
Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.1
Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:
I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong; When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy. Won’t you take a day off? Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy! Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be! Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?
Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.
Dear disappointed subscribers–at least, I hope you’re disappointed:
My abject apologies for the big gap in your receipt of these blog posts. I’ve been writing them all along, as usual, but my e-mail service stopped sending them last July because I’d exceeded my subscriber limit for their free plan. We thought we’d addressed the problem but clearly hadn’t. That’s all I’ll bore you with about the issue, except to say that I shoulda listened to a friend who kept saying, “How come I never get your posts any more?”
Included in the recipients for this post are those of you who subscribed at some point after the limit was reached and who therefore have never received anything via these e-mails. I do hope you’ll stick around, along with all of you who subscribed before the Great Cut-Off. There’s a lot of interesting material here, if I do say so myself.
Yes, folks, I do dabble in subjects other than the meanings of musical texts. Since this blog is my main outreach to the public, I figured it was perfectly legitimate to tell you about this other project which I’ve been working on for over two years. Are you a true-crime addict? Then you’re certainly aware of this case. I had somewhat of a epiphany back in September 2022 when Adnan Syed, the man who’d been imprisoned for over 20 years for murdering Hae, was released after his conviction was vacated. While the majority of interested observers believed in his innocence and were thrilled with this outcome, there were still many “guilters” out there. Chief among those partisans, understandably, were the close family of Hae–her brother, mother, and uncle. They started pushing immediately for the reinstatement of Adnan’s murder conviction. And I thought, “They’ll never give up on this, not unless the real murderer is definitively identified.” This “real murderer” has always been assumed by most of those who’ve studied the case carefully to be Don Clinedinst, the young man whom Hae was dating at the time of her death. And what was my epiphany? I suddenly realized that Don’s motive for the confrontation leading to Hae’s death could be explained on the basis of a tiny nugget of information that no one seemed to have picked up on:
“Hae wanted to go live with Don.”
Make sense to you? Well, maybe not. I’d urge you to watch the video below that I made to promote my book in which I explain the significance of that short sentence. Then, if you’re intrigued, I’d urge you to order your own copy.
Good question! Do you mean the place, the actual isle or island? Or do you mean the song? Or perhaps the poem? As you can see, it’s complicated.
Let me start out with the poem that William Butler Yeats wrote in 1888, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Since it’s only 12 lines I’m going to quote it in full here:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Sources are unanimous in saying that the origins of this Irish folk song are “somewhat unclear.” Since its theme is so universal (a woman left behind as her sweetheart goes to war), you could say that the exact historical reference doesn’t really matter all that much, but it’s always interesting to dig into such things (if you’re a history nerd like me). The most common theory about the song’s background says that it refers to the time of the British Glorious Revolution in 1688, when James II of England, a Roman Catholic, was deposed and replaced by William of Orange,1 a Protestant, and his wife Mary, the daughter of James by a previous marriage and also a Protestant. (If you want a fuller overview of this turbulent time, see my post about the song “Loch Lomond.”)
The Irish were solidly on the side of Catholicism, joining in with James II’s heirs in various attempts to wrest the throne from the wicked William’s hands. (That’s how they saw him, anyway.) But it was all in vain. By 1691, three years after William’s ascension to the English throne, the so-called Williamite War in Ireland was ended with the Treaty of Limerick (a town in Ireland).2 Although there were assurances of safety for Irish soldiers who remained at home, many of these men chose to go to France for military service there. (They were pretty savvy to leave, as the promises to those who stayed weren’t kept.) After all, if your profession is that of a soldier, and you’re forbidden to fight in your homeland, why not go somewhere you can? Louis XIV of France really wanted Irish soldiers to help him in his war against the Dutch, and William III was Dutch. So these exiled Irish soldiers could console themselves with the thought that they were continuing to fight the good fight. This exodus of Irish soldiers to France is called “the flight of the wild geese.” About 20,000 Irish in total fled Ireland, including about 6,000 women.
I could just quote the e-mail sent to me by the composer/arranger of “Thistle and Rose (with ‘Ye Bonnie Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon’),” Phyllis White, in answer to my inquiries about her thought processes as she wrote the piece, and you’d be quite well informed. I will indeed quote her later in this post. Have to say that it’s a total joy when I can communicate with living musicians as I’ve been able to do here. Let me first, though, unpack the symbolism of the thistle and the rose, which stand for Scotland and for England respectively. The story about the thistle comes from an incident in Scotland’s history:
It was 1263 when King Haakon’s fleet of battle-hardened Norsemen was blown off course and landed on the shores of Largs in Ayrshire. To their delight there was a sleeping Scottish army nearby. Not suspecting an attack, the Scottish were doomed to suffer an ambush. The Norsemen removed their boots in preparation for sneaking up on the slumbering soldiers. Fortunately, a field of thorny thistle flowers surrounded the Scottish. One Norse soldier, stepping on a thorn, yelled out in pain. This scream woke the Scottish men, who jumped into action and slaughtered the invading Norsemen.1
Grainne Mhaol Ni Mhaille statue, Westport House, in Westport, County Mayo, accessed via Wikipedia
Oh man! Have I chased down a number of rabbit trails about this seemingly-simple song.
Here’s what seems to have happened: The inestimable Wikipedia says, “Similarly to many folk songs, the origins of this song are obscure.” To put it mildly! However, it seems to be the case that sometime in early Irish/Celtic history (and who knows what time period this actually was) a tradition developed of “hauling the bride home,” which took place a month after the original wedding and consisted of the new bride’s being “hauled” to her now-husband’s house. It isn’t clear to me where she’d stay for that month–at her father’s house, one would guess, but who knows? It’s important to note that the original folk song (if there is indeed such a thing) consisted only of the chorus.
Anyway, here’s how (we think) it went, again from Wikipedia:
The “Hauling home” was bringing home the bride to her husband’s house after marriage. It was usually a month or so after the wedding, and was celebrated as an occasion next only in importance to the wedding itself. The bridegroom brought home his bride at the head of a triumphal procession—all on cars or on horseback. I well remember one where the bride rode on a pillion behind her husband. As they enter the house the bridegroom is supposed to speak or sing: Oro, welcome home, I would rather have you than a hundred milch cows: Oro, welcome home, ’tis you are happy with prosperity [in store for you].” The piper, seated outside the house at the arrival of the party, playing hard [i.e. with great spirit]: nearly all who were at the wedding a month previous being in the procession. Oh, for the good old times!
