Folk songs

The Long and Winding History of “Ain’t No Grave”

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Image by person678 from Pixabay

I used to get a Sunday newsletter from a journalist named David French, and he’d always include a video of a contemporary worship song. I’m not a big fan of such music as a usual thing, finding most of it syrupy and breathy. (Sorry!) But I’d usually click on the video at least briefly, and one Sunday he’d put up a performance of “Ain’t No Grave” with a singer named Molly Skaggs. Hmmm, I thought, is she related to Ricky Skaggs, the great bluegrass performer?

Oh my! She is indeed his daughter, and a worthy representative of his musical tradition. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched/listened to that video. (It’s great for getting myself going on cleaning up the kitchen.) I love the words, and the music, and Molly standing there with her acoustic guitar and belting out the song. No glamor, no glitz—just pure talent. Later I found out that the song had been covered by many, many artists—including Johnny Cash. (After I insisted that my whole family watch the video my son said he really liked the song, and when I expressed astonishment he said, “Someone made an animation sequence to go with the Johnny Cash version.” Oh.)

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Hacking through the symbolism in “Children Go Where I send Thee”

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Image accessed via SecondHand Songs

Man, if I went through this song line by line, starting to write as I am on Nov. 1, giving all the variants both of the song itself and also its precursors, Christmas would be long gone by the time I finished. I’m sure there have been whole doctoral dissertations written on just this subject. But not everyone shares my obsession with history and etymology, so I’m going to concentrate on this version, usually sung or performed as a Christmas song even though none of the verses except for the first one refers in any direct way to the Christmas story.

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What Happens to the Ivy in “The Holly and the Ivy”?

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Pixabay

I had never noticed this before analyzing the carol for this post, but the ivy is mentioned in the first line and then it just disappears. Here are the first two lines:

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

Wouldn’t you expect that there would be a third line explaining the role of the ivy, something that starts out with “Of all the vines that are in the wood, the ivy bears . . . ” But there isn’t. Here’s somewhat of a explanation from an academic website:

The lyrics are somewhat puzzling. The first line is “The Holly and the Ivy,“ yet ivy is mentioned nowhere else in the carol except in the last verse, which is a repeat of the first verse. Holly is given the starring role in the song and ivy is ignored, so it seems strange that ivy is even mentioned.

The explanation that is often given is that the first line in the carol is a remnant of the old custom of linking holly and ivy together. In the rest of the carol ivy isn’t needed. The “holly” in the carol refers to Christ and the theme of the carol is his life. (“English Ivy Symbolism, Traditions, and Mythology“)

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Is “Scarborough Fair” about Herbs?

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No. Hey, that was easy, wasn’t it? You can just stop reading now if you want to.

However, if you’d really like to know what “Scarborough Fair” is about, I’ll say that the true meaning is probably quite different from the impression you have. That was certainly the case for me, as I always vaguely thought as I listened to Simon and Garfunkel that the song was about a pining lover asking someone to say hello to a former true love if that someone was going to the fair where presumably the former true love was going to be. A wistful “Say ‘hi’ to him/her for me,” in other words, perhaps in the hope that the lover would say, “Oh yeah–I should get in touch.” (This sort of thing never happens.)

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Robert Burns and the Lasses–Two Love Songs

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Jean Armour at age 57, 26 years after Burns’ death. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

It’s always a bit of a facer to track down some lovely, idealized idea about a person or artwork and find out the real story. So it’s been with Robert Burns and two of his famous love songs, “O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose” and “I’ll Ay Call In by Yon Town.” Was he a tender, faithful lover who paid the object of his desire these tributes? Does he stand as an example of proper behavior to those reading his poetry? Did he . . . well, I think you get the gist: the answer to these and similar questions is a resounding “no.”

When Burns died at age 37 he’d fathered 13 children (that we know of) by four different women and had love affairs with a number of others. The only woman he married, though, was Jean Armour. Were she alive today she’d probably be labeled as an “enabler;” she even went so far as to bring up Burns’ daughter by another woman who was born the same month as his son with Jean. As she said, “Oor Rab needed twa wives.” Just to sketch out the relationship between Jean and Burns takes up a fair amount of space. He met her in 1785 when Burns was 26. She quickly became pregnant by him, but her father refused to let the couple marry because of Burns’ poor financial prospects. He went off and got involved with someone else while Jean gave birth to twins. The couple reconciled and married after “many bizarre turnings” and yet another set of twins. She seems to have remained faithful, and her last child by Burns was born on the day of his funeral. He was an on-again, off-again presence in her life. I can’t imagine what they talked about when he was home!

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The Mysterious and Haunting “Skye Boat Song”—Tragic History told in Beautiful Music

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Isle of Skye, Photo by Piotr Musioł on Unsplash

You’ll probably think as you read the lyrics below that they sound familiar, and you’d be right. This song has had a very long and popular life, starting with its first publication in the 1880’s. The most recent incarnation has been as the theme song for the long-running drama Outlander, based on a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. I’m not going to deal with anything outside of the actual historical origins of the song, as there’s plenty to say just in that area.

The short version of the story behind the lyrics is that it centers around the Battle of Culloden in 1746, in which the Scots were soundly defeated by a much-larger English force. The battle had come about through an attempted restoration of the Stuart dynasty to Britain’s throne, with the Scottish forces being led by Charles Stuart, or “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (and often referred to in the material below as “BPC.”) It’s an incredibly complicated bit of history that I won’t go into in detail here. If you’d like to get a more thorough overview of the events referred to in the song, let me direct you to a post I wrote several years ago that tells the story behind yet another very famous song associated with this battle: “I’ll Take the High Road and You’ll Take the Low Road.”

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What’s Up with the Twelve Days of Christmas?

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I remember back in elementary school being teased a bit by some Jewish classmates about the superiority of Hanukkah over Christmas: “You only have one day to get presents, but we have eight.” I’m sure I wasn’t quick-witted enough to mention the plethora of gift-giving in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with its extra days of celebration. So here’s the information I didn’t have back then.

But first, before you read any further, you must watch the absolutely definitive performance of this song by none other than John Denver and the Muppets. Here’s the link (sorry about the horrible low-res quality):

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How Can I Explain the Backstory of “How Can I Keep from Singing?”?

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Image by Lukas Bieri from Pixabay

I think this is the second time I’ve had a double question mark in a post title. Always up for a grammatical challenge, that’s me. (That’s I?)

Anyway, when my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, recently rehearsed this piece the conductor said, “This is one of the most-frequently arranged songs around.” There’s no way to definitively quantify the number of arrangements out there for any piece, but it does seem to be quite popular. As usual I’m more interested in the words than the music, but the tune is truly lovely, written by a Baptist minister, Robert Lowry, in the mid-1800’s. I was interested to see that his three other most-famous hymns, “Christ Arose,” “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” are all songs I’ve sung in church myself. I love, love, love “Shall We Gather” and always sort of thought that it was a folk song or spiritual.

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How do we know that “She Moved Through the Fair” is a true folk song?

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Image accessed via the “Why Donegal?” Facebook page; no source given.

We know this because it has so many different versions, points of origin, and people claiming to have had a part in its creation. Any time you have a song that simply refuses to be pinned down, rest assured that it can truly be categorized as “folk.” If there is a known author, then the most you can say is that the piece is “in the style of” a folk song. I have been fascinated to read the Wikipedia article on this piece; the various claims and counterclaims are so multi-branching that they almost form a spider’s web.

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The Wild and Wacky World of Wassailing

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no image attribution given on the website https://www.manmadediy.com/

Oh my goodness! If you’ve read many of my posts on this site you’re probably familiar with my saying, “Well, I thought this was a simple song . . .” But nowhere would this phrase be more appropriate than it is here, as I attempt to explain the concept of “wassailing” and then apply those ideas to two traditional Christmas songs that are often performed during the holidays, “Gloucestershire Wassail (Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town)” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” with a bonus mention of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which doesn’t directly mention wassailing but which contains wassail-adjacent ideas as you’ll see below.

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