"Blue-Eyed Gal/Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss"

The ascendancy of the now-ubiquitous guitar in its many incarnations as the primary instrument of American folk music is actually a rather recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1960 (likely thanks to the combined popularity of Elvis Presley and the Kingston Trio) that guitars actually outsold pianos in the U.S. Think about that one - relative cost, size, and difficulty to master. The mass media of recordings and radio pushed the guitar past the piano, and it has never looked back, the former now outselling the latter by factors of ten.

So what did our eighteenth and nineteenth century forbears use to make music while the guitar was still in the childhood of its development and played largely by refined urban young ladies in parlors? Harmonicas, of course, and the ever-present concertina - even the banjo was beginning to break out of its segregation as a slave instrument by the 1830s. But the granddaddy of all American folk instruments is the humble fiddle, simply a slightly smaller and cruder version of its more august sibling, the violin. Compact, light, and portable - but capable of producing a great volume of sweet sound when played well - the fiddle was perfect for accompanying either voice or dance, as a solo instrument or in tandem with just about anything else that could make music. "Turkey In The Straw," "Flop-Eared Mule," "Old Dan Tucker," "Devil's Dream" - there is an entire repertoire of American folk songs, many that we now think of as banjo tunes, that first saw the light of day two centuries ago in rural American hoedowns and square dances and camp meetings, played on the fiddle.

This week's song, which has dozens of names and variants, generally starts with a short fiddle riff, with a clawhammered banjo coming in at the second bar. It is a very old song, learned by legendary country-folk performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford from one Fletch Rymer in 1898 - and Rymer was a really old man at the time. Lunsford was one of the first to record it, along with Sarah Bumgarner as "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" in 1924, the same title used in the same year by Frank Blevins and his group. In this remarkably well-remastered 1931 recording with yet again the same name, The Skillet Lickers gave the tune genuine national exposure on radio:



I am not sure of the personnel of the group here - Britain's folk site Mudcat.org identifies the lead singer as Riley Puckett - but I'm going to hope that Chicago musician and old-time music devotee Jeremy Raven will fill us in a bit on this. It is to Jeremy that many of us owe any knowledge of this group at all, whose bang-up version here certainly sounds like a 1930 edition of the Kingston Trio in their energy and the fun they are clearly having with the tune. I am also reminded here of Lindsay Buckingham's remark to John Stewart that a good recording should be "simple, repetitive, and hypnotic." I think Buckingham may have meant "simple-sounding," because the sophistication of the instrumentation on this recording is amazing.

The Kingston Trio in 1960 didn't have a fiddle player handy - but their version of the song as "Blue-Eyed Gal" gave them an opportunity to showcase the impressive development of Dave Guard as a banjoist and vocal arranger of the lyrics adapted by KT's Bob Shane with Tom Drake and Miriam Stafford:



Guard is blending different banjo styles here, much as he would do a year later in his tour-de-force "Coast of California." It is not exactly a traditional rendering of the song - but definitely one that respects the origins and roots of the piece.

The New Lost City Ramblers" made a career out of presenting authentic readings of old mountain tunes, as they do here:



I always get a kick out of talented non-professionals, especially when they are young. Here is the Short Mountain String Band in Frostburg MD two years ago - a fine toe-tapping instrumental once they get going:



Another great instrumental, this one by Julie Duggan on clawhammer banjo:



Duggan's right hand work here is mind-blowing.

For a more contemporary reading - indie rock group Built to Spill (now almost 20 years old) updated the lyric and electrified the accompaniment on an album appropriately named Ancient Melodies of the Future:



I actually rather like this, though it clearly uses the root song as a starting point only, as for instance the Kingston Trio did with "A Worried Man." But for sheer repetitive and hypnotic exuberance, I'll take the Skillet Lickers any day - or the Kingston Trio.

"Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies"

"Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies," whose cautionary words to young women about young men is a standard folk motif, seems to be one of those fairly rare American Appalachian originals - I say rare because so many other ballads from the southern mountains have clear antecedents in Britain or Ireland. "Ladies" may as well, and some experts think so, but no clear bloodline exists to any one song from the British Isles, or even from one family of songs. My usual sources for consultation - mainly John A. Lomax and Lesley Nelson-Burns (from The Contemplator site) both identify the song as American, as does British expert on Appalachian songs Cecil Sharp. That should be good enough for anyone - though in some of the lyrics there are distant echoes of UK songs like "The Water Is Wide," among others.

But Lomax has more to say pertinent here in his 1947 Folk Songs of North America. In fact, he uses a musical setting for "Ladies" in his introduction as an example of how folk music should not be arranged - with sixth and augmented chords of the kind that we hear in several of the pop folk versions below but not in the traditional ones. He especially disliked "chromatic upholstery, overrichness of harmonic texture, [and] modulations." Whew.

First, a couple of almost-traditional versions. Maybelle Carter of the legendary original Carter family (and as a guitarist, the inventor of the "Carter lick" that most of us use in some form) performs our first version:



The autoharp adds a nice touch, I suppose - but it's not a traditional mountain instrument, having been patented in the 1880s in Germany and in the 1920s in the U.S. What is authentic here, though, is a simple accompaniment of major chords with an occasional minor thrown in.

The Abbott Family also hails from the mountains - the Coast Ranges of Santa Cruz, CA. But they have been born again into mountain music, and though using the Carter Family melody, they go fuller-on trad in their instrumentation:



Now for the versions that John Lomax wouldn't like - first, the Kingston Trio:



Very smooth, soft, and thoughtful - but the syncopated rhythm of the guitar line and occasional sixth note in the harmony makes this version anathema to purists. Pleasant listening, though, if you don't mind a bit of sophistication in your folk music...

...which you can also hear in this version from Ireland's Lumiere, consisting of Eilis Kennedy and Pauline Scanlon:


The guitar part sounds as if it had been arranged by Paul Simon in his heyday. Really lovely.

Gene Clark of the Byrds (with Carla Olson) in his last recording before his death in the 1980s gives the song a signature folk-rock setting:



Jackson Browne from 1975 shows his folkie-country roots here:
(Ed. Note: Jackson B. is down for Copyright - so here is the stunning soprano of the early Joan Baez recording.)



And finally, the classically-trained and oriented Ishtar from Belgium with a lovely take on the song:



Not surprisingly, I find this last and the Lumiere versions to be the most affecting, likely in part to the plaintive feminine voices in these videos. They are also (with the Kingstons) the most musically complex. The debates about what constitutes folk music are long past - it seems to be today whatever you want to make it. While I truly enjoy Mother Maybelle and the Abbotts, I also feel that a good song like this one benefits from creative license. A good part of the ultimate value of the Folk Revival, I think, will prove to be that it both rediscovered and popularized traditional music but at the same time made it available for thoughtful re-creation.

"Hangman/The Maid Freed From The Gallows"

This week's song goes under many names: the oldest is "The Maid Freed From The Gallows," though it has also been known as "The Gallows Tree" and "Gallows Pole" and simply as "Hangman, Hangman." It is a song with a rich and varied history and all the things that I love about real folk songs - a good tune and story, origins lost in the mists of time, major variations in tune, tone, and tenor, and that tantalizing single motif that unites all the versions and indicates a common source. Someone is about to be hanged and his/her family proves indifferent to the fact. Things are looking bad for our prisoner until his/her beloved (usually the fiance/fiancee) shows up with enough gold to bribe the hangman and save the day. Significantly - and unlike other folk songs like, say, the family of songs that eventually morph into "The Gypsy Rover" that have radically differing endings - our prisoner always escapes the noose due to the good offices of the beloved.

The versions of the song that we know come from England, where it was known in its oldest forms as "The Briarly Bush" or "The Prickly Bush," but the actual origins of the song are from the continent. Virtually every country in Northern Europe (and many in the south) have some variant of it, and the great folk scholar Francis James Child (1825-1896), the American who did landmark work in tracing both the origins and permutations of about three hundred ballads from the British Isles, believes the song to be German or Hungarian originally.

In UK and European versions, the prisoner is almost always a maid, often one kidnapped and held for ransom by pirates; in America's southern Appalachians and in the Texas-Louisiana area where the song is also known, the condemned is usually a man. Regardless, the motif of purchasing one's freedom from the gallows (or a hostage situation) does in fact have its roots in history. Though then as now capital punishment was a deterrent, an act of vengeance, and a kind of terrorism inflicted by the ruling class on the lower classes to keep them in line - it differs from the procedure-laden, appeals-rich and legally intricate method of today. In 17th century England and before, for example, those accused of capital crimes were not permitted a solicitor and had to mount their own defense. And if reprieve could not have been purchased all that frequently at the point of execution - some gold given to the right jurist prior to then could work wonders. And there were reported cases (in Scotland, not surprisingly) of executions forestalled by the payment of a ransom.

Our first version of the song is fittingly a pub performance from the UK, by an 84 year old woman simply known as Bella.:



Bella is apparently from central Europe but lived most of her nine decades in the north of England. She sings in the authentic a capella style that most ballads were performed in traditionally. I'm intrigued by how the younger-skewing audience (fueled by ale, no doubt) finds the parents' refusal to help amusing. Whatever dark humor permeates a lot of folk songs - there isn't much here in this one. Rather, it is an implicit commentary on how the bonds of romantic love transcend those of birth family - and the laughter shows what happens when folks get cut off from their folk roots. No wonder American Idol and its ilk are popular.

The two classic American folk performances of the song probably belong to Leadbelly, who claimed to have learned it in prison (he spent a lot of years there for various offenses including manslaughter) and Odetta. Leadbelly throws in a really bluesy tinge to the melody (which I bet influenced the Kingston Trio's Nick Reynolds) and in a comment on YouTube absolutely shreds the twelve string guitar here - if you ever wondered why people regard ol' Huddie Ledbetter with reverence, listen to him play here:



Odetta on the other hand approaches the song with the almost operatic seriousness that characterized most folk singing before the commercial/pop folk era began big time in 1958:



The commercial popularizing groups also took a couple of good whacks at the piece. The Kingston Trio included it - fittingly, I'd say - on their early 1961 so-called "dark" album Make Way, so called because of the generally quiet tone of most of the song selections (and the dark dust jacket, the illustration in the video):



The first generation of the Trio here is doing what it often did and is seldom credited for doing - using a fairly close reading of the original song with some interesting wrinkles. Note how close this version is lyrically to Bella's above and the aforementioned Leadbelly-esque bluesy tone of the vocals. I'm also wondering idly here if I am hearing Dave Guard on his fairly new Gibson twelve string and Bob Shane on plectrum banjo....

Peter, Paul and Mary also do a fine job with a melody a bit more reminiscent of the oldest British version that can be heard here - "The Briery Bush". From a 1965 BBC television show:



Led Zeppelin riffed off Leadbelly's version in 1970, as Robert Plant explains in his intro to this 1998 live performance with Jimmy Page:



There's a bit of Steppenwolf's cover of Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher" in the intro too, I think.

Two final versions - first, another opera-serious almost a capella rendition from Kentucky's master dulcimerist and folkorist, John Jacob Niles:



And I'm sure you've been waiting for this one - the Smothers Brothers unforgettable - ah, abbreviated version:



Roots and branches, roots and branches....the very nature of real folk music.

"Bonnie Heilan' Laddie"/"Highland Laddie"

Roots and branches - that's what these sixty-odd posts have been about - where songs come from, and how they morph into a variety of often very different versions over vast stretches of time and place. Additionally, I've been able to rediscover for myself both the richness of the Kingston Trio's versions of these songs (and sometimes have noted the limitations of the same) as well as some wonderful, original, traditional, funny, or in some cases outright bizarre versions of those same tunes.

Well, this week's selection, "Bonnie Heilan' Laddie," embodies quite literally all of the above. The benchmark performances belong IMHO to the KT and Pete Seeger (a fine pedigree indeed) but extend as well in the videos below to some startlingly original arrangements, a go at the song by one of the greatest musician/composers who ever lived, and perhaps the weirdest video I have ever offered here.

"Bonnie Heilan' Laddie" is a Scots number of course, and I'm guessing that most of us figured out fairly early that "heiland" was Scots for "highland." It's just as clearly a sea chantey, though what connection our highland boy has with all the places named in the tune is obscure, or even why the singer is asking if the lad has ever been there.

The song seems first to have been a piper's number, and it remains in its original form of "Bonnie Laddie, Highland Laddie" the regimental march of about two dozen military units both in the UK and across the Commonwealth. It's a stirring and inspiring piece, a dramatic reminder that in Celtic countries what we refer to in English as "bagpipes" were known in their original languages as "war pipes," the purpose of which was not only to rally one's own soldiers but to inspire fear in the enemy through the eerie sound of the pipes (the exact effect accomplished according to veterans of the Battle of New Orleans as General Edward Pakenham's Highland Infantry charged Andrew Jackson's emplacements through a thick fog - to no avail, of course, though the sound of the pipes scared the bejesus out of Andy's men).

Now I know that the pipes do not excite the same thrill in everyone as they do in many of us who claim Celtic ancestry, so here is a short clip of massed pipers doing the song - the melody is a bit different from "Bonnie Heilan' Laddie," but you can clearly hear the "bonnie laddie, highland laddie" section repeated at the end of each musical phrase:



It is easy to infer that a memory of this tune inspired some nameless Scots sailor boys to adapt the basic music into a song that could be accompanied by a fiddle or pennywhistle, which were by far the most common instruments brought onto 18th and 19th century sailing ships, whose voyages could last for months at a time and on which music and dancing were the only forms of genuine recreation. Dave Guard of the KT and respected music archivist Joe Hickerson arranged the sailors' folk song into this version, adding a fragment of another song ("This Boston town don't suit my notion...") that exists only as - well, a fragment:



I love this version from the "dark" album Make Way - but I felt that the Trio was holding back a bit on it, that it could have benefited from a bit more of the full-steam-ahead enthusiasm that Pete Seeger demonstrates below. Nonetheless, even crusty old traditionalist and banjo master Billy Faier, who finds little to like in the Kingston Trio at all, approves of their treatment of "Helian Laddie."

Billy Faier On The Kingston Trio

Seeger essentially owns this song, having rescued it from folk obscurity and promoting it as a concert sing-along, which he tries to do in this video from Australia in the early 1960s, albeit without a whole lot of success. It's a great solo effort even if it wasn't intended to be:

Note: The cited video was taken down for CopyVio, but a fragment of Seeger doing the song can be heard around 4:22 in the video below -



Now the result would have been very different had Mick Coates been in that hall!

In the last few years, there have been a number of internet polls conducted trying to ascertain who the greatest of Irish folk singers is/was. The winner is invariably one of three men - Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, Liam Clancy, or my own favorite, Tommy Makem:



There are a number of pretty good amateur versions on YouTube, though only the Brothers of Through here have posted a full version of the song - rough-edged but enthusiastic:



Finally - like many other classical composers, Ludwig von Beethoven occasionally turned to folk music for musical phrases and themes and occasionally complete airs. In 1818, he debuted his "25 Scottish Songs For Voice With Piano, Violin, and Violincello" with lyrics adapted by James Hogg (Hogg's Lyrics As Sung In The Video Below). Beethoven's tune is recognizably the same as the pipers' number and is a favorite of leider singers. But Robin Hendrix is an opera singer, here recorded doing the number in France earlier this year. I am not sure what was going through Ms. Hendix's mind - but this is certainly the strangest interpretation of a folk song I have ever seen:



Well. I think I'll stick to my own version, one that I play for myself often, which cross-pollinates the KT with Seeger and Makem. Seems like everyone else has had a run at adapting the number, so I have as well. Feel free....

Dark Romance: "Blow The Candle Out"

As early as 1959 in a Downbeat Magazine article, Nick Reynolds and Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio were frank in acknowledging that among the original three only Bob Shane had the chops to make it in the entertainment business as a solo - the chops being the voice, of course, but the guitar, personality, and looks as well. Yet Shane had the chance to make a good go of a solo career in 1968 and even had a promising beginning with the single of "Honey" - yet he expressed then and ever since that he preferred working in a group. There's no mystery there, I think, because as great a job with solos as Bob has always done, he has always been at his best working in and around harmony, and I believe he understood that he had found his corner of the music world, and it was spelled F-O-L-K, as he and Guard and Reynolds had redefined the genre, all protestations to the contrary.

Consider. Bob Shane ventured into show tunes and pop/blues/jazz with great solos like "Scotch and Soda," "She Was Too Good To Me," "When My Love Was Here," and so many more. But I always thought that Bob was at his most effective in the folkier numbers like "Stone" and "Candle." He is such a great singer that he was able to enhance a fairly mediocre boozy, bluesy bar number like "Scotch and Soda" and essentially trick audiences into thinking it was a great song simply because his performance of it was one of the best vocal efforts of the 50s (though don't forget - he also played that great guitar part as well). "One For My Baby And One More For The Road" the S&S song is definitely not - yet Shane elevates it into that level of the musical stratosphere by sheer force of talent.

When Bob had really good material to work with - "Maria," "A Rolling Stone," and "Blow The Candle Out," all of which are definitely in the folk-sounding bracket, the performances soared to a level unmatched by any of the other great folk voices of the time, among which I'd put Glenn Yarborough and Chad Mitchell and Tommy Makem. Sinatra and Tony Bennett could and did take successful shots at some of Bob's pop songs, and Bob could have handled much of their repertoire. But do you remember all the great baritones and second tenors doing pop back then? Jack Jones, Ed Ames, Robert Goulet, Bennett, Steve Lawrence, Andy Williams, Perry Como - as great and distinctive as Bob's voice is, it would have melded into that collage of performers. But in the folk world, Bob had only two serious challengers among baritones - the aforementioned Tommy Makem, who largely stayed within his Irish genre, and Cisco Houston, who died way too young and just as the Trio was peaking.

What I love about Shane's performance of this week's selection is the sustained sweetness and control of the vocal - it's a quiet song that still has an underlying sexual tension that Bob implies but does not exploit, making the song as beautifully romantic as anything he ever did. As we'll see below in both the lyrics and the other videos -no one else quite knows how to hit that subtle combination in their renditions.

"Blow the Candle Out" first appeared in print quite a long time ago, in 1724 in England with the original seaport town being London or Bristol. I've heard an Irish version that uses Dublin, and most American versions mention Boston. Shane is credited with re-writing the lyric and throwing in a parson where non existed in the original, which is more of a sailor's girl-in-every-port song rather than the romantic courtship and marriage piece that Bob presents. The original lyric included these two verses not exactly in the KT's performance:

Your father and your mother
In yonder room do lie
A-hugging one another
So why not you and I ?
A-hugging one another
Without a fear or doubt
So roll me in your arms my love
And blow the candles out.

I prithee speak more softly
Of what we have to do
Lest that our noise of talking
Should make our pleasure rue.
The streets they are so nigh, love
The people walk about
They may peep in and spy, love
So blow the candles out.

The sailor asks the girl to name the child after him (as in the KT's song) but leaves open the question of whether or not he'll ever return.

Here is the Trio's version, from the supposedly "dark" album Make Way, in actuality a thoroughly professional and satisfying musical offering:



All three Trio members are providing excellent instrumental support. As always, Dave Guard's lack of formal instruction on the banjo works brilliantly in his favor, as he lines out individual notes in a unique way - people just didn't do that on the banjo. Nick and Bob's harmonious guitar work compliments the banjo beautifully.

Our other performances of the song are talented amateurs, the best of whom I believe are England's Nancy Wallace and Jason Steel here:



Don Sineti and Steve Roys from Chicago's Maritime Festival go for a kind of art-folk ambiance with Roys' rounded baritone - pretty effective and I like the wash that the accordion lends:



Finally - the Sirens of Sterling seem to be a mid-Atlantic/New England group that performs at Renaissance fairs and pirate shows all through the area - I featured them on "The Gypsy Rover" a few months back. They get the tension but clearly aren't interested in matching Bob Shane's subtlety:



And a final thought that confirms for me that Bob Shane made the right decision in staying in the folk genre that he helped to define, at least as far as the recording industry is concerned. Have you ever seen Bob Shane performing without playing his guitar...seen him in a tux, cradling a mic with his hand in his pocket? Can you even imagine it?

Woody Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'"

" I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."
- Woody Guthrie

And just such a song is this week's selection, "Hard Travelin'," which I think must rank in the top five of Guthrie's best-known songs. It's prototypical political and myth-making Woody Guthrie at his best, celebrating the virtues of the common working man while at the same time infusing it with a hint of discontent and protest - and continuing to paint the portrait of himself that he wanted painted in the public's imagination.

Now, Woody Guthrie was the real deal as far as intinerancy and joblessness went, but some of that was of his own creation. The family that he was born into in Okemah, Oklahoma was until he was 14 far more prosperous than nearly any other family in town, and despite a series of setbacks and disasters including the death of his mother, WG's eventual nomadic lifestyle came about as much from his own dislike of school, discipline, and authority in general (and from his dislike of the uncle he lived with after his family dissolved in his late teens) as it did from economic circumstance. [Some speculate that it was WG's hatred of top-down authority that kept him from actually joining the Communist Party.] So Oklahoma-born and bred Woody Guthrie was never an Okie - never one of John Steinbeck's hardscrabble dirt farmers made homeless by foreclosed mortgages in the Depression.

And Guthrie seemed to have more of a taste for work in radio stations and music (at least as far as union organizing went) than he had for work in "hard rock tunnels" and "Pittsburgh steel." That's not to say that Woody didn't do that kind of work, because he did, most notably in FDR's WPA projects around the west, including the Grand Coulee and other dams on the Columbia River. But Woody turned that into good coin - he wrote a group of labor-oriented songs while being paid well by the federal government to do so because somebody in Washington recognized that WG had a voice that resonated with the common people. Traditional folksinger Raymond Crooke of Hong Kong and YouTube fame wrote, "It is ironic that some of Woody Guthrie's best songs were written as pro-government propaganda. In May 1941, he was hired to promote the federal dams on the Columbia River, especially the enormous Grand Coulee Dam..."

None of this mitigates the quality of WG's legacy as an artist or citizen - it's just that it is at at least slight odds with the public persona he created in his autobiography Bound For Glory - and in songs like "Hard Travelin'."

Our first performance is of course from Guthrie himself, from the Folkways recordings of the late 40s. I find his voice here quite pleasing - and the lyrics are different from some of the ones we've heard:



Now the Kingston Trio did this song in two distinctly different ways. The KT with Dave Guard gave the song a slightly bluesy quality, moderate speed, with a touch of country. The Trio with John Stewart used this is an opener when I saw them, and that version is faster, louder, less nuanced - because as here from the album Once Upon A Time, it's an opener:



I've always preferred the version by the original Trio with Dave Guard, however - fabulous bass opening by David Wheat:



Thanks to my KT message board friend Dave Long for uploading this.

About the same time that the Kingston's were getting started in the U.S., Lonnie Donnegan was beginning the skiffle craze in the UK. Sort of anticipating what Jim McGuinn described as "putting a Beatle beat to folk music" to create folk-rock, Donnegan put a simple 4/4 r&r beat to folk numbers like "The Rock Island Line" and this one, creating hits in Britain that influenced the young and impressionable John Lennon and Paul McCartney:



And now for three rather different contemporary versions. First, Flatt and Scruggs put their distinctive bluegrass spin on the song:



Recently uploaded here, some classic videos from the most dedicated KT tribute band, and I'll bet the longest-lived, the CountyLine Trio. The show is from 1982, and I'm hoping Chuck C. can fill us in a little bit on this - a fine upbeat performance of generally the Stewart arrangement:

Slainte! To Health In The New Year: "The Jug Of Punch"

Just about the only cultural element as widespread throughout the countries of the world as music has been the fermenting, brewing, or distillation of some local products - grains, berries, fruits, tubers, and in Mongolia, mare's milk - into some mood-altering and intoxicating beverages. So it's no wonder that most every country also has a positive raft of folk songs related to the pleasures and joys - and not infrequently the sorrows - of drinking, and we're not talking about water here. As my long gone cousin Jimmy Conway ("I made it out of Ireland one step ahead of the Black and Tans" - that'd be 1922) used to respond to my mother when she'd offer him a glass of H2O on his visits to our home - "Did ye ever see what that stuff does to the inside of a pipe?"

The fact that alcohol is a frequent guest at celebrations of all kinds - from weddings and funerals and parties to - of course - New Year's festivities - makes a drinking song the exactly right selection for this week's Weekend Videos. And there is no drinking song closer to my own heart or to those of my nine brothers and sisters as "The Jug of Punch."

Since most Xroaders know the Kingston Ttio version, before we get to some interestingly different performances of the song, it might be worthwhile to explain - what exactly is punch, as in the song? I had labored under the misapprehension for many years that it was a sort of Irish boilermaker, a combination of beer and whiskey, called in colonial New England by its British name, flip. [Parenthesis: a true and original boilermaker is a tad different from flip - you're supposed to drop the whole shot glass full of your favorite whiskey into the beer stein; in Ireland, one never does so but (if you've money enough for the pricey whiskey) orders instead a "a shot and a pint" - same effect.]

In fact, Irish whiskey punch is more closely related to the hot rum drinks also popular in New England in colony days. Recipes differ, but the common denominators seem to be, in addition to whiskey, lemons, cloves, hot water, and sugar (brown, preferably). Mix it all up and quaff - it can be consumed at room temperature but the preferred method of serving was following a stir with a hot poker, ashes and all. [Sounding good right at this moment - it's in the mid 30s here in SoCal, unusually cold for us, and it would go nicely with the Christmas tree and the fire.]

"The Jug Of Punch" song comes to us in two clearly related but distinctly different versions, which for want of more apt descriptive terms I'll call tippling and inebriated. The tippling version, which requires some dexterous tongue and vocal work, seems to be the older of the two - very Celtic sounding and all - and one might guess more commonly sung early of an evening. The raucously inebriated version would likely show up after a few bowls of punch - or even more than one "shot and a pint" - a combination sure to be lethal to one's sobriety.

This might well be an Irish song that, like the earlier "Mountains of Mourne," the Kingston Trio did not get directly from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who were just getting organized into an act in 1960 at the time of the Make Way album.
The Clancys had included a version on their very first album (Come Fill Your Glass With Us) on the Tradition label that they owned in 1959, but that version is clearly the grandparent of the one posted below and not the only influence on Nick, Bob, and Dave, who are clearly tippling here and not raucous:



Luke Kelly of the Dubliners (on the short list with Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem as the greatest of Irish folk soloists) was known to take a hit or five before going out and performing, and I believe it shows in this version of the song, whose lyrics and musical structure suggest that this is at least a progenitor of the NBD arrangement:



A word of explanation on Kelly's introduction. Everyone but everyone knew of the Clancy's "raucous" version, posted below; Luke is differentiating his older version from the one that the CB used in performance. I'd be more surprised that Paddy and his brothers did the older version at all - but Vanguard brought out a kind of bootleg album that included a rare tape of the Brothers doing Luke's version.

For a truly delightful and rather more musical studio take of this version, here is Altan from the album Celtic Wonder:



A really excellent and complex vocal arrangement of the tipling version was recorded in the 1970s by Scotland's wonderful folk group, The Corries - here the original trio as opposed to the later duo:



And now, the version I first heard in the late 50s - in a live performance from the early 1980s. This is Paddy Clancy's (1924-1998) signature song. I believe it was Mr. Banjo who observed earlier that he liked the way that Paddy just stood up to the mic, fists clenched, chest and jaw out, and belted away.



It was this version that my brothers and sisters and I would bellow at the top of our lungs, as children just for the sheer joy of it, and as adults (occasionally) under the very spell sung of here. One family sing - and these were always spontaneous, never planned nor too wholesome nor cheesy in the least - that stands out in my memory - in summer of 1982, my father in the last month of his life (though we didn't know that for sure at the time), the twelve of us sitting in the grand library that he'd added onto the house - my dad (who had spent his entire life trying NOT to be Irish) suggested that we sing this one before he retired for the night. Perhaps inspired by that, we all shouted it out (in tune of course!) like we were kids again, complete with every bark, whistle and growl on the original recording plus a few dozen more.

I'll never forget it. Auld lang syne, indeed.

The Water Is Wide

In The Kingston Trio On Record, Ben Blake and Jack Rubeck's comment on the original Kingston Trio's ninth album Make Way was that it lacked "the spark of vibrant enthusiasm" of earlier LPs, that its jacket suggested a "brooding aura" of "dark tones" - and their estimate that many fans regarded it as the "least effective" of the NBD efforts. While the album lacks the all-out banjo blaster that became the Trio's hallmark, it does in fact have some outstanding cuts: the song that in a faster version became the show opener for the NBJ trio's last two years (Guthrie's "Hard Travelin"), one of Bob Shane's best solos - one that really showcases the range and color of his voice ("Blow The Candle Out"), two fine and original versions of English folk songs ("Hangman" and "Fair And Tender Ladies"), and three nicely-turned Celtic songs in "Bonnie Heilan' Laddie," "The Jug of Punch," - and "The River Is Wide."

"River" is copyrighted by the Trio as a Nick Reynolds arrangement, and in the best KT tradition, Nick simply changed the rhythm and a few words of a very old Irish (or Scots - no one is sure) song entitled "The Water Is Wide," also known as "O Waly Waly." Authoritative websites like The Contemplator [a treasure chest for traditional music lovers - here's his "Waly" page: The Contemplator] suggest the song dates to 1734 - but they're not entirely correct - I found a version of it in the crumbling leaves of a Renaissance song book from about 1590 in the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois many years ago.

The song has a multitude of variants - the Irish "Carrickfergus," which to me sounds little enough like the original until the very end, and with distant echoes in Ray Hannisian's choral number "I'm Moving On" and even Rod McKuen's "Isle In The Water" (this last not surprising since most of McKuen's lyrics are derived directly from a poem by William Butler Yeats, who was steeped in his own Irish folk traditions).

The sheer plaintive beauty of the song, with its older-but-wiser and lost love themes, is given a simple, direct, and effective reading by the Trio in their album cut - which is here from Make Way:



The song has been re-interpreted scores of times in scores of ways by a plethora of really famous and talented musicians.

Speaking of whom - I believe my earlier posting of golden-voiced New Zealand soprano Hayley Westenra's "Shenandoah" scored some points with a few Xroaders who hadn't heard her before, and she has several performance videos of her interpretation:



The most traditional-sounding version I could find - and interestingly, the one closest in some ways to the KT's - is not surprisingly Liam Clancy's solo effort:



Back to the ladies - I alluded above to an Irish song called "Carrickfergus" - which I knew as a child through the rough voice of Tommy Clancy. Well, before Hayley W. there was Charlotte Church, to whom Hayley is often compared. Here Church sings "Carrickfergus," and you can hear the extent to which it echoes "The River is Wide":



A search on YouTube will yield many more female singers giving it a go, from the sublime version of the late Eva Cassady to the disappointingly awful bluesed-up version attempted by Sheryl Crow. Bob Dylan gives it a shot - a rather poor one, I think, even with Joan Baez trying to help. But Joan B's solo rendition is, as you would expect, sublime:




Of the many instrumental versions out there (often over-done - something about the simplicity of the melody seems to encourage guitarists and pianists to start riffing all over the place), the most unique I found was this slightly syncopated yet still traditional sounding one - by a chorus of harp-guitars:



The last word for this post will be a blast from the past, black and white, sung in mid-Sixties syncopated pop fashion by a great pop singer of the era, gone now for nearly a decade from cancer - Dusty Springfield:



It's a great song that keeps getting reinvented - many more versions out there on YT.

Addendum 6/11/10

The late actor Pernell Roberts (1928 - 2010), most famous for TV roles on Bonanza in the '60s and Trapper John, M.D. in the 80s, was also a trained and professional singer whose ten years on the boards in NYC included a number of musical comedy roles. He released one album of folk songs, and his rich baritone on "Water" is a revelation to those who knew him only as an actor:


Addendum II - July 2012

The explosion of popularity of YouTube over the last four years has led to the posting of dozens of more quality versions of this and most any other good song. Here are a few of the ones that I regard as the best.

2009 - Emmylou Harris & Ensemble At Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday Celebration



Australia's Seekers, About 1966



Judy Collins, 2005



Fred Neil From His 1965 Debut Album - The Only Song On The Record That He Did Not Compose