"Bimini Gal"

Folk music and drinking seem to have a natural affinity for each other, and there is no wonder in that given the really large number of traditional songs that celebrate the imbibing of alcohol in all its forms. Some of those numbers are sprightly tunes that depict dancing and fellowship and good times and the virtues of spirituous liquors, others rather darker in nature as they recount hangovers, fights, violence, and disasters begotten of alcoholism. Not surprisingly, the Irish seem to lead the pack in the sheer quantity of songs of both kinds about alcohol  - but the Caribbean balladeers really aren't very far behind them, and our island friends seem to be even better than the Irish at blending the two themes into a single song. Think of some of the highest-profile island songs and you'll see what I mean. "The Banana Boat Song" as we know it today is about backbreaking labor on the graveyard shift, the reward for which is "work all night for a drink of rum." Perhaps the most internationally famous song from the area, "The Wreck of The John B" as Carl Sandburg titled the first published version, is generally performed with a happy, somewhat uptempo rhythm - this despite the fact that the lyric is about as dark as drinking lyrics come. Recall that singer, grandfather, and crew all get so plastered that they end up in a confrontation with each other violent enough to trash the ship and force the local police to intervene and (by implication) haul them off to the slammer, from which the singer (sounding as if he is still drunk) "want to go home" because "this is the worst trip/Since I've been born." Not your garden variety good times and brews tune,  however much that everyone from Blind Blake Higgs to The Beach Boys seems to perform it that way.

"Bimini Gal" and its later adaptation "Bimini" are first cousins to "John B." Both are Bahamian in origin, with "John B" traceable to a real ship that sank in the harbor of Eleuthra Island about the year 1900 and "Bimini" (whose harbor is depicted above) arriving some decades later from the eponymous pair of islands a mere 80 miles due east of Miami.The oldest version of "Bimini Gal" seems to exist only as a fragment, perhaps the chorus of a sea chantey-like work song for repetitive labor. Its sole lyrics were

Oh, when I go down to Bimini
Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.

Bimini gal is a rock in the harbor
Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.

Pete Seeger identified it as "a descendant of a street dance from Nassau" and included it on his Folkways recording of Folksongs Of Four Continents from 1955. A sample of this version appears on the Smithsonian/Folkways page for the album HERE, and if you play the clip you'll hear Erik Darling on lead, three years before he replaced Seeger in The Weavers.

The most unusual rendition of this version - and oddly, perhaps the most influential - was recorded by legendary Bahamian guitarist and singer Joseph Spence (1910-1984), a unique musical artist if ever there was one. As Allmusic's Mark A. Humphrey has written, "Spence created an idiosyncratic (and inimitable) guitar style rife with percussive and improvisatory vamps....He was a folk guitarist's Thelonious Monk, and his growling vocal counterpoint and surprising inventions are one of folk music's great delights." And further-

The combination of Spence's voice and guitar is one of music's most unforgettable. It is a low, rumbling voice that is sometimes simply moaning and mumbling, as if this was a Glenn Gould voice track. As for lyrics, clearly enunciating two words out of a line is a good average for this man, and the results should make many other vocalists think about following suit. His vocal style could be appreciated simply for being bizarre and unorthodox, true, but the same could never be said for his guitar playing. He often uses a drop-D tuning, which means his bass string is lower than usual. This in turn creates many variations in harmony as he plays, combining very nicely with the hard, percussively snapping feel of his picking.

Lest you think Humphrey is exaggerating here, take a listen to Spence's mesmerizing delivery of the number:



Inimitable to be sure, and if Spence's vocals aren't to everyone's taste, you still have to stand in awe of what the man is doing with his guitar. Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham once told John Stewart that a good song should sound "repetitive and hypnotic," and I think that is a perfect description of what Spence is doing here.

Bruce Molsky is a folk artist whose work I have learned of only in recent years, mainly from research for this blog. He is talented and tasteful, and he presents a more conventional instrumental of Spence's "Bimini Gal" here:



Like Spence, Molsky is using a dropped D tuning, though he is using finger picks as opposed to Spence's hammering flatpicking. Without exactly imitating Spence, Molsky retains the "percussive snapping" effect that the Bahamian achieves in his rendition.

The original lyric that Spence growls out is suggestive of the later "Bimini" song. The "Bimini gal is a rock in the harbor," which sounds a bit odd until you realize that a rock in a harbor is likely to sink a ship, which for our singer is getting that licking that he had never experienced before. There were other Bahamian songs recounting bar fights over girls, with some expressly citing Bimini Bay or Bimini Harbor as the locale for the ruckus, so it wasn't much of a leap for songwriters Bill Olofson and Mark McIntyre to fuse "Bimini Gal" with one of those other tunes and come up with "Bimini" (in much the same way that Seeger combined another Bahamian fragment, "When The Whale Gets Strike" with the old Anglo-Irish "Greenland Whale Fisheries" to come up with the most familar modern folk version of the song, sung in that manner by Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Weavers). The Kingston Trio included the new combined song on its fourth studio album, 1960's Sold Out.



The album cover in the video is, of course, a picture of the wrong edition of the Trio, but the track retains its appealing energy a half century after it was recorded. The aforementioned fusion creates an oddity - a song with two choruses, the "Never get a licking" from "Bimini Gal" and the "Send my bail down to Bimini" of the more modern tune. The cut also underscores one of the strengths of the first configuration of the Kingston group, that being the marvelous sense of rhythm that each of the originals possessed - Bob Shane on guitar, Nick Reynolds on bongos, and Dave Guard on banjo.

The current KT slows the tune down a bit and invests it with a bit more of a pop-calypso feeling:



The Olofson-McIntyre version has also remained a favorite of amateurs - here, Chicago-based band "A Bunch of Coconuts," one of several versions currently on YouTube:


Finally, contemporary Caribbean artist Stevie S and the Calypsonians do a modern riff on the original "Bimini Gal" song:



Stevie seems to be going for repetitive and hypnotic, as he melds calypso and ska rhythms with a dash of reggae - and if you listened long enough, a touch of bluegrass as well.

There is a good-natured, good-humored element in both these songs. Our local lady may be a dangerous rock, but that doesn't seem to keep the ships away, impending licking or no. And while she may be the proximate cause of a "Sloop John B" kind of alcohol-fueled disaster, it's pretty clear that once that bail arrives, our boys will be out and about and after her again. Warm breezes, tropical women, and a bit too much rum can do that to a guy.

Will Holt #2 - "Raspberries, Strawberries"

My first post on Will Holt (L) appeared a bit under a year ago. It was a discussion of Holt's re-imagining of a Brazilian folk song as "Lemon Tree," a tune that was probably one of the twelve or fifteen most widely-known songs of the folk era at the time of the revival, thanks in no small part to its appearance on Peter, Paul and Mary's first album. That recording stayed in Billboard's Top Ten for over a year and spent an impressive month at the #1 spot, and "Lemon Tree" was a minor hit, reaching #35 on the magazine's Hot 100 singles chart.

"Lemon Tree," however, was not Holt's first charting composition. That distinction belonged to another reworking of a traditional song, in this case an old French tune that Holt recast as "Raspberries, Strawberries." The latter tune was one of the earliest recordings of the Kingston Trio and the one that for some mysterious reason they chose as a single release to follow up their monster 1958 hit "Tom Dooley." An odd choice, really, because the two songs could hardly have been more different. However polished and commercial the arrangement may have been, "Tom Dooley" was a real folk song, a ballad of obscure origin from 19th century North Carolina. "Raspberries, Strawberries," on the other hand, was a clear attempt by Holt to replicate in English the sense and sentiment of the French cabaret chanson. In that respect, Holt's effort parallels the early compositions of Rod McKuen, who like Holt had fallen under the spell of European cafe society.

For my money, whatever the charms these gentlemen's songs possess, they really don't capture the feel and the atmosphere of the European cabaret, any more than "Lemon Tree" does of Brazil. That may be why I have never responded with any great enthusiasm to either of Holt's best-known songs. The genuine cabaret music has a kind of implicit tragedy built into it, and a depth of feeling that neither Holt nor McKuen quite get to. Consider, for example, the legendary Yves Montand, here with one of his classic numbers, "Les Feuilles Mortes":



Most undoubtedly recognize this as the root song of "Autumn Leaves," though the French lyric - and Montand's delivery - is much more poetic than the standard English versions. The last few lines of the final verse mean something like "But life separates those who love/So quietly and sweetly/ And the sea erases on the sand/The steps of the divided lovers." That's cabaret.

As I noted in the linked "Lemon Tree" article above, I think Holt was much more successful in rendering and performing German-born Kurt Weill's songs for Bertolt Brecht's plays, and subsequent to his fairly brief ventures into folk-type music, Holt had a wonderful career in musical theater both on and off Broadway, winning Obie and Drama Desk awards as well as scoring several Tony nominations.

But in an earlier era, one in which the world seemed larger, more mysterious, and perhaps more exciting, Holt's folk efforts felt more genuine than perhaps they really were. Today we can hear Montand and Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour at will with a click on a YouTube video or a download from Amazon. In the 50s and early 60s, Holt was about as close as the pop mainstream was going to get to that European sound, at least until all three of the aforementioned artists ventured into the U.S. market, their way being paved in part by the admiration of Frank Sinatra for their work.

So "Raspberries, Strawberries" is a kind of faux-French, just as many of the pop-folk groups were performing what purists in the U.S. derided as faux folk. Fifty years after the fact, both of the above look a lot better than they may have at the time, given especially some of the directions that both pop and folk music have taken since then. So - here is R&S as performed by the current configuration of the Kingston Trio, the group that gave the song its highest profile five decades ago:



For the sake of comparison - the original group's 1958 recording, taken down repeatedly from YouTube, is hiding in the middle of this next video, which is quite clearly uploaded from a vinyl copy. You have to work your way through a Gordon Lightfoot number from his great 1968 album Did She Mention My Name? - but that's a recommendation IMO:



There is a persistent canard, fueled no doubt by the notation in early 60s KT songbooks that the lyrics included "French double talk," that the KT's Dave Guard was either singing ungrammatical French or mangling the pronunciation. About ten years ago I discovered the redoubtable Jerry Kergan's compelling refutation of the tale on his Kingston Trio Liner Notes site, which is great across the board and especially so for this song. (Jerry has also provided a fascinating background page on Will Holt HERE with bio and liner notes from his folk albums.)

Holt was, as noted, working from an older song, one version of which was recorded as "Les Fraises et Les Framboises (The Strawberries and the Raspberries)" by Le Trio Soucy in 1949:



The other main folk-flavored version of Holt's song comes to us from Bud and Travis. Though better known for their thrilling repertoire of Mexican folk songs, the duo also did a lot of "world music" numbers, including a fair number of French-inflected songs - here in 1964:



This is a bit closer to Holt's original than the KT rendition. Trio fans undoubtedly recognize that the third guitarist is none other than David "Buck" Wheat, the Kingstons' bassist for most of their first four years.

Some years after the folk revival, the song was re-done into a polka called "Strawberries, Raspberries" with a completely different set of lyrics. Some sources credit polka king and multiple Grammy winner Jimmy Sturr with this version, though it may pre-date him. In any event, the polka version is most closely associated with Stur - but his version has been taken down from YouTube, so here is popular polka-ista Steve Meisner and his band doing Sturr's version:



That is even farther from the original intent of Holt's song than Bobby Bare's rewrite of Hedy West's "500 Miles". Folk process, I suppose.

"Raspberries, Strawberries" has remained a favorite through the years of Kingston Trio fans, and Holt proudly claims it as his own on his website and in his press releases (he still performs occasionally at the age of 82). It is not, as noted, truly French, but that is not a failing exactly, any more than an Italian or German western film is, and there are plenty of those. If we get a glimpse, however slight, into the ethos of another land, then the song or film has on balance likely done more good than harm. Thus it is, I think, with this song.

Among The Leaves So Green-O: "The Keeper" / "The Hunter"

This week's song has been one of my favorite traditional tunes since I first heard Burl Ives' version of it rather more than fifty years ago. The most common name for it is "The Keeper Did A-Hunting Go," but it has also appeared in publications as "The Hunter," "Among The Leaves So Green-O," and "Derry Derry Down." It is clearly and unmistakably English in origin, and from what I can gather occupies the same place in U.K. music education that perhaps "Oh! Susanna!" does in the U.S., meaning that for a very long time just about everyone learned to sing it in primary school. Most versions sport an antiphonal chorus - one in which one singer or group alternates responses with another, like "Jackie Boy - Master" here - and is consequently a delight for little children to learn. Or it was, at least when most of us were children. I'm not sure how much basic education in the joys of singing is left in schools today in either Britain or here - and I am even more uncertain that Stephen Foster or "The Hunter" would be included today in any event.

Too bad, because the song is a delight on several levels. Most versions sung today are derived from the rather sanitized version published in 1909 by legendary British folk song collector Cecil Sharp in School Songs. Sharp's rendering makes the song a literal deer hunt, and the tune works just fine on that level:

The keeper did a-hunting go
And under his cloak he carried a bow
All for to shoot a merry little doe
Amongst the leaves so green-O.

The first doe that he shot at he missed,
And the second doe he trimmed he kissed,
And the third ran away in a young man's breast,
She's amongst the leaves of the green O.

The fourth doe then she crossed the plain,
The keeper fetched her back again.
O and he tickled her in a merry vein,
She's amongst the leaves of the green O.

Now, unless you're ten years old, you might well look at that lyric and suspect that something else is afoot here, since most hunters as far as I know neither kiss nor tickle their prey. If you further consider the soft and supple coat of a doe, its fetchingly luminescent brown eyes, its skittish temperament, its elusiveness - well, you don't have to be Freud to figure that the deer might well be a kind of folk code for a supple, luminescent, and elusive female of our own species. (One of my all-time favorite poems is from about 1530, "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind" by Sir Thomas Wyatt where the connection is clear and intentional, a hind being a female red deer.)

In fact, Sharp was presenting a 19th century cleaned-up lyric of a much older song, one that was first printed in the 1500s and has long been thought to date back to the 13th century, the time of Robin Hood. The 1600s version was called "The Huntsman's Delight; or the Forester's Pleasure" and included stanzas like:

The third Doe she made great moan,
Because that she was big with Fawn,
Which made her to go weeping home,
From 'mongst the leaves so green a:
Hey down, &c.

The fourth Doe could no longer stay,
But she must be gone her way,
For fear that the Keepers should her lay
Amongst the leaves so green a:
Hey down, &c.

The fifth Doe leapt over the stile,
But the Keeper he got her by the heel,
And there he did both kiss and feel,
Amongst the leaves so green a.
Hey down, &c.

That's pretty clear, I'd say. Whatever the quarry is, however, the song is just plain tuneful fun, as our videos will show. First, an instrumental version done with overdubbed pennywhistles by Edinburgh's Gordon Hudson. Lest that sound too weird, give it a listen - it's a delight:



Warms the cockles of my Irish heart, it does.

Now you would think that the Weavers would deliver a creative but straight-up traditional version of the song, as I did when I got the Travelling On album in about 1960. You would be wrong:



The group ultimately cannot blame this travesty on their Decca Records producer Gordon Jenkins and his insistence on orchestrations for folk numbers in the quartet's 1950 recordings; this dates to 1959, though since Seeger had left the group by then over disagreements about the commercialization of material (you think?) and the fact that the other three compelled him to sing on a cigarette commercial that he really objected to, the recording cannot be later than April of 1958. Even if the cut is a refugee from the Decca vaults that somehow found its way onto this otherwise excellent Vanguard album, the group still had to sign off on its inclusion. Big mistake.

That version simply enables me to attempt to drive yet another stake through the heart of the casual misperception of pop folk groups, because the Kingston Trio does exactly what the Weavers should have done - which was to deliver a sophisticated arrangement that respects the song's musical roots:



A truly marvelous arrangement indeed, as Jeremy Raven notes below in my post about Nick Reynolds: " 'The Hunter' is one the Kingston Trio didn't write or significantly rewrite...But probably the harmonic spin was their own. Listen to the quiet verse and chorus, starting with "'Tis merry we are"...The modality of the harmony evokes madrigal-singing or even Gregorian chants , even more so than 'Riu Riu Chiu /Guardo El Lobo'. It's a perfect example of the kind of thing Dave Guard wanted them to start being able to accomplish by learning to read music!" It also exemplifies what I think was the genius of the original group - the ability to present legitimate folk material in a modern setting that does not ultimately distort the integrity of the number. My thanks to Jeremy R. for the comment (part of what made me want to do the song this week) and to Dave Long's marvelous upload. (Dave is saving me a lot of work these days!)

For more creative interpretations - first, a fine a capella version from The Futureheads, recorded appropriately over a few beers in a bar:



From the UK again, Chris with a kind of new-age arrangement done on a 12 string guitar in what sounds like an open tuning (but actually is not, since Chris forms a perfectly normal-looking B minor chord at the end of each verse), slightly reminiscent of John Denver's take on "The Bells of Rhymney":



Youngsters Colin on lead with Mary and Dickon in an adaptation as part of a dramatic version of The Secret Garden:



And finally - because the fantasy camp is coming up soon, because I have been thinking a lot recently about our late friend Bo Wennstam, whose video this is, and because I always like to include in these articles amateurs having fun with folk songs in informal settings, here are Triofan John Lee, Zurich's Tom O'Donnell, and I making up in volume and enthusiasm for what we lack in rehearsal time. It's a jam, after all:



And that is an example of what goes on at the KT Fantasy Camp, pretty much 24 hours a day somewhere or other. The late John Stewart used to remark at the camp that the only way that songs like this and folk music in general would ever survive the onslaught of music biz-American Idol pop culture would be if people just got together and sang their lungs out on these tunes. This last one's for you, John.

¡Víva Las Mujeres Mexicanas! - "La Adelita"

Director Fred Zinneman's 1952 film High Noon is on the short list of the best westerns ever made, and in fact of the best American movies of all time. Beyond the taut drama of a decent man facing almost certain death as the clock ticks relentlessly toward noon, the film was decades ahead of its time in its depiction of good and evil, of racial prejudice, and of thoughtful and mature women. The latter aspect of the film featured the classic cinematic dichotomy between the fair-haired heroine, in this case actress Grace Kelly portraying Amy Fowler Kane, the prim Quaker bride of Gary Cooper's Marshal Will Kane, and the dark and passionate lady Helen Ramírez, played by the superb Mexican actress Katy Jurado. Ramírez owns the local saloon (purchased with money earned in a bordello) and was Kane's lover prior to his marriage.

Both women in the film are frightened by the prospect of Kane's imminent gunfight with four convicts whom he had sent to prison, and wife Amy vows to leave town rather than see her Will shot down. In a last desperate attempt to forestall the duel, Amy visits Helen an hour before the fight to enlist her aid in dissuading Kane from facing his enemies. Jurado's Helen listens in disbelief as Kelly's Amy announces her intention to depart, and then scorches the Quaker woman with her contempt by saying, "What kind of woman are you? How can you leave him like this?...If Kane was my man, I would never leave him like this. I would get a gun. I would fight."

When I first saw the movie on television some years later, that scene burned itself into my memory. I knew that in the Hollywood scheme of things (though clearly not in the subversive Zinneman's view), I was supposed to respond to the delicate, virginal, and ultimately sexless morality and beauty of the Kelly character. But it was Jurado's Helen and her fierce and undying love for the man who had been faithless to her that seized my imagination. "I would get a gun. I would fight" - now THAT was a woman.

And it is just such a woman who has been immortalized in the ever-popular Mexican corrído "La Adelita," a song as widely-known and as frequently sung in México as perhaps "This Land Is Your Land" is in the U.S. The song in its present form dates from the period of the 1910 Mexican Revolution in which Francisco Madero led a democratic rebellion against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (though it may be based on an older tune). The lyrics exist in several significantly differing variants. Some portray Adelita as the beloved of an officer in the revolutionary forces whom he must leave to fight for freedom; in many others, however, she is the very personification of the soldadera, the strong and independent woman who goes to battle herself, both for liberty and for the man she loves. In other words - "I'd get a gun. I'd fight."

Both the authorship of the song and the woman depicted in it are of uncertain origin. Some research seems to suggest that there was a woman from Durango, possibly named Velarde, whose battlefield exploits provided the raw material for the song, but this is speculative and no hard evidence exists. Nonetheless, "Adelita" came to be a term used to describe any of the women who joined the military. One soldadera recalled in a 1979 interview:

The most popular lyric sung today makes only passing reference to Adelita's courage:

En lo alto de la abrupta serranía
acampado se encontraba un regimiento
y una joven que valiente los seguía
locamente enamorada del sargento.

(In the heights of a steep mountainous range
a regiment was encamped
and a young woman bravely follows them
madly in love with the sergeant.)

Popular entre la tropa era Adelita
la mujer que el sargento idolatraba
y además de ser valiente era bonita
que hasta el mismo Coronel la respetaba.

(Popular among the troop was Adelita
the woman that the sergeant idolized
and besides being brave she was pretty
that even the Colonel respected her.)

Y se oía, que decía, aquel que tanto la quería:

Y si Adelita se fuera con otro
la seguiría por tierra y por mar
si por mar en un buque de guerra
si por tierra en un tren militar.

(And it was heard, that he, who loved her so much, said:

If Adelita would leave with another man
I'd follow her by land and sea
if by sea in a war ship
if by land in a military train.)

Y si Adelita quisiera ser mi novia
y si Adelita fuera mi mujer
le compraría un vestido de seda
para llevarla a bailar al cuartel.

(If Adelita would like to be my girlfriend
If Adelita would be my wife
I'd buy her a silk dress
to take her to the barrack's dance.)

One of the earliest recordings of the song is from Trio González, waxed in 1917:



This rendition is in the original, simple, pure mariachi style - accompaniment by strings only, with a simple harmony in thirds around the melody.

A more contemporary mariachi sound, one in a style that you'd be more likely to hear in México today, is by Pepe Aguilar, a great singer in his own right but also son of the legendary Antonio Aguilar:



The trumpet flourish that opens the song is now an almost required element in modern arrangements of corridos, and the lushness of the instrumental accompaniment indicates how sophisticated (or you could say "commercial) traditional music in México has become, as is the case here.

A fine instrumental version here from Stephane Kubiak and orchestra:



Once again, the trumpets open the number, but note both the primacy of the strings (both violins and guitars) and the polka-like tempo throughout.

"Adelita" is one of a handful of genuine Mexican folk songs that has become popular in the U.S., especially in the southwest. Though English-language versions are rare, no less of a major pop vocalist than Nat "King" Cole gave the song a try in Spanish in the late 1950s:



Though Cole is singing only the chorus, he is showing a remarkable respect for and fidelity to the source song, very unusual for a norteamericano at the time.

Cole's version almost undoubtedly inspired the Kingston Trio's loose translation of one version of the lyric where Adelita is the passive lover and not the brave fighter:



This is clearly an anglicized version of the song, but while not copying the Spanish source, it too respects the song's origin in its own way - and it is no further afield from that than many of the KT's and other pop folk groups' renditions of English language traditional songs were.

And Mexican folk has also gone country and electric, as the next two versions demonstrate. First, the Country Roland Band combines "Adelita" with a familiar country tune:



And if you're ready for it - a Mexican ska version:



To such an end folk music seems to be coming worldwide. If you know Oysterband or the Dropkick Murphys or the Pogues or the Killigans, you'll recognize the trend of electrifying and rock-ifying songs that originally were neither.

Yet even in these last versions, something of the original spirit of La Adelita survives. I think that my personal favorite of these is the very first one in this collection, for its purity and its proximity in time to the actual inspiration for the song - who in my mind will always look like Katy Jurado: "I would never leave him like this. I would get a gun. I would fight."

"With You My Johnny Lad"

I can well remember fifty years ago being intrigued by an anomaly that I noted in many of the folk records that I was listening to regarding a Scots song (one that was often covered by Irish groups) called "My Johnny Lad." It's a fun little song about dancing and courtship and a whole bunch of other things. What was odd, though, was that there were two rather radically different versions of the song that I was hearing. By itself, perhaps, that was not such a big thing - after all, it's hard to imagine how a song like "The Raggle Taggle Gypsies/Black Jack Davy" morphed into a variant like "The Gypsy Rover" - but the different and associated "Johnny Lad" songs were at the same time very different in tone and pace while sharing many of the same words.

The first version that I heard was from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's first album on Columbia Records in 1961 (they had three full albums on their own Tradition Records prior to this release). Here is a live performance virtually identical to the album cut from a 1962 Chicago PBS broadcast:



This is one of the all-too-few CB&TM numbers that features eldest brother Paddy on lead vocal. I remember a comment made on this site when I wrote about "The Jug of Punch" two years ago that Paddy had a distinctly aggressive way of presenting a lyric, one that was refreshingly manly. The same could also be said for the Clancys' general approach to Celtic songs, one that generated for them the same kind of criticism in Ireland that the pop folk groups here in the U.S. were getting at the same time. This is not surprising, because as Liam Clancy related in his autobiographical The Mountain of the Women a few years back, the group patterned themselves after the Kingston Trio, even including the decision to wear nearly matching versions of those impossibly warm, cable-knit Aran Island sweaters (or "jumpers" as they called them). Many of the Clancys songs - their trademark opener "Brennan on the Moor," for example - were originally medium to slow reflective tunes that the group powered into high energy numbers, replete with shouts and barks and whistles. And that approach to the music, as we'll see below, became standard for Scots and Irish folk groups that followed them.

A couple of years before the Clancy release, the Kingston Trio had recorded a song called "With You My Johnny" on Sold Out, one of their musically most satisfying albums. This version has distinct lyrical similarities to the Clancy version but with a radically different melody:



This is vintage popularized folk music. The Guard-Reynolds-Shane lyric is simply an anglicized rendering of the traditional Scots dialect version done a couple of years before by the great Ewan MacColl and his lady Peggy Seeger, which you can see on Mudcat.org HERE. The group's musical setting - somewhat slower and in a minor key compared to the Clancy rendition - is a clear attempt rhythmically to catch the feeling of the drone of bagpipes, with its heavy, punctuated emphasis on every fourth beat - listen to Bob Shane's guitar intro to hear it.

To muddy the waters further, the Kingstons two years later recorded a number with a Clancy-type melody and chorus and verses that evoke the same feeling as the traditional number - but that they called "Genny Glenn" (with a June 2013 thanks to Capitol/EMI as noted at right for permitting playback of KT videos on YouTube:



The reconciliation between the two versions, it turns out, was not at all that complex. Ewan MacColl, a folklorist as well as performer (and radical and actor and 20 other things as well) wrote that the "Johnny Lad" song was "originally a very beautiful pastoral song in the tempo of a slow (minor) strathspey. Johnny Lad moved to Glasgow during the late 19th century and was transformed into a children's street song. The lyrics became urbanized and the original air was abandoned in favor of a catchy but much plainer tune." A strathspey is a Scots dance that featured a moderate tempo, named after a region - as can be heard in the Kingstons' "Johnny" above. That's the original rural version, with its slyly naughty lyric. The Clancys are doing the second, later, urbanized version with the slightly more sophisticated and satiric lyrics. Note that the "with you my Johnny chorus" of the KT version fits with the lyric sung by a girl - but that the "urban" Clancy version is a man's song except for the chorus. As for "Genny Glenn" - a Kingston re-write, probably by John Stewart, to reap the copyright rewards, just as the group had done with other traditional songs like "A Worried Man."

Now for some other versions. First, the rural girl's number sung by a lady, from a house concert by the charming Sarah McQuaid, whom I previously featured as a lady doing a lady's song in my post about "The Wagoner's Lad":



McQuaid, who has an Irish mother and spent her formative years in Eire, is doing the KT modern English rendering of MacColl's Scots lyric. The jazz-based chords of the guitar setting make an interestingly original if not wholly successful presentation.

One of the great Folk Revival Scots groups was The Corries, here from 1976:



You can hear traces of the old strathspey here, I think.

Finally, from the Canadian-Irish trio Ryan's Fancy:



This was a great group, performing here on Tommy Makem's TV show and with, I think, a clear bow of the head to the pioneering musical style of the Clancys with Tommy.

I have to say that this has been one of the most enjoyable of these posts for me to write, not only because I've always loved both versions of the song but also because of the number of actual live performance videos here. I'd also add that however "popularized" these may be, they sound a hell of a lot more authentic that the punked out stuff of the Killigans or the Pogues on one extreme and the sugary and sentimental Celtic Thunder-type groups on the other end of the contemporary "Celtic" spectrum.

From South Africa: "Mangawani Mpulele"

One of the delights of the 1950s-1960s popular folk explosion was the attention drawn to folk songs from around the world. This started with the Weavers, who despite the general take on them that they were somehow "more authentic" than the "collegiate" pop folk groups who followed them, were popularizers who set the pattern that everyone else followed of a) finding, rearranging, and copyrighting public domain English language songs, and b) seeking out songs from other countries to include in their albums. Two of the Weavers' hits in their first run of popularity in 1949 and 1950, in fact, were "Tzena, Tzena" (Hebrew from Israel) and Pete Seeger's own discovery, Soloman Linda's "Wimoweh", which Seeger had transliterated from the Zulu "M'Bube." And one of the Weaver's most popular numbers included in their Carnegie Hall concert album was "Around The World," which had snippets of folk songs in five different languages.
Since the Weavers were the template for all who followed, it's no surprise that other groups also chose to do foreign language songs, most notably Bud and Travis with their extensive knowledge of and feeling for Mexican songs (though B&T also did other languages as well) and the Kingston Trio, which covered the globe but is likely most notable for bringing the Polynesian songs (both Hawaiian and Tahitian) of Guard's and Shane's background to the mainland. [Parenthesis: I'm reading Richard Noble's book on the Highwaymen called Number #1; he's ascribing the foreign language bit to that group. Sorry, Richard: the KT has you beaten by several years.] Soloists like Theodore Bikel and Joan Baez also included international songs in their repertoires.
It is from Bikel (the original Capt. von Trapp on Broadway's Sound of Music - remember?) that the Trio got "Mangwani Mpulele," a South African song that even Bikel misidentifies (see HERE) as Zulu when it is in fact a Sotho song - Sotho being a language and group of people related to the Bantu (not Zulu) and living in Botswana and (suprise) Lesotho in addition to South Africa.
Bikel does not suggest that the lyrics are exactly nonsense - he mentions that it means something like "auntie open the door" and "come in from the rain." Well, sort of. Here's what a native speaker of Sotho named Sibusiso Mbokazi posted to a Sotho website (yes, there are such things):

Mmangwane mpulele, ke nelwa ke pula
Mmangwane mpulele, ke nelwa ke pula
Ha di le pedi le ha dile tharo ke nyala mosadi
Mmangwane=your mother's younger sister
mpulele=open for me
ke=I
nelwa= (raining)pouring on me
ke=by
pula=rain

Ha di le pedi le ha dile tharo ke nyala mosadi
Ha=if
dile pedi=they are two
le ha=even if
dile tharo=they are three
ke=I
nyala=marry
mosadi=woman

This makes for a very different meaning. Remember that the Irish "Foggy Dew" originally had an explicitly sexual meaning, and as this is a celebration song, note - YOUR mother's younger sister is not my auntie; rain is something like the foggy dew; "open for me" is likely not the door; the robust intent of the speaker to "marry" (if that's correct) two or three women is clear at the end.

So I'm guessing that the Kingston Trio would have been fine with the slightly blue implications of the song, if they knew - but their vocal arrangement treats it somewhat like nonsense:

They actually make it sound fun and just a tad naughty - good round effect here, and much different as we'll see from the choral groups' renditions.

With his flair for foreign language songs and his especial feeling for the music of Africa, Harry Belafonte here works off of a fabulous instrumental arrangement, which not surprisingly has strong elements of Jamaican music overlying the African rhythm:

Laura Brannigan (who I was shocked to see had died at 47 of a brain aneurysm in 2004) of "Gloria" and "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" fame gives the song a more serious treatment:


Brannigan sub-titles this "The Wedding Song."

If I'm right about the slightly naughty implication of the lyrics, I wonder how many of the vocal groups following were aware of that? First, here is the Vorarlberger Landesjugendchors (national youth choir) of Germany:

Listen to the end - there's a swinging clarinet solo - lots of fun.

And for the fun of it (dig the hairstyles) from 1988 the Woodbury School chorus from Salem, NH:

And the Champlin Park High School chorus from Minneapolis:


So - whatever "Mangwani" may be, nonsense it is not. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.....

For Novelty's Sake: "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm"

One of the oldest and most delightful of folk subgenres is the nonsense song - tunes like "Polly Wally Doodle All The Day" and "Jimmy Crack Corn" and "There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly" - plus a host of Irish and English songs whose choruses and sometimes verses include no recognizable words in our mother language (see "Polly" above).

Commercial music's closest relative to folk's nonsense is the so-called novelty song, a composition whose primary point is humor, satire, or just plain weirdness. Though the era of recorded music has created an explosion of songs of this type - and we all remember gems like "The One-Eyed, One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater" and "The Monster Mash" and "Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" - such known-author ditties go way back. We have examples from 17th century England and 18th century colonial America, and every country I know of has some entries in their musical omnibus. Often born in taverns and bordellos, frequently bawdy to outright obscene, many of these novelty tunes seem to outlive apparently worthier compositions that just don't catch the long term public fancy with the same staying power.

Probably the single richest mine of novelty songs before the advent of record companies was the 19th century English music hall, ancestor of subsequent forms from burlesque to revues to musical comedies. There was a usually uptempo, ribald, joshing nature to the songs and a distinctive musical framework which has left its traces in 20th century music from flat-out music hall performers like Sophie Tucker (and about half the import acts on the old Ed Sullivan Show) to the structure and sound of performers like the Beatles (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band IS a music hall album far more than anything that could be called rock) to Herman's Hermits To Elton John.

The Kingston Trio from almost the first recognized the value for pacing in shows and on albums of including some of these numbers. Their "formula" for the early albums usually included a banjo blaster or three, a foreign language number, ballad/solos, a sea chantey and/or spiritual - and one song at least designed to evoke smiles and laughter - they were, after all, a nightclub act that got seriously out of hand. And the English music hall was one of the best sources for KT funny numbers - consider "Three Jolly Coachmen" (folk, but a music hall staple), "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey," (ditto), "The Ballad of the Shape of Things (a modern satire of madrigals but one that would have been at home in those old British theaters), "The Tattooed Lady" (authentic music hall) - and this weekend's videos of a late entry into the genre but one of its most popular, Weston and Lee's "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm" from 1960's Sold Out Album.

Most people know the rough outlines of the story of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, mother of the great Queen Elizabeth, and victim of likely trumped-up charges of adultery, for which she was beheaded. I fear, however, that recent dramatic treatments of this lady have served to distort the reality of the complex, driven, headstrong person that she was in an effort to garner more sympathy for her than most in Britain seem to feel - or than she deserves. It'd be hard not to feel some pity for a woman in an era in which all females were chattels of men, who succeeded brilliantly in many of her ambitions, and who met an unjust death (historians are about 99% certain that she was just too clever to commit adultery with anyone, much less with her brother, one of the four named co-respondents) with courage, dignity, and a remarkably well-crafted speech - unless you also remember that she parlayed Henry's desire for her (which she thwarted until he had tried to annul his first marriage) into the dismissal of a woman ten times her superior in everything except sexual politics (Catherine of Aragon, the princess of the age), a crown, and the securing of it through the engineered executions of the saintly Bishop John Fisher and the most remarkable intellect of his and nearly any age, the man for all seasons himself, Sir Thomas More. Anne's date with the headsman was an example of "as ye soweth, so also shall ye reapeth." She played a high stakes game remarkably well until she lost the final big wager.

That may account for the English ambivalence about her reflected in this song. Macabre in its conception (and likely less amusing in the wake of the very real horrors of the last ten years), the song manages to steep itself in a kind of campy horror that clearly echoes "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" and provides the same kind of amusement that prevents you from taking it seriously. Composers Weston and Lee, successful in pop music in the 20s and 30s, wrote the song in 1934, apparently for the prince of the British music hall, the then-44 year old Stanley Holloway, still two decades away from his signature role as Eliza Doolittle's father in the London, Broadway, and film productions of My Fair Lady ("I'm gettin' married in the mornin'/Ding dong the bells are going to chime.....get me to the church on time"). Here's Holloway in the original recording:



Holloway's American music hall counterpart Rudy Vallee - he of the megaphone and dancing chorines - attacks the number with more American gusto and Cyril Smith on lead:



The Kingston Trio used Vallee's American lyric rewrite ("Army" and "Red Grange") but give it their own distinctive flair - one of those too rare numbers that features Nick's tenor guitar at the front of the accompaniment:



For a creepier, slower and weirder version - Dean Gitter from 1957:



And finally, a novelty within the novelty - a lady singing the piece - Molly Twitch at a 2010 DickensFest. This is what a 19th century English music hall performance may well have looked like::



Weston scored again in the 40s with a song that many of us remember from the 60s - "I'm 'Enerey The Eighth, I Am" as done by the aforementioned Herman's Hermits. It takes a rare talent - and an unusual mind - to come up with two such memorably off-beat songs.

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The Mountains Of Mourne

I was always a bit puzzled by Dave Guard's comment in the Elizabeth Wilson interview (most of which is available at Dave Guard Interview under "Read, Look, and Listen" starting on p.22 of the Popular Folk Music Today DG Memorial Issue and appears in full in Allan, Ben, and Jack's Kingston Trio On Record) that the original Trio began to "run out of ideas" "halfway through Here We Go Again." I say puzzled because in addition to my personal preference for that record, I regard it as critically the best of all Trio albums in design, pacing, song selection, harmony, solos, cover,the kitchen sink, and everything else.

But I am more puzzled because the next two albums, String Along and Sold Out, which Dave apparently regarded with some disdain and which Bob has indicated he disliked several songs included therein ["Don't Cry Katie" comes to mind], include some fabulous songs, one of the most memorable of which is on the short list of the best songs Nick Reynolds ever sang and possibly his finest solo, "The Mountains of Mourne."

Not quite a real folk song, "The Mountains of Mourne" was penned in England in the late 1800s by Percy French (with collaboration from H. Collisson), a music hall composer who realized that he would never make a good living in impoverished Ireland and hence moved to London, where his often comedic songs and stage routines earned him great success for more than 20 years and led to tours of Canada and the U.S.

What might not be immediately apparent to American listeners is the source of the clear satire of the early part of the song. The ethnic jokes that in the U.S. are "Polish" or "dumb blonde" or take-your-pick-of-the-group-you-wish-to-mock have for more than a century been "dumb mic" or "dumb Irish" jokes in England. So in "Mourne" we have a poor, rural, rube of an Irish boy gullible enough to take literally the sardonic comment of sewer workers that they are "digging for gold in the streets" - and who is appalled by the high fashion, high society décolletage of Victorian ladies, a style that violates his Irish Jansenist and puritanical sense of propriety. In one of the verses that the Trio omits but that Don McClean (below) includes beautifully, our lonely young man sees a hometown friend who is a London traffic cop and ascribes to him "great powers" because the traffic stops "at a wave of his hand."

But unlike several of his expatriate peers (see the "Finnegan's Wake" song for a wickedly funny stereotype of Irish drunkenness), French redeems the humorous portrait with the poignant devotion of the singer to his "wild rose that's waiting for me." Unlike many an Irish song popular in America that tend toward sometimes over-wrought feeling ("Danny Boy," "Galway Bay," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and the like), French manages to present the emotional framework of the song in such a way that it skirts the edge but never falls over the cliff of pure sentimentality.

We start, of course, with the audio of the best version of the song on record, Nick Reynolds singing the solo but with Bob and Dave both playing and "ooohing" in the background.




A close second to this, IMHO, is Don McClean's version, which adds the verse about the policeman (but not the three others about French's hope that Ireland and England could be friends - some chance of that). Piano adds a nice touch.



Even a good song can be overdone, and Irish singers do have a tendency to drift into overly-florid singing. I thought I'd upload a Frank Patterson version, or Daniel O'Donnell, or some other less-than-reserved Irish tenor - but since Celtic Thunder is the flavor du jour in over-wrought imitation Celtic music, here's how the song would sound if sung on American Idol.

(2/3/11 - CopyVio got Celtic Thunder - so until they return to YT, here's a fine folk version from Irish Mist:)



Despite the satire, the song is beloved in Eire, as well as in much of the rest of the Celtic world - or perhaps because of it. The Irish do have a sense of humor, and the song is just too lovely and too authentic-sounding to ignore. Here's Scots-Canadian tenor Johnny McDermott:



From England, famed British tenor (from the D'Oyle Carte operatta company and a long career in light opera) Webster Booth, around 1940:



And finally, a nice a capella choral version from 1982 by a group called Wall Street Crash (how timely!) that includes the verse about being friends with England.



I always wished that Liam Clancy would sing this - I believe it would have been comparable in excellence to Nick Reynolds' superb version.