Peeking into the rock

I haven't forgotten. I've recorded almost forty (not all of which will be uploaded). But I have other fish to fry at this moment.

Content advisory: this contains very personal, possibly contentious, potentially offensive material about religion and its place in the current cultural and political landscape.  I'm not looking for a fight.  I'm not looking to be convinced I'm wrong, or to be vindicated by other people's experience. I'm mourning a personal loss. (most of the performer links lead to different songs from the ones I'm talking about)


I've told Emma about this.  I've lost a big chunk of my heritage just recently.  I grew up listening to old scratchy records, some of them older than my father, largely from the South (black and white).  The soundtrack of my childhood was the Carter Family, the Ernest V. Stoneman, the Skillet Lickers, Ma Rainey, of course Bessie Smith,  and Memphis Minnie, Bob Wills, Jelly Roll Morton,  Jimmy Rodgers, and I could go on and on but the point is just to express the range.  I remember my mother asking my father how come I sounded like Maybelle Carter whenever I opened my mouth (I wished I sounded like Sarah instead, but there it is). We had a great big speaker (one, this is before most people had stereos, and the old records were all mono), and I practically climbed into it, picking at the woven straw that covered the friont while I sang along with the Blue Sky Boys. (that link leads to "Are You From Dixie?" -- if you're suffering from the same problem I am, you probably shouldn't click this.  On the other hand, if you worship fine mandolin technique . . .)

A lot of those songs are highly religious.  Some of them were really, really reactionary, but in the political landscape of my youth they seemed quaint rather than threatening.  These days, because of the aggressive, highly organized, and increasingly effective war that the religious right is waging against the world, I can't sing some of my favorite songs, and I turn the radio dial when I hear music that should make me nostalgic -- honestly, if I hear even a certain singing style or a certain kind of instrumentation, unless I very quickly recognize the song to be one that doesn't make me sick to my stomach, I'll turn the radio off.

I can't hear Uncle Dave Macon singing "Shall We Gather at the River?" without remembering that at least half a dozen of his songs were direct attacks on learning and science, and without realizing that the import of that song and others like it -- "Diamonds in the Rough,"  "Bringing in the Sheaves," "Where the Soul Never Dies" -- is that the state of this world and its future do not matter because the elect will leave it all behind and go live with their god who made this jewel and then sanctioned its destruction.

I can't hear "Amazing Grace," even, though it was one of my favorites to sing at the sink when the kids were growing up, even though the story -- that the man who wrote it had been the captain of a slave ship, and had come to realize how horrible it was, and quite, and become religious somewhere in the process --that story used to seem so sweet to me.  Now I hear it, and I hear smugness in the voices of the people who sing it (don't bother telling me that there are some upstanding freedom fighters who love to sing this song.  This isn't about that: it's about my own state of terror).



Honestly, it all sounds like the Horst Wessel song to me at this point.  All of it.  Even Blind Lemon Jefferson singing "See that my grave is kept clean."  Even Doc Watson singing about old Daniel (you can see a bit of Pete Seeger listening in that video), or Mary and Martha, or Paul and Simon.  Especially Dock Boggs singing "Oh Death."

It's an extreme reaction, but I'm looking at a hideous, hideous thing, dressed up in traditional values, threatening to make The Handmaid's Tale look like The Poky Little Puppy.  (and what the hell, Wikipedia?  how is that more notable than Nick Mamatas?)  I was raised to embrace everybody's culture, to celebrate the best of everybody's values and traditions, to tolerate different world views.  It all seems so luxurious now, with respectable politicians coming right out and saying out loud in so many words how little they value my people and my land, how much they hate people like me.  And by people like me, I mean: Women.  Mothers.  Working people.  People who don't make a lot of money.  People whose jobs enable other people to work and go to school and live better lives.  People who need health care in order to live productive lives. Non-christians.  People who work to defend the actual living world we're in.

Fortunately, "Life's Railway to Heaven" is not a complete wash -- there's still the labor version,  "Weaver's Life is Like an Engine." (which I cannot find on youtube, naturally)  However, if I should hear the instrumental intro, am I going to stick around for the probably trauma, on the off chance that I'll get to hear the good old voices reminding me that there are times and places where the USian working class thinks for itself and has opinions that are not vile and slaved to the interests of the richest of the rich?

On a related front, the favorite songs in the toddler room (where I have been for the last week and will be for about another week) at the moment are:

The Mommy Song (number one on the hit parade naturally)
"If all the raindrops were gumdrops and lemondrops' (known to toddlers as "Aah-aah-aah")
"The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"
"Happy Birthday"


Other songs I sing to manage traffic and focus the play:
"Clean-O" ("Branna, Brianna come wash your hands, Oh Jonathan, come wash your hands, Oh Esmeralda come wash your hands, and make 'em nice and clean-oh" with variations about rubbing and scrubbing and bubbles)
"What shall we do when we all go out?" (or in, as the case may be)
"Scraping up sand from the bottom of the sea, Shiloh, Shiloh" (sand play, naturally)
"I see you jumping"
"Leslie wore her pink shirt, pink shirt, pink shirt, Leslie wore her pink shirt, all day long" (same tune as the Mommy Song)
"Round and Round the VIllage" (I do this as a finger play)
"Six Little Ducks" (the one about the little duck with the feathers on her back leading the others with a quack quack quack)
"Five Little Ducks" (same tune, but in this one the little ducks wander off one by one until there are no ducks and mother duck has to go find them)
"Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed"
"Five Little Monkeys Swinging in the Tree (teasing Mr. Alligator, can't catch me)
"Three Green Speckled Frogs"
"I had a little rooster by the garden gate" (inevitably leading to "I had a little monster by the garden gate")
"Bought me a cat and the cat pleased me" (same song, but the tune is a bit different, it accumulates, and it has funny noises instead of just onomatopeia)
"The tree in the wood" (for nap time) ("once there was a pretty little tree, prettiest tree that you every did see, and the tree was in the wood and the green grass grew all around, round, round" -- all these tree parts, and a nest and a bird and a wing and a feather and a flea and a mo-skee-tee, accumulating)
On the same note "When I first came to this land (I was not a wealthy man.  So I bought myself a farm and I did what I could)" (accumulating farm animals and equipment)
"Open, Shut Them" (your hands)
"Saddle up boys, we're going to Boston"
"Summertime" (naps)
"Way Down Yonder in a Hollow Tree" (naps: Froggy went a-courting)
"The Frog Song" (A Sam Hinton number of which I wish I could remember the rest of the lyrics or find them online)
"Down In Cupid's Garden" (naps: it's a Copper Family song, probably a music hall thing about a sailor and a girl who meet and fall in love in a public park, or something, it seems covertly lewd but it's really pretty)
"Bluebird, Bluebird" (circle game)
"Little Sally Walker" (circle game)
"Here we go Looby-Loo" (dance game like Hokey-Pokey, exactly, except that I learned it earlier)
"Sally inthe Alley" (dance game)
"Oh the sunshine" (weather themed finger play)
"Lazybones" (naps)
"Baa baa black sheep, where'd you leave your lamb?" (originally a horrifying hostile baby rocking song which I have thoroughly bowdlerized and extended so it's now mommy's fears about baby's independence instead of baby's fears of abandonment and death)
"Little red caboose"
"Freight train, freight train" 
The usual circle time things ("good morning/buenos dias," "Adrian is here today," "uno, dos, tres deditos/one, two, three little fingers," the color song, the alphabet song
"I had a little nut tree"
"Baby Beluga" (but I need the book because I don't know all the verses)
"Rubber Blubber Whale"
"Do, do pity my case" (a song about housework)
"The Linen clothes" (It was on a Monday morning the first I saw my darling cutting out the linen clothes: she sews them, launders them, and wears them over the course of a week)
"You can go to sleep too" (one of my own nap songs about how all the animals in the world sleep in their special ways and you can go to sleep too)
"Sleepy,sleepy, sleepy oh"(another of my own nap songs in which various objects and abstractions are paired conceptually and by rhyme and all of them are declared to be sleepy)
"Wheels on the bus" (of course)
"Old Paint" (naps)
"You've got to wait sometimes" (one of my own, very cheerful, lists all the lengths of time a person might have to wait -- I'm prepared to go all the way out to an era if necessary)
"Whimper and Whine" (originally a demonstration of the power of the letter E, from Electric Company)
"One of these things is not like the other" (from Sesame Street)
"Brush Your Teeth"
"Bear Hunt"
I wish I knew the Sesame Street song about the shark and his wonderful teeth, and the one about cooperation
"Lavender's Blue"
"You are my flower"

This list is probably not interesting to anybody but me.

I went looking through my tags, which meant I spent an hour I do not have, but I did not find this, so I guess I never wrote it down before. It's the song "Pretty Peggy," sometimes called "Fennario." It has a pretty tune with pretty variations, and a simple story: the army comes through town, the captain falls in love with a girl that won't have him, and he dies of a broken heart.

Okay. But the version I know best is a Scottish one, and it seems to me that this version is crawling with subtext and it makes me wonder if the "fennario" versions that we heard so much of in the sixties didn't simply miss the point?

Here's how I remember the words:

There was a troop of Irish dragoons
They marched down through Fyvie-O
And the captain fell in lobve with a very pretty girl
And her name it was called Pretty Peggy-O.

"Oh come down the stairs, Pretty Peggy, he cried,
Oh come down the stairs, Pretty Peggy-O --
Come down the stairs, come out your yellow hair,
Bid a last farewell of your daddy-O."

"Oh march boys, march,} the colonel he cried,
"Oh tarry, oh tarry," cried the captain-O:
"Oh tarry, oh tarry another day or so
While I see if the bonny lass will marry-O."

"I'll give you ribbons, and I'll give you rings,
And I'll give you a necklace of amber-O:
And I'll give you silken gowns to wrap your middle round
If you follow me on my wanderings-O."

Long were they come out of Fyvie-town,
they had the captain to carry-O:
And long were they come down to Aberdeen,
they had the captain to bury-O.

Okay, this song is sung to a sprightly, kind of martial tune: you can hear it played as a tattoo with brass and bagpipes here. There are longer versions that have various bits in it -- references to the beauty of the countryside, the naming of places, a part where Peggy rejects him explicitly because of his being a foreigner, a part where somebody or other contemplates burning down the town in revenge . . .

None of which do anything but enhance my suspicion that Pretty Peggy was not originally sung as a tragedy of young love or an indictment of fickle young ladies.

No, I think that it's Scottish nationalism at the core, and the "Irish dragoon" is rejected because of working for the English army (I've seen other slurs against Irish compradors in Scottish folksongs). Googling around, I see that there's a connection between the song and a the Battle of Fyvie, but it's a retcon, as are so many such associations in folk material, and only serves to enhance the subtext.

So far I haven't said anything new. This is it: I think the song is a taunt. "You want this, but you'll die trying to possess it." The tune sounds like a taunt, anyhow, especially as done by all bagpipes as here.

Here's a version I don't like.
Here's one by the Dubliners a long time ago that I like a bit better.
Here's a kind of pretension version by the Corries.
Here's one of those point-missing versions I was talking about.
Here's a livingroom bagpipe version with a drummer wearing an Edvard Munch "Scream" mask.
Here's a version where the piper's tricked out in a kilt and sporran and standing in front of a ruined castle and I think he really missed the point but it's pretty even though he's medleyed it with "The Collier Laddie" and a bunch of other things I don't recognize but which are probably also songs about girls refusing boys.

Anyway. The point is, and I did have one, that here's this song, which can be and probably usually is in recent decades, played as a sweet, sad song about young love gone wrong, which I think is originally, and more to the point, more interestingly, played as "neener-neener."

on another front: when I upgraded firefox, they turned the arrows that tell you there are more tabs -- and which you must click to see the more tabs -- invisible grey instead of visible blue. Why? Now I have to dig through all the stupid customization pages to see how to turn them back into something visible.

Because I'm a big old geek or something, I want to learn to sing the Levan Polkka to sing to the babies.

But I don't know what doubled vowels and doubled consonants do in Finnish, or what they use the umlauts for. Worse -- because I can't begin to imagine what they sound like -- are the doubled umlauted vowels. Anybody know how to tell me, or should I ask in linguaphiles?

( rambles in baby entertainment below the cut )