Prison, work, songs

This weekend I heard a presentation of work songs from the prison farms of the early 20th-century south.  Pain, sadness, humor, anger — all were intense in this music.



The vast prison farms were an evolution of the plantations that had been there before. When the 13th ammendment banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” Southern whites did the obvious. They imprisoned their former slaves for offenses like loitering and failing to yield the sidewalk.

If you ever go to Houston,
Boys, you better walk right,
And you better not squabble
And you better not fight.
Benson Crocker will arrest you
Jimmy Boone will take you down.
You can bet your bottom dollar
That you're Sugarland bound.

Of course, hearing the work songs of imprisoned people, I thought of the prisoners I work with in a northern, urban jail.

They spend a lot of time watching TV. I think it keeps people pacified, but I also wonder if there weren't something better they could be doing.  Being idle is especially hard for some of the immigration detainees, who have mostly been manual laborers since childhood. “I worked my whole life,” one of them said, “and now I'm sitting here with my arms folded.”

Work is one thing I wish we could have more of at the jail. After you've been there a while, and if you've stayed out of trouble, you can work if you want to. Men work in the kitchen or print shop, running errands, and cleaning things. Women are taken out of the facility to pick trash and paint walls. They earn about a dollar an hour, but the biggest perk is that it passes the time.  There are more inmates who ask for work than get it.

(More work might have the benefit of reducing prison costs. But I'd like to stay clear of actually making a profit, as the labor camps of the old south did. Economic incentive to imprison people is a very bad thing.)

On the way home from hearing these songs, I talked with a friend who had worked with prisoners at Angola Prison in Louisiana (so named after the origin of the slaves who originally farmed that plantation). She said work there was mandatory, and inmates there spent their first months hoeing the collard fields before they had the option of switching to cushier jobs.



Ironically, hoeing collards is the kind of job idealistic college students love to sign up for. I spent my first summer out of college as a part-time farmhand on a small hippie farm. But I chose it, and I worked with other people who wanted to be there. We sang a lot, mostly happy songs, not the slow-burning songs of slavery. We loved eating the fruits of our labor, just as the inmates of Angola Prison feed themselves. Everything is different when it's chosen freely.

(Side note:
I couldn't write about field hollers and not include Stan Roger's parody, the White Collar Holler.  He reframes computer programming as soul-crushing drudgery, presumably in contrast to the old-fashioned fishing and sailing jobs he loves to write about.  The song doesn't resonate for me, because most of the programmers I know have a good bit of freedom and enjoy their jobs.  Again with the autonomy and the work satisfaction.)




The other thing I wish we could have more of at the jail is creativity. The emphasis is on passing time rather than doing anything with it. Some inmates make ingenious things with their hands – teddy bears sculpted from soap and delicately tinted with toothpaste. A Christmas tree from a carefully deconstructed toilet paper tube. And those more frightening creations in the contraband exhibit they show you at orientation: the blow-darts made from staples, the shivs made of toothbrushes and razor blades, the hotwired contraptions used to heat urine to boiling temperatures so it can be thrown in an enemy's face.

That kind of destructiveness is the explanation given for why inmates can't have any materials: no colored pencils, no yarn, no crochet hook, no wood to carve, no guitars. But sometimes I wonder if they'd be less destructive if they had something constructive to do.

Of course, like those older prisoners, they still have word and song. Those inalienable tools are alive and well in the form of rap. I have yet to hear the compositions of any of the inmates I work with, but several of them have explained how important it is to them.

One more song to finish with.  Hear the anger channeled into work:

Why do we love British songs?

Maple Morris gathered in Boston this weekend. Which meant a lot of dancing and a lot of singing. One staple of a Maple weekend is always a jaunty version of “Cornish Lads”:

Cornish lads are fishermen
And Cornish lads are miners too
But when the fish and tin are gone
What are the Cornish boys to do?

Another favorite is “Torn Screen Door”, about the loss of small farms:

They worked their fingers to the bone 
Nothing left they can call their own 
Packed it in under leaden skies 
With just the wheat waving them goodbye

Had a life that they tried to save 
But the banks took it all away 
Hung a sign on a torn screen door:
'Nobody lives here no more.'

It always strikes me as odd that a bunch of young urban Americans and Canadians, nearly all with degrees from expensive colleges, should get together to sing these particular songs. What makes a law student or a business consultant stay up all night singing about the poor economy in Cornwall or rural Ontario?

Sometimes I think it doesn't matter what the songs are about, and we would sing anything as long as it had a chorus with room for a couple of harmony parts. Morris is a hedonistic experience, with hard physical exertion all day and drinking and singing late into the night. There's a lot of hugging, a lot of enjoyment in being around people we love that we don't see often. Harmony singing is the sound of community. And some of it is just really excellent music (seriously, follow that link to “Torn Screen Door”).

But I also think it's because our real lives don't allow for much sentiment. Young urban people embrace irony. It's not cool to take anything too seriously. There is no song about our real lives, about the high cost of apartments in Boston or having to grade biology exams all weekend. The closest I can think of are parodies like White Collar Holler.

But the difficulties of rural life a century earlier, preferably on another continent? Those we can sing about, arms draped around each other.

Of course, the US has a genre about rural life, and about the love of friends and home: country music. When Stephan sang a country ode to

A little bit of chicken fried 
Cold beer on a Friday night

we listened with laughter, despite the fact that it was indeed sung on a Friday night, cold beer in hand. The real hilarity started with the last verse, apparently mandatory in country songs, thanking God for the Stars and Stripes. (To be fair, it was a really terrible verse, especially the line indicating that veterans must die to defend our right to fried foods.) And yet we can sing “Rule Britannia” with something approaching a straight face. Nobody really thinks we love the British navy, but a song that people in our own country take seriously has to be distanced with laughter.

I don't mind the irony, though, if it's a way we can get close to each other.

Remember their names

I was at the New England Folk Festival this weekend, listening to a ballad singer from Kentucky singing “Pretty Polly.” It's a classic murder ballad in which Polly's jealous lover brings her to the woods:

Oh Willie, oh Willie, I'm afraid of your ways
I'm afraid you will lead my poor body astray.

Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, your guess is just right
I dug on your grave the best part of last night.

He stabbed her to the heart and her heart's blood did flow
And into the grave pretty Polly did go.

And it struck me, as it sometimes does, how full this tradition is of violence to women. Yes, there are ballads where men get killed by other men. And there is a little female-on-female violence, as in “The Twa Sisters.” There's plenty of suicide and occasional infanticide.

But most often, it's men killing women. A ballad about a female wrongdoer is one where she cheats on her lover. A ballad about a male wrongdoer is usually one where he murders his lover.

There's the supremely creepy “Longlankin”:

My lady came down
Not thinking any harm
Longlankin stood ready
To catch her in his arms.

There's blood in the kitchen
There's blood in the hall
There's blood in the parlor
Where my lady did fall.

There's the highwayman ballad “All Alone and Lonely” (with a very amateur robber who somehow doesn't have any better weapon than a penknife):

It's will you be a robber's wife?
All alone and lonely
Or will you die by my penknife?
Down by the green woodsidey-o

I will not be a robber's wife
All alone and lonely
And so he took her own sweet life
Down by the green woodsidey-o.

As a teenager, I loved the gory ballads. Now I feel the weight of them. From the forests of England to the deserts of Juarez, the murders are real. A few weeks ago I saw Peggy Seeger singing “Tom Dula”, about an actual murder from 1866.

You killed poor Laura Foster,
And you know you're bound to die.

Peggy paused the song and said, “I want to remember their names, the women who died.”

Benedicimus te

This year I went to the Christmas carol service at Harvard (college towns! I love 'em!) The church, as usual, was packed enough that latecomers had to sit on the floor. People come mostly to hear the excellent choir and organ, but also for the pleasure of singing through some of the carols. It's the only place I've been that expects you to sight-read Latin on "Adeste Fidelis", though they do give you a choice of German or English on "Silent Night." It's a legit church service with gospel readings and prayers, but I don't have a good sense of how many of us come for a musical more than a religious experience. Sometimes I worry that I ought to find some more secular outlet for my harmony-singing urges, but I've had no luck.

We are now in the midst of family Christmas with twenty or so of Jeff's and my family. It's a solid week of cooking, eating, board games, singing, exchanging gifts, playing music, napping, and walking around the neighborhood. Pretty much my ideal way to spend a week. I know at least three people who wandered into Thomforde gatherings and stayed for days.

At night we light the menorah. My understanding of the Hebrew words we sing is vague at best. I know they feel warm and close. I'm grateful to whatever has preserved my father-in-law and his ancestors, grateful for Jeff singing beside me.

Last night we all went to see Revels, a stage show of traditional Christmas music and dance. Revels is aimed at a more secular crowd, and is generally very good at making folk culture accessible to people who aren't normally part of that scene.

Revels also includes a good bit of participatory singing, which I always approve of. There's no sensory experience that instantly conveys "you're among friends" to me like lots of people singing in harmony. Revels ends with a stately version of the Sussex Mummers' Carol, complete with Ralph Vaughan Williams' soaring descant.

God bless your house, your children too
Your cattle and your store
The Lord increase you day by day
And send you more and more,
And send you more and more.

And I decided it doesn't much matter what the words mean. We don't have cattle, and many of us don't believe in God. It is enough to stand in a warm building surrounded by a thousand other voices, singing a blessing onto each other.

Stumbling

One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Cherry Tree Carol, based on a story from an apocryphal gospel. Joseph and the pregnant Mary are walking through an orchard. She, maybe because of the pregnancy, gets a yen for the cherries and asks him to pick her some. Joseph, none too pleased with the mysterious pregnancy situation, answers,

"Let him pick berries and let him pick cherries
That brought thee now with child."

It's such a typical interaction. Joseph and Mary are both feeling wronged. He's mad because someone knocked up his fiancée, and she's mad because she wants those cherries and can't go clambering around to get them. Plus she's just been insulted.

But because this is a story, a miracle happens and settles the argument. Unborn Jesus takes sides and tells the trees what to do.

Then bowed down the tallest tree
Into sweet Mary's hand.
Then Mary cried, "Oh, see now, Joseph!
I've cherries at command."

Mary is vindicated. Joseph, embarrassed, attempts an apology:

O, then bespoke old Joseph,
"I have done Mary wrong,
Cheer up, cheer up, my dearest dear,
And do not be cast down."

Arguments in real life don't work like this, but we wish they would. I often see this in social work clients (and myself): we act like if we can just prove how wronged we are, someone will take notice and rectify the situation. We would like the universe to announce: "You are right, and he is wrong." And we make up stories where it really does happen.

But in real life, there are no trees that bow down to settle arguments. The other person's hurt is as real as our own. There will not be a divine arbitration, so we have to patch things up as best we can.

And the carol echoes this: after the miracle, life goes on as usual.

So Mary picked one cherry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary and Joseph, they walked on homeward,
All with their heavy load.

I find this the most touching, most human part of a very human carol. We are all carrying heavy loads. We are all stumbling along in the dark, groping towards each other.

What keeps us safe

My housemates' baby is four months old now. As I watch them bounce, cuddle, and sing their son to sleep, I wonder about how lullabies worked before recording. If you're actually only singing them when your child is so young they can't fall asleep unaided, the child is too young to remember songs. Maybe older siblings hear what their parents sing to new babies, or what neighbors or relatives sing?

There are modern lullabies that obviously never went through the folk process. Take the beautiful "John O' Dreams":

When midnight comes good people homeward tread
Seek now your blanket and your feather bed
Home is the rover, his journey's over
Yield up the night time to old John O' Dreams.

It's lovely, but it's not exactly for kids. It's got four wordy verses which I've sung dozens of times but can't remember. This is clearly not the kind of thing that sleep-deprived parents pass down orally. But why write a lullaby for adults?

The other shoe dropped for me recently in a lecture on self psychology. Self psychology is cursed with terrible nomenclature - almost none of its terms accurately describe what they mean. So the "idealized parental imago pole" of the textbook sounded like mumbo-jumbo until the professor explained: "Our lifelong task is to find what feeds us and keeps us safe." We never outgrow the need to feel that we are protected by someone wise and strong. People may get this from religion, from idealizing a romantic partner, from hero-worship. And it's okay, because it gives us ideals to strive towards as well as a sense of wellbeing.

Children are born without much ability to self-soothe. Parents do it for them with sounds and touch. Later children carry around objects (blankets, dolls) to comfort themselves with when the parent isn't there. Still later, we repeat verbal assurances we have heard from others. (The first time I took a city bus alone at age fourteen, I repeated the phrase "It's going to be okay" under my breath for the duration of the trip.) The need to be comforted doesn't go away, but we learn to parent ourselves.

One of my favorite experiences is falling asleep while other people are awake and making music. It feels comforting in the same way that reliving childhood pleasures is comforting, except that this wasn't actually something that happened in my childhood. I think it's the sense that I can relax because all's well in the world. I've heard other people describe this feeling while falling asleep in a car with someone else driving.

This is why we have wordy lullabies for adults. This is why 25% of businessmen take their teddy bears with them on business trips. This is why Guns N' Roses wrote "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a joke and it topped the charts. Even if our parents will never literally hold us and comfort us again, we have to get that feeling somewhere.

Hostile lullabies

Jeff and I share an apartment with another couple and their two-month-old baby. I'm getting lots of babysitting practice, and with that comes lots of singing. After a day with a person who can't speak or understand your language, what you really want is to be verbal. Reading is difficult because babies have a way of occupying your hands. The kid likes hearing a human voice, but you quickly run out of things to say to someone who can't talk back. Thus, singing.

I'm realizing lots of the standard lullabies are strangely slow in tempo and sappy in lyric. At least at this age, the baby seems to want a lot of upbeat jiggling, not slow rocking. And since the baby only hears sounds, you can say anything. Which explains all the less-than-kind older lullabies. Think "When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall."

From Scotland, with too many children:
Hee O, wee O, what wou'd I do wi' you?
Black's the life that I lead wi' you;
Many o' you, little for to gie you.

A sleep aid from Appalachia:
What'll we do with the baby-o?
If he don't go to sleepy-o?
Dance him north, dance him south,
Pour a little moonshine in his mouth.

From the Blackfoot:
Come wolf, bite this baby:
He won't sleep.

Then there are the homemade kind, made up on the spot. Our housemate Hassan's go something like this:
Baby baby, you're the one
You make bathtime . . . you actually hate bathtime.

Bottom line: If you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for.

The blues

I've been thinking about how the blues shows up in different cultures. We use the term to mean a specific kind of black American lament, but the same idea pops up all over the world.

Spain has the cante jondo, the "deep song." It's from the Roma (Gypsy) tradition - a people who have some major reasons to feel down. From what I can understand of the lyrics, they're mostly about lost love. But a lot of it doesn't even have words - it's just boiled-down sorrow expressed by a man and a guitar.

Tú a mí me lastimas
cómo aguja de muerte.
Mi sangre grita.
(You hurt me
like a death-needle.
My blood screams.)

A missing lover is also the main theme of American blues, as in Muddy Waters' "Garbage Man":

My baby, she run away with the garbage man.
Yeah, you know, my baby, she run away with the garbage man.
Please come back to me, so you can empty my garbage can.

I don't know where this little girl been, and I don't know where she going.
I don't know where this woman been, and I don't know where she going.
Please come back to me, woman - my garbage can is overflowing.

The American bluesman, like his Spanish equivalent, laments the lack of sex. But in Ireland, the equivalent of blues is a female genre. Sex is the problem in these songs. In Blackwaterside, the speaker realizes her lover is not sticking around:

That's not the promise that you made to me
When first you lay on my breast,
You could make me believe with your lying tongue
That the sun rose in the west.

There's not one girl in this whole wide world
So easily led as I
When the fish do fly and the seas run dry
It's then you'll marry I.

Although the lyrics have different themes (essentially boiling down to who gets pregnant), I'm not sure the literal content is the important thing. In all three cases, the songs of sorrow come from vulnerable people - people coming from grinding poverty and physical danger from those in power. Fats Waller was more straightforward about it than most in his "Black and Blue":

I'm white inside, but that don't help my case
Cause I can't hide what is in my face
How will it end? Ain't got a friend
My only sin is in my skin
What did I do to be so black and blue?

Pain comes out, and everybody knows it when they hear it.

Left behind

I heard a radio program of songs from the Vietnam era, both for and against the war. I was surprised at how many of them focused on women and children. The pro-war songs paint them as the ones who must be protected, and the anti-war ones paint them as the victims who have to go on living after their men are killed.

This trope has been going on for a long time. (We can also see the universal constant that all soldiers are called Johnny.)

During the Civil War Patrick Gilmore wrote When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" for his sister, who was awaiting the return of her fiancé. He promises
The village lads and lassies say
With roses they will strew the way,
And we'll all feel gay
When Johnny comes marching home.

But an older version of the song comes from Ireland, where they've been resisting English drafts for quite some time. They didn't have a name for post-traumatic stress, but clearly they knew it when they saw it.
Where are your eyes that looked so mild,
When my poor heart you first beguiled?
Why did you run from me and the child?
Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

150 years later, John Prine described the homecoming of another veteran:
There's a hole in Daddy's arm
Where all the money goes.

"Traveling Soldier" is probably the most famous of the girlfriend-waiting-for-soldier songs.
Crying all alone under the stands
Was a piccolo player in the marching band
And one name read but nobody really cared
But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair.

The remarkable thing about this type of song is that both pro- and anti-war people love them. The disagreement is on whether the death was necessary, and the songs usually don't address that. One ambiguous song is "Warrior", which describes a woman burying her man and planning for their son's life as a soldier. With lines like "We must kill more people," I think it had to be meant ironically. Then again, Bob Hope had them perform it for troops, so somebody must have missed the irony.

My favorite of the songs was recorded by a Motown girl band, Martha and the Vandellas. It rejects the "they're fighting for you" rhetoric.
I was under the dryer when the telegram came:
'Private John C. Miller was shot down in Vietnam.'
And they say that I should be proud; he was fightin' for me
They say that I should be proud, those too blind to see
But he wasn't fightin' for me, my Johnny didn't have to die for me.

One great songwriter of a different era expressed the same message in prose. Julia Ward Howe wrote the fiery pro-war "Battle Hymn of the Republic", but recanted after seeing the carnage of the Civil War. In her Mother's Day proclamation of 1870, she framed war as a women's issue.
"Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air

I've seen those "Jesus was homeless" teeshirts. But I didn't realize the connection (though not the slogan) had been made about 60 years earlier. I just heard Woody Guthrie's rewrite of the outlaw ballad "Jesse James," rewritten as "Jesus Christ."

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
Hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor."
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

The major problem with the song is that not much rhymes with "Judas Iscariot".

Revolution

My mom talks about how strange it is that my generation thinks it's no big deal to have people in space. Moon landings have been around for longer than we have. Because Mom remembers when the first one happened, it's still a big deal to her.

My grandmother, born in 1908, saw a lot more changes in her lifetime. She remembered when electricity came to her hometown. One change I had never thought much about, but that revolutionized people's lives in the last century, was easy access to birth control. Fifty years ago, sex usually meant babies. If you listen to old songs, you hear it everywhere.

The lyrics to the Kingston Trio's "It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song" never made much sense to me. Recently I heard Woody Guthrie's version, no doubt influenced by his time in the 1930s as a homeless dustbowl refugee trying to earn money to send back to his wife and three children. (Long distances are an unpleasant but effective method of birth control.)

Yes we got six children, and expecting several more
Kids run out like cattle when you open up the door.
Yes you single boys can ramble and can lead a rowdy life
But you'll have to take it easy when you get yourself a wife
You will have a flock of children and have others coming on
It takes a married man, boys, to sing a worried song.

Older folk songs are full of the same complaint:

When I was single, I'd sport and I'd play
Now how the cradle it stands in my way.

Loretta Lynn (who married at 13 and had four children by the age of 19) recorded a number of songs on the topic. In 1970 it was "One's on the Way," written by Shel Silverstein(!)

The girls in New York City, they all march for women's lib,
And Better Homes and Garden shows the modern way to live.
And the pill may change the world tomorrow, but meanwhile, today,
Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin',
The dog is a barkin' and the floor needs a scrubbin'.
One needs a spankin' and one needs a huggin',
And Lord, one's on the way.
(Oh gee, I hope it ain't twins again.)

In 1972 when she recorded "The Pill", stations wouldn't play it:

You wined me and dined me
When I was your girl
Promised if I'd be your wife
You'd show me the world

But all I've seen of this old world
Is a bed and a doctor bill
I'm tearin' down your brooder house
'Cause now I've got the pill.

Matt McGinn of Scotland writes of the same wish in another part of the world:

Now they're talking o' the pill, they've filled my heart wi' hope
I'm sitting here and waiting on a signal frae the Pope
I went along to buy some at fifteen bob a tin
I hope we hae the Pope's okay before my man comes in.

It's fifty years this week since the FDA approved the first birth control pills. What a change.

The rhythm of the week

I'm fascinated by the ways household work has changed over time. Today I had a laundry revelation.

I've never done laundry without a washing machine, but for the last five years or so I haven't used a dryer. In summer you can do the whole operation in a day, but in winter, the routine is more like:
Day 1: Get home from work, put laundry in machine. Put on your coat and hang the laundry on lines outside. Laundry freezes.
Day 2: Laundry slowly dries, going straight from solid to gas.
(If snowing or raining, insert more days here.)
Day 3: Take the laundry in.

I just realized the reason for ordering the days of the week Monday: wash day, Tuesday: ironing day, etc, ending in Saturday: baking day and Sunday: day of rest. Baking is something you want to do right before you need it, so the bread is fresh. (At the Orthodox Jewish preschool where my mother worked, all the other teachers left on Fridays at noon to get their baking and cooking done before sunset.) But laundry is unpredictable. If you want clean clothes for church and can't work on the sabbath, you'd better start your laundry well in advance.

There's an English song about it:
'Twas on a Monday morning
When I beheld my darling
She looked so neat and charming
In every high degree
She looked so neat and nimble-o
A-washing of her linen-o
Dashing away with the smoothing iron
Dashing away with the smoothing iron
She stole my heart away.

It continues with hanging her linen on Tuesday, starching it on Wednesday, etc. until on Sunday she's finally a-wearing of her linen-o. This has always begged two questions: Where was she going so fast with that smoothing iron? And what was she wearing the rest of the week? No wonder he found her so charming!

Burns Night

This year I'm celebrating Jeff's birthday by dragging him to a Burns Night - our first ever. Burns Night being a festival in honor of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. There are not many writers so fabulous that people are still partying 214 years after their death.

He ranges from maudlin:

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!

To political:

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

To pornographic:
Then gie the lass a fairin, lad,
O gie the lass her fairin,
An she’ll gie you a hairy thing,
An o it be na sparin;
But cowp her ower amang the creels,
An bar the door wi baith your heels,
The mair she bangs the less she squeels,
An hey for houghmagandie.


To tipsy:
O thou, my muse! guid auld Scotch drink!
Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp an' wink,
To sing thy name!

Okay, so 18th-century Scots is pretty incomprehensible to English speakers at times. But that just makes it better. I urge you to sample the joys of Burns.
Death And Dying Words Of Poor Mailie, The Author's Only Pet Yowe.
Apology For Declining An Invitation To Dine.
To A Louse, On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church
Address To The Toothache
To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough

What the songs have to say

Did you ever notice how many pop songs from the 50s and 60s involve references to marriage, even when it seems totally out of place? Think of John Lennon's tomcat howling to "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" with the totally incongruous line "Girl, I want to marry you." Earlier periods had songs that really were about marriage - think 1873's hit "Silver Threads among the Gold":

When your hair is silver white,
And your cheeks no longer bright,
With the roses of the May,
I will kiss your lips and say,
Oh! My darling, mine alone, alone,
You have never older grown!

But that transition period in the 20th century seemed to produce a lot of songs using marriage references as a weird coverup for songs about short-term sexual attraction.

The songs that have been running through my mind, though, are the older traditional songs of America and Britain. There are some bitter ones, complete with child abuse, cold feet on your legs, no dinner, and screaming babies:

The very first year me wife I married,
Out of her company I could not stray
Her voice as sweet as a lark or a linnet,
Or the song of the nightingale at break of day.

Now she's fairly altered her meaning,
Now she`s fairly changed her tune
Nothing but scolding comes from her mouth
A poor man's labor's never done.

All young men that is to marry,
Don't, they'll grieve you evermore
Death, o death come take my wife,
And then my troubles will all be o'er.

Or this one:

Come all you young men that are going to be wed
Don't be trapped like a bird with a small bit of bread
I'd have you be careful in choosing of a wife
O, for when you are trapped you remember it through life.

Or from the woman's perspective:

Sorry the day I was married
And sorry the day I was wed
And it's oh, if I only had tarried
When I to the altar was led.

Think, pretty maids, ere you marry
Stand fast by your sweet liberty
And as long as you can you must tarry
And not be lamenting like me.

The pressures of poverty:

When I was single, went dressed all so fine,
Now I am married, go ragged all the time.
Three little babes crying for bread
With none to give them, I'd rather be dead.
When he comes in it's a curse and a row
Knocking down the children and pulling out my hair.
Lord, don't I wish I was a single girl again.

But there are happier ones. There are a lot about young lovers who face down angry parents to win their own happiness. Usually the man turns out to be somehow better than they thought, as in Willie O'Winsbury when he's unexpectedly good-looking and rich:

But when he came before the king
He was clad all in the red silk
His hair was like the strands of gold
His skin was as white as the milk

"It is no wonder," said the king
"That my daughter's love you did win
For if I was a woman, as I am a man
My bedfellow you would have been."

"Now will you marry my daughter Janet
By the truth of your right hand?
Will you marry my daughter Janet?
I'll make you lord of all my land."

"Oh yes, I'll marry your daughter Janet
By the truth of my right hand
Oh yes, I'll marry your daughter Janet
But I'll not be the lord of your land."

He's mounted her on a milk-white steed
Himself on a dapple grey
He has made her the lady of as much land
As she will ride in a long summer's day.

In "Jock O' Hazeldean", the bride deserts the man her family has picked out and runs away with her lover instead:

The kirk was deck'd at morningtide
The tapers glimmer'd fair
The priest and bridegroom wait the bride
And dame and knight were there
They sought her baith by bower and ha'
The lady was na' seen:
She's o'er the border and awa'
Wi' Jock o' Hazeldean.

I love how old songs aren't nearly as straightforward you would expect. The king meets the man who got his daughter pregnant. . . only to declare that it's fine because he's so hot? We'll finish with "The Blaeberry Courtship", about a highland man who woos a lowland woman . . . with jam.

"O the hills are bonny when the heather's in bloom.
'T would cheer a fine fancy in the month o' June
To pu' the blaeberries and carry them home,
And set them on your table when December comes on."

At the end of the song he turns out to be her old sweetheart from school, whom she somehow hadn't recognized. He reminds her of how she used to share her lunch with him:

"For don't ye remember, when at school wi' me,
I was hated by all the rest, loved by thee?
How oft have I fed on your bread and your cheese
When I had naething else but a handful o' peas.
Your hard-hearted faither did hunt me wi' dogs;
They rave all my bare heels and tore all my rags."

"Is this my dear Sandy whom I loved so dear?
I have not heard of you for mony a year.
When all the rest went to bed, sleep was frae me
For thinkin' whatever had become o' thee.
In love we began and in love we will end,
And in joy and mirth we will our days spend."

Aww.

Fal lal de ral

Today I was listening to Kate Rusby's "Cowsong", about a boy with a cow who dallies with a girl he meets by the roadside and ends up losing both cow and trousers. I got to thinking: there's a lot of this scenario in English folksong. Boy meets girl, suggestive dialogue, they have sex in some bit of countryside. In the sad songs she winds up pregnant and deserted, in the happy ones they agree to meet and do it again. In the funny ones one of them is tricked - ha, he lost his trousers! Ha, he won't marry her because he already has a wife!

Was there this much casual pastoral sex in England of one and two centuries ago?

Pastoral, probably yes. Buildings were smaller and more crowded then, and there were no backseats of cars. I personally would not want to be always finding barns and bushes to hide in, but people must have managed. Some songs do attest to the difficulty of locating a convenient place:

"He looked east and he looked west,
He looked north so did he south,
But he could not find a privy place
For a lay in the devil's mouth."

Some of them make it sound quite nice, though:

Then lie thee down, my beam,
I'll not spoil thy gaudy shining gear:
I'll make a bed of fern,
And I'll gently press my Jenny there.
Let me lift thy petticoat,
And thy kercher too that hides thy bosom:
Show thy naked beauty's store—
Jenny alone's the lass that I adore!

But I'm pretty sure this wasn't happening as often as the songs suggest. Queer sex was too unspeakable to even appear in the songs. Before birth control, surely it took a great deal of stupidity for women to have random sex with men by the side of the road. There wasn't formalized education about it, but people living around livestock probably understood from an early age how mammals get pregnant.

Certainly people were having extramarital sex, but I doubt it was so often unpremeditated. Maybe it was more often carefully planned adultery, like in this tragic ballad:

"I have loved you, fair lady, full long and many's the day."
"And I have loved you, Little Musgrave, and never a word did say."
"I've a bower in Bucklesfordbury, it's my heart's delight.
I'll take you back there with me if you'll lie in me arms tonight."

But maybe people liked songs about casual sex because they weren't realistic. People make this stuff up because they'd like it to be real, not because they think it is. And throughout time, it's been very popular. Said the organizer of a Robert Burns festival, "What could be closer to the tradition of modern gangsta rap music? Yes, it's sexist; yes, it's offensive; and yes, it's gratuitous — it's identical in almost every respect." We'll end with some of that esteemed poet:

The night was dark, and thro the park
I cou'dna but convoy her;
Sweet Betsey fell, fal lal de ral!
I am a Fornicator.

The modern workday

I just started three months of temp work for Oxfam America, which is great so far. I love the cause, I love the people, I even love the commute. But when you get down to it, data entry is always going to be data entry. And I had forgotten that when I’ve been doing monotonous computer work for a while, I start humming.

I think the lack of modern work songs is a big problem. Our ancestors had songs for laundry, marching, hoeing, weaving, working on chain gangs, you name it. Our modern monotonous tasks don’t have songs, but I find I’ve got to have something to occupy my mind a bit while my hands are doing their own thing on the keyboard.

The best attempt at this, of course, is Stan Rogers’ (dated) “White Collar Holler”:

Well, I rise up every mornin' at a quarter to eight,
Some woman who's my wife tells me not to be late.
I kiss the kids goodbye, can't remember their names,
And week after week it's always the same.

And it's whoa boys, can you code it (huh!)
Program it right,
Nothin' ever happens in this life of mine,
I'm haulin up the data on the Xerox line.

And it's code in the data, give the keyboard a punch.
Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch.
Correlate, tabulate, process and screen,
Program, printout, regress to the mean.

So, at the risk of driving the person at the next desk crazy, what songs do we need? I’ve long wanted a photocopying song.

Sweetheart on the barricade

Dear Richard Thompson,

Don’t get me wrong, I love that you’re one of a handful of people writing songs about working class women. “We stood on the picket line, my Jennifer and me.” “She's my bright jewel of the alley / She's my Cooksferry Queen.” “I fell in love with a laundry girl who was working next to me.” Okay, you’ve established factory girls as romantic leads. But I assume there’s not a Jennifer out there writing songs about how much fun it was to picket with you as an accessory, her Richard, the equal of any woman? Not so much fun to be cast purely as the love interest, is it?

While you’re at it, why don’t you do a cover of “Union Maid” and advise us all to “get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary”? It might not go over so well with Jennifer, though.

Sincerely,
your feminist academia queen

Daughters of feminists

The last 24 hours have been full of luxury: I bought some yarn, found a thrift store, and got the registration number I needed to get a library card. I now have all the books I can read, purple fuzzy yarn, two wool skirts, and a copy of Marie Claire (to practice my French, but more fun than a textbook.) I hadn't realized how poorly I function without access to thrift stores.

In the library I witnessed a rather pathetic sight: a Danish guy was giving a blues performance with his guitar in the main lobby. I assume he had written the lyrics himself, because they were pretty stupid. I felt bad for him, since he was writing in a language that obviously wasn't his own, but you just can't sing the blues in Danish. What would it be about, anyway? "My heart's aching but at least we have free healthcare"? "My woman left me because the kids are in state-funded daycare so she doesn't need my income, and Lutheranism isn't that strong here anymore"? "It rains a lot here"?

My pre-library card reading was Michael Crichton's A Case of Need, which I think was intended to raise issues, but not the ones it raised for me. Without any other factors, you can tell it was written around 1970 because it's clearly after the civil rights movement but the women's movement. Crichton makes a point of having one of the characters be a black lawyer, just like he makes a big point of having female doctors or something in his later books (but a maximum of one main female character per book.) Here, the secretaries are all female and are referred to as girls. The doctors are all men. Their wives are all housewives who apologise for not keeping the kids out of their husbands' hair enough.

The thing that made me think was that a couple of years ago I wouldn't have noticed this at all. He's not making some point about "This is the natural order, and all women should be in the background supporting their husbands." He just doesn't notice or challenge it. It seems so stupid that for 18 years I held most of the assumptions about gender that people started questioning decades before I was born. It makes me want to raise my kids in a vaccuum so they're not raised surrounded by images of people in the traditional roles while they're still too young to question it all. I don't want them to have to go through the miniature revolutions in their heads when US society had this revolution long ago.

Of course, this doesn't work because a) doing this would mean forbidding them most of the world's books, art, etc. because a truly feminist culture has never existed, and b)the scraps of Disney movies that make it into the house would be prized because they're forbidden and rare. It's like that rather clever song:

Daughters of feminists think they'll get married
To some wealthy guy who'll support them forever
Daughters of feminists don't bother voting at all.
Daughters of feminists beg to wear lipstick
Each day from the age of three.