Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage, and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosie, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Four for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, an Everly Bros. cover, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addendum:

1.  On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Comments

[Andrew Nelson]

I first heard Ketty Lester's Love Letters only a few years ago on Spotify and have had it on high rotation ever since.

[Joe Odegaard]

Silver Dagger was the first song on Joan Baez's very first album. But that album also has this sweet and positive song, Fare Thee Well (Ten Thousand Miles). The positive attitude and hope wins in the end. Enjoy !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K758HsZsExA

And here's for the ancient stones of Notre Dame, now cleaned and restored:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hQ4taBuTG8

As an aside, since DJT is visiting Notre Dame for its re-opening, you should see the TDS that creeps into the architectural posts on FaceBook. It is demonic, there is no other word to describe it.

[BV]

Andrew,

As you may know, David Lynch's *Blue Velvet* incorporates the Ketty Lester number. Here is an interestingly moody montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6OixSIF5NQ

[BV]

Andrew,

There's also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgUaj3PErW8

I have been listening to Lester's "Love Letters" since it came out in '62. I could listen to it once a day and not get tired of it.

[BV]

Joe,

Joanie's version is sweet indeed but her voice is so pure and angelic and operatic that it pains me a bit. Joan on one end of the folk spectrum; Dylan and Tom Waits on the growly other.

A different farewell song, a Dylan cover, that you will enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU3sXJcx_vI

[BV]

Joe,

Leftists are losing it bigly over Trump's presidential ass-kicking even before inauguration. Look at what he has already accomplished!

TDS is most assuredly real, whether or not it is demon-driven. I neither afform nor deny that it is.

[Andrew Nelson]

It seems that David Dalton is repeating a modern urban legend. The nursery rhyme Ring around the Rosie had nothing at all to do with the Black Plague.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-02/nursery-rhyme-meanings-often-urban-myths/8225910?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

Snopes and Wikipedia also call it an urban myth, saying that the rhyme itself only dates back to the 19th century and the story of its purported plague origin dates back only to the mid-20th century.