JOAN BAEZ "The Greenwood Side"

Bear with me, here. There's method in my madness.

Today I got writing about Songcatcher, a haunting movie about a woman professor's attempts to collect and capture folk music from the Appalachians in the early 20th century. That got me going, of course, on folk music.

I thought of one that my sister used to do (my sister, my sister), a harsh, dissonant thing called Down by the Greenwood Side (i-o). This was the version Ian and Sylvia made popular, sung in fifths I think, harsh and shivery. But today I found another version that shone with wonder and grief, sung by Joan Baez. The essential story is the same, though much more drawn-out. The tune, however, couldn't be more different, and it reminded me of something else.

I puzzled over this. Then I remembered. In the early '60s there was a song by Ewan MacColl called The First Time Ever I Saw your Face, and Gordon Lightfoot recorded a memorable version of it. It's hard to recognize here because the Roberta Flack version that came out a few years later kind of drowned it. Hers was drawled and drawn-out, smokily sexual and completely different from this more compact, folky (but no less heartfelt) version.

But the resemblance between the two, between Lightfoot's version and Baez's Greenwood, was what made my skin prickle. I wonder if MacColl even thought about it as he wrote his paean to erotic love. But the melody, those magic intervals that make up a tune, are so much the same, so full of mystery and ache.

So, listen to these two, and you tell me: do they sound the same?