Dead leaves in your pockets. . .

 
 

 

When you're in the Little Land
You watch the wee folk play,
You see them through a game or two,
You come out old and gray.

 

When you're in the Little Land
They fill your hands with gold,
You think you stay for just a day,
You come out bent and old.

 

 

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

 

 

 

Lights shine in the Little Land
From diamonds on the wall,
But when you're back on the brown hill side
It's cold pebbles after all.

 

 

 

 

 

Music in the little land
Makes the heart rejoice.
It charms your ear so you can not hear
The sound of your true love’s voice

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

 

 

 

 

When you’re in the Little Land

You watch the wee folk play,

You see them through a game or two,

You come out old and gray.

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

  

 

 

 

Why did this leap into my head today, and where did it come from? Until this morning, damned if I knew. I remember my brother singing it in the '60s when he came home from university. Everyone was singing and playing the guitar and going to hootenannys, whatever they were, and most of us sucked our songs off record albums, often with wrong words and crazy chords.

 

It took me quite a while to find any semblance of this song, except for a very Irish version of it on YouTube. His didn't much resemble mine. It spoke of leprechauns, which gave me a clue as to what the song was about. But my version was one of those cobbled-together-from-memory things. I was only 9 or 10 years old and impressionable. I had NO IDEA what this song meant or even where it came from: I remember finding it weird and disturbing, which it still is.
 

 

 

So today, thanks to the good graces of YouTube, I more or less hunted it down, but it wasn't easy. This was originally written by Malvina Reynolds, an eccentric folk genius who wrote Little Boxes (on the hillside) and What Have they Done to the Rain? This was one of her more obscure numbers and sounds like it's based on folk poetry. One false lead took me to a poem called The Little Land by Robert Louis Stevenson (ph?), but it was one of those How Would you Like to Go Up in a Swing kind-of things, echoes of childhood, etc. Not threatening enough.

 

Somewhere I found a reference to the Limelighters, a folk group we listened to a lot back then. It featured Glen Yarbrough (borough? Who has time to check?), a tenor with a voice that would cut through barbed wire. I remember quite a few of their songs, but not this one.

 

 

So it was still pretty obscure when I finally tracked down the available fragments and pieced them together with my  bits of memory: hey, folk singers do that all the time. (I left out one line: someone's version said "Deadly in your pocket," which is completely nonsensical. 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.) But somewhere else, someone made a comment that actually made sense: Reynolds had a sense of social satire which could be quite biting (see Little Boxes). Perhaps the song was about another kind of "enchantment", not by leprechauns, faeries or other "little folk", but by the seductiveness of riches and fame.

 

It actually works. First you're just looking in from the outside, watching all these charming people at play, and it looks harmless enough, so you stay around for "a game or two". But then, bizarrely, you wake up and realize that decades have passed in a flash. The gold pouring through your hands eventually runs out and disappears. As in those alien encounters where people mysteriously lose time, the lurch ahead into old age is frightening: suddenly you're a has-been who never was.

 

 

The dead leaves in your pockets that I took so literally as a child could be the deadened browned scorched currency of false fame, crumbling away into nothing.  And I don't need to explain those snowflakes. Bright lights, white hair, cold stones. To enchant, literally, means to gain magical power over someone by chanting, usually in song. Soon the sound of enchantment becomes so strong that we can no longer make out the voice of the one we love.

 

It's a kind of evil reverse fairy-tale where the victim quickly shrivels under forces he or she can't comprehend. So much for cute little leprechauns, Lucky Charms and Kiss Me, I'm Irish.

 

 

 

Sick birds and Mahler symphonies

I vaguely remembered this song from my childhood: though we weren't exactly the Von Trapps, we were given to singing in harmony, even in round, and I may  have taken the soprano part (though I doubt it). Then the whole thing was tossed to the back of my brain, to the point that I began to think I had imagined it. For decades, it just didn't come up.

What shook it loose? Uhhhh. . . my bird got sick. That's right. I was ridiculed on someone else's blog  just for having a bird, and a large picture of me was posted with Jasper on my shoulder: anyone who has birds must be nuts, some crackpot old lady half out of her mind.

I'm not. But to get back to the original point, we did some painting upstairs (in my office, in fact: it's now a lovely soft blue with a touch of dove-grey) and my bird got sick. We tried everything to keep him away from possible fumes. It may not have been the paint at all. He has something wrong with the toe on his left foot, and has partially lost his grip. Did he take a fall? For whatever reason, he was puffed up, ruffly and almost unresponsive, and we feared the worst.

When I picked him up (for he no longer had the energy to just hop into my hand as usual), he snuggled down in my palm as if in a nest and buried his head in my hand. Not normal behaviour, at all. It was then that the song began to play in my head. After more than 50 years, my sick birdie pushed "play".

Ah, poor bird. Take thy flight. For some reason I remembered my brother Arthur singing it. It was one of those songs that came from who-knows-where: nobody wrote it, apparently. It just "was". On doing a bit of digging, however, I discover that the roots of it may well be Elizabethan. No doubt it sounded different hundreds of years ago and there were/are many versions, but this is the one I kept finding on YouTube.

This was the only decent version I uncovered.  It's an amateur group, but they're definitely singers. It's touching, if not perfect: meaning, it's music. I like the way they sing it more than once, the way they work on it and discuss it and let it evolve. The process is everything (and I particularly like their obvious joy in singing).

Most of the videos I found were of Godawful children's choruses singing wildly off-key. It's a children's song, apparently, like Frere Jacques. . . but hey, do you hear a sort of similarity? Flip Frere Jacques into a minor key, and there you have it. With only a few changes, we have the original Ah Poor Bird, stolen by who-knows-who.

Way leads on to way. The next association was with Gustav Mahler and his - what, second symphony? We played Mahler recordings endlessly when I was a child (along with every other classical composer, up to and including Kurt Weill and Alban Berg). One day the slow movement of this symphony was playing, and my older brother Walt said, "Listen to this. It's Frere Jacques." "No it isn't." "Yes it is.  It's just in a minor key." "What's that?" "You know. The sad key." I was probably eight years old, but it somehow stuck.

I found a recording of the Mahler piece and will post it next, along with some revelations about the composer and Leonard Bernstein, then deemed the go-to guy for interpreting Mahler symphonies.  It's funny how finding one video, or remembering one bit of tune due to a sick bird, can open out memory telescopically, or rather, kaleidoscopically.

By the way, my bird suddenly recovered and is now hopping into my hand, devouring millet and humping his plastic toys with his usual elan.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Guitar lessons

Caitlin's musical tastes are along the lines of American Idol and Taylor Swift, whereas mine are steeped in classical music (from childhood, whether I wanted it or not) and the folk craze of the mid-'60s. So who knows where this musical experiment will end up. I think she's a little young (7) to be starting, so I hope Mom doesn't Craigslist the guitar due to lack of storage space.

Burl Ives: did he fake his own death?

Last time my husband and I were driving around Utah (having come to see Bryce Canyon, the holiest place in the world, full of glowing gilded cathedrals of God-carved stone), we were suddenly stopped dead in our tracks.
There was a sign up ahead saying, "Tourist Stop: THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN!"

I looked at Bill.

"There's never a Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's a Burl Ives song."

"No, it was based on this mountain here! Let's stop."

He got out and enthusiastically took a picture of a small, ordinary-looking mountain, the farthest thing from rock candy imagineable. We were hungry, and there was a restaurant. As we walked past a nominal gift shop with cheap t-shirts and cellophane bags of rock candy, Bill blinked in surprise, then whispered in my ear.

"There he is."'

"Who?"

"You know! Look over there."

At a table in the corner, facing a beer and a corned beef sandwich, was a heavyset older man with a grey goatee.

"Hm, well, it does look like him, but the truth is - "

"I know it's him."

"See, that's the thing. He's been dead for ten years."

"Maybe he faked his own death."

"Then he'd be 116 years old."

"Well, he looks it, doesn't he?"

He did. But he didn't look much like Burl Ives to me.

When I think of Burl Ives now, I think of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: his surly, snappy, sour performance was one of the best I've seen in a character actor.

But I also thought of other things. I was raised on Burl Ives. One of my first memories was that mild, burly tenor voice of his singing, "Here's a song about a whale, with a most amazing appetite." There was also Holly Jolly Christmas and Little Bitty Tear and a couple other mainstream hits, but they came second to his songs for children, his "Little White Duck" and "The sow took the measles and she died in the spring" (kind of an awful song for the kiddies, probably an old Appalachian thing.) There were some I did myself when I briefly had a kids' TV show in Alberta: "Old witch, old witch, she lives in a ditch, and she combs her hair with a hick'ry switch."

Having never heard it before, the kids loved it.

Anyway, my husband ordered a corned beef sandwich and a beer and kept shooting glances at this Burl Ives stand-in. It occurred to me later (hell, it just occurred to me this second) that they'd hired this local yahoo to stand in and wow the tourists.

Another thing that happened just this second: I looked up the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and found out that it was really just a song, something invented by hoboes. There were approximately seventeen Big Rock Candy Mountains scattered all over the US, each claiming to be THE Big Rock Candy Mountain, bearing big signs and restaurants serving corned beef sandwiches and beer.
Did they all have a Burl Ives lookalike? I really can't say.

Anyway, the video I've posted is haunting. It reminds me structurally of the Child Ballad, I Gave my Love a Cherry, and also evokes Christ's temptation in the wilderness. It's no doubt deeply Appalachian, thus harking back to somewhere in ancient Britain, preserved as only music preserves ancient things.

I have a hankering for another Burl Ives song which seems to be impossible to find. It was on one of his more contemporary albums (meaning, no Child Ballads), and it had songs like Mr. In-Between and Shanghai'd.

Deeply remeniscent of Long Black Veil, it was called That's All I Can Remember. I didn't recall much about it except that it was an execution song, like something out of The Green Mile. It had a couple of lines in it that stuck in my head like barbed wire: "And the wheels in my head started turnin'. . .and they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. " If this man was looking back on his own execution, it surely wasn't from Paradise.

I dug around, and dug around, and couldn't find a recorded version anywhere (though supposedly it was also recorded by Lefty Frizzell. Who the fuck is that?). But I found a fragmentary, scrambled-up lyric, which I'll try to reconstruct here. Since there is more than one version, there's some repetition of lines. I fought and fought and fought to have consistent line-spacing, and my computer just wouldn't let me do it, but since nobody reads this anyway. . .
I've never killed anyone, but I do identify with this fellow's loneliness.

That's All I Can Remember
Come listen while I tell you 'bout a man that's gonna die
Be patient with me won't you please, if I should start to cry
Maybe one of you can understand my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

I'm lookin' up from somewhere below
The atmosphere is warm and they've got plenty of coal
Maybe someone above can hear my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

Now Bill was my friend, throughout my short-lived life
'Til I caught him out with Mary, my wife
Then the wheels in my head started turnin'
A death plan I made up for both of those concernin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

They took me to prison and they locked me in a cell
They gave me my last big meal then strapped me to a chair
Then my life before my eyes came returnin'
Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

There's another verse in there, about how he killed Bill and Mary, a very lurid one, but I can't find it anywhere. I can't find the composer and lyricist of the song. In fact, I barely found it at all.

But it stuck in my head, which is how songs are transported or propelled forward. It happened even before anything was written down. Most of the people who sang and remembered them couldn't read or write anyway. People from Appalachia who sang those twangy, multi-versed songs with tunes that all had similar intervals, and even told similar stories. Unlike the kid from Deliverance, most couldn't play very well, and just strummed one chord on the banjo, bom-jigga, bom-jigga, bom.

Everything went around in a circle then, and everyone was everyone's cousin. How many broke away? Some must have. But mostly, the musicologists had to go after them, first with pen and ink, then gramophones, then more sophisticated equipment.

If you want a repository of those songs, go listen to Joan Baez' first album. I can hardly stand it now, her voice is so bleak, so wintry, so devoid of youth or joy. My brother used to sing songs about someone named Geordie, put to death for poaching "the King's royal deer". I used to think they were being cooked, like eggs. My sister sang "Go 'way from window" and other cheery ditties (one of them called Poor Old Horse: "the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). But then, my sister was bitter and emotionally deformed, even in her twenties. She was weird, holding the guitar between her legs like a cello, and having a new boy friend every six months.

How did I get on to all this? Burl Ives didn't really have a very good voice, but then, neither did Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan. Charisma, they had, and an understanding of the underpinnings, the deep traditions of music. They were building on something. There wasn't an internet then, but songs were a repository, not necessarily of history, but of things that happened all the time. Not factual, but nevertheless true.

POSTSCRIPT. I just listened to this song again, and I take it back, what I said about Ives' voice. It vibrates like Waterford crystal, sounds like nothing else, and defies all analysis.

And the song! Listen to it one more time. It's clearly Appalachian, probably a Child Ballad from antiquity, with that plainspun tune and spooky medieval intervals. But what grabs me is that he plays just two chords. Two. There used to be a joke that if you could stand up and play three chords, you were a folk singer, but this trumps even that standard for minimalism. Pick-twang, pick-twang, pick-twang: not even full chords, but maybe three strings. And he tells this incredible story, this question and answer. Why nine questions? The Trinity/three wishes, times three, making it three times more powerful? Nine-ty-nine-and-nine-teeeeee. Three nines. But flip those three nines over, and you have. . .
The devil's number.

POST-POST-SCRIPT. I guess I can't count. There are only eight questions. So what is the ninth: whether he's "God's or mine"?