When you're in the Little Land. . .

 

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 truly love, the only one whose love is not based on greed.

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.

POST-MORTEM. I will confess that this is a rerun, originally posted in 2012. Six bloody years is long enough, and hey, if *I* don't remember it, no one else will! I was certain I'd be able to find ample imformation after all that time had passed - it always happens on the internet. What shocked me was that nothing had changed - in fact, it was even harder to find anything at all about this song. There was a weird pdf of Reynolds' song lyrics that looked like it was typewritten on an old Olivetti portable from 1959, but I couldn't do anything with it. All sung versions have disappeared. The Limelighters DID record it, and I was allowed to listen to 30 seconds of it, enough to realize my memory had been close to correct. Malvina included a few lines in the original which specified the "wee folk" were, in fact, leprechauns. Nearly every culture has a myth about tiny people running around in the woods, doing demonic mischief and scaring people half to death. Leprechaun is a horrible word when you look at it. Scares the living shit out of me. No wee folk for me! Go away from my door.

POST-POST DISCOVERY. All right. I have it! I have that lyric sheet from the Olivetti. Here is the relevant lyric:

As you can see, this is pretty close to the version at the beginning of this post, without those few lines about the leprechauns. The possible meaning of the lyric (being bedazzled by wealth and fame, while at the same time seduced and sucked dry) is made more clear by the line, "They'll dazzle you and promise you, and lead you by the hand". It couldn't be more clear, in fact. The Limelighters version leaves that verse out, so it starts in the middle, kind of. But we still get the message. 'Tis luck to catch a leprechaun. Except when it isn't.

POST-IT NOTE: This is a summer repeat, inspired by a comment I just had on the ORIGINAL post (from years ago! I just love it when I get those.) I hadn't thought about it in years!

Here is our conversation:

Anonymous July 29, 2022 at 5:35 PM

There's more now, and based on the information you've given, I've tracked down a Malvina Reynolds recording on YouTube. Also a short version by a Raymond Crooke. Also the Limelighters version, which is least like what I heard in the 60's. Thanks for the leads!

Margaret Gunning July 30, 2022 at 10:51 AM

I had almost forgotten about this! Yes, it amazes me how, if you check back in a few years, suddenly there's all sorts of videos pertaining to the subject at hand. YT grows exponentially by the year. Thank you for your comment!

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

EERIE, ANCIENT FOLK SONG: "She is only a pauper, who nobody owns"

This snippet came from a very strange documentary from decades ago, about a woman from rural Maine in the late 1800s who was ostracized from her community for what was considered the ultimate sin. This woman had a desperate life of privation from childhood on, and was violated and made pregnant at age 13 (already stigmatized by poverty, and now by illicit pregnancy). The baby was taken away from her and sent away, perhaps even sold, destined to be an unpaid farm laborer. She was forced to go on struggling through a harsh life, marrying a poor farmer, being widowed, then later in her life meeting a younger man whom she thought understood her soul. 

She married him for love, a rare thing back then, in spite of her community's disapproval of the age difference. A few years later, someone came to visit her and recognized the young man. To everyone's horror, this turned out to be the baby she had been forced to give away at age 13. Without any knowledge of it, she had married her own son. She spent the next few decades of her life living as a hermet, with virtually no contact with other human beings. Only occasionally, someone would begrudgingly donate food to keep her alive. Children would be sent over to her shack with bags of basic provisions, a sack of potatoes, a few garden vegetables - and THROW the sack over her fence so they would not need to talk to her. The town congratulated themselves on their charity towards such a sinner.

This woman was a pauper - a person so poor and so devoid of fundamental resources that she becomes a pawn in the hands of the powerful. I was horrified to learn that paupers were actually bought and sold as an acceptable form of slavery. They were expected to be grateful to be "rescued" from starvation and homelessness and given the golden opportunity to perform unpaid, backbreaking labor on a farm for room and board. The only escape from this fate was death.

This song seemed to sum it all up. It was so eerie it made my hair stand on end. The words are as follows:

There's a grim horse hearse
And the hearse has no springs,

And hark to the dirge the sad driver sings:
"Rattle her bones (her bones)

Over the stones (the stones)

She is only a pauper

Who nobody owns."

This evokes the image of a corpse lying in the back of a rickety old wagon, given a pauper's burial which the community no doubt thinks is too good for her.

What makes you sleep so sound

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

Gonna tear your still house down. 

Go 'way, go 'way darlin' Corey 

Stop hanging around my bed 

Bad liquor's ruined my body 

Pretty women’s gone to my head.

I’m going across the deep ocean 

I’m going across the deep sea 

I’m a-going across the deep ocean 

Just to bring darlin' Corey to me. 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow

Go dig me a hole in the ground 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow 

Just to lay darlin' Corey down. 

Don’t you hear them blue birds a-singing 

Don’t you hear that mournful sound 

They're a-preaching Corey’s funeral 

In some lonesome graveyard ground.

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

They’re going to tear your still house down.

Burl Ives 1941

It took me a while to figure out why this song is such a work of genius - that is, as Burl Ives sings it, with one endlessly-sustained, finger-picked chord. It's the minimalism of it, the stripped-down quality, like a pine board silver-greyed and punched full of knotholes. He uses only the barest minimum of his incredible voice, just the edge of a single vocal cord, and whispers the ending in a way that chills the blood. 

I was only familiar with that other version, the one all the folkies sang in the '60s after Harry Belafonte made it famous. I don't remember stills being torn down and "Darlin' Cor-ray" being buried in a "medd-a" in that one. Belafonte homogenized it somewhat, tamed the lyric, took the coldness, the whiskery scarecrow quality out of it. 

Ives was a strange one, walking out of a schoolhouse one day saying he had had enough of education, then walking just as confidently into a totally unique lifelong career as an actor and a folksinger. He had a sort of effortless, artless tenor that could wrap itself around any kind of song - remember Little Bitty Tear? But then there was that chiller That's all I Can Remember (which see):

It took me a few decades to catch up with this amazing jailhouse ballad again, sung in his usual downplayed, straightforward way. But ah, the way he sings, "Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. . . " Like Johnny Cash, who was never in the service and never spent a single day in jail, Ives somehow presented himself as a man who had been everywhere, done everything, and lived to sing the tale. 

Then there was the acting. His Big Daddy was downright frightening, malignant, cold-eyed, the polar opposite of his grandfatherly self, chuckling away on that wretched Christmas show he was in. I am sure I watched it, listened to Holly Jolly Christmas, Little White Duck, and that incredibly stupid song about The Whale, which my smart-ass/pain-in-the-ass family endlessly, pretentiously quoted:

I have to admit to being both drawn and somewhat repulsed by Ives, by his bulk, his scary tremorous voice, his heartiness backed by a surly rage that scares the hell out of me. He was too many things at once, but there is no beating or repeating that voice. It's one of those but-he's-not-doing-anything voices. He does not seem to be putting any effort into it at all, and chances are he wasn't. It was just a genius voice. Not a mountain voice at all, not a holler or a howl. It was actually kind of refined. Some of his oeuvre was not to my tastes - he did a lot of bland, country-ish stuff that I remember listening to a lot as a kid, the same way I listened to Andy Williams.

But then he starts whispering to us about Darlin' Cor-ray, and a chill works its way up, or tingles on my scalp so my hair seems to stand on end. This is one of those minimalist things, a few brush-strokes expressing a world. Van Gogh could dab his brush on a canvas a couple of times and paint a recognizable human figure, a person with an attitude, a mission and a soul. Minimalism has died out; cacophony is king. We have to go back to the records, because they're all we've got left.

Southern Gothic: the news about Billie Joe

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay

And at dinner time we stopped and we walked back to the house to eat

And mama hollered at the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"

And then she said she got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge

Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Papa said to mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas

"Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please

There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"

And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge

And now Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe

Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show

And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?

"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it just don't seem right

I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge

And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?

I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite

That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today

Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way

He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge

And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billie Joe

Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo

There was a virus going 'round, papa caught it and he died last Spring

And now mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything

And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge

And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

I think  more deep psychological meaning has been assigned to this song than (even) MacArthur Park or Inna Gadda Da Vida. I confess here and now that I like it, and that, upon reflection, it's not as schmaltzy as it may appear on the surface.

In only five spare verses, Bobbie Gentry opens up a world. That world is wounded, disaffected, and achingly lonely. The story is about a suicide, but it's also about the callousness of adults casually discussing a young man's death while they scarf down a typical Southern meal ("Pass the biscuits, please").

The food obviously means more to them than the boy, with one exception: a girl sitting at table unable to eat, trying to absorb the shock. Though she narrates the story, she is never named. The trauma and horror of the details accumulate bit by bit, along with her family's indifference towards the  tragedy. And then, of course, there are all those mysteries: who was Billie Joe McAllister, what relationship did he have with the girl, was he black, was he gay, did he make her pregnant? And (most importantly), what were she and Billie Joe throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge?

Gentry, a Southerner from Mississippi who rebaptised  herself from her birth name Streeter (perhaps to distance herself from her po'-white-trash roots), doesn't explain a lot of things, and has even admitted she doesn't know all the details herself. Storytelling is the art of implication, leaving lots of space for the listener's interpretation.

A movie was later made about the story, solidifying some of the myths, and I think that spoiled it. Of course, in the movie it's all spelled out: Billie Joe was gay and jumped off the bridge out of sexual guilt. I hate it when someone comes along and plugs all the holes and spaces, usually with the most trite possibilities.

And then there are the "mystery verses". As I began to dig into the enigmatic, brilliantly-written lyrics, I discovered there was a so-called "seven-minute version" featuring only voice and acoustic guitar, which was later cut down to four minutes (still unprecedented in length, except perhaps for MacArthur Park) for radio play. Of course I couldn't find it, and it's doubtful it even exists. This version is tighter, and though the lines somehow fit into the sad, almost bluesy tune, many of them don't scan. This gives them a conversational rhythm that's eerily lifelike. It's one of those things that shouldn't work, but does. Obviously this song has been worked on and worked on, and yet the seams don't show.

I'm no Bobbie Gentry fan, and this genre doesn't interest me at all for the most part, but every time this song comes into my head it arrests my brain. So what was it: an aborted fetus, a wedding certificate, stolen cash, a Grammy award? This last tantalyzing detail is probably what secured the song as a timeless hit. (When asked what it was, Gentry was famously quoted as saying,"I don't know.")

There's a lot we don't know: if the family is black or white (unlikely they are black, because they seem to own their own spread and don't give the impression of being impoverished), whether or not the girl is pregnant (?) or just mad about the boy. Or if she even loves him. His supposed gayness comes out of left field: some say the ie spelling of his name (inexplicably changed for the movie) indicates his sexual orientation, though the fact it was recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a masculine name with an unconventional spelling, obscures that (rather stupid) possibility. Billie Jean King was yet to rise to ascendency, but Billie Joe, Betty Joe and Bobbie Joe were already fixtures on Petticoat Junction.The fact Gentry and one of the Bradley daughters have the same first name seems tremendously significant. (Just a coincidence? You decide.)

The song touches on various raw nerves of '60s pop culture: the angst and disaffection of youth (then called the "generation gap"), racial tension, poverty, social status, forbidden sexuality, and lyrics that you had to listen to over and over again and "figure out" (unlike Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Love in my Tummy and My Baby Does the Hanky Panky). Of course I looked for the seven-minute version with all those extra verses, and turned up only one image of a sheet of paper, a rough draft which may or may not be bona fide. Lots of old threads on message boards from 2007 ask the same questions and come up with all sorts of possibilities. Bobbie Gentry was smart not to answer them. Personally, I always thought Mama was trying to fix the girl up with that "that nice young preacher, Brother Taylor" - did she know more about her daughter's infatuation than she was letting on? Was she trying to get her mind off the whole sordid mess? At any rate, they've invited him for dinner, no doubt so they can throw pleasantries at each other with only passing reference to that unrepentent sinner, Billie Joe.

And that's all I have to say about it for this moment, but the more I listen to that lyric, the more I study it, the better it gets. You see, it shouldn't work - the lines have too many syllables - it's melodramatic and even depressing.  But as with Dionne Warwick's  Do You Know the Way to San Jose (which drew unprecedented numbers of people to the city, in spite of the fact that the song portrays it as a sinkhole of failed dreams), people thronged to Tallahatchie Bridge in the strangely-named town of Money, Mississippi. It was only a 20-foot drop, and I'm not at all sure that's enough to kill a person. But the bridge collapsed in 1972, an eerie thing. It had rotted away, obviously, or merely bucked under the weight of pop-culture legend.

Miscellany

Money Bridge Collapses, Greenwood Commonwealth, 06/20/1972

MONEY – The Tallahatchie River Bridge here collapsed between 11:30 and midnight Monday and presumably joined Billy Joe MacAllister in the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie.

Leflore County Deputy Sheriff Ricky Banks said he received a call from Sheriff Rufus Freeman about 12:15 a.m. today telling him the bridge had collapsed.

Leflore County Second District Supervisor Ray Tribble had called Sheriff Freeman earlier when two boys who had been fishing discovered the bridge had collapsed.

The two boys reportedly had gone upstream to fish and upon returning to Money found they couldn’t get over the collapsed span in the Tallahatchie River.

Tribble and his county road foreman Homer Hawkins then blocked the bridge off at the approaches on each side to prevent anyone from driving into the river.”

[Caption under photos]  BRIDGE OUT AT MONEY – The middle section of the Tallahatchie river bridge at Money tilted towards its upstream side as it collapsed Monday night. The steel suspension bridge was built in 1927. Staff Photos by Steve Bailey.

(Post-script. This now strikes me as a total crock. I mean  - look at the names! Sherriff Rufus Freeman is straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. Ray Tribble - ? What can I say? Then we get to Homer Hawkins, and we KNOW we are in the territory of satire.)

Biographical tidbit about B. G. :

Of Portuguese descent, Gentry was born Roberta Streeter in Chickasaw County, MS, on July 27, 1944; her parents divorced shortly after her birth and she was raised in poverty on her grandparents' farm. After her grandmother traded one of the family's milk cows for a neighbor's piano, seven-year-old Bobbie composed her first song, "My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog," years later self-deprecatingly reprised in her nightclub act; at 13, she moved to Arcadia, CA, to live with her mother, soon beginning her performing career in local country clubs. The 1952 film Ruby Gentry lent the singer her stage surname.

POST-THOUGHTS: This post may have quite a few add-ons, despite the deceptively simple subject matter. I wrote earlier that the girl in the song sits there looking ghostly with shock. But how do we know how she looks? There is no mention at all of how she feels or reacts until the FOURTH verse, and even then, all we know is that she has no appetite. Her mother chides her for it, not so much because her child isn't eating but because all her cooking efforts are going to waste. And that is all we know about her reaction. There is no mention of grief. There is no mention of tears. Nothing! Just a mother getting on her kid's case for wasting food. It's shocking, when you really look at it, because all the rest of it, the assumption of a grief-stricken girl listening to the adults expressing their callous indifference to a tragedy, is imagined, inferred. It's what we don't know about her and about her relationship with Billie Joe that makes the song so compelling.

So how do we even know she loved him?

It's everything that is going on around the subject. Of course the adults aren't as indifferent as they may appear. They're keeping the subject at a distance because it's so horrific. When her brother starts to reminisce about Billie Joe and the playful, if rather disgusting incident at the Carrell County picture show, it's obvious the girl knew him, and her parents knew that she knew him.

Another layer? The stigma of suicide: "well, he done it to himself, didn't he?" is the unspoken subtext as they stuff themselves with cornbread and black-eyed peas. He should've acted like a man, faced up to his troubles, whatever they were.

The end of the song is so heartbreaking that I haven't even touched on it. It's the most masterful verse because of its Southern Gothic melancholy, worthy of passage in a  Tennessee Williams play. By the end of it, the girl is completely alone, idly tossing flowers over the side of that fatal bridge. Ironically, the last verse somehow echoes the terseness of her parents in its lack of emotion. She is simply stating the facts.

AND THIS IS THE LAST THING I WILL SAY. (Promise!) I found out in all my meanderings through the song and the history of the bridge that Money, Mississippi is where Emmett Till was brutally murdered, inspiring Bob Dylan to write one of his fieriest songs when he was only 20 years old. I can't quote it here because it's a subject unto itself. But Money, Mississippi strikes me as a bubbling, seething cauldron, a place where ignorance and evil ruled, and perhaps still rule. I would like to think we are making progress, that all the hard work of the '60s paid off. But these days, as we slouch toward Bethlehem or slide toward oblivion, I have so many doubts that I wonder if we're going to make it at all.

POST-POST. This is a summer rerun, but one that I like. Hell, I put hours into this thing, and did more than four people read it? Never mind. If I weren't in this to amuse myself, I would've been long gone by now. It's the laziest dank ditch days of summer, inescapably close and sticky, and while we're far from the fly-buzzing steaminess of Money, Mississippi, the house feels like it's underwater from humidity. A lawnmower leaked in the night, filling the house with toxic fumes that rose like a mushroom cloud to the upstairs bedrooms. Right now I am sticking to my chair. No matter how much summer may suck, and it sucks big-time, there's something that sucks even more: you know that all too soon it'll be over and you'll slide down the other side. So I thought this long, not-so-lazy piece might be appropriate.

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 truly love, the only one whose love is not based on greed.

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.

POST-MORTEM. I will confess that this is a rerun, originally posted in 2012. Six bloody years is long enough, and hey, if *I* don't remember it, no one else will! I was certain I'd be able to find ample imformation after all that time had passed - it always happens on the internet. What shocked me was that nothing had changed - in fact, it was even harder to find anything at all about this song. There was a weird pdf of Reynolds' song lyrics that looked like it was typewritten on an old Olivetti portable from 1959, but I couldn't do anything with it. All sung versions have disappeared. The Limelighters DID record it, and I was allowed to listen to 30 seconds of it, enough to realize my memory had been close to correct. Malvina included a few lines in the original which specified the "wee folk" were, in fact, leprechauns.  Nearly every culture has a myth about tiny people running around in the woods, doing demonic mischief and scaring people half to death. Leprechaun is a horrible word when you look at it. Scares the living shit out of me. No wee folk for me! Go away from my door.

POST-POST DISCOVERY. All right. I have it! I have that lyric sheet from the Olivetti. Here is the relevant lyric:

As you can see, this is pretty close to the version at the beginning of this post, without those few lines about the leprechauns.  The possible meaning of the lyric (being bedazzled by wealth and fame, while at the same time seduced and sucked dry) is made more clear by the line, "They'll dazzle you and promise you, and lead you by the hand". It couldn't be more clear, in fact. The Limelighters version leaves that verse out, so it starts in the middle, kind of. But we still get the message. 'Tis luck to catch a leprechaun. Except when it isn't.

He is a monster, not a man

The Klan

by Alan Arkin and David Arkin, 1951

The countryside was cold and still
There was a cross upon the hill
This cold cross wore a burning hood
To hide its rotten heart of wood

Father I hear the iron sound
Of hoofbeats on the frozen ground

Down from the hills the riders came
Jesus, it was a crying shame
To see the blood upon their whips
And hear the snarling of their lips

Mother I feel a stabbing pain
Blood flows down like a summer rain

Now each one wore a mask of white
To hide his cruel face from sight
and each one sucks a little breath
Out of the empty lungs of death

Sister lift my bloody head
It's so lonesome to be dead

He who travels with the Klan
He is a monster, not a man
Underneath that white disguise
I have looked into his eyes

Brother, will you stand with me
it's not easy to be free

Who ARE these people?

How I wish I could find out more about this video and the women in it! I found it on a YouTube channel that has hardly anything on it. The song was featured on a couple of movie soundtracks, including Fargo and Brother, Where Art Thou? It's a traditional tune with many versions, but is believed to originate with slaves in the U. S. south, predating the Civil War. Some say it's about a runaway slave; some say, a runaway mother leaving a child behind. What fascinates me about this version is the rhythmic table-thumping and clapping. I love the joy of these singers, but WHO ARE THEY? This is what is so frustrating about YouTube, and about the internet in general: the fragmentary or non-existent information about things you are fascinated with. 

I did find a name, Cartes sur table (cards on the table), but when I clicked on it I got reams of news videos from somewhere, don't know where but "not here". Nothing else. The name of the channel it was on rings no bells. Mystery. 

Why they cancelled the KKK

The Klan

by Alan Arkin and David Arkin, 1951

The countryside was cold and still There was a cross upon the hill This cold cross wore a burning hood To hide its rotten heart of wood Father I hear the iron sound Of hoofbeats on the frozen ground Down from the hills the riders came Jesus, it was a crying shame To see the blood upon their whips And hear the snarling of their lips Mother I feel a stabbing pain Blood flows down like a summer rain Now each one wore a mask of white To hide his cruel face from sight and each one sucks a little breath Out of the empty lungs of death Sister lift my bloody head It's so lonesome to be dead He who travels with the Klan He is a monster, not a man Underneath that white disguise I have looked into his eyes Brother, will you stand with me it's not easy to be free

I'd say I don't know why this song came into my head again, after something like 50 years, except that I DO know.

While I was watching the Scientology series on A & E (and I will confess to a total fascination with cults in every form), an ad came on - a weird, perhaps overdramatic but nonetheless chilling preview.  At first I thought it was for a dramatic series. Then came the title: Generation KKK. It depicted people in white robes with the ghastly pointed headpieces, holes cut for eyes, and the voiceovers were something like: no, the Klan is not dead, it's just moving into the next generation. Children were depicted hand-in-hand, standing around a big fire.

I felt queasy. If this was "real", why was A & E giving these people any air time? It seemed too horrible to be believed.

Then that was it. I didn't see anything more about it, and kind of hoped I'd imagined it.

But I hadn't.

Just yesterday, I saw a whole slew of news items about the series. A & E had been getting a lot of flak on social media for it, so they solved it by changing the title from Generation KKK to Escaping the KKK, to make it match up with Amish and Mennonite and all those other horrific organizations that lynch black people.

Uhhhhmmmm, yeah. 

Not so, as it turned out. The series has been abruptly cancelled. There are several stories about this. One is that the producers (demonized by A & E executives, who seemed to want to distance themselves from the whole thing) had been paying KKK leaders to do the show. Another, more suspicious, yet more believable rumour was that the KKK leaders were being paid to say and do whatever the producers wanted. Which was, according to those leaders, bullshit that did not reflect anything that actually went on.

Eye -yi-yi-yie.

If so, then A & E has sunk to new levels of depravity. Not only are they funding the KKK with their bribery, they're telling them exactly how to BE KKK members. Of course the actual Klan will try to play down their atrocities, while A & E will do the opposite, ramp it up to the maximum, because it "makes good television".

In any case, the show is canned, and the fallout is - we'll see. The problem with all this is that a lot of people will say, "Good for them! At last, someone in reality TV is showing a little moral fibre." But was the whole thing staged from the very start, to whip up curiosity for the NEXT "reality" show?

Had they begin filming on this already? Had they finished it?  I think it was all set to go to air. Let's hope someone will leak it onto YouTube so it can be poked with sharp sticks and ridiculed into the ground.

Meantime. . . the song. My brother Walt used to sing this during the folk boom, when everyone played guitars and sang, but then it sort of sank out of sight. It was hard to find the lyrics, and I found only ONE recorded version of it by Richie Havens. He turns it into a Richie Havens song, but it is the same one, believe me.

The Richie Havens lyrics were way different, by the way. So I had to dig some more to get to the bedrock.

The song was written by Alan and David Arkin (yes, THAT Alan Arkin, the actor). I don't know how many songs he wrote, if it was a sideline or what, and right now I feel like I've been run over, so I don't want to look it up. It was all wrong on message boards: people kept saying things like, oh, it was Malvina Reynolds, or Pete Seeger. It wasn't.

I don't know what inspired Alan Arkin and his father to write this, but if A & E can get everyone in a lather by faking a show about them, then the KKK supposedly have some sort of relevance beyond Birth of a Nation.  Of course there are supposed ties to Donald Trump. I would imagine they'd go for him more than for Hillary Clinton, but they'd elect a basset hound sooner than Hillary Clinton.