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.
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.
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.
Some of my favorite Lucky Charms commercials from the 1960s. I especially like the fact that the "rainbow" colours all come out in shades of grey. This reminds me of Dorothy stepping into Oz. None of us knew that the picture turned to colour at this point, because none of us had SEEN it in colour. So he has to describe the colours to us.
Lucky Charms has steadily escalated the number of marshmallow bits over the years, until the "cereal" is now nothing but a bowl of chemicals. North Americans are puzzled, with big question marks appearing above their stupid heads, as to "why" their children are so obese. How can they become obese from a cereal that's "magically delicious"? In recent years the leprechaun has become insufferable, speaking in an obviously phony Irish accent (I mean, even more phony than this one) while he rolls out the "new" marshmallow shape/flavour. The last one was in the shape of a silver Porsche.
Oh, the old turf fire and the hearth swept clean,
There is no-one half so happy as myself and Paddy Keane;
With the baby in the cradle you could hear her mammy say
"Wouldn't you go to sleep, Alanna, till I wet your daddy's tay."
"Oh the man that I work for is a richer man than me,
But somehow in this world, feth, we never can agree;
He has big tow'ring mansions and castles over all
But sure I wouldn't exchange with him my little marble hall."
"I have got a house and a tidy bit of land;
You would never see a better on the side of Knocknacran;
No piano in the corner and no pictures on the wall,
But I'm somehow quite contented in my little marble hall."
O the old turf fire and the hearth swept clean,
There is no-one half so happy as myself and Paddy Keane;
With the baby in the cradle you could her her mammy say,
"Wouldn't you go to sleep, Alanna, till I wet your daddy's tay."
I heard Catherine McKinnon sing this, ages and ages ago, on Don Harron's TV show. Harron was known mainly for his braying, hole-y-sweater-wearing, rural alter ego, Charlie Farquarson, a quintessential/stereotypical Canadian long before Bob and Doug came on the scene. He and McKinnon were married, which seemed like a strange match since she was cultivated, gorgeous, and sang beautifully.
The only thing I remembered about this song were:
- the tune;
- the "little marble hall"; and
- "wet your daddy's tay", which I assume means refill his teacup,but which COULD mean other things.
I also assumed the title was My Little Marble Hall, and it wasn't, so it was - well, not exactly hard to find, though it took thirty seconds instead of five. Little Marble Hall didn't work, but when I entered the line about "tay" it took me right to the song, not to mention the sheet music.
The wonders of the internet.
This is deeply Irish, and I must find out more about it. Here I go.
OK, right away I find variations, including a version that really makes a lot better sense in voice. The first version seems to switch back and forth: it's the wife first, speaking of "myself and Paddy Keane", then a sort of weird shift to second person: "you could hear her mammy say", then back to mammy: "wouldn't you go to sleep. . . ", THEN obviously switching to the voice of (we assume) Paddy Keane for the rest of the song as he boasts of his tidy little home, made (most incongruously) of marble. Just calling it a "hall" is strange, but maybe it made sense in old Ireland, or maybe it was originally a different phrase altogether.
Here's another version that makes better grammatical sense:
Oh, the old turf fire, and the hearth swept clean
There’s no one quite so happy as meself and Mary Keene
With the baby in the cradle, you can hear her mother say
“Won’t you go to sleep, Alana, while I wet your Daddy’s tay”
Now, I’ve got a little house and land, as neat as it can be
You’ll never see the like of it, this side of Moneylea
No piano in the corner, and no pictures on the wall
But I’m happy and contented in my little cottage hall.
(etc., etc. - the rest is much the same).
In this version, Paddy Keene sings the whole song (referring to "meself and Mary Keene"). The town he names is Moneylea rather than Knocknacran, so obviously it's worded differently to rhyme and scan. Neither name makes a goddamn bit of sense to me.
And there isn't even a "little marble hall" in this one. It's a mere cottage, which is pretty disappointing. I wanted Paddy and Mary to live in some stonemason's nightmare, with huge slabs of marble hewn from quarries in Kilkenny (or wherever) drug off to Moneylea by shaggy dray horses. Or perhaps made of great collapsing chunks of stone that Michaelangelo had rejected. And "cottage hall" is even more nonsensical than the other one.
Then there are these strange couple of verses I found on various sites that have nothing to do with Mary and Paddy Keene:
Round the old turf fire
Sit the old folk, bent with years
As they watch us trippin' lightly
They're smilin' thro' their tears
So sadly they are dreaming
Of their youthful heart's desire -
In those dear old days so long ago
Around the old turf fire
The only reference to the couple is "as they watch us trippin' lightly", which is pretty strange. It seems like a paste-up job, something added later. A lot of folk songs have that cobbled-together feel, mainly because they've been passed down and passed down, never heard quite accurately, like that game you play where you whisper a phrase down a line of people and see how much it changes.
This is a not-half-bad post, unlike some of the old ones which make me shudder. Mondegreens are just words misheard in song lyrics, then repeated and repeated as if they're correct. If you quote the lyric properly, someone will say the wrong one at you. The example that comes to me is "s'cuse me while I kiss this guy".
So I've put a tiny piece back in the mosaic of my listening past. Or something. That "little marble hall" has come back again and again over the years, and a question mark has formed over my head like in those old Felix the Cat cartoons, but then I'd forget about it. I may even have tried to find it on the internet once or twice before. But the internet is an amoeba which doubles in size every few seconds, so if you can't find the information you want, check back in a minute or so and you'll be inundated.
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.
This is one of John Candy's finest moments. He plays a giant, vindictive leprechaun wielding a shilellagh (sp.? Does anyone know how to spell this?) and pushing his special brand of "rainbow meat", chock full of chemicals. I miss John Candy so. In many ways he was the glue holding SCTV together. His movie career, while it had some great moments, never quite came up to the wild creativity of his SCTV days, with its multiple and often complex characters. This is just plain wonderful!
Top ten reasons why some Irish Americans have no real clue about Ireland
Loud and too proud many Irish Americans make a very bad impression
By JAMES FARRELL, IrishCentral Contributer
Published Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 7:23 AM
My American friends always tell me how they love Ireland. But when I stayed in Chicago in the 1990s they described an Ireland I never knew existed. On a recent visit back, it seems that little has changed.
Maybe a little self-awareness and education about how the Irish really live might help.
1. We don’t live in thatched cottages anymore -- get real. We’re an urbanized society and have the same living standards as the rest of the world.
2. We don’t say faith and begorrah or chase Leprechauns -- Hollywood has infected the brains of too many Irish Americans. We don’t believe in fairies, banshees, or leprechauns, unless it is for gullible Americans.
3. We don’t drink all day and fight all night. Too many showings of ‘The Quiet Man’ have pickled some Irish American brains. We like a drink but we rarely fight.
4. We don’t hate the British any more. Sure we did once, but we’re best friends for years now since the peace process, the Queen’s visit was totally popular.
5. We generally don’t like American Republicans. We are much more comfortable with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and their nuanced international world view than cowboys like George Bush and Ronald Reagan -- sorry all you Tea Party Irish.
6. We don’t really think you are Irish, the same way as us. If you are not born here then by our definition you are not Irish.
7. We don’t really like "Danny Boy" and all the sentimental songs. Sure, they are fine for a late night sing song for Americans but we are fed up of them.
8. We often tell jokes about you, usually about the phony Irish accents and Aran sweaters
9. We don’t know the Murphys from Cork or the Sullivans from Kerry, there are thousands of them.
10. We don’t want to hear any more Irish drinking jokes -- they are pathetic and demeaning to us for the most part.
*James Farrell is an Irish writer now living in Dublin
Yes! This just about sums it up. It must be irritating for the Irish to be stuck with these mostly inane stereotypes. (Thus the green typeface.) As the illustrations prove, and by the way they are MEANT TO BE IRONIC, FOLKS, NOT LITERAL, SO DO NOT CALL ME AN IGNORANT RACIST, this sometimes took the form of a vicious discrimination so primitive it defies analysis. The infamous "no dogs or Irish" rule proved that white people could treat white people with the same dehumanizing cruelty as blacks and Native Americans.
My own family had a rather ludicrous pride in the fact that we were "Irish", having descended from the Pedlows, which is about as Irish a name as I've ever heard. My mother eventually admitted to me that my "Irish" grandmother had been born in Canada. Though she always said I was "one-quarter Irish", now it seems to be more like 1/8. Are my children 1/16, and my grandchildren 1/32? Am I doing the math right? As Jonathan Winters once said about his Comanche heritage, "One nosebleed and I'm out of the tribe."
I worked all this into my first novel, Better than Life, exaggerating it so that the Connars believed that even a drop of Irish blood (and what exactly IS Irish blood, anyway?) made you a son or daughter of Eire. Erin go Blagggh, and all that stuff.
I had a cousin Eileen, OK. And another, Deirdre, though that can also be English, I think. Or is it Celtic?
I'm not sure why no one thinks of William Butler Yeats or James Joyce when they're rhyming off these Irish stereotypes: the bleak, often hopeless literary genius, grimly foretelling an apocalyptic future, light years ahead of his time but hard to sit next to at the bar. No doubt they went for a pint at the end of a long day of dystopic anhedonia, but not with the suicidal fervor that killed off the Welsh genius, Dylan Thomas, at the age of 39.
(Sorry. I had to throw in a little Separated at Birth.)
