David James O'Donoghue. The life of William Carleton: being his autobiography and letters; and an account of his life and writings, from the point at which the autobiography breaks off. London: Downey & Co., 1896.
Typical of early nineteenth-century journals, reviewing in the Quarterly was highly politicized and on occasion excessively dismissive. Writers and publishers known for their Unitarian or radical views were among the early journal's main targets. Prominent victims of scathing reviews included the Irish novelist Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), the English poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor, the English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In an 1817 article, John Wilson Croker attacked John Keats in a review of Endymion for his association with Leigh Hunt and the so-called Cockney School of poetry. Shelley blamed Croker's article for bringing about the death of the seriously ill poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's ironic phrase, 'by an article'
The Dublin Review was an influential Catholic periodical founded in 1836 by Michael Joseph Quin, Cardinal Wiseman and Daniel O'Connell. Quin had the original idea for the new journal, soon persuading Wiseman to lend his support, and next enlisting O'Connell whose Catholic Emancipation campaign he admired. Quin edited the first two issues before leaving to take up a post in the Spanish colonial service. This fell through, but O'Connell would not re-instate him as editor, nor allow him to continue as co-proprietor.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "The review was intended to provide a record of current thought for educated Catholics and at the same time to be an exponent of Catholic views to non-Catholic inquirers." Its editors and contributors included many well-known writers discussing current affairs alongside religious, literary and historical topics.
The name was chosen because Dublin was a centre of Catholic culture, and it echoed the title of the flourishing Edinburgh Review, but the journal was actually published in London: quarterly at first, then monthly. Contributors to the magazine included Don Luigi Sturzo, E. I. Watkin.[1] and Barbara Ward.[2] In 1961 the name was changed to the Wiseman Review, to avoid confusion, but the publication reverted to the original name in 1965. It ceased publication in 1969, and was incorporated into The Month.
LATER (Sept. 26): Wordnik at https://www.wordnik.com/words/ahagur links to a sketch titled "The Poor Scholar" in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
Google Books cite: Geography of an Irish oath. The Lianhan Shee. Going to Maynooth. Phelim O'Toole's courtship. The poor scholar. Wildgoose Lodge. Tubber Derg; or, The red well. Neal Malone
Volume 2 of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, William Carleton
Author William Carleton
Publisher Wilson & Hawkins, 1862. https://books.google.com/books?id=THlKAQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Excerpt from email to Wms C.: It was kind of fun trying to figure it out. The only times "ahagur" appears on the Internet is in old editions of Carleton's books, and it only appears then in dialog. The context is always a conversation between two people who know each other, and it's used as a kind of direct address -- e.g. in the linked passage, a couple address each other as "avourneen" and "ahagur," and that's typical of the others.
In this bit of dialog, Carleton translates it as "jewel." I can't find the exact word, but I'm guessing it's Co. Tyrone dialect -- or something he heard from his mother -- on the order of "dearie" or "honeybunch" or "good morning, sunshine."That's still guesswork, but I'm comfortable enough to say "ahagur [a term of endearment]" with my guess in brackets after the word when I get the article ready to send off a magazine.
BTW, the excerpt I'm sending you from Carleton's _Traits and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry_ is his take on a country priest who: (a) is preaching about Purgatory; and (b) sounds a lot like the jake-leg country preachers who were still plying their trade down home when I was a kid, and no doubt still are.
Again, thanks for your help. Sometimes looking for something, coming up with nothing and identifying it as a blind alley is an important part of the process, at least in my experience!
I guess you could call it a blended congregation ...
In Denver the Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber has started a Lutheran congregation called the House for All Sinners and Saints. It was intended to be a ministry to "academics and queers and comics and recovering alcoholics," in Bolz-Weber's words, as well as others who didn't fit in with your typical suburban mainline Protestant churches. But it didn't stay that way ...
Bolz-Weber, who goes by Pastor Nadia to her congregation, was interviewed recently by Terry Gross of National Public Radio's Fresh Air program, one of the best interviewers in the business. It aired today, and is now available on
NPR's website.
Bolz-Weber's congregation includes LGBT people, people with addictions, compulsions and depression, and even nonbelievers. "Some churches might have a hard time welcoming junkies and drag queens; we're fine with that," she says.
Still, Bolz-Weber admits to feeling uneasy when "bankers in Dockers" started coming to her services: "It threw me into a crisis, because I felt like, 'Wait, you could go to any mainline Protestant church in this city and see a room full of people who look just like you. Why are you coming and messing up our weird?' "
Ultimately, Bolz-Weber says, mixing more traditional newcomers with her church's original parishioners has been good for her congregation. "I thought it was diluting the weird; now it's much weirder to have them all together," she explains.
And regardless of who fills the seats, Bolz-Weber's message from the pulpit remains the same: "My job is to point to Christ and to preach the Gospel and to remind people that they're absolutely loved ... and all of their mess-ups are not more powerful than God's mercy and God's ability to sort of redeem us and to bring good out of bad."
She told Terry Gross:
Nobody ever meets me and guesses. The best thing is on airplanes. ... Eventually if you talk to [people], which I try not to do, but if it has to happen, then they'll say, "What do you do?" and I'll invite them to guess, and never once have they guessed. I did get "burlesque dancer" once, which pleased me to no end. If you're a middle-aged Lutheran pastor and someone guesses you're a burlesque dancer, that feels like a win for the day.
And this:
One of the values my community has always held is this idea of welcoming the stranger. ... So having this value — it was really challenged at that point when different people started coming in. ...
The Denver Post ... ran this big front-page story about me with this terrifying picture of me, and so the next Sunday, tons of people showed up. But the thing is, you know who takes the paper are, like, 60-year-olds in the suburbs. That's who showed up. So we're looking around going, "What's happened? Our weirdness is being diluted." I called a friend of mine who has a church with a similar demographic in St. Paul, Minn., and I was like, "Dude, have you ever had normal people mess up your church?" and he goes, "Yeah, you guys are really good at welcoming the stranger if it's a young transgender kid, but sometimes the stranger looks like your mom and dad." ...
That's what is challenging to me about Christianity is that exact thing — being forced to look at your own stuff and being pushed into a space of grace that's really, really uncomfortable.
"I'll lay Shibby to a penny trump that you could dance your own namesake -- the Colleen dhas dhun, the bonny brown girl -- upon a spider's cobweb." (55)
The Traditional Tune Archive,
CAILÍN DEAS DONN [1], AN. AKA and see "My Pretty Fair Maid," "Pretty Brown Girl (2) (The)." Irish, Jig. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. See also similar melodic material from strains of "Big Bow Wow." http://tunearch.org/wiki/Cail%C3%ADn_Deas_Donn_(1)_(An)
CAILÍN DEAS DONN [2] (A Pretty Brown-Haired Maid). AKA and see "Pretty Brown Maid/Girl [3]," "Bobby in Bed." Irish, Air (12/8 time). F Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. Does not seem to be related to "Cailín Deas Donn (1)". Also called 'Bobby in Bed.'" See also "Move Up to Me," "Did You See My Man Looking for Me? [1]." O'Sullivan (1983) points out that the tune was in the dorian mode in Bunting's manuscript, altered to the ionian mode in the printed collection: both are nearly exact mirrors of one another, save that the dorian mode tune is transposed down one step. However, the key signature for both versions remains the same. O'Sullivan is unable to account for this, save that Bunting may have been trying to 'improve' the tune in his published work.
Source for notated version: the index to the Irish collector Edward Bunting's 1840 collection gives that the tune was noted at "Deel Castle, Ballina, in 1792," though a note in Bunting's MS version states it was taken from the harper "Charles Byrne.
PRETTY BROWN GIRL [1], THE (An Cailín Deas Donn). Irish, Air (3/4 time). D Major. Standard tuning. AB. Roche Collection, 1982; vol. III, pg. 9.
PRETTY BROWN GIRL [2], THE (An Cailín Deas Donn). AKA – “Pretty Brown-Haired Girl.” AKA and see "Colleen Dhas Dhoun," “Colleen Dhas Dun,” "My Pretty Fair Maid," "The Pretty Fair Maid," "Máirín Buggerty.” Irish, Double Jig. Ireland, Connaught. G Major (Breathnach, Levey, O’Neill): D Major (O’Farrell). Standard tuning. AB (Levey): AABB (Breathnach, O’Farrell, O’Neill). The tune was printed by O’Farrell in his Pocket Companion for the Irish or Union Pipes (1810) as “Calleen Das Dawn.” Breathnach (1976) finds two settings in Stanford/Petrie under the “Pretty Brown Girl” title and as “A Connaught tune” (1327/28); he finds second part of Petrie’s “Buachallín Óg [1]," (1266) the same as the first part of “Pretty Brown Girl.” Aird’s “The Big Bow Wow” uses the same first part. O’Neill’s “Move up to me” has the second part of “Pretty Brown Girl” as does his song “Did you see my man looking for me? [1]” (in Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, 24). Songs set to the tune have the parts reversed from the way musicians render it, so that the chorus goes with the first part of the music. Source for notated version: flute player Jim Conroy, 1970 (Cluain Cua, near Graigue, Co. Galway, Ireland) [Breathnach]. Breathnach (CRÉ II), 1976; No. 14, pg. 10. Levey (Dance Music of Ireland, 2nd Collection), 1873; No. 54, pg. 23 (appears as “Colleen Dhas Dun”). O’Farrell (Pocket Companion, vol. IV), 1810; pg. 75. O'Neill (Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems), 1986; No. 151, pg. 40.
X:1
T:Pretty Brown Girl, The [2]
M:6/8
L:1/8
R:Jig
S:O’Neill – Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems (1907), No. 151
Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion
K:G
A|B2d cAA|BGG cAG|B2d cAA|BGG G2A|B2d cAA|Bde dBG|B2d cBA|BGG G2:|
|:f|gee fdd|ece dBG|gfe fdf|ece d2 e/f/|gfe fdf|e/f/ge dBG|B2d cBA|BGG G2:|
X:2
T:Calleen Das Down
M:6/8
L:1/8
R:Jig or Air
S:O’Farrell – Pocket Companion, vol. IV (1810)
Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion
K:D
A | F2d GEE | FDD GEC | F2d GEE | FDD D2 :|
|: A | dBB cAA | BGG AFD | ded cAA | BGG A2e |
fed cAA | ABG AFD | F2d GEE | FDD D2 :|
PRETTY BROWN MAID/GIRL [3] (Cailin deas donn). AKA and see "Cailin Deas Donn [2]." Irish, Air (12/8 time).
Red-haired Man's Wife
xxx
Ment. "fair of Baltihorum" (???) Cf. Baltehorum Jig in "The Irish Fiddler" Irish Penny Journal, p. 54.
"Again, Thy glorious sun doth arise" -- the Swedish hymn I demonstrated on the psalmodikon at First Baptist Church Moline and Colona United Methodist Church this summer in the Quad-Cities (details and links at:
Video shows the hymn performed en ensemble last month by Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet. Says Göran Carlström of NPsF, who posted it to YouTube:
"Elva psalmodikonmusikanter framför Din Klara Sol i Slaka Kyrka, Linköping i augusti 2015" (11 psalmodikon musicians play "Again, Thy glorious sun" in Slaka Church, Linköping, August 2015).
PLEASE NOTE: Members and friends of the Clayville-Prairieland Pioneer Academy of Music song-sharing and instrumental slow jam sessions are invited to play at the Clayville Fall Fesival from 1 to 4 p.m. (or thereabouts) Saturday, Sept. 19, and Sunday, Sept. 20, at Clayville Historic Site, Ill. 125, Pleasant Plains. Details at
It's very informal, and we don't have a playlist, but this is a song I hope we'll play.
One song we haven't played a lot lately is "Down by the Salley Gardens," an Irish air with words by William Butler Yeats set to a traditional Irish melody. I couldn't find it when I went looking through my disorderly batch of sheet music, chords and dulcimer tab tonight. So I went on line and found new tab (hey, I don't know it's new -- it may be the same tab), which is linked below in case you can't find our old music.
It's a lovely song, and it was around in one form or another before Yeats arranged it -- or wrote it -- and published it in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889. Says Wikipedia:
Yeats indicated in a note that it was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself." The "old song" may have been the ballad The Rambling Boys of Pleasure ..."
And this:
"Salley" or "sally" is a form of the Standard English word "sallow", i.e., a tree of the genus Salix. It is close in sound to the Irish word saileach, meaning willow.
The video below, taken from a British Broadcasting Corp. TV special, features Irish vocalist Karen Matheson backed by studio musicians from the US, Ireland and the UK.
It's from Transatlantic Sessions (series 2), a BBC television special that aired in 1998, featuring Nashville musicians and artists from Ireland, Scotland and England
fiddle: Aly Bain
accordion: Donald Shaw
flute: Ronan Browne
dobro: Jerry Douglas
guitar: Russ Barenberg
bass: Danny Thompson
... with a quote attributed to University of Chicago church historian Martin Marty in a review article in Christian Century. I couldn't tell you exactly what it means -- in fact I'm posting it here so I'll see it and I can keep thinking about it -- but I think it describes where I come from (or ought to), both theologically and politically:
Martin Marty once said that the best wisdom in the church comes from the left of the right and the right of the left—which is not the same as the middle.
I hadn't known the HD was traditionally played in Ireland. However, there's at least little bit online to suggest a tradition of Irish dulcimer players.
Here's a discussion group page on the tradconnect website, "connecting traditional Irish musicians across the world," at http://tradconnect.com/group/the-hammered-dulcimer-grou-irish-traditional-music. Says Dick Glasgow of Northern Ireland, "The Hammered Dulcimer has been here & playing Irish Music in Ireland at least since 1738, when we know one Archibald Williamson, was active in Dublin."
And an interesting thread on The Session, at https://thesession.org/discussions/25484", concluding -- but not quite conclusively -- that "as voiced by many session musicians over the years, it is not what you might call the most popular of instruments, when it appears in the Pub doorway, under someone’s arm."
(A sentiment that mountain dulcimer people also run into.)
Standard reference is David Kettlewell's thesis at ____________ University in England. Summarized on line at Dulcimer-players and Their Instruments. http://dulcimer.new-renaissance.com/ ["David Kettlewell's doctoral thesis 'The Dulcimer' (1976 with updates)
is gradually being presented here"]
A mystery, well, not so much a mystery as something I didn't expect and I don't know what to make of it yet -- while I was looking for something else [*see below], I found a reference to a dulcimer in a novel published in 1857 in Ireland. It's in Chapter XIII of "The Black Baronet; or The Chronicles of Ballytrain" by William Carleton, and it's almost certainly a hammered dulcimer. (But good scholar that I try to be, I can't say that with 100 percent assurance.) Available on line in several editions. The one I consulted (which has links to illustrations, etc.), is at
And a later passage, in which "Dandy Dulcimer" plays his instrument on top of a stagecoach. It's of interest because it gives a hint of the size of the instrument, and how it was played ... and it mentions a couple of songs:
The tops and bottoms of the pages are cut off here, but it's enough to give the flavor of the passage ...
William Carleton, according to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carleton, "is best known for his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry a collection of ethnic sketches of the stereotypical Irishman." He was regarded as something of a turncoat anti-Catholic who "succeeded in offending everybody during the course of his life," according to Wikipedia. Judging by the excerpts I turned up this morning, his sketches in Baronet are nothing if not stereotypical.
But there's that hammered dulcimer, and those songs.
"Bonnie Brown Girl" -- [PLEASE NOTE: When I first started looking at this a couple of weeks ago, I though it referred to the common English ballad "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor," also known as the "Bonnie Brown Girl" and widely sung throughout the British Isles. But I found another reference in an article by Carleton that clearly identifies it as an Irish song called "The Pretty Brown Girl." I'm leaving what I wrote about "Lord Thomas ..." up on the blog (never know when you might need it in future), with this note indicating that I've reconsidered it. -- PE 09-24-15]
Lord Thomas is a twerp whose mother thinks that the sun shines out of his saddle sores. Does a lot of riding does our Thomas, what with all the to-ing and fro-ing between his place, his mother's place, the penniless but very lofty and fragrant (where O where have we heard that word before?) Fair Eleanor in her gaff and his imminent wedding. Seems that Thomas and Eleanor think of the Brown Girl as nothing more than some nouveau riche arriviste unworthy of his attentions—except (as far as he is concerned) for that damnably interesting “rich” part following on from the loathed “nouveau” and preceding the equally contemptible “arriviste” bit. Eleanor's mother, however, is possessed of at least half a brain and is far from blind to this disaster waiting to happen, but even her focused warnings fail to stem her daughter's drive to impale herself on her own spite. The one truly lamented casualty here is the Brown Girl, whose love is thrown back in her face but whose riposte is swift, silent and final. Costs her her own life though. A.L. Lloyd is right when he says that some of the Scots oral versions have small illuminating extras, so while ditching the last two “Rose and Briar” verses which seem to me our of place, I've taken a couple of others from those Scots sets in order to underline the fragrant Eleanor's real malice aforethought. It's from Somerset and Cecil Sharp.
MERRILY DANCED/KISSED THE QUAKER('S WIFE). AKA - "Quaker's Wife." AKA and see "The Legacy," "The Humours of Last Night," "Blithe Have I Been," "Wilke's Wrigle." Scottish, English; Jig. Irish, Slide. G Major (Bremner, Gow, Mitchell, Taylor/Tweed): D Major (Hardie, Johnson, Kerr, Sumner, Sweet). Standard. AB (Hardie): AABB (most versions): AABBCC (Mitchell, Taylor). A variant of "Merrily Kissed the Quaker('s Wife)." Phillips Barry, FSSNE, No. 11, pg. 13, traces the tune back to the 14th century plain‑chant, "on the authority of Wilhelm Tappert's curious little book Wandernde Melodien' (Bayard, 1981). Bayard thinks that "Merrily Danced" is either devolved from "The Mill Mill O" or that both tunes evolved from a single tune; thus, to him if Barry is right and one tune stemmed from the late Middle Ages, then logically so does the other. John Glen (1891) finds the earliest appearance of the melody in print in Robert Bremner's 1757 Collection of Scots Reels or Country Dances, and it also early appears in the 1768 Gillespie Manuscript of Perth. However, an earlier printing can be found in Rutherford’s Choice Collection of Sixty of the Most Celebrated Country Dances (London, 1750).
***
Francis O’Neill (1922) remarks: “For over a century the name ‘Merrily Kissed the Quaker’ has been associated with a tune or Special Dance in Ireland, but no song or verse relating thereto has been traced. In O'Farrell's Pocket Companion for the Irish or Union Pipes (1804-10), we find the tune with name annotated ‘New Sett Irish’ {ed. note: the ‘New Sett’ tune, given below, appears to be a different tune or so distorted or distantly related it may be considered a different tune}. Continuing the investigation we discover that ‘Merrily Dance the Quaker’ (probably the original tune) was printed in No. 7 of Bremer's Collections of Scots Reels, or Country Dances" issued in 1760. The traditional version in North Kerry taken from the Rice-Walsh manuscript serves to illustrate how far a tune may deviate from the original in a few generations.” The title appears in Henry Robson's list of popular Northumbrian song and dance tunes ("The Northern Minstrel's Budget"), which he published c. 1800. Merrily Danced the Quaker's Wife is also the name of a rather uncommon Scottish country dance.
***
The Quaker’s wife sat down to bake
With all her bairns about her.
She made them all a sugar cake,
And the miller he wants his mouter (i.e. a fee for grinding flour).
Sugar and spice and all things nice,
And all things very good in it,
And then the Quaker sat down to play
A tune upon the spinet.
Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife,
And merrily danced the Quaker
Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife,
And merrily danced the Quaker.
***
The melody was well-known in America at the time of the War for Independence where it was employed as both a quick march and dance tune. As a march, it was published in Captain Robert Hinde’s (1720-1786) Collection of Quick Marches (Hinde was the author of The Discipline of the Light-Horse, an authoritative work on the use of light cavalry, and very influential in the British army). It appears in Henry Beck’s manuscript copybook for the flue (1786) and (as “So Merrily Danced the Quakers”) in the music manuscript copybook of Henry Livingston, Jr. Livingston purchased the estate of Locust Grove, Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1771 at the age of 23. In 1775 he was a Major in the 3rd New York Regiment, which participated in Montgomery’s invasion of Canada in a failed attempt to wrest Montreal from British control. An important land-owner in the Hudson Valley, and a member of the powerful Livingston family, Henry was also a surveyor and real estate speculator, an illustrator and map-maker, and a Justice of the Peace for Dutchess County. He was also a poet and musician, and presumably a dancer, as he was elected a Manager for the New York Assembly’s dancing season of 1774-1775, along with his 3rd cousin, John Jay, later U.S. Chief Justice of Governor of New York.
Here's the information I was chasing. On the Athens (Ala.) Dulcimers website, David and Carolyn Bennett posted an account of their visit to the Mountain Music Museum in Bristol, Tenn.-Va., titled "Bob Mize & Maybelle Carter Dulcimer Connection" with a picture of a dulcimer Mize created for Mother Maybelle Carter. Included in the dulcimer picture is a placard reading, "The Appalachian dulcimer is based on the design of the German 'doran.' When the instrument makers of the region began building dulcimers, they forgot the original name and searched the Bible and came up with this name."
First I'd heard of an instrument called a "doran." So I searched the Internet and came up with -- "Dulcimer Dandy" and William Carleton's novel. Never did find what I was looking for!
Watching coverage of the refugee crisis unfolding in Europe last night, I caught a glimpse of Syrian and Afghani migrants -- refugees -- crossing the border from Hungary into Austria. As they walked into an emergency transit station, local volunteers applauded them and I heard one singing Schiller's "Ode to Joy" from the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Among its other accolades over the years, perhaps most notably the its performance in Berlin conducted by Leonard Bernstein when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it is an anthem of the European Union.
I couldn't find the video at the Austrian border again on the BBC News website, which is where I thought I'd seen it, so I tried searching under keywords like "Austria" and "Ode to Joy," and I found this flash mob instead. It was put up by
Evenord-Bank eG-KG, a co-sponsor of the event featuring members of the Hans-Sachs Choir and Philharmonie Nürnberg.
It is utterly charming, especially the intro. If I say any more, I'll ruin it. Just watch.
PLEASE NOTE: First of several posts getting ready for the Clayville-Prairieland Pioneer Academy of Music's annual Advent soup supper performance in December. Technically, I guess it's the second because I posted some YouTube clips of the "Cherry Tree Carol" to the blog last year. But who wants to get technical? (Mountain dulcimer tab in DAA and DAD tunings with guitar chords and lyrics by Ralph Lee Smith and Maddy McNeil available at http://archive.dulcimersessions.com/dec07/smith.html.)
Ho ho ho ...
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat ... please put a penny in the old man's hat.
When I was in the choir at Springfield College in Illinois, we'd start practicing Christmas anthems as soon as school began in September. So it feels like it's time for the Clayville-Prairieland Strings folks to start pulling together a holiday program. Atonement Lutheran Church, where we've been meeting, has voted to merge with two other parishes and a lot of details are up in the air, but as far as I know, the new blended parish will still have Advent soup suppers and we'll be invited to play.
If not, we can always find a nursing home. Or just go wassailing. "If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do /
If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!" And there's always the annual Christmas party at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop, which has been one of the highlights of the year for us.
We've had a couple of good suggestions already for the Advent program. One is the "Cherry Tree Carol." We sang it last year at Clayville, and there's a lovely southern Appalachian version available online. I'll post more about it soon.
Another Christmas song that we can arrange a little (kind of like we did last year with "Carol of the Bells") is a traditional English carol called "I Saw Three Ships." There's a nice "D-for-dulcimer" lead sheet available here that we can start with:
Let's learn it now, and when we've got it under our belts we can work out entrances, solos, etc.
There's detailed background on the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website, and some of it is fascinating. Check it out sometime. The song has been a cherished part of the English folk music scene for 150 years and more. As usual,
Wikipedia has the basics:
"I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)" is a traditional and popular Christmas carol from England. A variant of its parent tune "Greensleeves", the earliest printed version of "I Saw Three Ships" is from the 17th century, possibly Derbyshire, and was also published by William Sandys in 1833.
The lyrics mention the ships sailing into Bethlehem, but the nearest body of water is the Dead Sea about 20 miles (32 km) away. The reference to three ships is thought to originate in the three ships that bore the purported relics of the Biblical magi to Cologne Cathedral in the 12th century. Another possible reference is to Wenceslaus II, King of Bohemia, who bore a coat of arms "Azure three galleys argent". Another thought was the three kings that came to baby Jesus.
Plenty of video clips on YouTube. Here's one I especially like:
Trace Adkins and Alyth McCormack - "I Saw Three Ships" -- at the CMA Country Christmas concert in 2013. She's singing Scots Gaelic in the first verse.
Other YouTube clips, ranging from Paddy Maloney and the Chieftans, the King's College Cambridge boys' choir, the folk rock duo Blackmore's Night, pianist Jon Schmidt, Nat King Cole and a mind-blowing session guitarist from the U.K. named Robbie McIntosh, that might give us ideas we might want to adapt, steal or ignore altogether:
Here is a picture of the actual landscape today around Bethlehem, which is located in the hills of Judea and surrounded by upland desert. Buildings in the background are a gated Israeli "settlement" in the occupied territories.
The bottom line, the main thing I would remember to play the traditional old music, ... it’s kind of like Zen. It’s not what you can add – it’s how much you can let go of and let drop away till you can get to the core of what the old people had. -- Don Pedi http://donpedi.com/about.htm
.
LITTLE SWITZERLAND, N.C. -- Today's Appalachian dulcimer players strum modified guitar chords in a I-V-IV progression, but the dulcimer wasn't originally designed to produce chords. And traditional mountain music was always more about melody than chords. In fact Don Pedi, who has collected old-time fiddle tunes and played them on the dulcimer for 30 years, says the first guitar wasn't played by a western North Carolina string band musician until 1911.
"He was Luke Smathers," Don said at his fall retreat here over the weekend, "and he ordered it from Montgomery Ward."
Don's annual "Way of the Dulcimer" Fall Retreat was held Aug. 27-29 at Little Switzerland's Wildacres Retreat Center. Don had lots to say about traditional ways of playing mountain music, and the struggle to maintain them as more and more players use a "chord-melody" dulcimer style based on playing guitar chords in a "bum-ditty" pattern derived from folk musicians in the flatlands.
Following are some of my notes and random thoughts. I've done this before, beginning after Don's 2013 retreat. As before, I made no attempt to cover the main points of the retreat. Instead, I jotted down notes when subjects came up that especially interested me. As in 2013, my thoughts are more random than thoughtful.
Retreat group in Wildacres dining hall. Bobby McMillon is third from right, behind the table.
Bobby McMillon
A highlight of the retreat was a Saturday night concert featuring Don and traditional ballad singer and storyteller Bobby McMillon. A recipient of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, McMillon went to school with descendants of Tom Dula -- the "Tom Dooley" who killed poor Laurie Foster in the ballad made famous by the Kingston Trio -- and is himself descended from Laura Foster.
"Eventually, I began to realize," he says in a blurb copied to copied to Don Pedi's website, "that if I didn't perform the songs I was learning, most of the repertories of the people I learned from would be lost because they didn't have family members of their own to hand them down to."
I didn't record the concert, but I did locate a YouTube clip of Bobby McMillon and his singing partner Marina Trivette singing the old songs and recollecting the experiences that led them to become ballad singers.
A couple of North Carolina expressions need translation for flatlanders -- a "booger" is a local word for the boogieman, also an evil spirit in Cherokee folklore; and "painter" is the local pronunciation of "panther." The YouTube clip is from a film by Tom Davenport, independent documentary filmmaker and folklorist of North Carolina, at http://www.folkstreams.net/film,96.
"Brushy Fork of John's Creek"
One of the tunes Don taught us was "Brushy Fork of John's Creek." His version is after Kentucky fiddler Fernando "Dandy" Lusk's, and he said it commemorates the last battle fought in Kentucky during the Civil War.
Nashvilleoldtime.org has a lead sheet with guitar (and mandolin) chords in A Mixolydian (two sharps in the key signature, at F# and C#), and traditionalmusic.co.uk has lead sheet and chords in G Mixolydian (no sharps or flats). It's traditionally played in A Mixolydian, which gives it a dark sound appropriate to the waning days of the Civil War in a state where brother truly fought against brother.
It was recorded Jan. 6, 1977, by tune collector Bruce Greene, who often performs with Don and has cut CDs with him. Hiram Stamper played it, on a fiddle in the "cross key" AEAE tuning. And Don usually tunes his dulcimer EAA, which blends nicely with the fiddle in A modal tunings like AEAE.
But Don's tab gives fret numbers only, and he played it for us both in his preferred tuning and in DAD, which was a Mixolydian tuning before the dulcimer clubs took it over. Hey, everybody plays in DAD, and if dulcimer tab ever comes available for "Brushy Fork of John's Creek," I'll bet any amount of money they'll tab it in DAD or capo the dulcimer on the fourth fret and play it in A on the high end of the fretboard. That's what dulcimer clubs do, bless their hearts.
But if they do, they'll lose that dark sound of the old A modal fiddle tunes.
All of which got me to thinking: Traditional southern Appalachian fiddlers had all kinds of cross-key tunings for songs like "Brushy Fork ..." and "Bonaparte's Retreat," and there's a reason for that. Traditional dulcimer players retuned a lot, too, and I'll bet it was for the same reason -- in the open modal tunings, you get that darker, lower sound that comes from playing a drone on the open strings.
How the dulcimer got to Mountain View, Ark.
One of the most important instrument makers in the Midwest is McSpadden Dulcimers at Mountain View, in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas. Don filled in an important piece of the instrument's history when he mentioned McKinley Craft, a Kentuckian who learned how to make dulcimers from Jethro Amburgey at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky. Don said Craft swapped a dulcimer for a bottle of whiskey in Batesville, Ark. It turned out to be the model for Lynn McSpadden's first dulcimers.
I got interested at one period [in the 1960s] in trying to document the use of the dulcimer in the Ozarks, and it never was great as it was in the Appalachian region or somewhere like that, but what I found was people - folklorists - who came through here researching folklore were basically interested in the lyrics and the music. They were not interested in the instruments that were being used. Through several contacts, I found out that there was an old fellow over at Leslie who had a dulcimer, so I took off to see him. He was a bootlegger, had made his living for years . . . It was way back in the sticks out of Leslie, and he had moved there from Kentucky in about 1920 - along in there somewhere - and his cousin, McKinley Craft back in Kentucky, had sent him a dulcimer or brought him a dulcimer, and he said that . . . Joe Craft told me that when he was young back in Kentucky that, if there was a band was going to play for a dance, there would be three instruments. There would be a fiddle, of course. There would be a banjo, and there would be a dulcimer. What’s missing is what everybody thinks of as the folk instrument now: the guitar.
But what got me thinking was when the interviewer asked McSpadden, "Were any of your ancestors involved in handicrafts or any kind of --"
McSpadden: No, I taught my dad how to make dulcimers.
[Interviewer]: Oh, is that right?
McSpadden: It would be nice if it were handed down through the generations, but I can’t come up with that story at all. ...
Instead, McSpadden said discovered the dulcimer as a divinity student at Duke -- another North Carolina connection! -- after he'd "gotten interested in folk music via the Peter, Paul, and Mary route." He said:
McSpadden: Oh, well. When I was a student at Duke University, Elliott Hancock was my roommate, and we both worked in the cafeteria, and he’d come in at night after finishing his work and eating, and sit down and play his guitar, and I thought, “Well. I’m going to defend myself. I’ve always liked the sound of a banjo.” So I went and bought a twenty dollar banjo at the pawn shop at Five Points in Durham, and I couldn’t tune the thing, and I certainly couldn’t play it. My fingers wouldn’t move in that direction. And I heard a friend from West Virginia, I guess - maybe Kentucky - was playing a record one night, and it had a dulcimer being played, and Billy Ed Wheeler, who was a semi-popular singer at the time, was singing and playing “Ash Grove,” and I thought, “Boy, that’s a nice sound,” you know. ...
Wheeler, of Swannanoa, is yet another North Carolina connection. Long associated with Warren Wilson College, he's best known perhaps for the novelty song "Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back" and a collection of Appalachian humor he co-edited with Loyal Jones of Berea College.
But I was struck by the way McSpadden stumbled onto traditional Appalachian music by listening to Peter, Paul and Mary as a divinity student at Duke. For a guy who stumbled onto the music as a grad student at the University of Tennessee, it's nice to know that one of the key players in the revival of traditional music in the Ozarks also got interested in it "via the Peter, Paul and Mary route" about the same time.
__________
From Ken Watson video on Don's website: http://donpedi.com/about.htm.: [2:10] The bottom line, the main thing I would remember to play the traditional old music, and being born in the time and the places we’re born, it’s kind of like Zen. It’s not what you can add – it’s how much you can let go of and let drop away till you can get to the core of what the old people had. Because they came from an agrarian culture where everything was felt; now we’re in technology world. Everything is thinking. And so it’s interesting. That’s it.
[2:46] And then I learned a lot directly from the old guys I’d meet around this part of the world and got those older sensibilities. I don’t learn from records or nothing. Mostly it’s from people. But, you know, it’s funny. ‘cause nowadays all these dulcimer people are saying ‘oh boy, you’ve got a good gimmick. But I’ve had a good gimmick for 30 years and when this ain’t popular any more, I’ll have the same gimmick. It’s just what I love, and it’s just what I do.
And the EverythingDulcimer.com website at http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/#M -- scroll down the directory to "Michael ..." by Peter Widenmeyer. ("Einfaches Arrangement" is how they say "simple arrangement" in German). Or you can open the PDF file at
Most of us of a certain age know "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" as a summer camp song, one we sang in between "Kumbaya" and roasting marshmallows on a stick, but it is much older than that. First set to standard musical notation in 1863 in Port Royal, S.C., it was originally a work song, sung by African American slaves as they rowed across the waters surrounding the Sea Islands of the Carolina and Georgia low country. It was also a spiritual, in a day and a culture that didn't make distinctions between sacred and secular music. In fact it is one of the oldest black spirituals.
All of which gives it an energy and a surging call-and-response rhythm I don't think we quite captured in the Episcopal church camps of my youth.
Of the many versions available on YouTube, the one that I think comes the closest to the original is this performance by the Glory Gospel Singers, of New York City, in concert in Barmstedt, Germany, earlier this year:
The Glory Gospel Singers' sound strikes me as contemporary African American gospel, but "Michael" is one of the first spirituals written down by abolitionists from New England during the Civil War. It originated well before that, as a work song that kept boat crews rowing together. William Russell, a war correspondent for the Times of London who toured behind the Confederate lines in 1861, was reminded of the voyage that ferried lost souls over the River Styx to Hades in Greek mythology:
The oarsmen, as they bent to their task, beguiled the way by singing in unison a real [N]egro melody. ... It was a barbaric sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning was followed by the others in unison, repeating the refrain in chorus, and full of quaint expression and melancholy:-- ... To me it was a strange scene. The stream, dark as Lethe, flowing between the silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up near the landing by the fire in the woods, which reddened the sky--the wild strain, and the unearthly adjurations to the singers' souls, as though they were palpable, put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.
"Michael" was collected in an 1867 book titled Slave Songs of the United States (available online from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill at http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html), compiled by abolitionist teachers who worked with the freed slaves who fled to the federal lines after the Union Army landed in South Carolina and set up a supply depot around Port Royal. One of the teachers named William Francis Allen, who had heard similar work songs in seaports up north, explained how the call-and-response of African American singing helped dock workers pace themselves:
Some of the best pure [N]egro songs I have ever heard were those that used to be sung by the black stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, of the West India vessels, loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I have stood for more than an hour, often, listening to them, as they hoisted and lowered the hogsheads and boxes of their cargoes; one man taking the burden [verse] of the song (and the slack of the rope) and the others striking in with the chorus. They would sing in this way more than a dozen different songs in an hour; most of which might indeed be warranted to contain 'nothing religious'--a few of them, 'on the contrary, quite the reverse'--but generally rather innocent and proper in their language, and strangely attractive in their music; and with a volume of voice that reached a square or two away.
Allen noted that the work songs combined sacred and secular lyrics -- "I know only one pure boat-song, the fine lyric, "Michael row the boat ashore" (No. 31 [in the book]); and this I have no doubt is a real spiritual -- it being the archangel Michael that is addressed." He quoted Charles Pickard Ware, who actually collected the song, at some length:
"As I have written these tunes," says Mr. Ware, "two measures are to be sung to each stroke, the first measure being accented by the beginning of the stroke, the second by the rattle of the oars in the row-locks. On the passenger boat at the [Beaufort] ferry, they rowed from sixteen to thirty strokes a minute; twenty-four was the average. Of the tunes I have heard, I should say that ... 'Lay this body down' (No. 26), 'Religion so sweet' (No.17), and 'Michael row' (No. 31), were used when the load was heavy or the tide was against us."
That's how Allen heard it, as he described it in a diary quoted by Dena Epstein in her Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: U of I Press, 2003), which is probably the best book available on the origins of African American music:
Sunday, March 20, 1864…. we had wind and tide against us, and a heavy load, so we were not home till near seven … there was a full moon and the men sang most of the way as they rowed. It was curious to see how their rowing flagged — for they were quite tired — the moment the singing stopped. It wasn’t a very good set of singers, still I was very glad to hear them, for I have heard very little boat music. They sang “Michael row,” “Hold your Light,” and several others …
Although the Wisconsin Synod’s constitution stated that “everything should be in keeping with the true word of the Bible and the confessions of our Evangelical-Lutheran church”, and although all pastors pledged themselves to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession (UAC), practices did not always follow beliefs. The practices which were flawed were those concerning fellowship. Pastors often served congregations comprised of both Lutherans and Reformed Christians. This most likely stemmed from a “loyalty to the Langenberg tradition of peaceful coexistence among conflicting creeds which could not easily be shaken.” Ever since the Prussian Union, these Lutherans were used to worshiping side by side with those who did not have the same beliefs as they.
Fortunately, God did not allow this practice to continue in the Wisconsin Synod. By His guiding hand, our early church fathers began to turn from these unscriptural ways. God used a number of means to accomplish this turnaround. First of all, the synod’s constitution was still founded on the beliefs of a confessional Lutheran church. However, these beliefs obviously clashed with the current practices of fellowship. This caused disorderliness in the congregations, and because of this, pastors began to take a more consistent confessional stance on the applications of the doctrine of church fellowship.
By Steve Smith of the Western North Carolina Dulcimer Collective, on the EverythingDulcimer.com website at http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/files/tab/shenadoah.pdf(or go to Dulcimer Tablature menu and scroll down to Smith's version of "Shenandoah." There are a couple of others -- his is the one you want.) A couple of videos available on YouTube:
Shenandoah in live concert by Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø, with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftans and Swedish artist "Kalle" Moraeus on violin. It was recorded during her concerts held in 2001 Drammen Theater, Norway, released on the album In Symphony and picked up on her American album Sissel. (Kyrkjebø, by the way, is pronounced sort of like "SHIR-ke-buh" in Norwegian. I have no idea how it would be pronounced in English.)
Suzy Bogguss, Shenandoah. At the Loveless Cafe Barn for Music City Roots in Nashville, April 20, 2011. Pat Bergeson on harmonica, Fred Carpenter on fiddle, Will Barrow on accordion, Brian Owings on drums and Charlie Chadwick on bass. Suzy Boguss, by the way, was a homecoming queen at Aledo High School up in the Quad-Cities area.
A Shenandoah Lullaby by Jerry Garcia, vocal and guitar, and Jerry Grisman on mandolin.
Mudcat Cafe has several lengthy threads speculating on the song's origins and early history, which are obscure and varied. Two of the most informative are here
and here. I like what Kim C said May 11, 2001, at 10:15 a.m. in the thread "Subject: RE: Shenandoah Origin":
Here's what I tell people when I perform this, and it's as near as I can figure ... originating as a boatman's song in the 1830s or thereabouts, went out to sea as a shanty, came back to land as a ballad and has been sung as one for many years. It was popular with soldiers during the Civil War, and went out west with them afterwards and has enjoyed an incarnation as a cowboy ballad.
But by far the best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Shenandoah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Shenandoah
"Oh Shenandoah" (also called simply "Shenandoah" or "Across the Wide Missouri") is a traditional American folk song of uncertain origin, dating at least to the early 19th century.
The song appears to have originated with Canadian and American voyageurs or fur traders traveling down the Missouri River in canoes, and has developed several different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics refer to the Native American chief "Shenandoah" (Oskanondonha) and a canoe-going trader who wants to marry his daughter. By the mid 1800s versions of the song had become a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world.
Sea Songs and Shanties, Collected by W.B. Whall, Master Mariner (1910, Glasgow).
["Shenandoah"] probably came from the American or Canadian voyageurs, who were great singers .... In the early days of America, rivers and canals were the chief trade and passenger routes, and boatmen were an important class. Shenandoah was a celebrated Indian chief in American history, and several towns in the States are named after him. Besides being sung at sea, this song figured in old public school collections.
Radio show on the kantor who put together Martin Luther's first hymnals. Family tradition is that he was an ancestor of the Walthers in my paternal grandmother's (farmor's) family in Norway.
Hat tip to my cousin John, who writes, "I think I mentioned finding www.lutheranpublicradio.org several weeks ago - a website with lots of good church music that plays continuously, 24 hours per day. A high school classmate told me that her son, a LC-MS [pastor?], spoke on the talk side of the website. While scrolling through to find him, I found a talk on page 5, titled Issues, Etc. Encore: 16th Century Lutheran Kantor Johann Walter – Dr. Paul Grime, 4/24/15."
Toward the end of the podcast, Grime, of Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Ind., makes the point that by the standards of his day, Luther was writing "Christian contemporary" music.
I knew my father's middle name was Walther -- Birger Walther Ellertsen -- and both of his sisters had it as their middle name. But I didn't know till a family gathering in 2014 of the connection with Luther's arranger. From a blog post to Hogfiddle on our 2014 cousins' reunion in upstate New York Music seems to run in the family -- Bestefar's father and perhaps his grandfather were cantors in Bergen, and at Koinonia I learned that Bestemor's family, from an industrial town called Sarpsborg in southeastern Norway, claims descent from the Johann Walther who edited Martin Luther's early congregational music.
In fact, later on that weekend we celebrated the family tradition by singing some of Walther's arrangements, including Christ lag in Todesbanden ("Christ Jesus lay in death's strong bands"). ... <.blockquote>
A couple of times lately we've played "Midnight on the Water," and it's a waltz tune I need to learn to play better (true confessions time here). It's got a nice Western Swing feel to it, and it's often played in "cross-key" fiddle tunings with a D string left open that should blend well with the drones on an Appalachian dulcimer. We made a pretty good start toward making it our own a couple of sessions ago, so let's take another run at it when we meet Thursday, Aug. 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson. It's one of those tunes that keep growing on you as you get to know them better. Well worth mastering.
Here are a couple of YouTube videos:
Midnight on the Water - John Hartford. Lots of nice ornamentation by a master of old-time string band music.
Midnight on the Water/Bonaparte's Retreat - Jay Ungar and Molly Mason\. Two standards in the open D fiddle tuning often known as the "dead man's tuning." Our tune begins at 2:00, after some very interesting (to me) talk about fiddle tunings, etc., but "Bonaparte's Retreat" is worth a listen, too. We ought to add it to our list of tunes to learn.
Western Swing, like bluegrass, was heavily influenced by jazz. And we can hear that influence in "Midnight on the Water."
The most significant of the new generation of Texas fiddlers [in the 1930s and 40s] was Benny Thomasson, (1909-1984) for whom the jazz music on early radio was a huge influence. His father Luke was also a well respected fiddler, and wrote the famous waltz Midnight on the Water. Luke was a friend of Eck Robertson, and would often visit the house, proving a major inspiration for Benny as a child. Benny’s repertoire ranged from traditional reels, hornpipes, polkas and waltzes to jazz numbers such as Sweet Georgia Brown.
Haigh also has an interesting aside on jam session styles, which are a bit different in the world of Western Swing, more like bluegrass and jazz sessions:
I asked Bryan [Jimmerson, president of the Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association] about the nature of the car park and campfire jam sessions which are an important feature of fiddle contests and conventions. In Britain we are used to the Irish trad session where a circle of players will do tune after tune in as near perfect unison as possible. In a tradition where improvisation and variation are valued, this surely could not be the same? I have rarely been around a jam session where folks play tunes at the same time. I have heard several young players do this from time to time but it's because they all take from the same teacher and have the exact same version of the tune so they are all playing the exact same notes. Generally at our jams the more seasoned fiddlers will play a tune and pass it to the next person to let them show what they can do with it. It's fun to watch them show off and try to out-do each other especially on swing tunes. Another jam scenario would be that one fiddler sits with the guitar players and plays until he is ready to let someone else play and then he gives up the "hot seat" to someone else and on it goes.
Old-time sessions fall somewhere in between. Most of us play slightly different versions of a tune, and some of us couldn't play it the same way twice if we tried. But our jams are more about blending with the other players in a group than individual performance, and we quickly learn we'd better not get too free with the melody!
MIDNIGHT ON THE WATER. Old‑Time, Waltz. USA, Texas. D Major. DDad tuning. AABB (Spandaro): AA'BB' (Brody, Matthiesen, Reiner & Anick). This popular composition is usually credited to Texas fiddler Luke Thomasson, although it has been published that Luke's son Benny (a famous Texas‑style fiddler who popularized the melody) long remembered the night he heard both his father and uncle composing the tune on the family porch (c. 1900?). Several sources have noted this tune’s resemblance to an Oklahoma-collected tune called “Old Paint,” and there is an ongoing debate about whether “Midnight” is derivative of “Paint” (or vice versa). The Library of Congress recording "Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas" (LOC lp L28), collected by John A. Lomax and edited by Duncan Emrich, has a version of the “Paint” song by Jess Morris which has quite similar melodic material with “Midnight on the Water.” The liner notes to the album point out that Morris was born in 1878 and would perhaps have been contemporary with the Thomassons, who, like Morris, lived in the Texas panhandle. ...
If you loved "To Kill a Mockingbird" and you're reading "Go Set a Watchman," there's a series on the AL.com newspaper website you ought to bookmark. Carla Jean Whitney, a feature writer for the Montgomery News, has written a lot about "Watchman," including a chapter-by-chapter synopsis (probably full of spoilers), a podcast featuring Whitney and editorial writer John Hammontree and other stories about Harper Lee and her books from a Deep South perspective today. I think it's essential reading.
Link here for a partial directory and surf around in the links:
As we prepared to record this week's Red Clay Readers podcast, my friend and colleague John Hammontree said something that shocked me:
He might prefer "Go Set A Watchman" to "To Kill A Mockingbird."
John is the first person I've heard make such a declaration, and I quickly turned on the tape recorder (er, iPhone app) and asked him to explain himself. "I think there's a lot more to unpack there, which I think makes it a more interesting book than the fairy tale that is 'To Kill A Mockingbird,'" he said.
Listen to that discussion, then chime in and let us know what you think.
This stuff isn't indexed, and there's a lot of it. It's part of a standing feature called the "Red Clay Readers," which is sort of like an online book club for readers of the Montgomery News, the Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register. Whitney describes it like this and adds she'll host a livechat Friday of this week:
Red Clay Readers, AL.com's online book club, has spent the past month examining Harper Lee's "Go Set A Watchman." That analysis ends Friday, and we'll follow it with a live chat Friday afternoon at AL.com/books.
The book club kicked off with The Next Chapter events in Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, in which panelists and audience members discussed themes in and expectations for Lee's second book. Friday's live chat will include some of those folks, and we hope it will be an opportunity to revisit those discussions.
Friday's chat will include Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, Auburn University-Montgomery's Nancy Grisham Anderson and Margaret Terwey, Books-A-Million's senior fiction buyer. Save the date and join us! The chat will take place from 2-3 p.m. at AL.com/books. I'll post that morning, and the conversation will take place in the comments.
There's been a lot more about the novels on the AL.com website, and the discussion I've read -- admittedly a small sampling so far -- brings to it a perspective that I think is important for the rest of us to know about.
As editorial writer John Hammontree suggests in the podcast, we gain a sense of Atticus Finch as a more well-rounded character from reading the novels together. I'd like to hope, speaking strictly for myself and from a perspective of having grown up in the South during the period Harper Lee wrote about in "Watchman," that we can come to an understanding of the complexity of race relations similar to what Harper Lee's Jean Louise Finch struggled with in "Go Set a Watchman." I suspect the book is deeply flawed, but it's important because we don't like to think about race -- and even if the novel isn't successful, Lee at least tries.
Audio clips at http://drdosido.net/fiddleclub/tag/genevieve-harrison-koester/. "A selection of tunes from Dear Old Illinois (both a place and the life work of Genevieve’s father, Garry Harrison). Gena plays with her dad in the New Mules, a band featured at the Old Town School’s Trad Fest in January 2008. The first of these tunes is from the David McIntosh collection of folksongs from Southern Illinois from the middle of the last century. The next two are tunes Garry collected from downstate fiddlers 30 years ago."
Pride of America -- CD
by The New Mules at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/newmules. "... Fiddler Garry Harrison learned the local music of his native downstate Illinois the old-time way, from his father and in person at the homes of elderly players from the area. Just as those folks learned and as Garry learned from them, Garry's daughter Genevieve in turn learned to play the fiddle in the old style, her first guidance being from her father.
"Garry and Gena joined with some of the area's finest players to form the New Mules. Abby Ladin plays the bass, Smith Koester the banjo, and Andy Gribble the guitar. Their music is from authentic traditional sources and includes both rare and obscure old gems and previously unheard versions of better-known numbers. The group brings renewed life to this music with their own unique arrangements and performances, and no one has more fun in doing it.
"The New Mules were honored with the award of First Prize in the Traditional Band competition at the Appalachian String Band Festival, Clifftop, West Virginia, August 2, 2008."
UPDATE: So when I order Pride of America from CDBaby.com, the online record store that caters to independent artists, I get this shipping notice in my email:
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!
* * *
[tracking details omitted]
(1) The New Mules: Pride of America
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, August 11, 2015.
We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music.
Members of the Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet, the group that is reviving the instrument today in Sweden, will play for a Psalmodikonhögmässa [high communion, or mass] Aug. 23, the 12th Sunday after Trinity [the season of the church year we call Pentecost, or ordinary time, in the US], at Slaka-Nykils pastorat in Linköping. The flier on the Church of Sweden's website has some information I didn't know before -- and confirms something I did know!
SVENSK KULTURHISTORIA: INSTRUMENTET ÄR
KANSKE VÄRLDENS ÄLDSTA.
Psalmodikon är ett svenskt kulturarv som kan vara på väg att försvinna. Ändå var detta det mest vanliga instrumentet i Sverige under 1800-talet. Att det nära på försvunnit beror inte på bristen på instrument utan avsaknaden av folk som vet hur man använder detta enkla robusta instrument.
Själva lådan består av gran (bästa ljudet).
Strängen är gjord av fårtarmar.
Den skriker ibland! Stråken gjordes förr av en gren och hästtagel.
Idag använder vi fiolstråkar.
Vi spelar fyrstämmigt d.v.s. Sopran, Alt, Tenor och Bas.
Repertoar: Välkända psalmer, visor (Taube, Ferlin, Dan Andersson).
Which I translate (very freely, and with a big assist from Doktor Google} as follows:
SWEDISH CULTURAL HISTORY: INSTRUMENT IS PERHAPS THE WORLD'S OLDEST
Psalmodikon is a Swedish cultural heritage that may be about to disappear. Yet this was the most common instrument in Sweden during the 1800s. Its disappeared is not due to lack of instruments but the lack of people who know how to use this simple, robust instruments.
The box itself is made up of spruce (best sound).
The string is made of sheep intestines.
It screams sometimes! The bow was formerly made of a branch and horsehair.
Today we use violin bows.
We play in four-part harmony -- i.e. soprano, alto, tenor and bass
Repertoire: Well-known psalms, or hymns, and ballads. Taube, Ferlin and Dan Anderson were Swedish traditional musicians.
I can attest to the part about how the psalmodikon shrieks at times [skriker ibland]. So can practically anyone who has heard me play!
