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Bring
Me Home
TRACK 1 - PEACOCK STREET As I was a-walking down Peacock Street Yeah, I took everything that old big shot had Chorus They put me in jail for a year and a day NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL:
Peggy sings "Peacock Street" very much in the singing style Aunt Molly Jackson used when recording "Crossbone Skully" for Mary Elisabeth Barnicle and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress (1930s). This song and others were eventually released on Aunt Molly Jackson, Library of Congress Recordings (Rounder Records 1002, 1972). TRACK 2 - HANG ME My daddy was a gambler, learned me how to play Way down in old Missouri, sick as I could be (2) Well, if I'd a-listened to Momma, I wouldn't been here today (2) Chorus Momma and Poppa, little sister make three (2) Go send for my two babies to come and see me die (2) They'll put that rope around my neck, they'll pull me very high (2) NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: As with many other execution songs that take the criminal's viewpoint, both the Laws and Peggy Seeger versions express regret that the murderer disregarded the advice of his mother. Peggy also includes a verse in which the condemned man asks to have his children attend the execution, if only to hang their heads and cry. Peggy's tune parallels Laws' melody (as transcribed by Randolph) except for a flatted seventh towards the end of the second phrase. This gives it a strongly mixolydian feel. Fran Majors, recorded a fuller version ("The
Blue Ridge Mountains") for the Missouri collector Max Hunter
in 1959. Her version has a decidedly western feel and the protagonist
is a cattle thief. One can hear it at the fully digitized Max
Hunter Collection. TRACK 3 - WAGONER'S LAD words, music: traditional USA O hard is the fortune of all womankind O I am a poor girl, my fortune is sad Your parents don't like me, they say I'm too poor Your horses are hungry, go feed them some hay Your wagon needs greasing, your whip is to mend The heart is the fortune of all woman kind NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: "The Wagoner's Lad" and "My Horses Ain't Hungry" belong to a larger family of tunes ranging from "Rye Whisky" to "Farewell to Tarwathie." Many of its floating verses appear in a variety of songs such as "Bachelor's Hall" or "On Top of Old Smoky." "The Wagoner's Lad" is found primarily in the United Sates although its opening verse appeared as early as 1728-1732 in a British theatrical piece "The Ladies' Case" and was later set to music by William Boyce (1711-1779), the English classical musician:
Bruce Olson, in a guest post on the Mudcat Café, an online folksong forum associated with the Digital Tradition, gives a partial history of the song, "Hard is the Fortune of All Womankind." He tells us it was printed in the eighteenth century and quotes the text from a single song sheet with music published in 1730. Henry Carey is credited with creating the lyrics of the verses that seem originally to have constituted the complete song:
The lyrics bear the earmarks of a popular song designed for genteel company, but their sentiment has been distilled and emotionally compressed in Peggy's version. These are stylistic hallmarks of Anglo-American oral tradition. Olson also shares something about the song's printed history: The song was printed without credits and without music in a book of 1734, 'The Vocal Miscellany', II, p. 159, and noted in a book with music, 'The Universal Musician', [1737], to have been sung by Miss Raftor (trained by Carey) at the Theatre Royal. She made her debut in 1728 and became Mrs. (Kitty) Clive in 1732. Mr. Gouge (whose first name seems to be unknown) was credited with the music in later printings, e.g., 'The Muses Delight', p. 143, Liverpool, 1754 (slightly revised and retitled 'Apollo's Cabinet', 1757). The song then can be definitely put as 1728-32. The verses here [above] are from the single sheet issue, c 1730. Peggy's version closely resembles the seminal rendition by Buell Kazee, first recorded in 1928 (Brunswick 2138, 064); on Harry Smith's compilation Anthology of American Folk Music (3 vols., 6 LP) (FA 2951/2952/2953, 1952). Kazee's version has been covered by artists ranging from Joan Baez to Bruce Molsky. TRACK O4 - NAPOLEON words, music: traditional USA Old Boney is away from his warring and his fighting No more in St. Cloud is he seen in such splendour The rude rushing waves all around the shores are washing Ye Parliaments of England and your Holy Alliance Those of ye who have got wealth, pray beware of ambition For but one
degree in fate may reverse your condition NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: The song contrasts the loneliness of Boney's exile with his former grandeur, advising those with wealth to beware of ambition as fate is unpredictable. There is also a curious intimacy about the song and a focus on Bonaparte's family. As with most Bonaparte songs circulating in America and the British Isles, implicit sympathy is expressed for the emperor Napoleon. Boney was a symbol of hope for Irish nationalists and others for whom a French dictatorship seemed more attractive than the home-grown variety. This was, after all, a period in which brutal conditions were experienced by the impressed British sailors who served for years without leave while enforcing the embargoes of the Napoleonic Wars. Peggy's tune has shifted from those found in other collected versions- her second phrase repeats the first rather than the third phrase (AABA). She says the tune she sings most closely resembles that found in Mary O. Eddy's Ballads and Songs from Ohio (Hatboro, Folklore Associates, 1964, orig. ed. 1939), which indeed follows the AABA structure. Some words, as in the first line, "Old Boney Is Away From His Warring and His Fighting," also depart from better-known versions. In once instance, Peggy heard an English singer draw out the last syllable of each verse's last line: "The Isle of St. Helen-eeeee." "Eee is a pure vowel," she says, "and you can hold it better than the closed 'uh' of Helena." Her other textual changes clarify or intensify rather than alter the meaning. This can be seen in her last verse:
TRACK 5 - MOLLY BOND words, music: traditional USA If all the girls in London City was placed in a row She was going to her uncle's when the shower come on. Her lover was a hunting, a-hunting for swan He went on a-hunting, a-hunting in the dark With her apron wrapped around her he took her for a swan. Then he ran to his father and threw down his bow With her apron wrapped round her I took her for a swan Down came his father, his hair hangin' grey. Stay in this county till your trial come on If all the girls in London City was placed in a row NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: Jennifer J O'Connor's article, The Irish Origins and Variations of the Ballad 'Molly Brown' " (Canadian Journal for Traditional Music, 1986), says the Irish folklorist Hugh Shields posited that a factual incident in a part of Ireland once known as Kilwarlin (north-west of County Down) may have given rise to the ballad. He based this assumption on an examination of area surnames and place names. On the other hand, O'Connor suggests the ballad originated in seventeenth century Ireland. In doing so, she looks at a few traditional legal ramifications of such a killing: According to early Irish law, crimes were not committed against the state, but against the individual; therefore, the penalty always took the form of a fine to be paid to the family injured. Homicide or bodily injury was atoned for by a fine called "eric," which was determined by a "brehon" (judge). The criminal's family was responsible for the eric if he did not pay; moreover if they chose not to pay, they were required to hand him over to the victim's family who would then kill him, use him or sell him as a slave. In Peggy's version the male lover's father assures his son that he will not be punished at the trial, suggesting that the family will assume responsibility for his accident. The exotic elements: "swan," "mountain of snow," add a trace of supernatural myth, but the haunting impact of Peggy's version comes primarily from an eerie tune.
TRACK 6 - ROVING GAMBLER I am a roving gambler, gambled all around I've gambled down in Washingtown, gambled over in Spain I had not been in Birmingham many more weeks than three She took me to her parlour, she cooled me with her fan O daughter, dearest daughter, how could you treat me so O mother, dearest mother, you know I love you well I would not marry a farmer, he's always in the rain; I would not marry a doctor, he's always away from home I would not marry a railroad man, here's the reason why: I hear the train a coming, coming round the curve Hear the train a-coming, she's coming round the bend O mother, dearest mother, forgive me if you can NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL:
American antecedents are easier to trace. "The Gamboling Man" appears
in "Delaney's Song Book No. 23" around 1900 and was republished,
with repeated lines eliminated, by Carl Sandburg in his American Song
Bag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927). Sandburg assumes it
was disseminated by the minstrel shows through the south and west,
and stresses that the gambling motif is an American introduction: "while
gamblers may gambol and gambolers may gamble, the English version carries
no deck of cards." Sandburg includes three variants including "Yonder
Comes My Pretty Little Girl," which concludes with:
The narrator shifts from male to female in the Roving Gambler and in
some versions two narratives of a headstrong daughter and an adventurous
gambler's are intertwined. Peggy foregrounds the girl's story, and
her inclusion of an extra floating verse (before the last verse) emphasizes
the girl's bold departure from home. This verse is sung from an onlooker's
point of view and suggests the girl is rupturing ties not only with
her family but her larger community:
TRACK 7 - NEWLYN TOWN words, music: traditional USA In Newlyn Town I was bred and born At seventeen I took a wife I robbed Lord Gould and I do declare To Coving Garden we went straightaway My father cried, I am undone! When I am dead and go to my grave Six blooming virgins to carry my pall NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: Bob got his songs from all over the place and he adored English versions. Bob whistled the last line after each verse, which is what I normally do in concert. Other English and Irish versions of the song are variously known as " A Wild and Wicked Youth," "In Newry Town," "The Robber's Song," "The Roving Blade," or "The Flash Lad," and the American variants go by "The Rambling Boy" or "The Wild and Rambling Boy." This is an archetypical eighteenth-century English broadside of the bold highwayman familiar to anyone who has seen The Beggar's Opera. As the century progressed, a severe penal code resulted in an increasing number of people hanged for crimes, petty or violent, at public spectacles. The condemned person's purported last words were captured in song and sold on broadsides during and after the event. "Tyburn ballads," as these were sometimes called, ordinarily focused on the events of a robber's life, narrated impartially with emotional display reserved for parents and sweethearts. At a time when criminal corpses were frequently claimed for medical research or allowed to rot on gibbets for all to see, these songs often expressed the criminal's wish for a decent funeral. Peggy's version is faithful to all these elements and closely resembles the version sung by the Norfolk singer, Harry Cox. The song also names places and people that evoke the flash life of eighteenth-century London: "Ned Fielding's crew" refers to the Bow Street Runners, a proto-police force founded by author Henry Fielding, a magistrate whose office was at 4 Bow Street. We know Fielding yielded this position to his brother John in 1754, and this helps us date the ballad historically. The condemned highwayman also takes his wife to the theatre in Covent Garden, an urban playground where, in the eighteenth century, high life and low life intermingled. In this rich evocation of place, Stephens Green seems an anomaly as it is associated with Dublin. Newlyn itself, where the robber was born, is a fishing port along Cornwall's coast near Penzance. In most versions, the "wild and wicked youth" started off in the saddling trade, but in Peggy's, he "served his turn at the weaving trade." He was probably an apprentice and no doubt violated the terms of his apprenticeship by marrying at age seventeen. Peggy is thus singing about an unemployed youth who blew off his future prospects and then resorted to crime. At the end, he envisions a gangland-style funeral attended by his posse of armed highwaymen still at liberty and accompanied by a group of blooming virgins. The scene is as timely now as it was then.
TRACK 8 - DINK'S SONG words, music: traditional USA If I had wings like Norah's dove I got a man, he's long and tall One of these days and it won't be long I went to the river, sat down and cried, Late last night it was drizzling rain NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL:
It was a short-term arrangement, mediated by white economic power
and prevailing racial stereotypes. As the white overseer put it,
this was a way to control and pacify the black male laborers lest "they
hunt all over the bottomlands for women" which could mean "trouble,
serious trouble. Negroes can't work when sliced up with razors." "Today
ain't my singing day," Dink told Lomax as her little son played
at her feet. "He ain't got no daddy... I ain't had no time to hunt up
a name for him." Dink erupts with the resentful comments Lomax transcribed as follows:
No onsite recording was made to show us what Dink, "reputedly
the best singer in the camp," actually sounded like. It
has been up to each succeeding singer to create this song afresh.
Peggy does exactly that, eliminating the verses about pregnancy
or about listening to the advice of one's mother. She adds a
new verse which either underscores earlier hints of resentment
in Dink's song or sets them in another light by introducing a
possible premonition of death:
Peggy's version, backed by a finger-picking blues accompaniment, is stark and reserved. It is a hook on which all women can hang their sorrows and frustrations.
TRACK 9 - LITTLE BIRDIE words, music: traditional USA Little birdie, little birdie, Little birdie, little birdie, Little birdie, little birdie, Well, I'd rather be in deep darkness Well, I'd rather be a little birdie A married girl sees trouble Fly down, fly down, little birdie, NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: The words she uses are not the same as either those of Holcomb or
her brother Mike Seeger. She has not replaced them so much as she
has expanded them with lines from other variants. Her "Little Birdie" is
an accumulation of traditional floating verses that migrate from song
to song. It shares some of its verses with "East Virginia" (or "Dark
Hollow"), "I
Wish I was Single Again," "Single Girl," and has been
compared to and associated with "Kitty Kline." Frequently
there is a thread of adultery running through the common verses. Both
Mike Seeger's version (Southern Banjo Sounds, Smithsonian Folkways
Recordings SFW40107, 1998) and Pete Seeger's version (Pete Seeger's
Children's Concert at Town Hall, Legacy 2000, reissue) are laments
that mourn transient love, pure and simple. Peggy's version is decidedly
female and adds floating verses that express a complex variety of sentiments:
anticipation, perhaps for someone deceased ("I know that my little
lover is a-waiting in the sky"); jealousy (the singer would
prefer to be in darkness rather than to know that her lover would
be someone else's darling); despair over being saddled with marriage
and parenting responsibilities; nostalgia for the single life; and
blame for much of her trouble on someone else. All of these verses
exist in a related form elsewhere, but through her process of selection
and interpretation, Peggy has made them uniquely her own. TRACK 10 - LET THEM WEAR THEIR WATCHES FINE Worked in a town away down south You factory girls who hear this song I get up early every morn We work from weekend to weekend We then go home on payday night When all our little debts are paid Our children they grow up unlearned The boss man jerks them round and round We work from weekend to weekend The folks in town who dress so fine As we go walking down the street Let them wear their watches fine NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: Jacqueline Dowd Hall, in her article "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Image" (Journal of Southern History 69.1, 2003) says that the southern writer Grace Lumpkin heard the traditional song, "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme," while researching the Gastonia, North Carolina textile strike (1929) for her novel, To Make My Bread (1932). She published its lyrics in The New Masses (May, 1930). Lumpkin believed it had never before appeared in print and describes the night she first heard the song, sung to the tune of "John Hardy," while singing before a meeting at the North Carolina's National Textile Workers Union Hall in Charlotte: In the group was a woman named Daisy McDonald, a Gastonia worker who supported a sick husband and seven children on $12.90 a week. Like Ella May [Wiggins], McDonald had a gift for putting new words to familiar tunes, and she had transformed the "Wreck of the Old 97" into a stirring union song. At the end of one of the ballads, McDonald asked her husband to lead the group in "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme." Years before, he said, "he had worked at the loom next to a man in a mill in Buffalo, South Carolina.... [T]his weaver had spoken out the words of the Rhyme under the noise of the looms, making them up as he worked. And the song has gone from one worker to another and now it is known to hundreds of cotton mill hands.... The song usually ends as it does in Peggy's version, with a millenarian vision:
For the Gastonia strike, however, the term "Day of Judgment" was changed to the "Great Revolution." Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread was transformed into Let Freedom Ring, a Broadway play that opened in New York City and toured labor halls throughout America. Will Geer, who had a starring role, had previously heard the song at a Huntington, West Virginia Baptist church social (1933). He remembers it being sung by one Edith Mackie of Parkersburg to the tune of "Poor Boy." Archie Green, devotes a chapter to this song in Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and tells us that Geer remembered "Poor Boy" when he shaped his own satirical song, "The Ballad of the Wives and Widows of Presidents and Dictators," (sung for a Library of Congress recording in 1938). Trying out for his role in "Let Freedom Ring," he also set "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" to this tune -- hence the somewhat distorted tune title, "Warren Harding's Widow." "The Ballad of the Mill Hand" (as "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" was known in its theatrical version), was heard by two Birmingham labor activists in the New York audience, Joe and Esther Gelders. TheGelders in turn adopted it for an Alabama labor song, "The Ballad of John Catchings" (1936), which they later recorded for the Library for Congress (1937). Pete Seeger told Archie Green (1974) that he had never heard Will Geer sing the song, but he did hear the Library of Congress recording of the Gelders, with whom he later became friends. Somewhere along the line, Seeger must have made the connection between those two songs set to the same tune. Peggy says she learned "Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine" (as "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" is now called) from Pete. She sings it less as a rousing labor anthem than as a solemn indictment of class injustice and exploitation. TRACK 11 - O, THE WIND AND RAIN words, music: traditional USA Early one morning in the month of May Two sweet sisters, side by side Johnny gave the young one a gold ring, (etc) The sisters went a-walkin' by the water's brim (etc) The miller ran for his driftin' hook He laid her on the bank to dry He saw that poor girl lyin' there He made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair, He made a fiddle of her little breast bone And the only tune that fiddle could play Yonder's my sister sittin' on
a rock NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL: Kilby Snow's song, sung quickly and dispassionately to a lively accompaniment, omits a key part of "The Two Sisters:" he eliminates the sororicide and, in a typical "murdered sweetheart" rendition, tells us how a lover murdered his girl friend when they went "fishing on a hot summer day." The lover proposes and then batters his sweetheart to death, throwing her in the river where she floats to the mill pond. The miller fishes her out and makes a fiddle from portions of her body. The fiddle, as it always does when appearing in this ballad, plays just one tune, "Crying The Dreadful Wind and Rain." Snow says he learned the song from his grandfather, a Cherokee, when he was very little. He reconstructed what he heard from memory. This may help explain the atypical elimination of the sisters from the plot. Mike Seeger restores the sororicide motif and has the oldest sister pushing the youngest into the river because a suitor gives the younger girl preferential treatment. As the victim drifts down to the mill pond someone cries "father, father there swims a swan." The miller retrieves the corpse and lays it on the bank to dry. A fiddler comes along and fashions a fiddle "with a sound that would melt a heart of stone" from parts of the girl's body. Peggy's version takes the tune of the other two versions and retains most of his story. She sings it as a modal dirge set against a drone with soft touches of harmony on the refrain. The focus is on sibling rivalry and the descent of "two sweet sisters side by side" into jealousy and murder. After the fiddle is built and plays its woeful tune, we suddenly view life from the drowned woman's perspective: "Yonder is my sister sitting on a rock/tying my Johnny a true lover's knot." The fiddle has not specifically alerted others to the crime, ultimately bringing the murderer to justice. It rarely does so in American versions of "The Two Sisters." In a song where evil is unavenged, Peggy increases our discomfort by having the murdered girl witness her sister's amorous victory. How does a modern performer come to grips with the horror of a ballad like this? Lydia Hammesley, in her "A Resisting Performance of a Traditional Appalachian Murder Ballad; Giving Voice to 'Pretty Polly,' " (Women & Music, Vol. 9, 2005) talks about how a singer can resist the violence against women, so common in traditional songs, not by rewriting or doing away with it but by "taking on the violence on its own terms and in its own context." She underscores this point: Resistance to a traditional song, or any song from outside of our present context, does not necessarily come about by performing it in a way that reflects a contemporary reality or aesthetic. Indeed, performing a traditional ballad in this way runs the risk of being misunderstood as a parodic or patronizing rendition. Rather, the possibility for real resistance and dialogue emerges when a performer explicitly works within the reality that the song reflects and within the context from which the song comes. When we listen to Peggy here, we see that she has done exactly that.
As an interpreter of tradition, Peggy has chosen to sing this song
straight, with few dynamics and a near drone for accompaniment. By
adding a traditional verse or two, she has shifted the focus to the
women themselves and has re-sensitized her listeners to the atrocity
that has taken place. She does not insert herself into the song as
so many modern singers do but has empowered the words to tell themselves
with maximum impact. TRACK 12 - HOME, DEARIE, HOME The sailor being weary, he hung down his head, Chorus She jumped in beside him to keep herself warm Early next morning the sailor arose If I have a baby, what am I the worse? If it be a girl, she can wear a gold ring NOTE BY ELISABETH HIGGINS NULL:
echoes a chorus found in the 17th- century broadside, "The Northern Lasses Lamentation," according to Bruce Olson's posted comments on Mudcat Café forum:
Some variant of the oak/ash
choral fragment is a regular part not only of "Home Dearie Home," but of its cleaner, more sentimental
cousin "Ambletown," modern versions of "The Northern
Lasses Lamentation," and variants called "The Oak and The
Ash."
Cicely Fox Smith, in her poem "The Long Road Home" (1914),
has a sea voyager singing for joy when reaching home at last:
Peggy adds her own little twist to the chorus, momentarily taking on the voice of a watchful narrator:
But she sings it gaily with a couple of youthful female voices. Peggy says she sees her female chorus as: sisters, not parents or advisers- sisters, who've all been through the same thing. I've noticed in 'girl left pregnant' songs that she's either drowning in self-pity or she's saying 'so what? I'm still me!' Here the woman-to-woman chorus precedes a traditional verse common primarily to the older broadside version:
Peggy is still singing from a female viewpoint, but in this case, it's the voice of the seduced girl, cheered by the money she has been given and assuming it will let her pass responsibility for a child onto someone else. The girl looks forward to resuming her life as a maiden all over again, but the listener wonders if she really understands the full consequences of one, brief night of pleasure. For a broader range of versions of this song and its variants, consult the entry for "Rosemary Lane" at The Traditional Ballad Index (California State University at Fresno).
TRACK 13 - BRING ME HOME words, music, arrangement, ©: Peggy Seeger I heard my mother's birthing cry My brothers' hands took hold of mine Long, long-gone family time A woman's hand took hold of mine Long nights while the watchful moon All that I have loved so long Peggy writes about this song: Its first draft saw the light at a songwriter's
session. which I was teaching. Everyone had to write, overnight, a
personal song. I decided to do as I said and came next morning with
my own personal song. I presented it, accompanied by fast, monotonous
single-string guitar picking, for the group to critique. They gave
me excellent suggestions which resulted in my alleviating its sentimentality.
Then, thinking it was finished, I sang it to my friends Judy and Dennis
Cook (Judy of the unbelievable repertoire and Dennis the Unbelievable
Singer's Companion). They commented that the complex accompaniment
masked the words. I simplified the accompaniment to more or less what
it is now. Then, thinking it was finished, I took it to my Second Son,
Calum, and my Second Life Partner, Irene. Between them they subtracted
two verses, changed words and pared the text down. Then I changed more
words myself and reduced the accompaniment even more. It's been a communal
effort. Thanks to all. I sing it now with even less accompaniment.
So far, it's finished.
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