And for your boatman choose old John O'Dreams

[sovay]

I realized that I don't think I ever heard Bill Caddick sing any of his own songs. I learned my first one as a lullaby, as though it were the folk tune it was often mistaken for, and started paying attention to his name somewhere between Priscilla Herdman and June Tabor. I just sang "John O'Dreams" to spatch as I remember learning it from my babysitter because I just read that Caddick has died. In a week of artists dying—Rob is mourning Ricky Jay—this is the one that caught me. The song frightened me as a child even when I loved the sound of it, I think because I heard in it the same likeness that makes sleep the sibling of death: sleep is a river and there are other rivers to cross. It haunted me and I have sung it as a lullaby. There are echoes of Housman and Stevenson and Sappho in it. I wonder if it will be the song people sing for him.

Comments

[negothick]

How about a shout-out to Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, the acknowledged origin of the haunting melody? I have always loved the song, and the way Caddick folk-processed the melody so that it has become part of the tradition (I've heard it introduced as "a traditional Celtic lullabye," but then I've heard people call Shel Silverstein's "The Unicorn" "an ancient Irish ballad," without a hint of irony).

[cmcmck]

You know you've made it as a songwriter when your stuff gets labelled with 'trad'.

Bill Caddick's: 'she moves among men' has also been so labelled and he was once told not to sing it because it's a 'woman's song'..........

June Tabor's version

https://youtu.be/N52XAbYdhKA