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

[sovay]

The version I have (by a friend's DC area folk-rock group, from back when I was in college) has that sweet, sad sound to it, both soothing and faintly macabre.

Do you have a link? I've never heard any recorded version other than Herdman's, although I saw last night that there are approximately a million out there. (I was looking for Caddick's.)

[isis]

I've put it in my dropbox and shared it with you, since I just have it as an mp3. I don't think it's on YouTube. Though having listened to it again, I wonder if maybe my memories are of a different version, as I recall a smoother song?

The group, btw, is Clam Chowder, who used to play a lot of SF conventions in the 70s and 80s.

[sovay]

I've put it in my dropbox and shared it with you, since I just have it as an mp3.

Thank you so much! Even if it is a different version.