sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-11-29 03:10 am

And for your boatman choose old John O'Dreams

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 [personal profile] 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.
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2018-11-30 08:13 am (UTC)(link)
Any band with both Bill and Jon Tams in it was likely to create something really special and it did.