He took to drinking ratafia and thought upon Miss Bailey

[sovay]

I felt that for years I had been unfair to the Kingston Trio, since I grew up knowing them for a handful of songs—"Tom Dooley," "M.T.A.," "The Merry Minuet," "The Shape of Things"—and otherwise mostly as the bête noire of the Limeliters, the mid-century folk trio I actually grew up listening to. So when I saw that Lou Gottlieb of said Limeliters had in fact worked with the Kingston Trio on their album Here We Go Again! (1959), I figured it would be a reasonable compromise to start with. About half the album was playlisted on YouTube. Okay, close-harmony, collegiate-polished pop-folk. I wasn't not enjoying it, but it wasn't the Limeliters and it wasn't the Chad Mitchell Trio. And then I hit "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey."

By the fifteen-second mark, I had already decided to post the song because I heard the opening plink-out of "Rule, Britannia" and then an affectedly dry-academic voice announced that "In 1742 it was customary in the township of Halifax for a gentleman to partake occasionally of ratafia—" and I stopped the recording and stuck my head into the other room to yell delightedly at spatch, because there was Lou Gottlieb, albeit in the voice of either Dave Guard, Bob Shane, or Nick Reynolds, or as it turned out all three of them as the line was handed off by turns; no one else from the late '50's through the mid-'60's could hold a candle to him for nasal meta-pedantry except Tom Lehrer. And then I started the recording again and at the thirty-three-second mark I gave up completely because the first verse begins—

A captain bold in Halifax who dwelt in country quarters
Seduced a maid who hanged herself one Monday in her garters

—and I was reading those lyrics last night on the train from New York because they are the "English ballad" that Hannibal Sefton is singing, not necessarily badly, but really, really drunkenly, when he makes his spectacularly failbucket entrance in Sold Down the River (2000) which concludes with him quoting Latin and passing out. It's a genuine early nineteenth-century song. I'd never looked it up before, but it's first attested in an 1803 musical farce by George Colman called Love Laughs at Locksmiths, gains a popular life of its own on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually has its tune stolen for Andrew Jackson's campaign song "The Hunters of Kentucky," which in context of New Orleans in 1834 probably makes it funnier that Hannibal's singing the bawdy-parody original. The liner notes for Here We Go Again! credit it to "Trad., Gottlieb" and he seems to have altered the lyrics only mildly in the process of arranging it for the Kingston Trio; its particular style of folk sendup (a seduction, a suicide, a ghost—now add bribery) aged remarkably well. I'm a little sorry the Limeliters themselves never recorded it. I presume I now know where Barbara Hambly got it.

Anyway, this entire rabbit hole finished with me listening to a lot more of the Limeliters, so I think my original project failed completely, but I'm still delighted. Plus hearing their "Rumania, Rumania" and "Zhankoye" again after a season of singing Yiddish makes me listen to their pronunciation differently. I wonder if Gottlieb did know the language. "Well, there's a good deal of ethnic solidarity out tonight . . ."

Comments

[kore]

It's a genuine early nineteenth-century song

Aww, Hambly is so great.

[sovay]

Aww, Hambly is so great.

I never had reason to believe it wasn't an authentic song of the period, but I didn't recognize it and I never went looking, and finding it as the topper to the Lou Gottlieb discovery honestly made my night. Sorry, Kingston Trio.

[moon_custafer]

My mother was in a folk-music group with some friends when she was at university. She has a good singing voice, and I think she also played autoharp. They called themselves “The New Lost Rambling Four,” which may be the most perfect early-‘60s-folkie name ever – my brother liked it enough that in the early twenty-oughts he used it as the title of a song he wrote for the (power-pop) band he was in at the time.

[sovay]

They called themselves “The New Lost Rambling Four,” which may be the most perfect early-‘60s-folkie name ever – my brother liked it enough that in the early twenty-oughts he used it as the title of a song he wrote for the (power-pop) band he was in at the time.

Seriously! (I am charmed by both of these facts.) Do you have any recordings?

[moon_custafer]

None of Mom's group, and I've searched the internet but my brother does not appear to have posted that song in particular.

Rumania, Rumania

[lauradi7dw]

The canonical version for us is from the 1980 Klezmer Conservatory Band (Judy Bresler singing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeJGN9wUn5o

Still, this was my favorite until today (when the Limelighters' version usurped it). (unbelievably creepy - the minute I typed that here, the L version popped up on youtube as the top hit for the title, not previously the case).
There was a sitcom in the early 1990s set in the mid-1950s, called "Brooklyn Bridge."
This is a whole episode, but the backstory is not required to enjoy the song part, which starts at about 15:54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy5DgK0IIQs

Re: Rumania, Rumania

[sovay]

Still, this was my favorite until today (when the Limelighters' version usurped it).

That was a great version of "Rumania, Rumania." (I looked up the singer and was delighted to see that, in the classic tradition, Stewart Figa went from Yiddish theater to chazzanut. It goes the other way, too.) The Limeliters were my first version, then Aaron Lebedeff, then a friend of mine who never made a commercial recording that I know of. Golem have a version on their album Homesick Songs (2004), some of which I like and some of which I suspect would work better live.

(unbelievably creepy - the minute I typed that here, the L version popped up on youtube as the top hit for the title, not previously the case).

I hate how these kinds of algorithms make the world smaller.

[pameladean]

This is a glorious description of one of my favorite processes, that sudden clicking together of history, fiction, and art. I am so glad you got to have it.

P.

[sovay]

that sudden clicking together of history, fiction, and art. I am so glad you got to have it.

Thank you!