I can fix you anything, a camshaft to a spade

[sovay]

I just walked around the house for more than half an hour singing Ewan MacColl's "The Fitter's Song" to myself—technically the version I learned from Eliza Carthy & The Wayward Band—because I knew there was another song under its melody and it was driving me up the wall not to remember it. It scratched at me most strongly in the chorus, although the end of every verse snagged me, too. I had a physical memory of the same intervals with fewer syllables. It kept glimmering through my head without catching. I said to spatch, "I don't think it's one of the tunes Peter Bellamy borrowed for his Kipling settings," like "Derwentwater's Farewell" for "Danny Deever" or "Dol-li-a" for "The Widow's Party," but I had a flash of association with the sea, like a chantey. I considered briefly whether I was hearing a minor-key echo of "The Bark Gay Head" and decided not.

It clicked when I was in the shower, repeating the stickiest line over and over to myself without the interference of MacColl's words. I was right to think of Kipling and right to think of Bellamy. I was hearing the "Anchor Song," which I learned first from John Roberts and Tony Barrand but prefer in Bellamy's own rackety voice and which I have sung myself, at least twice at Arisia and once for an audition and often when I am walking, since it has a good striding rhythm and catalogue lyrics. It's not a one-for-one overlay—Bellamy's tune is rangier and more elaborate—but the mode is the same and the general shape of the music and that damnably nagging You'll always find me working where you find the big machines snaps exactly into the place of Oh, we're bound to Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea! Even the introductory accompaniment is an ornamentation on that signature line; it's there in Carthy's electro-stomp as well as MacColl's guitar and it's there in the violin scrawl of Chris Birch on Bellamy's Keep On Kipling (1982). I had every right to think I knew it.

First recorded as part of the 1958 BBC radio ballad Song of a Road, "The Fitter's Song" has itself another song under it: A.L. Lloyd's "The Castlereagh River," which he first recorded in 1956. I would be shocked if that wasn't where MacColl had gotten the tune. What I don't know is which one of them Bellamy got it from. I don't know if it's possible to track that down. He named his source tunes if they existed in the liner notes for Oak, Ash & Thorn (1970) and Merlin's Isle of Gramarye (1972), but I don't know if he performed the same service for Keep on Kipling. If so, my only defense for catching on just now is that I don't have the liner notes.

In any case, at the moment I am feeling proud of myself for placing the ghost. I love the "Anchor Song"; it's woven through more than one of my stories. I would have felt really stupid if someone had had to point it out to me.

Comments

[a_reasonable_man]

So interesting! I know exactly, though, what you're talking about--that nagging feeling of familiarity about a line that has nothing to do with the content of the words or the specifics of the melody. Are there poems/songs written like this, in which the lines in "mode and general shape" are supposed to echo the lines of another poem/song?

[sovay]

I know exactly, though, what you're talking about--that nagging feeling of familiarity about a line that has nothing to do with the content of the words or the specifics of the melody.

Well, it is partly the specifics of the melody in this case—if you listen to both songs, it's not just the rhythm but the actual notes of You'll always find me working where you find the big machines/Oh, we're bound to Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea that match. Each verse also begins with the same interval and remains in the same kind of pattern, to the point where you can nearly sing one over the other without dissonance. It can't quite be done, so the effect is less like the setting of new words to an old tune, as MacColl did with "The Castlereigh River" to create "The Fitter's Song," than as if Bellamy unraveled the older tune and rewove it into the "Anchor Song." But the likeness is musically there.

Are there poems/songs written like this, in which the lines in "mode and general shape" are supposed to echo the lines of another poem/song?

There is a lot of repurposing of tunes in the folk tradition. What Bellamy was doing with his Kipling settings was a sort of archaeological variation—like a number of Kipling scholars and fans, he believed that many of Kipling's poems had been written effectively as songs, with traditional tunes in mind during composition whose traces were still subtly or plainly visible in the metrics of the poetry. So you get the two examples I cited in the body of this post; he also matched "Poor Honest Men" to "Spanish Ladies," "Mandalay" to "Blow the Winds High-O," and "Gunga Din" to "Maggie May." Sometimes he identified a traditional tune but did not choose to use it, as was the case with "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and "Ford o' Kabul River." Some of his settings resemble the melodies of traditional songs without being direct transfers; some are inventions in the traditional style. I'd thought the "Anchor Song" was one of the latter until I heard "The Fitter's Song." It makes me wonder what else I haven't recognized. I have never been systematic about tracking these parallels down. Someday I'll figure out what I heard once that reminded me of "The Land."