I can fix you anything, a camshaft to a spade
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 ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
no subject
Says it perfectly, but on a humbler level, this reminds me of solving a double-crostic, where you have a few scattered letters in a grid, and can suddenly see the whole passage, because the intervals in English work that way. So does math.
Come to think of it, when I'm writing strongly, I can hear the ghost of the next lines before I know what I'm going to say.
You sing "The Anchor Song" magnificently. It's a joy to hear you.
Nine
no subject
That makes sense to me. I had that experience at second hand a couple of nights ago: the woman sitting next to me on the Red Line was doing the Wall Street Journal crossword and I knew I couldn't offer her suggestions, even when the key to an entire box was answering "In a funk" with "Blue."
What I'm trying to decide now is whether there's an echo of "The Castlereigh River"/The Fitter's Song" in Ron Angel's "The Chemical Worker's Song," which like most people of my generation I first heard performed by Great Big Sea, or if that's just a coincidence of common lyrical patterns about men at work.
You sing "The Anchor Song" magnificently. It's a joy to hear you.
Thank you. It may happen again at this year's Kipling circle!
I just found this fantastically shape-changing version of "Ford o' Kabul River" by a band with the pleasing name of Blackbeard's Tea Party; it starts as a military tattoo and turns into protest rock.