I've come five hundred miles just to see your halo

kore asked about a recent thing I've enjoyed. Technically that's several movies, but while I'm figuring out how to write about those—

The Jack Horntip Collection is a time sink, the page of field recordings especially. I found it for the first time a dozen years ago when I was looking for the short bawdy song sung by Jared Harris in Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page (2005); I had no luck there, but I did discover four different versions of "I Don't Want to Join the Army"¹ and eventually such gems as "I Don't Want to Be a Housewife" and "Durex Is a Girl's Best Friend." The collection is a wild mix of NSFW and actually fine; some of it's schoolyard, some of it's barracks, some of it's locker-room, some of it's smutty and/or surreal parodies of pop culture, and some of it's chanteys and work songs and other folk songs whose lines of transmission are immediately recognizable if you know from Peter Bellamy or A.L. Lloyd. These are not necessarily distinct categories. One minute you can be listening to a perfectly traditional version of "Little Sally Racket" and the next minute it's Clinton-Lewinski filk to the tune of "Rosin the Beau." I will always appreciate the site's existence because it put tunes to lyrics I'd read decades ago and because its songbooks and scans include Pete Seeger's "Report from the Marianas: Notes of an Innocent Bystander" (1945), but let's be honest, "Somebody Stole My Pants" was inevitable.

What it has not turned up is a recording of "Gertie from Bizerte," possibly because the version I learned from The Canterville Ghost (1944) is the home-front clean-up of an authentic soldiers' song, i.e., the line about the mousetrap under her skirtie is right out. Unfortunately, when sung by Charles Laughton and Robert Young it is a total earworm and heartwarming in context to boot. I found Dick Haymes crooning it in 1943, but that is not at all the same emotional effect as one English ghost and one American GI from a family said to be cursed with insoluble cowardice returning triumphantly and rather punchily from disposing of a blockbuster bomb and blowing themselves up slightly in the process. "Gertie from Bizerte" is the song the company of U.S. Army Rangers marched off singing that morning, when Cuffy who froze at a moment of crisis was left behind with the bitter news that he was being sent back to his old outfit; now it signals to Margaret O'Brien's Jessica that her new-found kinsman survived and did a brave deed for the honor of the Cantervilles after all. He holds out his arms to her, a smoke-stained man grinning all over his joker's face; she springs onto him like the monkey that small children are so often said to resemble and he swings her joyously around and drops them both down on the couch laughing—the gal for me! O'Brien had worked previously with Young on the film she took her professional name from, Journey for Margaret (1942), and their work in The Canterville Ghost is a wonderful depiction of a friendship between an adult and a child, which is one of the reasons I think Cuffy is quite right to laugh at the close of the film when Lady Jessica from the full height of her nearly seven years solemnly declares her intent to wait for him—any chance of creepiness is defused by the way he doesn't look for a second as though he's considering it, though he may well be the American cousin who someday gives her away. But the song is one of the moments in the film that make it work for me despite the wavery pacing and the wildly inconsistent production values, these odd, real bits sneaking in around the edges of the morale-raising fantasy-comedy. When the fantasy-comedy is firing on all cylinders, it's a lot of fun. But the people stick with me most of all. The scene itself is not on YouTube or I would include it as evidence.

Okay, I guess that was one recent thing and one thing that isn't recent at all. I still enjoyed them!

1. Which may be older than I thought, if Les Cleveland is right that it goes back to the Peninsular War. I've never seen the first version he quotes ("I don't want the Sergeant's shilling"), only the variants from World War II, by which time it's assimilated and repurposed the affected refrain of "A Conscientious Objector." See multiple field recordings at the Jack Horntip Collection, including several more since the last time I checked.

Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again

At first we couldn't figure out why there would be mounted Boston police in front of the Omni Parker House on Tremont Street, especially in company of city officials and Mounties in dress uniform. Then we couldn't figure out why Boston Common was covered with crowds and corporate sponsors and considerably more in the way of security. spatch confirmed that it was Saint Andrew's Day, which maybe accounted for all the pipers, but maybe not. The penny finally dropped that we were attending the annual lighting of the Boston Christmas tree, this year commemorating the centenary of the Halifax Explosion and the aid Boston extended, in recompense for which the province of Nova Scotia gifted the city of Boston a significant tree for Christmas in 1918 and has continued the tradition every year since 1971. We watched the ceremony open with a performance by American and Canadian pipers and then there was a lot of Christmas pop and smokers behind us wherever we went and there seemed an insufficient percentage of CanCon in the festivities (I would have led with both national anthems, not just ours—it's an international event, come on) and the tree-lighting itself was an hour and half away and Rob got tired of me shouting "Just sing 'Northwest Passage'!" so we caught the Red Line from Park Street and fed the cats as soon as we got home and made biscuits for ourselves with milk gravy and the ground goat we had bought earlier that evening at the public market, a life decision I can enthusiastically recommend. And maybe there was more from Nova Scotia and less from Boston later on, but I think we would have needed to plan to spend the evening on Boston Common to find out. Here is Nathan Rogers singing "Northwest Passage" with Dry Bones in 2014. I hope people in this city remember the origins of their tree.