Said you want to dance while the world stops

[sovay]

Today's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #59. The issue is themed around music, fire, and ghosts; it contains especially recommendable work by Craig Rodgers, Alexandra Seidel, Tim Jeffreys, F. Brett Cox, Stephanie M. Wytovich, and Davian Aw, as well as my poems "The Great Fire" and "The Women Around Achilles." The latter was written as a gloss on the story of Achilles on Skyros, a piece of post-Homeric midrash whose gender essentialism has always sat badly with me; the former is a very recent take on chronic illness and politics. There is a ridiculous typo in one of them which is entirely my fault.

1. Last night I attended the premiere of Michael Veloso's Trinity (2018) at Lexington High School. I desperately want a recording. I have very high standards for atomic art and this piece easily exceeds them; I know less about twenty-first-century classical music than I should, but anything where I can hear neutrons clicking and cascading and the furnace churn at a fireball's heart is a success by me. It was not quite as weird to revisit my old high school auditorium as I had been worrying.

2. I woke this morning hearing the last stanza of Kipling's "The Widow's Party"—Bellamy's setting that uses the tune of "Dol-Li-A." All I can remember of my dreams is that I was singing it; I don't know when or for whom. It's been in my head all day, especially when I walked to the library and back to pick up a research book. We broke a King and we built a road—

3. I appreciate handful_ofdust tagging me Leslie Howard in one of the cuter moments of Berkeley Square (1933). I also appreciate her commentary on this photograph of Ida Lupino, Roscoe Karns, and Toby Wing. Whatever they just suggested, he'd be an idiot to refuse.

4. I don't understand what kind of person could read the headline "Green-haired turtle that breathes through its genitals added to endangered list" and not want to save it on the spot.

5. I am never not going to be happy that my fifth-grade teachers taught us about probability by teaching us to play craps so that we learned (a) about probability (b) the house always wins.

Comments

[negothick]

Only you, sovay, would think "Dollia" rather than "Liverpool Lullaby" in response to the Brian Peters/Anni Fentiman recording. I had to trace the 60s song, familiar to me from Judy Collins, back to its source--which was "Dollia."
"Liverpool Lullaby" by Stan Kelly "is based on a Tyneside song [Sandgate Dandling Song] written by Robert Nunn (1808-1853), a blind fiddler, to a traditional tune called Dollia:

When daddy'd drunk he'll take a knife
And threaten sair to take my life.
Who wouldn't be a keelman's wife
To have a man like Johnny?

Stan Kelly has reshaped the song in modern Liverpool terms without sacrificing any of its character and without parodying it.'

Kipling could have had the blind fiddler's version--or the original--in mind when shaping this poem. It's a perfect match for the narrative voice and the heavy weight of irony.

[sovay]

Only you, sovay, would think "Dollia" rather than "Liverpool Lullaby" in response to the Brian Peters/Anni Fentiman recording.

Thank you.

Kipling could have had the blind fiddler's version--or the original--in mind when shaping this poem. It's a perfect match for the narrative voice and the heavy weight of irony.

That was Bellamy's rationale for setting Kipling's verse to the tunes he did! He thought you could discern from the contours of the poetry the songs that must have been in Kipling's head as he wrote. I read an article that cited either written remarks of his or an interview about it; I'll try to find it again. It's strongest in the Barrack-Room Ballads. In some cases I'm pretty sure he just wrote his own trad-sounding melodies, but the majority I can recognize are very plausible, like "Blow Ye Winds" for "Mandalay," "Maggie May" for "Gunga Din," or "Derwentwater's Farewell" for "Danny Deever." (He owed a serious debt to Louisa Jo Killen.) "Poor Honest Men" fits so perfectly with "Spanish Ladies," I'm sure Bellamy was right to use it. I wish I had the liner notes to his Kipling albums as well as the songs.

[edit] This is not the article I was thinking of, but it alludes to some of the same material.

[negothick]

"Mandalay" fits best to "Ten Thousand Miles Away", I think--as does Heather Wood. Even the rhymes are similar. In fact, she shared Peter Bellamy's--and other folk settings--of Kipling's sea songs at a Sea Music Symposium at Mystic about 10 years ago. A historian (and not a folkie) in the audience had the nerve to question her sources, not knowing who she was. "How can you prove that Kipling had these songs in mind? Were you there?" It led to a verbal brawl that almost turned physical.

[sovay]

"Mandalay" fits best to "Ten Thousand Miles Away", I think--as does Heather Wood. Even the rhymes are similar.

I think we're talking about the same song. I heard it first as the whaling song rather than anything else.

It led to a verbal brawl that almost turned physical.

I assume she ate the historian for breakfast.

[negothick]

Yes, she made him regret he was ever born--he never returned that I know of, and before this incident, he used to attend regularly.
But no, not "Blow Ye Winds in the Morning"--this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWcj9LeFqhA *(sung by Dan Milner, who was in attendance that fateful symposium)*

[sovay]

But no, not "Blow Ye Winds in the Morning"--this one

I'm not arguing the Milner is a closer match, but I think of them as fundamentally the same tune, just one with a little more embroidery than the other. I recognized Bellamy's "Mandalay" at once from having heard Cooney's "Blow Ye Winds."