RE: Comments

My dears, you may have noticed that lately here at Blogger I have left your very kind comments unanswered. This is NOT because I do not appreciate each of them and treasure your kind words. It's THIS: for some reason, every time I try to leave a comment, here at my blog or at anyone else's on Blogger, my computer goes haywire. It begins putting up blank IE screens that multiply at an alarming rate and only cease to do so when I completely shut down the puter.

Some of you will be able to leave comments at my other blog (Fairweather Lewis); others cannot because of a glitch there preventing some ISPs from opening new accounts on Blogstream.

My computer guru Willard and I are brainstorming to try to find some way either to straighten this blog out or to put my blog into a format where I can put together my own comment settings.

Until then, know I value all your comments. Thank you all for your kindness, and hopefully we'll figure out something soon.

Take This Tune: 'At Sojer Boy's Got a EVIL Twin

This week at Take This Tune, our theme is love lost and found, as in the ballad Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden, with roots in the sixteenth century.

The faithful soldier in "Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden" is the epitome of fantasy: he returns after seven long years (unrecognizable to his true love). The fantasy could go wrong, of course; the potential for disaster is in the questions he asks, designed as a test for her. What if he’s "in some watercourse drowning" or "on some battlefield slain" or—YIKES!!!--"to some fair girl married"? The Pretty Fair Maid’s answers are apparently satisfactory, for he reveals himself as her true love, and they live happily ever after.

Sometimes, though, things don’t turn out exactly in the approved fairytale fashion. Witness the ending of Clarence (Tom) Ashley’s variant on the theme, "The House Carpenter", in which the female protagonist has married in the interim, but leaves with her old true love, only to find she misses the child she bore her husband—whereupon, abruptly, she and her partner in elopement die in a shipwreck—an ending no doubt approved in the Calvinist traditions of the mountains.



In the variant from which "The House Carpenter" sprang, though, things get downright terrifying. As noted, that soldier has an EVIL twin: "The Demon Lover".

In this I will not budge: the most hair-raising version of "The Demon Lover" I have ever heard is the one recorded by Tim O’Brien and Karen Casey on O’Brien’s 2001 CD TWO JOURNEYS. Unfortunately, it isn’t available anyplace on the Webz that I’ve been able to find (and I even used the Google). The lyrics, though, give you an idea. They begin quite innocuously, as in Ashley’s variant, with the true love having returned "from the west" to find his own true love has married a house carpenter. She’s not content though; she is seduced away from her husband and sons with almost indecent ease, and then the fun begins.

Well met, well met, my own true love,
Well met, well met, cried he
I have returned from the salt salt sea,
And it’s all for the sake of thee

I’ve come for the vow you promised me
To be my partner in life
She said, My vow you must forgive
For now I’m a wedded wife.

Yes, I got married, a house carpenter
To him I’ve borne two fine sons
It’s seven long years since you sailed to the west
And I took you for dead and gone.

(instrumental break. Then we learn she’s discontented—and perhaps a bit mercenary.)

If I was to leave my husband dear
And my two babies also
Just what have you to take me to
If with you I should now go?

I have seven ships out upon the sea
And the eighth one that brought me to land
And four and twenty bold mariners
And music on every hand.

It was then she went to her two little babes
And kissed them on cheek and on chin
Saying fare thee well, my sweet little ones
I’ll never see you again.

They had not sailed much more than a week
I know that it was not three
When altered grew his countenance
And a raging came over the sea.

(instrumental break)

And when they reached the shore again
On the far side of the sea
It was there that she spied his cloven hoof
And wept most bitterly.

Oh what is that mountain yon, she cried,
So dreary with ice and with snow?
It is a mountain of Hell, he cried,
Where you and I now will go.

Karen Casey sings her part with all the passion and intensity of a young, bored, and finally frightened—badly frightened—woman, while O’Brien sings his with an almost flat matter-of-factness that will freeze your heart stone-cold with that final couplet.

"The Demon Lover" is, according to some folklore scholars, based on the true story of a Scotsman named James Harris, who, back in the sixteenth century, allegedly abducted a former lover in somewhat the same fashion. There are other stories, variants on this basic motif, from other centuries, other places, including one from 1930s Kentucky.

Aw, heck, may as well admit it, though: the sucker had me at "music on every hand."

Take This Tune: Heartbroke, Anybody?

This week at Take This Tune, an occasional contributor who goes by the nom de clavier of Fairweather posted a live version of Emmylou Harris’s song "Heartbreak Hill", then added this:

"Now as you know, my field of preference is classic country and bluegrass, and we've got a blue goodelin' of songs about heartbreak--but it's also a constant theme in other genres, from jazz, blues, rock, classical/opera.

So--what is your favorite song about heartbreak, and why? Start writing~~Fairweather "

Well, in between blowing my nose, fixing Mom’s supper, and letting Blackadder in and out of the house (he still seems to think the moon’s near the full), I remembered this one—and added tears to the mix. This one also seemed appropriate because it rained in the knobs all day today. (Good thing too; thanks to that interminable arctic cold snap, we’re already two inches down on our rainfall total for the month.)

The Everly Brothers, "Crying in the Rain"



Even on the funny, fast Felice and Boudleaux Bryant songs at which they excelled, the Everly Brothers could melt your heart with their angelic harmonies; this song, written by Carole King and Howard Greenfield, can break that same heart.

Take This Tune is a weekly meme hosted by my friend and fellow music lover Jamie. Each week she posts a song and invites you to blog about your thoughts about or reactions to the piece. If you’d like to participate, please click on the Take This Tune link above. Full instructions are given there.

DER VAMPYR

We’ve all heard the story of how, way back in 1816, during a thunderstorm on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the British Romantic poets Byron and Shelley, Shelley’s wife, Mary Godwin, Byron’s mistress Claire Clairmont, and "physician" and groupie John Polidori gave each other serious cases of goosebumps telling scary stories. There was an agreement made that all the participants would write a tale of terror. Shelley and Clairmont never completed theirs; Byron began one but abandoned it; Mary Shelley took her idea and made it into arguably the greatest horror/philosophical classic of all time, FRANKENSTEIN, or, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

And then, there was Polidori’s tale. Called "The Vampyre" and published in 1819, it was for many years wrongly attributed to Byron. Almost certainly, the main characters—Aubry, the wannabe man of the world, and the suave, sophisticated, yet brutal Lord Ruthven, who turns out to be a vampire—were based on Polidori and Byron themselves. Byron was at great pains to dissociate himself from its composition, and indeed from Polidori. But the story was embraced by its public, particularly by contemporary French and German Romantic poets, playwrights and composers. In 1821, it was dramatized for the stage by the German playwright Heinrich Ludwig Ritter. Seven years later, the composer Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861) and librettist Wilhelm August Wohlbruck turned Ritter’s play into an opera. DER VAMPYR premiered at Leipzig on March 28, 1828.

Marschner, according to Wiki, was the most important German Romantic composer between the two giants Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner. DER VAMPYR was, in fact, quite a favorite of Wagner’s; he produced and conducted it several times himself, and once rewrote the ending of one of Aubry’s arias for his brother, an operatic tenor, who complained it wasn’t "effective enough"—an ambiguous phrase that I, at least, take to mean it didn’t give him scope to show off his high notes.

Wagner’s reworking of the aria did not catch on. In any case, the main character in both story and opera is Lord Ruthven, the vampire, a baritone role. Imagine my surprise when, last night while cruising YouTube, I found this gem: Ruthven’s aria "Ha! Noch einen ganzen Tag" ("Still a whole day"), sung by the operatic love of my life, Thomas Hampson.



I’m not sure exactly when this recording would have been made; at a guess, perhaps the very late 1980s or early 1990s. Hampson is in excellent voice, but—dare I confess—I got the giggles listening to him declaim, "Blut! Ich muss blut!" ("Blood! I must have blood!")
As to whether I would allow him any of mine?

It’s negotiable.

Ruling Days

There's a sweet old hillbilly custom that my mom and aunt still follow: the "ruling days." The old people in the mountains and knobs would make note of weather conditions on the twelve days beginning on Christmas Day, as they believed these would correspond to weather conditions in the coming twelve months. Christmas Day "rules" January, yesterday "rules" February, and so forth. The ruling days end on January 6th, to which the old people often still refer as Old Christmas--in the Roman Catholic tradition, the Feast of the Epiphany, the date on which the Magi are said to have visited the Christ Child and given him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Here in the knobs, Christmas Day's weather was cold and cloudy, windy with rain late in the day. January, therefore, will be cold and rainy, especially toward the end of the month, according to the old people. Yesterday, February's ruler, was cold but sunny, while today, March's ruler, is sunny, mild (48 degrees) and breezy.

Right up until January 6th, Mom and Aunt Barbara will keep track of the weather.

And then, we'll see.

Christmas Lullaby

Many years ago, when I attended a small Baptist church, the altar call at the end of sermons was frequently a mournfully beautiful tune in a minor key of which I never knew the name or for that matter any of the words. It wasn't until about a decade ago, in a Methodist church I attended at the time, that I learned it was called "Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy", from its opening line, in the Methodist hymnal, in which it was first included in the 1990s. In the old Broadman hymnals, used for many years in Baptist services, it is called "I Will Arise and Go to Jesus" from the opening line of the refrain.

The words to "Come Ye Sinners" were published in 1759 by their author, British minister Joseph Hart. In 1835, a Spartanburg, South Carolina singing school teacher named William Walker--better known among fans of oldtime music as "Singin’ Billy"--set the words to a tune called "Restoration" in his shape-note hymnal THE SOUTHERN HARMONY.

I left the Methodist church in April of 1998, if I recall. In May, I found Doc Watson’s 1990 CD ON PRAYING GROUND, on which he sang a set of Christmas lyrics to the same tune. The words Doc sings are taken in part from a poem by the great British hymn writer Isaac Watts. Doc's lyrics, identified as traditional with arrangement by Doc Watson in the songwriter's credits, are:

Hush my babe, lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

How much better art thou attended
Than the son of God could be
When from Heaven he descended
And became a child like thee

Soft and easy is thy cradle
Coarse and hard the Savior lay
When his birthplace was a stable
And his softest bed was hay

Hush my babe lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

Doc sings with only his own guitar accompaniment, and pronounces the word "gently" as "gentlie"--a very old mountain way, not uncommon at all in traditional mountain music.



I can imagine a mountain mother, awake in the night with a fussy baby, rocking and singing, rocking and singing. . .

An Evening with M. R. James

Imagine a room like this:



Decorated for Christmas, it’s warm and cozy. Now then, imagine that over to the righthand side of the fireplace, there sits a man in a large armchair. He’s not a handsome man by any means, but his face is strongly marked by intelligence and humor—and he is about to work magic.

All stories are magic, but there are some that gain in the telling by being read aloud. So imagine, also, a group of students—all male, for this man is provost of a famous British preparatory school—seated in chairs or on the floor, coltish legs and sharp elbows pulled in, anticipating wonders.

We owe the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas mainly to Charles Dickens. Dickens’s most famous work in the genre, A Christmas Carol, is subtitled Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Dickens, as editor of various magazines in the course of his career, always put out a Christmas annual which consisted in the main of ghost stories, by some of the most famous writers of his day: Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Amelia B. Edwards, and of course Dickens himself.

The man who is about to read to his students, however, was born too late to submit his stories to Dickens. Montague Rhodes James is, however, arguably the finest of all writers of fictional ghost stories.



Born the youngest son of a Sussex clergyman in 1862, he was also one of the unlikeliest. By profession a historian (mainly of medieval England), he lived out his life a bachelor, first as a Cambridge University chancellor and, for the last eighteen years of his life as provost of Eton. There would seem to be nothing in his background to account for his taste for the macabre.
In his spare time, however, he wrote ghost stories. At first he read them to his fellow Cambridge dons during the Christmas season; later, for his pupils at Eton.

In our own day, we are used to writers in the horror genre who use bloody menaces—serial killers, killer clowns, demons, rabid dogs, kinetically gifted teens (yes, Stephen King, I’m primarily, but not solely, talking about you)—to scare us witless. Not once does M. R. James resort to this type of over-the-top plotline, or, in King’s evocative phrase, go for the gross-out, yet James’s stories can scare one into turning on extra lights, and checking dark corners, strictly by the power of suggestion. In the preface to a collection of his stories called A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS AND OTHER STORIES, the author Ruth Rendall—herself no mean hand at creating uncanny atmospheres—gives a near perfect description of how James achieves these scares:

"His stories begin quietly, often with a description of a place, a town or a country house or library, and his traveller to whom in a little while dreadful things will happen. There are—at first—no ghosts and demons, only a gradually increasing, indefinable, slow menace. And James’s characters bring trouble on themselves by such simple innocent actions, by being a little too curious, by merely examining an old manuscript or borrowing a certain book, by picking up an apparently harmless object on the beach." (pages vii-viii.)

The stories to which Rendall refers, in that final sentence, are, respectively, "A Warning to the Curious", " Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" and "The Tractate Middoth," and "O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad", but the general idea holds true for all of James’s stories. Not to mention that these stories have influenced a good many writers—even Stephen King—who came after James; there is a scene in King’s 1977 novel The Shining that must have been inspired by one in James’s early story "Lost Hearts", in which a young boy is frightened by a ghastly figure he sees in a bathtub.

It is astonishing, as well, that James’s influence should have spread so far when his output in the genre consists of no more than thirty-one short stories.

I suspect, though, that one thing that makes them so memorable is, simply, that James himself first read them aloud—and he must have been a wonderful reader, for none of the fellow professors or students who heard him read them at Christmastime ever forgot them. At least one of his pupils, the English actor Christopher Lee, has read James’s work on BBC radio, and shared his memories of hearing "Monty" in his youth. (James died in 1936.)

I frankly cannot do any sort of justice to James’s work; my powers of description aren’t equal to the task. However, his best stories are available online. These two are my favorites.

Lost Hearts

A Warning to the Curious

These will give you a savor of M. R. James’s variety of dark magic.

Bobby Helms's Hat Trick

In 1957, Bobby Helms (1933-1997) had three monster hits in a single year—one of which makes a comeback each Christmas season.

The first of the three was "Fraulein", released on March 30. It told the story of a young man who had fallen in love with "an old German’s daughter/by the banks of the old River Rhine" while serving in the postwar occupation of Germany. Stone country, it went to number one on the country charts and an astonishing number thirty-six on the Billboard Top 100—sort of the "pop charts" back in the day.



A few months later, Helms released "My Special Angel." More overtly pop in construction, and with backing vocals by the legendary Anita Kerr Singers, it went to number one on the country charts and peaked at number seven on the Billboard Top 100. It has proven over time to be the most durable of Helms’s mainstream hits; it was first covered by The Vogues in 1968 and has been in the repertoires of a number of groups ever since.



A few days before Christmas in that same astounding year, Helms released "Jingle Bell Rock." Possibly because it was a holiday-oriented song, and a novelty tune at that, it didn’t make it to number one on its first release; it went to number thirteen country and number six on the Billboard Top 100. However, it was re-released during an additional five Christmas seasons and eventually became one of those songs that—well, it wouldn’t be Christmas if you didn’t hear "Jingle Bell Rock" at least once.



After those three monster hits, all within a nine-month period in a single year, Helms settled into a comfortable if mediocre career. He never had another major hit, and recorded his last album in 1987. He died in 1997 at the age of 63, and has been inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, although I think it’s about time the Country Music Hall of Fame added him to its roster.

Saturday Music: One Bright Star

This song comes from Vince Gill's 1993 Christmas CD LET THERE BE PEACE ON EARTH. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when I learned that Sis was tapped to direct the kids' Christmas play at her church and had cast the Princess in the lead role. The Princess said (proudly, I thought), "I'm the star."

"Hey, that's cool!" I enthused.

"No, I mean LITERALLY I'm the star. The Star of Bethlehem."

OH-kay. . .

Sis confided later that the main reason she had cast the Princess as the Star had nothing to do with nepotism. True, the role is the largest in the play--but, she added pragmatically, "With her, I knew for certain I could bully her into learning the lines."

Imagine me trying not to ROFLMAO--

Okay, the graphics in this video are moderately weird. But Gill's sweet tenor and the gorgeous harmony vocals overcome the graphics and make a lyrically commonplace song about the Star of Bethlehem into a rare treasure. Hope you like!

Y'all Gotta Hear This!

I've held forth at length in the past about my love for George Frideric Handel's 1741 oratorio MESSIAH, a work for all seasons that is most popular around Christmas. I was surprised--AWFULLY surprised--when yesterday over at Facebook this link turned up: the bass aria "The People that Walked in Darkness" sung by my beloved baritone Thomas Hampson.




The text is from Isaiah 9:1-7.

This is not a piece I would have thought Hampson would choose. He is a lyric baritone, his voice somewhat less hefty than the weight one would associate with this aria, not to mention that he seldom (or at least, in nothing I've heard him sing) uses his lower register like this.

I think I fell in love all over again--with Handel, MESSIAH, and Hampson--after hearing this.

Illustrations

One of the greatest charms of the original edition of A CHRISTMAS CAROL is the series of color and black and white illustrations done by John Leech (1817-1864). Charles Dickens himself hired Leech to illustrate his "Ghost of an idea", in the process coming into conflict with his publishers. Dickens had grandiose ideas for his little book; he wanted gilt-edged pages, colored endpapers (originally in a chalky green that rubbed off, changed in later editions), and color illustrations, all to be sold at a price of five shillings. He wanted caricaturist John Leech because Leech was known to have a strong social conscience; his political cartoons had attracted Dickens in the first place, and since A CHRISTMAS CAROL had a strong message for the wealthy, Dickens felt his work would be more appropriate than that of his usual illustrator,
George Cruikshank. In the end, Dickens self-financed the publication, broke with his publishers--those sticks in the mud who wanted a more or less chapbook affair--and left his story and us much the richer.

In the event, only two of Leech's illustrations were suggestive of that social message, one obliquely, one overtly. Four were in color; four were in black and white, but they all have an offbeat charm. One was used for the frontispiece of the book: a depiction of Old Fezziwig--to whom Scrooge was, in his youth, apprenticed--and his wife, standing forth to lead the ball guests in "Sir Roger de Coverley" (which we here in the States know as a Virginia reel).



Leech perfectly captures the chubby, kindly couple of Scrooge's memory, but others in the series are deliciously eerie. Take, for example, the color etching of Marley's entrance and the scene outside the window through which Marley departs, after warning Scrooge he will be visited by the three spirits.





Marley, even in a caricature style, gives one a shiver, with his thin transparence; the scene outside the window, foreshadowing the fate that awaits Scrooge should he not reform, is more overt, with the ghosts wailing over the heads of the homeless woman and her child, on the stoop below.

Scrooge is, of course, a tough nut to crack; if he weren't, then we wouldn't have a story. But he is disquieted enough by the memories roused by the Ghost of Christmas Past ("Long past?" "No. Your past.") that he tries to put out its light, in a little drawing that reminds me no end of a candle being snuffed:



Scrooge's encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, beginning as it does in an all-but-unrecognizable decorated version of his own miserly apartment, is done in bright, uproarious colors, only appropriate for a spirit whose mission is to spread joy and peace:



But even this spirit, grand and jolly though he may be, has hidden a reminder of the poverty and degradation that most societies try to forget: the skinny, dreadful children named Ignorance and Want, before whom Scrooge quails, then begs the spirit to cover them.



Hard upon this horrifying vision comes the most frightening of all the spirits Scrooge has encountered on this night of many wonders: the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who by his very eloquent silence terrifies Scrooge into a realization of the fate Marley hoped to spare him.



That all but skeletal hand, pointing Scrooge onward toward a miser's grave, does more than all the other spirits combined to convince Scrooge to mend his ways.

Leech's illustrations end, as does Dickens's story, with Scrooge sitting down over a wassail bowl with his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, to discuss ways in which Scrooge may help Cratchit's family.



Other artists over the years have illustrated A CHRISTMAS CAROL more lavishly and copiously--among them Arthur Rackham, whose 1915 edition turns the whole book into a delightfully spooky fairyland. No one, however, has ever captured the lessons of the spirits with quite John Leech's elan; his arresting little set pieces remain one of the pleasures of this little book, and are available in any number of facsimile additions.

And as Tiny Tim observed (it's worth repeating, this time of year!), God bless us, every one!

WHAT THE DICKENS?!!

Being a Story of How Charles Dickens Plagiarized Himself, Got Out of Debt, and Created the Most Famous Christmas Story Outside the Gospel of Luke

Also an ego trip for yours truly, this being probably my alltime favorite of the blog posts I've written in the last three years. Originally posted at Fairweather on November 26, 2007, and again on December 6, 2008, it's getting yet another run here. And thank you for your indulgence.



In October 1843 Charles Dickens was in a bind. Married since 1836, he was already the father of four children and his wife was pregnant with a fifth. His latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit--published in installments, as were his previous ones--was not doing well. Worse yet, he was in debt. As a twelve year old, Dickens had seen his father imprisoned for debt, one of the more charming conventions of European history. He was damned if he would expose his family to that shame and horror. He needed to write a "potboiler" to raise cash, and he needed to write it fast.

Sometime during that dreary October, he had an idea for a story of a miserly old bachelor whose whole character would change after visits from a series of ghosts associated with the Christmas season. Eventually he would call that old buzzard Ebenezer Scrooge, and the little book that told his story was given the name A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being, a Ghost Story of Christmas.

Dickens was, in fact, recycling material he had already covered. In his first great work, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , he used the theme in a story within a story, told by Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell. Later extracted from the main narrative of The Pickwick Papers and anthologized as "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," it treats of one Gabriel Grubb, a drunken curmudgeonly sexton who is spending Christmas Eve digging a grave instead of joining in the jollities of the season. He is dragged off by goblins, and changes in character after a series of visions shown him by the Goblin King convince him he lives in a wonderful world after all.

Dickens would enlarge upon that theme. He would replace the visions with actual visits from the ghost of Scrooge's dead business partner, Jacob Marley, and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. He threw in a grossly sentimental subplot (also used in passing in "The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton") about a sickly poor child--Tiny Tim Cratchit--of the sort Victorians adored and wept over. He wrote in a frenzy; he told a friend that he laughed and cried, cried and laughed, throughout the composition. And he delivered it to his publisher in less than six weeks, with very few if any rewrites.

Dickens distributed advance copies of his little "Ghost of an idea" on December 17, 1843; the original printing of six thousand copies sold out within three days of its official December 19 release date. It never looked back; it has never gone out of print. It has been done as a one act play, a musical, and in any number of movies, the earliest being a 1908 production by Thomas Edison. Ebenezer Scrooge even lent his name to a Bill Monroe instrumental on Monroe's 1981 Master of Bluegrass LP.

With A Christmas Carol, Dickens established the tradition of ghost stories being written, read and told at the Christmas season. Until his death in 1870, he produced a number of so-called Christmas annuals consisting of ghost stories written by himself and other Victorian writers. The tradition survived into the 20th century.

And by the way, he was able to pay off the debt that plagued him into writing A Christmas Carol, and was from then on well to do. He was able to leave both his wife, from whom he was formally separated in 1858, and his mistress, an actress whom he met in 1857, independently wealthy to the ends of their lives.

And as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one.

Saturday Music: Early Snow with Loreena McKennitt

Snow seldom comes this early in the knobs, with the winter solstice still a couple of weeks away, but we woke this morning to a couple of inches, white and crisp as linen sheets over lawn and trees and as far on the horizon as one could see. Mom called Sis; the Princess and her friend Miss V had been out playing in it since 8:30, coming indoors occasionally to warm up and gulp hot chocolate, then back out they went. Brother Olde Hippie notes ironically, "White stuff on the ground. Is this what the oldtimers call SNOW?"

It also gave me my theme for Saturday music. The Irish-Canadian musician Loreena McKennitt has, over the course of her career, recorded several winter-themed songs.


One such is "Snow", with lyrics by the Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, (1861-1899). Originally recorded on her 1987 CD TO DRIVE THE COLD WINTER AWAY, it was rerecorded in a slightly different form on 1995’s A WINTER GARDEN.




The wistful carol "In the Bleak Midwinter" was written by the English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) sometime before 1872, although it was not published until a decade after her death. Rossetti titled it "A Christmas Carol" but it is more usually known by its opening line. Set to music in 1906 by the Swedish-British composer Gustav Holst, it is performed here as an instrumental, from McKennitt’s 2008 album A MIDWINTER NIGHT’S DREAM, on which songs from A WINTER GARDEN were reprised and augmented by new recordings.




Now, in mid-afternoon, the sun is peeking out and the snow is melting rapidly, dripping steadily off the roof—an ephemeral but lovely gift from Old Man Winter.

Six Geese A-Slaying: A Christmas Cozy

Imagine this: two days before Christmas, a small Virginia town is forming up for its annual Christmas parade. This year's theme is The Twelve Days of Christmas, and so twelve drummers and eleven pipers are trying to out-noise each other, various people in costume are roaming around (including thirty-seven members of the local birdwatching/conservation club dressed as Canada geese), there are animals everywhere--including two elephants, three camels, and a herd of sheep--On the Nativity float, a very pregnant young woman who is portraying the Virgin Mary is going into labor. A third-rate stringer from a Washington DC newspaper is hassling everyone, most notably Mistress of Revels Meg Langslow.

And then, just when it seems all will finally settle down and the parade will get off to a peaceful and successful start, two Boy Scouts (assigned to clean up behind the elephants) run up to Meg, eyes wide, breathless, to announce they just found Santa in a shed where he had gone to get into costume--dead.

Dead he is, with a stake of holly shoved through his heart.

And so begins Donna Andrews's Christmas cozy, Six Geese A-Slaying.

The series began with Murder with Peacocks, and presently runs to ten volumes. Six Geese A-Slaying was published in 2008.

Complications abound throughout the opening chapters as Meg tries to get the parade ready to roll, but a dead (MURDERED) Santa is just about the last straw. The dead man is, as is usual in cozies, the most loathed man in town, Ralph Doleson, a truly unfit choice to play Santa; unfortunately, he's the only one in town who will fit into the suit, bought years earlier by the city council, who refuse pointblank to buy a new one and appoint a new Santa.

At first Meg--influenced by her college-professor (and still new) husband Michael, who's rehearsing for a one-man show of A Christmas Carol--thinks there's a Dickens connection. But as she digs deeper, offering her amateur but competent help to the police, she finds that it's not a hatred of Santa that got Doleson killed--it's his activities as a blackmailer. And his vic list is extensive.

Donna Andrews writes in a style reminiscent of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, so events unfold in excruciatingly funny detail until the denouement, when Doleson's killer kidnaps Meg and her injured brother Rob. He's foiled in his attempt, of course, but even that unfolds in hilarity.

If you're in the mood for a lighthearted mystery, I recommend this one.

As for me, I'll be somewhere in a corner with a book.

A Very Strange Coincidence: Take This Tune

This week's selection for Take This Tune is Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust", in which she reconnects by phone with an old love (said to have been Bob Dylan). As Jamie notes, there are countless songs about reconnecting with lost loves. It can be through a friend:

Gordon Lightfoot, "Did She Mention My Name"

or by looking at old pictures

Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, "Just Someone I Used to Know"

or sitting by the sea, watching the waves.

Hank Snow, "Rockin' Rollin' Ocean"

The contact need not be direct; it can simply be a touch on a memory.

In my case, a song one would not usually associate with a lost love (although it does bring two lovers together at the end) is one that I will always think of in such a connection. That song is

Marty Robbins, "El Paso"




When I began blogging at Fairweather Lewis in January 2007, the second post I wrote was about this song. During the week I was writing it, word came that the father of my "lost love" had passed away.

I wouldn't exactly say that Lee (his middle name) and I were childhood sweethearts, but we had been friends from first grade on. He quit school at Christmas of our senior year and went into the military, and I had completely lost track of him. He had had a difficult home life, and apparently, at one point, had cut family ties altogether; nearly twenty years after we lost touch, I happened to meet his mother--who told me that at the time she hadn't heard from him in seven years.

So I wrote and rewrote my blog about "El Paso", which had nothing to do with lost love. I polished and fretted, I cried with frustration and finally decided if I didn't post it as was, I would never have the nerve.

Two days after I posted the blog, Lee's father's obituary came out in the local paper. And at last I knew where my lost friend had gotten to--

for there, in black and white, I read "son, Lee, of El Paso, Texas."

Coincidence?

I don't know, but it still is one of the strangest things that ever has happened to me.

Circle of Steel

I don’t shop on Black Friday—never have. I don’t like braving massive crowds, each individual flailing the air with lists, credit cards, or cash, for one thing, or traffic all going one way with snarling killers at the wheel who were, only the day before, smiling, laughing, and stuffed with Thanksgiving goodies and goodwill. Nor am I in favor of getting up at some godless hour without a darned good reason—something along the lines of the house burning, perhaps—or going home in shadowy dark among scurrying strangers who might—or might not—turn out to be cutthroats. Give me time to think, leisure to walk around without having to worry about being beaten senseless by savage elbows or constantly threatened by those lethal weapons known by the quaint name "shopping carts", and I’ll browse and dream for hours—but not on Black Friday.



In short, the very idea of Black Friday, with its emphasis on sales and saving the retail sector from disaster, with fights over the last sale item or breakdowns over getting to said item a few steps too late, its innate and ineradicable commercialism, the lights and sales signs, brings out something—grinchy—in me: cynical, critical, and altogether not in the proper spirit of the season.

All of which may explain, by the scenic route, why one of my favorite songs come Christmastide is Gordon Lightfoot’s almost Dickensian "Circle of Steel".




Rows of lights in a circle of steel
where you place your bets on a great big wheel. . .

Set among the poverty-stricken classes of some anonymous big city, "Circle of Steel" reminds us that Black Fridays are, far from being once-yearly orgies of spending and screaming that enable retailers to finish the year "in the black", dark and ugly everyday realities for some.

Two women form the core of the song: one an alcoholic whose doctor, "found on his welfare round", spends only the minimum time necessary with his patients; the other, the poor but honest wife of a man doing time because his "pride was his means to provide"—an almost sure bet that his pride drove him to some criminal act, rather than deal with the welfare system which is supposed to catch those in the act of falling through the cracks.

Violence implied?

"Deck the Halls" was the song they played
In the flat next door where they shout all day. . .

And yet, out in the street, no one is aware of this deadly cycle of poverty and hopelessness as they come and go on their business, their busy-ness an insulation.

Sights and sounds of the people goin’ round
Everybody’s in step with the season. . .

No, they aren’t. No. . .they aren’t.


The painting "Going Home at Dusk" was done by British artist John Atkinson Grimshaw in 1882.

Gordon Lightfoot originally recorded "Circle of Steel" for his album SUNDOWN in November 1973. Released the following April, the title song became arguably his most famous hit, while "Circle of Steel" remains relatively obscure. His version is not available online; this is a very good cover by Brian E.

Simple Gifts

Great food: turkey, dressing, gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, deviled eggs, mac & cheese, crescent rolls, wheat germ yeast rolls—and the DESSERTS!! Miss Lucy’s Apple Dumplins, made from scratch chocolate cake, oldfashioned walnut cake, chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

Sharing memories and jokes, some of them never shared before because only one remembers. Laughter and family gossip. Watching the end of the Macy’s Parade and then the National Dog Show, oohing and aahing over the toy dogs and the giant dogs and all the sizes in between. Bubba and Amanda—eleven months apart in age, a foot apart in height and a hundred pounds or so in weight, so different in so many ways, but cousins, chatting merrily about whatever twenty/nineteen year olds chat about (mostly electronics). BIL’s stepdad and my brother talking about music. The Princess serene in a corner by the TV, making refrigerator art for everybody to take home.

Mom couldn’t be with us. This time of year—and sadly, increasingly, other times too—her various ailments keep her housebound. Gathering stuff together, making her a plate, pouring tea in empty bottles for her (she loves iced tea), amid inquiries about her health and messages to give to her.

As we all leave, some to go home, others to second feasts, there is love all around, hugs and kisses and "I love yous" and "be carefuls".

Simple gifts.

I am so thankful for simple gifts.





Photos: Jim Crotty

Cello: Yo Yo Ma

Vocal: Allison Krauss

'Nother Song about Billy the Kid

Over at Fairweather Lewis I posted a ghost story about the western outlaw Billy the Kid, being as how today marks his birth in 1859. There I posted a song by Marty Robbins that makes the Kid look like a sort of anti-hero.

This song is a bit different. Written and recorded by Joe Ely in 1987, it tells an entirely different story about the Kid. Dare I say it gives me the giggles with its mordant humor?

Enjoy!!

We Gather Together: Take This Tune

The Thanksgiving hymn "We Gather Together", Dutch in origin, carries me, around this time each year, back forty years and more, to my days in what we called, back then, elementary school.



In those days, we’d never heard of an atheist named Madelyn Murray O’Hair down here in the red mud knobs, and we still sang songs in school that were from religious traditions, especially around Christmas. This, though, is the one I remember most—possibly because school was the only place I ever heard it sung! Most of the churches around were Baptist and were still using the old greenbacked Broadman hymnals—and this hymn, apparently, was not in that great collection.

Our music teacher was a lovely redhaired "old maid schoolteacher", as the older people still dismissively called those women in the profession who weren’t married and parents themselves—Miss Codella. If I remember right, around Thanksgiving of my second or third grade year, she began teaching us the words:

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing
He chastens and hastens His will to make known. . .

Of course, we had no idea what, exactly, the word "chastens" meant, although we had some vague idea that might be what would happen if you got sent to the principal’s office. And the rhyming word "hastens", we eventually figured out, meant "hurry hurry hurry!!!"

When I hear the lyrics, nowadays, I don’t hear it sung in powerful, unmistakably adult voices. I hear it as we sang it, long, long ago—children’s voices, some of them small but true in pitch, others wandering innocent of key but hearty and loud, with Miss Codella’s church-solemn piano for accompaniment, on the old stage in the elementary school auditorium, with its low stage and heavy, dusty blue velvet curtain.

I remember the stage decorations: lots of autumn leaves made of red and orange and yellow cloth, the brown turkeys in their incongruous Pilgrim hats, pumpkins stolid and plain, with no fancy Halloween carvings, and corn, Indian corn, as we called it, its brown and tan and orange and yellow kernels shining out of dry husks and dry stalks standing tall and straight.

I remember the first graders being seated in front of the stage on metal chairs, their feet dangling and their eyes wide, the second graders behind them, the third and fourth graders filing up the steps to the bleachers, then filing back down.

We always had our Thanksgiving program on Wednesday before getting out of school for the long holiday weekend, and turkey and stuffing for lunch that day, and our mouths watered as the program progressed because the lunchroom was just down the hall from the auditorium and we could smell the food being prepared—frankly, about the one time of year lunchroom food was edible.

This Thanksgiving, the old elementary school has been razed, with only a single annex built many years after I was a student there remaining, small and insignificant compared to the new "primary school" looming nearby to accommodate our large and growing population of kindergarteners through second-graders; third and fourth graders, once part of the elementary school, now attend the "intermediate school" a couple of miles away. (Some of them—Lord help us!--are the GRANDchildren of my schoolmates.) Miss Codella, who finally married and with her husband spent many happy years writing gospel songs, has long since passed away. And this morning I got word that a classmate whom I had known from first grade on—redhaired, easygoing Steve, who sang with us on that stage—has passed away of cancer.

I hear us, today, led by Miss Codella’s soprano, as if the years had not intervened.

The wicked oppressing cease now from distressing
Sing praises to His name, He forgets not His own.

This post is a contribution to Take This Tune, a weekly meme hosted by my friend and fellow music lover Jamie. If you would like to participate, please click on the Take This Tune link. Full instructions will be given there.

Winter Waltzes

The cold of approaching winter has finally sneaked into the knobs. Yesterday afternoon my brother-in-law came and turned on the gas heater. This morning the chill is gone from the hardwood floors, and Blackadder seems quite happy (he’s been hinting for a couple of weeks that we really need to turn on the warm!)

And even though snow is quite a ways off (if we get any this winter), I watched the blue flames dance and was reminded of two lovely "winter waltzes", both dear and familiar.

Emil Waldteufel, "Skaters’ Waltz" (1882)






Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky, "Waltz of the Snowflakes" from THE NUTCRACKER (1891-92)





I can imagine dancing through falling snow, coming in breathless and rosy, to settle in with a cup of cocoa, maybe a freshly baked cookie, and a good book—while the snow goes on whirling outside and the flames dance inside.

Good place to be—even if it’s illusory.

Later, dear ones. . .