Sweet Baby James

I've been reading Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers rather slowly. Today I came to Frankley's poem about Saint Brendan, with its interesting rhyme scheme:

We sailed for a year and a day and hailed

no field nor coast of men;

no boat nor bird saw we ever afloat

for forty days and ten.

As you can see, in the first and third lines of every quatrain, the first foot (not the second as in limericks) rhymes with the fourth. Sometimes this is done in a very clever way which would not have been possible if rhymes came only at the ends of lines:

We turned away, and we left astern

the rumbling and the gloom;

then the smoking cloud asunder broke,

and we saw that Tower of Doom:

What this made me think of, oddly, was the James Taylor song "Sweet Baby James." In my 2019 post "The rhyme burden of various poetic forms," I had noted the song's rhyme scheme as being slightly more challenging to write in than the ottava rima of Byron's Don Juan. (By the metric used in that post, the rhyme burden of ottava rima is 0.35, while "Sweet Baby James" is 0.357. Frankley's poem is 0.429, the same as a Spenserian sonnet.) 

These thoughts led me to listen to "Sweet Baby James," and some of the lyrics hit differently than they had in the past -- "Good night, you moonlight ladies," for instance. What really got my attention was this verse, though:

There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway

A song that they sing when they take to the sea

A song that they sing of their home in the sky

Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to see

But singing seems to work fine for me

In "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy," I wrote about the song the ransomed sing as they return via a "highway" which is actually the sea. And of course this "sea" may in fact be a figurative reference to outer space, hence the song "of their home in the sky." In that post, the ransomed are portrayed as singing yaks, tying in with the cattle-herding theme of "Sweet Baby James."

New moon shine

The new moon doesn't shine, at least not perceptibly. I suppose in theory it provides a bit of double-reflected Earthshine, but in practice a new moon is invisible, indistinguishable from no moon at all. Therefore, references to the light of the new moon tend to be few and far between.

Last night, I was reading Koté Adler's Timelock. The main character, Alik, is on board an enormous spaceship, all alone until he discovers, of all things, a small yellow bird flying through it. (This was a minor sync in itself. A few nights ago I watched the 2016 film Arrival, in which humans repeatedly board an enormous alien spaceship to learn to communicate with the aliens and always bring with them a small caged bird. The yellowness of the bird also hints at my tiny yellow pterodactylus; I used to have dreams of following it, like Alik, into the unknown.)

Alik follows the bird:

Eventually the corridor widened wider and wider until the oriented ceiling vanished altogether explosing a vast, unexplored, weightless, void-like space. The bird sailed into the dimly lit abyss, leaving Alik at the mouth of the corridor wondering and staring into the darkness. There was light emanating, somewhere within the blackness, but it was barely perceptible. . . . its soft halide glow washed through the room like the shallow fingers of a pool. It was the light of a new moon, present but just barely (p. 185-186).

This evening I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post, "The Water Is Wide," about the James Taylor song of that name. He mentions the album it is from:

The name of the album is "New Moon Shine".  In terms of links to my topics here, and even about being able to cross this sea, this title could refer to both a stone (The Moon or Ithil Stone shining) as well as a drink (Moonshine is traditionally used in the US to describe liquor that is made and sold illegally).

Also, in the upper left is a symbol like an eclipse that I think has come up before on WJT's blog, and others he has cited, though I can't remember right now in what context or why important; so just pointing it out.

I like James Taylor -- "Sweet Baby James" was my lullaby in infancy -- but I've only posted his music here once. It was "Down in a Hole," from New Moon Shine, with the album cover visible in the post. This was in the November 2020 post "Coming up for air." This same post also featured a page from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, saying, "Mr. Fox! I hate this game, sir." I reposted this image almost exactly three years later, in "'Tim' and The Key," and it was then referenced by William Wright in "A battle of wits."

"The Water Is Wide" is well done, but my own personal favorite version of that song will always be the one sung by Cedric Smith and Loreena McKennitt:

In fact, William's references to stones and moonshine actually fit this version's lyrics better:

Now in Kilkenny, it is reported

They've marble stones there as black as ink

With gold and silver I would transport her

But I'll sing no more now, till I get a drink

I'm drunk today, but then I'm seldom sober . . .

Safka's Dylan

While most of the luminaries of the the '60s and '70s pop music scene were represented in my parents' record collection, conspicuous by his absence was the inimitable Bob Dylan, for whom they both professed (and still profess!) an especial dislike. (My father liked to tell a story about how his college roommate had put up a big poster of Dylan on his side of the room, and how he had retaliated by putting up an even bigger poster of the Ideal Beef Steer on his, which I guess showed him!) Like acorns that have to be boiled and drained and reboiled before they begin to approach edibility, Dylan songs were deemed to be fit for human consumption only after they had been processed and reconstituted by the likes of Peter, Paul, and Mary -- and that was the only way I ever heard them throughout my childhood. (I remember the frisson of discovering a tune called "It's a-hard, and it's hard" in one of my banjo books and realizing it might be the mysterious and much-maligned "Eets-a harrd" song of Dylan's, but it turned out to be some unrelated Woody Guthrie thing.)

So naturally, as soon as I was old enough to start acquiring my own music collection, I began cultivating a taste for Dylan -- perhaps the only teenager in history to choose that particular way of rebelling against his Boomer parents! -- and a concomitant disdain for easy-listening covers, which increasingly struck me as vaguely gauche, like fruit-flavored beer. No Byrds, no Peters, no Pauls, and no Marys, thank you, and may God forgive Ritchie Blackmore!

The first crack in my zero tolerance for Dylan covers appeared in 2004 when I discovered a reworking of the Dylan fragment "Wagon Wheel" by the old-timey LARP group Old Crow Medicine Show -- which happened to be playing on the radio as I was packing my suitcases at the start of my Wanderjahre, and which became a sort of private theme song for a good long time.

But for a long time that remained an isolated exception, made for sentimental reasons, to an otherwise ironclad preference for the Man Himself.

⁂

It wasn't until years later that I became aware of the existence of one Melanie Safka, who was apparently known as plain Melanie back in the day. I first encountered her through her version of “Ruby Tuesday,” which I love and hate at the same time, that voice almost — almost — being enough to persuade me to forgive the nonchalant vandalization of Keef’s perfect lyrics. Such other pieces of hers as I happened upon left me similarly ambivalent. "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" for example, is undeniably a work of talent but can, I think, only be fully appreciated by a genuine member of the Woodschlock generation -- which I, for all my anachronistic listening habits, am not.

The first Safka piece that really got my attention and won her my full respect was her heartbreaking rendition of James Taylor's "Carolina in My Mind" (ain't it just like a friend of mine to knife me in the gut?).

After hearing that, I was willing to take a deep breath and give her Dylan remakes a try -- and, well, all is forgiven. She demonstrates an undeniable right to reinterpret the master, making each song her own and creating pieces that are as beautiful in their way as the originals are in theirs. (I had originally written "perfect" instead of "beautiful," but of course that would be a singularly inappropriate adjective to apply to the rough-edged, organic, imperfect genius of either Safka or Dylan.)