Dusty Springfield

Songs to drive the cold winter away

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

I am not one who makes much of the festive season, but inspired by the example of my favourite blog, Thom Hickey’s Immortal Juke Box, here are five favourite Christmas songs. No Neil Diamond or Mariah Carey here.

Five

The King, sung here by Canadians Loreena McKennitt and Cyril Smith, from Loreena’s Christmas album To Drive the Cold Winter Away, hails from a long tradition of “Wren King” songs. The king of the title is the wee wren, “the king of all birds”, as many old songs tell it. Through December until Twelfth Night (the sixth of January), it was common among Celtic-speakers in Brittany, Wales, Manx, Scotland, and Ireland for children and adults to cruise their neighbourhoods cadging food, money or booze in return for seeing a Wren that they had captured. This particular “King Wren” song dates from the eighteenth century, although the heavy weaponry was added in the nineteenth.

Health, love and peace be all here in this place
By your leave we shall sing, concerning our King
Our King is well-dressed in silks of the best
In ribbons so rare no king can compare
We have travelled many miles over hedges and stiles
In search of our King unto you we bring.
We have powder and shot to conquer the lot
We have cannon and ball to conquer them all.
Old Christmas is past, twelve tide is the last
And we bid you adieu, great joy to the new

Four

Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.  Northumbrian Kate Rusby’s rendering of the old English carol The Holly and the Ivy is gorgeous. I reblogged Thom Hickey’s tribute to this lovely song earlier this month. It is worth another look and listen. The lyrics are so bucolic, so timeless:

The rising of the sun
The running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing in the choir

Three

Loreena sings a lovely version of The Wexford Carol on her Christmas album. But Christmas songs don’t get much more beautiful than this beautiful version by American bluegrass diva Ali Krauss and cellist virtuoso Yo Yo Ma. The carol is believed to have originated in twelfth century Ireland in my mother’s home town of Inis Córthaidh.

Two

In 1961, Dusty Springfield was but a young lass, but even back then, she had a fabulous voice! I was twelve years old and this was the first time I’d heard the Springfields, the Americanesque folk trio founded by her brother Tom. It was the beginning of unrequited puppy-love that ended when I heard the Bobster’s Love Minus Zero No Limit – see my reverie What’s Bob Got to Do With It?  Dusty went on to become one of the greatest soul singers of all time, and Tom gave the world The Seekers. He adapted Bambino from a traditional Italian carol, just as he was later to transform a Russian folk-song into The Carnival is Over.

Santo natale bambino mio…
To you and all mankind,
To you and all mankind, maybe,
And from strife we shall be free.

One

It’s been voted the best Christmas song of all time – in the U.K, that is, because Americans don’t get it, as The Independent discovered – and, yes, it’s my number one because it IS the best Christmas song of all time. And yet, it seems, the “bah humbug!” straighteners and virtue signallers are out to get it, as reported recently by Aussie writer Mark Mordue: Sanitize Clause would rob a Christmas ballad of its soul.

The irascible, untuneful, dentally-disadvantaged Shane McGowan and his hot ceilidh band hit the big time with this “Christmas Eve in the drunk tank” shanty, wonderfully aided and abetted by the gorgeous and doomed Kirsty MacColl, who could’ve been famous but for a rich Mexican in a speedboat. The repartee between these loser-lovers is up there with Burton and Taylor:

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you…

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

When it comes to a Christmas song, how low can you Go? And, as the band kicks in with the accordion and pipes, how high can you fly?

Happy Christmas.

Back In The Day

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

I was in love with Dusty Springfield. In the drear tea-time of my adolescent soul, I worshiped her truly, madly, deeply. Tiny girl, big hair, panda eyes, hands moving like a beckoning siren. I just had to hear “da da da da da da” and then “I don’t know what it is that makes me love you so…” and I was hers for the next two and a half minutes. Until…

It was one of those beautiful late-spring evenings that you would get in the England of memory. The evening sun poured through the gothic stained glass windows of the school library – it was one of those schools. A group of lower sixth lads, budding intellectuals all, as lower sixth tended to be, gathered for a ‘desert island disks” show-and tell of their favourite records. Mine was ‘Wishin’ and Hopin‘ by you know who. Then it was on to the next. Clunk, hiss,  guitar intro, and: “My love she speaks like silence, without ideas or violence, she doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, but she’s true like ice, like fire…” Bob had arrived, and I was gone, far gone. So was Dusty.

dusty

I bought a guitar. A clunky, eastern European thing. I tried ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, but what came out was unrecognisable. My dad said he’d break it over my head. One day, that tipping point was reached. It sounded indeed like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, or something similar. I was away, and the rest, as they say, was hearsay.

Young Bob

On a  high of hope and hype, so it all began. With a heritage of Irish rebel songs and folksongs, and the ‘sixties folkie canon (but never, ever ‘Streets of London’). Sea shanties, a capella Watersons, Sydney Carter’s faith-anchored chants, ‘The Lord of the Dance’ being the most beloved (a song now and forever burdened with the curse of Michael Flatley). Across the pond, young Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary decanted fine old wine into new bottles, and during the Easter CND march in London in 1966, billeted in an old cinema in Southall, a first public ‘performance’ with Ewan MacColl’s “Freeborn Man of the Traveling People”. The journey had begun, and, as the father of America poetry had crooned, “Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose”.

And it led beside strange waters. “Marc Bolan warbled “My people were fair, and had sky in their hair, but now they’re content to wear crowns stars on their brows“. But didn’t they all in the days when Tolkien was king, and elves and ents walked amongst us. We thoroughly understood and empathized. And we marveled at the Scottish bard who could pen ‘The Minotaur’s Song‘ and ‘Job’s Tears‘, and then run off with Old Father Hubbard. Then Roy Harper, the high priest of Anglo angst, sang ‘McGoohan’s Blues’, a twenty minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable television series. “The Prisoner is taking his shoes off to walk in the rain”.

Unicorn(Album)

‘The Songs of Leonard Cohen’ played in every wannabe poet’s bedsit. “Come over to the window, my little darlin’. I’d like to try and read your palm“. What a pick-up line, so fitting for the generous times that were the ‘sixties. Others might sigh over the agonies of ‘The Stranger Song’, and ‘The Stories of the Street’. But I preferred the drollery of “Sometimes I see her undressing for me; she’s the sweet, fragrant lady love meant her to be“. And the wondrous punch-line of ‘Chelsea Hotel #2‘, that gorgeous tribute to the peerless Janis: not what happened on the unmade bed, but “we are ugly, but we have the music”. Bob segued from folk to rock, carrying with him many if not all of acolytes on the joker man’s journey from “Oxford Town” to “Desolation Row”. To this day, people ponder the meaning of “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule”‘ and marvel at “The ghosts of electricity howl in the bones of her face“.

HangmansBeautifulDaughter

Read on in the full Introduction to In That Howling Infinite – Poems of Paul Hemphill, Volume Five

© Paul Hemphill 2013.  All rights reserved.

What’s Bob Got To Do With It?

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

 

Or, ‘How I  came to  write songs and play guitar’

I was in love with Dusty Springfield. In the drear tea-time of my adolescent soul, I worshiped her truly, madly, deeply. Tiny girl, big hair, panda eyes, hands moving like a beckoning siren. I just had to hear “da da da da da da” and then “I don’t know what it is that makes me love you so…” and I was hers for the next two and a half minutes. Until…

It was one of those beautiful late-spring evenings that you would get in the England of youthful memory. The evening sun poured through the gothic stained glass windows of the school library – it was one of those schools. A group of lower sixth lads, budding intellectuals all, as lower sixth tended to be, gathered for a ‘desert island disks” show-and tell of their favourite records.

Mine was Wishin’ and Hopin” by you know who. Then it was on to the next. Clunk, hiss, electric guitar intro, and: “My love she speaks like silence, without ideas or violence, she doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, but she’s true like ice, like fire…” I was gone, far gone. So was Dusty.

I bought a guitar. A clunky, eastern European thing. I tried Blowin’in the Wind, but what came out was unrecognisable. My dad said he’d break it over my head. One day, that tipping point was reached. It sounded indeed like Blowin’ in the Wind, or something similar. I was away, and the rest, as they say, was hearsay.