"and we know every inch of the way / from albany to buffalo / low bridge, everybody down"

[larryhammer]

TBD is in a phase of demanding we sing to her frequently, and I've taken to ransacking leafing through our folk song collections for something, anything, that I remember from my childhood. "The Grandfather Clock" was a nice rediscovery, as was "Erie Canal."* Aside from the problem of not having the True, Correct Version of "Froggy Went a-Courting,"** there is a significant omission from all of them -- none seem to have this favorite:

White coral bells upon a slender stalk,
Lilies-of-the-valley deck my garden walk.
Oh, don't you wish that you could hear them ring?
That will happen only when the fairies sing.

Does anyone else know this round? Or other, similar bits of loveliness?


* Original title: "Low Bridge, Everybody Down." Huh. Also, originally three verses instead of two.

** The one from an old Pete Seeger LP with the chorus "Here's to Cheshire, here's to cheese / here's to the pears and the apple trees / and here's to the lovely strawberries / ding-dang-dong went the wedding bells."

---L.

Subject quote from "Low Bridge, Everybody Down," Thomas S. Allen.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

My fave as a little kid was "The Ash Grove." Still remember it!

[larryhammer]

Which version? There seem to be a plethora of lyrics for that.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The Oxenford is the one taught to school kids in the fifties.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

"White Coral Bells" was a Girl Scout song for me--how well I remember those high chiming voices in rounds. I always thought the line was "lilies of the valley in my garden walk," sort of Ent-like flowers.

[larryhammer]

Googling, one finds many variations: "deck," "down," "in," "line," et cet.

Girl Scout voices could do lovely things with that! It was usually just my mother and I.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! I'd forgotten that--it is so beautiful in round!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Did your Girl Scout companions sing the other version of it?

Lace underpants upon a laundry line
Polka-dot pajamas--oh my gosh, they're mine!
Oh don't you wish that you could wear them too?
But that will happen only when the seat wears through.

Oh, Girl Scouts.

[larryhammer]

LOL!

[kate_nepveu]

Because I didn't grow up in New York, my first experience with "Erie Canal" was when Bruce Springsteen was touring with the Seeger Sessions band and we went to see them outdoors in Saratoga, and suddenly in response to the first line, which I don't recognize at all, _every person on the lawn_ is singing along.

I used to sing the kids "Brokedown Palace" when walking the floor with them as infants. Then they demanded I not sing to them at all, though this seems to have passed recently.

[larryhammer]

I'm pretty sure it's not just a New York thing: it was taught and retaught by adults in the Washington, DC area in the '70s.

Heh. Appropriate song.

---L.

[kate_nepveu]

Well, if we were taught it in MA it entirely failed to stick, and I think I'd probably remember it.

Yes, I made a point of not singing them anything I didn't agree with the lyrics to, which rules out, e.g,. "You Are My Sunshine."

[larryhammer]

Yeah, that. I'm still trying to come up with an alternate line for the ants when they come marching seven by seven.

---L.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

I learned it from my fourth-grade teacher and I grew up in Michigan, although there's still a Great Lakes connection there, obviously.

My best friend's older daughter absolutely loved "The Wee Cooper of Fife" as a baby. (Now that she and her younger sister are old enough to understand lyrics, that one is out of the rotation.)

[larryhammer]

Heh.

[genarti]

Ha, yes. I love the tune! I'd mostly heard it as an instrumental piece. And then I looked up the lyrics, and... well, I still love the tune! Sometimes I'll sing the first verse to myself, but that's about it.

[larryhammer]

*wry smile*

My current version of "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater" ends:

She went to live in a pumpkin shell
And there she lived her very well.

[genarti]

Ha. Very much improved! I'll have to keep that in mind in case I ever find myself called upon to recite that one.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

That's a good one.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I learned "Erie Canal" plus a number of similar tunes, including things like "Country Roads" by John Denver, in grade school in Idaho and Alabama.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My third grade teacher taught us White Coral Bells - but I think not as a round.

Do you have a copy of Rise Up Singing? (Songbook from Sing Out! amagzine) It's great for singable stuff - old songs, protest songs, sixties stuff like Four Strong Winds and so on. It mostly only has guitar chords, no music, but if there's anything in there you like but don't know there's some guy who has a project to learn and play every one of its 1200 songs on Youtube.

[larryhammer]

No, we don't. That sounds like something worth having.

We've started playing a Pete Seeger station on Pandora for background music.

---L.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

This (http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Up-Singing-Group-Songbook/dp/1881322149/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422549238&sr=8-1&keywords=rise+up+singing) is the edition I have currently (my third! I wore one out and lost another somewhere in my many moves). THey claim it's large print but the actual print size doesn't seem annoyingly or especially big to me - the book itself is larger but it may be thinner.

There was a homemade Quaker songbook somewhere in the 1970s called WInds of the People. Someone in my college dorm had, not the book, but photocopies of most of it, and we used to sing from those. Rise Up Singing, an expanded version of Winds of the People, was first issued somewhere in the 1980s. I came across it on a table at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and was literally jumping up and down in glee when I realized what it was and that I could buy my own copy. It's been reissued a couple of times since, with improvements made to it (better indexing, for one thing). If you google Rise Up Singing Project, you can find the Youtube project I mentioned earlier (the guy's name is Matthew Vaughan) which should give you more idea of the songs in it.

(Disclaimer: I have no relationships with the songbook or its editors; I just love it.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

ETA: On their website, riseupandsing.org, the editors Annie Patterson & Peter Blood specifically say "We are working with many others to carry on the life-long work of Pete & Toshi Seeger, empowering people to create a better world through singing together. This site provides resources and support for this work. " THey're putting together another songbook, Rise Again, with another 1200 songs including some more modern ones, and Pete Seeger wrote the preface for that.

(THey will have a dilemma, though: if I recall correctly, Stan Rogers' song Mary_Ellen Carter, whence the "Rise Again" chorus comes, is in the *first* book!)

[larryhammer]

I met it at, well, Quaker Meeting (in St. Louis -- my local meeting is not much into songs). Been years since I thought of it.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that one! From elementary school music classes maybe?

ETA: Oh, yes, Rise Up Singing! You are exactly the people who should have that, if you don't already.

[larryhammer]

Which we don't. Something to rectify soon.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I don't know the missing verse, but it is lovely!

And I have that Erie Canal song! And my playlist for a CD for you guys is just about complete :-)

[larryhammer]

*\o/*

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

White coral bells is one of my favorite camp rounds. I miss lilies of the valley.

[larryhammer]

So do I -- we had some in our back yard, so I knew what we were singing about.

---L.

[genarti]

I love that round!

When I was young, we had a songbook-and-cassette thing called Wee Sing. (There were also some sequels, I believe.) I suspect there's a lot of overlap between that and a) Girl Scout and Boy Scout camp songs, and b) Rise Up Singing. The songbook contained multiple verses to longer songs; the singers on the accompanying tape tended to sing a verse or two and then move on to the next. That did give me a certain tendency to drive my mother crazy by insisting that we couldn't possibly sing the later verses, that was NOT CORRECT, we had to segue straight on to the next song in the tape's rotation!, but other than that it was a big hit with the whole family, and I can still sing a lot of them.

Hmm, what else. Everything you mention, yes. My parents sang me a lot of Scottish folk songs, especially "Skye Boat Song" (minus the bloodier Culloden verses), which they sang to me in my cradle a lot.

"All The Pretty Little Horses." "I Gave My Love A Cherry." "The Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly." "Fox Went Out." Plenty of others I can't think of at the moment!

[larryhammer]

Oh, yes, "Swallowed a Fly" -- I'd forgotten that one. And "Fox Went Out" (though I never sang that as much).

---L.