"and brought him strings and ceiling wax / and other fancy stuff"

[larryhammer]

I've been monkeying around with the folk process again. My current favorite bedtime song* is "O Shenandoah," to the tune found in one of TBD's song books with extended verses from a book of sailor shanties. Only, I've been reordering the verses and monkeying with the words, to unkink the narrative line, such as it remains. In my defense, in its sea-shanty life,** the leader constantly changed up the free lines anyway (the refrains, when sailors pulled, were fixed solid), so I figure I can continue that license.

Anyway, here's how I'm singing it now:

O Shenandoah, I long to see you
Way away, you rolling river
O Shenandoah, I long to see you
Away, I'm bound away
Across the wide Missouri

O Shenandoah, I love your daughter (x2)

O Shenandoah, I'll not deceive you
O Shenandoah, for I must leave you

O Shenandoah, I've got a notion
To sail across the stormy ocean

O Shenandoah, time 's come between us
It's seven years since last you've seen us

O Shenandoah, I long to see you (x2)

It makes a good lullaby, with its deep slow lines.


* TBD's favorite is unclear. Or possibly it constantly shifts.

** It started as a fur-trapper ballad about a white man who falls in love with a native chief's daughter, became a shanty (hauling song) on the Mississippi river boats, then migrated to the ocean in the mid-19th century.

---L.

Subject misquoted from "Puff the Magic Dragon," another bedtime song.

Comments

[paulakate.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that link!

[larryhammer]

It's a tasty work of musical folklore.

---L.