Snowbird

A version recorded live for a CoastFM Live Lounge session. Words and music (such as it is) by me. A few rough patches but the guitar is mostly in good shape: I’m really going to have to record this properly one day.

Backup:

I’ve got me a golden needle to help me tie my threads
I’ve got a bottle for my baby and a blanket for my head

So lay down, lay down mama, lay down and let me be
Somehow I feel like old cold turkey has his claws in me

If I had a silver dollar like I had one thin dime
You know I’d clip that turkey’s wings with another shot of turpentine

And if I had me a roll as thick as my right leg
You know I’d fly back up up country like a snowbird to its nest

I’m going back right now, back to my daddy’s farm
If I can find me a rag to bind up my right arm

Soul food when I’m hungry, white lightning when I’m dry
And maybe I’ll get to feeling better by and by

So lay down mama, lay down and let me be
Somehow I feel like old cold turkey has its claws in me

Another song I’ve written several times: basically, I wanted to do something based on the Cocaine Blues/Honey Take a Whiff on Me theme. Eventually this version popped out as a (more or less) eight bar blues around 1976.

David Harley

My Boy Jack [demo]

My setting of the poem ‘My Boy Jack’ by Rudyard Kipling: I was looking at a couple of projects to coincide with the centenary of the ending of the Great War, but this is the only one that’s actually been heard in public.

It’s often assumed that the poem refers to the loss of Kipling’s son John, presumed killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. The confusion was probably increased by the TV adaptation of David Craig’s play, which missed out the 3rd Act and finished with Kipling reciting the poem. However, while Kipling’s own grief did, no doubt, contribute to the overall tone of the poem, it was first published at the top of a series of articles on the Battle of Jutland, in which the British fleet sustained heavy losses, and it seems to me (and others) that, given the importance of ‘the tide’ in the poem, that the name Jack probably reflects the more generic ‘Jack Tar’. (While the earlier ‘Tommy’ has a very different tone, it does use the generic name ‘Tommy Atkins’ in a somewhat similar way.)

The guitar is a Nashville-strung Baby Taylor. I think the final version of this might have include some double- or triple-tracked vocals. Even if it doesn’t, the vocal needs work.

Backup:

‘My Boy Jack’
1914-18

“HAVE you news of my boy Jack? ”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide. 

Song of Chivalry (live version)

Recorded during my recent ‘Live Lounge’ session with Ian Semple at CoastFM.

Originally published as a poem in Vertical Images 2, 1987.  I waited 30+ years for the melody to turn up, and finally did a make-it-up-as-you-go-along job earlier this year.

And yes, I know that it’s unlikely that M’Lord fought both at Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). While the Black Death subsided in England from about 1350, outbreaks continued beyond the first half of the 15thcentury. I’m not sure how likely it was that M’Lord slept on silk sheets, but it’s a metaphor, not a history lesson…

When M’Lord returned
To his sheets of silk
And his gentle lady
Of musk and milk

The minstrels sang
In the gallery
Their songs of slaughter
And chivalry

The rafters roared
With laughter and boasting
Goblets were raised and drained
In toasting

The heroes of Crécy
And Agincourt
Or the madness
Of some holy war

The hawk is at rest
On the gauntlet once more
Savage of eye
And bloody of claw

Famine and fever
Are all the yield
Of the burnt-out barns
And wasted fields

The sun grins coldly
Through the trees
The children shiver
The widows grieve
And beg their bread
At the monastery door
Tell me then
Who won the war?

David Harley