More Jimmie Skinner: Dark Hollow

I learned this song from a recording by the late north Georgia singer Jim Padgett and his then-wife Mary, back in the early 1980s. It wasn’t until quite recently that I learned it was written and originally recorded by Jimmie Skinner.

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Bedtime Music: Barbara Allen

I’m told that this song–Child Ballad 84–was one of my paternal grandfather’s two favorite songs (the other being the old eerie camp meeting tune “Wayfarin’ Stranger”). “Barbara Allen” first appeared on a broadside c. 1750, but its roots go back at least a century before that. Samuel Pepys, that indefatigable diarist, mentions it as “the little Scotch song of ‘Barbry Allen'” in a January 1666 entry.

There are a number of exceptional recordings of this ballad about a cold, self-absorbed woman who rejects a true love, only to repent when he falls ill and dies. This one, by the great bluegrass singer Mac Wiseman, happens to be my favorite one.

I seem to recall reading once that the great song collector Alan Lomax once received a request from a man in Georgia, from whom Lomax had been collecting songs, to sing “Bob’ry Allen”. The man told him that he had learned the song at his mother’s knee, and although he did not sing it himself, it “seems like ever time I hear it, the hair stands up on the back of my neck.”

There is something a bit hair-raising about this ballad–not in the sense that it’s spooky, but more because it’s so romantic–the last two verses in particular:

She was buried in the old churchyard
And he was buried nigh her
On William’s grave there grew a red rose
On Barbara’s grew a green briar

They grew to the top of the old church tower
Till they could not grow any higher
They lapped and tied in a true lover’s knot
The red, red rose around the briar. . .

These verses are sort of portmanteau ones, appearing in several other traditional ballads (most notably one called “Lord Lovell”, I think), but they seem to fit “Barbara Allen” best of any.

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Doin’ My Time

I was fortunate enough to see the late great Jimmie Skinner in concert when he appeared up on the old baseball field at Tellico, in late summer when I was about to begin my senior year of high school. He was old–nearly seventy–and his strong and distinctive voice was softened by age–but damn, he put on a great show, singing nearly all of the great songs he wrote. This one is one of my favorites of his, probably recorded c. 1950.

On his 1992 album This One’s Gonna Hurt You, Marty Stuart recorded “Doin’ My Time” with Johnny Cash. Here’s a live performance:

On the album this piece begins in a different key and rocks hard, like some of Cash’s old Sun sides. Me, though, I hear Skinner’s influence in both versions.

Skinner was one of the greats, for certain, but not as well remembered as I might wish. 😦

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A Doom in Song

There are many stories of people who, for whatever reason, place curses on the living from their deathbeds. One of the most potent is said to have been placed by accused witch Giles Corey as he was pressed to death in Salem, Massachusetts on September 19, 1692; specifically on Sheriff George Corwin, who was overseeing Corey’s brutal death. George Corwin died a few years after–still a young man–of a sudden massive heart attack. It would seem, though, that the curse followed not only Corwin, but the sheriffs of Salem who came after him. Author Robert Ellis Cahill, one of those sheriffs, has said that he was forced to leave office because of a heart ailment–and so, he says, did all the sheriffs before him for whom cause of death is known.

The following story isn’t quite so dramatic, but when I ran across it recently I was enchanted by it, as a music lover, because the curse was placed in song. It comes from Dane Love’s 1995 Scottish Ghosts and begins with the old truism–it’s hard for two people to keep a secret.

The MacLeans of Brolass, in the Mull district of Scotland, had two lovely daughters of marriageable age. The two were as different as could be in temperament; Elizabeth was easily pleased, it seemed, for she married the first man who proposed to her.

Her younger sister Margaret was another story altogether. Now Margaret–unlike a certain Shakespearean character who had trouble finding a husband–was no shrew, but she flatly refused all offers of marriage. Her parents were angry about this, and frequently called her too picky and ordered her to tell them why she was so against the idea of chosing one of her numerous suitors, but she remained defiant and silent.

The aggrieved parents finally left it up to happily married, wheedling sister Elizabeth, who remained close to Margaret, to get the reason out of her. It was that simplest and most dramatic of all reasons: Margaret was in love, and with a man of whom her parents would never approve. He was a MacDonald, and, unfortunately, the MacLeans of Mull and the MacDonalds were feuding at the time. To avoid complications, and in hopes of making a life together, the Scots Romeo and Juliet were planning to elope, and never return to Mull.

Margaret swore her sister to secrecy, but Elizabeth was one of those constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret, no matter what promises she made. Her bottom didn’t touch the seat of a chair before she confided Margaret’s secret to her husband.

And, unfortunately for Margaret and her lover, Elizabeth had married a man whose bottom didn’t touch the seat of a chair before he was planning to foil the elopement.

The perfidious brother-in-law got together several of Margaret’s rejected suitors, and, on the night when the two made their way to MacDonald’s boat, planning to sail away to a new life together, the posse intercepted them. In the ensuing melee, young MacDonald was stabbed to death. Margaret, screaming and sobbing, flung herself over his corpse, but was dragged away to be taken home in disgrace. She looked back on her dead lover, calling out the dignity of the MacDonalds through her tears, then flung a taunt at brother-in-law and suitors: the conceit of the MacLeans.

Somehow, she managed to break away and ran out onto the moors. Located a few weeks later, she was taken home, but starvation and exposure to the weather had weakened her to the point of death.

On her deathbed, she sang a song in which she foretold her parents’ deaths, Elizabeth’s ruin, and bewailed the loss of her lover.

My mother’s chair is empty, empty and cold,
My father, who loved me, sleeps in death,
My sister, her promise broken, all has told;
I am without kin, without lover, I have only breath.

Sister, may ill befall all that you loved best,
May neither rain nor dew bless the soil you till,
May no child of yours want your arms in rest,
May your cattle find no food upon the hill.

I am searching the moors and the bens,
All the spots where I courted my dear,
I am searching the mountains and the glens,
But he is not here, not here. (Love, pages 175-6)

The song is haunting enough in English; in Scots Gaelic, it would never leave the ear or heart.

Margaret died within hours of singing that song, and the Doom of the MacLeans followed not long after. Her father and mother died within days or weeks of one another, it’s said of grief.

And upon Elizabeth fell the full power of that second verse.

Shortly after Margaret’s death, Elizabeth’s husband left her. Suddenly impoverished–for most likely any property she might have inherited from her parents her husband took out of the marriage–, Elizabeth lived out the rest of her days as a beggar, dying childless and alone.

They say that Elizabeth’s spirit still wanders around Brolass, a quiet shade who no doubt bears a weight of sorrow for the doom her loose lips brought down upon her.

And sometimes, people report hearing a voice singing in the area of the old MacLean home:

Margaret, still singing her curse to the empty air.

Perhaps she sings to remind people of the tragedy a secret thoughtlessly shared can cause.

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For Anna Molly: A “Blue” Song that’s Not So Blue

Over at Much Ado About Nothing my buddy Anna Molly posts a question (check out the comments sections) in which she asks “when’s the last time you heard a song about blue that wasn’t. . .well, blue?”

And I remembered this one, which my beloved Teddy and Doyle Wilburn released as a B side way back in 1957. It’s sung in a bluesy style, but the words aren’t so bluesy.

On the other hand–there are some songs out there that are blue in a somewhat–ahem–pornographic sense, but I don’t think she had those in mind– (^_^) 😀

Anyway, we had this song on an album called Carefree Moments. The whole album (which came out, if I remember right, c. 1959) is a good ‘un, but this is one of the highlights.

Enjoy, AM– 😉

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Sunset in February

Hyacinths have exploded
at the western rim of the world

bells withered to the winking purple
of the sea
lie thin as glass in a straight strand
beneath a sanding of dusty amethyst

a blush of mauve
along reefs of rose pink

crowned with snow cream
stars falling in silver sprinkles
on the last swirl of froth
before the velvet night

Poem copyright 2004/2011 by Faire Lewis

PS Got good news–Mom will be coming home in about three weeks! Been a long while–but things are looking up– 🙂

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Two Love Songs from the Man in Black

It’s a tossup today: I could write about how Al Capone was haunted to his own death by a gangster killed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, or I could post love songs.

Well, I’ve posted bloody Valentines before–

so this year, I’m going with music.

The late Johnny Cash was–and remains, to me and many others–a wonder. He could go from a tough muscular song like “Folsom Prison Blues” or a rudely funny one like “A Boy Named Sue” or a working man’s fantasy like “Oney” without seeming even to draw breath.

And he sang a few devastatingly great love songs too.

One such is “Flesh and Blood”, recorded in 1970 for the soundtrack of a film called I Walk the Line, which starred Gregory Peck and is not to be confused with the 2005 biopic Walk the Line. I’ve always thought that surely JR wrote this for his beloved June Carter. It’s remarkably sweet and tender, and the nature imagery is perfectly suited to the sentiment.

In 1971, Cash recorded “A Thing Called Love”. Written and recorded by Jerry Reed in 1968, it had been recorded by other acts before Cash, but nobody–not even Reed, whose version is gently rueful–ever quite put it across exactly what this thing called love is the way JR did.

(The children’s choir doesn’t hurt either.)

Happy Valentine’s Day, my friends. May love be with you, this day and every day.

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Jack Courage

jealousy is cruel as the grave. . .Song of Solomon 8:6

Jealousy? Temper? Envy? I seem to detect hints of all three in this story from Edinburgh of young love, a forced marriage, and an O. Henry twist of fate.

Way back in 1712, a retired colonial administrator named Thomas Elphinstone bought a home in Edinburgh’s Morningside district. He was a widower, whose wife had died giving birth to a now-grown son. This son was long since on his own in life, and it seems there must have been some friction between him and his father, for reasons that will become clear as our story progresses.

Sir Thomas–he had been knighted for his services to the Crown–was, by this time, a man in his fifties, but he was in love: with a much younger woman called Elizabeth Pittendale. As was often the case in the old days, her family was all in favor of Sir Thomas’s suit, never mind the difference in age.

And never mind that Elizabeth’s heart was given irrevocably to another. At some jollification or other, she had met a dashing young army officer called–surely an unusual name–Jack Courage.

Jack, however, was about to be posted overseas, and her family would, she felt sure, never agree to her marrying him and leaving them, perhaps forever. Their pushing and prodding finally persuaded her that she should do her duty instead of following her heart. She broke off with Jack, and, once he was gone, married Sir Thomas.

She tried hard to be a good wife. Oh, she tried! But the careful pretense she built up of being blissfully happy tumbled down not long after her marriage, for Sir Thomas told her they would soon be getting a visit from his grown son, John. He had been serving abroad in the military and was coming home on furlough.

And–wouldn’t you know, and as you may already have guessed, Dear Reader–she recognized John Elphinstone no sooner than she saw him.

John Elphinstone was none other than the young man to whom she had given her heart: the man she had known as Jack Courage.

I could go off on a long thread of speculation here: perhaps father and son hated each other, with the father blaming the son for the loss of his first wife and the boy’s mother, the boy resenting the father’s undeserved blame; perhaps the boy ran away to join the service, and gave himself a new name in the process. . .or most sinister of all, that Jack Courage knew of his father’s affection for Elizabeth Pittendale and had deliberately courted her under an assumed name. . .

Nothing more than conspiracy theories tricked up in romantic dress, those speculations. Young Jack Courage, it would seem, loved Elizabeth, stepmother or no, as passionately as she loved him.

It followed, perhaps inevitably, that the much older Sir Thomas found his young wife, one day, in a feverish embrace with his son.

Sir Thomas went after his son like a tiger after prey, and Jack fought back with equal fury.

Unfortunately, neither of them reckoned on Elizabeth.

In the course of the fight, Sir Thomas had pulled a knife, and to prevent him from stabbing Jack, Elizabeth stepped in and took the blade through her own heart.

Horrified and heartbroken, Sir Thomas took his own life that same day. Three days later, his shaken son had the bodies of husband and wife placed side by side in the family vault.

John Elphinstone, aka Jack Courage, inherited the house and his father’s fortune, but did not stay in Morningside; he rented the house out to a friend and returned to his military service.

This friend and tenant settled into the house and lived quietly for some time, until, one night, he was surprised to hear footsteps in an upstairs corridor where, he knew, no one was present at the time; all others in the house were downstairs at the time.

The tenant went upstairs and was startled to see a pallid figure walking down the corridor toward one of the bedrooms: a woman, weeping as she went.

Although he wasn’t frightened–or claimed not to be–by this obviously spectral being, the tenant could not help but be moved by her tears and general air of sorrow.

It would be another hundred years and more before spiritualism became widely practiced, but there were those around who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead, and the tenant consulted one such, who told him what he probably should have known before: that the weeping lady was none other than the late Elizabeth Elphinstone. The medium, though, added something interesting: Elizabeth was not able to rest in the family vault, and would not rest, as long as she lay beside the man who had killed her.

The tenant communicated with Jack Elphinstone, who came home and promptly had Elizabeth’s body moved out of the vault, and buried in the nearby churchyard, after which her spirit no longer walked.

When Jack Courage died, a very few years later, he was buried beside his beloved Elizabeth.

Chalk it up to an unnecessarily vivid and romantic imagination, but this story–which comes from Lily Seafield’s 2006 book Ghostly Scotland–reminds me of Doc Watson’s variant of Child Ballad number 81, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”. Doc’s version is called “Little Matty Groves”; in it, the young wife of Lord Daniel falls in love with Matty Groves, much closer to her in age. Lord Daniel catches the pair together and kills Matty in a duel, after which he asks his wife which of them she loves more, himself or Matty Groves.

. . .better I love little Matty Groves than you and all of your kin
Than you and all of your kin

You can dig my grave on a pretty green hill
Dig it wide and deep
And put little Matty Groves in my arms
Lord Daniel at my feet
Lord Daniel at my feet. . .

Yes–jealousy is, indeed, as cruel as the grave, often deadly in its consequences. Sometimes the ghosts of such tragedy continue to walk long after their deaths; others, like Elizabeth, are easily pacified.

And in any case, she rests beside the man with whom she should have shared her life.

Better late, I guess, than never.

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Mirror, Mirror

Nowadays–thanks to Dr. Freud–narcissism is defined as a sort of personality disorder: self-centeredness taken to a pathological point. Freud took the name of the condition from the Greek myth of Narcissus, the beautiful and selfish young man who pined away yearning for the love of his own reflection in a pool of still water.

There’s a ghost story from Ireland about a young woman afflicted with the same illness. She didn’t get her jollies from staring into a pool of still water, though; she had a castleful of mirrors wherein to admire herself. Her absorption in her reflected beauty made her pathologically selfish, and that selfishness cost her–first true love, then her sanity.

As always with James Reynolds’s book Ghosts in Irish Houses (1947), I advise caution; I’ve never found this story in any other source, and have noted before that it’s not always possible to locate the actual physical locations where the ghostly events he writes of took place. Let us specify that he says this story comes from Belvelly Castle in County Cork, where, in the late seventeenth century, there lived a maiden of rare beauty named Margaret Hodnett.

Margaret Hodnett was, without a doubt, the belle of County Cork: wealthy, charming, and a great beauty to boot. She was courted by many men, and by none more assiduously than a neighbor called Clon Rockenby.

Alas, Rockenby truly worshiped the ground under Margaret Hodnett’s dainty feet. . .

while she worshiped naught save her reflection in her myriad mirrors.

These, it’s said, were gifts from the many men she took up with and then cast aside when they began to bore her or–God help them–were not properly reverent of her loveliness. During these little contretemps, she would cast Clon Rockenby aside until her fancy for a new man passed, then call him back. And he always came running. . .

Now Margaret’s favorite mirror was a huge, full-length one from Venice, which gave her back an almost photographically clear reflection whenever she looked into it. She had it hung on a wall just inside Belvelly’s entrance, so that the last thing she saw when she left the castle, and the first when she returned, was her radiant reflection.

Time went on. The faithful Clon Rockenby kept running when she called, hoping that someday her selfish butterfly heart would settle and appreciate his love and devotion and she would at last declare herself his.

Margaret, however, at long last rejected him altogether. She told him she never wanted to see him again, tore up letters he sent her in front of those who delivered them, and, when in disbelief and desperation he called on her himself, slammed the door in his face and shot the bolts home before he could say a word.

please be gone, I’m tired of you. . .

(Okay, no, Stephen Stills really has no place in this story, but it fits 😉 .)

No doubt she thought that, as he had a thousand–or more–times before, he would come running when, in her flightiness, she wanted him again. In this she was sorely mistaken. Clon Rockenby, humiliated and angry, decided he was going to teach this selfish brat a lesson.

So he raised a small army and laid siege to Belvelly Castle, determined to starve them out. He thought, perhaps, that Margaret would give in at the first hint of privation, or that her father–who should have told his flighty daughter a few home truths long before things reached this pass–would come out under a flag of truce and offer his lovely daughter in return for the lifting of the siege.

Lord Hodnett, unfortunately, was as stubborn as his daughter was selfish. Belvelly’s inhabitants held out for three years, eating all the livestock within the castle precincts–and God knows what else–before giving in at last in the third winter of the siege.

Clon Rockenby was the first to enter Belvelly after the surrender, and the first living being he encountered was a mere animated skeleton: Margaret Hodnett herself, so thin the bones showed in every inch of her once lovely face and body. Horrified, he couldn’t speak at first. She, red-eyed and weak almost to the point of death, merely wept and said, See what you have done to me.

And she turned and looked into that great Venetian mirror that still hung in the entrance hall of Belvelly.

The horrified Clon couldn’t stand to look with her at the tottering wreck of her former self. He took his sword by the blade and swung it; the heavy hilt shattered the mirror into a million fragments, whereupon Margaret screamed and fainted.

He carried her outside, and ordered his army to carry food and other necessities into the castle. He was tending Margaret himself, tenderly feeding her a little broth and crooning incoherent love words and self-reproaches and reproaches to her when he died.

Margaret’s younger brother, with some last reserve of strength, had pulled himself up to the roof of Belvelly, carrying a bow and arrow. Despite his starved state, he had enough strength to fit an arrow into the bow and fire it at Clon Rockenby, hitting him in the cheek and slicing through an artery in his face.

Clon’s last words were for Margaret Hodnett.

Margaret, with my last breath I curse you. May you seek for mirrors forever, and never find them.

Margaret Hodnett, it’s said, never regained her beauty, nor did she ever marry. For many years, she would not have a mirror anywhere near her. In her later years, she suffered from dementia, and only then, with her mind wandering, would she allow mirrors in Belvelly again: small ones, in which she vainly sought to see if, miraculously, her beauty had returned.

Toward the end of her life, she lived in a barred room in the castle. The servants feared that she might do herself harm otherwise.

She has haunted Belvelly ever since her death. She appears in the entrance hall where, so long ago, Clon Rockenby had smashed her favorite mirror to pieces–a lady in white, who sometimes wears a thick veil over her face, or sometimes is said to have no face at all; it is obscured by a luminous mist.

One thing she does, all who have seen her agree on: she rubs a place on the wall, in the exact spot where the Venetian mirror once hung, and then peers at that spot as if looking at herself. Rumor has it that she has rubbed a shiny spot on the stone wall over the years. . .

a shiny spot that looks like a mirror–and has been known to throw back the reflections of passersby.

FWIW, I was reminded of this story while watching an old episode of a 1990s TV series called Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?. One of the featured stories (told for true, and alleged to have happened somewhere in Florida c. 1970) was about a self-absorbed beauty on whom a curse was placed–I curse you with the mirror of your soul– and who ever after saw a hideously ugly, almost monstrous face every time she looked in the mirror, though to others she looked the same as she always had.

Huh–a bit like the picture of Dorian Gray–

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A Promise Kept: Savannah’s Sweetheart of Mankind

This is not the story I intended to write today; but this one has a sort of naive charm all its own. Someday, I’ll get to Savannah, and when I do, I’ll pay my respects to Florence Martus, the Sweetheart of Mankind.

Down in the haunted city of Savannah, they refer to the late Florence Martus either as “Savannah’s Waving Girl” or, more evocatively, as “the Sweetheart of Mankind”. Her story so touches those in the city near where she spent forty-four years waving to passing ships that, thirty years after her death, they placed a statue of her on River Street.

Florence was a lovely young girl of eighteen when she moved with her older brother to his new job as the lightkeeper on Elba Island, seven miles out from town in Savannah harbor. It was sometime after that move that she met a young merchant seaman; they fell in love. They were engaged when her lover sailed away on another voyage. She made him a promise before he left that, come sunshine or storm, she would go out and wave her apron, greeting every passing ship until he returned.

That was the last she ever saw of him. Perhaps his ship was lost at sea; perhaps he fell ill and died far from home; perhaps he found a sweetheart in some foreign port and forgot Florence entirely. In any case, he never returned.

Florence, however, was faithful until death and beyond to her promise.

She would go out every time a ship passed the lighthouse and wave her apron in greeting, hoping against hope that one of the ships coming into the harbor would be the one that brought her true love home. More than once, over the years, she and her brother weathered storms that might have killed them had they not been sheltered in the bulk of the lighthouse, but when the wind and surge settled down and the sun came out, she was back out greeting incoming ships.

The men aboard the ships always returned her greetings. None of those men, sadly, was her fiance.

She kept up that promise for forty-four years, from 1887 to 1931, when her brother reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy and moved away.

Florence died in 1943. She has never been forgotten in Savannah, though. Nearly thirty years after her death, she was honored with a statue of her, waving her apron over her head as if greeting a ship, that stands in a plaza on River Street.

Sometimes, though, a report comes in from the harbor itself that a ship passing by Elba Island has spotted Florence, in front of her old home hard by the lighthouse, waving her apron as she did for so many years.

They still wave back. 🙂

I first read Florence Martus’s sweet sad story in Nancy Rhyne’s 1985 book Coastal Ghosts. Her story is also told by Nancy Roberts in Georgia Ghosts (1997).

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