Our friend (Abu-Ramâdi), commenting on a piece below, remarked:
“a world with only a few songs that everyone perfects as they were written would be a very dull world”.
Taken literally, that may well be; but the fantasy was a parable. Perhaps, indeed, such a world (unimaginable in these channel-surfing times) would be one of continuous religious ecstasy. As when, grasping the rosary, to tell your beads, you say the same prayer (Ave Maria) over and over; you don’t vamp it, or come up with variations so as not to be bored.
The strict Muslim practice of banning secular music, yet allowing the lilting tajwîd cantillation of the sacred text, corresponds pretty neatly with what I envision, and sometimes desire.
For we do not lack for tunes and variations, riffs and interpretations -- those we have in spades. What we have lost is a sense of what needs to be sung -- like the monk at his matins, faithful each day, the dawn not yet softening the sky.
*
At summer camp, they taught us just a handful of songs. But they were good ones, and we sang them over and over, and they never left us, we sing them yet -- sing them soundlessly, in our dreams; as a sound-track to our prayers. Half a century after I first learned them, they still echo -- much as in the parable imagined earlier.
One, for some reason, seized me today:
If you want …. to get to Heaven,
way out on …. the other shore:
Keep out ‘the way of the long-tongued liars --
O good shepherd, Feed my sheep.
(singin’)
One for Paul, and One for Si-las,
One for to make-a my heart re-joice!
Cán’t yóu héar, the lambs a- crying??
Oh good shepherd, Feed my sheep !
Da capo al fine; but with a switch: now we are warned against the shotgun devils; now the blood-stained bandits; and now…
At the time, I was unchurched. I knew not of that Silas, who walked with Paul; nor that Paul who had been Saul; nor of Him who had effected that great change. And we -- not yet having flowered into those first inklings of man’s estate -- we knew nothing of shotgun devils, we’d never met them, nor of the other strangely-named dangers evoked in the song. But it all sank in, deepening our souls, like digging a well, till you hit water.
Bless the Counselors that taught us these things! Bless them, abundantly bless !!!
*
I sought the lyrics on the Web, but was unable to find them in full. There’s a version by the Jefferson Airplane, a valid re-imagining:
(studio version)
But its verse-count is limited, and it moves to the jittery rhythms of adolescing, not as the sough of the docile sea of ten-year-olds, digesting their dinners, patiently learning and maturing, with a whole evening to kill. And therein they lose something; for a chief delight of the song is that recurring molossus, which can be indefinitely extended, like the cockleshells motif.
So now I,
as a public service,
do here dip my scoop into those same waters, running dark and deep,
and cull up the like admonitions, some old, some new,
to be sung by whoever is so moved.
Teach it to your children, teach it to your campers,
sing it till the sun sets on the world …
If you w-a-n-t …. to get to: Heaven,
way out o-n … the other shore:
keep out - ‘the way -- nay nay, stay away! -- from:
the flat-foot shamblers,
the dead-eyed gamblers,
the hot-breath’d wooers,
the talk-not-do-ers,
the bent-back-biters,
the work-shy slighters,
the loud decriers,
the Christ-deniers
O ! good shepherd:: Feed: My: Sheep !
Postscript:
Our folklorist colleague, Doctor Erika, writes in with a reference to a 1933 recording (the earliest she has heard), in which one of the mysterious dangers to watch out for is the “Blood-Strained Banders” (sic, sic). You can listen to some of it here:
Not entirely sure who these might be (making the sign of the cross here), but they sound like the forebears of the Dementors (and most unlike the quality of mercy).
Anyhow, by searching on this ominous phrase, I was able to find another performance,
Anyhow, by searching on this ominous phrase, I was able to find another performance,
where, however, the portentous peril has been domesticated into the familiar “blood-stained bandits” (an annoying but relatively anodyne inconvenience of any high-road). Personally I hang tough to the lectio difficilior from that earlier time: and shall shun those crafty banders -- shun them as we must shun sin -- blood-strained as they be in their impiety and impenitence, whene’er the pale moon casts the shadow of the hanging-tree athwart the crossroads …
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