“Once I Had a Sweetheart” (Director’s Cut)]

 

(Chatbot & Schwärmer:  an improbable duet)

 

dj] In the stirring versions of Carolyn Hester (1962) and later Joan Baez (1963) and Marianne Faithful (1965), the song opens thus:

 

Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none.

Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none.

He’s gone and leave me, he’s gone and leave me,

gone and leave me   in sorrow to moan.

 

The crux for us is the grammar of the verb-phrase “He’s gone and leave me”.

Here “gone and” is a sort of periphrastic auxiliary, like “up and”.  But though both are colloquial, the latter is normally followed by a preterite:

“He up and left”/ “took and left”, and variants.

 

What then is the philological pedigree of the present tense in the Hester version (the actual temporal reference  still being present, or present-perfective)?

 

That is the question for yourself.  An afternote:

 

A curious aspect of the case, is that ever since I first heard the Hester verion as a lad, it has seemed exactly *right*; I turn aside at other versions that do use “left”.   Perhaps this is an artifact of the unexampled depth of rendition in Hester’s performance -- perhaps her finest ever.  But it is equally possible that, somewhere in the Celtic/Hellenic subconscious of my soul, that is the version that the naiads do sing  upon the rocks.

 

In these, and in the exquisite rendition by Lauren McGlynn with Syster (though this one falls back upon the sanitized “left me”),  we hear the lilt of das Ewig-Weibliche  unfiltered,  unstrained.  And I, tel Ulysse, would fain burst the bonds that bind me to the mast,  and embrace the music with equal directness, though I be dashed in the roiling foam…

 

AI] Your deep resonance with this specific lyric touches on one of the most fascinating corners of traditional folk dialectology. That sense of intuitive "rightness" you feel isn't just an artifact of Carolyn Hester’s haunting performance; it aligns with deep-seated syntactic structures preserved in regional British and Hiberno-English speech.

 

The phrase "He's gone and leave me" operates through a few specific philological mechanisms:

 

1. The Historical Present of Narrative Folk Style

Traditional balladry frequently relies on the "historical present" to collapse the distance between past events and the singer's immediate emotional state. By dropping into the present tense (leave) right after a present-perfect auxiliary (He's gone and...), the narrative shifts from a reported past action to an ongoing, lived trauma. The abandonment is not a historical fact; it is a present reality the singer is trapped within.

 

2. Suffix Reduction and Syncretism

 

In many southwestern English dialects (such as Somerset and Devon) and parts of Appalachia—where many of these ballads were preserved—verb inflections frequently flatten.

In these dialects, weak verbs often drop the dental suffix (-ed), leading to a homophony between the present and past tense.

 

Furthermore, the preceding phrase "He's gone and..." sets up a pseudo-coordinate structure. In regional speech, when a series of verbs follows "go and" or "come and," the subsequent verbs frequently revert to their bare, uninflected base form (infinitive/present), regardless of the tense established by the auxiliary.

 

3. Hiberno-English Influence: The Resultative Present

 

Given the strong Irish and Scottish lineages of the melody and text, the syntax heavily mirrors Hiberno-English structures.

In Irish-influenced English, the combination of a perfective marker (gone) followed by a coordinate present verb (and leave) mimics the Irish language's way of describing a state that began in the past but continuously defines the present.

Rather than the standard English perfect ("He has left me"), the phrase denotes a continuous, static state of being left. The action of leaving is frozen in time.

 

4. Rhythmic and Phonetic Fluidity

 

On a purely vocal and poetic level, "leave me" allows for an open, unstopped vowel sound. The standard "left me" introduces a harsh dental stop (the /ft/ consonant cluster) that abruptly cuts off the breath and the melodic line. For a singer like Hester, Baez, or Faithful, "leave me" maintains the fluid, lamento-like legatissimo of the line, allowing the sorrow to "moan" without mechanical interruption.

 

It is entirely fitting that you view this as the un-sanitized, primal version. The preservation of these "corrupt" or non-standard grammatical structures is precisely where the archaic power of the folk tradition lies—unfiltered by the standardized grammar of modern compilers, sounding directly from the "rocks" of older oral traditions.

 

 

dj] Aye, aye -- ye tell it right,

bot though ye be.

 

Yet had it been I --: I would not have left her,

never left her forever,  but,

however long delayed,

yet sail home to her  in Ithaca,

in high, proud Ithaca,

 

return to her  in Ithaca,

there to dwell with her for ever,

in peace and in fidelity,

sovereign and faithful,

 

till our twin graves be joined again,

side by side, joined again,

twin graves  be joined entwined,

by the growing rose, and briar.

 

The crown-bound brows of the Bard of Hibbing (expanded)

Well I recall, in 1965, listening to the new album “Highway 61 Revisited” in my parents’ basement;  thinking:  This is the real deal.   Unlike much of the pop music my generation has enjoyed, this will last (thought I);  people would still be listening to it,  fifty years from now.

Then the decades went by, his career veered into less interesting avenues, and his voice lost much of its timbre and zing; I no longer followed his activities.

Yet lo -- Who would have predicted that, half a century from 1965, not only would people still be listening,  but the old codger would still be touring.  A lot.  Amazing.

And now the Nobel Prize.   Kind of out of left field, but one of the committee members made the valid point:  that, going back as far as Homer, poetry has been meant to be performed, even sung.  And this, in many different cultures.

The rustic troubadour, in a lyrical mood

So:  A tip of the stetson to you, old man.

~  [The genre now shifts  from memoir  to sotie] ~

It is not for us to add any groat’s-worth of comment to his abundantly documented biography.   Yet we do take comfort in having been, apparently, the only HRNS [highly-respected news site] to document Ibn-Guthrie’s  brilliant but little-known 1965 concert in Oslo:

“Desolation Row” --Norwegian version

[Footnote] I just checked the link for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Remarkably, it is still available -- most songs by the Prairie Skald  have been deleted or disabled on YouTube by the Copyright Police.   The Norwegian lyrics of this one  apparently protected it -- de minimis non curat Attila.   If this trend continues, by 2076, all Internet content will be in the Norwegian language.

~

Meanwhile, the snarky, fairly brainy site Boulevard Voltaire, is underwhelmed:

Nobel de littérature : aujourd’hui Bob Dylan, demain un « twittérateur »

http://www.bvoltaire.fr/mariedelarue/nobel-de-litterature-aujourdhui-bob-dylan-demain-un-twitterateur,288740

They offer a political décryptage for the Committee’s choice, which I leave to your perusal.  That the choice might be politically motivated is not out of the question:  certainly this year’s choice for the (always highly politicized) Peace Prize makes no sense at all aside from such a perspective.  (And it’s not the obvious one -- nothing to do with the FARC really.  But my keyboard is running out of pixels, so you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves.)

~

Back to the blind bard of the Achaeans.

Whatever might have been their origin in oral performance, some folks have felt that such hit ditties as “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” read pretty well on paper too.  Whereas Zimmerman’s lyrics, so displayed, are thin stuff.  He himself took them seriously as poetry; the lyrics were printed in full on the backs of his albums of circa 1965. 

I recall in the late ‘sixties, when (excellent) bootleg albums  were appearing (like the Basement Tapes), a book of poems came out, Tarantula.    Still very much a fan, I almost bought a copy, but, glancing at it first, was obliged to toss it aside.  (Lennon’s In his own Write was actually amusing by comparison.  Heck, I even enjoyed Ono’s Grapefruit -- now there’s a collecter’s item.)

It is no knock on his song-lyrics as lyrics  to say that they fail to impress on the printed page.   One of the finest lines of all time, from the world of popular music, goes:

Bom ba-bom bom,  ba-dang ba-dang dang,

ba-ding ba-dong ding   BLUE MOON.

No seriously, it’s great;  but you have to hear it, not read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eMkH0s3Vpc

Okay, that said:  We could still defend the Committee’s decision on the grounds that it recognizes the oeuvre, not sub specie printed poetry, like that of the modern eye-poets, but as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the music no more abstractable from than lyrics  than flesh from bones, or “The Godfather” from its soundtrack.

In any event, the Nobel committee was not the first to consider pop lyrics an integral part of the poetic canon, next to T.S. Eliot  and all the rest.  For, the anthology of American poetry published in 2000 by the prestigious Library of America, includes ditties from Tin Pan Alley (Ira Gerschwin, Lorenz Hart) and Delta Blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson  et alia).   And indeed, as I near the end of reading through both volumes, it may be affirmed that those offerings, while hardly standouts, are at least entertaining and worth reading  -- an evaluation that I would deny to (alas) a great deal that made it into these volumes, and that from  celebrated pens.

[Update 26 March 2017]  A judicious and enjoyable survey of the state of affairs, by David Orr, may be savored here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/after-dylans-nobel-what-makes-a-poet-a-poet.html