Singing down memory lane.

[rivka]

telerib just posted the marvelous news that Boston has named their reloadable RFID-based subway card the "Charlie Card."

I grew up on the song "Charlie on the M.T.A.." (Anyone unfamiliar with the song? It's about a guy who gets stuck on the subway for eternity because they want to charge him an "exit fare" to get off.) It was one of the songs my father loved to sing for his kids. One of the many songs.

I remember so much of my father's music.

He sang something that, whoa, apparently was originally a Child Ballad. (I had no idea it had such a distinguished pedigree!) It's about a ship that encounters a mermaid, and my father used to sing it when we were out on his little sailboat. I don't remember the verses from his singing, but he sang the chorus this way:

And the ocean waves do roll, do roll
And the stormy wind doth blow, doth blow
And we poor sailors go running to the top
While the landlubbers lie down below, below, below
While the landlubbers lie down below.

He sang the deeply mysterious song "Green Grow the Rushes-O." I spent hours trying to figure out what it meant, and am pleased to find that others have apparently found that "the lyrics of the song are in many places extremely obscure, and present an unusual mixture of Christian catechesis, astronomical mnemonics, and what may very well be pagan cosmology."

But mostly he sang goofy songs from his college years. He liked Norman Levy's intricately rhymed "Thais," and a similar retelling of "Bluebeard" which I am astonished to discover is more than a hundred years old.

When I was six years old, I liked to sing:

One day while sleeping heavily, from wresting with the Devil he
Had gone to bed exhausted, though the sun was shining still
He had a vision Freudian, and though he was annoyed, he an-
Alyzed it in the well-known style of Doctors Jung and Brill.

He dreamed of Alexandria, of wicked Alexandria.
A crowd of men was cheering in a manner rather rude.
And Athaneal glancing there at Thais, who was dancing there
Observed her do the shimmy, in what artists call The Nude!

Said he,"This dream fantastical disturbs my thoughts monastical,
Some unsuppressed desire, I fear, has found my monkish cell.
I blushed up to the hat o' me to view that girl's anatomy
I'll go to Alexandria and save her soul from Hell!"

I was an odd six-year-old, and my father is at least partially to blame.

He sang the Kingston Trio's bastardized version of the traditional Scandanavian immigrant song "Oleanna." And he sang us every song from Tom Lehrer's first record. His favorite was "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," but I also remember him treating us to "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," "The Old Dope Peddler," "In My Hometown," "Be Prepared" ...all when I was a tiny kid.

What off-the-beaten-path music shaped your childhood?

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's about a guy who gets stuck on the subway for eternity because they want to charge him an "exit fare" to get off.

And his wife brings him lunch but not the nickel he needs, which is very hmmm.

I was raised on a rich melange of lefty folks songs and murder ballads. Every time I see the name of the author of A Heart Shaped Box, I start humming that stupid song.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

And his wife brings him lunch but not the nickel he needs, which is very hmmm.

That is exactly what I've wondered about every time I heard the song.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I remember how pleased I was when I worked that out, and running to my father to ask him why Charlie's wife didn't put a nickel inside the sandwich. I felt soooo clever. My father, bless his heart, didn't let on that it wasn't a new idea to him.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I think it's clear Mrs. Charlie doesn't want Charlie back soon.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I took it to be that she, in a long suffering way, understood that her man had to do things his way.

(Later on, it occurred to me that the song might be entirely fictional. I take this as a possibility, but I provisionally dismiss it, because if it *was* all fictional, it would ruin such a fine deate :-) )

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

She was in Scollay Square. That was the area of the burlesque houses.

(Since that time, the neighborhood has gone downhill -- they put in a Brutalist monstrosity of a City Hall, and it's now called "Government Center".)

[ckd]

Actually, there's an argument that he did get off in the 1980s, finally qualifying for the senior citizen fare (then $0.10, which he'd already paid).

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I was raised on a rich melange of lefty folk songs and murder ballads.

Thank goodness they didn't hybridize in my brain. "This is my song about how the working serial killer needs a union to protect his interests. 'Bob has a yard filled with bodies/but never had a 401(K)/He's killed and killed and killed and killed (pause for wild-eyed panting: knife brandishing optional)/ but even he'll have to retire one day."