Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 8. This week’s theme is Last Things, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 sixteen days after its twin, Voyager 2, for a stupendous mission to chart the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond- that continues to this day.
The golden record affixed to the spacecraft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. From the world of classical music, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnston and Chuck Berry from the realm of popular music.
For some, the journeys and voyages have been both within and across the surface of the globe. Marco Polo, whose travels to China and back to Venice encompassing 24,000 kilometres and twenty-four years are remarkable and were influential in whetting the appetite of Europeans for exploration- but little is known of the interior changes wrought in the man who set out as a youth of seventeen years and returned as a middle-aged forty-one-year-old dignitary.
However, someone who travelled a comparable distance in time and space but who leaves an account which deals with what is within- from a time thirteen hundred years before Marco Polo set out on his journey- is the towering figure of St Paul. The song is about him- but not only him, because I mash him up with another outstanding character from world history, contemporaneous with the apostle of the Gentiles; St Peter- you know, the guy who denied his leader- how many times?
Was there ever such an inauspicious start for a world religion? St Paul: such an intrepid traveller; such an obstinate adversary; such an eloquent interlocutor; such a fine explicator of the nature of belief and love and, above all, he had the quality that my mother said all true men should have: the ability to endure, whatever comes. So intertwined are the stories of Peter and Paul that, in this song, I ascribe Peter’s Quo Vadis moment to Paul, as well. Heretic! I hear the guardians of holy text screech. But then, maybe none of them has ever been in the grip of furor poeticus where the madness of composition dictates form and content rather than any rigid adherence to orthodoxy. [insert song]
People can be unpleasant. Wasn’t it Satre who said- Hell is other people? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that- Give me a dog any day! To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. Milan Kundera. Or: Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain.
Every dog will have his day, and my last pet, a miniature fox terrier, we named Maggs after the Peter Carey character who, in turn, was based on the Charles Dickens’ character Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations. For ten years Maggs kept the family company before succumbing to heart problems. But even at the end he would stick his nose under the gate and welcome me home in the evening. And this was particularly healing after a day enduring meetings with those whose joy in life was the sound of their own voices.
Our grief for the dog was real. On his final day, I recall sitting on the back step listening to his laboured breathing, watching the stars come out, stroking his bony head and recalling Gerard Manly Hopkin’s Spring and Fall: Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving/Now no matter child the name/Sorrow’s springs are the same/Ah as the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for. [insert song]
Thankfully, I no longer have to suffer through any more meetings- surely, with emails, the biggest waste of time in the workplace. Next week, I present two songs about Australian workers.
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 7, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. The theme this month is Last Things.
Catholics will tell you that the four last things are: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. The first death recorded in Genesis was also the first crime: fratricide, when Cain killed Abel. Interesting, from the point of view of a contemporary audience, is the paucity of detail surrounding that murder.
Basically, all we are told is that God accepted Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Cain gets in a snit. Then they go out into the field where, in the words of the King James Bible, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him. That’s it. Nothing more. The aftermath is more detailed, of course. When God enquires after Abel, Cain replies with the famous line: Am I my brother’s keeper?
God then condemns Cain to roam the earth as a fugitive and a vagabond, unable to till the ground as it has drunk the blood of his brother. When Cain complains that he will be a marked man, God replies: Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
So, originally the mark of Cain was divine protection! Fratricide has been a feature of legend, history, and society from this time: In The Antigone, by Sophocles, Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other by stabbing one another through the heart; Romulus kills Remus and founds the city of Rome- setting the stage for lots of family killings down through the centuries. In Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king to grab the throne and Queen Gertrude.
At about the same time as the composition of Hamlet, it was not a recipe for long life to be the brother of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In the reign of Mehmet III, upon the birth of a male heir to the throne, nineteen of his brothers were strangled with silk cords and buried with their father. In contemporary popular culture, Michael Corleone kills his brother in The Godfather, Part Two and, in Disney’s The Lion King, Scar kills his brother Mufasa. I wrote the first song of this episode for a TV show I was pitching to Ulster TV but left to return to Australia before it could be progressed- another still-born project, alas, but The Mark of Cain remains. [insert song]
In a cartoon from the sixties by Ron Cobb, entitled Progress, the upper panel shows two cavemen brandishing bones at one another. Then, dividing the upper panel from the lower, is the word Progress. The lower panel shows two men in suits; one has a pistol with which he has just shot his rival dead. The concluding song of this episode, also called Progress, inserts a few more panels between the cave-dwellers and suit-wearers of the Cobb cartoon, outlining the long history of warfare culminating in nuclear Armageddon.
But progress, in the few short years since I first published the song in May 2021 has delivered a new nightmare to trouble our slumbers. Artificial Intelligence will either usher in a Nirvana with humans achieving immortality within the next 20 years, if you believe the cheerleaders for this technology, or, as the Cassandras prophesy, the technology, having become sentient and taken control of the requisite means of production, will surreptitiously decide that we are superfluous to the future and devise our demise by, for instance, manufacturing myriad nanobots that will be introduced into the environment and infiltrate our bodies, every living human body on earth, and at a predetermined time, these little engines of death coursing through our bloodstream and brain will simply activate and cause every member of our species to…deactivate. [insert song]
The flamboyant Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde declared at a technical college in Dublin in 1872, Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more. Mmm, but maybe not more AI development until we actually learn how to rule ourselves. Just a thought.
Credits:All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 6, 15 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the microphone. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. Two days into another month, and time to unpack the theme Last Things.
A theme that fits November: as English poet Thomas Hood (1799-1845) observed- No sun – no moon! No morn – no noon – No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member – No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November. Of course, this sentiment properly belongs to the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the smoggy environs of Victorian London, but that’s OK- we’ll go with that as I relax here in the sunny gardens surrounding Radio Quotidia where butterflies, bees and birds abound amidst the various flowers and fruits as I prepare for our first program of the month.
My first selection for this theme is a song I wrote many years ago when I was affected by seasonal affective disorder while living in Ballymena during November in the mid-1980s. The resultant song, An Impervious Wall, prompted a post in Letters From Quotidia, episode 108 in July of 2021. Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offence./Something there is that does not love a wall, that wants it down.
Truly spoken, Robert Frost. In Edwin Muir’s poem, The Castle, the besieged look unconcernedly from the turret walls surrounding the fortress at the foe half a mile distant confident in the knowledge of their ample provisions. But There was a little private gate,/A little wicked wicket gate./The wizened warder let them through. And why? Our only enemy was gold,/And we had no arms to fight it with. TheGreat Wall of China is stupendous to look at but failed miserably in its purpose of keeping out determined invaders, who simply rode around it or had its gates opened by traitors.
The Berlin Wall failed, and one may surmise (indeed, hope) that similar walls still in place around the world, will ultimately fail, too. Walls made of unobtanium would be the ideal of oppressors throughout history. Such a wall would be impervious to any agency- but it’s out of reach in our material world. The only place such walls may be forged are in the furnaces of the dogmatic mind. Is there anything in this universe more adamantine than the certitude of the religious bigot or political ideologue? [insert song]
What is it about them…Photographs. I mean- the older sort- printed on special paper and placed in albums or behind frames or in glossy magazines, not the digital imposters that feature grinning, gesticulating loons having such a hell of a good time all of the time that they can barely maintain continence. There goes that old man yelling at clouds again!
Susan Sontag, in 1977, wrote that the proliferation of photographic images had created in people a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world around them; and this, mind you, thirty years before the iPhone amplified that to include an overwhelming, self-absorbed narcissism. For some, a photograph is more precious than any material treasure. In wildfires, the family photo album is taken ahead of the silverware.
Although, I must admit that technology enabling images to be saved to the cloud may consign future albums to the flames. The idea for the song originated in the aftermath of the bombing of the Abercorn Restaurant and Bar in central Belfast on Saturday 4th March 1972 where innocent shoppers were caught in the blast which killed two young women and injured 130 leaving many with horrific wounds. Such loss, such evil. The Silver Frame imagines a photograph discovered twenty years after a tragic loss, in the aftermath of the Holocaust: precious, irreplaceable, unrepeatable. [insert song]
Next week, two songs, the first looks at the first crime recorded in Genesis and the second tracks human progress from the primitive missiles of wooden spears to the slim tubes of ballistic rockets delivering Armageddon.
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 5 of The Blues, 12 minutes of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the Blues.
Six months ago, I wrote this in a previous post: are you old enough to remember the first Terminator movie? Released in 1984 (and does that year ring any bells for you?) It tells of the point, in the year 2029, when the Artificial Intelligence systems of the time interconnect, become prescient, decide that we- as a species- are superfluous to requirements and, now merged as Skynet, immediately inflicts nuclear Armageddon on the human race. Just shy of forty years later, this is not a distant sci-fi dystopian tale but a pressing possibility for our near future.
ChatGPT and similar programs are presently shaking up the zeitgeist as workers, artists, writers, and the administrative and managerial classes wonder if they will still have meaningful jobs in the near future. Even in Quotidia, the tremors have been felt. I asked Bing’s AI bot the following question: Me: Can you put together a short article… about St James Infirmary...
Bing AI: Sure! Here’s a short article about St James Infirmary, …St. James Infirmary Blues is an American jazz song of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that it is based on an eighteenth-century traditional folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”) about a soldier who uses his money on prostitutes and then dies of venereal disease. The American version of St James’ Infirmary is along the same theme but puts the song into third person…I hope that helps. Me: Thank you, I will credit you for this when I publish it on my podcast. Bing AI: You’re welcome! I’m glad I could help. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. Good luck with your podcast! 😊
It took Bing just seconds to churn this out whereas I would have spent the guts of an hour on the same task. It’s amazing how far we have come in a short six months. And it’s not good news at all. I find YouTube almost unwatchable because of the plethora of AI produced programs complete with artificial spoken commentary! I wonder what the digital landscape will look like six months from now. So, before the bots take over everything, here’s my rendition of St James Infirmary, a suitably doleful yet defiant blues lament in the face of fate. [insert song]
Daddy was a jazz singer in the rain, Mama got wet was the first line that just popped into my head one day as I was noodling on my guitar in 1981. Was this an unconscious referencing of duBose Heyward’s with mammy and daddy standing by which finishes his classic lyric to Summertime featured in episode 2 earlier in the week? Maybe. I carry a lot of stuff around in my head: snippets of poetry, lines of songs, quotations from the Bible, a lifetime’s perusal of books and paintings- all the detritus of a liberal arts education (which, of course, includes a lot of science stuff, too).
But it’s sort of strange, considering my decades-long love of the Blues, that I’ve written only one Blues song! Perhaps a reticence to appropriate from a culture so different to my Irish one? I don’t know. In my search of a way to conclude this brief essay in the blues, I was asked by Bing AI if I wanted it to generate a blues poem. Curious, I said yes, and Bing AI responded,
Okay, here is a blues poem that I generated for you. I hope you like it. I got the lockdown blues, baby I got the lockdown blues /I can’t go out and see my friends/ Or buy myself some new shoes/I’m stuck inside this tiny room/ I’m stuck inside this room/ The only thing that keeps me sane Is listening to some tunes/But music can’t replace your touch/ But music can’t replace your touch/ I miss you more than words can say/ Oh baby, I love you so much//
Yeah, Nah! Look, anyone out there wishing to set AI’s words to music- be my guest! Cynics among you may conclude that I prefaced my own Blues composition with AI’s feeble effort so that Still On The Move will not suffer too much in comparison to the truly great songs covered elsewhere in this Blues month from Quotidia.[insert song]
In November, commencing in two days’ time, I will present a series of programs about Last Things.
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 4 of The Blues, 15 minutes, give or take, of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the blues.
And we’ll start with a guitarist, Albert King, who was a bit of an enigma, maybe even a little bit shady. This guy stood well over 6 foot tall and weighed in at 250 lbs, drove a bulldozer for his day job, stole B. B. King’s nickname, blues boy, and had the audacity to call his guitar Lucy, knowing that BB called his Lucille! Oh, and he claimed to be B.B. King’s brother. B.B. later said: He called his guitar ‘Lucy,’ and for a while he went around saying he was my brother. That bothered me until I got to know him and realized he was right; he wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in the blues.
Now B.B. King I revered from my mid-teens in the mid-sixties. When he sang, nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin’ too! I was hooked. I was one of the many teens of that era that sought out the genuine American art form that was the blues, in the wake of our heroes hailing from Britain: the Beatles, of course, and the Stones, who this month are releasing the first album in 18 years- and don’t you love their single from that album- Angry?– yeah, you may talk about angry old men but Mick, Keith and Ronnie were laughing as they launched Hackney Diamonds with Jimmy Fallon in London last month.
But back to the sixties- there was also John Mayall, Cream, and the original Fleetwood Mac among many others, and let us not neglect the land of my birth- Ireland producing Rory Gallagher with Taste and Van Morrison with Them. I used to play Born Under a Bad Sign on my first electric, a Burns short-scale jazz guitar when I was in residence at Trench House- to the annoyance of those benighted souls who did not appreciate the Blues. That guitar, as I previously mentioned, I ended up pawning to pay my rent arrears when I moved out for bedsitter land in Belfast the following year.Here is my version of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign that knocked me out when I first heard it in 1967.[insert Song]
I’ve always admired the Blues for its refusal to descend to mawkish sentimentality in the face of the challenges thrown up by society and the world at large. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. So says, Zora Neale Hurston (born in 1891, who died in 1960): part of the Harlem Renaissance she was a contrarian to say the least, a deeply conservative Republican, but militantly atheist daughter of a Baptist preacher father, this anthropologist, author, and filmmaker produced a considerable body of work but ended her life in poverty and obscurity like so many talented African American artists.
She embodies the blues- no self-pitying here. I’m not sure if she was familiar with the song that closes this episode, Sittin’ on Top of the World, but I reckon she would have approved of its approach to life. It is a country blues song written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon. They were core members of the Mississippi Sheiks who recorded it in 1930. Vinson claimed to have composed the song one morning after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi. Sittin’ on Top of the World has become a standard of traditional American music. The song has been described as a simple, elegant distillation of the Blues. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or artistically significant. Here’s my version of the song. [insert song] Now a bonus track, Oh Pretty Woman, another gem from Albert King’s repertoire
Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 3 of The Blues, 12 minutes of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. The theme this month is the blues.
But today, it is turned blood-red with two tales of murder inflicted by one intimate partner on the other. Found in various music genres, the murder ballad horrifies and fascinates equally. The horror is rooted in our abhorrence of the act that cannot be taken back- extinguishing a human life for whatever reason. The fascination often arises from our recognition that there but for the grace of God go I. Who among us has not seen red at a real or perceived betrayal of one we loved or trusted implicitly?
In early December 1966 I saw Jimi Hendrix on the popular UK music show, Ready Steady Go performing Hey Joe. Hendrix was in a different league to the guitar-slingers of the time: an exotic black god dressed in plumage that would make a troupe of tropical parrots dowdy in comparison. His piratical swagger and pyrotechnical display of blazing fretboard magic ensured that all the British rock establishment came to pay homage. Here’s my version now, which makes no attempt to duplicate Hendrix’s guitar lines but rather adopts a more country blues vibe: [insert song]
Overwhelmingly, it’s men who are the killers in this scenario, but they don’t have a monopoly on such murders. The femme fatale is a literary trope- developed by men I would suspect- to shift the blame of the consequences of amorous entanglements onto the woman who uses her charms which are really magical spells to entrap her male victim into making disastrous choices. However, that is a bit of a digression. The song I wish to cover next depicts a murder ignited by a jealous rage. It has a long history having been recorded by at least 256 artists since the early 20th Century according to my muse, Wikipedia.
I refer to Frankie and Johnny. The song was inspired by one or more actual murders. One of these took place in an apartment building located at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, Missouri, at 2:00 on the morning of October 15, 1899. Frankie Baker a 22-year-old woman, shot her 17-year-old lover Allen Britt in the abdomen. Britt had just returned from a cakewalk at a local dance hall, where he and another woman, Nelly Bly, had won a prize in a slow-dancing contest. Britt died of his wounds four days later at the City Hospital. On trial, Baker claimed that Britt had attacked her with a knife and that she acted in self-defence; she was acquitted and died in a Portland, Oregon mental institution in 1952.
Other instances of this particular scenario exist, of course, where the killer receives the penalty that has been around since the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu was promulgated some four thousand years ago where, if you take someone’s life, you forfeit yours. I listened to a few of the more popular of the 256 recordings of the song and IMHO the version recorded by Jimmie Rodgers in 1929 is by far and away the best. I read somewhere that Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame had all his records- figures! Here I try to keep close to the spirit of the Jimmie Rodgers original by utilising banjo, fiddle, guitars, and vocals in a bluegrass-country blues fusion, but I don’t, and count yourselves lucky here, attempt to recreate the yodelling! [insert song]
Next week, you can thank your lucky stars that you are not like the protagonist of the first song on offer where he laments, if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all. And if you find yourself saying, Snap! My commiserations. The second song is another country blues composition. And if, like the title, you tell me you’re sitting on top of the world– commiserations likewise. To conclude and to give you pause should your mood be especially dire, may I recommend Dorothy Parker’s poem Resume,Razors pain you;/Rivers are damp;/Acids stain you;/And drugs cause cramp./ Guns aren’t lawful;/Nooses give;/Gas smells awful;/You might as well live.//
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 2 of The Blues, 12 minutes of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. Let’s continue now with a couple of great tracks.
In 1971, a month or so before I got married, my brother Brendan, who had bought me Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited six years before, organised a night for our family and friends at a small, cosy, hotel in Cushendall. We had a meal and retired for drinks to a small lounge area where a piano was set against the wall. A pleasant-looking matronly guest who was staying at the hotel- not one of our little group- sat down and began to play. Emboldened by wine, I asked did she know Summertime.
The previous year I had devised a lead break for the song on my Burns short-scale jazz guitar instead of studying for my exams. I was rather proud of it and still had dreams of rescuing that Burns short-scale, my first electric guitar, from the pawn shop where I had traded it for rent arrears. Historical note- I never did get round to it. Maybe, that’s why I requested that song- I can’t remember now- but I remember with gratitude her rendition of this classic for a rather bleary-eyed young man. Memory renders it right up there with the great interpreters. And, for what it’s worth, here is my take on it: [insert song]
The song is fromPorgy and BessIts lyrics are by DuBose Heyward, of whom Broadway legend, Stephen Sondheim, wrote, he has gone largely unrecognized as the author of the finest set of lyrics in the history of the American musical theatre – namely, those of Porgy and Bess. The music, of course, was written by George Gershwin.
The setting of the song was Catfish Row, a dockside area of Charleston, South Carolina in the 1930s, Clara, a young, black woman, sings to her baby. Her husband Jake is a fisherman, and, like all the people of the settlement, they live hardscrabble lives. This scenario, of life, of death has been repeated throughout history and indeed prehistory. Through all the noise and nonsense, the conflict, the clash, we hear the soothing tones of mother to child as she seeks to shield her offspring from the unruly universe by resorting to a lullaby.
21-year-old Billie Holiday recorded the first cover of this song in 1936. She was part of the Harlem Renaissance spanning the 1920s and 30s including such important black artists as musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. According to Wikipedia some people would argue that the Harlem Renaissance never ended and has continued to be an important cultural force in the United States through the decades: from the age of stride piano jazz and blues to the ages of bebop, rock and roll, soul, disco and hip-hop.
A great song and I still remember vividly the rendition at my Buck’s night in 1971. The year before, in 1970, I was in Belfast’s Smithfield Markets rummaging for cheap second-hand records when over the speakers in the record store I heard Christine McVie’s haunting performance of I’d Rather Go Blind. And, of course, I had to buy it. When I heard of her death at the end of November last year, I listened again (and again) to the track that had captivated me over half a century ago. So, in tribute to this great artist, I present this version [insert song]
And, remembering that the blues is about more than crying or being sad, here is a poem by Joyce Grenfell, born to an affluent Anglo-American family. I remember her as an amusing anecdotist and reciter of her own verse on light entertainment shows in the late sixties and early seventies. Joyce was a monologuist of real talent, who had an international career spanning four decades. I present here a short verse of hers. While in no way fitting the mould of a typical blues versifier, I think the acerbic wit displayed in these lines would fit right in, If I should die before the rest of you,/Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone./Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice,/But be the usual selves that I have known./Weep if you must,/Parting is hell./But life goes on,/So sing as well. [749 words]
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 1 of The Blues, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the blues. [insert song]
The song was the opener on the first LP I ever bought, The Rolling Stones, released on 14 April 1964. I loved it from the first bars of Route 66 which blasted out of my Dad’s stereo in the front room of our home in Cushendall, County Antrim. Written by US Marine Bobby Troup in 1946, who didn’t see colour, only soul, according to one of the marines serving under him. It remains one of the finest songs about freedom and the open road. According to my muse, Wikipedia, Route 66 symbolises escape, loss, and the hope of a new beginning; Steinbeck dubbed it the Mother Road. Another designation was the Main Street of America.
It was a primary route for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it supported the economies of the communities through which it passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous, and they later fought to keep it alive in the face of the growing threat of being bypassed by the more advanced controlled-access highways of the Interstate Highway System in the 1960s and 70s.
It underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, but it was officially removed from the United States Highway System in 1985. Nothing ever stays the same, but it’s good to remember the good things about places and people. Now to another storied highway in American blues culture, Highway 61.
According to my muse, it extends 1,400 miles (2,300 km) between New Orleans, Louisiana and the city of Wyoming, Minnesota. The highway generally follows the course of the Mississippi River and is designated the Great River Road for much of its route. It terminates in New Orleans and was an important south–north connection in the days before the interstate highway system. The highway is often called the Blues Highway because of its long history in blues music. It is also the subject of numerous musical works, and the route inspired the album Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan.
As Dylan writes in his memoir, Chronicles, Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.
The suits at Columbia records didn’t understand Dylan’s title for the 1965 album and wanted to call it something else but Dylan fought for his idea right up the ladder until, as Robert Shelton, recalled, word came down and said, Let him call it what he wants to call it. So, Highway 61 Revisited, it is.
Hey, if you’re into spooky tales, the intersection of this highway with Route 49 is said to be the locus where Robert Johnston sold his soul to the devil. Anyway, here it is- my version of the title song. [insert song]
My thanks to my older brother Brendan who bought me this album for my 16th birthday, and I’ve been listening to it, off and on, ever since that time. That’s it from deep inside the digital onion that is Quotidia. Next week I’ll continue the theme with a Gershwin classic and a blues oldie to bracket the broadcast. And to quote from that Gershwin song, don’t you cry. Blues isn’t about crying- or not just about crying. I’ve always been captivated by its humour, truth and insight about the human condition. As Langston Hughes said in his short poem, Blues on a Box, written the year before I was born, Play your guitar, boy,/Till yesterday’s black cat/Runs out tomorrow’s back door// Talk about compressed wisdom! [695 words]
Credits:All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Welcome to the final letter from Quotidia. They began on January 11, 2021, as the pandemic was an entrenched feature of life just about everywhere. They reach their terminus on October 1, 2023. Over that time I have published 250 letters. That is a nice round figure to wrap up what began as a pandemic project.
Grief is a polymorphous beast. When my sister-in-law, with whom I had exchanged many letters over the years, died in October 2010, it prompted recall of a story about her mother who had a near-term stillborn infant who, because of dogmatic strictures, could not be buried in consecrated ground. On her deathbed, she revealed that she had never forgotten, for even a day, that child and she asked to be buried with the lonely one. The lonely one. One is a number grief understands. When I read that 599 children have been killed in Ukraine, I am numb.
But then I read the following account of a recent attack on the hometown of president Vlodymyr Zelenskyy, from the latest issue of A Letter From Ukraine made available by the Polish Dominicans who administer my local parish, Russian rockets hit a 9 storey apartment building…Among the dead were ten-year-old Daria and her mother Natalya. Next to the ruined building people assembled a mound of flowers and toys. In the picture you can see two boxes of Barbie dolls. The same ones that are in the dreams of millions of movie-going peers of Daria around the world. My eyes fill.
On grief, Emily Dickinson, as with so many other topics, has a singular view and I offer here the opening two stanzas of a much longer poem, I measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing, eyes – /I wonder if It weighs like Mine –/ Or has an Easier size.//I wonder if They bore it long –/ Or did it just begin –/ I could not tell the Date of Mine –/ It feels so old a pain – So old a pain- this year my first-born son, Brian would have turned 50, but as he died at age 15 in 1989, such a celebration was never going to be.
Over the years I have written several songs about him, and I will present here a song I wrote in December 2005, with the title, (on what would have been) Your 32nd Birthday. It was first published it in August 2016 as part of my blog TheSumma Quotidia, which, as I mentioned in the last post, was the precursor to Letters from Quotidia, where it found new life as part of a podcast published on 3rd June 2021. Here it is. [insert song]
Have you ever passed a medieval cathedral and looked up in wonder at the gargoyles leering out high above you? They are intended as ornate waterspouts protecting the building from the excess run-off of rainstorms. But they are also examples of apotropaic magic, intended to ward off harm or evil influences. Many cultures over many centuries have practised apotropaic magic right down to the present day.
Not me! I l hear you scoff. So, you don’t have a good luck charm, never cross your fingers, avoid cracks in the pavement, knock on wood or toss spilled salt over your shoulder. Instead you walk under ladders, smash mirrors whenever you can and wouldn’t wish upon a star even on a romantic midnight tryst with the woman (or man) of your dreams. OK. Brave (or is it foolhardy) you. But the song you will next hear is an example of such magic. Here’s how it came about.
The song, A World of Pain, waswritten and recorded in February 2002. I wrote in The Letters from Quotidia of May 2021, you know, it took me about six months to even believe fully in the events of September 11, 2001. But, here, from the perspective of COVID-ravaged 2021, I stand by the imaginative recreation of a possible dystopian future, outlined in the song, for people like me… It is as likely to come to pass as any of the prognostications of the experts I …read in the daily newspapers…The song posits a post-apocalyptic world in which small groups of Westerners, clinging to remnants of their culture and past, wander through a desolate landscape, harried by bands of fanatics (the successors of the Taliban and Islamic State, perhaps) who periodically force them to uproot and keep moving. I recorded the song in my workroom with just an acoustic guitar and vocal. I overdubbed a thin, sparse electric guitar after this and hoped that the apotropaic magic of the composition would help ward off the dystopian future foretold in the lyrics. It has worked so far- for me and my family.
But alas, not for far too many Afghan women, children-and let’s not forget their supportive men- trapped in just such a nightmarish situation. I want to pay tribute to their bravery, resilience, and humour by reference to a poetic form, the landay, which is part of an oral tradition dating back, according to the estimable Poetry Foundation,to the Bronze-Age arrival of Indo-Aryan caravans to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India around 1700 BC. These poems could have evolved out of communication through call and response back and forth over a long caravan train. The call and response nature of landays has morphed into teasing and sparring love poems between men and women; a kind of stichomythia that rivals that of ancient Greece.
Listen to an example of this ancient form from the second decade of the 21st century, When you kissed me, you bit me,/What will my mother say?/Give your mother this answer:/I went to fetch water and fell by the river./Your jug isn’t broken, my mother will say,/so why is your bottom lip bleeding that way?/Tell your mother this one:/My jug fell on clay, I fell on stone./You have all my mother’s answers, sweet./Now take my raw mouth — bon appétit! [insert song]
To conclude, here is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1866 where the Roman god, Terminus addresses the poet. Terminus is speaking also to all of us fortunate enough to have reached or surpassed three score and ten: It is time to be old,/To take in sail:—/The god of bounds,/Who sets to seas a shore,/Came to me in his fatal rounds/,And said: “No more!/No farther shoot/Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root./Fancy departs: no more invent;/Contract thy firmament/To compass of a tent./There’s not enough for this and that,/Make thy option which of two;/Economize the failing river,/Not the less revere the Giver,/Leave the many and hold the few./Timely wise accept the terms,/Soften the fall with wary foot;/A little while/Still plan and smile,/And,—fault of novel germs,—/Mature the unfallen fruit./Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,/Bad husbands of their fires,/Who, when they gave thee breath,/Failed to bequeath/The needful sinew stark as once,/The Baresark marrow to thy bones,/ But left a legacy of ebbing veins,/Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—/Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,/Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”//As the bird trims her to the gale,/I trim myself to the storm of time,/I man the rudder, reef the sail,/Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:/“Lowly faithful, banish fear,/Right onward drive unharmed;/The port, well worth the cruise, is near,/And every wave is charmed.”
With any luck, in the words the poem just quoted, I may for a little while still plan and smile and create something else because- that is what I do. And optimist that I am, and again in the words of the poem, I do believe The port, well worth the cruise. While I hope that port is still a little way off- the letters have reached their terminus. The final song I cover for the letters was recorded in 1965 by an artist I have listened to in awe and thankfulness through seven decades, Bob Dylan. I think it fits. [insert song]
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. The 72-odd hours of podcasts encompassing several hundred songs and several hundred thousand words of prose and poetry that go to make up the Letters from Quotidia, over 33 months would prompt the retort of any junior doctor that he or she works that many hours in a typical week, routinely saving lives as part of their daily round. So, I ‘ll just end by saying a humble thanks to all those who have listened to these podcasts. I’ll also reprise the final words from my final podcast for the Summa Quotidia, in 2016, where the ancient Greek poet Archilochus fleeing battle, throws away his shield reasoning, But at least I got myself safely out! But, in two days’ time, tune in for Radio Quotidia: a series of weekly podcasts of 15 minutes or less featuring two songs. Fifteen weeks remain before the end of the calendar year. Each month will have a theme. October’s theme is The Blues, and the first program features two songs about American highways: Route 66, America’s Main Street, and Highway 61, the Blues highway. Tune in, then and… we’ll see.
(on what would have been) Your 32nd Birthday (words and music Quentin Bega)
Well nobody told me grief could stay green
Time would not heal the pain I feel
I’ve got diabetes my heart is not strong
High blood pressure pulses and I’m oh I’m getting on
We visit your sister now she’s 33
Found a life partner wants to be a mother-to-be
Your brother’s a young man who beat all the odds
He looks just like you two peas two peas in a pod
You’ve got a young sister you never knew
In our family history we’ve still to bring her to you
Your mother is frailer her bones breaking down
But she’s held us together since you went into the ground
Yeah nobody told me grief could stay green
And time would not heal the pain this pain I still feel
A World of Pain (words and music Quentin Bega)
Thunder is distant a storm on the way
As we lie under the shade of a prophecy tree
mumbling into our beads we pray
Horseman appear in a cloud of woe
Shouting this is the end so pack up your gear
And wrap up your women from head to toe
Oh so we set out over the plain
Looking for shelter again and again
As they ride away yeah they ride away
And leave a world of pain a world of pain
Days are for hunger nights are for dreams
Of magic lights in the sky
Before the dawn breaks a lone voice screams
Now once we had cities brighter than gold
Now ragged tents hold our tribe
The horsemen drew near and once again we must face the cold
Oh so we set out over the plain
Looking for shelter again and again
As they ride away yeah they ride away
And leave a world of pain a world of pain
Oh so we set out over the plain
Looking for shelter again and again
As they ride away yeah they ride away
And leave a world of pain a world of pain
It’s All Over Now Baby Blue (words and music Bob Dylan)
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are coming through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
The sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty handed armies, they’re all going home
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Credits:All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
It’s the 17th of September as I publish the penultimate podcast in the Letters from Quotidia series: podcast 19 of 2023. On this date in 1849, three people fled from a Maryland plantation and made their way north towards emancipation. Harriet Tubman and her two brothers, Ben and Henry. The brothers got cold feet and turned back but Harriet persevered and continued her journey into history where she is revered as an icon- an abolitionist, a social activist and supporter of women’s suffrage. What Ben and Henry did is a story as old as the Bible and as up to date as the latest Tik Tok dancing sensation: people escaping their chains only to regret leaving the devil you know for the unknown perils and pitfalls that striving for freedom delivers.
The Danes have a word: Hygge, which the Oxford Dictionary defines asa quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being. Is this the same as our pejorative term comfort zone or is it something else? Oh, I hope it’s something else because I would be more than a tad disappointed to find that the comfortable conviviality that I so very often embrace is, in fact, a trap, a sticky, honeyed prison from which there is no escape because the entrapped have no desire for anything at all but the sweetness of their servitude. Gemütlichkeit, the German word that describes the cozy domesticity of Schubert’s Biedermeier Vienna, is yet another term that comes to mind.
As I ponder the dilemma between choosing a cozy existence or seeking a more challenging milieu, I remember a recording my father made of The Green Glens of Antrim, a song about the place of my birth.He took his treasured AKAI reel-to-reel tape recorder down to a hotel where there would be a recital featuring the song. This would have been in the mid-1960s. He was proud as punch to be able to memorialise the event, as no one else in the village of Cushendall has such equipment back then. Fast forward to the mid-1980s when I directed a play for the amateur dramatic society in Cushendall after I had returned from Australia, and we were placed in the All- Ireland Finals (confined section).
In the hotel bar afterwards, a singsong commenced. Someone started to sing, Far across yonder blue… the opening line of the song. I have never heard a better rendition for we glens folk raised the roof with the best a capella version of the song I can recall. Of course, my eyes may be framed with rose-tinted glasses and misted with the fumes of the copious spirits we consumed that night, but I did get round to recording my take on this nostalgic song of place during lockdown in 2020 back in Australia. It doesn’t bear comparison to the epic rendition in that hotel bar in the west of Ireland, but it delivers hygge to me and you can find more detail about this in my post A Bit of Banter, Episode 90 [insert song]
Our world is acting out- like a toddler or, for that matter, a teenager throwing a tantrum. One may wonder if the Gaia hypothesis is real, and the earth is reacting to the multitudinous insults she has suffered at our hands in the past few centuries. However, in spite of the wildfires, the floods, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, mudslides, and pandemics presently afflicting us, who among us is not awestruck at the many wonders our world reveals to us when she is in a beneficent mood: the sunsets, coral reefs, floral profusion, caressing, cooling breezes, and the magnificent varieties of animal and bird life?
Switching gear now to poetry, and who better to evince the beauties of the world than John Keats in his majestic Ode to Autumn,Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;/Conspiring with him how to load and bless/With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;/To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,/And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;/To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells/ With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,/And still more, later flowers for the bees,/Until they think warm days will never cease,/For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.//Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?/Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find/Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,/Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;/Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,/Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook/Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:/And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/Steady thy laden head across a brook;/Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,/Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.//Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?/Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—/While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,/And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;/Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn/Among the river sallows, borne aloft/Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;/And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;/Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft/The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;/And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.//
Who would choose to leave such a place behind? Too many do, alas. It takes a lot to bring me to tears but a song that does that is the elegiac, This Sweet Old World by Lucinda Williams first released on an album in 1992 and when Emmy Lou Harris, who covered the song on her 1995 album Wrecking Ball joins her in a duet, well… Williams wrote this song after someone she loved took his own life. When I sing it, I think also of all those who left the world before their time through carelessness or recklessness, or who were taken through mayhem, murder, or misadventure. Even the elderly believer in a paradise awaiting is in no hurry to get there, generally speaking. [insert song]
I’m going to use a somewhat loaded term, now- patrimony. Seven years ago, in August 2016 I published a post and song with this name as part of a series I called The Summa Quotidia– the seed corn, in fact, of the present Letters from Quotidia.I wrote then, Patrimony is defined by Merriam-Webster as anything derived from one’s father or ancestors. It may be material and exogenous, such as a mansion or something less tangible but nevertheless real- such as an inheritable characteristic such as a predisposition to…what? Let us conduct a mind experiment where the progeny of St Francis of Assisi and Snow White are set against the issue of, say, Adolph Hitler and Cruella De Ville. The children: a boy and a girl from each union, are stranded on a sinking ship. There are only two places left on the last lifeboat. You must choose who is to be saved. Do you save the girls? The boys? The pair from the forces of Good or those of the forces of Evil? Or one from each family? Choose. Perhaps you want to leave that to the Twittersphere…
Quaint, isn’t it? We can no longer refer to the Twittersphere. But what, then? The X-sphere? Back then, I quoted the poem, Heredity by Thomas Hardy, I am the family face;/ Flesh perishes, I live on,/ Projecting trait and trace/ Through time to times anon,/ And leaping from place to place/Over oblivion.//The years-heired feature that can/ In curve and voice and eye/ Despise the human span/ Of durance- that is I;/ The eternal thing in man,/ That heeds no call to die. He was referring unknowingly to DNA, even though it would be decades before Crick and Watson won a Nobel Prize for it in 1962.
I wrote the song Patrimony in 1996 when I was at a low ebb financially and in questionable health. I recorded the song at a small home studio in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney during long service leave I took in 2000. There are no backing tracks, it’s just me playing an acoustic guitar and singing. As I said in introduction to the song in 2016, Patrimony is really just the good stuff we tell each other. [insert song]
For a while now, I’ve tried to tell you good stuff in prose, poetry, and song but as the cliché will have it, all good things come to an end and the end is nigh, as any street preacher will tell you. I won’t be quite so histrionic but will simply inform you all that the next post will be the last of the Letters from Quotidia as they have run their course as a pandemic project. Until then keep well, keep true.
The Green Glens of Antrim
Far across yonder blue lies a true fairyland With the sea rippling over the shingle and sand Where the gay honeysuckle is luring the bee And the green glens of Antrim are calling to me
Sure if only you knew how the lamp of the moon Turns a blue Irish bay to a silver lagoon You’d imagine a picture of heaven it would be Where the green glens of Antrim are calling to me.
Soon I hope to return to my own Cushendall T’is the one place for me that can outshine them all. Sure I know every stone I recall every tree Where the green glens of Antrim are calling to me
Now I’d be where the people are simple and kind And among them the one who has been on my mind Sure I pray that the world would in peace let me be Where the green glens of[Antrim are heaven to me
Where the green glens of Antrim are heaven to me
This Sweet Old World (music and lyrics by Lucinda Williams)
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips
A sweet and tender kiss
The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone’s ring
Someone calling your name
Somebody so warm cradled in your arm
Didn’t you think you were worth anything
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
Millions of us in love, promises made good
Your own flesh and blood
Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one
Didn’t you think anyone loved you
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
Patrimony (words and music by Quentin Bega)
I ain’t left a will there’s nothing much here that can’t be divided easy
Some things I’ve been some things I am are not very likely to please ya
What I have left are tokens at best a battered guitar and a sack full of rhymes
I hope you can make more of them now than I was able before ya
And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground
Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya
Wear this cloth cap it represents what our forbears had to put up with
Put on these boots yeah walk in the shoes your father tried to get by with
Take this gold ring place on the finger of someone who loves you and can bring
Into your life the gifts of the time that will never leave ya
And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground
Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya
Now go outside gaze at the moon whistle a tune that comes easy
Walk through the trees yeah take your ease by a stream that is running beside ya
Splash in the waves laugh at the clouds smell the wild flowers and kick up the sand
And if you can watch the sunrise painting the sky up above ya
And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground
Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya
Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya
Credits:All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff:Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
