Quentin Bega

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 18

Welcome to the antepenultimate podcast of the Letters from Quotidia. On September 3^rd 1752 Britain and the British Empire (including the American colonies) adopted the Gregorian Calendar, losing 11 days in the process. People rioted thinking the government had stolen 11 days of their lives. So, you see, conspiracy theories were alive and… kicking(?) back in the day, folks.

And talking about back in the day, one night in 1949, lyricist Jack Segal was invited to the New York home of concert pianist Evelyn Danzig. In fifteen minutes, they had written a hit song that has endured for well over seventy years. In the annals of Tin Pan Alley, there are many examples of One- Hit Wonders – songwriters who only ever managed a single enduring success… Evelyn Danzig’s was the affecting folk-style ballad Scarlet Ribbons. Although her other compositions failed to achieve popularity, more than 40 years of royalties from Scarlet Ribbons were sufficient to keep Evelyn Danzig comfortably until the age of 94.

That was then- now she might be able to afford a cup of coffee and croissant on the royalties she’d get on one of the streaming platforms- but I must avoid identification with that old man yelling at the clouds meme and content myself with a reminiscence: The first person I remember singing this song was Jim Reeves, known as gentleman Jim and, with Chet Atkins his producer, one of the originators of the Nashville Sound. He toured Ireland in 1963 and was immediately taken up by Irish audiences. Reeves returned the compliment, although he did not rate, at all, the quality of the pianos in those many draughty country halls in which he and his band performed. He charted many times in Ireland both before and after his tragic death in July 1964 at the controls of his own single-engine aircraft at age 40.

His silky, trademark, baritone voice is still popular today. Scarlet Ribbons has long been a favourite of mine, even though, in my rebellious, rock-infused, teenage years, I hid this almost blasphemous affection. It is amazing how many people of all ages and conditions love this product of Tin Pan Alley, cobbled together in a quarter of an hour over 70 years ago. But, as a father myself who has looked in at my sleeping daughters wishing I could make their dreams come true, I’m glad Jack and Evelyn met back in the year of my birth to create this wonderful song. I recorded a pared-back version for my post A Bit of Banter, Episode 109 during lockdown in June 2020. [insert song]

Who doesn’t like a good foundation myth? The Garden of Eden comes to mind, Romulus and Remus for Rome, of course, and the Pilgrim Fathers for America are also fairly well known foundational accounts, but the one that really tickled my fancy concerned a guy who sailed across the Adriatic to Italy to escape religious persecution, fled up a hill to escape a deranged woman who claimed she was his wife and who established a state that has endured through all sorts of political vicissitudes to the present day. San Marino, or more euphoniously, Serenissima-Repubblica-di-San-Marino-is-a European microstate enclaved by Italy. Located-on-the north-eastern side of the Apennine Mountains,

San Marino is the fifth-smallest country in the world and covers a land area of just over 61 km², with a population of 33,562.^{(Thanks Wikipedia)} San Marino can trace its roots back to 301 AD when St Marinus- the name means man from the sea- founded a monastery that went on to be the oldest extant sovereign state as well as the oldest constitutional republic. It also had the world’s first democratically elected communist government which held office between 1945 and 1957. The practice of having two heads of state, like Roman consuls, chosen in frequent elections, is derived directly from the customs of the Roman Republic. The council is equivalent to the Roman Senate; the captains regent– San Marino’s two heads of state- can be compared to the consuls of ancient Rome. It is thought the inhabitants of the area came together as Roman rule collapsed to form a rudimentary government for their own protection from foreign rule.

During World War II, San Marino provided a haven for more than 100,000 Jews and other Italians (approximately 10 times the population at the time) from Nazi persecution. In 1861, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln accepted San Marino’s offer of honorary citizenship in a letter that said: Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honoured, in all history. Look, I would be likewise pleased to become an honorary citizen of the serene republic! But fantasies aside, I think the human scale of governance in that landlocked nation would serve as a fine model for humanity- can you imagine such a polity pursuing a war of aggression and genocide?

In previous posts I’ve covered our yearning for utopias in song and literature and here I provide another example from the American age of the hobo where homeless men roamed the country in search of work or something better. The singer Harry McClintock wrote The Big Rock Candy Mountains in 1895 and provided the first recorded version in 1928 as Haywire Mac. Orwell also referenced the song in Animal Farm where the animals’ version of heaven is called Sugarcandy Mountain. It’s been covered numerous times down the decades and I now offer my version of this nirvana, this utopia. [insert song]

Of course, there are no utopias. San Marino had the highest per capita death rate from COVID during the pandemic because they opted for the Russian vaccine rather that the more efficacious EU alternatives because of the latter’s slow roll out. And even the big rock candy mountain has its dark side. Harry McClintock claims that, at 16, he was homeless, singing for change. He told a radio host that he was a shining mark, one of those boys able to bring in money for an aggressive hobo who treated him as an exploitable piece of property: there were times when I fought like a wildcat or ran like a deer to preserve my independence and virginity. He, and other artists too, have left out the verse he wrote that painted this reality.

But other writers and poets have had a stab at what heaven would be like. For Rupert Brooke, writing in 1913 from the point of view of a fish, heaven is like this: ~~But~~ somewhere, beyond Space and Time/Is wetter water, slimier slime!/And there (they trust) there swimmeth One/Who swam ere rivers were begun,/ Immense, of fishy form and mind,/Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;/And under that Almighty Fin/,The littlest fish may enter in./Oh! never fly conceals a hook,/Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,/But more than mundane weeds are there,/And mud, celestially fair;/Fat caterpillars drift around,/And Paradisal grubs are found;/Unfading moths, immortal flies,/And the worm that never dies./And in that Heaven of all their wish,/There shall be no more land, say fish.//

If you are Emily Dickinson heaven is always just out of reach, “Heaven”—is what I cannot reach!/The Apple on the Tree—/Provided it do hopeless—hang—/That—”Heaven” is—to Me!//The Color, on the Cruising Cloud—/The interdicted Land—/Behind the Hill—the House behind—/There—Paradise—is found!//Her teasing Purples—Afternoons—/The credulous—decoy—/Enamored—of the Conjuror—/That spurned us—Yesterday!// So, there are a few accounts of what heaven or something equivalent to it might be like. But what about all the times when it isn’t heaven? Forty years ago, I wrote just such a song called, When It Isn’t Heaven and I’m using here a recording of it for a podcast in August 2016. I winged the accompaniment using the Spanish guitar my wife bought me when we first came to Australia in the early seventies. [insert song]

The second last podcast in the series will be published on 17 September and I hope you (and myself, too!) are around to hear it. But, if not, may we be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows we’re dead! Until then, may I leave you with this thought, Heaven is found in good company so, keep good company, be of good cheer and avoid like the plague those who seek to blight the time they spend with you.

Scarlet Ribbons (lyrics Jack Segal music Evelyn Danzig)

I peeped in to say good night and I heard my child in prayer
“Ooh for me some scarlet ribbons scarlet ribbons for my hair”
All the stores were closed and shuttered all the streets were dark and bare
In my town no scarlet ribbons not one ribbon for her hair

Through the night my heart was aching just before the dawn was breaking
I peeped in and on her bed In gay profusion lying there
Lovely ribbons, scarlet ribbons scarlet ribbons for her hair
If I live to be a hundred I shall never know from where
Came those lovely scarlet ribbons scarlet ribbons for her hair

The Big Rock Candy Mountains (words and music Harry McClintock)

One evening as the sun went down, and the jungle fires were burning,

down the track came a hobo hiking. And he said “Boys I’m not turning.

I’m headed for a land that’s far a-way be-side the crystal fountains.

So come with me we’ll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. There’s a land that’s fair and bright,

Where the hand-outs grow on bushes and you sleep out every night.

Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every-day.

On the birds and the bees, and the cigarette trees, the lemonade springs,

where the blue bird sings in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the cops have wooden legs

and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.

The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay.

Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow, where the rain don’t fall,

the wind don’t blow in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. You never change your socks.

and the little streams of alcohol come a trickling down the rocks.

The brakemen have to tip their hats and the rail-road bulls are blind.

There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too, you can paddle all round’em in a big canoe in the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, the jails are made of tin.

And you can walk right out again, as soon as you are in.

There ain’t no short-handled shovels. No axes, saws or picks

I’m gonna stay where you sleep all day, where they hung the jerk

who invented work in the Big Rock Candy Mountains

I’ll see you all this coming fall, in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

When It Isn’t Heaven (words and music Quentin Bega)

When it isn’t heaven in the bed alone

When the bottle’s empty on the floor

When it takes just one more drink

To make it seem all right then it isn’t heaven it’s my life

She left me early morning a week ago today

Got her job back smiles behind a desk

And I remember her last words as she closed the door

I guess I’ll marry safe forget the rest

I see the train wheels glowing I hear the whistle sound

Feel the tunnel pressing in on me

I feel the ashes flowing down my face like tears

A country drunk’s the saddest fool around

When it isn’t heaven in the bed alone

When the bottle’s empty on the floor

When it takes just one more drink

To make it seem all right then it isn’t heaven it’s my life

Then it isn’t heaven it’s my life then it isn’t heaven it’s my life

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 17

Welcome to the 17^th podcast of 2023. On this date, 20^th August three things happened of particular note- to me, anyway. In 1908 America’s Great White Fleet arrived in Sydney harbour and was greeted enthusiastically by the locals. This flotilla toured the world from 1907-1909 to make the point that Britannia no longer ruled the waves, but Uncle Sam was now in command. Over a century later it is still the case- no navy and no military force on earth can yet (notice the yet?) outclass America in any arena.

The second event I noted was in 1940 when the Royal Air Force defeated Hitler’s Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. What Churchill said then still resonates: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. With democracy seemingly in retreat across much of the globe, neo-Nazis rising in influence in many countries, and totalitarian governments in Russia, China and much of the world, who will rally the forces of freedom? Do you see any Churchillian figure on the horizon?

The third event- and this is the one I wish to highlight- leaves the martial grounds of the previous mentions behind and, indeed, is hurtling through interstellar space as I speak. I refer, of course, to 1977 when NASA launched Voyager 2 towards the outer planets. This diminutive spacecraft has performed prodigious feats of planetary exploration under the guidance of dedicated scientists and engineers and represents the best that humanity has to offer.

One of these is Ed Stone, who was the chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab before he retired last year. He spent over half his life dedicated to the Voyager program overseeing the spacecrafts churn out discovery after discovery as they explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The ingenuity of the Voyager team will ensure power to Voyager 2 until 2026 but, even ingenuity will reach its limits. By the time a successor program gets off the drawing board and off the launchpad it will be 2036 and perhaps by then our AI overlords will have cancelled all the plans of humanity. Wow, that got dark all of a sudden, I hear you exclaim! So, let’s lighten the load by escaping the bonds of earthly gravity with a song about a man who works 9 to 5 driving a rocket ship- you’ll know it when you hear it, I hope. [insert song]

Yes, yes, I have the temerity to cover such a classic by claiming it’s in homage. But I’ve been a fan of Elton John ever since I bought the 45-rpm single Your Song for my fiancée in January 1971. Elton completed his years-long world tour by headlining Glastonbury earlier this year. Like all the old-stagers of my generation, The Who, The Stones, the remaining Beatles, Van Morrison, etc I imagine he will keep on going even if he gives away global touring with all its demands.

Now, to another song that has been downloaded more than a few times, Little Old Wine Drinker Me. I can remember visiting my brother, who was a Vet in West Cork, Ireland, where we always made sure we had an adequate supply of Sherry from the Wood. (Does anyone remember that concoction?) A group of us would play cards, chat, drink wine and listen to records into the early hours of the morning. As was exceedingly common for that era (late 60s-early 70s) the room was wreathed also, in tobacco smoke from the cigarettes, pipes and cheroots on the go. One of our favourite 45s (the vinyl single discs rather than those heavy handguns) was Dean Martin singing this song. It was first released by Charlie Walker in 1966, on the album Wine, Woman & Walker.

The song became a hit when it was released by Robert Mitchum in early 1967, and by Dean Martin later the same year. Like many others, I misunderstood part of section B because I mis-heard it. I rendered I matched the man behind the bar…as I asked the man behind the bar… which makes no sense when you think about it. Jukeboxes are kept out in the general bar area with lights flashing to entice punters- not behind the bar with the bar-tender! I guess I misheard it because I was not familiar with the verb matched in this context.

So, imagine the scene: early evening, the heart-broken narrator is having a few in a bar near where he is staying. Nothing much is going on- certainly, no-one is putting coins into the jukebox, and the barman holds up two bits and offers to match the guy. This involves each person holding a 25-cent coin and slamming it down on the counter. The punter gets to call match or no match. If he wins the match, he gets to put the won coin into the jukebox and play three songs (or, if he’s heart-broken he might want to double the number of sad songs and put his two bits in, too…) Of course, the house always wins- that sly ol’ bartender was going to put a coin into the jukebox, anyway, to liven up the joint!

I’ve loved the song from the moment I heard Dino’s suave delivery. This country-blues gem (clocking in at two and a half minutes) references those part of the US that are part of the country-blues tradition: it also has a broken heart, a train, a bar, rain, and a jukebox. What more could you ask for, apart from a dog and a pick-up truck? (And who’s to say the narrator didn’t drive his beat-up old Ford from Nashville to Chicago with his best friend hanging his muzzle out of the passenger window?) I recorded the song during lockdown in June 2020 for my post A Bit of Banter Episode 116 and reprise it here. [insert song]

Here in the land down under, it is the end of winter- which in Sydney is not too hard to take. I helped out in my local parish by lending a 6mx3m canopy, some tables, and boxes of pandemic bought paperbacks for its annual fete- the first since 2019 when lockdowns constrained life just about everywhere in Australia. Fete derives from the French for festival or feast. In English its first use was by Horace Walpole.

Incidentally, if you are interested in a tragic tale of doomed romance and supernatural horror set in a baroque castle, why not open a book he wrote, The Castle of Otranto, the first gothic novel, published in 1764. He also coined the word serendipity, which means an unplanned, fortunate occurrence or discovery. One of my favourite words, I have applied it on more than a few instances to my own life. I also like his aphorism, This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. Fans of the Gothic will feel more than think, wouldn’t you say? The following poem by Shelley,

The Cold Earth Slept Below, is a good example of this, The cold earth slept below;/Above the cold sky shone;/And all around,/With a chilling sound,/From caves of ice and fields of snow/The breath of night like death did flow/Beneath the sinking moon.//The wintry hedge was black;/The green grass was not seen;/The birds did rest/On the bare thorn’s breast,/ Whose roots, beside the pathway track,/Had bound their folds o’er many a crack/Which the frost had made between.//Thine eyes glow’d in the glare/Of the moon’s dying light;/As a fen-fire’s beam/On a sluggish stream/Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there,/And it yellow’d the strings of thy tangled hair,/That shook in the wind of night.//The moon made thy lips pale, beloved;/ The wind made thy bosom chill;/The night did shed/On thy dear head/Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie/Where the bitter breath of the naked sky/Might visit thee at will.

To conclude this post, I offer this original effort called Fete. I like the ambiguity of the homophone and borrow from Christina Rossetti’s Gothic poem, Goblin Market, for some of the imagery. [insert song]

Of course, our parish fete was not a Gothic horror scene. Far from it, it was a congenial gathering of the community. But writer’s make use of any material lying to hand, don’t they? And so, we leave the parish fete and head out towards the antepenultimate post (or third-last if you prefer two syllables rather than six!) Along the way may I caution you about buying candied apples from little old men emanating a faintly sulphurous smell? G. K. Chesterton opined, children are innocent and love justice while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy! Caveat emptor you know, let the buyer beware. But also note, caveat auditor-don’t believe everything you hear. I was going to say more but then came across this epigram, to be kind be quiet.

Rocket Man ( Music Elton John lyrics Bernie Taupin)

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour, nine AM
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then

I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time…

Little Old Wine Drinker, Me ( words and music Hank Mills and Dick Jennings)

I’m praying for rain in California
So the grapes can grow and they can make more wine
And I’m sitting in a honky in Chicago
With a broken heart and a woman on my mind

I matched the man behind the bar for the jukebox
And the music takes me back to Tennessee
And they asked who’s the fool in the corner crying
I say a little ole wine drinker me

I came here last week from down in Nashville
‘Cause my baby left for Florida on a train
I thought I’d get a job and just forget her
But in Chicago, the broken heartache’s still the same

I matched the man behind the bar for the jukebox
And the music takes me back to Tennessee
When they ask who’s the fool in the corner crying
I say a little ole wine drinker me
I say a little ole wine drinker me

Fete (words and music by Quentin Bega)

The winter sun is shining down the flyers out about the town

And now the parish fete has set its wares- the people wait

The wonders that they all will see on tables and stands almost for free

There are plants in pots with macramé knots to hang about verandas plain

There are books and prints and paintings wrought and curios for you to claim

Laura and her sister Kate are laughing as they pass the gate

Revealing tables under shade with a dazzling range of goods displayed

They agree to meet under the ghost gum at the hour of half past one

Laura likes exotic trinkets Kate want to taste the range of sweets on show

And so they part exploring what the fete will reveal to them in store

In a shadowed corner a man sets up his stall

Baskets of strange-shaped fancies seem beckoning to all

But where are all the people the silence like a pall

Shrouds the magic table as incense rises and falls

Here comes Kate with a coin

Eager the little man to join

Laura checks her ticking watch the time to meet has come and gone

Where is my flighty sister now I’ll go to seek her out somehow

My mum will give me living hell if I can’t find her I can tell

And so she starts her searching calling sister as she goes

Ahead she sees a shimmer like nothing that she knows

Through the magic curtain steps Laura as she sees

Her sister reaching for a candied apple from the stall

Don’t you dare Kate your sweet tooth will surely be your death

Don’t object come with me now- you should save you breath

Little did she realise the truth

The horror she saved her sister from in sooth

The little man hissed as they left his quota now will be one less

The gentle soul he missed today will count against him I would say

Among the council of the damned others like that evil man

But Laura and her sister Kate oblivious of that looming fate

Laugh and sing as they are passing through the parish gate

Yes Laura and her sister Kate oblivious of that looming fate

Laugh and sing as they are passing through the parish gate

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 16

Welcome to the first podcast of the month of August 2023, which happens to be the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Exactly one year ago, I commemorated this day by featuring five songs dealing with that event in Letters from Quotidia Postscripts 9. Four of the songs had featured in previous posts, and one was a cover of the folk song- Morning Dew.

I wrote then, “Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson wrote the song after seeing the 1959 black-and-white film On the Beach The film depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war. The final scene shows, and thanks, Wikipedia, for this dramatic sentence: The empty windblown streets of Melbourne are punctuated by the rise of dramatic, strident music over a single powerful image of a previously seen Salvation Army street banner: “There is still time … Brother”.

Bonnie wrote the song, Morning Dew, the first of her career-and what a first!- after friends she was staying with in L.A. went to bed. It has been covered by a wide range of artists. It was first released in 1961. She is still going strong this year, rousing audiences in Britain at the age of 83, what a woman, eh? The song has universal themes- which I will not insult you by explicating here- the 21-year-old Bobbie Dobson set it out as clear as the morning dew.” Well, I’m reprising it here one year later.

As I was researching material for this podcast, I came across a poem by Sankichi Toge, August 6, translated by Karen Thornber. SankichI Toge (1917 – 1953) was a Japanese poet, activist, and survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. His collection ‘Poems of the Atomic Bomb’ was published in 1951. I found it on the site cnduk.org. can we forget that flash?/suddenly 30,000 in the streets-disappeared in the crushed depths of darkness/the shrieks of 50,000 died out//when the swirling yellow smoke thinned/buildings split, bridges collapsed/packed trains rested singed/and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers – Hiroshima/before long, a line of naked bodies walking in groups, crying/with skin hanging down like rags/hands on chests/stamping on crumbled brain matter/burnt clothing covering hips//corpses lie on the parade ground like stone images of Jizo, dispersed in all directions/on the banks of the river, lying one on top of another, a group that had crawled to/a tethered raft//also gradually transformed into corpses beneath the sun’s scorching rays/and in the light of the flames that pierced the evening sky/the place where mother and younger brother were pinned under alive/also was engulfed in flames/and when the morning sun shone on a group of high-school girls/who had fled and were lying on the floor of the armoury, in excrement/their bellies swollen, one eye crushed, half their bodies raw flesh with skin ripped/off, hairless, impossible to tell who was who/all had stopped moving/in a stagnant, offensive smell/the only sound the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins//city of 300,000/can we forget-that-silence?/in-that-stillness/the powerful appeal/of the white eye sockets of the wives and children who did not return home/that tore apart our hearts/can it be forgotten?!// [insert song]

Can it be forgotten? The final line of the poem, August 6.It should never be forgotten. Though, who will tell those psychotic clowns who are threating the use of these obscene devices in Ukraine, Korea and elsewhere? Now, to matters more infused with what makes life worth living- love, in all of its variations.

Three years ago, in June 2020, during COVID-19 lockdown I recorded a wonderful love song written by Barney Rush and popularised by Christy Moore who had met Barney in 1969 in Jersey. “Barney explained it to me,” Christy recalls. “When he was writing this love song, he needed a name to tie it all together. Nancy Spain was a famous English journalist back in the 1960s, and Barney really liked the sound of her name. That was the name he chose for the subject of his song.” Nancy Spain was no ordinary journalist, but one promoted as a free-roaming controversialist by The Daily Express which declared proudly, if somewhat feverishly: “They call her vulgar. . . they call her the worst dressed woman in Britain. . .”And the reason “they” found her badly dressed may have had more to do with the repressions of the 1950s than with Nancy Spain’s own sense of style. In her public appearances on TV shows such as What’s My Line? she tended to favour “natty gents’ sportswear” and what they called “mannish” clothes.

Nancy Spain was, in fact, a lesbian. And it is said that she had many affairs with other women, including Marlene Dietrich. All of which was apparently accepted in good spirit by her soulmate Laurie. The two women even died together when the light aircraft in which they were travelling to the 1964 Grand National crashed into a cabbage field near Aintree racecourse. Noel Coward wrote that “it is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out, when so many bores and horrors are left living.” Well, Noel, old boy, the rain falls on the good and evil alike, as I think an itinerant preacher put it in Palestine a while back. (I got this info from an article by Declan Lynch writing in The Irish Independent, October 4, 2014) and her Wikipedia entry.)

After Rosalita and Jack Campbell, this is my most downloaded song. I think Nancy Spain would have been mightily amused to think that her name is used as the title of this love song. [insert song]

I will end this podcast with a song that is sort of like a lullaby. I imagine a mother reassuring her child that all will be well even though events unfolding in the world around might suggest that all may not be well. And I’ll preface it with a verse or two from one of my go-to poets- Walt Whitman. Several posts ago I used the first section from his profound and magisterial poem, Poem of the Open Road, Here is the second section of that poem that I think fits in well with the themes I am exploring,

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe that much unseen is also here.//Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,/The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied;/The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,/The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,//The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,/They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,/None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

And, from section six of that poem, Here is the test of wisdom,/Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,/Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,/Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,/Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,/Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;/Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.//

And talking of wisdom, in Job we find, Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding? You would hope so but listen to some of the geriatric bloviating emanating from so many of our ageing politicians, shock jocks, and assorted long-in-the-tooth looney tunes and you would have to wonder what Job was on about!

In the closing song a mother tries to convey some wisdom to her child. But the child in the song is rather sceptical about the mother’s consoling nostrums. I tried out several styles to try to capture the spirit of the song and settled on this one to frame my original composition which asks the question, Is There a Ledger? [insert song]

Listen to this quotation from Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of the nuclear blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies. There’s wisdom for you! Until the 20^{th of} August, take care of yourselves, those you love, those around you and, if possible, the environment.

Morning Dew (Music and lyrics by Bonnie Dobson)

Take me for a walk in the mornin’ dew, my love
Take me for a walk in the mornin’ sun, my love
You can’t go walkin’ in the mornin’ dew today
You can’t go walkin’ in the mornin’ sun today

But listen, I hear a man moanin’, “Lord”
Oh yes, I hear a man moanin’, “Lord”
You didn’t hear a man moan at all
You didn’t hear a man moan at all

But I thought I heard my baby cryin’, “Mama”
Oh yes, I hear my baby cry, “Mama”
You’ll never hear your baby cry again
You’ll never hear your baby cry again

Now, where have all the people gone?
Won’t you tell me where have all the people gone?
Don’t you worry about the people anymore
Don’t you worry about the people anymore

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 15

Welcome to the fifteenth podcast of 2023. As I close in on the terminus of Letters from Quotidia, I will reprise a few songs that have been downloaded over the years the Letters have been published. The standout is a song which I will provide some context around. I first published it back in 2020 as the pandemic was biting hard. The original post can be found in A Bit of Banter, Episode 70.

Rosalita and Jack Campbell was written almost a quarter of a century ago by Sean Mone of Keady, Co Armagh about the terror of drive-by shootings and targeted assassinations in Belfast in the early 1970s. I first heard the song from Christy Moore’s singing in 2019. It brought me back to my years in Belfast; first, as a teenager, from 1966 to mid-1968 when I spent weekends going to music venues with my girlfriend (later, wife); then, from late 1968- mid 1972 where I attended St Joseph’s College of Education, known colloquially as Trench House, for a teaching degree.

I saw Belfast turn from a vibrant, modern city into a bitter, sectarian battleground in those short years. The descent into hell did not take very long at all. From late 1969 to mid-1970, I lived in a dingy one-room bedsit near Carlisle Circus at the bottom of the Antrim Road. Across the landing lived a boozy journalist from The Belfast Telegraph who would regale me with tales of the dark doings of British special forces and various loyalist and republican groupings. The stuff he knew curdled my blood, even if he did, perhaps, exaggerate for effect. In July 1971

I got married and, in 1972, moved into a small house in a lane just off the Whiterock Road with my wife and infant daughter. There, we experienced the increasing violence that internment without trial spawned- and witnessed (but mostly heard) skirmishes between the IRA and British forces on that road where we could read, from our upstairs bedroom window, the graffito on the cemetery wall, Is There a Life Before Death? In answer to this question, we left the first setting of our married life for Australia in September 1972.

Hearing the song brought it all back, because, not just ourselves, but very many people in Belfast and Northern Ireland have been touched by such a shooting or other instance of violence associated with the “Troubles” which, alas, post-Brexit, may be metastasising again. Put up again thy sword…for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Do any of you think that the words of admonition spoken in the garden of Gethsemane by Jesus has much effect on those who are like the street demons of the song you will hear now? It would be nice to think- yes, a few, even if far too few. Here’s my most downloaded song: [insert song]

Regular listeners to the podcasts will know of my affection for the mythos of the American Old West: its gunfighters, explorers, adventurers, wild women and, in particular, its cowboys. It encompasses most of the 19^th Century with its unruly offspring- the Wild West- which stretched from the end of the Civil War, for 30 years, until the advent of the 20^th Century. Like so many other aficionados I eagerly consumed movies, TV shows, songs, novels, histories, and documentaries on this fascinating period and I still look forward to more quality work in this genre.

A poem, Out Where the West Begins, written in 1912 by newspaperman Arthur Chapmanto settle an argument between governors of various Western states who each claimed that their state was the true origin of the West, became popular almost immediately and was copied nationally and internationally. I give it here and no explanation will be needed for fans of the genre. Out Where the West Begins.

Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,/Out where the smile dwells a little longer,/That’s where the West begins;/Out where the sun is a little brighter,/ Where the snows that fall are a trifle whiter,/Where the bonds of home are a wee bit tighter,/That’s where the West begins.//Out where the skies are a trifle bluer,/Out where friendship’s a little truer,/That’s where the West begins;/Out where a fresher breeze is blowing,/Where there’s laughter in every streamlet flowing,/Where there’s more-of-reaping-and-less-of-sowing,/That’s where the West begins;//Out where the world is in the making,/Where fewer hearts in despair are aching,/That’s where the West begins;/Where there’s more of singing and less of sighing,/Where there’s more of giving and less of buying,/And a man makes friends without half trying,/That’s where the West begins.//

Yes, while the original Old-and-Wild West occurred in a specific place and time, I like to think that it persists in all places and among all peoples who display the generosity of spirit and love of freedom set out in the poem. I had little problem finding a companion piece to the first song of this post. Marty Robbins, according to one account, was travelling along the Carlsbad Highway near El Paso and Juarez in the mid-1950s and wrote a draft of his great song El Paso. Three years later, in 1959 he had finished the draft and recorded El Paso in Nashville.

It is one of the finest songs of the genre and it reached number one in the American charts in 1960 and has charted around the world being covered by among others, The Grateful Dead, who featured it for a quarter century in their sets for a total of 389 performances. Sung by Bob Weir, supported by Gerry Garcia on harmonies, it was the Dead’s most requested number. And, because this is a homage and not a competition, I have no hesitation in giving my version here. Or maybe just a little hesitation… [insert song]

A personal journal such as this will obviously talk about the meaning of the term home and all it connotes from time to time. But as I look back over the past three years of the podcasts, I realise that the concept Home permeates the Letters. The final song of this post was prompted by episode 29, Home, published on 01 March 2021. In it I wrote, On New Year’s Eve, 1999, I was relaxing in my backyard with a beer in my hand and my guitar by my side. My family were all in residence and the sun was shining. The heat of the Australian summer was tempered by a cool breeze. I realised that, for the first time in over thirty years, I was in a place that I could call home without demur.

Some people live in the one spot, the one dwelling, their whole lives as have their parents and grandparents before them and they, in turn, expect to hand on the home to one or more of their children- but such instances must be rare today. For instance, in the first 45 years of my life, I had lived in twenty different places on three continents. However, for the past twenty-five years I have lived at the same address. And counting. The opening of the song that concludes this post was an echo of a line from Robert Frost, whose long conversational poem, The Death of the Hired Man has in it this statement, Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in. The other prompt for the concluding song was episode 65, Homebase, published on 03 May 2021.

Here I will make a comparison between these podcasts and a Bildungsroman. A Bildungsroman relates the growing up or “coming of age” of a person who goes in search of answers to life’s questions. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest son going out in the world to seek his fortune. Well, I am the youngest son, and many would say I am also a bit of a dunce, too. In the first line of the song, Homebase, I wrote, most things worth knowing I learned by the age of four, school was a drag and I walked out that door, All that I really want, all that I really need is you. Listen to my latest song with the word home in its title and you will see the connections. Here is that song, Home is the Place. [insert song]

Podcast 16 will land in a new month on an ominous date, 6 August, which is the day that humanity- or should that be inhumanity- ushered in what I think of as the beginning of the Anthropocene when the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, the first nuclear strike, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. While the pundits are vociferously wondering if AI will spell the end of the human race, maybe it will be beaten to the punch by an older apocalyptic fear.

Rosalita and Jack Campbell (music and words by Sean Mone)

In a bar room in Belfast, into his pint glass,

Jack Campbell he sang as last orders were called.

The bar stool was his mustang, he swayed as his wife sang,

at the gunfire that rang around the O.K. Corral

Her name was Anita, he called her Rosalita

when the beer and the whiskey it went to his head.

To him she’s whisper “let’s take a wee dander,

to where we’ll be cosy in our little homestead”.

When the sun goes behind the black mountain,

street demons come out to dance

And cowboys who sing about gunfights and Indians,

against sub-machine guns they haven’t a chance.

As homeward they rambled, Rosalita and Jack Campbell

called in to their local fast-food takeaway.

As they danced round the chippie, singing yippee-aye-yippee

the crowd in the queue answered Yippe-aye-yay!

Till a car it came cruising, seeking a victim

Jack turned in confusion when he saw the gun.

His last word was “Jesus…” the trigger was squeazed

Jack fell to his knees and the car it was gone.

When the sun goes behind the black mountain,

street demons come out to dance.

And cowboys who sing about gunfights and Indians,

against sub-machine guns they haven’t a chance.

The years passed over, behind her closed door,

Anita she sank into Prozac and gin.

Her nights and her days spent in a haze

down the lonesome road thinking what might have been.

Rosalita, the dark senorita, still waiting to hear

from Jack Campbell her man.

He whispers to her “let’s ride into the sunset”

Heaven’s only one step from the old Rio Grande

When the sun goes behind the black mountain,

street demons come out to dance.

And cowboys who sing about gunfights and Indians,

against sub-machine guns they haven’t a chance.

And way out beyond the black mountain,

Rosalita and Jack Campbell dance,

Where troubles and old songs are forgotten and gone,

And dreamers still hold onto love and romance.

El Paso (Music and lyrics Marty Robbins)

Out in the West Texas town of El Paso

I fell in love with a Mexican girl.

Nighttime would find me in Rose’s Cantina,

Music would play and Felina would whirl.

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina,

Wicked and evil while casting a spell

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden,

I was in love, but in vain I could tell.

One night a wild young cowboy came in,

Wild as the West Texas wind.

Dashing and daring, a drink he was sharing

With wicked Felina, the girl that I love.

So in anger

I challenged his right for the love of this maiden;

Down went his hand for the gun that he wore.

My challenge was answered, in less than a heartbeat

The handsome young stranger lay dead on the floor.

Just for a moment I stood there in silence,

Shocked by the foul evil deed I had done

Many thoughts raced through my mind as I stood there;

I had but one chance and that was to run.

Out through the back door of Rose’s I ran,

Out where the horses were tied.

I caught a good one; it looked like it could run,

Up on its back and away I did ride.

Just as fast as I

could from the West Texas town of El Paso,

Out to the badlands of New Mexico

Back in El Paso my life would be worthless;

Everything’s gone in life nothing is left.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the young maiden,

My love is stronger than my fear of death.

I saddled up and away I did go,

Riding alone in the dark.

Maybe tomorrow a bullet may find me,

Tonight nothing’s worse than this pain in my heart.

And as last here

I am on the hill overlooking El Paso,

I can see Rose’s Cantina below.

My love is strong and it pushes me onward,

Down off the hill to Felina I go.

Off to my right I see five mounted cowboys,

Off to my left ride a dozen and more.

Shouting and shooting; I can’t let them catch me

I have to make it to Rose’s back door.

Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel

A deep burning pain in my side.

Though I am trying to stay in the saddle.

I’m getting weary, unable to ride.

But my love for

Felina is strong and I rise where I’ve fallen;

Though I am weary, I can’t stop to rest.

I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle,

I feel the bullet go deep in my chest.

From out of nowhere, Felina has found me,

Kissing my cheek as she kneels by my side.

Cradled by two loving arms that I’ll die for,

One little kiss and Felina goodbye.

Home is the Place (Music and lyrics Quentin Bega)

Home is the place where you can go

When every other place shows you the door

Home is the only place where you know

Friends will bring you joy then bring some more

Where laughter’s always easy never cruel

No one’s cornered as the dunce or fool

Where you can be open and just be yourself

Knowing no one here is hard of heart

Knowing that you won’t be left up on the shelf

That no one wants to tear your peace apart

Here you are contented and it seems

All things are possible even dreams

Hey! Ho! highs and lows round and round my spirit goes

Chasing after moonbeams I suppose in through the meadows of repose

Up down round and round time is slowing winding down

And in this moment not a sound as into your loving arms I drown

Home is the place where you can go

When every other place shows you the door

Home is the only place where you know

Friends will bring you joy then bring some more

Here you are contented and it seems

All things are possible even dreams- even dreams

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 14

Welcome to the 14^th Podcast of 2023. It is now July, dry for some but such abstinence or even temperance is not to be found in the bounds of this Letter from Quotidia- or indeed in its author who struggled manfully through the last podcast process battling a respiratory illness-dragon that my wife labelled as merely a man-flu.

Which leads me to the song I am re-recording, I’m Supposed To Be. I addressed the background to it in Letters from Quotidia Episode 33: Four years in the heat of North Queensland and I was slowly going troppo. Outward trappings of success, a commission to write a musical play put on in the local commercial theatre, confident and assured as the head of English at a pleasant school, and I was sinking. Friends and acquaintances, family, excursions to the Whitsunday Islands, fishing trips and holidays on Magnetic Island- none of these rescued me from a melancholic miasma of weary wondering what’s it all about?

I was approaching my mid-forties, within the zone for an occurrence of the mid-life crisis, although empirical research has found no evidence for it and questions its validity as a human condition. So, sorry guys, just say to your wife that you’re buying that sports car because you’re a selfish sod and be done with it! I wasn’t really happy with the version I recorded back then so I have decided that an acoustic-only version of the song, at a slightly slower pace, is what is needed.

To help set the scene, I’ll re-visit two valued poets I have referred to elsewhere in my Letters, Amy Lowell, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Like black ice/Scrolled over with unintelligible patterns/by an ignorant skater/Is the dulled surface of my heart.//This gem, Middle Age, by Amy Lowell, written in the second decade of the 20th Century, neatly describes how middle-aged me felt at that time in the tropical heat- and also four years later writing the song, as I was trying to get a toehold in the Sydney property market and carrying debts that nearly crushed me.

Discontent is woven into the human condition, is it not? Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose parents had wanted a girl and held off naming him for six months, wrote about a man uncomfortable in his skin in one of his best-known poems, published back in the year 1910, Miniver-Cheevy, Miniver cursed the commonplace/And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;/He missed the mediæval grace/Of iron clothing./Miniver Cheevy, born too late,/Scratched his head and kept on thinking;/Miniver coughed, and called it fate,/And kept on drinking. Well, 30 years down the track and no longer middle-aged, I’ll admit to scratching my head from time to time as I keep on drinking. Here is the re-recorded song, I’m Supposed to Be: [insert song]

Now, I can’t leave this part of the post without recounting a couple of anecdotes concerning Robinson which are greatly amusing, to me at least. And thanks to the site Poetry Foundation for this information: According to scholar Robert Gilbert, all his life Robinson strenuously objected to free verse, replying once when asked if he wrote it, No, I write badly enough as it is. A critic found Robinson’s tone not sunny enough, writing, “the world is not beautiful to [Robinson], but a prison-house.” To which he responded, “I am sorry that I have painted myself in such lugubrious colours, The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”

I also admire his old man in the poem John Evereldown who refuses to stay by the safety of the fire, saying in the final verse, God knows if I pray to be done with it all/But God’s no friend of John Evereldown./So the clouds may come and the rain may fall,/the shadows may creep and the dead men crawl,—/But I follow the women wherever they call,/And that’s why I’m going to Tilbury Town. Let us leave the environs of Tilbury Town, now, with the proviso that we will return to it towards the end of the post.

The beauty of the morning at dawn as light spreads across the sky gives rise to feelings of optimism as a rule. Why this may be is, perhaps, covered by the pathetic fallacy where felicities in nature give rise to feelings within that all is well with the world. The islands off the west coast of Ireland have become refuges of those pushed to the edge of the world. The Connemara Cradle Song is a lullaby where a mother croons to her infant child and prays for the safe return of her husband from the night seas where he fishes for herring.

Some sources have attributed the lyrics to Irish singer and collector Delia Murphy who recorded on 78 rpm records in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Her last recording was an LP, The Queen of Connemara in 1962. The song has been recorded by numerous artists over the decades. With my version I have sought to keep instrumentation to a minimum. Traditionally, lullabies should be sung unaccompanied in 3/4 or 6/8 time rocking between the tonic and dominant, but I would not wish to inflict my unadorned voice on the tender ears of my listeners. Think of the song, perhaps, as a soothing filling between the rather more astringent slices that make up the song-sandwich of this podcast. Here is, The Connemara Cradle Song: [insert song]

A couple of podcasts ago I featured a Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu who wrote a short poem about the fleeting contentment of sharing drinks with an old friend. At the risk of being labelled a running dog of the Chinese regime, may I cite yet another poet of the Middle Kingdom? This time it’s Lu Yu, a 12^th Century poet who, according to Britannica online, gained renown for his simple, direct expression and his attention to realistic detail which set him apart from the elevated and allusive style of the prevailing school of poetry. Well, give me simple and direct anytime.

Here is his poem, Written in a Carefree Mood, translated by sinologist Burton Dewitt Watson: Old man pushing seventy,/In truth he acts like a little boy,/Whooping with delight when he spies some mountain fruits,/Laughing with joy, tagging after village mummers;/With the others having fun stacking tiles to make a pagoda,/Standing alone staring at his image in the jardinière pool./Tucked under his arm, a battered book to read,/Just like the time he first set out to school.

This fine reflection on life finds an echo in a 19^th Century poem, Nature, by American poet William Wadsworth Longfellow. As a fond mother, when the day is o’er,/Leads by the hand her little child to bed,/ Half willing, half reluctant to be led,/And leave his broken playthings on the floor,/Still gazing at them through the open door,/ Nor wholly reassured and comforted/By promises of others in their stead,/Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;/So Nature deals with us, and takes away/ Our playthings one by one, and by the hand/Leads us to rest so gently, that we go/Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,/Being too full of sleep to understand/How far the unknown transcends the what we know. Also, simple, direct, and profound as I hope I have demonstrated elsewhere in the Letters.

And simple and direct is this from The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance who writes about one of the glories of American culture- the blues- which I have revered since my mid-teens. In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone/I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—/”Ain’t got nobody in all this world,/Ain’t got nobody but ma self/.I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’/And put ma troubles on the shelf.”//Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor./He played a few chords then he sang some more—/ “I got the Weary Blues/And I can’t be satisfied./Got the Weary Blues/And can’t be satisfied—/ I ain’t happy no mo’/ And I wish that I had died.”/And far into the night he crooned that tune./The stars went out and so did the moon./The singer stopped playing and went to bed/While the Weary Blues echoed through his head./He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead// And now, as promised, we’re back in Tilbury Town, [insert song]

All too soon it’s over, and as the final half-dozen podcasts hove into view, I’m enjoying the sunny days and crisp nights of winter in Sydney’s outer west. Enjoy your slice of the world, too.

I’m Supposed To Be (music and lyrics by Quentin Bega)

I am a middle-aged man with both my parents gone

And my firstborn son he lies in the ground

I am a pillar of strength or I’m supposed to be

For my family they all look to me

To provide the material goods that keep them in the race

The lower middle-class is a frightening place

When there’s no way up that I can see but the way on down

Keeps on beckoning to nowhere town

Sometimes I get drunk and I howl like a dog

Sometimes I am aching with fear

At times I don’t know how I’m going to go on

I don’t know how to go on

But I am a middle-aged man with responsibilities

Although the point of this keeps eluding me

Read the new-age pundits read my stars sometimes

Scratch my head sometimes I’m still on the line

Between a birth and death that makes no sense to me

No one can show to me a larger mystery

Yet at the office I am still a force to be reckoned with

They don’t cross me if they know what’s good for them

Sometimes I get drunk and I howl like a dog

Sometimes I am aching with fear

At times I don’t know how I’m going to go on

I don’t know how to go on (instrumental verse and chorus)

I am a middle-aged man with both my parents gone

And my firstborn son he lies in the ground

I am a pillar of strength or I’m supposed to be-

Sometimes I get drunk and I howl like a dog

Sometimes I am aching with fear

At times I don’t know how I’m going to go on

I don’t know how to go on- But I go on

The Connemara Cradle Song (trad)

On the wings of the wind o’er the dark rolling deep
Angels are coming to watch o’er thy sleep
Angels are coming to watch over thee
So list to the wind coming over the sea

Hear the wind blow love, hear the wind blow
Lean your head over and hear the wind blow

Oh, winds of the night, may your fury be crossed,
May no one who’s dear to our island be lost
Blow the winds gently, calm be the foam
Shine the light brightly and guide them back home

Hear the wind blow love, hear the wind blow
Lean your head over and hear the wind blow

The currachs are sailing way out on the blue
Laden with herring of silvery hue
Silver the herring and silver the sea
And soon there’ll be silver for baby and me

Hear the wind blow love, hear the wind blow
Lean your head over and hear the wind blow

The currachs tomorrow will stand on the shore
And daddy goes sailing, a sailing no more
The nets will be drying, the nets heaven-blessed
And safe in my arms dear, contented he’ll rest.

Tilbury Town. (music Quentin Bega, lyrics Quentin Bega and E A Robinson)

I’m going to Tilbury Town to mingle with the women there racing around

Don’t ask my age or means or purpose what I intend to do with my purchase

I could have stayed by the fire smoking dreaming dozing the hot ash poking

Why should I wait for someone to ask me for a song or tune or joke to task me

I want to be free to follow the breeze where ‘ere the will o’ the wisp takes me

Free to be stupid, freedom to fail, stand at the crossroads, wonder who will [be next to] forsake me

God knows if I pray to be done with it all

But God’s no friend of me- you can write that down

So the clouds may come and the rain may fall,

The shadows may creep and the dead men crawl,—

But I follow the women wherever they call,

And that’s why I’m going to Tilbury Town.

I’m going to Tilbury Town to mingle with the women there racing around

Don’t ask my age or means or purpose what I intend to do with my purchase

I could have stayed by the fire smoking dreaming dozing the hot ash poking

Why should I wait for someone to ask me for a song or tune or joke to task me

I want to be free to follow the breeze where ‘ere the will o’ the wisp takes me

Free to be stupid, freedom to fail, stand at the crossroads, wonder who will [be next] to forsake me

So I am going to Tilbury Town, you know I am going to Tilbury Town

Oh, yes I am going to Tilbury Town

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 13

At the alder-darkened brink/Where the stream slows to a lucid jet/I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,/And see, before I can drink,//A startled inchling trout/Of spotted near-transparency,/Trawling a shadow solider than he./He swerves now, darting out//To where, in a flicked slew/Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves/Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,/And butts then out of view//Beneath a sliding glass/Crazed by the skimming of a brace/Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,/In which deep cloudlets pass//And a white precipice/Of-mirrored-birch-trees-plunges-down/Toward where the azures of the zenith drown./How shall I drink all this?//Joy’s trick is to supply/Dry lips with what can cool and slake,/Leaving them/ dumbstruck also with an ache/Nothing can satisfy.//

I’ll just reprise that last stanza, if I may- Joy’s trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy! Wonderful! Real poets can achieve in a hundred words what lesser mortals strive- and fail- to convey in a thousand! Real artists do this. And real artists smile at our imitations of their inimitable excellence because they know such homage is just a way of saying thank you for your service to all of humanity: [insert song]

Louis Armstrong- Satchmo- one of the true greats of music, achieved a hit in the UK with this song, reaching number one. I remember, because, as a world-weary cynic of the advanced age of 17 I told my parents that it was just sentimental tosh- or words to that effect! The site, discovermusic.com is much more accurate than that pimply, callow, youth of the late sixties living in the Glens of Antrim: For Armstrong, it told a story of possibility. With his craggy, weathered voice, he sang a song of hope that seemed to resonate with people everywhere. What made his performance magnetic was its poignancy: it was as if Armstrong, who was in his twilight years and ailing from a heart condition, was taking one last, appreciative look at life, and taking stock of the simple things that most people take for granted. “It seems to me, it ain’t the world that’s so bad, but what we’re doing to it,… All I’m saying is, see what a wonderful world it would be, if only we’d give it a chance.”

Well said, Satchmo. This reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi’s reply to a reporter’s question: What do you think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a good idea. Almost sixty years later, I agree with Satchmo that the world remains a wonderful place, in spite of all the forces that are ranged against it. And the wonder of the world encapsulated by Hamlen Brook in little over one hundred worlds is a marvel in itself. True artists don’t waste space, colour, music, material, words, or your time (and mine): unlike the scammers of various sorts in various guises who not only waste your time (and mine). But also, they seek to separate us from our money. Alas, too many victims are also separated from hope and joy and peace of mind shattered by the predatory wickedness of those whose place in one of the circles of hell is assured eternally- should cosmic justice be a thing! Old man, stop yelling at the clouds! Who said that?

Excuse me, now, as I step down off my soapbox. Where were we? Separation. Yes, that brings me to a song I wish to re-record. In one of the early Letters From Quotidia Episode 22, in fact, I recorded a song about separation that I was not entirely happy with. And, as I was wondering how to fix it, American poet, W. S. Merwin, astonished me with the way he compressed the meaning I was looking for into 20 words, including the title. His haiku-like poem, Separation goes: Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle./Everything I do is stitched with its colour. I thought I was pretty clever way back when I wrote the song Unhallowed Ground using a series of similes and metaphors to tell of the separation of my wife from me in 1989 when we had to part for a couple of months. 146 words or, without repeats, 91. Pretty good, I thought. But for comparison let me reprise W. S. Merwin’s gem: Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle./Everything I do is stitched with its colour. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The song you are about to hear is much more autumnal, even wintery in its tone despite one summer reference. [insert song]

The greatest separation is, of course, death. W. S. Merwin wrote the following poem entitled, For The Anniversary Of My Death, Every year without knowing it I have passed the day/When the last fires will wave to me/And the silence will set out/Tireless traveller/Like the beam of a lightless star//Then I will no longer/Find myself in life-as-in-a-strange-garment/Surprised at the earth/And the love of one woman/And the shamelessness of men/As today writing after three days of rain/Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease/And bowing not knowing to what. W. S. Merwin died in 2019, aged 91 and Richard Wilbur who wrote Hamlen Brook, quoted at the beginning of the post, died in 2017, aged 96. Both men had a good, long innings, to use a metaphor from the game of cricket. When I was putting this post together, I thought, yeah, let’s compose something upbeat to season the sombre timbre of this episode. And as it happens, more often than not, and to use a phrase from Robert Burns, the best laid plans of men and mice aft gang agley. Which means, our most careful planning can fall to bits.

Burns composed his poem To a Mouse, with the epigraph On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785. His second stanza resonates with my near despair at what we are doing to the natural world, I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion/Has broken Nature’s social union,/An’ justifies that ill opinion,/Which makes thee startle,/At me, thy poor, earth-born/ companion,/An’ fellow-mortal! The concluding stanza states, Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!/The present only toucheth thee:/But Och! I backward cast my e’e,/On prospects drear!/An’ forward tho’ I canna see,/I guess an’ fear! My concluding song takes us to 1849 when a 19-year-old Christina Rossetti hooked my soul with her poignant poem, Remember.

As I read that wonderful sonnet, I picked up my guitar and started to strum in a stately bluegrass waltz time and within a few minutes I had the template for the final song of this post- chiefly because that amazing 19-year-old poet supplied me with the lyrics! Readers of Christina Rossetti’s lovely sonnet will note that I have used her words almost unaltered. [insert song] I hope the plangency of the music and poetry in this letter has not proved too much of a buzzkill as I believe the younger set defines anything that takes away from the fizzing and frenetic fulsomeness supplied by our eager consumption of the confections that comprise contemporary life for we fortunate few living in the lap of western consumerism: old man yelling at the clouds again, I fear. So, until we meet again in early July (dry or otherwise) do care and take care.

What a Wonderful World (words and music Bob Thiele and George David Weiss)

C G Am Em

I see trees of green, red roses too

Dm C E7 Am

I see them bloom, for me and you,

F G C

And I think to myself, What a wonderful world.

Verse 2

C G Am Em

I see skies of blue and clouds of white,

Dm C E7 Am

The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night,

F G C

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Verse 3

G C

The colours of a rainbow are so pretty in the sky

G C

Are also on the faces of people going by

Am Em Am Em

I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do

Am Em C G

They’re really saying I love you.

Verse 4

C G Am Em

I hear babies cry, I watch them grow

Dm C E7 Am

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know,

F G C

And I think to myself what a wonderful world

F G C

Yes I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Unhallowed Ground (words and music Quentin Bega)

Feeling like unhallowed ground

An instrument without its sound

A pilgrim left without a creed

Like a meadow gone to seed

An empty rhythm in my head

Tells me I’m not really dead

Like a rhyme that I should know

Like that blackbird in the snow

You’ve been gone far too long

How am I to carry on

Hurry home I’m alone

Cold as earth before the dawn

Sunlight gathered in your eyes

Blue lakes under summer skies

Moonbeams played about your form

As your body kept me warm

You’ve been gone far too long

How am I to carry on

Hurry home I’m alone

Cold as earth before the dawn

Feeling like unhallowed ground

An instrument without its sound

A pilgrim left without a creed

Like a meadow gone to seed

A pilgrim left without a creed

Like a meadow gone to seed

Remember (lyrics Christina Rossetti music Quentin Bega)

Remember me when I am gone to that silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Remember me when I am gone to that silent land

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Remember me when I am gone to that silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

When you can no longer hold me

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 12

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 11

Welcome to the eleventh podcast of 2023 in the Letters from Quotidia series. I conclude my tribute to my former student, friend, and collaborator, Mark Dougherty, who died much too young in a Belfast hospital on Christmas Day, 2020. The song that brings the jazz suite to a close is called, Yesterday is Cancelled. And the follow up clause goes; Tomorrow won’t be around.

Now, at that time, newspapers were in rude– and that is the appropriate word- good health. So, we know I’m going back decades! Newspapers everywhere, it seems, are now on life-support. It is the most, ah, lyrically challenged of the suite of songs we composed- it comprises 66 words if you don’t count repeated lines and phrases and if you do, it only weighs in at 89 words. But, I guess, if yesterday is cancelled and tomorrow won’t be around- what is there left to say? So, let’s hear the final song of The Paper Suite: [insert song]

There are sounds that tear at your heart and make you tear up: a child’s despairing cry, the sudden snatch of a song that brings to mind a loved one long dead, or something in the fabric of a musical note produced by a virtuoso player that accesses something deep and bleak and truthful in your soul. Such it was two weeks ago when I was sitting in my kitchen watching a documentary on my iPad about the great Irish fiddler, Sean Keane, best known as a member of The Chieftains, who had died one week before on 7^th May 2023.

Paddy Glackin, another renowned Irish fiddler said, Keane excavated music in a way few people did. He uncovered different tonal colours from dark to brightness. He understood that there were particular tonalities associated with traditional music that set it apart and set him apart… Keane understood the emotional, spiritual, and lonely quality in Irish traditional music. You only have to listen to the way he plays the opening note of Dark Loughnagar– it would break your heart. Listen to it if you can, and you may agree.

That haunting note recalled to my mind Seamus Heaney’s fine poem, The Given Note, from his second collection, Door into the Dark, published in 1969, about a fiddler who went alone to the most westerly storm lashed Blasket Island off the coast of Kerry and brought back a tune that is called Port na bPucai or The Fairies’ Tune. This was the only one of Heaney’s poems to be read at his funeral, if I am to believe Bing A. I.’s notes which accompanied my research on the topic as a pop up side-bar! My God, A.I. gets more ubiquitous with every post!

So, in memory, in appreciation, and in gratitude to these two fine Irish artists, I will now read The Given Note: On the most westerly Blasket/In a dry-stone hut/He got this air out of the night.//Strange noises were heard/By others who followed, bits of a tune/Coming in on loud weather//Though nothing like melody./ He blamed their fingers and ear/As unpractised, their fiddling easy//For he had gone alone into the island,/And brought back the whole thing./The house throbbed like his full violin.//So whether he calls it spirit music/Or not, I don’t care. He took it/ Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.//Still he maintains, from nowhere./It comes off the bow gravely,/Rephrases itself into the air.//

In a memorable collaboration with uillean piper Liam O’Flynn, who played with seminal Irish folk group Planxty for many years, they produced an album of poetry and music in 2003, The Poet and the Piper where O’Flynn follows the poem with the air Port na bPucai in English, The Fairies’ Tune, the tune brought back from the Blaskets by the Kerry fiddler Heaney writes about in his poem.And as a reminder of just how intertwined the Irish arts community is, there’s a photograph of Sean Keane, Paddy Glackin and Liam O’Flynn taken in 2018 shortly before O’Flynn’s death in March of that year. The original composition for this letter is in homage to the keepers of Irish Traditional music and song over the centuries; those few whose names are writ large in history such as those mentioned before and the many nameless men and women who have kept the tradition alive for no reward beyond the tradition itself. I call it The Setting Sun, [insert song]

I wrote what might be considered a companion piece to this almost thirty years ago in the mid-1990s. Our family had not long returned from North Queensland and from time to time I visited Irish pubs in the centre of Sydney with my friend, Kevin Baker, poet, and musician, who lived for a time in an apartment up Glebe Point Road. These venues were OK, the Guinness was generally good, and the musicians served up popular ballads for the entertainment of the tourists. But there was something missing and I found that the crack I had with my friends in Banter, a newly formed group in the outer west of Sydney which featured traditional tunes and less known songs was more to my liking. So, I wrote a song about it which I called Sing Along.

I published this song in episode 35 of Letters From Quotidia. (I am currenting writing episode 241 so I’m referencing the early history of the Letters.) I re-recorded the song for this podcast- but before we hear it- this is what I said back then, and it can bear a re-telling: Maybe it all started a hundred thousand years ago on an escarpment fringing the African savannah. A number of families of early humans have sought sanctuary in caves and hollows from marauding bands of hyena who howl their hunger under a blood-moon as infants cower in their mother’s arms and their fathers with fire-hardened wooden spears muster at the entrances to stave off the predators surrounding them. As the slavering shadows draw near, a lone voice responds defiantly and then another, and another, until along the line of cave mouths a human chorus sings out a challenge to Death as, emboldened, the hunted become the hunters and the hyenas are scattered by an outrush of warriors. Later, around triumphant campfires, the voices re-enact the battle-scene in shaped notes that predate harmony and history.

Ever since those misty proto-mythological times, song, in all its proliferations, has taken root in human culture and almost every human heart. To evince a dislike for music is akin to an admission of having no sense of humour. The Lothario with his lute, serenading his lover under her balcony is an enduring stereotype and, indeed, an admitted motivation for a legion of actual and wannabe rock stars. The well-springs of song are not only amatory but also rise from love of many kinds- of God, of tribe and country, of children and even, for heaven’s sake, of material goods.

The great poet, William Wordsworth, with his sister Dorothy, stayed at a village in Scotland near Loch Lomond in 1803 and was inspired by hearing a lone woman singing in Gaelic to write The Solitary Reaper. He is captivated by the tone and expressiveness of her melody even though he does not understand a word: Behold her, single in the field,/Yon solitary Highland Lass!/Reaping and singing by herself;/Stop here, or gently pass!/Alone she cuts and binds the grain,/And sings a melancholy strain;/O listen! for the Vale profound/Is overflowing with the sound.//No Nightingale did ever chaunt/More welcome notes to weary bands/Of travellers in some shady haunt/,Among Arabian sands:/A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard/In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,/Breaking the silence of the seas/Among the farthest Hebrides.//Will no one tell me what she sings?—/Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow/For old, unhappy, far-off things,/ And battles long ago:/Or is it some more humble lay,/Familiar matter of to-day?/Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,/That has been, and may be again?//Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang/As if her song could have no ending;/I saw her singing at her work,/And o’er the sickle bending;—/I listened, motionless and still;/And, as I mounted up the hill,/The music in my heart I bore,/Long after it was heard no more.//[insert song]

The podcasts for 2023 continue in two weeks’ time with episode 12 for the year. I do hope you all are able to make connection to the music of your particular tribe and gain sustenance from it- so, until we meet again- do please, sing along!

Yesterday is Cancelled (music Mark Dougherty lyrics Quentin Bega)

Woke up and I bought the paper, wonder what they’ll say

Got home and I made the coffee stretched out on my settee

Nothing but a banner headline splashed on every page

They say yesterday is cancelled tomorrow won’t be around

(Instrumental interlude)

Nothing but a banner headline splashed on every page

They say yesterday is cancelled tomorrow won’t be around

No need to look in the Mirror, no need to look at the Sun

No need to open the Mail- headline news today-

They say Yesterday in Cancelled!

The Setting Sun (Words and music Quentin Bega)

The fiddlers, the pipers and the poets,

The dancers and the storytellers too,

Are following our heroes of tradition,

The Chieftains and the Queens of melody-

They are sailing sailing sailing to the setting sun

If your soul is parched and dry, then you know it’s

The lack of life that requires the falling dew

Which revives your spirit in this sad condition

And restores to you a joyous harmony

Then you’ll be singing, singing, singing to the setting sun

Oh you’ll be singing singing, singing to the setting sun

Make the effort that connects you to the only true authentic sound

Thank the men and women who before you have tended and prepared this holy ground

The fiddlers, the pipers and the poets,

The dancers and the storytellers too,

Are following our heroes of tradition,

The Chieftains and the Queens of melody-

They are sailing sailing sailing to the setting sun

Sing Along (Words and music Quentin Bega)

If you want to go across the sea to Ireland

If you want to kiss the Blarney Stone In May

If you want to plant a shamrock in your garland

If you want to find the fairy folk today

Sing along sing along

Irish dancing at the Feis is in my mind now

As your father played his fiddle in the glen

And you danced upon the platform light and easy

And the evening sky was glowing after ten

Once again once again

But those summer nights are lost to view forever

Now project houses fill the fields of yore

And the young folk surf the Web and they have never

Seen the light shine as it did before

Nevermore nevermore

I went searching in the Irish pubs of Sydney

For an echo of the place where I belong

But it wasn’t there I found it in my backyard

Among those friends who’ll join me in a song

Sing along sing along

If you want to go across the sea to Ireland

If you want to kiss the Blarney Stone In May

If you want to plant a shamrock in your garland

If you want to find the fairy folk today

Sing along sing along

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 10

Welcome to the tenth podcast of 2023 in the Letters from Quotidia series. I continue my tribute to my former student, friend, and collaborator, Mark Dougherty, who died much too young in a Belfast hospital on Christmas Day, 2020.

Now I present a slow burning ballad from The Paper Suite, which we co-wrote back in the mid-1980s. The song, Problem, which focuses on the agony aunt section found in some newspapers, is sung here by Candy Devine, accompanied by the Desmond Harlan Quartet. This is the penultimate offering from this jazz suite and I’ll preface it with Solitude, by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox whose work I have quoted before in my Letters from Quotidia

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/Weep, and you weep alone;/For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,/But has trouble enough of its own./Sing, and the hills will answer;/Sigh, it is lost on the air;/The echoes bound to a joyful sound,/But shrink from voicing care.//Rejoice, and men will seek you;/Grieve, and they turn and go;/They want full measure of all your pleasure,/But they do not need your woe./Be glad, and your friends are many;/Be sad, and you lose them all,—/There are none to decline your nectared wine,/But alone you must drink life’s gall.//Feast, and your halls are crowded;/Fast, and the world goes by./Succeed and give, and it helps you live,/But no man can help you die./ There is room in the halls of pleasure/For a large and lordly train,/But one by one we must all file on/Through the narrow aisles of pain.//[insert song]

I shall not sing a May song./A May song should be gay./I’ll wait until November /And sing a song of gray.//I’ll wait until November/That is the time for me./I’ll go out in the frosty dark/And sing most terribly.//And all the little people/Will stare at me and say,/’That is the Crazy Woman/Who would not sing in May.’//

So says African-American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks; however, I will sing in May and about May as well even though here in Australia the months and seasons bear little or no relation to those obtaining in Europe and America from whence most of my allusions, literary and otherwise, originate. Aficionados of The Swan of Avon, aka Shakespeare, are going to accuse me of raiding A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for material when they hear the lyrics of my “original” song for this post. So, sue me- but remember what happened in the Ed Sheeran court case when the jury decided he could keep using those common chords that have been used by musicians for the last century at least. Same applies to literary allusions, I would imagine. Here is my latest composition, then- The Madman in May [insert song]

You know, part of the discipline of writing a post such as this is finding a song to accompany publication that is just right in some way- and so it is for the next song which references the date in May on which the podcast is published, the fourteenth, in its opening line: It was on one Whitsun Wednesday, the fourteenth day of May. The song is Lisbon set during the Napoleonic Wars where a young man, William, declares to his lover, Nancy, that he must be off to serve the Queen in her conflicts on the European continent. Nancy, of course, will have none of it, revealing that she is pregnant with his child, and furthermore, she will cut her hair to accompany him both at sea and on the battlefield.

How this will be feasible with an ongoing gestation is not addressed in the song- but since when have folk songs ever cared about mere details! The theme of women pursuing their men through thick and thin, adopting disguises to switch gender is a common trope in folk music and serendipity in the guise of YouTube delivered me a version of the song sung by English folk singer, June Tabor, whose recordings I have dipped into for pleasure over the decades.

Slaves to presentism, we often think that our generation is the most enlightened. But consider Leigh Hunt, who was instrumental in introducing Keats, Shelley, Browning, and Tennyson to the British public. He suffered two years’ imprisonment for daring to attack such worthies as the Prince Regent George, describing him as corpulent! He was visited in prison by notable figures of the time such as Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, and Jeremy Bentham. I will quote an excerpt of a poem he published in The Examiner in 1810 concerning the deaths of 4000 men in the swamps of Walcheren, an island at the mouth of the River Scheldt in the Netherlands as a way of introducing the song, Lisbon–

Ye brave, enduring Englishmen,/ Who dash through fire and flood,/ And spend with equal thoughtlessness/ Your money and your blood,/ I sing of that black season,/ Which all true hearts deplore,/ When ye lay,/Night and day,/ Upon Walcheren’s swampy shore.//… In vain your dauntless mariners/ Mourn’d ev’ry moment lost,/ In vain your soldiers threw their eyes/ In flame to the hostile coast;/ The fire of gallant aspects/ Was doom’d to be no more,/And your fame / Sunk with shame/In the dark and the swampy shore.// Ye died not in the triumphing/ Of the battle-shaken flood,/ Ye died not on the charging field/ In the mingle of brave blood;/ But ’twas in wasting fevers/ Full three months and more,/ Britons born,/ Pierc’d with scorn,/ Lay at rot on the swampy shore. [insert song] T

That song should have completed my usual complement of songs for the post. But the death earlier this month of Gordon Lightfoot impels me to offer one more. When I first heard If You Could Read My Mind playing on the jukebox in Hamill’s Café in Cushendall in 1971 it stopped me in my tracks: its obvious musical and lyrical qualities aside, its devastating analysis of the breakdown of a relationship stunned me.

I was getting ready to enter the optimistic state of matrimony myself that very year- indeed, in fewer than six weeks! My Bucks’ Night was looming and the enormity of what I was undertaking was bearing down on me more and more. I should have obtained my teaching qualification by then had I not transferred to the degree course which entailed an extra year of study. But we (really, I) argued that we need not postpone the wedding. No biggie then: no job in prospect, no means to speak off and only a fuzzy appreciation of what life as an impecunious married student might entail. All this, of course, during the ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland- and we would be returning to Belfast after a brief honeymoon to look for a rental somewhere on or near the Falls Road.

As I prepare this script, I question once again my sanity and, indeed, the mental acuity of my fiancé, who acquiesced in my Pollyanna-like belief that all would be well. And more through good luck than good management- so it has turned out- touch wood! The opening lines of John Keats great ode to love- Endymion- seem appropriate here:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing./Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing/A flowery band to bind us to the earth,/Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth/Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,/Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways/Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,/Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon/For simple sheep; and such are daffodils/With the green world-they-live-in;-and-clear-rills/That for themselves a cooling covert make/’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,/Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:/And such too is the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead;/All lovely tales that we have heard or read/:An endless fountain of immortal drink,/ Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink/

John Keats joined the mighty dead much too young from TB before he could spend much time with the love of his life- Fanny Brawn. Here’s Lightfoot’s great song. [insert song]

Once more I shall return to the fastness of Quotidia to plot and plan yet another essay in music, verse, and blather- to entertain you, I hope!

Problem (music Mark Dougherty words Quentin Bega)

I’ve never felt the slightest need to write to you before

But here in my cold dark room I can’t pretend any more

Broken hearts fixed while you wait you really take them in

And now my defences down I wonder how to begin

If you can help me I won’t mind

Paying the price but now I find

It isn’t so easy putting the pieces on show

I used to smile at your advice to all those lonely souls

But here in my cold dark room I don’t smile anymore

If you can help me I won’t mind

Paying the price but now I find

It isn’t so easy putting the pieces on show-

Putting all the pieces on show

The Madman in May (words and music Quentin Bega)

Let me start my morning routine

By smearing mud across me face

It’s something we crazy people do for fun

For breakfast I’ll fry an aubergine

Spread marmalade on my piece of plaice

Climb out the window for my daily run

Around the maypole decked with flowers

Bells on my fingers bells on my toes

Dancing and singing under the midday sun

Dancing and trancing here for hours

With maidens dressed in buttons and bows

Thus the afternoon wanes and then it’s done

Before you condemn me in your head

Before you set your damnation down

Look at yourself in the mirror now

As you join the throng of the living dead

The insects crowd around at dusk

They whirr and they buzz as dark descends

Accompany me as to the moon I sing

Night flowers spread their sultry musk

As the queen of the fairies she upends

Day’s order as to the woodland she will bring

Her elves and goblins marching there

With drums and fifes and banners bright

They dance around her throne in a swaying ring

Their laughter fills the magic air

They praise their queen into the night

Fireflies surround her with a glowing string

Before you condemn me in your head

Before you set your damnation down

Look at yourself in the mirror now

As you join the throng of the living dead

Of the living dead- poor Tom’s afeard

Lisbon (trad)

And it was on one Whitsun Wednesday, the fourteenth day of May

That we untied our anchor, and so we sailed away

Where the sun do shine most glorious, to Lisbon we were bound

Where the hills and fields are daintied with pretty maidens around

I wrote a letter to Nancy, that she might understand
That I was going to leave her unto some foreign land
She said: “My dearest William, these words will break my heart
Oh, let us married be tonight before that you do start

“For ten long weeks and better, love, I’ve been with child by thee
So stay at home, dear William, be kind and marry me.”
“Our captain has commanded us and I shall have to go
For the Queen’s in want of men, my love, I cannot not answer, No.”

“Oh, I’ll cut off my yellow hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on
And I will go along with you and be your waiting man
And when it is your watch on deck, your duty I will do
I’ll brave the field of battle, love, so I could go with you.”

“Your pretty little fingers they are both long and small
Your waist it is too slender, love, to face the cannon-ball
For the cannons they do rattle and the blazing bullets fly
And the silver trumpets they do sound to drown the mournful cry.”

“Pray do not talk of danger, for love is my desire
And I will go along with you and with you spend my time
And I will travel through France and Spain all for to be your bride
And it’s on the field of battle I will lay down by your side.”

And it was on one Whitsun Wednesday, the fourteenth day of May
That we untied our anchor, and so we sailed away
Where the sun do shine most glorious, to Lisbon we were bound
Where the hills and fields are daintied with pretty maidens around

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND (Words and Lyrics Gordon Lightfoot)

[G]If you could read my mind, love

[F]What a tale my thoughts could tell

[G]Just like an old- time movie

[F]’bout a ghost from a wishing-well

[G]In a castle dark or a [C]fortress strong

[D]With chains upon my [Em]feet

You [C]know that ghost is [G]me

And [C]I will never [Em]be set free

As [Am7]long as I’m a [D]ghost you can’t [G]see

[G]If I could read your mind, love

[F]What a tale your thoughts could tell

[G]Just like a paperback novel

[F]The kind that drugstores sell

[G]When you reach the part where the [C]heartaches come

The [D]hero would be [Em]me

[C]And heroes often [G]fail

[C]And you won’t read that [Em]book again

[Am7]Because the ending’s [D]just too hard to [G]take

[G]I’d walk away like a [C]movie star

Who gets [D]burned in a three way [Em]script

[C]And enter number[G] two

A [C]movie queen to [Em]play the scene

Of [Am7]bringing all the [D]good things out in [Em]me

But for [C]now, love, let’s be[G] real

I [C]never thought I could [Em]act this way

And I’ve [Am7]got to say that I [D]just don’t get it

[C]I don’t know where [Em]we went wrong

But the [Am7]feeling’s gone

And I [D]just can’t get it [G]back

[G]If you could read my mind, love,

[F]What a tale my thoughts could tell

[G]Just like an old-time movie

[F]’bout a ghost from a wishing-well

[G]In a castle dark or a [C]fortress strong

With [D]chains upon my [Em]feet

The [C]story always [G]ends

And [C]if you read be[Em]tween the lines

You’ll [Am7]know that I’m just [D]trying to under[Em]stand

The [C]feeling that you [G]lack

I [C]never thought I could [Em]feel this way

And I’ve [C]got to say that I [D]just don’t get it

[C]I don’t know where [Em]we went wrong

But the [Am7]feeling’s gone

And I [D]just can’t get it [G]back G F G F end on C

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.

Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 9

Welcome to the ninth podcast of 2023 in the Letters from Quotidia series. I continue my tribute to my former student, friend, and collaborator, Mark Dougherty, who died much too young in a Belfast hospital on Christmas Day, 2020. I present here two songs separated by the overture reprise of the Paper Suite we wrote and produced back in the mid-1980s for BBC Radio in Belfast. The first song is called Chance and focuses on the horoscope section of the newspaper. The second is called BMD which stands for the Births, Marriages, and Deaths section of a newspaper.

Here’s how it came to be written- taken from Letters from Quotidia Episode 112- Mark and I met over the summer months in the pleasant coastal village of Cushendall and hammered out a draft- I handled the lyrics and he composed the music. All went well until, in the autumn term, I received an urgent telephone call one Friday evening: the suite was not long enough as drafted and the deadline for submission was looming. So that night, I stayed up until about 2:00 a.m. working on the lyrics and music. The next day, I drove to Belfast with my guitar and lyrics, and we worked in the Whitla Hall at Queen’s as he sat at the grand piano and composed a jazz score of the song I had written. It sufficed, and we later recorded the suite at BBC Northern Ireland for radio broadcast with the Desmond Harlan Quartet and Candy Devine as singer. Candy Devine was a fine jazz singer then and I was not surprised to learn that Mark had enlisted her to sing the song he and I were working on when he died.

Here’s a poem by performance artist and poet, Jayne Cortez, 1934-2012, called Jazz Fan Looks Back It is followed by our compositions, Chance and BMD: I crisscrossed with Monk/Wailed with Bud/Counted every star with Stitt/Sang “Don’t Blame Me” with Sarah/Wore a flower like Billie/Screamed in the range of Dinah/scatted “How High the Moon” with Ella Fitzgerald/as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium…//I cut my hair into a permanent tam/Made my feet rebellious metronomes/Embedded record needles in paint on paper/Talked bopology talk/Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases/Became keeper of every Bird riff/every Lester lick/as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues/…Blakey drummed militant messages in/soul of my applauding teeth/…Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones/I moved in triple time with Max/Grooved high with Diz/Perdidoed with Pettiford/Flew home with Hamp/Shuffled in Dexter’s Deck/Squatty-rooed with Peterson/Dreamed a “52nd Street Theme” with Fats/…scatted “Lady Be Good” with Ella Fitzgerald/as she blew roof off the Shrine Aud. Here is the third instalment of the Paper Suite: [insert songs]

I earlier referred to the pleasant coastal village of Cushendall: I have mentioned in previous posts the close links between Scotland and my birthplace in the Glens of Antrim, Northern Ireland. In the 14^th Century a Scottish clan, the MacDonnells settled in County Antrim and became the dominant family there but not without opposition from prominent families there including the O’Neills and O’Donnells. Long a threat to British interests, James I began the plantation of Ulster in the early 17^th Century by settling colonists from southern Scotland and northern England and this process was fully accomplished later in the century by Oliver Cromwell’s harsh military campaigns which put paid to these local squabbles in his harsh subjugation of the whole of Ireland and ruthless confiscations of Catholic land.

But that was then, in the “now” of my teenage years I looked forward to the invasion of Scottish visitors to the Glens in the mid-1960s. They brought energy and excitement to relieve the torpor of autumn and winter in the sleepy village of Cushendall. But the seeds of conflict, planted centuries before, erupted again in the late 1960s and our visiting Scottish friends did not return, alas.

I, too, departed for more peaceful vistas and in Australia in 1973 I was involved in establishing the folk group, Seannachie, in Wollongong, New South Wales. One of the songs we performed arose from a fragment Scottish poet, Robert Burns, wrote in 1796. This fragment has morphed into a number of versions over the years, but it concerns a certain Lord Ronald MacDonald- who has nothing at all to do with the mega burger franchise! This laird is in search of a wife and comes to Edinburgh for the quest. According to one telling of the story, he had to obtain permission from his mother-who consented only if he went dressed as a pauper. The verse lyrics of this version are rather sparse, and the chorus gets more than its fair share of the song- which is why there are other versions which redress the imbalance. But, for what it’s worth, here is the version of Leezie Lindsay I learned fifty years ago in Australia: [insert song]

In 2021, The Guardian in Britain reported on an attempt to get AI write a poem: Now an artificial intelligence trained by experts on more than half a million lines of poetry has had a stab, coming up with the almost-comprehensible image of a “box of light that had been a tree”. The algorithm…was fed lines from more than 100 British contemporary poets as inspiration. Here is that attempt- and soon I am staring out again,/begin to practise my words, expecting my word/will come. it will not. the wind is calling./my friend is near, I hear his breath. his breath/is not the air. he touches me again with his hands/and tells me I am growing old, he says, far old./we travel across an empty field in my heart./there is nothing in the dark, I think, but he./I close my eyes and try to remember what I was./he says it was an important and interesting day,/ because I put in his hands one night/the box of light that had been a tree. Huh?

In the time since this attempt, I would be surprised if more convincing examples have not emerged. I’m sure they will, and so what? For years now computer programs have been able to thrash even world champions at chess- does this mean people no longer play chess for pleasure? As, inevitably, AI proves superior across all fields of human endeavour, does that mean that there will be no more poets, novelists, painters, and musicians? I don’t think so. For decades I have been slaving away in the groves of poetry and music in the full knowledge that I can’t compare to my betters: those made merely of flesh, bone, and blood.

And had I access to an AI accomplice of artistic expertise; would I cheat and pass off its effusions as my own? No, I wouldn’t! I mean, what would be the point? And that there are those out there who will eagerly participate in such subterfuge, I can contemplate with equanimity. After all, the world has always had its wheat and its tares. If you remember the parable, an enemy goes out under cover of darkness and sows tares among the farmer’s wheat. According to the Jewish Virtual Dictionary, tares or darnel is the species Lolium temulentum which grows among grain, particularly wheat. Its grains resemble those of wheat so that it is very difficult to separate them by sifting, and as a result they are sown together with the wheat and grow with it in the field. Darnel flour is poisonous and gives a bitter taste to bread in which it has been mixed.

The New King James Version takes up the tale The servants said, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them but gather the wheat into my barn. In this consoling, if severe, Biblical telling, we are assured that true worth, if you like, will be discerned in the end. But should an AI superintelligence develop godlike powers would any human be gathered into the hospitable barn? That is the question. May I present, Along the Shore, a song inspired, I admit, by a parable or two. [insert song] I’ll keep walking along the shores of Quotidia and invite you to keep walking along the consoling shores, whichever form they take and wherever you abide until we meet again a mere two weeks from now- DV.

Chance (music Mark Dougherty words Quentin Bega)

Today is not a day for taking chances

The spell you weave in your glances

Might be broken and romance is

Stale and crumpled as the news

Blowing down the empty street

In yesterday’s papers

It’s written in the stars shining up above

Message from afar warning you of love

The crazy wheel goes spinning round

The cards are stacked against you now

You find the dice are loaded

When you’re down and out

Today is not a day for new advances

Prepare yourself for dull expanses

Waiting don’t you rush the fences of love

Though you might feel he fits you like a hand in a glove

It’s written in the stars shining up above

Message from afar warning you of love

The crazy wheel goes spinning round

The cards are stacked against you now

You find the dice are loaded

When you’re down and out

Today is not the day, today is not the day

Today is not the day for taking chances

BMD: Births Marriages Deaths

(Words and Music Quentin Bega arr. Mark Dougherty)

When first I saw the light of day

I featured on a page of the local paper

My parents proudly told the town

A daughter born they said to the local paper

For eighteen years I had to wait

Before I was again in the local paper

I married such a handsome man

We posted up the banns in the local paper

But large events outside the town

Required our young men said the local paper

My husband marched to death and fame

Which lasted for a day in the local paper

For fifty years I’ve lived along

No mention of my name in the local paper

But with the legend rest in peace

I’ll feature once again in the local paper

Yes, with the legend rest in peace

I’ll feature one last time in the local paper

Leezie Lindsay (Traditional, verse fragment by Robert Burns)

Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Will ye gang to the Highlands with me?
Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Me bride and me darling to be?

If I gang to the Highlands with you, Sir?
I don’t think that ever could be
For I know not the land that you live in
Nor knowing the name you go with.

Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Will ye gang to the Highlands with me?
Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Me bride and me darling to be?

Oh, lass, I think you know little,
If you say that you don’t know me
For me name is Lord Ronald MacDonald
A chieftain of highest degree.

Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Will ye gang to the Highlands with me?
Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Me bride and me darling to be?

So she’s kilted her skirts of green satin
And she’s killted them up round her knee
And she’s gone with Lord Ronald MacDonald
hHs bride and his Darling to be.

Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
Will ye gang to the Highlands with me?
Will ye gang to the Highlands, Leezy Lindsay,
my bride and my darling to be?

Along the Shore (words and music by Quentin Bega)

Where are all the people who were with me

When I started on this trek so many years ago

Some are scattered where the four winds blow

Some are held in death’s fierce grip: when will they be free?

So I go along the shore that darkens over time

I haven’t found an answer to these questions in my head

You’re looking in the wrong place you should try instead

Searching in your heart where lies the answer sublime

Watch the child who throws the starfish to the waves

One in a hundred is all that the child saves

Why persist, I turn and say, in such a futile task

If you were this starfish, I wonder would you ask

Oh, you have been at my side on this trek with me

In the cold and in the heat, through rain and sleet and snow

Ever faithful when I wanted to give up you know

When to help me walk and when to carry me

Watch again the child who throws the starfish to the waves

One in a hundred is all that the child saves

You would not say that this is such a futile task

If you were that starfish, so why do you ask

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.

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