A Slow Train
I’m on the beach again with the ocean roaring in my ears. Today I hear darker voices calling through the sinew and muscle of the waves; I shiver as the cold water curls around my toes. I’m fairly sure that the ghosts who are haunting my bright Californian afternoon have been summoned straight from a song contained in the first volume of Dylan Bootlegs. I’ve been listening to it repeatedly alongside preparing myself to rewatch Angel Heart. That Mr Cyphre; he’s not quite what you think he is.
Anyway back to the song.. for this week. House Carpenter is the title under which Bob sings it. It’s a song which forces you to sit up and pay attention. When you do a little bit of digging you find that it has a long and interesting history on both sides of the Atlantic. Thinking about this has lead me into some deeper musings about such traditional music and the role of music in general.
House Carpenter is a later title given to a song originally known as The Daemon Lover or James Harris. It’s also often referred to, somewhat confusingly, as Child 243. To unpick the last first: Dr Francis James Child was an American scholar who lived in the nineteenth century. (1825-1896) He was a deeply accomplished man whose greatest love was the study of English vernacular ballads. He accumulated a huge number of these and his final work, a collection of 305 ballads, was published under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Most of them date to the 17th and 18th century with a few traced to pre 1600. If Dr Child found variants then he included these in the collection. You can still buy it today in five volumes; it’s a treasure trove.
House Carpenter is number 243 in the collection under the name James Harris (The Daemon Lover). From the evidence it seems that the first written record we have of the song dates to the 17th century but it was likely in oral circulation long before that. It was published as a broadside ballad and was very popular, known in both England and Scotland. One Laurence Price receives the credit for its composition. It had the rather weighty title of, ‘A Warning for Married Women, being an example of Mrs Jane Reynolds (a West Country woman), born near Plymouth who, having plighted her troth to a seaman, was afterwards married to a Carpenter and at last carried away by a spirit, the manner how shall be presently recited.’ This version ran to a lengthy 32 verses! Luckily for everyone, the title and the content became shorter as time passed and the song became honed into the vehicle of power it is today.
By the time the song makes its appearance across the Atlantic in America, it is the early 20th century and the song now has a new name, ‘House Carpenter’. Clarence ‘Tom’ Ashley first recorded it around 1928 and it appeared on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. This anthology cast a long shadow and it was referenced by many recording artists in the mid 20th century. It seems likely that House Carpenter’s popularity can be traced to its inclusion therein.
Dylan has recorded the song twice. The first version was an outtake from his debut studio album, Bob Dylan which was released in 1962. This recording is on Volume 1 of the Bootlegs. The second version is an outtake from the 1970 album Self Portrait and hence it made its way onto Volume 8 of the Bootlegs, Another Self Portrait. Whichever of the versions he’s singing I’m convinced that he’s fully intending you to feel the supernatural elements to the story that were so strongly present in the Old World version but often somewhat lost in transit to the New. Both versions are essential listening in my opinion and I’m currently fascinated with the one that’s on Another Self Portrait. He has a band behind him, he plays the harmonica with echoes of the style of John Wesley Harding which is appropriately atmospheric, the tempo is slower, the song is longer and it just takes you away, way back in time.
As Bob says in his introduction to his earlier version, House Carpenter tells the story ‘of a ghost come back from out of the sea to take his bride away from the house carpenter.’ In some variants of the song, the ghost is legitimately who he claims to be, in others a demon is impersonating the shade of the former lover. Here ambiguity rules. What is certain is that whoever this spirit is, he is determined to claim the lady as his own:
‘Well met, well met, my own true love
Well met, well met, cried he
I’ve just returned from the salt, salt sea
All for the love of thee’
Initially the lady tries to resist him and tells him that she’s happy with her house carpenter. Eventually her will crumbles and she falls at the feet of temptation. Our sympathy for her is lost in both versions which Dylan performs but particularly in the second, longer one where her mercenary nature is on full display. Whereas in the first version she is seduced by the promise of foreign shores, the green green grass of sunny Italy, in the longer one she interrogates her ‘lover’ as to how he will keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed before she callously abandons her house, home, husband and children.
‘Well if I should forsake my house-carpenter
And go along with thee
What have you got to maintain me on
And keep me from poverty?’
Of course, the ghost has plenty with which to satisfy her grasping mind,
‘Six ships. Six ships all out on the sea
Seven more upon dry land
One hundred and ten all brave sailor men
Will be at your command’
As the song progresses, we move from the lady’s proudly heartless departure to her growing sorrow and terror as she realises her fate. At this point it is impossible not to recognise the true nature of the ballad. The song is a cautionary tale, a warning if you like and not a pleasant or a comforting one. One is reminded that it would have been heard in the context of a culture very familiar with the words of Romans 6.21-4.
‘But what fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Of course the theme of the consequences of negative behaviour, without the insistence upon the power of divinity, but simply as the expression of the inescapable truth of karma, can be found in the words of any traditional Buddhist text which deals with moral discipline; a topic banished by modernity from the public square.
‘Oh what are those hills yonder my love?
They look as white as snow
Those are the hills of heaven my love
You and I’ll never know
Oh what are those hills yonder my love?
They look as dark as night
Those are the hills of hell-fire my love
Where you and I will unite
When we see the approaching hills through the maiden’s eyes we are supposed to feel her terror and the inevitability of her doom. This leads us to reflect that such is the outcome of her deleterious behaviour, the abandonment both of her responsibilities and of those dependent upon her in the fulfilment of her own selfish desires. In other words, one of the functions of these traditional songs was to remind the listener of the importance of decency and correct behaviour. One would have to search forever to find a traditional folk song which lauded the selfishness and degradation which our society seems, at times, to revel in.
While I have listened to this song these past weeks I have come to realise that most of the popular music which blares out at us from the pulpits of modernity, stands in diametric opposition to such simple wholesomeness, being unchained from any history or tradition. In the same way, the individual has been set free from the security lying within the limiting strictures of the village. His ears hear only the siren song of self obsession and his eyes are captured by the fleeting illusions of romantic love. Of course there’s much worse beside if he should choose to load that particular song into Spotify.
Now more than ever, it is important to remember the fast vanishing elements of a traditional world. We must strive to emulate the ways in which humans have spoken to one another across generations and time, using the great methods of artistry to remind each other of the right path to follow, of the true, the beautiful and the simply good. Spending time with a song like House Carpenter, imagining all those who had a hand in shaping it, playing it or simply taking its uncomprising message to heart allows us to feel connected to the the truth of our human existence. We can keep choosing to swim in the deep uncharted waters of our being where transcendence and wisdom are possible, the tools are still with us as it stands. Death waits for us in the shallows, the slow dying of our light and the emergence of a grey and mechanical birth.
In the final analysis, when I feel low down and disgusted I remember our extraordinary good fortune in living at a time when there are those heroes of the human heart who will yet carry the lights forward into the darkness which is coming up the road to meet us. Whether we can hear the wheels on the track or not there is a slow train coming, coming up around the bend.
