Dead Songs in Depth

    
Ah yes, Warlock! Barry Smith's inks for Conan the Barbarian (the first
twenty-odd issues) are superb comics from that era. Marvel-ous!
  

    
73 and 74 of course had that amazing sound system designed to bring out each
instrument.
  

    
Paul, Hows that list comin'? Can't wait to review it. You got my
email, right?
  

    
Bryan, I just emailed the list to you.
  

    
thanks Paul, I've sent you two in reply already. I can't wait!!!!
  

    <scribbled by tnf Fri 28 Dec 07 01:10>
  

    

I was poking around the net looking for info on "Lady of Carlisle" (getting
ready to play an Ian and Sylvia recording of it on the radio), and I found
this:

 (excerpt)

 Then up spoke this fair young lady,
 Saying "I can't be but one man's bride
 But if you'll come back tomorrow morning,
 On this case we will decide. "

 She ordered her a span of horses,
 A span of horses at her command;
 And down the road these three did travel
 Till they come to the lions' den.

 There she stopped and there she halted
 These two soldiers stood gazing around,
 And for the space of half an hour,
 This young lady lies speechless on the ground.

 And when she did recover,
 Threw her fan down in the lion's den
 Saying, "Which of you to gain a lady
 Will return her fan again?"


 http://www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=3476



(In Hunter's version, we meet the soldier and the sailor first.  Then
the lady arrives, by way of a door in the fire - how cool is that!
This bit of research is making me love "Lady With a Fan" all over
again.)


Anyway, I'm wondering what's up with this bit -

 There she stopped and there she halted
 These two soldiers stood gazing around,
 And for the space of half an hour,
 This young lady lies speechless on the ground.


They're parked in front of a lion's den.  The men are gazing around,
presumably on the lookout for lions, and she TAKES A NAP?

I don't geddit.
  

    
You know, I'm wondering if this is the same song I heard late at night 
several years ago on our local NPR station (WUNC). I regret not calling 
the station right then to find out about it, but I swear he said it was 
called "The Carolina Lady" but I could have misheard. It sounded very 
similar and was also from the 1930's so it prolly is the same song. It 
blew my mind that night.
  

    
>> she TAKES A NAP?

Maybe she swooned?  Or was in the throws of some sort of spell?
  

    

Alex Allan posted a reply on my blog:

http://logblog.gdhour.com/?p=658


With a link to his research on the GD Lyrics and Song Finder:

http://www.whitegum.com/songfile/LADYCARL.HTM


It was more of a late-night stoned goof than a serious question, but I was
glad to see what Alex has come up with.
  

    
Swooning makes sense, but the ground she falls down on in the second
to last verse here isn't inside the lion's den and, by inference, must
be above where the lions are, because in the last stanza here, it says
that:

<And when she did recover,
 Threw her fan DOWN IN the lion's den>

This is before she asks the soldiers to recover her fan, "again."


[Maybe the Coliseums back then had Corporate suites for the Lords and
Ladies to chill out in while the games were played.] 



  
  

    
slippage
  

    
I've been digging around and finding out more on the origins. I'll
update my site when I have a moment. While the original "Glove" stories
do have the action taking place in a coliseum, the later versions have
the three travelling to a separate lion's den - in some it's the lions
kept in the Tower of London. That would allow for lots of ground for
her to swoon on.
 
  

    


In the half-circle at the guitarist’s feet, a line of blue, red and
gray boxes connected to the amplification and looping, but looked more
like model train cars ready to loop around a miniature track.  The log
beams on the ceiling of the spacious Santa Fe home vibrated from
Deadhead loco motion.  Behind the big sectional that elbowed through
the spacious living room, I was flanked by Tinydancer gyrating on one
side, and a ponytailed reveler grooving like a gandydancer on the
other.  The miniature boxcars weren’t moving, but the echoing repeats
of the musician’s song hinted of denouement.

Ten feet away from the musician, Jacob Cohen, the young musicologist,
snuggled on the couch with his wife.  The day before he had presented a
conference paper called “The Compass Always Points to Terrapin:
Harmonic and Geographic Ambiguity in the Grateful Dead’s ‘Terrapin
Station’.”  It discussed the suffused notion of place within the
musical arrangement of this composition widely considered to be the
Grateful Dead’s opus magnus.  In this “rare and different tune… some
rise, some fall and some climb to get to Terrapin.”   

I tapped him on the shoulder, leaned down for him to hear, and pointed
at the performer’s feet: “Hey, Jake.  There’s no more ambiguity.  I
think we found Terrapin Station.”  

Jake tilted his neck in my direction and smiled: “That does look like
a train depot.”

The next morning at the hotel, David Gans was loading his car with
boxes and a guitar case.  I offered to help and told him how he had
launched into his evocative rendition of “Terrapin Station” the moment
after Jake and I spoke.

“Really?” he said.  “You’re kidding me.”



––Albuquerque, February 2008
  

    
I happened to notice, the other morning before sunrise, both Venus, rising
first and shining best, and the crescent moon above the Eastern horizon.  
The moon, however was not "brand new" but instead was in the last days of
the cycle.  The new moon crescent is seen at sunset.  (Venus can be seen
at sunset too, of course, setting last.)

(Which is not to say that I think the narrator claims to observe both 
simultaneously -- he could as easily be describing the course of a day, 
when Venus rises and the crescent moon sets into the sound of crickets and 
cicadas.)  

It's also worth noting, I guess, that crickets tend to sing after dark, 
while the cicada's buzzy siren is heard during the hot part of the day.
  

    
I know a plein air painter (Anthony Holdsworth, from Oakland) who will
paint all day long from one place, and a curious effect of this is
that his shadows are all mixed up--some of them seem to be cast from
earlier in the day, some from later, depending on when he put paint to
canvas. 

Which may have nothing whatsoever to do with anything, except that
<mcow>'s post made me think of it...
  

    
When Venus is seen at sunset rising first I take to mean as the first start
(star) to shine.  That is when it would be seen next to a brand new crescent
moon.  I have seen that configuration at least a few times, it is always
breathtaking.
  

    
Indeed!
  

    
Always was confused about how there could be a "Northwest Corner" to a
crescent moon. Decided not to be too literal.
  

    
Yeah, I never could figure that out either, and arrived at the same
solution.  Similarly 'Sitting plush with a royal flush / Aces back to
back'
  

    
you can look at any object

mentally draw some cross hairs

they represent North/South West/East

then you nave a northwest corner

like in this flag although it has multiple stars

http://flagspot.net/flags/tm.html
  

    
That's how I identified the NW corner, too.
  

    
more poetical than "oh, from the top-left corner of brand new crescent
moon"

next topic: brand-new moons are not crescent shaped. discuss.
  

    
Depends on how you define brand-new  Sure, when it is NEW, there is no moon
at all, but days 2 and 3 after that, up until about day 4... those are
pretty sliver crescents, no?  I think of the song describing the moon on
about day 3 - still pretty darn new.
  

    
And I know we've all seen this sky that's being talked about, on many
occasions since we first heard the song, and the song has amplified, in
some way, the sheer beauty of the sight. 
PS Thanks for the cross-hairs explanation, <sffog>! That helps.