Lost Verses

The verses we add, or omit, from folk (and other) songs change the story

I.

My current earworm is “The Old Dun Cow”, a rollicking audience-participation piece (“MACINTYRE!”) that is a standard among the Renaissance Faire crowd. I can sing the chorus from memory, but without looking up the lyrics, I can only remember the storyline. The basic tale is that of people taking advantage of a bar fire by locking themselves in the cellar and consuming all of the alcohol there. The capper is, after everyone “got blue, blind, paralytic drunk” exhausting the Old Dun Cow’s booze, the instigator rushes the group to the pub across the street (presumably for even more booze).

It took me a while to locate a version of the lyrics which included that final verse. (That version also includes a verse in which “the vicar of the local church” castigates the lot for not saving him any of the Benedictine wine.) These “missing” verses put a bit of a different spin on townsfolk not just taking advantage of a disaster, but wanting even more than they were taking.

II.

Those hard-to-find verses reminded me of a song we learned from one of those grade-school film-strip-and-record music-and-history lessons, “The Cruel War is Raging”. The historical context of the song is that from before the US involvement in World War II until the end of US involvement in Vietnam, young men were drafted (conscripted) to serve in the Armed Services; meanwhile, women were legally prevented from engaging in armed combat. (While volunteering for noncombat positions, they could still find themselves under attack and/or in the crossfire: consider the TV shows M*A*S*H* and China Beach.) In the song, the young man (“Johnny”) is required to report to his captain in two days, and his woman wants to come along with him. In the Peter, Paul, and Mary version (the same as in the film strip), Johnny repeatedly tells her “no” until she says he’s being “unkind” and says she loves him “far better than words can e’er express”. He relents, and that’s the end of it.

But that wasn’t the end of it — at least according to the version I later learned in Girl Scouts. We followed the “Yes” verse with one in which

The cruel war is over; Johnny has come home
His head hung in sorrow, he walks all alone.
She died in a battle; no one will ever know
“Won’t you let me go with you?”
“No, my love, no.”

Another version, describing how the woman died, can be heard here.

Both of these additional verses bring home the most obvious of war’s horrors: that people die. In the past couple of decades, we’ve been learning more about women who fought in wars waged by (or against) the United States, often disguised as men. Omitting either of those final verses is like gaslighting these determined women.

III.

Some of the Black authors here on Medium have reasoned against accepting “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the US National Anthem. There are a lot of arguments against the song as it is set, starting with the wide vocal range it requires and continuing on to the tune’s origin as a somewhat bawdy drinking song (“To Anacreon in Heaven”). Supposedly there was once a strong opinion in favor of “America, the Beautiful” — but I haven’t read the arguments for and against, or the interwar context in which our national anthem was enshrined.

But the issues that trigger our Black and Indigenous colleagues are the lyrics of the third and fourth verses. In the third, Key writes,

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.

In bold, broad, terms, our national anthem enshrines and supports our history as a nation of enslavers and slavery-enablers (also indentured servitude, but we’ll ignore that for obvious reasons). The fourth verse enshrines Manifest Destiny, the drive towards conquest and colonization:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto — ‘“In God is our Trust”

These lyrics beg the question, “Are we really ‘the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave’?” Does the answer depend on the color of your skin, the year in which your family moved (or were moved to) the land currently claimed by the United States of America, and/or the year you (or your family) became citizens of this nation? Does it depend on whether or not you worship a monotheistic deity called “God” (particularly the version of said deity who had a human son named “Jesus”)?

IV.

Music enters the “folk” lexicon because it is easy to sing, because people misremember the lyrics, and because people add and change the lyrics to meet the needs of their message and their audience. Sometimes, lyrics are completely replaced — often, but not always, as parody. (There are a number of versions of lyrics to “Wait for the Wagon” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom” that trade off Union and Confederate sympathies, frustration with leadership, and even supply management issues.)

In the process of looking for “Dun Cow”’s lyrics, I learned that “MacIntyre” was a sort of code for “Fire!” (or, “There’s a fire!”) because, well, you didn’t want audiences illegally crying “Fire!” when there was no conflagration. Knowing that takes the edge off the fun of everyone yelling “MACINTYRE!” for no apparent reason.

Sometimes, though, learning why a verse was added — or deliberately omitted — provides a historical context that might otherwise elude us.