Sunday, January 6, 2008

Single Song Sunday: House Carpenter
(Natalie Merchant, Nickel Creek, Roger McGuinn, Tim O'Brien)



It's been some week here at Cover Lay Down. Features on popular singer-songwriters Billy Bragg and Paul Simon brought us to the top of the charts at musicblog aggregator The Hype Machine and a linkback from New York magazine's Vulture blog. On Friday, almost 900 of you visited the site, a new record; download tracking shows that many of you came in for one song, but stuck around to try something new. Welcome, kudos, and thanks for validating our goals here at Cover Lay Down.

But a slow day at home and a new branch of our local library system got me thinking about our roots, both as a folk blog and as community members. Popular artists and indieacts may have got you here, but there's more to folk music than the indiefolk and Grammy winners of the last decades. Above all, it is our goal at Cover Lay Down to broaden your horizons, even while we serve your existing biases and favorites.

Today, we return to our roots for the fourth in our very popular Single Song Sunday series with a feature on Child Ballad #243 in the canonical collection of British folk ballads, a song more commonly known as
House Carpenter.




Habitat for HumanityThey're building one of those Habitat for Humanity houses in our town, just along the main road, out past the edge of what counts for downtown in these rural one-bar parts. A few weeks ago our local church helped make lunch for the crew -- chili and cornbread, the kind of early winter comfort food that can be soaked up quickly, and keeps the fires going for hours. I wasn't there, but the story goes that they had plenty of leftovers, primarily due to the fact that the workforce that day was a group of local college girls, doing their community service. The girls ate all the clementines, though. I guess we made the food with heartier carpenters in mind.

The 18th Century folk ballad House Carpenter, officially titled either James Harris or Demon Lover, isn't about hope, or new beginnings. Quite the opposite. It's a morality play, in which a woman is tempted by a finer life with an old flame, gives in, leaves her new little babe in the care of her carpenter husband, regrets it too late, and drowns for her sins. It's about the perils of choosing style over substance; it's about the consequences of valuing speed and beauty over community and commitment. Like our Habitat for Humanity project, it's not about house carpenters: it's about the girls who showed up to be house carpenters, and the church making lunch; a reminder of the value of all who help make a house, a home, a community.

That authenticity is hard to come by in the world today is an oft-repeated trope in folk music; it is the universality of the sentiment, as much as the plaintive beauty of House Carpenter's simple tune, which explains why the song continues to find voice in each new generation of folksinger. In some ways, it's frustrating to find that the message is still needed, hundreds of years after it was first found necessary. But the house goes up, nonetheless. Looks like it's going to be a cosy place, too.

Work on our local Habitat house seems to have been put on pause for the winter. The girls who came that day to help have gone back to their lives with a new entry for their graduate school applications and, hopefully, a true sense of having participated in something selfless and pride-worthy. May their lots and ours be better than the lot of our alternate-verse narrator, who sinks and goes to hell for one bad decision. If their work on the house is any indication, they're already headed for a better life.

Unlike Rain and Snow, the emotion of this oft-covered song is set in the lyrics; as such, most interpretations aim for a melancholic delivery. But as today's featured artists demonstrate, there's a wide potential for instrumentation and tone, even within a limited emotional range.

The fast-paced storyteller's banjo on Pete Seeger and Clarence Ashley's ancient versions creates a tension which serves the piece equally, if differently, from the languid brushstrokes, etherial harmonies and skeletal bass of The Tami Show's haunted cover, the sweet, rich mysticism of Mick McAuley's celtic ballad, or the fuller instrumentation and nuanced tonal ebb and flow of Tim O'Brien's moody, celtic-flavored bluegrass.

The sparse, cracked doublevoiced tones of Roger McGuinn are a world away from the mournful, driving blues Natalie Merchant brings to the piece. And interpretations by folkfave youngsters The Mammals and Nickel Creek provide a study in contrast, two new-folkgrass bands taking the song through vastly distinct but equally powerful paces.

Try 'em all. Find your favorite. It is, after all, the personal connection that makes us folk.

As always, all album and label links above take you direct to the source for your musical purchase. Buy local, support community: it's that simple.

18 comments:

Marcus Frödin said...

Just a quick note (catched you via the hypem): Folk rockers Oakley Hall did a cover of this too, on their album Gypsum strings.

Thanks for the music!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the music - I had never heard this song before, at least not that I can remember.

boyhowdy said...

Marcus: Though Single Song Sundays cannot by definition be comprehensive -- there are quite literally hundreds of recorded versions of most of the better known Child Ballads -- I'm always interested in another take.

I haven't heard the Oakley Hall version, so if you've got a copy, feel free to send it along via the email link on the blog sidebar. And thanks again for dropping in!

Anonymous said...

One of the most amazing versions of this song that I know is by Kelly Jo Phelps. Unfortunately, I don't have, but I promise it's well worth seeking out.

Grace said...

I love this song, in all its myriad versions. I love the rollicking banjosity of the Mammals' version, and Nickel Creek's live version is a total tour de force of Thile's stage presence and gives me chills.

While I realize no post like this can be comprehensive, here's a less common one which I like a lot. I've heard him do it better than this, with more looper, but the way he builds momentum into it is delicious. I'm guessing you're at least passing familiar with him - I first heard him through the NE folkie scene, but Lang does some absolutely scorching covers.

Jeff Lang - House Carpenter

boyhowdy said...

Thanks for the song, Grace -- Though the vocals are a bit forward for this guitar wizard, this is a great recording. I've seen Jeff Lang in concert a couple of times, enough to have real respect to what that man can do with a guitar, but not enough (yet) to be counted a serious fan.

Folks, thanks for all recommendations and send-alongs, and keep 'em coming! Keep an eye open for the next (Re)Covered feature, which will include the Jeff Lang version, plus a Dylan version and one by Pentangle -- the latter much truer to the original Child Ballad.

Anonymous said...

Another vote for the Kelly-Joe Phelps version from me.

Also one for The Handsome Family's version from their album 'Milk and Scissors', sung by Rennie Sparks. (Who perhaps won't ever win a Grammy for her singing but gets away with it for being planet Earth's top lyricist by some distance).

Anonymous said...

As time passed someone, maybe Bob Dylan, changed the lyrics from the original 18th century celtic ballad to accentuate the numbers two and three. This is the part that floored me! I've written extensively of the significance of the branching mechanism in evolution, transcendence and how it's affected by the difference between duality versus the the trinity. This ballad could have been titled "Two not Three" and really driven the point home.

Specifically here:
Origins of Thought by Michael Stancato
http://www.motionista.com/downloads/Theory_of_Almost_Everything/Origins of Thought 01 LowRez.pdf

The larger picture here:
http://theperplexity.blogspot.com/2009/12/theory-of-almost-everything.html

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