We're going to need a bigger boat
And a handsome boatman
I was recently at a cottage with a friend who was using her down time to play around on a beautiful ukelele she’d acquired in Hawai’i some years back. She was working her way through some of the fewer-chord numbers in a book called Daily Ukelele, a grab bag of folk songs, well-known pop hits, numbers from musicals, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Somehow the traditional Irish tune “Carrickfergus” came up, specifically the Bryan Ferry version, which I’d never heard, and she started teaching herself that. The version I know best is the one on the album a university roommate used to play frequently in our apartment, “Irish Heartbeat”, Van Morrison singing with the Chieftains. (Listen for the penny whistle kicking in at about 1:26.)
I learned a number of traditional Irish songs through that album – many of which were likely also in the songbooks similar to Daily Ukelele that we had on top of the piano in my childhood home. My dad played guitar and banjo. My mother had a dulcimer and, I think, a mandolin. Occasionally, folk songs were sung, but more often, in my recollection, my dad played along to Bob Dylan.
(True story: I was once leafing through one of those Rolling Stone coffee table “Best Albums of Each Decade” books while at someone’s house, and read about Blood on the Tracks. I’d gone through a brief period of Dylan-curiosity after reading the fantastic oral-history biography of Edie Sedgwick by Jean Stein, a rescue from a remainder table at the first bookstore I worked at. But that interest had been limited to Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited, as I tried to determine whether or not those lyrics really were all about Edie. Blood on the Tracks was, I believed, new to me – an unmined gem, a classic I should really school myself on. Except when I listened to it, I knew every song, down to every last vocal tick, imprinted on my developing brain from frequent (very frequent) repetition.)
A few years ago, I took voice lessons for the first time since I was a teen after bidding on them at a silent auction. The teacher’s studio was set up so that I sang directly into the house of an elderly widow next door who would, every week, get up to close the window.
I’ve sung in choirs for a lot of my life, but during a ten-year break I’d lost not only confidence, but also vocal range. By the time I took the lessons, I’d been back in a choir for a while, but I’d been singing alto, which was sometimes so low I could barely make any sound come out. When our parts were higher, my throat cleared up and the sound was better. The goal of the lessons was to work at opening up the higher part of my range again.
The teacher gave me a song to work on: “The Water is Wide.” It sounded familiar, so I looked it up: one site claimed it was an American version of “Carrickfergus.” A scholarly write-up noted that the Irish Gaelic lyrics that accompany the tune of “Carrickfergus”, as is often the case, appear to be quite different from the standard English-language ones today. Another website said “Carrickfergus” is a “modern Irish version” of an old Scottish tune. The songs are either highly, or not really, related. A Song a Day (or week or month) is not going to wade into this debate, except to note that the Irish “Carrickfergus”, with frequent references to death and drink, is considerably more morose than the English/American “The Water is Wide”.
Where “Carrickfergus” despairs:
But the sea is wide and I cannot swim over
Neither have I wings to fly
If I could find me a handsome boatsman
To ferry me over to my love and die
“The Water is Wide” is decidedly more hopeful:
The water is wide, I can't cross o'er
And neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat, carry two
And both shall row
My love and I
Let’s end on that happier note, shall we?*