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“This young lady lies speechless on the ground…”

I‘m an educated amateur, but even professional scholars find themselves walking among lions when assuming art’s meaning to people long passed from the earth.  Nonetheless, I want to take a couple of simple, quiet steps towards such understanding here.

First, we know romantic love has not been a static concept in the Anglophone world.   The songs we’ve explored in this blog give plenty of evidence, and there’s more to read out there on the subject.  “True love,” such as the lady in the ballad represents, meant something different to an English noble than to a commoner in the late 18th century.  It meant something different altogether again to an Appalachian farmer before World War II, and then to a thirty-something hippie in the mid-1970s.  Yet, we see the song sustained in all of those contexts, always with the lady’s love central.  Whatever love might mean then, it would seem this ballad’s durability testifies to the faith that love is worth the risk.

There is also something culturally constant about the courage demonstrated in the song.  Mortal risk for great reward is a theme Ancient Greeks would understand as well as anyone today.  We value different things, tangible or otherwise, across the ages – but courage such as shown by the bold captain persists as something to admire and emulate.

Consider the combination of love and courage in this performance.

Lyrics for “Lady of Carlisle” by The New Lost City Ramblers (after Basil May)

The New Lost City Ramblers waxed their version of “Lady of Carlisle” in 1961, in a style both faithful to Basil May’s and all their own.  It’s pre-war rural Appalachian music, descended from British broadsides, interpreted by post-war college-educated urban youth.  And why not?  John Cohen in his liner notes for the album claimed making “direct connections between the present form and some very old styles” was secondary.  What mattered most to Cohen was –

“…the chain of feeling which links this song to the past.  Each artist plays it in the way he liked it, and that is in the “old time” way.  Yet each artist brings his own ideas to the music, which makes it directed and meaningful to the present as well.”

“Chain of feeling” is as good a phrase as any to describe what I’m on about here.  A song like this doesn’t last because it is so general that it fits any historical context.  It endures because the specific feelings it evokes transcend time and place.

Certainly, the music would differ in, say, Ulster in 1810.  Their definition of love, and other elements, would vary as well.  Consider that in the earliest broadsides the lion’s den is clearly that of the Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London.  That’s interesting, but hardly mysterious.  Note as well the period of time that the lady “lies speechless on the ground.”  If you check out the broadsides above, you’ll see that she’s simply overcome with awe and fear of the lions.  It’s explicit, and a bit plodding at that.  By the time we get the song in Appalachia, both the lion’s den and the lady’s senseless period seem to come out of thin air.

Whence appears that lion’s den?  What is the nature of the lady’s trance?  Is she in communication with powers we can’t comprehend?  The loss of context for such elements, to my ear at least, adds to the compelling mystery of the ballad.  While the usual pattern is that old world ballads lose their magical elements when replanted in America, this one seems to pick them up!  There are no elves, sentient birds, or the like – but what seems pedestrian in the broadsides instead spurs the imagination in the American version.  The process that led to that is almost certainly accidental, but a happy accident it is when you see where this ballad ends up!

“Down in Carlisle he loved a lady…”

Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were both folk music junkies long before they penned their classic tunes for the Grateful Dead.  Like Bob Dylan, they were not only familiar with contemporary interpreters of old-time music like the New Lost City Ramblers.  They devoured that stuff and dug for whatever was older and available to their ears.

We’ve already established in this blog that The Grateful Dead not only covered traditional songs like “Cold Rain and Snow,” they also revitalized old folk ballads into new post-modern classics – “Stagger Lee” and “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” for example.  Perhaps their grandest and weirdest effort of that type involves “Lady of Carlisle.”  The old ballad, recast as “Lady with a Fan,” forms the backbone of their psychedelic epic “Terrapin Station.”

David Dodd’s annotated Lyrics for “Terrapin Station” by The Grateful Dead

To be sure, the old narrative is only a part of what propels “Terrapin Station.”  Robert Hunter explained in his collected lyrics Box of Rain that his words and Garcia’s music were born separately on the same day during a “flamboyant lightning storm.”  When he showed Garcia his lyrics, the music fit perfectly.  If you believe that sort of thing, then clearly more was at work than Hunter’s love for the old songs.  For sure, he wasn’t simply trying to recapture an old story or sound.

The lyrics of “Lady with a Fan” and “Terrapin Station” sit squarely within that mysterious space that began to inhabit “Lady of Carlisle” in North America.  Now the lady and her lovers are born of fire, in “strange shadows of the flame.”  That’s just the start of it.  To use the vernacular, ‘it’s totally trippy!’  Yet, the core narrative of the old ballad remains, and indeed does the yeoman’s work of the lyric part of the song.

I wouldn’t dare interpret “Terrapin Station” for you now, or any time for that matter.  It will be what it will be to you – “Some rise.  Some fall.  Some climb to get to Terrapin.”  Yet, there’s no denying that the bold risk of the sailor at the heart of this song is very much the point of it all insofar as what we can do when confronted with “mysteries dark and vast.”

Take the risk, come what may. Love, whatever it means, is worth it.  On that point, the new, weird poet both speaks for his generation and  affirms what could be taken from the old ballad in any place or time.

Counting stars by candlelight
all are dim but one is bright:
the spiral light of Venus
rising first and shining best

Coda – “Inspiration, move me brightly…”

Robert Hunter starts “Lady with a Fan” with an “invocation to the muse” as he put it.  In a sense, that’s what this whole piece has been about.  What else, really, could a medieval French storyteller have in common with Victorian English broadside publishers, Depression-era Carolina mountaineers, and California counter-culture musicians?

Hunter goes on to ask the muse in “Terrapin Station” what any of those people, indeed any of us, could ever hope for in that regard.

Inspiration, move me brightly
light the song with sense and color,
hold away despair

John Cohen identified a “chain of feeling” between the old songs he and his compatriots sought out and the art they made in their here and now.  Isn’t he just describing in prose what Hunter asks in song?  To my mind, that’s why any of what we do in this blog is worth it.  We love history and provenance, and they can inspire awe.  Yet, if we can prance our way through such lions, there is something more awesome and beautiful to find.

Whatever fan may be yours to retrieve, friends, I hear the muse saying, “take the chance and go for it.”

Thanks for reading and listening today folks!