When first I came to Caledonia

[shewhomust]

In the best folk tradition, I first learned the song When first I came to Caledonia from my brother; later I heard Martin Simpson sing it, and it's his version that I've been earwormed by of late. It's on his CD Kind Letters, and he explains in the sleeve notes that he heard it first by Chris Wood & Andy Cutting, then by Waterson:Carthy, and finally tracked it to source in Songs and Stories from Deep Cove, Cape Breton, as remembered by Amby Thomas (where, he says, it starts with three floating verses from a woman's point of view; he chooses not to sing these, and they don't appear in any of the versions of the lyrics I've found).

Here are the lyrics, as sung by Waterson:Carthy. It's the questions they raise, as much as the tune, which go round in circles in my head.

There's a natural break after the fourth verse: the first four verses offer a narrative, I came to Caledonia, I saw a girl..., and the three verses which follow reflect on his love for that girl. The narrative is full of specific detail, names of people and places, and the lyric verses are generalised "floaters", the sort of quatrain that turns up in song after song. Which makes it tantalising to know that the source has the song starting with three more floating verses.

There is a quirkiness even to these floating verses: an interview with Martin Carthy has him referring to the exquisite detail of the words, and drawing conclusions which I don't find entirely convincing. On the other hand, take the quatrain:

If I had pen from Pennsylvania
and I had paper so snowy white
and I had ink of rosy morning
a true love letter to you I'd write

The theme may be commonplace: the lover cannot express his love in speech, and even in writing only the finest materials will do - in fact, it requires materials so impossibly fine that it can't be expressed at all (which serves, of course, to express its extraordinary nature). But what a wonderfully diverse set of descriptions! The paper is perfectly material paper, though of the highest quality; the ink is metaphorical, derived from the beautiful colours of the dawn - beautiful, but not not entirely appropriate colours; and the pen - the pen is qualified with a purely verbal echo. As I heard someone saying on KDHX's folk program last weekend, this is the sort of non-sequitur you only find in traditional folk songs and the more cryptic works of Bob Dylan.

ETA: I found another instance of that rosy ink.

Much of what appears obscure in the first four stanzas is simply a matter of information: Caledonia is the name of the mine, where the narrator finds work, presumably not hewing the whatever it is they are mining, but loading it for removal from the mine. Martin Simpson seems disconcerted by the quality which attracts him to Donald Norman's daughter, but he's obviously a man who appreciates good tea (it's one of the few things he tries to buy from the store) and what's wrong with that?

But what's happening in the next stanza? My initial assumption was that this was a flashback: that the narrator comes from Scatarie island, and that it was the poverty of life there which drove him to leave and find work at the Caledonia mine. I have no evidence for this, except that brother Charlie seems to have been left behind somewhere. Is the month of April a particularly bad time to be spearing eels? My information doesn't reveal. Certainly it isn't a happy memory.

On the other hand, Norman's refusal to hand over the tea, the soap and the mysterious brochan "till fish got plenty on Scataree" implies that this is still his source of income - so perhaps the order is straightforwardly chronological, and although when first he came to Caledonia he worked at loading, later he was reduced to spearing eels. So naturally he falls for a girl from Boulardrie, an area of richer farmland and richer folk: "All he needed", as Waterson:Carthy's sleeve notes remark.

There's a certain haziness to the material on the net, as to whether the song was written by Amby Thomas, or collected by him, or whether he (or someone else) set the traditional words to a different traditional tune. I started out thinking of it as a composed song, and expecting the words to display a certain kind of coherence - but if it's tradional, my expectations shift, and all is well. Though if anyone knows anything about the eel-spearing calendar, I'd be grateful for enlightenment!

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for posting that. I am far too overworked just now to answer properly; but I love that song. And those are wonderful links.

Some other time? I hope.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it makes some sort of sense outside my own head; and of course I'd be interested in what you make of it - the post or the song itself - any time you have the chance.