by Peter Berryman
More Nonsense
Eventually this column is parking on the outskirts of Light Verse. But we're going to take a few side roads to get there.
In the last episode, I talked about nonsense songs, and mentioned Kum Bye Yah, prompting Phyllis Noble to send me this fascinating message:
I thought Kum Bye Yah was just nonsense, too, until I went to Nigeria as a Peace Corps volunteer in the '60s. I taught some American folk songs to my Nigerian secondary school students. They picked up on Kum Bye Yah right away, but when they sang it, it sounded like "Come by Here," with a West African accent.
She said her students had not known the song before. But that when they heard her sing it, it sounded to them like she was saying "Come By Here." Assuming the phrase was originally West African, and had made its way only phonetically to the folk songbooks of America, this may be a sort of reverse mondegreen (mondegreen = misunderstood lyric; see August's Whither Zither). I suppose a lyric can toggle a number of times, in the game of telephone called the folk process, coming back to and leaving its original meaning more than once.
Washington songwriter Rob Lopresti also wrote, wondering if the song Right Said Fred (also known as Right Says Fred and Cup of Tea) qualifies as a nonsense song.
In Right Said Fred (©1962, lyrics by Myles Rudge, music by Ted Dicks), a few blokes are struggling to move a large object. Throughout the song, attributes of the object are mentioned, but they only add to the mystery:
And Charlie had a think, and he thought we ought to take off all the handles
And the things wot held the candles...Took its feet off, even took the seat off
Should have got us somewhere but no!
So Fred said, "Let's have a cuppa tea."
And we said, "right-o."
Rob mentioned a few more songs that feature a similar unsolved mystery, such as Ode To Billy Joe by Bobbie Gentry and The Thing by Phil Harris, and opined that although these may be related to nonsense songs, they fall into a somewhat different category. I agree, and would add that they offer great examples of what Alfred Hitchcock would call a "MacGuffin."
Hitchcock expert Ken Mogg describes a MacGuffin this way:
The term 'MacGuffin' was coined by Hitchcock's Scottish friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, for something that sets the film's plot revolving around it. It's really just an excuse and a diversion... It could be anything - or nothing - at all... In effect, the function of a MacGuffin is like the 'meaning' of a poem - which T.S. Eliot compared to the bone thrown by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind while the poem goes about its own, deeper business...*
The mysterious object in Right Said Fred is the MacGuffin that holds your attention while the "deeper business" of the song -- a character study of the schleppers -- develops surreptitiously.
There may be songs that have MacGuffins yet are plotless, but usually a MacGuffin is used to help build a storyline. And that got me to thinking more about songs with plots in general.
Which I was thinking about quite a bit anyway, because my musical partner Lou and I just returned from playing at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, Arkansas, for their humor and storytelling weekend. We were thrilled to visit Mountain View, home of many incredible Ozark musicians, most notably Jimmie Driftwood (1907-1998). Driftwood played a large part in the creation of the Folk Center.
Incidentally, Mountain View, population 2,876, is quite a town. On any weekend night around the courthouse square, musicians of all ages swap songs, accompany each other, and harmonize, huddled on restaurant decks, street corners, and courthouse steps. With its fried food stands and popcorn wagons, the whole downtown has the feeling of a folk song carnival midway, like a traditional musician's sweetest dream come true.
To keep with the weekend theme of storytelling and humor, we played many of our more plotted funny songs, and heard a good many outrageously hilarious songs and stories. But it occurred to me at some point that, as is usually the case at folk festivals, there were no examples of stories in rhymed verse, which you would think would be plentiful in the transitional region between the folk story and the folk ballad.
There are exceptions to this absence, of course, as with the unbelievably funny rhymed poems of Les Barker, performed at many a folk festival. Cowboy music and poetry festivals feature rhymed verse. And at the Shawano Folk Festival a few years ago, our pal Tim White proved that the rhymed verse of Klondike poet Robert Service fit right in.
But -- though this may not be true in strictly storytelling festivals -- rhymed spoken verse is a rare bird in the broader based folk festivals. Maybe rhymed verse, seeping down through folk channels, doesn't have a chance of oozing too long without having a melody stuck to it. I find that true of my own light verse. I don't know if I've ever finished writing a rhymed poem without some wayward melody schmearing onto it before the second stanza is finished.
Well, there! After revisiting Nonsense and Mondegreen, and with a side trip to MacGuffin, finally we made it to Light Verse in one piece. Let's have a cuppa tea. Special thanks to Phyllis Noble and Rob Lopresti for their insights, and to the folks of Mountain View, Arkansas, for their hospitality and inspiration.
Bibliography and Webliography:
*The Alfred Hitchcock Story by Ken Mogg, Taylor Publishing, 1999
Ozark Folk Center State Park: http://www.ozarkfolkcenter.com/