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Thursday, December 18, 2003

 
3:00 PM: [#] [0]

advent calendar, day 18: "help make somebody's wish come true."

i'm amazed at the response for "when a body meets a body!" margaret barber came through, of course, and how...!

OK, first the source. Go to http://ingeb.org/songs/rye.html to see Robert Burns' words and hear the melody [this is the same link mark sent]. It's about a girl named Jenny whose clothes are all wet. Why? Because she has been foolin' around in a field of tall rye grass with some laddie.

It helps to have heard other Scottish songs about people who fondly remember their youthful days of making out in the fields of rye, corn, barley, etc. One can extrapolate a socio-history of rye fields just from the songs. These crops grow tall, and they're at their tallest in late summer, when the nights are warm, the stars are out, hormones are rambunctious, and the moon is shedding soft light upon the world. These crops are planted in "rigs" or rows, which are usually raised slightly, making a nice surface to lean back against, --hence the songs about the "rigs o' rye," or rejoicing that "corn rigs are bonny-o" (also by Burns, attesting to his agricultural roots and multi-faceted experience of physical proximity to the fertile earth). The rigs also provide pathways for people to take across the fields of rye, corn, etc. Any number of people can meet and remain hidden in one field of rye, for there are many rigs in each--as long as they're not standing up, depending on how far into summer it is when they are meeting. The earlier in the season, the lower they must get.

Privacy wouldn't have been readily available elsewhere, is my guess -- which is why 95% of Scottish marriages took place between August and December for centuries, the babies being born the following February thru June (i.e., 9 months after the rye grass season from May-Sept.) (ok, I made that up)

Anyway, Jennie met someone, got her petticoat wet because it rains a lot in Scotland in the summer, and it seems to be a habit with her ("Jenny's seldom dry"), so she's getting teased about it in verse 1. Verses 2-4 are her defense ("what's wrong with kissing someone, need the world know?"). In verse 5 we find that Jennie is a loose woman. She has no steady beau but finds the laddies friendly whenever she just happens to be passing through a field of rye. Clearly, her defense of kissing a body in the rye is designed to hide the facts, which those who tease her in verse 1 have figured out: she's doing more than kissing, and they're proably chuckling at her when she says "Can't a person kiss another person . . .?", thinking she means "body" more literally and generally. Given Burns's authorship, I suspect the song was much funnier to its original audience than most give it credit for today.

I always hoped that if I listened to enough Scottish folk songs, some day I would be able to solve one of the world's great mysteries. You have made my day!

Feel free to copy this into your blog if you want to. I love it when people want to know all about Robert Burns.

cha! is it any wonder she's the best person to go to england with ever? margaret is one of the most resilient, energetic, kind, and intelligent people i know. (why doesn't she keep a blog? ;)