Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Good morning everyone and happy Friday to those of you who’ve made it through another week.
My week might best be described as the old in-a-barrel-over-Niagara-Falls sort of week. Then again, I knew that going in so I’m not so much complaining as bragging about my powers of prognostication. (Or at least my ability to follow through on a self-fulfilling prophecy.) But this morning I’m up early because clearly I can’t seem to learn the easy lessons and am busy preparing for another day. And while I may sound a bit tired, I’ll honestly say it’s been a very productive week at work and at home. So, I may be overplaying my bruises and scratches slightly—like the kid secretly proud of his shiner.
In celebration of a tough week, I thought I would stick to something wholesome and on the innocent side of things: nursery rhymes. My love brought the subject up earlier in the week, reminding me of various songs and childhood rhymes from her past and some that were favorites in her family. “Mockingbird” was one both our fathers had sung to us and one that still makes us smile to this day. As I looked up the lyrics and she sang a few verses, I told her about a course I took in graduate school on the history and meaning of old children’s rhymes. What I had signed up for as the English Department’s equivalent to basket-weaving turned into a fairly rigorous and quite entertaining seminar.
Given the long history of so many of our English-language rhymes, it shouldn’t have surprised me at how many different theories there are on their origins. I was stunned (as I’m sure you were) to find out that Mother Goose was not the Homer of our nursery rhyme canon: she wasn’t even a real person from what I can tell. Her name appears in English from a translation of the French Contes de ma Mère l'Oye by Charles Perrault. Along the same line, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” might well have been a ditty about the Great Custom (a tax on wool that was introduced in 1275) or, as others have suggested, a perpetuation and acceptance of the dark nature of the master/slave relationship.
Likewise, “Jack and Jill” (1765) might have been about King Charles I’s attempt to reform the tax on liquid measures; which—when rebuffed by Parliament—he reduced the liquid measures by half. Those measures were popularly know as jacks (a half-pint) and gills (a quarter-pint). Personally, I think it’s a love story gone horribly wrong despite the couple’s attempts. “Three Blink Mice,” some believe, refers to the execution (burning at the stake) of three Protestant bishops (Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Radley, and The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer) after their unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Queen Mary I (the one affectionally referred to as Bloody Mary).
Queen Mary must have made quite an impression on her people as several nursery rhymes have been traced back to her rule. One of my favorite rhymes is “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” A lovely verse for aspiring gardeners.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells
And pretty maids all in a row
And pretty maids all in a row
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells
And pretty maids all in a row
And pretty maids all in a row
Though there is some disagreement over what some of the exact images may refer to, the experts agree that this is yet another poem about our beloved Mary Tutor and her psychopathic reign of terror as she tried to convert the country back to Catholicism from the Church of England. (Remember, her father was Henry VIII and he sort of divorced England from Rome during his stint on the throne). The silver bells and cockle shells may refer to torture devices of the day or church bells and pilgrimages, but most in authority agree that the maids are nuns and the growing garden is the cemetery. No rosy picture there—and certainly no gardening advice.
There are phrases and expressions we commonly use that have layered histories. Some good some not so good, some opaque and some clearer. Words are powerful and made even more so when we take the time to understand the weight of history they carry with them. With understanding, though, comes a burden. Innocence and truth are not always synonymous.
But this morning I want just to breathe and have my coffee and enjoy the sounds and initial memories of rhymes forever colored by my father’s voice.
❧
From the original review in Rolling Stone:
Upon the release of David Bowie’s most thematically ambitious, musically coherent album to date, the record in which he unites the major strengths of his previous work and comfortably reconciles himself to some apparently inevitable problems, we should all say a brief prayer that his fortunes are not made to rise and fall with the fate of the “drag-rock” syndrome — that thing that’s manifesting itself in the self-conscious quest for decadence which is all the rage at the moment in trendy Hollywood, in the more contrived area of Alice Cooper’s presentation, and, way down in the pits, in such grotesqueries as Queen, Nick St. Nicholas’ trio of feathered, sequined Barbie dolls. And which is bound to get worse.
For although Lady Stardust himself has probably had more to do with androgony’s current fashionableness in rock than any other individual, he has never made his sexuality anything more than a completely natural and integral part of his public self, refusing to lower it to the level of gimmick but never excluding it from his image and craft. To do either would involve an artistically fatal degree of compromise.
❧
☕️
Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?