Note:
I apologize for yesterday’s glitch. I accidently and clumsily sent you Sunday’s First Day of Hanukkah newsletter as a second mailing.
After receiving yesterday’s inaugural newsletter, my daughter Wendy who has been helping me with technical aspects of online publishing, suggested that perhaps an afternoon publishing time might work better for people. Since I am encouraging folks to just listen to the music as a break from their daily routine, receiving the newsletter at 3:00PM PST might spark people to do so.
I thought that was a good idea so and I began re-scheduling all of the newsletters in the queue. I had six of them in the queue, edited and scheduled to be published at 1:00AM on their proper days. While trying to reschedule the Sunday posting I accidently touched the Publish button, and a note came up on my screen saying that the Sunday newsletter had just been published. I want into shock and scrambled to try to find a way to withdraw it, but to no avail.
I suppose that some good might come from this. I got yet another in a long lifetime series of lessons in humility, you’ll get a break from my newsletters on Sunday, and you also got a reminder that Hanukkah is coming up soon.]
Today’s song and instrumentals
Perhaps it is because of my childhood was in Minnesota in the 1950s that I still think of the Yuletide season as beginning on American Thanksgiving, and Over the River and Through the Wood is the only song that I associate with that holiday. The lyrics were written by Lydia Maria Child and first published in 1844 in a book of stories and poems for 4-6 year-old children called Flowers for Children, Volume 2. There it had the title The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day. Since this was before the establishment of a national Thanksgiving Day holiday, the song would have been referring to the annual day that was proclaimed by the State of Massachusetts.It was hard for me to find a non-saccharin recording of this children’s song. It is very well-known in America (at least in the northern states) but may be unfamiliar to most Canadians, where sleigh riding on Thanksgiving Day is highly unlikely.
The song is performed here by Grant Raymond Barrett, who posted it to the internet in 2006 on a blog site that no longer exists, but is still used in the Wikipedia entry for its author. I found that it came from a children’s EP CD called A Turkey for the Stuffing that he self-published in 2010. The original poem is 12 verses long, but as with this version, only 6 or fewer verses are usually sung today.
I cannot find when Over the River and Through the Wood was set to its familiar melody by an unknown composer (and that’s not for lack of trying!) The melody is used for no other songs and I have never heard the poem sung to a different melody. Given the time period involved, and its survival in pop culture for about 180 years, this exclusiveness of the melody is very unusual for a folk song.
For a longer and updated adaptation of the song that is much more fun, written by Linda Ashman and recorded by Emily Arrow, click on the above video image.
Troika. Because (unlike my write-up about it) the Thanksgiving song itself is quite short I have paired it with two instrumental tunes about riding in a sleigh. In this case the sleigh is a Russian one pulled by three horses abreast. Troika was written by Sergei Prokofiev as part of his orchestral score for the 1934 early-talkie Soviet comedy film Lieutenant Kijé. Prokofiev later adapted parts of his film score into the five-movement Lieutenant Kijé Suite, which is now a commonly-performed “pops concert ” orchestral piece. This is an interpretation arranged by Fraser Jackson of the Troika movement from that work. It is performed here by the former Caliban Quartet of Bassoonists and three of their colleagues from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The recording is from Caliban’s above 2005 album.
Jingle Bells is closely associated with being a children’s Christmas song, and it is the first song that many parents teach their pre-schoolers to sing. In fact, the song isn’t about Christmas at all, and it wasn’t intended to be a seasonal song. It just happens to be set in the winter because it was inspired by Boston's rowdy annual one horse sleigh (cutter) races from Medford Square to Malden Square. If you pay attention to the lyrics you will notice that the song is actually about driving a very fast flashy vehicle dangerously to gain the companionship of a young woman named Fanny, who presumably was attracted to bad boys.
The song was originally written in 1857 by James Pierpont under the title One Horse Open Sleigh. It is often misattributed to his father, the famous Unitarian minister and poet John S. Pierpont. He would have been very upset by such amisattribution. The elder Pierpont did not approve of his ne'er-do-well son nor his music and they became estranged at about the time that the song was written. But that was probably more because he was a fervent abolitionist and as the Civil War approached his son moved to Georgia to support the Confederacy.
The song was not an immediate success, even after James revised it slightly in 1859 to the tune and lyrics with which we are now familiar, and changed its title to the jauntier Jingle Bells. However it gained fame through a 1902 recording by the Edison Barbershop Quartet, and gained immortality when Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters' lively swing version became a hugely popular hit in 1949.
This interpretation of the melody is by the Cuban-born Canadian blues harp player Carlos del Junco. Shortly before this recoding in 1995 Carlos won two gold medals at the Hohner World Harmonica Championships in Germany, and in 1996 he was named Blues Musician of the Year by Jazz Report Magazine. I saw him perform at the Vancouver Island Musicfest a few years ago. He puts on a great show!
Essay: Lydia Maria Child; more than a sleigh ride girl [word count 678]
Lydia Maria Child (née Francis; 1802-1880) is now primarily remembered for her authorship of this children’s song, which is very unfortunate. Even if she were to be remembered only for her children’s literature it should be for having been one of America’s first author to pioneer that genre rather than for this particular poem. In 1826, Maria (the name she favoured over Lydia) founded Juvenile Miscellany, the first English language publication intended exclusively for children. She wrote and self-published that children’s magazine for eight years.
But she was also much more than that. She wrote and published America’s first domestic advice manual and cookbook aimed for working class women, rather than for middle- and upper-class housewives with servants. It was called The American Frugal Housewife. According to food historian Kathleen Fitzgerald: “Child was writing as ‘Aunt Maria’ for young wives who had migrated to the newly opened West or to big cities to start families and were setting up households without the help or advice of their mothers.”
More importantly, Child was an early anti-slavery activist who wrote and published an influential scholarly analysis called An Appeal in Favour of That Class of Americans Called Africans. That was America’s first antislavery tract in book form, published 19 years before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
She knew that taking a position on the most important social justice issue of the day would be detrimental to the sales of her children’s literature and for her domestic advice writing. The book’s Introduction she says: “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” Her observation about unpopularity proved correct: Even though political views were not expressed in the children’s magazine they turned the parents of much of her audience against her, especially in the South, and led to its demise.
Besides her dedication to abolition, she was also one of the early women’s suffrage activists, believing that women and slaves were in a similar position in that white men held both in subjugation and treated them as property rather than as full human beings. In fact, her activism on that issue led to a split in the in the
Abolition Movement when woman began insisting on equal opportunity to participate and be leaders in anti-slavery organizations.
Child also campaigned for the very unpopular idea of respect for human rights and the various cultures of America’s Indigenous people. She wrote a pamphlet that opposed the forced displacement of the Seminole people from their traditional territories, and supported tolerance for Native people’s traditional cultural practices (including polygamy).
Although nominally a Unitarian she was not active in that or any other church. In 1855 she wrote a 3-volume history of Christianity in which she blamed many of the world’s ills on religious dogma and theology. “It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work that theology has done in the world”. Commenting on theologians: “What a blooming paradise would the whole earth be if the same amount of intellect, labor, and zeal had been expended on science, agriculture, and the arts!”
Reviewing the titles of her books, pamphlets or articles it does not appear that she was an activist for another social issue that was gaining prominence in America at the time -- the Temperance Movement.
For more information about this pioneering author and social justice activist, in addition to her Wikipedia entry (which includes a list of her writings) I recommend this biography in the Introduction to a compilation of her correspondence (which also includes links to that correspondence), this brief biography from the Poetry Foundation, and this brief biography from ThoughtCo.com as places to start.
Lydia Maria Child remained active and prolific until her death in 1880 at the age of 78. It is very unfortunate that she is now only a footnote in history and is remembered primarily as the author of a catchy but rather banal children’s song.
