The composer Vaughan Williams said that on first hearing the folk song, “Dives and Lazarus”, he felt as if he had known it all his life.
I’m pretty confident many – maybe most – of us have had a similar experience.
I don’t mean the sensation of hearing a song and finding the melody or rhythm familiar and wondering if you’ve heard it before: neither do I mean pieces of music which, on first hearing, have a tremendous emotional impact.
What I do mean is that we somehow feel as if the music we’re hearing for the first time somehow already existed inside our psyches: hearing it has made us realize it was there all the time. The music resonates within us, but with the force of recaptured experience – like picking up the phone and hearing the voice of someone once dear to you with whom you’ve lost contact, or rounding a corner and realizing in a glorious rush that this is a place you’ve visited before, and which you loved.
The experience feels both surprising – and the most natural thing in the world.
It happened to me when, as a teenager, I was watching television one night and The Spinners, a Liverpudlian folk group, came on and began a rousing rendition of “Whup Jamboree”, a sea shanty which I knew I had never heard before, but which was somehow absolutely familiar to me emotionally and physically. It was as if someone had pressed a button inside me, releasing a tumble of recollections of experiences I’d never actually had.
I had a vague liking for folk music at the time, but it was very vague – I had one Joan Baez LP and a friend had just bought Bob Dylan’s first album and I enjoyed listening to it. But they were young, hip, cool, part of the explosion of popular music in the 1960s. The Spinners were, essentially what Billy Connolly would later refer to fondly as “singing sweaters”. They were accomplished performers, but they were irredeemably, terminally unhip: owning a Spinners’ LP would have been as unthinkable as professing admiration for Vince Hill (Google him, kids).
But, by God, the singing sweaters grabbed me that night.
“Whup Jamboree” dates from some point in the first half of the 19th Century – of course, it could be a lot earlier than that. Musically, it’s usually done in the key of Em, but, like so much folk music, it’s in a mode (Google it, kids). It has drive and verve, and while it’s extremely cheerful, there’s also something strangely threatening about it. Perhaps that’s a result of the lyrics. of which there are many variants. What follows is as near as I can determine the most typical English (as opposed to American) version of the song, and very close to what The Spinners sang that night over 40 years ago:
The Pilot he looks out ahead
Hand in the chains, heaving on the lead
And the Union Jack’s at our masthead
"Come and get your oats me son"
Chorus:
Whup Jamboree, Whup Jamboree
Oh you pigtail sailor hanging down behind
Whup Jamboree, Whup Jamboree
Come and get your oats me son.
And now we’re past The Lizard light
And The Start me boys will heave in sight
We’ll soon be abreast of the Isle of Wight
Come and get your oats me son
And when we reach those Blackwall docks
The pretty young girls come down in flocks
With their long tailed drawers and their short tailed frocks
Come and get your oats me son
Or else brave boys be of good cheer
For the Irish coast will soon draw near
And we’ll set a coarse for old Cape Clear
Come and get your oats me son.
The Union Jack’s at our masthead
And bosun roars to wake the dead
We’ll soon be level with Birkenhead
Come and get your oats me son
And when we reach those Liverpool docks
All hammocks lashed and all chests locked
We’ll be up to Dan Lowrie’s on the spot
Come and get your oats me son.
So it’s a bunch of sailors returning to England after a long time at sea, and looking forward to the company of young ladies, no doubt for the purpose of genteel conversation.
Some versions are downright smutty. In several, “Come and get your oats, me son” gets replaced by “Jennie, keep your oatcake warm”, placing it firmly in the great British double entendre tradition, while several more replace “Oh you pigtail sailor, hanging down behind” with “Oh you long-tailed black man poke it up behind me”, the meaning of which I reallydon’t want to know.
I’m pretty sure when I first heard it I didn’t even begin to grasp any of this – but I was aware it was about a boat at sea, passing impossibly-romantic sounding landmarks – the Lizard Light, Cape Clear, the Irish Coast, the Blackwall Docks. It even managed to make the Isle of Wight and Birkenhead sound enticing. I could see each of these places in my head as they passed – and I felt in some weird way that I’d seen them in reality, that I’d been clinging to the rigging of a big ship under sail, scudding for home, with the excitement rising powerfully inside me.
None of which, as far as I knew, I’d ever done, or even read about.
And, as it was the Sixties, I’d better confirm that I hadn’t been drinking and didn’t know what drugs looked like.
The experience didn’t awaken in me any particular interest in Folk – later, I adored Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief , a few Steeleye Span tracks, and ex-Byrds’ frontman Roger McGuinn’s traditional folk stuff – but apart from that, I’ve pretty much steered clear of the genre. And while I quite enjoy boats, “Whup Jamboree” didn’t give me an urge to go to sea, or even to visit any of the places mentioned in the song.
But, despite thousand of hours of intense pleasure listening to music, no other classical or popular work has awakened in me such an overpowering and immediate sense ofrecognition.
Freud would no doubt put it down to my teenage subconscious finding in the song an echo of my own unrequited sexual urges - but, as so often with Freudian interpretations, it was far richer and more mysterious than that.
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