That thing about writing blogs about each of my five favorite Christmas songs didn't quite work out. Press of time and events, you might say.

Anyway, my favorite of all time is Doc Watson's recording of "Christmas Lullaby" from his 1990 CD ON PRAYING GROUND. Four very simple little verses such as a mountain mother might sing while trying to lull a fussy baby to sleep; but the back story of the tune to which it is sung is fascinating to me.

Many years ago, when I attended a small Baptist church, the altar call at the end of sermons was frequently a mournfully beautiful tune in a minor key of which I never knew the name or for that matter any of the words. It wasn't until about a decade ago, in a Methodist church I attended at the time, that I learned it was called "Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy", from its opening line, in the Methodist hymnal, in which it was first included in the 1990s. In the old Broadman hymnals, used for many years in Baptist services, it is called "I Will Arise and Go to Jesus" from the opening line of the refrain.

The words to "Come Ye Sinners," as I will call it for convenience, were published in 1759 by their author, British minister Joseph Hart. In 1835, a Spartanburg, South Carolina singing school teacher named William Walker--better known among fans of oldtime music as "Singing Billy"--set the words to a tune called "Restoration" in his shape-note hymnal THE SOUTHERN HARMONY.

The words Doc Watson sings to that tune on ON PRAYING GROUND are taken in part from a poem by the great British hymn writer Isaac Watts. Doc's lyrics, identified as traditional with arrangement by Doc Watson in the songwriter's credits, are:

Hush my babe, lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

How much better art thou attended
Than the son of God could be
When from Heaven he descended
And became a child like thee

Soft and easy is thy cradle
Coarse and hard the Savior lay
When his birthplace was a stable
And his softest bed was hay

Hush my babe lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

Doc sings with only his own guitar accompaniment, and pronounces the word "gently" as "gentlie"--a very old mountain way, not uncommon at all in traditional mountain music.

I have at http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/fragments/2002/12/cradle_hymnchristmas_lullaby.html found some additional lyrics for this song, evidently the remainder of the ones written by Isaac Watts, who is best known to most of us as the lyricist of "Joy to the World" and other great hymns of the Christian tradition.

Myself, though, I listen to Doc Watson, shut my eyes and hear a mountain mother, up in the night with a restless little one, perhaps walking back and forth on a broad-board floor, singing in a soft breathy voice, "Hush my babe lie still and slumber. . ."

You can download and listen to this sweet little nothing of an Appalachian lullaby at http://play.rhapsody.com/docwatson/onprayingground/christmaslullaby
if you like.

And on that sleepy note, fair thee well.

Dan Fogelberg has lost his three year battle with prostate cancer. He was 56.

I am not all that familiar with his soft-rock output. Oh, I've heard his hits--"Leader of the Band," "The Power of Gold," "Rhythm of the Rain"--but I would put his 1985 bluegrass album, HIGH COUNTRY SNOWS, up against anyone's in the field of bluegrass.

Inspired by the 1984 Telluride bluegrass festival--this was during his years living in the Rockies--Fogelberg made a wish list of great musicians with whom he would like to record, then built an album of oldies and new songs around that core. The musicians and vocalists included the legendary guitarist Doc Watson, David "Dawg" Grisman, drummer Russ Kunkel, Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill. The songs included bluegrass standards from Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers and new material from Fogelberg and other contemporary songwriters.

I heard about the album (it was still on vinyl when I first bought it!) from my friend Tooey, who was a great fan of his. I was knocked out by it from the very beginning. It still is one of the CDs (yep, it was one I had to have once it was available) I play most frequently. The title song is a beautiful dreamy steel-guitar led waltz. Other pieces are equally impressive; "Sutter's Mill" is a six minute history of the California gold rush of 1849, "Wandering Shepherd" is a stunning little folk-gospel quartet with backing vocals by Vince Gill and the multitalented Herb Pedersen, and "Go Down Easy" is a gentle little piece about a woman whose lover leaves her "in the early part of autumn."

To me, the standout of the whole collection is "Wolf Creek," an instrumental featuring Doc Watson and Fogelberg on duet acoustic guitar. Doc Watson in my estimation has no peers as a guitarist; he even outpaced the immortal Chet Atkins on an album they made together in the late 1970s. It never fails to amaze me that Dan Fogelberg did not embarass himself playing with Doc; master and pupil both play brilliantly. Too bad nobody has ever mined this CD, that I know of, for a movie or TV soundtrack; it would be a very rich source.

And on that sad note, fair thee well.

Schroder from the PEANUTS comic strip was always agitating to make this, the birthdate of the Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven, an official holiday.

I'm not quite such a fan, although I do love the little piece Schroder plays in A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, the "Fur Elise" aka Bagatelle in A minor; the adagio movement of the so-called "Moonlight" Sonata, aka Piano Sonata #14 in C sharp minor; and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies.

In my younger, more hormonal days, the "Moonlight" sonata inspired me to write the following poem. No doubt Beethoven, also regarded as a loser in love, would jeer at its sentimentality and self-pity, but what the hell, he's dead and I'm gonna share it anyway.

ungovernable
this gall of emptiness
this heart a parched cask waiting for wine
this body new ground never seeded to fruition

giving to hollow fever

I form you out of moonbeams and darkness

eyes shut like a china doll's

my hands seek the night
clutch you, back and flanks,
pull you down drowning to me

drunk to the bone with your scent
heart to beating heart
I cry for the breaking weight of you
to pound me out of my churning soul

I conjure your voice
to hear you
pant and plead
my triumph

love words like sheets of rain
flung from the thunder-heavy air
mingling slick with sweat and tears

dying
drop me headlong into Eden

I wake
having possessed only your wraith

how long can I stare upward
into the dark
broken by your image above me

So much for moonlight on Lake Lucerne, huh? And on that sour note, fair thee well.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear--the tale of how a mob of angry patriots stormed the Boston docks, threw some forty-five tons of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, and brought down the wrath of the British government on their heads--another episode leading to "the eighteenth of April in seventy-five."

Some background: by 1773 the bewildered British government had removed all taxes imposed on an increasingly fractious group of Americans except the one on tea. Smugglers--among them John Hancock, who would ultimately be one of two men to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776--got around that irksome little fact by buying from the Dutch East Indies company; the British East India Company soon found itself in dire financial straits thanks to this subterfuge. In an attempt to turn East India Company's fortunes around, the British government exempted East India from paying taxes in England on their imports, leaving them to pay only the much lower import duties in the colonies. This enabled the East India Company to undercut the prices--and profits--of John Hancock and others.

Following the arrival of three shipsful of tea in Boston Harbor beginning in November 1773, mass meetings organized by the Sons of Liberty, the local patriot group, eventually led to a plan to destroy the tea. On the night of December 16, 1773, a mob of some two hundred men, poorly disguised as Narragansett Native Americans, boarded the three ships and tossed all the tea aboard into the briny waters of the harbor, then spent hours rowing around punching the mess down into the water to make sure nobody in dire need of caffeine could salvage anything potable. For an eyewitness account of this momentous event, go to http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/teaparty.htm.

Needless to say, a great ruckus ensued once news got back to England of the destruction of East India property. The government responded with the so-called Intolerable Acts: Boston harbor was closed to shipping, effectively strangling the local economy; exempted British officials from trial in Massachusetts courts; housed British troops in American homes; and above all curtailed political assembly--although that last did not silence the Sons of Liberty by a long shot.

The Boston Tea Party, although certainly the most spectacular of the protests against the tea tax, was not the only such demonstration. In Annapolis, Maryland, the following October, a local Tory family attempted to smuggle tea into the harbor aboard the cargo vessel PEGGY STEWART undercover of a legitimate cargo of fifty-five indentured servants. Before the dust settled the Tory family itself burned the ship, with the tea still aboard, to hush the angry rumbles of patriots--then quietly sold up and relocated to Nova Scotia.

It seems to me, though, that the most ornery response to the Tea Tax crisis actually happened in South Carolina. The Boston Sons of Liberty abandoned their legendary Yankee thrift and destroyed a great deal of potential profit in a superb fit of protest theater; in Charleston, tea brought into the harbor there was quietly warehoused for three years, then, on the outbreak of war, sold to finance the Revolution. Talk about stickin' it to the man--

One gathers that Ron Paul, the "libertarian" candidate who is running as a Republican for president, will be holding another of his so-called "online tea parties" to raise money today. Somehow I don't think any of the old patriots in Boston would buy into that notion--the issue was not taxation per se, which Paul purports to despise, but taxation without representation--which we have in plenty between a spineless Congress and a president who's frantically trying to finance a war that's even less popular than the one that broke out in 1776; that one at least had 33% approval among the populace.

And on that ornery note, fair thee well.

Hello all. Hope everybody's having a great weekend. Me, I have a huge speckleware pot of homemade vegetable soup on the stove, the house smells wonderful, Mom's having a good day, and I've been rereading the spookiest book I ever read.

You might think, judging from older posts of mine, that I never read anything except ghost stories, but the book I have in mind has no supernatural happenings whatsoever. Some of the things that do happen SEEM supernatural, but they are a result of mystification and illusion, not the paranormal.

This book is called THE THREE COFFINS (in the US; in the UK it was published as THE HOLLOW MAN) and was written in 1935 by American author John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), a master of the murder mystery subgenre called "the locked room mystery."

Its plot features not one but two "impossible" murders built around a revenge plot--i.e., suppose Abel had survived Cain's attack and vanished, only to return years later to settle scores? Misdirection galore, with hints of premature burial, vampirism, madness, stage illusions, and writing that stops you with magisterial shivers; for example, this excerpt from the end of chapter one, when a mysterious man enters a private room behind the bar of a London pub to issue a warning to one of the murder victims:

"The door had closed. . .before anybody moved or spoke. And the door also closes on the only clear view we have of the events leading up to {the night of the murders}. The rest lies in flashes and glimpses. . .The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place on that last-named night, when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of the prophecy were filled at last."

There is comedy in the unfolding of the story, only to be expected when the major character is Carr's series detective, the rotund Dr. Gideon Fell (an apparent inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe); but more often than not a plot twist will make you jump out of your skin, or a sentence will startle you into remembering how eerie the whole situation is: ". . .the murderer was invisible before the eyes of witnesses, and still he had left no footprint in the snow."

Much of this atmosphere depends on the setting: a snowy February in a London between the two world wars, with comfort and light still in the fashionable areas of town, while literally streets away the poor live in single dingy rooms, in a world that barely noted the impact of the Great Depression because they had always lived in poverty; a post-Dickensian London where nothing has changed, in short, save the slums are shabbier and the contrasts more stark, and would remain so until the blitz mandated change.

More frightening hints that behind that facade not all is as it seems:
one character confides in another a secret that ultimately kills two men in this way. " 'Three of us were once buried alive. Only one escaped.' {The confidant} said, 'And how did you escape?' To which {he} answered, calmly: 'I didn't, you see. I was one of the two who did not escape.'"

It's all explained in the end in the tradition of the old original Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe, where all supernatural machinery turns out to be human chicanery--but it's a long cold scary ride until then. This would be worth a read if you can locate it; most of Carr's books are out of print, but some are available online at Amazon and ebay. This one, perhaps his most accomplished, certainly is.

Thanks for holding your yawns till the end. And on that note, fair thee well.