O is for Offense Folk Songs

Recently, I've been digitalizing much of the music that I have stored up through the ages. One of the oldest albums to undergo this media transformation is The Lollipop Tree an LP of children's music sung by Burl Ives, whom most of us know as the voice of the snowman narrator in Rankin and Bass' Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. (Those of us with a bit more culture recognize him as Big Daddy in the classic film, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) The process of digitalization is quite difficult with the limited hard and software I have. I set up a turntable to tape onto a cassette which in due turn feeds into my PowerBook G4 running Audacity which then transfers the music into large AIFFs for iTunes to finish into MP3s.

It's hard work, but a labor of love: The Lollipop Tree was our very first album. My sisters and I spent many happy hours listen to this record and to think - the memories of my childhood are now distilled into 1s and 0s for eternity (or until my hard drive gives out.)

But, does Ives' mellifuous voice mask a sinister nature in these folk songs? Or in my adulthood, am I reading too much into the lyrics? Could what I once thought was a ballad about an inept ranch hand turn out to be about wimp struggling with his sexuality? I should have guessed as much since the title of the song was The Lavender Cowboy who died with "only two hairs on his chest." This had to mean that he was gay... Or, Chinese...

But how could a song such as Wee Cooper O'Fife get past the censors? I have a hard time believing that generations upon generations of Scottish children listened to and sang this song, accepting its Punch and Judy storyline in which a frustrated husband resorts to beating his snooty wife. It's not something you want your children to mimic, laugh at or sing about. Oddly enough Burl Ives' rendition doesn't include the lyrics in which the threatened wife swears to change:

Oh I will card and I will spin
And think nae mair of my gentle kin!
Oh, I will wash and I will wring
And think nae mair o' my gowden ring
Oh, I will bake and I will brew
And think nae mair o' my comely hue
She drew the table and spread the board
And "My dear husband" was every word.

Anyway, who needs to get on the moral high horse to ban rap music and its profession of violent misogyny? We should start with our own children's music...