My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Folk Songs here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.
I wasn’t planning to mention Rambling Syd Rumpo in this series of articles on horror themes in folk music, but it’s been such a bleak journey that I think we all need a bit of light relief before we say goodbye.
Here then is British comic legend Kenneth Williams pretending to be a folk singer whose strange olde worlde phrases all sound like euphemisms, and whose melodic melodramas end in hilarious disaster for everyone involved:
Ah the poor Somerset Nog. Doomed to ‘expire’ beneath the weight of an unreasonable number of people.
This is a parody of the Devonshire folksong Widecombe Fair where almost exactly the same thing happens: a horse is forced to carry so many people that it dies and then ‘When the wind whistles cold on the moor of the night…Tom Pearce’s old mare doth appear ghastly white.’
In the Rambling Syd version the two ghostly halves of the Nog (somehow) sing a lament in duet.
This is a classic example of a ghost verse, an epilogue to folk song which brings back one or more characters to sing from beyond the grave.
My favourite example of a ghost verse which is played deadly straight comes from ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’ This song uses a trick I love of repeating the same words twice and having them take on a whole new sinister meaning the second time around. In this story, a young man remembers meeting his sweetheart and gazing after her as she said goodbye and ‘moved through the fair.’
My young love said to me, “My mother won’t mind”.
“And my father won’t slight you, for your lack of kind.”
And she stepped away from me, and this, she did say:
“It will not be long, love, ‘til our wedding day.”
There’s an ominous sense here that there was something unique about this particular memory, this seemingly mundane yet vivid image of her walking away through the crowd. The reason the narrator remembers this exchange so clearly is because it was their last. The woman died soon after…but she returns to him in the night saying those same words again. Now they sound like a gloomy promise that they’ll be united in death:
Last night, she came to me; she came softly in.
So softly she came, that her feet made no din.
And she stepped closer to me, and this, she did say:
“It will not be long, love, ‘til our wedding day.”
Another famous example is from ‘Molly Malone,’ such an Irish classic that there’s actually a statue of the character in Dublin:
We are told of Molly’s beauty and how she used to sing her tradeswoman’s song to sell her seafood “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”’ We then hear that she died tragically young and that her familiar call has become the town’s enduring memory of her:
She died of a fever,
And no one could save her,
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone.
But her ghost wheels her barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
Depending on how heartless you are, these lines are either incredibly sad or bluntly funny. There can be a kind of thudding bathos to ghost verses, they can accidentally sound a bit like a punchline: ‘And then she died. Goodbye.’ Molly is dispatched so quickly that we barely got to know her, and the grim irony of the fact her ghost wanders around singing ‘alive alive oh’ teeters on the brink of silliness.
You can see why Kenneth Williams can so easily make fun of such songs. If you go and listen to the whole ‘Best of Rambling Syd Rumpo’ album —which was recorded in one go in 1970 — there’s a point (1.18 in the video below) where you can hear the audience laughing and groaning just at the mention of the ghostly epilogue because they’re so fatigued by this trope: ‘and they do say as how his ghost rides abroad…’
This one is the tragic tale of ‘The Black Grunger of Hounslow’ which is a song about a highwayman who is strung up (with his horse) and now sings as he haunts the place ‘where he once straddled his nadger so gailey.’ It has now, unfortunately, become a supermarket.
The folk songs I have explored throughout this series have expressed so much real historical trauma that there was a point where my brain started looking for humour as a coping mechanism. I found I had to laugh at the silly-sounding archaic terms, the excessive nastiness, the blunt calamities, in other words, I had to go a bit Rambling Syd to stop myself curling up in a ball and sobbing.
We really are singing with ghosts in these traditional songs. Their words are a testament to all sorts of bitter truths that would have passed unrecognised if it hadn’t been for this form of storytelling which was equally accessible to the literate and illiterate alike. Here, we find a record of abuse in all its forms, but also a reckoning with it. Folk songs reassure those who face violence, war, disease, or prejudice, that they are not alone and that, if justice is out of reach in this life, truth might survive in song. For every moment of horror, there is a moment of joy, or love, or hope, sometimes side by side in verse and chorus.
Epilogue
Well that brings us to the end of…horror moments? On Monday, I shared a video explaining what I’m changing about my Substack over the next couple of months. The TLDR is that I’m switching from two articles per week to one which means that my regular Thursday horror moments slot is being laid to rest…
HOWEVER
As all horror fans know, death is not the end and I will be resurrecting horror moments in various forms. I even have some articles queued up on several different themes so don’t worry, this format will return in a new shape…until then, happy nightmares everyone x
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There's a wonderful sea shanty called Lowlands, where the woman comes to the sailor in a dream, & he slowly understands that she's died.
My parents introduced me to kenneth Williams via Hancocks half hour. He was a unique talent