The Ed McCurdy LPs in the Lyric Erotica series are just supplements to his When Dalliance Was In Flower and issue other songs from Pills to Purge Melancholy.
- Lyrica Erotica
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Lyrica
Erotica Volume 1: Ed McCurdy
- Walking In A Meadow Green Time: 3:00
- Chloe Blushed Time: 0:35
- Young Strephon And Phillis Time: 1:31
- The Pipe Of Love Time: 3:19
- Of All The Brisk Dames Time: 1:22
- The Queen Of May Time: 2:31
- A Nymph Time: 2:44
- Cuckold's Haven Time: 2:24
- A Short Dialog Time: 0:39
- My Mistress That's Pretty Time: 1:22
- The Cowardly Clown Of Flanders Cuckolded Time: 4:10
- Proferred Love Rejected Time: 1:53
- The Schoolmaster's Lesson Time: 3:52
- Susannah And The Elders Time: 0:54
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PRESTIGE / lNTERNATlONAL 13044
LYRICA EROTICA
VOLUME I
ED McCURDY, vocals and guitar
SANDY BULL, banjo
PETER GARDNER, guitar
ISABEL GARDNER, flute
SIDE A
- WALKING IN A MEADOW GREEN
- CHLOE BLUSHED
- YOUNG STREPHON AND PHILLIS
- THE PIPE OF LOVE
- OF ALL THE BRISK DAMES
- THE QUEEN OF MAY
- A NYMPH
SIDE B
- CUCKOLD'S HAVEN
- A SHORT DIALOG
- MY MISTRESS THAT'S PRETTY
- THE COWARDLY CLOWN OF FLANDERS CUCKOLDED
- PROFERRED LOVE REJECTED
- THE SCHOOLMASTER'S LESSON
- SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS
When A. E. Housman observed that "chastity is the rarest of the sexual aberrations" he was not drawing bis evidence from the tens of thousands of folk-songs that have been legally published in the English-speaking world. Judging from this great body of literature, one would have to conclude that the three billion people on the earth had all been found as infants under cabbage leaves.
Of course the folk are not so appallingly moral, as a glance in any anthropology book will instantly reveal. To most of the world's people, romantic love is sensibly recognized as intensely pleasurable temporary insanity upon which no society in its right mind would base so important an institution as marriage, though it is a fitting subject for song. Even as late as the 12th century Andreas Capellanus laid down the rule that sensual love could exist only outside of marriage, as all these songs affirm. The Chastity Syndrome which so virulently infects us is an ancient but restricted hereditary complaint, nevertheless, which originated with the Near Eastern founders of Western Civilization (as Ralph Linton stated, "from Moses to Freud, Semites have been preoccupied with sin and sex", burgeoning with the Old Testament Puritans who briefly took over England in the early 17th century, and florescing in the appropriately virgin land of America, where it ran to ugly seed.
It is a slander to call latter-day prudery "Victorian," for it was the Americans, not the British, who were its most assiduous practitioners. It was an American, let it not be forgotten, one Amelia Bloomer, who invented in 1849 the ludicrous but effective underdrawers which made 19th century women virtually impregnable. It was an American who first divided chicken into "white meat" and "dark meat," since one did not speak of breasts and thighs in respectable American homes. It was an American who devised the idea of attiring the "limbs" of furniture in modest little pantaloons, as many British visitors to 19th century America hilariously recorded. And in the subject matter at hand, it was an American, Francis James Child, who took sex out of folksong. Child's influence has been the greatest and most debilitating smother ever to settle upon folk scholarship. He was an insufferable prude who admitted only the feeblest of bawdy ballads into his collection, and those__with undisguised repugnance—in expurgated form. Significantly he collaborated on the editing of the first three volumes of the "Bishop Percy's Folio Mss." (see "Walking in a Meadow Green"), but delicately withdrew when the time came to put together the fourth volume, "Loose and Humorous Songs." Since the publication of his "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," some 700 legal collections of English-language folksongs have been published, but not one contains an unexpurgated bawdy song.
The songs on this record come from a happier time; all of them were written in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and even those that originated in the Puritan interregnum are protests against the dour blue-noses who put an end to all pleasure in England for a generation. Half of them are in the pastoral tradition, a literary and behavioral convention that originally derived from Theocritus of Syracuse, who three centuries before Christ wrote such charming poems of idealized rustic life that he set a tradition that lasted two thousand years. Imitated by Virgil in his "Ecologues," which became the most influential of these unrealistic but delightful fictions, Theocritus' invention for a long time dominated several European literatures. Coming into English from Italian and Spanish writers/the pastoral convention was given a tremendous stimulus by Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" and Spenser's "The Shepherd's Calendar" in Shakespeare's time (Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is a well-known example), and nearly every writer tried his hand at creating lovesick shepherds and shepherdesses; even the sour Puritan, Milton, had a go at it. Jaded aristocrats even acted out the fiction; Marie Antoinette and her ladies dressed in peasant garb and gamboled over the landscaped gardens pursued by amorous courtiers.
WALKING IN A MEADOW GREEN: The history of ballad collection, bawdy and otherwise, began in 1658 when Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, visited a rural friend's home and saw a housemaid tearing off pages of a large manuscript and using them as spills. He rescued the papers, which proved to be a century-old collection of ballads, and bowdlerized them into the famous "Reliques." This song was in the original manuscript, not printed until 1868. Like so many bawdy songs, this has a beautiful melody.
CHLOE BLUSHED: This was written at the beginning of the 18th century by Nicholas Rowe, lawyer, poet, first editor of Shakespeare, producer, and playwright, who would have been shocked to know that one of his songs would end up in a collection of erotic lyrics, for he was the fist playwright to rebel against the patriotic "licentiousness that distinguished the English theatre after the expulsion of the Puritans in 1660. The play from which this was taken, "The Biter," was a flop in 1704, but Rowe went on to become Poet Laureate.
YOUNG STREPHON AND PHILLIS: "Strephon" was first a character in Sidney's "Arcadia," the stylized shepherd who loved Urania, and his name became conventionalized as the archetypical rustic lover. Chloe was generally the corresponding name for his mistress, but Phillis (from the seductible and seduced maiden in Virgil's "Eclogues") often took her place. The song is from D'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy," 1720.
THE PIPE OF LOVE: This is from "Songs Comic and Satyrical" written in 1782 by the negligible poet, G. A. Stevens. "Satyrical" is a pun frequently used in song collections of this sort, combining the Greek satyros (a riotously lascivious sylvan deity) and the Roman satura (a dish of hors cfoeuvres, early signifying a collection of critical writing).
OF ALL THE BRISK DAMES: From the "Westminster Drollerie" (1671-1672), one of the indecent miscellanies deriving from the "Musarum Deliciae" published surreptitiously in 1655 to scandalize the Puritans. "Drolleries" long outlasted the Puritans, who were replaced by other undesirable political groups in the satirical songs, and many off-color songs and poems that otherwise would not have been printed found refuge in these ephemeral collections.
THE QUEEN OF MAY: From "Pills to Purge Melancholy," "The Queen of May" recalls a custom—maypole dancing—that has lost its original phallic significance. To appreciate the humor of this song, one should know that the "Queen" expected a consummation that, as the song frustratingly suggests, was not forthcoming. The American Puritans knew what the May ceremonies meant, and extirpated them from this land.
A NYMPH: The "Academy of Complements" (1650), from which this song was taken, was the sort of thing that enraged the Puritans, who were in power when it was published, for they abolished bull-baiting in England, as a contemporary said, not because it gave pain to the bull but because it gave pleasure to the people. The story here is a slight but persistent one, illustrated in graphic art from a Pompeiian painting to several current Swedish movies.
CUCKOLD'S HAVEN: John Ker, third Duke of Roxburghe (1740-1804), one of the greatest of all English bibliophiles, assembled a magnificent collection of early books, including three volumes of irreplaceable broadsides, from which this song is taken. The sale of his library in 1812 occasioned the founding of the first book club, whose members were each required to publish at personal expense a rare volume. The ballads were published in nine volumes between 1871-1899.
"Hornified" possibly requires definition; cuckolds were considered to wear visible horns, probably from the fact that medieval Europe identified capons by grafting their spurs on their heads. "Cuckold" itself has an ornithological etymology, from the cuckoo which lays its eggs in other birds' nests.
A SHORT DIALOG: Another "drollery" excerpt, 1672.
MY MISTRESS THAT'S PRETTY: "Pills to Purge Melancholy," from which this and several other songs in this collection were taken, was the chief poetic production of Tom D'Urfey, England's Francois Villon, in 1719 (a facsimile edition of the 1876 publication was issued in 1959 by the Folklore Library Publishers). D'Urfey wrote 350 of the 1144 songs in the anthology, many of which are far too obscene even to be sung by Ed McCurdy. "The Town may da-da-damn me for a Poet," D'Urfey once said, "but they si-si-sing my Songs for all that."
THE COWARDLY CLOWN OF FLANDERS CUCKOLDED: Taken from the "Collection of Old Ballads," 1723, this ultimately derives from a medieval fabliau, elements of which were used by Chaucer in his hilarious story, "The Reeve's Tale."
PROFFERED LOVE REJECTED: A lesson in elementary economics expressed often in the medieval theme "He who will not when he could, may not when he would." This was written by Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), a professional playboy and frequenter of the Mermaid Tavern. An archetypical "full" man of that virile period, Suckling was a famous wit, gambler (he invented the game of cribbage), exhibitionist, soldier, cloak-and-dagger intriguer, courtier, playwright, and excellent poet whose "Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?" is one of the most-often recited poems in the world.
THE SCHOOLMASTER'S LESSON: This and the following song were taken from early 18th century broadsides, those extremely ephemeral and uncensored single sheets of popular literature that were issued by the million on every imaginable disgraceful topic. Schoolmasters, for example, are the rarest characters in bawdy songs, for reasons which I hesitate to consider. Unless I have not heard all the extant stanzas, the schoolmaster was the only resident of Kirriemuir who did not attend the famous ball.
SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS: The story of the attempted seduction of Susannah is deservedly one of the most sought-after stories in the Bible among those who do not read the Great Book for religious inspiration, but this reason for Susannah's coyness is nearly unique in the profane redactions.
ED McCURDY, despite his unconvincing protestation in his earlier Prestige record "The Best of Ed McCurdy" that he doesn't go in for this sort of thing, is without quibble the world's best purveyor of the salacious song. Unfortunately for his fame and our pleasure, his best songs, written by himself, are quite unrecordable. Ed would have been completely at home among the frequenters of the Mermaid Tavern or at the classically naughty court of Charles II; he is not only a fine singer, as many of these distant forebears were, but a Johnsonian conversationalist, a D'Urfey songwriter, and, it must be confessed, a Boswellian sophisticate. Curiously, he has only three children.
Notes by JOHN GREENWAY
Recorded by RUDY VAN GELDER
Produced by KENNETH S. GOLDSTEIN
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