Lyrica Erotica Vol.3: Women's Delight (1700)

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Lyrica Erotica Vol. 3 Ed McCurdy  Women's Delight

ED McCURDY, vocals and guitar
SANDY BULL, banjo
PETER GARDNER, guitar
ISABEL GARDNER, flute

Side A

1.   NOT ALL CAN NICK IT THAT WILL
2.   TO A LADY THAT WILL ALLOW ALL FAVORS BUT ONE
3.   AN AMOROUS DIALOGUE
4.   UNDER THE WILLOW SHADE
5.   NARCISSUS, COME KISS US
6.   AN ANSWER
7.   A PURITAN OF LATE

Side B

1.   WOMEN'S DELIGHT
2.   WHEN FANNY WAS GROWING APACE
3.   RONDELAY
4.   THE COY SHEPHERDESS
5.   BLAME NOT A WOMAN
6.   A LOGICAL SONG
7.   YOUNG PHAON

From the time when Charles I's martyred head bounced away from the bloody axe until Cromwell's own dour cranium bobbed on a pole in a travelling circus, England was a mirthless place where Puritans hanged cats on Monday for killing rats on Sunday. But when Charles II restored the kingly crown to the kingly head England went on a debauch of merriment and misbehavior that Kathleen Windsor described in Forever Amber. For most of the century that followed, blatant immorality was a patriotic virtue, and those who provided the amenities of vice, the vintners and songsters, prospered as they never would prosper again, purveying to the hedonists who hung about the court and the clubs.

The lower classes did not have such a good time. They could stay in the country and spend more than half of their yearly income of £35 on oatmeal or come to the city of London and drift along with swarms of beggars, cows, and mad dogs 1hat trudged ankle deep in ordure. If they disliked their station in life, there were some 200 crimes for which they could be hanged out of this world in a hurry. Still, city life was better than working for fourpence a day in the mines; a city laborer could make twice the wages of a countryman, and the pleasures of life, which they took raw, were cheap. Few farmers could afford to eat the pigs they raised, but a city man could for 3 1/2 pennies "get a meal of cowheel or tripe, and wipe his hands afterward on the back of a woolly Newfoundland dog." Later on he could get drunk for a penny, and dead drunk for two, on gin (so-called from its original name on its first importation along with King William as "Geneva"). Fielding in 1751 wrote "Gin is the principal sustenance of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis."

If drink was the curse of the working class, work—in Oscar Wilde's phrase—was the curse of the drinking class. These songs emanate from the latter society, the "Town," which through most of this era consisted of only a few hundred people, indolent enough to infuriate any modern Liberal, but who had the saving virtues of urbanity, wit, intelligence, and sophistication to save them from the outer barbarity. As Bayne-Powell put it, the 18th century was too near the age when solitude was dangerous, and men congregated in herds for mutual protection. Ed McCurdy sings of what they did in their isolated congregation.

NOT ALL CAN NICK IT THAT WILL: Of the scores of Grub Street habitants who wrote the songs that 18th century roisterers bawled over their bottles, none was more successful than Thomas D'Urfey (1653-1723), known alike to king and courtesan as "Tom," who was in fact what his colossal vanity allowed him to call himself—a "double genius for poetry and music." He had also a genius for scurrility and witty obscenity that even in his sinful age had him haled before the magistrates, but above all he had a genius for knowing what the public wanted, and this he gave them in his Pills to Purge Melancholy, a tremendous col-

lection of songs on a great variety of subject, most of them indecent. D'Urfey was not over scrupulous about drawing his material from the public domain— specifically from the oral tradition of the clubs and dives; and so his anthology preserves the immediacy of the time in catch phrases like "Not all can nick it that will," which to the erudite lexicographers (like Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary was published in the middle of the century) were as ephemeral as the virility of the lover in this song.

TO A LADY THAT WILL ALLOW ALL FAVORS BUT ONE is a fair example of the quality of the 350 "Pills" that D'Urfey wrote himself, compositions that impress us more than they did his contemporaries. Buckingham wrote of him, And sing-song Durfey, placed beneath abuses Lives by his impudence, and not the Muses.

AN AMOROUS DIALOGUE: The incipient capitalists of the 17th and 18th centuries had a hard time of it. "I heard once," wrote the great hosiery merchant, brickmaker, publisher, journalist, novelist, and spy—Daniel Defoe—"of a shopkeeper that behaved himself to such an extreme that when he was provoked by the impertinence of customers beyond what his temper could bear, he would go upstairs, beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be furious for two or three minutes as a man chained down in Bedlam, and again when that heat was over, would sit down and cry faster than the children he had abused, and after the fit, he would go down into the shop again and be as humble and courteous and calm as any man whatever." Meanwhile, behind his back this sort of thing was going on. The volatile merchant was paying his help as little as four shillings a week, so one can hardly blame John for taking "what was to be had."

UNDER THE WILLOW SHADE: As early as 1655, when the Puritan interregnum still had five years to bind up English merriment, the anti-Puritan underground felt strong enough to publish the first of a long series of poetic miscellanies whose primary purpose was to disseminate obscene satirs on Puritanism. Called "drolleries," these persisted forty years after the Puritans were gone as vehicles for the publication of songs that had too little literary elevation or dignity to be printed on their own. This deceptively innocent song with the surprising last line appeared in the Windsor Drollery of 1672.

NARCISSUS, COME KISS US: This delicious exercise in circumlocution is a great favorite of my four year old son who, I fear, doesn't understand everything of what is going on—which is less than I could say for Ed McCurdy's boy at that age. "Narcissus" would have been lost to us had it not been for the packrat collecting of Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725), a bibliomaniac who spent his life "among dust and cobwebs and bulwarks of paper . . . stowed three deep from the bottom to the top of the house" so that he had to sleep in the hallway. Addison immortalized him in Tatler No. 158 as that "learned idiot," Tom Folio. His manuscripts, in one of which this is buried, numbered more than a thousand.

AN ANSWER: From The Festival of Love (1789), this might be called, after Hogarth's famous social caricature, a "rake's progress." It is an exquisite little monologue, a dramatic evolution of a woman's seduction in 35 seconds, with one of the most delightful last lines found outside the limerick.

A PURITAN OF LATE: To appreciate this typical anti-Puritan drollery song (from the Merry Drollery, 1661), one must understand what the great majority of Englishmen thought of the Puritans. The name itself was an insult; they called themselves the Saints, which was a comfortable delusion at any rate. Those who question how such a noxious minority were able to take control of England for nearly 20 years must first answer how the 18th Amendment was passed in this country. Another parallel with the American situation is the fact that much Puritan support came from those who saw the Saints as the only effective opponents of a foreign ideology — Catholicism, which worked through what the Puritans called the "proud, Popish, presumptuous, profane, paultrie, pestilent, and pernicious prelates."

WOMEN'S DELIGHT, from the last published drollery, the Merry Drollery Compleat (1691), reaches to us in living folksong through its tune, which has been used as the melody of several sets of unprintable words, perhaps best known in the non-nursery version of "Old King Cole," who had other nocturnal adventures than fiddling.

WHEN FANNY WAS GROWING APACE: In 1765 the Americans, just recovered from the holocaust of the French and Indian War, were fuming about Taxation without Representation. The English were concerned with more important things, as the negligible poet W. Yates expressed in this sample of his New Songs.

RON DELAY: By far the most considerable poet and dramatist of the whole Restoration period was John Dryden (1634-177), whose unparalleled versatility in letters is illustrated by this little song which, beautiful as it is, is overwhelmed by his other writings. His literary versatility was equalled only by his religious versatility—he was quickly a Puritan, a Protestant, and Catholic, as expediency directed.

THE COY SHEPHERDESS: The 2000-year-old pastoral tradition in aristocratic literature and behavior seems rather effete to us, who come to it through expurgated textbooks. But neither in the Mediterranean of classical times nor in Europe of the 18th century was behavior so coldly marble, as anyone who visits Pompeii and has seen the "dordy peech" on the brothel walls knows. This typical pastoral song is from the collection of John Ker, third Duke of Roxburgh, whose library was the best in England. Its sale in 1812 marked "the highest point reached by the thermometer of bibilomania." His ballads alone (of which this is one) brought the monetary equivalent of 114,480 bottles of gin.

BLAME NOT A WOMAN: This is one of the songs that would have disappeared in the kitchen fire of Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal if Bishop Thomas Percy (1729-1811) had not been visiting in 1658 and if he had not had his clerical eye on the maid. Percy took the manuscripts from the arsonistic hussy, published the more seemly pieces in his famous Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and hid the rest away where they lay, unpublished, until he had been 57 years in his grave.

A LOGICAL SONG (from the Festival of Love, 1789). One of the dominant themes of song and poetry in a hedonistic age is the Carpe Diem—"sieze the day," of which Herrick's "To the Virgins" is the greatest example in English. The gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may argument seems to have been the chief intellectual ploy of seducers who found it necessary to use the reasonable approach to pleasures of the flesh.

YOUNG PHAON: John Playford, the inventor of the connected quavers in musical notation, was the most important musical publisher of this period; during the Restoration he had a monopoly in music publishing. His shop was the chief hangout for popular music enthusiasts—Samuel Pepys was a regular customer of Playford's. "Young Phaon" appeared in his Choice Ayres and Songs, published in October, 1679, when Playford was inconsistently reviving church music.

ED McCURDY: In reviewing the first volume of Lyrica Erotica, Jack Guinn of the Denver Post said that if archeologists ever find a bawdy song inscribed on the walls of a paleolithic cave, the first man to sing it will be Ed McCurdy. Though he is, as Guinn correctly observes, the outstanding purveyor of Adult Songs, singing the songs without the offensive leers and gasps that his competitors affect, he takes a firm comprehensive stand on song subjects, having conducted a radio series of sacred songs while singing less inspirational ditties in burlesque houses. Even if he had not "the finest voice in folkmusic," as one critic esteemed him, Ed's urbanity, wit, intelligence, and sophistication would make him the ideal person to convey the best of the Restoration and the 18th century to these dismal times.

Notes: John Greenway
Recorded: Rudy Van Gelder
Produced: Kenneth S. Goldstein

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