Hulver's site || Comments || I look at people and I see nothing worth liking

Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys! by atreides (4.00 / 3) #4 Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 03:33:33 PM EST

Actually, Liza Jane probably has different lyrics because there's a long tradition in country, jazz and cowboy music to change around lyrics to fit your needs. Sometimes the song is old and needs updating, sometimes they can't remember the original words, sometimes they personalize the song to themselves or the people around them at the time. I hear there's a tradition of that in Mexican folk music, but I can't tell you that with any certainty.

And as a minor sidebar, I came to find Bob Wills by accident when I was looking for a recording of a certain jazz tune on Soulseek... He definitely liked the jazz big time...

_{He sails from world to world in a flying tomb, serving gods who eat hope.}

Most if not all folk music, surely, does this by motty (4.00 / 1) #9 Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 09:13:50 PM EST

This is using 'folk' music in the widest possible sense. I'm sure (unless Robert Graves was lying to me) this kind of thing was prevalent also in the old Celtic bardic tradition; it's also true in the vast bulk of rock, blues and reggae also. Compare and contrast, for example, Dawn Penn's version of 'You Don't Love Me' with the one on the Bloomfield / Kooper / Stills SuperSession album - there is a still more ancient blues antecedent of these two variants which has different lyrics again, to say nothing of arrangement. Yet it's still essentially the same song.

It's easier to enumerate kinds of music where this doesn't apply, because singers change the lyrics as they see fit any time where it's more important to be singing with real feeling and conviction than to be parroting something that has been laid down in stone by some weird authority figure. Off the top of my head, only classical styles and liturgical music really require a sacred text; one could argue that it is precisely the point that a lyric has become sacred in this way that it stops being folk music and becomes classical somehow. Or liturgical. And also often boring.

I amd itn ecaptiaghle of drinking sthis d dar - Dr T
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You're probably right... by atreides (4.00 / 2) #13 Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 08:59:55 AM EST

...but I am not the musical master that you are. I didn't want to talk to other forms I'm unfamiliar with. And I have no idea why I didn't mention the blues. That's a big "duh!" on my part...

_{He sails from world to world in a flying tomb, serving gods who eat hope.}
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Master shmaster by motty (2.00 / 0) #14 Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 03:26:13 PM EST

I wish.

eanwhile, here's more on 'You Don't Love Me', which I just found, and which includes verses I've not come across before and refers to a Grateful Dead version I didn't know about. How did I not find this stuff last time I researched this?

I amd itn ecaptiaghle of drinking sthis d dar - Dr T
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: You never find it when you need it... by atreides (4.00 / 1) #15 Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 04:01:54 PM EST

...but it always in mind when you don't. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
_{He sails from world to world in a flying tomb, serving gods who eat hope.}
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