#902. Come and I Will Sing You

 

"Come and I Will Sing You (The Twelve Apostles)" has been an obsession of mine since I first heard it on the Great Big Album The Hard and the Easy, released all the way back in 2005 (if I can possibly believe it...!), one of the rare songs sung by Bob Hallett (sort of the band's own Ringo Starr in that regard).

...The problem is that Bob Hallett sings it...Bob's great!  Don't get me wrong.  But he doesn't exactly sing...clearly.  That's of course him singing in the first of the two videos (the second being an adorable version I found last month in my further attempts to get my family to love the song as much as I do), so you can hear what I mean.

But that's also part of the charm!  I love listening to Bob sing it.  Actually learning what he's singing becomes difficult, however, so that's why it's taken the better part of twenty years to do so...

Obviously I didn't dedicate a great amount of time in the past two decades to do so, but the interest was always there.  The song itself is based on traditional material (as with much of Great Big Sea's catalog), and the variations are known by different titles, but the gist of it is that it's a version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas," which itself has enough weirdness just trying to interpret what all the figures mean, which is also the fun of "Come and I Will Sing You," once you find out what Bob's singing.

To wit (and this is my version, don't you know):

Come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you one-o.  What will the one be?  One the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you two-o.  What will the two be?  Two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you three-o.  What will the three be?  Three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you four-o.  What will the four be?  Four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you five-o.  What will the five be?  Five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you six-o.  What will the six be?  Six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you seven-o.  What will the seven be?  Seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you eight-o.  What will the eight be?  Eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you nine-o.  What will the nine be?  Nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you ten-o.  What will the ten be?  Ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you eleven-o.  What will the eleven be?  Eleven that went straight to heaven, ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

So come and I will sing you!  What will you sing me?  I will sing you twelve-o.  What will the twelve be?  Twelve the twelve apostles, eleven that went straight to heaven, ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.

Hey!

Finally I decided I just needed to sing it, so I learned it, and some of it was tongue-tying until I learned it well enough, and that's how I spent the weeks of Christmas and so I've satisfied both my curiosity and interest in the song.  At last!

And here's some explanations:

• "One the one..." This one's pretty self-explanatory.  This is God.
• "Two lily-white babes" These are Jesus and Mary, born without original sin.
• "Three of them were drivers" The Three Kings.
• "Four gospel preachers" Well, Matthew Mark Luke & John.
• "Five ferrymen" One of the difficult ones to parse.  Possibly the five wounds of Christ on the cross.
• "Six pallbearers" Also subject to wide interpretation, possibly the six jars of water Jesus turned into wine, or the six days of creation.
• "Seven stars" Probably the seven sacraments.
• "Eight Gabriel singers" Archangels.
• "Nine bright-eye shiners" The orders of angels in general.
• "Ten commandments" Self-explanatory.
• "Eleven that went straight to heaven" The apostles excluding Judas.
• "Twelve apostles" And including him.

#901. Gasparilla 2024

Gasparilla is a festival that’s kind of a big deal in Tampa, and has been for more than a century, celebrating a fictional pirate named Jose Gaspar. It’s a fine excuse to have a little fun, a parade (two!) filled with floats of folk called krewes who toss bead necklaces at the gathered crowds, and celebrate local lore (real and imagined).

When I moved to Tampa back in the fall of 2017, I had no idea this thing existed, but by January 2018 (Gasparilla happens twice every January), I was fully onboard. No, I haven’t yet dressed as a pirate (or anything else), but, y’know, maybe! 

I grew up in Lisbon Falls, Maine, which for the part forty-odd years has celebrated Moxie Day (which I’ve talked about a few times in this blog), and when I was living in Colorado Springs there was Pikes Peak or Bust, another commemorative event (this one based on real events). Moxie Day is a community event steeped in the community, which Gasparilla is not, at least not in the same way. Moxie Day has things like bake sales and recipe contests. Gasparilla is food trucks. 

Anyway, so the first Gasparilla parade is always the children’s version. The second, a week later, is the adults one, where there is much drinking (it also has the “invasion” reenacted). I used to try and attend both, but that may be firmly in the past tense, or at least has turned in that direction.

My favorite part is actually all the skeleton pirates that pop up to help celebrate. There’s also the Rough Riders (Tampa was a staging ground for the Spanish American War), the Conquistadors, and the cows from Chick-Fil-A (the sponsor of the children’s parade; I took pictures of them previously but not this year). 

So that was yesterday.

#900. Sandman, Titans, Frasier

Well, here we are again, this time talking about some other TV shows I've watched recently, just before those other ones from last week...

Let's start with Sandman.  I didn't get into the comics until about a decade ago.  I know, I know, that's like twenty years later than all the cool kids, but whenever it happened I finally got there.  The efforts to adapt Sandman to movie and/or TV were byzantine, but it finally happened, on Netflix, and that of course meant someone who has never had Netflix was possibly never going to see it...Until Netflix decided to release the first season on physical media.  Which of course I snapped up.

For a comic book steeped in the goth culture of its time, there were probably going to be a few changes to keep it from feeling dated.  So that happened.  Along with about half the cast, Death is now black, and not the other most goth character in the story, but it really doesn't matter.  Same character, just as awesome, and half the best episode of the season, along with Hob Gadling (a tweet referring to which went as viral as I'm likely to).  Listening to Morpheus after all this time, just having a voice for the character, that's the biggest adjustment to make.  Absolutely totally worth the wait.  Will they really be able to adapt the whole comic?  Time to tell!

Titans finished out its run, and I caught up of course on home media (the way I've watched the whole series), with its fourth season (one whole episode of which finally gave Beast Boy a proper spotlight, which owed more than a little to Grant Morrison's Animal Man), and the whole run has a very symmetrical feel to it, along with the sliding time scale of the X-Men movies as close to a true comic book experience as live action adaptations have gotten.  Any regular reader of comics will know superhero team lineups come and go, and usually have a beginning and end of some kind.  The show began with the Titans getting back together (some of its best early material across the first two seasons are flashbacks to the past, a whole prior lineup we get to see with some of them coming back for me, including Wonder Girl), and ends with the group going back its separate ways.

The whole series has gotten so little attention (mostly in the beginning, when observers called it "needlessly violent"), and as such will be a welcome bit of rediscovery in the years ahead.  Definitely one of the hidden gems of the streaming era.

Speaking of which!  All these shows I've talked about in the past few weeks have come from one streaming service or another.  This last one this week is no exception.  Frasier is a reboot/continuation of the classic Frasier sitcom, which itself was of course a spinoff of Cheers.  Early reviews criticized the new version as lacking the depth of comic talent, specifically the actors playing Frasier's son and Nigel's son, but I find their unique characters in the general franchise to be refreshing, helping establish yet another identity for the third look at Frasier's world we've gotten to see.  It's also one of those shows I'm baffled has to be relegated to streaming (Paramount+), although the broadcast chances are maybe dicey with sticking strictly to Kesley Grammer as central star (whereas Night Court had a new face to the premise, and what's now known as The Connors had a whole cast it brought back).

Anyway, this old fan loved the results, which also helped keep me visiting my Paramount+ account in the absence (a fairly rare occurrence) of new Star Trek material (not that the service doesn't have other material, too).  There was a time (certainly when my working status had much different parameters, much less working hours) when I watched a flood of television programming, at least one show every night.  We're not really in a golden age of network television (although I think Ghosts is a classic too many people sleep on), so I'm not missing too much, and most of what streaming offers I can reasonably catch up with as I want.  I've also been watching Yellowstone (but curiously, not the streaming spinoffs).  Cable (premium or otherwise) rarely has much to interest me, and much of what critics love these days is indistinguishable from what they love in film.

So I guess I can say I'm keeping up about as well as always.

#899. The Mandalorian, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

Hmm. Let’s maybe get back a little more into blogging (last year is the first one I missed on this particular one since I started it back in 2002!). If I manage to keep this up, this’ll be a brief look at the highlights of what I’ve watched recently, hopefully on a weekly basis.

So this past week I finally saw the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. I’m really behind. I know this. This is a show that until a few weeks ago only existed on Disney+. Except for Paramount+ (and its predecessor CBS All Access) I haven’t really participated in the streaming future. I have spent most of my life without cable TV, too. I view it like that. 

So I finally got to watch it because someone decided to release those seasons in physical media. I got them on Blu-ray, which is itself a format I didn’t participate in until the pandemic started. But I’ve been catching up on that, too. I now have dozens of movies and TV shows on these slightly smaller, smoother, more visually detailed discs. The first one I got was, and also the impetus for, Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the directorial reimagining of the third film in the series, an attempt to finally make it respectable.

Not really the subject of this discussion. Anyway.

I didn’t really have an urge to watch any of the Star Wars TV shows. I’m a fan of the movies. Pretty much all of them. Modern Star Wars fans and I diverge on a lot of points. They like the cartoons, Rogue One…I don’t. I knew all about the Baby Yoda phenomenon. Kind of hard to avoid. I figured that was probably good enough.

Then this opportunity arose. So I dove in. The absolute best I can say is that it’s really interesting to watch familiar Star Wars elements sort of remixed. I mean, this is clearly (unlike, say, Rogue One) Star Wars. By the second season they’re clearly leaning more heavily into the connective material.

Let’s move on.

I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. All of them. (Prodigy now being on Netflix, this will change for the foreseeable future.) I’ve followed and enjoyed each new show to varying degrees (Prodigy least, so kind of fortuitous). 

This being said, last year the best new episode in decades (since the end of Enterprise) happened, and in the series most capable of achieving the necessary episodic format to reach it. Which is to say, Strange New Worlds.

The episode is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (which you might have been able to guess from the title of this post). It features a character who’s been a regular in the series from the start, a descendant of Khan, being forced in the most literal way possible, to confront her ancestry. 

The whole episode is magical. La’an herself had already been a favorite of mine (as much as it pains her to think of them I love to hear her say “Gorn,” and she was by far the best element of the fantasy episode in the first season, when I truly noticed her for the first time). How she plays off Kirk, and how the episode leans into Kirk himself, interprets him (kind of how Grogu cleverly depicts Yoda’s quip to Luke all those years ago, about he could possibly be so big eating the way he did), which for a character who has existed for some sixty years and this is the third incarnation of him, that’s a special kind of breakthrough.

But yeah, it also dives deeply into Star Trek lore, by giving us a glimpse into Khan’s origins, and La’an’s continuing efforts to reconcile her lineage. The whole experience is, as I may have mentioned, perfect, for all the reasons I’ve touched on and many more besides. It’s the most richly articulated episodes in franchise history, and yeah, one of the best. I have a whole blog dedicated to the franchise, and I have painstakingly detailed the new classics as I’ve talked about all those episodes, classics in Star Trek having become harder to identify the older it’s gotten.

This one goes leagues beyond most of them. And it baffles me that nobody seems to recognize this. So I try to talk about it here and there. I just happened to watch it again, which is why I’m writing about it here now.

I’ve been a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek most of my life, so it’s always nice to know there’s still new stuff worth talking about all these many years later, past the formative material. That’s not a sentiment that gets expressed enough, not these days. I’ve tried most of my blogging experience to counteract that, so it’s fitting to reiterate the point when trying to get back into the swing of it.