The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #82629 Message #1514492
Posted By: Le Scaramouche
03-Jul-05 - 01:13 PM
Thread Name: Slang & Other Colloquialisms in Music
Subject: RE: Slang & Other Colloquialisms in Music
"Keach in the Creel". Ni was a typo.
Lyrics are in the DT, so I won't copy them here.
It's a song about a guy who meets a girl but the problem is getting to her room. His friends raise him in a basket (the creel). So far so good, but her nagging mother thinks she hears a man, wakes her husband and they accidently fall into the creel and are pulled up and down till full of bruises and broken bones.
Ewan MacColl had written:
The first printed version of this ballad did not appear until early in the nineteenth century although the theme has been part of European literature since the middle ages. Professor Child concludes his notes on the ballad with a peculiarly prim comment: "No one looks for decorum in pieces of this description but a passage in this ballad, which need not be particularized, is brutal and shameless almost beyond description." These are harsh words for a scholar whose stock-in-trade was stories dealing with mayhem in all its forms and it is difficult to imagine what prompted them. It is, of course, possible that Child was shocked by the use of the word "keach" on which considerable play is made in the song. Used as a noun the word denotes bustle or fluster, when used as a verb, however, it can mean "lift" or "hoist" or alternatively it can mean to void excrement.
This is why I ask, though got muddled when I said 'vomit'.