I've been musing over the old ballad Scarborough Fair. As you probably know, in it the devil or an assistant devil taunts a woman that she can be his true love if she can perform any number of impossible tasks.

The Sing Out book has a verse that goes "Tell her to dry it (the famous cambric shirt) on yonder thorn/which never bore blossom since Adam was born." This isn't a very satifactory verse, since what's impossible about that?

I've decided that the original must have been "Tell her to dye it...", not dry it. The old-timers would have known immediately that a sterile plant with no juicy berries, colorful petals or sap could not be used to dye a fabric.

That's how I'm going to sing it from now on, and I invite you all to do so as well. I'm also going to change "blossom" to "fruit", since it scans better.

My next challenge is to make the song sound like a devil is singing it, and not like the warm, fuzzy version which Simon and Garfunkel recorded so long ago. Back then, all I thought was, "Isn't that sentimental? It's something about true love, but I don't know what."