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Lyr Req: The Bad Squire (from Chumbawamba)

Malcolm Douglas 23 Dec 04 - 11:25 AM
EagleWing 23 Dec 04 - 11:12 AM
Malcolm Douglas 23 Dec 04 - 10:42 AM
EagleWing 23 Dec 04 - 10:39 AM
EagleWing 23 Dec 04 - 10:29 AM
Malcolm Douglas 23 Jun 04 - 07:35 PM
GUEST,JTT 23 Jun 04 - 03:31 PM
Q (Frank Staplin) 23 Jun 04 - 12:52 AM
Malcolm Douglas 23 Jun 04 - 12:14 AM
Malcolm Douglas 22 Jun 04 - 11:50 PM
Jim Dixon 22 Jun 04 - 11:09 PM
Malcolm Douglas 21 Jun 04 - 12:00 AM
mack/misophist 20 Jun 04 - 11:42 PM
Malcolm Douglas 20 Jun 04 - 11:21 AM
mack/misophist 20 Jun 04 - 11:11 AM
Stewie 20 Jun 04 - 11:02 AM
GUEST,jimmy 20 Jun 04 - 08:57 AM
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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 23 Dec 04 - 11:25 AM

Has anybody heard both recordings? That's what I meant when I mentioned the tune. I'm familiar with Jon's take on the song, but I haven't heard the other one.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: EagleWing
Date: 23 Dec 04 - 11:12 AM

You're right Malcolm. (It's Jon Raven singing so I guess it's his version!) Apart from an occasional "Oh" or "a-", Raven seems to have changed only one word - he sings "at the _dreary_ workhouse door." instead of "cursed". He also misses out 8 verses but does it in such a way that the song still flows well.

Frank L.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 23 Dec 04 - 10:42 AM

It will hinge on the tune used: if it's Raven's then that's where Chumbawumba got the words, whatever they did to them subsequently. As I recall, all Jon Raven did was cut the poem down; I don't think he made any significant changes to wording.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: EagleWing
Date: 23 Dec 04 - 10:39 AM

CORRECTION:

I said "Mike Raven". It was, of course, his brother Jon that I meant.

Frank L.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: EagleWing
Date: 23 Dec 04 - 10:29 AM

Malcolm Douglas said "If the "Chumbawumba" transcription is accurate, then they have altered it to suit their own preconceptions. Probably they got it from the Raven arrangement, and misunderstood much of it. The original is far more powerful."

I have just been listening to the version on "Songs of a changing world" and, although Raven's version is reduced from Kingsley, there are major differences between Raven and Chumbawumba. The verse about the "mealy mouthed rector" is not in Chumbawumba but is in Raven, for instance. I'll look more closely at Mike Raven's version and post it later.

Frank L.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 23 Jun 04 - 07:35 PM

Only too true, sadly: capitalism survives by out-sourcing exploitation. Gated communities spring up all over the place, in order to exclude the growing western underclass whose jobs, poorly-paid though they already were, have been exported to places like India where the cost of living (and therefore pay) is far lower.

Slavery was abolished chiefly because it was cheaper to employ "wage slaves"; you didn't have to find them somewhere to live, or pay for a doctor when they were ill. You could just let them starve; there were always more where they came from. Slaves were an investment that had to be maintained, like the horses and the dogs; they had to be fed properly. That cost money.

A society can best be judged by the way in which it treats its most disadvantaged members. On those grounds, few nations in the world have very much to be proud of; but I'd put the UK and the USA (and the supra-national corporations that control them) very low on the scale of decency at the moment.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: GUEST,JTT
Date: 23 Jun 04 - 03:31 PM

Not so different now; as we wear our cheap clothes and eat our cheap food in the first world, children are working locked into factories in the third world to supply us.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 23 Jun 04 - 12:52 AM

Kingsley was a master of simple, clear prose and was considered a reformer.
I spent a few days in Edinburgh with an educator there and learned a little of the urchins who inhabited the city before the turn of the century. One reformer sent out men with nets to capture them for his school. The separation of people into gentry and near-animals as sugggested by Malcolm Douglas was a fact of life in major centers in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in America. In the New World, slaves had the worst position in the colonies, from Dutch times until emancipation; in the British West Indies about 1840 and in the States in 1865. After that, conditions for a short time in the major cities approached conditions in Europe.
In New York, areas where the upper layers of the gentry lived were patrolled to keep out the lower strata; unless they had proof of work there.


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Subject: Lyr Add: A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER (Kingsley
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 23 Jun 04 - 12:14 AM

Took less time to find than I'd expected. Here is Kingsley's full text, quoted from Yeast: A Problem (Project Gutenberg transcription).

You'll see that, set as a song, a great deal has been omitted. If the "Chumbawumba" transcription is accurate, then they have altered it to suit their own preconceptions. Probably they got it from the Raven arrangement, and misunderstood much of it. The original is far more powerful.



A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER

The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
Under the moonlight still.

Leaping late and early,
Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley,
Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead.

A poacher's widow sat sighing
On the side of the white chalk bank,
Where under the gloomy fir-woods
One spot in the ley throve rank.

She watched a long tuft of clover,
Where rabbit or hare never ran;
For its black sour haulm covered over
The blood of a murdered man.

She thought of the dark plantation,
And the hares and her husband's blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.

I am long past wailing and whining
I have wept too much in my life:
I've had twenty years of pining
As an English labourer's wife.

A labourer in Christian England,
Where they cant of a Saviour's name,
And yet waste men's lives like the vermin's
For a few more brace of game.

There's blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire;
There's blood on your pointer's feet;
There's blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there's blood on the game you eat!

You have sold the labouring man, squire,
Body and soul to shame,
To pay for your seat in the House, squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.

You made him a poacher yourself, squire,
When you'd give neither work nor meat;
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving children's feet;

When packed in one reeking chamber,
Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay;
While the rain pattered in on the rotting bride-bed,
And the walls let in the day;

When we lay in the burning fever
On the mud of the cold clay floor,
Till you parted us all for three months, squire,
At the cursed workhouse door.

We quarrelled like brutes, and who wonders?
What self-respect could we keep,
Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers,
Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep?

Our daughters with base-born babies
Have wandered away in their shame;
If your misses had slept, squire, where they did,
Your misses might do the same.

Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking
With handfuls of coals and rice,
Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting
A little below cost price?

You may tire of the gaol and the workhouse,
And take to allotments and schools,
But you've run up a debt that will never
Be repaid us by penny-club rules.

In the season of shame and sadness,
In the dark and dreary day
When scrofula, gout, and madness,
Are eating your race away;

When to kennels and liveried varlets
You have cast your daughters' bread;
And worn out with liquor and harlots,
Your heir at your feet lies dead;

When your youngest, the mealy-mouthed rector,
Lets your soul rot asleep to the grave,
You will find in your God the protector
Of the freeman you fancied your slave.

She looked at the tuft of clover,
And wept till her heart grew light;
And at last, when her passion was over,
Went wandering into the night.

But the merry brown hares came leaping
Over the uplands still,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
On the side of the white chalk hill.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: There's blood on your new foreign shrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 22 Jun 04 - 11:50 PM

I'm pretty sure that isn't what Kingsley wrote (he was a better versifier than that), though where the errors crept in I won't know till I know where Chumbawumba got the song. If from the recording I mentioned earlier, then there are mis-hearings. Meanwhile, I'd suggest that this is not harvested for the DT until checked. I'll try to find Kingsley's text.


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Subject: Lyr Add: THE BAD SQUIRE (from Chumbawamba)
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 22 Jun 04 - 11:09 PM

Copied from http://www.chumba.com/_rebelstext.htm

THE BAD SQUIRE

The merry brown hares came a-leaping
Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay a-sleeping
Under the moonlight so still,
Leaping so late and so early,
Till under their bite and their tread,
The swedes and the wheat and the barley
Lay cankered and trampled and dead.

A poacher's poor widow sat sighing
On the side of the moss-patterned bank,
Where under the gloom of the fir-woods,
One acre of ground laying rank.
She watched over barely grown clover
Where rabbit or hare never ran,
For the ground that it all covered over
Hid the blood of a good murdered man.

She thought of the shaded plantation
And the hares and her husband's own blood,
And the voice of her own indignation
Rose up to the throne of her God.
There's blood on your new foreign shrubs, Squire.
There's blood on your pointer's cold feet.
There's blood on the game that you sell, Squire,
And there's blood on the game that you eat.

You have sold out the labouring man, Squire,
Both body and soul for to shame,
To pay for your seat in the House, Squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.
You made him a poacher yourself, Squire,
When you'd give not the work nor the meat,
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving poor little one's feet.

When packed into one tiny chamber,
Man, mother and little ones lay,
While the rain pattered in on our bride bed,
And the walls barely held out the day,
When we lay in the heat of the fever,
On the mud and the clay of the floor,
Till you parted us all for three months, Squire,
And we knocked at the working house door.

So to kennels and liveried varlets,
Where you starved your own daughter of bread,
And worn out with liquor and harlots,
See your heirs at your feet lying dead.
When you follow them into your heaven,
And your soul rots asleep in the grave,
Then, Squire, you will not be forgiven
By the free men you took as your slaves.

[As sung by Chumbawamba on "English Rebel Songs 1381-1984."]


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 21 Jun 04 - 12:00 AM

He was a man of his time; and quite radical, believe it or not. The Water Babies, if you look more closely at it, was pretty subversive by contemporary standards. Most people hadn't even imagined that the children who cleaned their chimneys (and frequently died in the process) even belonged to the same species, let alone that they might have imaginations, and dreams, of their own.

Kingsley, like Kipling, is all too often misunderstood by people who make assumptions based on modern (anachronistic) attitudes. You need to understand how things were then before making judgements.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: mack/misophist
Date: 20 Jun 04 - 11:42 PM

Thank you. That's interesting. In Water Babies he gives the destinct impression that the gentry are nobler, finer, and, above all, cleaner than ordinary folk. He must have changed.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 20 Jun 04 - 11:21 AM

It was the same man. The poem appeared, it seems, in his novel Yeast. It was set to music by Jon Raven, and recorded on the album he made with Nic Jones and Tony Rose, Songs of a Changing World (Trailer LER 2083, 1973). I don't know whether Chumbawumba used the Raven tune or not.


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: mack/misophist
Date: 20 Jun 04 - 11:11 AM

Is this the same Charles Kingsley who wrote The Water Babies, the most saccarine children's book of all time? Sure doesn't sound like him!


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Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: Stewie
Date: 20 Jun 04 - 11:02 AM

What you are seeking is a song based on the poem, 'The Bad Squire', by Charles Kingsley. You will find a set of lyrics on this page: CLICK HERE.

--Stewie.


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Subject: Lyr Req: Theres blood on your new forein schrubs
From: GUEST,jimmy
Date: 20 Jun 04 - 08:57 AM

I heard this song a while ago - and would like to learn it - can anyone give me the words - ie - "Thees blood on your new forein schrubs sire - Theres blood on your pointers feet".

         Thanks for your help


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