An Old, Sad Song

Streets of Laredo is the cleaned-up, family-friendly version.

Most of the other variants make it plain- some with graphic detail- that the thing the protagonist is dying from is syphilis.

The protagonist is usually male, occasionally female. The song is variously entitled The Unfortunate Rake, The Unfortunate Lad, The Unfortunate Trooper, The Buck's Elegy and so on. My favourite title is Pills of White Mercury.

The earliest complete text is mid-19th century. A couple of verses are recorded in a late 18th century Irish source.

In one version the encounter between narrator and protagonist occurs in London's Covent Garden- placing it in the world of Hogarth's Rake's Progress and John Gay's Beggar's Opera- which feels exactly right.

Brendan Gleeson sings a version- a capella- in the final segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He sings it with great sweetness.

From notes on the Gleeson version I learned that "The Lock" was the Victorian word for a hospital specialising in STDs. The first Lock- so called- was in Southwark.

There's a Caribbean Version called Bright Shining Morning which appears on one of Norma Waterson's albums. I think it may be my favourite. The text is a little garbled which introduces a pleasing note of weirdness and mystery.

There are those who think The St James Infirmary Blues is yet another variant. From John Gay's London to Louis Armstrong's New Orleans- that's quite a journey...

A Door At Which I Never Knocked

I dreamed I was in Oxford- a very crowded city- searching for the rooms of the woman who was going to tutor me in Art History. Each set of rooms had its owner's name written in big letters on the wall outside, but I had no idea where hers was - and no system for finding it apart from going door to door.

I was going to propose that I do a study of the De Critz family- or possibly of Willem Drost- obscure 17th century painters I blogged about earlier this year. The de Critzs were English portraitists who- infuriatingly- never signed their work- and Drost was the Rembrandt pupil who may have painted The Polish Rider which is one of the great paintings of the world.

In real life I could have enjoyed being an Art Historian. And I would probably have chosen the 17th century as my particular field. In certain moods I tell myself that my favourite painter is Nicholas Poussin- not so much for his religious pictures- which strike me as merely dutiful- as for his heartfelt mythologies and landscapes.

Poussin was the particular preserve of Anthony Blunt- who also served as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. I was thinking about him yesterday after reading the latest installment of Alan Bennett's diaries- generously shared for free by the LRB. Bennett wrote a play about him- A Question of Attribution- in which he and the Queen do a stately minuet around the subject of his treason. Did she know he was a Soviet spy? Of course she did- a courtier later confided to Bennett- and he knew she knew, but nothing was ever said...

Had I become an Art historian I wouldn't have had Blunt's career- I didn't go to the right schools, didn't have his connections or his expensive taste in guardsman- but I might have been a backroom boy at one of the auction houses, visiting stately homes, scrutinising unregarded pictures and venturing attributions. "Why, I do believe this could be a de Critz!"

What fun that would have been...