"Oh Well!"
Last week I was on a journey back to my teen and university years. Friday nights spent listening to bands in the hot, sweaty Students Union and simultaneously trying to figure out how girls worked.
I like the live recorded, raw and vital sound of that Fleetwood Mac classic - "Oh Well" - spotted immediately by Peter. (To listen again use the player gadget at the bottom left of the screen.)
His namesake, guitarist Peter Green, was one of a handful of musicians who defined for me the sound of the late sixties, early seventies. A blues man, with a distinctive, effortless and individual style on the guitar as well as vocals, he produced a stream of classics in a few years with his Fleetwood Mac band. "Man of the World", "Need Your Love So Bad", and "Black Magic Woman" for example. The latter best known probably for the cover version by Santana. When he left, Fleetwood Mac deserted its blues roots and changed into the "supergroup" band that I suppose most people know today. If I sound nostalgic for something that has passed - then I am!
Like Gurney, Peter Green's career has been a tough voyage, beset with problems - but I'll let people investigate that themselves if they want.
This week's music also has something in common with these previous posts.
Marie Celeste contributed some interesting stuff about the Gurney/Fletcher song. If she is listening in, I wonder if there is any of this on her bookshelf, tucked alongside those Elizabethan Metaphysicals.. ?
The song gets a mention here: -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/highlandsandislands/content/a...
A song lyric is a completely different thing to a poem, though, and I'm not sure if this would have stood up on its own as poetry, although it works so well with the music.
However there are some interesting points here. I had posted the song because I knew and liked it, but hadn't really thought about it in the same way as "Sleep". The words are by Burns, as Peter also realised, but the music as you say is indeed a dance tune, and as I listen to the 4/4 repetitions I wonder why I missed it. It seemed so obviously a "melodie". I also discovered that there are different flavours of strathspey, however and this fits the idea of an "air". The dance itself is very stately , and reflects the contemplative longing mood of the words.
Is it a great poem? Probably not. You're right that it's first and foremost a song lyric, and it is a bit cliche'd. I doubt if Burns conceived it as any more than a warmly felt tribute to someone he loved and missed. It does capture that feeling nicely, without quite getting mawkish, when you see reminders of someone everywhere. cf with "All Kinds of Everything", the sugary Eurovision Winner of 1970 from Dana.
And it is beautifully sung - not easy I would think, at such a slow tempo.