Seven Deadly Sins: The Bonny Swans

Loreena McKennitt: The Bonny Swans

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Here's our missing sin: Envy.

The Bonny Swans is a murder ballad about sexual jealousy. Childs lists it as #10 of his 305 Popular English and Scottish Ballads, and the original version goes way back to 1656 or thereabouts (Childs labels it "The Twa Sisters"). Here's Wikipedia's summary of the gruesome plot:

Two sisters go down by a body of water, sometimes a river and sometimes the sea. The older one pushes the younger in and refuses to pull her out again; generally the lyrics explicitly state her intent to drown her younger sister (over a suitor)…When the murdered girl's body floats ashore, someone makes a musical instrument out of it, generally a harp or a fiddle, with a frame of bone and the girl's "long yellow hair" for strings. The instrument then plays itself and sings about the murder…so that the elder sister is publicly revealed.

This song clearly violates two of the many warnings from this wonderfully amusing list, Things I've Learned From British Folk Ballads", to wit:

Avoid navigable waterways. Don’t let yourself be talked into going down by the wild rippling water, the wan water, the salt sea shore, the strand, the lowlands low, the Burning Thames, and any area where the grass grows green on the banks of some pool. Cliffs overlooking navigable waterways aren’t safe either.

Sharing a boyfriend with your sister is a bad plan.

Seven Deadly Sins: Johnny McEldoo

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem: Johnny McEldoo

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The story of Johnny McEldoo illustrates perfectly how the sin of gluttony can turn deadly, even though the title character and his pals survive. Geovicki’s use of anime imagery inspired my choice of picture for this post. It comes from Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

If you’re keeping score at home, you will notice that this is the seventh post this week. However, there were two posts for lust, so the missing sin is envy. I hope we will see a post for that soon, and maybe some more repeat business for the others as well. Stay tuned.

Seven Deadly Sins: Angry Eyes

Loggins & Messina: Angry Eyes

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This song clearly depicts someone with a serious Wrath issue. It's from the accidental but wildly successful duo of Jim Messina and Kenny Loggins. Messina was a former member of both Buffalo Springfield and Poco who had turned toward record producing when he met songwriter Loggins. He initially agreed to produce Loggins' first album in 1972 and ended up performing as well on Kenny Loggins with Jim Messina Sittin' In. That same year they released this eponymous record.

The long version of Angry Eyes is posted here (a less-than-3-minute version appears on their greatest hits). It's noteworthy for its long jazz-rock jam---that's Al Garth soloing on sax and Messina on guitar. Remember, Steely Dan hadn't yet made the jazz-rock sound de rigueur yet, so it was pretty progressive for a couple of country-rock dudes. Hell, country-rock wasn't even that old then, either.

I like the imagery comparing "angry eyes" to a tangible weapon. I've included a subtle tip of the hat to a manga character with his own anger issues – my image shows Light Yagami from Death Note. Light's anger can actually kill people, so this song kinda suits, I think.

Seven Deadly Sins: Seven Curses

Bob Dylan: Seven Curses

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Seven Curses is a song that Dylan wrote and recorded during the The Times They Are a-Changin' sessions. It didn't make it onto the album, but it was later included on the Bootleg Series collecton, released in 1991. I consider it to be one of the most emotionally provocative and darkly beautiful songs in my moderately sized Dylan library.

The song is a cesspool of sin, but the most profound one is certainly that of Lust. The Judge is one of the cruelest and most loathsome characters that I''m aware of in pop music history. His wicked molestation and betrayal of the female protagonist is actually difficult to listen to. But that's why the song is so powerful. If you haven't heard this tune, give it a listen.

Seven Deadly Sins: I Feel Pretty

Little Richard: I Feel Pretty

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Who among us doesn't remember the classic film West Side Story... and the scene in which Natalie Wood as Maria, the shy girl from the barrio, struts her stuff in the shop after-hours, extolling the virtues of her fine self, spurred on by her new relationship with Tony - it's a buoyant and bright example of Pride (in the name of love... :-)

The song is turned on its ear in Little Richard's campy, yet more-than-capable, cover (from a CD dedicated to, and in honor of, Leonard Bernstein) - who says Pretty has to be gender-specific?

Seven Deadly Sins: Lazy Bones

Leon Redbone: Lazy Bones

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I hope there will be more than seven posts this week, and that means that some sins may be represented by more than one song. There may also be sins we never get to at all. Sloth will not be one of those.

Lazy Bones was originally done by Hoagy Charmichael, and there have been some surprising covers, including Chanticleer and The King’s Singers. But Leon Redbone was the artist who introduced me to the song. His version has the necessary lazy vibe, and also Redbone’s trademark wink. You know listening that Leon Redbone loves these old songs, but he never takes them too seriously. They are for fun, and his versions always make me smile.

Seven Deadly Sins: Feelin' Love

Paula Cole: Feelin' Love

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There's really no other song that so embodies the feeling of lust to me than this Paula Cole track does. It embodies it and manages to make you feel the sinful feeling at the same time. In the song she talks about how a certain man makes her feel and the fantasies she has about him. It's extremely sexy.

Lust was considered a sin apparently because when we feel lust it is impossible to have room in our hearts to love our Lord, and we must ALWAYS love the Lord. But of course, lust is impossible to avoid, and almost as impossible to not act on sometimes. But oh, it surely is one of the favorite sins, and certainly one of the more fun.

Seven Deadly Sins: Easy Money

Rickie Lee Jones: Easy Money

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Lowell George: Easy Money

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Let’s open our week of iniquity with the sin of greed, shall we?

Rickie Lee Jones had a hit on her debut album with Chuck E’s in Love, and there were two or three other singles. I don’t think Easy Money was one of them, but it’s a great song, and probably a better indicator of where Jones’ career was headed than any of the singles. The hint of jazz is here, as is the wonderful ability to draw characters in just a few lines. Easy Money is a morality tale told with a wink.

But then Lowell George of Little Feat took on the song on his solo album. George turns this into a soul-blues shout with great horn charts. There is no wink here. Instead, this is a bluesy lament of a deal gone wrong. So George clearly heard something different than I do in Jones’ original. But his version really works too.

Saints: Joan of Arc

Leonard Cohen: Joan of Arc

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Joan of Arc may be the most famous of the martyr saints, so I need not tell her story in detail. Leonard Cohen shows himself to be a gifted story teller here. He reimagines her martyrdom as a wedding between Joan of Arc and the flames that would consume her. Cohen has Joan at the last tired of war, and maybe seeking release. The song dates from 1970, so it may reflect Cohen’s feelings about the Vietnam War in this way.

The funny thing is, I don’t really like the music of Leonard Cohen that much. His devotees are passionate about him, and will probably resent my saying so, but I find that a little of his voice goes a long way. In fact, I never would have known about this song at all, were it not for an amazing cover by Darrell Scott. There is an informal rule here at Star Maker that we should not post anything released after 2000. We’ve bent that rule a number of times, but Scott’s Joan of Arc is from 2008, so that’s pushing it. That said, if one of my fellow Star Makers should happen to post Scott’s version in the comments, I won’t tell. I really like Cohen’s original as well, now that I’ve found it, but I just don’t know if I would want to listen to the entire album it came from in one sitting.

Saints: Saint Genevieve

Alison Brown: Saint Genevieve

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Like most of her solo work, this piece is an instrumental, so it's hard to say explicitly what commentary, if any, Compass Records founder and banjo-playing bandleader Alison Brown has to offer about the patron saint of Paris, France.

But music has mood, and this slow, stately, almost morose tune, with its sweet, soaring strings and gentle plucking, speaks to the pleading nature of the devout 5th century nun, a pious ascetic and vegetarian who spoke out on behalf of virgins, prisoners of war, and lenience to all wrongdoers.

Saints: Our Lady Of Fatima

Red Foley: Our Lady Of Fatima

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Some Catholic saints have more than one feast day, operating under several titles. None has more than Mary, the mother of Jesus. There are those that celebrate milestones, including the Immaculate Conception (which, trivia fans, refers to Mary’s own conception, not that of Jesus), others that mark her various ecclesiastical titles (Queen of Heaven), and others yet her apparitions to assorted people all over the place. The Catholic Church is reluctant to recognise most alleged apparitions, but can’t undo those that already have been approved and attract a massive following.

One of these is the alleged apparition of Mary to three shepherd children in the Portuguese village of Fatima in the 1910s. It was big news, and the deal was sealed when tens of thousands of people came to Fatima for the last of the scheduled apparitions, and saw the sun “dance”. Previously the shepherd kids, by now a national story, had said that the apparition would perform a miracle at an appointed time. Bang on time, the sun did all kinds of odd things, like swirling and zig-zagging towards the earth. Some witnesses, however, reported seeing nothing. Scientists explain the phenomenon as optical effects or mass hysteria.

Catholics are not required to believe in apparitions, but Pope John Paul II did. He credited his survival in the 1981 assassination attempt to Our Lady of Fatima, whose feast day it happened to be that day. The apparition allegedly gave the shepherd children three secrets. Two of them were boring, it seems, but the third was closely guarded. It was finally revealed in 2000 and was also boring. Catholic fanatics believe the Vatican released a fake secret and are withholding the real secret.

I don’t think country legend Red Foley was a Catholic, but his paean to the apparition at Fatima, released in 1950, is supreme kitsch, capturing the post-war American Catholicism of Bishop Fulton Sheen, that crook Cardinal Spellman, Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary's. Our Lady of Fatima was recorded with the Anita Kerr Singers, whose voices backed something like half of all RCA numbers recorded in Nashville in the 1950s; Elvis’ pals, The Jordanaires, appeared on the other half. Red Foley was Elvis’ childhood idol: his Old Shep was the first song Elvis Presley ever performed in public, at the age of 10.

Saints: St Stephen

Grateful Dead: St Stephen

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The original St Stephen was the first Christian martyr. The story goes that he was criticizing the way Judaism was being practiced in Greece, and the Jews there stoned him to death. Bear in mind that this was while Christ was alive, and remember that Christ was himself a Jew. So it was Christ’s version of Judaism, which would become Christianity after His death, that Stephen was preaching.

The Grateful Dead song St Stephen may also be about Steve Gaskin. Gaskin taught a spirituality class in San Francisco in the 1960s, and he would later found a commune called The Farm. So Robert Hunter’s lyrics may be trying to equate the newness of Gaskin’s teachings with those of St Stephen in his time. Musically, St Stephen is one of the Dead’s most interesting songs, with its tempo and mood changes. I was surprised to find that the song has almost never been covered.

Update: One of our readers pointed out in the comments that I made some fairly serious errors in my telling of the life of Saint Stephen. For more on this, please check the comments to this post.

Saints: St. Thomas

Joshua Redman: St. Thomas

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Poor St. Thomas. (To be more specific, poor St. Thomas the Apostle, not to be confused with St. Thomas Aquinas, or St. Thomas More, or St. Thomas of Becket, or any of the other dozen or so Thomases who are also Roman Catholic saints.)

Thomas had a long and productive saintly career. He is said to have travelled to India and introduced Christianity there (er, well, maybe not so productive there). But we know him best from one New Testament episode, and the story goes like this (with embellishment):

Thomas was not with the other disciples one fateful day---they probably sent him off for the beer and snack run. And when he returned, his apostolic buds had amazing news.

"Guess who was just here visiting with us? You'll never guess!" they told him.

"Dudes. Just tell me."

"Jesus!"

This must have struck Thomas as a really tasteless joke, since Jesus had recently gone through the "crucified, dead and buried" part of the familiar story.

"Yeah, right. Pull the other one, lads, it's got bells on."

"No, really. You just missed him."

"Look, next time, you can fetch your own damned beer if this is the thanks I get."

And then he said the famous words that he soon came to regret: "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe you."

And for this, a statement of incredulity that I bet every one of us would have come up with in some form, he is best known by the not-very-cool epithet, "Doubting Thomas."

A week later, the resurrected Lord pops in again, but this time Thomas is hanging around. Now I don't think Jesus was at all harsh about Thomas's earlier doubts. He must have had a pretty good sense of humor, because you have to admit, the whole notion of resurrection was pretty unexpected. So Caravaggio is probably taking artistic liberties with the sort-of-icky scene above. I'm sure that Thomas, when invited to act out his earlier words, just said, "No, that's okay, Lord, I'm good, thanks anyway."

Thomas did get a pretty sweet Virgin Island named after him, though, so there's that.

The real reason I'm posting this song is that I just saw Joshua Redman in concert on Sunday and wanted to share something from one of the great tenor saxophonists alive today. This is a tune written by Sonny Rollins, performed in 1995 by Redman at the Village Vanguard. You may recognize the melody after the long introductory solo, at about 4:30.

Saints: St. Peter

Letters to Cleo: St. Peter

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Saint Peter, whose real name was actually Simon until Jesus renamed him, was one of the original Apostles, and considered to be chosen by Jesus himself as the first Pope. These days he's mostly known as the doorman at the Pearly Gates of heaven because of a line in the scripture about Jesus handing him the keys to heaven, thus he is often depicted holding a set of keys.

In scripture, Apostle Peter was considered the most devout, the most enthusiastic follower of Christ, and thus why he became heaven's proprietor. In the song, St. Peter is used for a bit of symbolism. The song is about someone who lies, who is not what he says he is. In the Bible, Jesus predicts that Peter will deny him three times in the course of a day, and in deed, he does deny his faith three times, despite being the most devout of all. But he also represents judgment of those who've sinned, a bit of a dichotomy, and both ways are expressed in the song. So, in this case, knowing a bit of history makes for a great song, despite it being a bit bitter considering it's name-dropping one of the Lord's close buddies.

And I can't believe I hadn't posted a Letters to Cleo song here yet. Perhaps this theme had some divine intervention?

Saints: St Teresa

Joan Osborne: St Teresa

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St Teresa was an ecstatic saint, one who was said to receive holy visions. Hers involved painful experiences through which she received divine wisdom. Here is her description of one of her visions, of an angel:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...

Teresa battled various illnesses for much of her life, so the modern cynic might regard this not as a vision but as a fever-induced hallucination. However you see it, it is a fact that she developed a system of meditation which helped her in her studies of the Divine. Prayers are offered to her for relief from severe pain. Joan Osborne’s St Teresa is a perfect example of the kind of prayer I mean.

Saints: Prayer Of Saint Francis

Sarah MacLachlan: Prayer Of Saint Francis

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If you visit Assisi, the central Italian hometown of the most revolutionary of Christian saints, among the many souvenirs flogged there you will find paraphernalia featuring the prayer usually attributed to St Francis (whose name meant Frenchman, after his father’s Francophilia). “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.” And so on.

The prayer has been influential. Mother Teresa adopted it for her religious order; Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa has said it forms part of his daily devotions; Alcoholics Anonymous did use it for their inspirational literature. But there is no record of St Francis having composed such a prayer, even if it sounds like the kind of thing one would associate with the Catholic proto-hippie, who once was turned away from an appointment with the pope on account of his neglect in matters of personal hygiene — at an age when pretty much everybody stank.

The prayer’s first documented appearance dates to 1912, almost 700 years after St Francis’ death, in a French devotional magazine titled La Clochette (The Little Bell), published by a Catholic association known as La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe (The Holy Mass League). In 1916, during World War I, the prayer was reproduced by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and the French mass circulation Catholic daily La Croix, giving it wider exposure and a reputation as a peace prayer. The prayer was first attributed to St Francis in 1927 by a French Protestant movement, Les Chevaliers du Prince de la Paix.

It has been put to song several times, most often obviously within a religious context. Singer-songwriter Denison Wittmer (a Christian musician of the Sufjan Stevens and Rosie Thomas variety) has recorded it. And Canadian singer Sarah MacLachlan recorded it as a bonus track for the Japanese version of her 1998 album Surfacing. It was made available to non-Japanese consumers on her Rarities, B-Sides, and Other Stuff Volume 2 collection, released in 2008.

MacLachlan has performed for a pope and recorded a couple of songs with Christian themes, but also covered XTC’s “Dear God”, a hymn to atheism. Apparently her deal is agnosticism.

I Have A Dream -> Saints: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

Bob Dylan: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

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Thea Gilmore: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

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Of the several saints titled Augustine, it's not clear which one Dylan meant to reference here. But most folks assume it's Augustine of Hippo, an early Roman convert and philosopher whose work dwelled heavily on the nature of good and evil - patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians and sore eyes, framer of the concepts of original sin and just war, and often considered one of the theological fathers of Reformation due to his teaching on salvation and divine grace.

Pensive and spare in the '67 original, the song has been covered many times, by some of the stalwarts of folk music, from Joan Baez to Earl Scruggs. Most manage to retain the original guilty tone of the lyric, which decries the absence of martyrs in modern society, but holds us responsible for that lack even as it portrays us as powerless to fix it. My favorite cover, though, is Thea Gilmore's - in no small part because of the loud wash of echoey electric guitar which lends so much depth to its slow, gritty Americana pulse. For fans of the Cowboy Junkies, especially.

I Have A Dream: I Dreamed A Dream

Aretha Franklin: I Dreamed a Dream

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Last year, YouTube was abuzz with a version of this Les Miserables song done by a previously unknown vocalist, Susan Boyle. She went on to turn that wildly popular debut into a pretty successful album, and the rest passes for pop history.

This is not that version.

Instead, this is from a truly historic event: Bill Clinton's 1993 Inauguration. It's sung by one of the greatest vocalists of our time, a woman who was awarded Grammy's Living Legend and Lifetime Achievement Awards, and whose voice is an official natural resource of Michigan.

Life must not kill the dreams that we dreamed…

I Have a Dream: Innocent When You Dream

Tom Waits: Innocent When You Dream

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There is a history of other artists missing the point when covering the songs of Tom Waits. I love Bruce Springstein’s version of Jersey Girl, but it has a completely different backstory from Waits’ original. As for Rod Stewart’s Downtown Train, don’t get me started. There are a scattering of covers of Innocent When You Dream as well. Probably the best known artists to try the song are Great Lake Swimmers and Mark Ereli. Something very strange happens in these versions: the narrator sobers up! No! Innocent When You Dream starts with the line, “The bat’s are in the belfry.” Here is a guy who lost his love through his own mistakes, and he is drinking himself into oblivion, trying to forget. And that’s not beer either, it’s the strongest whiskey he can find. Tom Waits has portrayed characters like this throughout his career. They scrape the bottom of society, but Waits has always been able to find the beauty in their lives. That is his particular genius, and it is also the quality that is missing in so many covers of his songs.

I Have A Dream: Dreaming's Free

Ryan Adams: Dreaming's Free

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I've said it before: though it's blasphemous to say so, I'm a much bigger fan of Ryan Adams the sensitive folkpop artist than Ryan Adams the alt-country rocker. And this delicate piece is a beautiful love song, of the same acoustic playbook as Elliot Smith, Evan Dando, Beck, and other sensitive men who swing both ways musically.

That's David Rawlings and Gillian Welch on guitar flourishes there, by the way, as in most of Destroyer, an album blocked by Adams' label as "too folk", and still living a life as greyware, bootlegged and distributed through the 'net.

Dreaming is free, by the way. It's getting "all locked away," as Adams says, letting our dreamlives become all-encompassing, that's costly. The result is a slight hint of bittersweet in an otherwise simple love song, reminding us that dreams without action don't change the world much, save through our absence. As our week's theme comes to a close, it's worth remembering that - lest we lose sight of the dream which got us here in the first place.