{"id":2130,"date":"2004-07-12T22:04:44","date_gmt":"2004-07-13T05:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/07\/12\/2130.html"},"modified":"2004-07-12T22:04:44","modified_gmt":"2004-07-13T05:04:44","slug":"wild-mountain-thyme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/07\/12\/wild-mountain-thyme\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild mountain thyme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was a kid, my parents had a Clancy Brothers album, The Boys Won't Leave the Girls Alone,<\/cite> probably my first exposure to Celtic music. I eventually found it on CD, though it's long out of print, and I'm still quite fond of it. But the Clancy Brothers didn't always get the lyrics right, and I didn't always hear them right.<\/p>\n\n

One of the songs was titled \"Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?\" All through my childhood, I thought the chorus went:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

And we'll all go together<\/p>\n

To bluff wild mountain Ty<\/p>\n

All around the blue wind Heather<\/p>\n

Will ye go, lassie, go?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(I wasn't sure about \"bluff\"; maybe it was \"to blove\"? :) ) I also thought another line went \"Where the wild mountain Ty rose around the blue wind Heather.\"<\/p>\n

I had vague but intriguing images of a wild mountain named Ty, or maybe Thai, and a sentient blue wind named Heather. I wasn't sure what it had to do with the song (or how a mountain could rise around a wind instead of vice versa), but hey, I read speculative fiction; sentient blue winds didn't seem all that odd. I figured some sort of epic fantasy quest was involved.<\/p>\n

It was only many years later that I learned the chorus actually went:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

And we'll all go together<\/p>\n

To pluck wild mountain thyme<\/p>\n

All around the blooming heather<\/p>\n

Will ye go, lassie, go?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Much more prosaic. And the other line is \"Where the wild mountain thyme grows<\/em> around the blooming heather.\"<\/p>\n

But even so, one of the verses still had an interesting and unusual image in it:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

I will build my love a tower<\/p>\n

Near yon pure crystal fountain<\/p>\n

And on it I will build<\/p>\n

All the flowers of the mountain.<\/p>\n

Will ye go, lassie, go?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kinda cool: he loves her so much he's going to build her a tower, and he's going to carve stone flowers into it. Or something.<\/p>\n

It was only last week that I listened carefully to a non-Clancy Brothers version and learned that he's actually planning to build his love a bower<\/em>, and to place<\/em> flowers on it. I hurried back to the Clancy Brothers' version, and found that in this case it wasn't my mishearing; they very clearly sing it the way I heard it. The folk process at work.<\/p>\n

For something closer to the original version, and some notes about where the song came from, see the lyrics page<\/a> at Cantaria. (The song is more commonly known, btw, as \"Wild Mountain Thyme.\") But if you listen to the first MP3 version there, note that the Clancy Brothers version is sung at roughly twice that speed. (The second version on that page is closer to the speed of the C.B. version.)<\/p>\n<\/lj-cut>\n

For more on mishearings, see my 1998 column on Mondegreens<\/a>, which links to (among other places) Jon Carroll's Mondegreen columns<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, my parents had a Clancy Brothers album, The Boys Won’t Leave the Girls Alone, probably…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}