@PeacocksTaleMusic for all our videos
We performed this at our recent summer solstice party expecting our pagan friends to know it and join in. They didn't and didn't, citing a Christian-indoctrinated primary schooling. My class in Milk St Primary School Frome (the one before the 11 plus year) used to sing this with hip, miniskirted Miss Millington who possibly got it from the Pete Seeger version and worldview. Seeger was deeply involved in the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and no doubt enjoyed the progressive implications of the song, the keeper freeing the doe into the woods (among the leaves so green-o) rather than killing her or holding her captive. In the early 70s, as the English folk rock band Steeleye Span took Irish Republican folk songs like "All Around My Hat" ("I will wear a green willow) and McCartney singing "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" up the charts, I assumed "The Keeper" was a similarly progressive song about the changing relationship between England and Ireland. It could be though I'm not sure it started out like that. Apparently, it's just one of those eternal hunter/hind songs about sex, "under his cloak he carried a bow for to shoot a merry little doe." I prefer the green 1965 version with miniskirted Miss Millington where, despite our incipient pubescence and a propensity for innuendo, Class 7 thought it was about a keeper hunting and then releasing an elfin doe among the trees into a semi-magical wood, like the ones we knew in Somerset. (It was a progressive school but also marked by the limitations of its time : when the whole year group sang together, the 'remove' class was always and only given the percussion instruments.
Pic of me as the Keeper by Bhas Allan.
No comments:
Post a Comment