“Seasons will never change… the way I love you,” Mary and my mum (alias Supergran) finished singing “All Kinds of Everything”, the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest winner. (Dana was their backing singer on this occasion.)
Robert turned off the music and all the assembled family members, who had come to my brother’s house to celebrate Supergran’s ninety-third birthday, clapped and cheered.
“Now wouldn’t that be a lovely song for the girls to sing at Katie’s wedding?” my sister asked.
“Yes,” I concurred (not to be confused with conquered or conkered).
“Isn’t it a bit corny?”, “Ooh, not so sure…”, “Yes, too corny”, were some of the responses.
Sat over on the sofa with the tired seat cushions were Sophia and young Mary (my sister’s namesake), the little girls who have agreed to sing at their aunt’s wedding; having never heard the song before, they pulled faces expressing doubt about the proposed choice of song.
“Then how about that Aled Jones song about the shade and the trees?”, suggested my sister.
“That’s nice… or there’s ‘Marble Halls’ – that’s pretty,” I said.
“How does that go?” several asked.
“Oh, you know,” said Mary, but she couldn’t recall how it went so she looked to Robert… and his phone.
“Too complicated for little girls,” Robert shook his head, then looking to Katie, “What would you like Kate?”
“Oh, I don’t mind just so long as I get married…”
Several more songs were suggested, played, sung to and rejected by the majority; the romantic pop songs were “too poppy” (except for the little girls on the sofa) and the old ones were either “too corny” or “too difficult” to sing. At last my nephew Robert (my brother’s namesake) picked up a guitar and started singing “Scarborough Fair”, which was soft and beautiful – and quite appropriate for a country style wedding.
“How about singing that, girls?” asked someone amidst the hubbub of different conversations going on.
Now my hearing isn’t too bad but it’s not easy to discern every word from one conversation when there are five others in progress, therefore I heard just a snippet from the direction of the old sofa…
“….. …… quieter …….?”
“Surely no song can be ‘quieter’ than ‘Scarborough Fair'” I looked over at Judith (Sophia’s mother).
Judith started to giggle.
“No,” Judith paused to laugh, “the girls asked why we couldn’t get the ‘choir ter’ sing it!”
The Wikipedia article and lyrics, below, cause me to wonder if, after all, “Scarborough Fair” is the perfect wedding song; but on the other hand, husbands and wives often expect impossible tasks of one another. We can’t all be like Supergran.
Scarborough Fair (ballad)
The song relates the tale of a young man who instructs the listener to tell his former love to perform for him a series of impossible tasks, such as making him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks he will take her back. Often the song is sung as a duet, with the woman then giving her lover a series of equally impossible tasks, promising to give him his seamless shirt once he has finished.
As the versions of the ballad known under the title “Scarborough Fair” are usually limited to the exchange of these impossible tasks, many suggestions concerning the plot have been proposed, including the hypothesis that it is about the Great Plague of the late Middle Ages. The lyrics of “Scarborough Fair” appear to have something in common with an obscure Scottish ballad, The Elfin Knight (Child Ballad #2),[1] which has been traced at least as far back as 1670 and may well be earlier. In this ballad, an elf threatens to abduct a young woman to be his lover unless she can perform an impossible task (“For thou must shape a sark to me / Without any cut or heme, quoth he”); she responds with a list of tasks that he must first perform (“I have an aiker of good ley-land / Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand”).
Lyrics[edit]
As a popular and widely distributed song, there are many versions of the lyrics. The one here, intended as a duet by a male and a female, includes the place after which it is named:
Male part-
- Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- Remember me to the one who lives there,
- For once she was a true love of mine.
- Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- Without any seam or needlework,
- Then she shall be a true love of mine.
- Tell her to wash it in yonder well,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- Where never sprung water or rain ever fell,
- And she shall be a true lover of mine.
- Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- Which never bore blossom since Adam was born,
- Then she shall be a true lover of mine.
Female part-
- Now he has asked me questions three,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- I hope he’ll answer as many for me,
- Before he shall be a true lover of mine.
- Tell him to buy me an acre of land,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- Between the salt water and the sea sand,
- Then he shall be a true lover of mine.
- Tell him to plough it with a ram’s horn,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- And sow it all over with one pepper corn,
- And he shall be a true lover of mine.
- Tell him to sheer’t with a sickle of leather,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
- And bind it up with a peacock’s feather,
- And he shall be a true lover of mine.
- Tell him to thrash it on yonder wall,
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
- And never let one corn of it fall,
- Then he shall be a true lover of mine.
- When he has done and finished his work.
- Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme:
- Oh, tell him to come and he’ll have his shirt,
- And he shall be a true lover of mine.
So….you get married….you go to Scarborough Fair…you lose your shirt…..your wife starts setting you difficult requirements….and you begin to realise that marriage is actually “The Impossible Task”. Ideal!!! An excellent choice for the Wedding music!