Month: August 2025

Whistle While You Walk

Audio blog on Substack

I’ve never been a real blues player/singer, but sometimes I can’t resist pretending. This was written about 2017.

Whistle While You Walk (Harley)

Sometimes – you look into her eyes
And you just want to talk
Sometimes you have to see her
Sometimes you just have to walk

Just walk away
Walk away
And whistle while you walk away

Sometimes you’re the heartbreak
Sometimes you’re just broke
And all your songs are lost
In the space between the notes

Sometimes you know you love her
Sometimes you feel so cold
Sometimes your heart is empty
And you turn back to the road

Sometimes – you look into her eyes
And you just want to talk
Sometimes you have to see her
Other times you just have to walk

Just walk away
Walk away
And whistle while you walk away

Thomas Anderson – the eBook

This is a free eBook in PDF format about (mostly) my research into the death of Thomas Anderson in 1752. Anderson was the subject of an article for the Shrewsbury Folk Club magazine by the late Ron Nurse, which was the starting point for a song of mine that I’ve written about several times since, notably in my book So Sound You Sleep. Eventually that chapter became a series of articles for my Substack (Un)Selective Symmetry, and is now a short book in its own right. It also includes as appendices a couple of later songs with a tenuous connection to Kingsland, where Anderson was executed.

Image of book cover

Thomas Anderson eBook

Here’s the table of contents, just to give you the flavour.

Contents
Thomas Anderson………………………………………………1
Thomas Anderson…………………………………………..5
Thomas Anderson lyric ……………………………………7
Thomas Anderson Recording……………………………9
Historical Background……………………………………11
A Load of Cobblers (and Tanners and
Leatherworkers) ……………………………………….13
From the Guilds to the Flower Show ……………14
From House of Industry to Shrewsbury School
……………………………………………………………….18
The Arbour and the Old Show …………………….20
Death of a Rebel ……………………………………….25
Sources and References……………………………..30
Church Street and St. Alkmund’s…………………32
St Mary’s Church……………………………………….35
Admiral Benbow ……………………………………….35
Katherine Mary Harley……………………………….36
Robert Cadman…………………………………………38
Appendix 1: Black Velvet …………………………………..40
Appendix 2: from the Shropshire Gazetteer…………48
Appendix 3: Goose and Common ……………………….50
Goose And Common lyric ………………………………52
Another (later) version ………………………………….53
The Inclosure Acts…………………………………………54
Kingsland……………………………………………………..55
Harley’s Stone………………………………………………58
Goosed by The Commons………………………………61
Appendix 4: Jack in the Box ……………………………….63
Ida Gandy…………………………………………………….65
Lyric and Tune Links………………………………………66
A Bastille Soupçon ………………………………………..68
About David Harley…………………………………………..71

The Letitia Files

This is a collection of posts by or concerning the purely imaginary Ms Letitia Teaspoon, who ran a counselling service for the many irritating comment spammers who couldn’t resist posting to ESET’s WeLiveSecurity blog (and some of my personal blogs) when I was working with the company. Sadly, it turned out that comment spammers are impervious to satire, but I enjoyed writing the articles enough to rerun them as a series on my Substack (Un)Selective Symmetry. They’ve also appeared on Inspiration Point as a single post, but I thought I’d release the same post here as a free eBook in PDF format in case someone apart from Letitia wants their very own copy.

The Letitia Files

Keepsake Mill

My setting of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. From the New Silver Jug Band’s first album Farewell Reunion. The poem is from ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’.

Link on recording on Bandcamp (you don’t have to buy it to listen). Keepsake Mill

Over the borders, a sin without pardon,
Breaking the branches and crawling below,
Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,
Down by the banks of the river we go.

Here is a mill with the humming of thunder,
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,
Here is the sluice with the race running under—
Marvellous places, though handy to home!

Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller,
Stiller the note of the birds on the hill;
Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller,
Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river
Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,
Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever
Long after all of the boys are away.

Home from the Indies and home from the ocean,
Heroes and soldiers we all will come home;
Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion,
Turning and churning that river to foam.

You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled,
I with your marble of Saturday last,
Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled,
Here we shall meet and remember the past.

Words by Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Dublin Shop Window’ image, tune and vocal by David Harley. All instruments by David Harley and David Higgen.

The Nightingale (Á La Claire Fontaine)

[Edited extract from my book So Sound You Sleep, recently posted to Substack]

This is a song reassembled from traditional sources, but so heavily restructured and freely translated that I can’t point to any single version as its prototype. I acquired a recording of it on my way back from a school trip abroad, and made my first pass at a translation when I still lived in the county (was still at school, probably.).

This is not, of course, related to the well-known nautical ballad The Nightingale, nor to any of numerous songs with similar titles such as The Sweet Nightingale. And yes, I know that Á La Claire Fontaine doesn’t mean ‘Nightingale’ – it means by a clear spring or fountain, literally. I simply chose to change the title to something that fits better with the translated version than with the best-known French version.

This was possibly originally a Jongleur song from the 15th or 16th century: the translation is based on French-Canadian versions. I was never quite happy with my original translation, and never sang it in public – if I sang it at all, it would have been in French. This version is much more recent than my unsatisfactory 1960s translation. The evolution of the World Wide Web during the interim enabled me to research the song’s origins much more easily, allowing me generate a version of the story that appealed to me more.

I’ve always liked one particular tune to this French song (also widely found in Belgium and Canada), but the words as I’d heard them have always seemed problematical to me, with the lover whining that he was unjustly discarded for being reluctant to give his lady a spray of roses. It’s hard to be too sympathetic toward a cheapskate, but the Wikipedia article linked below includes a version that doesn’t sound much different, but makes it clear that the singer is female, which sheds a very different light on the story.

When I found this and other versions where the protagonist was clearly female and the spray of roses symbolizes her maidenhead, it made much more sense, though it also makes it more difficult for me to sing it convincingly myself. (I have thought of attempting a male version that is nearer to the original sense, but that seems much more challenging.)

This is a rather free translation, picking up a possible interpretation that the lady lost out by giving in too easily, then being considered too ‘easy’ to marry.

C’est de mon ami Pierre, qui ne veut plus m’aimer,
Pour un bouton de rose, que j’ai trop tôt donné.

…my friend Peter is no longer in love with me
because I gave him my rosebud too soon…

Other versions suggest that she was dropped because she didn’t give in, as described below. As well as making my chosen subtext a little clearer, I’ve compressed the story by dropping a couple of very common lines referring to the protagonist bathing, as somehow that doesn’t seem to translate well. The song is often seen as a children’s song, but this particular take on the story should probably be considered a bit too explicit for that.

The version of the lyric on Wikipedia is closer to the version I originally learned, but a couple of small but very significant differences make it clear that the singer is female, rejected because she refused to give in to her suitor and let him take her ‘bouquet de roses’. The version I first learned included the misleading line “J’ai perdu ma maîtresse” (“I have lost my mistress…”) rather than “J’ai perdu mon ami” (“I have lost my [male] friend.”) The Wikipedia article includes a more-or-less literal translation. I’ve borrowed the best-known French refrain for the end of my recording: Il y a longtemps que je t’aime / Jamais je ne t’oublierai. A more literal translation of that chorus than I’ve used in translation would be “I have loved you for a long time, I will never forget you.”

Here’s a link to the track on Bandcamp.

[Music and original words traditional. Translated, arranged and adapted by David A. Harley. Guitar and vocal also by David A. Harley.]

The Nightingale Lyric

As I walked from my love’s wedding

By the spring where we once lay
From the top of a mighty oak tree
A songbird sang to me

It’s been so long that I’ve loved you
I never will love again

Sing, happy nightingale,
Sing, for your heart is light
Sing out your notes so merry
But all that I can do is cry

My love has wed another
Though I was not to blame
I gave to him my love too freely
Now someone wiser bears his name

Oh, how I wish that the rosebud
Still flourished on the vine
And that my false true lover
Still returned this love of mine

It’s been so long that I’ve loved you
I never will love again

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime
Jamais je ne t’oublierai