A Case For Song: 'The Scarlet Tide'

[when i was cruel]

Really no introduction is needed for this song, it's beautiful, intrinsic, simple, I love it. Not played often enough live, although I will note a live performance where EC plays it solo in a small guest chair on a Late Night Talk Show.

( http://www.google.ca/url?q=http://www.y ... ry0ITWfQpg)

Thoughts ? Love it ? Hate it ? Bursting at the seams ?

[fred darden]

absolutely, one of my faves from this era. forgot about this version[maybe cuz i can't stand craig kilbourn]. could anybody mp3 this for us non tech folks? he did this on today show w/emmy lou, but this ukelele version is magic.

[Poor Deportee]

My only quibble with this lovely little song is the couplet

Man goes beyond his own decision/
Gets caught up in the mechanism

which raises two hackles: (1) the invocation of the abstract 'man' in song lyrics always bugs me as didactic and (2) the rhyme is a tad cumbersome. The pay-off couplet about 'brokers who break everything' is spot on, though; it just takes too long to get there.

It's nit-picking, but a song of this level of simplicty calls for impeccable composition.

[Jack of All Parades]

In its simplicity it is an effective enough song but if the message, as used in the film, is about the ultimate futility and uselessness of conflict, it is, as PD points out, most cumbersome in some of its execution[that rhyme does hurt the ear]. The shift to the didactic 'man' has never seemed earned to me within the stanza. I think it would have been better had he focused on the single life lost. By way of example I offer this lyric by Thomas Hardy along the same theme. Notice how it gains great power and universality by staying focused upon a single individual:

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew --
Fresh from his Wessex home --
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

Thomas Hardy

[sweetest punch]

A choir sings The Scarlet Tide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k96KbJSeXuQ

[Jack of All Parades]

That is lovely. It gives me encouragement when something like this occurs. A small HS choir chooses to perform one of his songs as part of their mid-winter concert. Just sweet.

[docinwestchester]

That is one hip high school chorus director. Bravo!

When I was in high school chorus (1979), we sang complete versions of both Bohemian Rhapsody and Someone To Love in full 4-part harmony. To this day I still remember all the words.

[Neil.]

Gah, I feel like a rotter - I love this song overall, but I've got to say that the lyrics of the chorus really bug me.

I don't like the big note being split into two syllables on the one-syllable word "through". Couldn't it have been "right down through the mountain?" Or, if he had to split a one-syllable word, "do-own through the mountain" would've been a more open, ringing vowel sound.

But that brings me on to my next cavil - I don't like the chorus lyric anyway: it just doesn't work.

I love the intended overpowering image of a sea of blood rising up to drown those who live in the mountains - the horror of war reaches everywhere. But "trickling down through" sounds like a stream, not a tide - streams which eventually become rivers, which eventually reach the sea. They are the opposite of tides - tides don't trickle down through mountains: mountains are as far away from from the sea as it gets. And 'trickle' is a really weak verb for what is intended to be a really powerful image.

You're gonna think I'm a right arrogant bastard, rewriting Elvis, but I think the lyric should have been one of these:

"We'll rise above the scarlet tide that reaches up to drown the mountain"
"We'll rise above the scarlet tide that swells right up to drown the mountain"
"We'll rise above the scarlet tide that swells up high to drown the mountain"

God, I'm a pedantic bastard. I love this song, but the central image has always annoyed me! (Please be aware I'm a lifelong Elvis fan, and most of the time I'm in seventh heaven with his astounding turn of phrase) x

[sweetest punch]

The Angel City Chorale sings The Scarlet Tide / Down To The River To Pray: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whWhOwSYWaM