Mark showed me this video yesterday. Actually he showed me the whole episode. This song was a bit startling to hear. Recently I talked to my daughter about the song, “The Great Silkie.”
Sarah brought the movie, “The Song of the Sea,” with her. It’s based on the Selkie legend.
When I was a young man living in Flint, Michigan, I have a physical memory of taking the Child Ballads off the shelf at the public library there. I can see the book in my mind’s eye. It is a large tome with gray covers.
This is the way I remember it looking on the page.
In it, I remember finding this ballad, numerous versions of it. I was so charmed by it that I did my own version. I remember recently running across the manuscript of it. When I get home I will look and see if I can find it.
I just ordered a print on demand version of the Child Ballads for 10 bucks on Abebooks. I’m not sure it’s the same book of course but for ten bucks I am interested in seeing what it is.
Dover prints a multi volume version of one of Child’s buy cheap valium thailand books. I’ll probably look into that after seeing what I get in the mail.
Today is Leigh’s birthday. I changed the strings on her guitar as per her request yesterday. I have been continually tuning it to see if it can be kept up to pitch. It usually takes a guitar a bit of time to settle down with new strings. Leigh’s guitar was missing the three lower strings which relieved stress on the neck (which is not a good thing), but that shouldn’t affect how well it holds tune.
Mark got me on a bit of an Irish kick yesterday and I pulled down some tunes off of IMSLP. I found a good collection.
They are fun to play on guitar even though my guitar chops are still pretty rusty.
I searched on YouTube for some of these. I found people playing pieces with some of these titles, however none of them were exactly what is notated above. Some were even completely different. I guess that makes sense.
Francis J. Child Ballads
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry (Roud 197; Child 113)
These are a couple of links I bookmarked while poking around.
Also, I used to have the soundtrack to the movie the Secret of Roan Inish – I know Emily liked this movie as well (about a selkie) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Roan_Inish
Mark thought that you probably were familiar with this movie as well. He and Emily both have access to this music, I believe.