Scarborough Fair

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Scarborough Fair is a traditional folk ballad, whose lyrics date back to at least 1670. The version sung here (based on Simon and Garfunkel's wonderful 1966 version, done in a Renaissance style) is a gorgeous choral piece, that combines conventional harmonies with voices sung in counterpoint. The song's lyrics have a well-known mythic subject: the impossible task. A man tells his former lover that she can return to him only if she can perform three impossible tasks for him. I've reworked the lyrics so that the descriptions of these three impossible tasks are interleaved with descriptions of other "impossible tasks", starting with famous ones drawn from mythology and fantasy, and ending with some real "impossible tasks" that currently challenge us. Because the voices overlap, I strongly recommend reading the lyrics as you listen, to be able to most fully take in this new version of a classic song. Enjoy!

Paul Simon's musical artistry. The first thing that must be mentioned is Paul Simon's musical artistry when it comes to folk music. He loved world music and freely drew from it. He is a master at taking a style from a particular people's folk tradition and transforming it into a successful pop song. In El Condor Pasa (1970), Simon took a song that was based on traditional Peruvian folk music, wrote English lyrics, and created a pop arrangement that included traditional Peruvian instruments (such as a charango, an Andean string instrument made from the shell of an armadillo), and a beautiful solo with a traditional Peruvian flute. Simon's 1986 album, Graceland, was full of South African music influences, and some of the singing was done by the South African a capella group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And in Scarborough Fair, Simon was drawing on the Renaissance tradition of folk music. You can hear the musical similarity in this French Renaissance dance song, and the similar contrapuntal vocal polyphony in this French Renaissance song.

Reworking the lyrics. Simon and Garfunkel's original lyrics were a mashup between the traditional Scarborough Fair lyrics, and a 1963 anti-war song Paul Simon had written, called The Side of a Hill. I believe Simon's main motivation for merging the two was purely musical: he liked the idea of adding a contrapuntal voice (in the Renaissance polyphonic style). He needed words for that second voice, and The Side of the Hill happened to be handy. He called the second, interleaved song "Canticle", and the entire piece, Scarborough Fair / Canticle. The resulting choral polyphony is gorgeous! And that's what drew me to covering the song, having just covered another song with beautiful harmonies (Who Loves You). Although the popularity of the song rose during the Vietnam War period due to its anti-war lyrics, the lyrics of the two songs have never really meshed very well.

So I decided to scrap Canticle's largely unrelated anti-war lyrics, and double down on the main theme of the Scarborough Fair lyrics: the impossible task. Consequently, I have the counterpoint voice in my version singing of famous "impossible tasks" throughout classical mythology and fantasy, as well as a couple of actual "impossible tasks" that challenge us in our own time. I think the combined lyrics have more integrity, as a result.

The impossible tasks of Scarborough Fair. The core of Scarborough Fair's lyrics has been traced back to a Scottish Ballad, The Elfin Knight, from the 1600's or earlier. In the original song, an elf threatens to abduct a young woman unless she can perform an impossible task. She then responds with a list of impossible tasks that the elf first must perform. Over the years, the song went through many variations, including one where a former lover tells his ex-love she can only return to him if she performs a set of impossible tasks. In a later version, after he tells her the tasks she must perform, she, in turn, tells him the impossible tasks he must perform! Simon and Garfunkel's version is the one where it is just the man requiring impossible tasks of his ex-love.

Verse 2 lays out the first impossible task:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Without no seams nor needlework
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

This is an impossible task because cambric is an extremely light fabric used for making lace and needlework, too light to make an entire shirt out of.

Verse 3 lays out the next impossible task:

Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strands
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

The "salt water" is the ocean. "Sea strands" was a poetic phrase that referred to the shoreline or beach. So she is to find an acre of land between the ocean and the shore, which is obviously impossible, since there isn't anything between the ocean and the shore.

Verse 4 lays out the third impossible task:

Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
And gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

Having found this impossible acre of land, now she must reap it (presumably it has crops growing on it) with a sickle of leather. A sickle is usually a tool with a sharp metal blade, used to cut down the stalks of grain crops. But here she is told she will only be allowed to use a sickle made of leather, which is soft and has no sharpness. Having done that, she must find a way to compress the entire acre of cut crop down to the size of a bunch of heather (which is the size of a bunch of flowers). You can see why this entire task is impossible!

The additional impossible tasks. I drew the impossible tasks from a variety of different sources, and they are "impossible" in different ways, which I'll now explore. I also chose "impossible tasks" that are quite a bit more interesting than the original ones in Scarborough Fair. Here are the added impossible tasks:

• Icarus flying too close to the sun. Icarus almost achieved the impossible task so many people over the ages have dreamed of: to fly. But he got reckless, and flew too near the sun, causing the beeswax holding his feathered wings together to melt, whereupon he plummeted to his death.
• Hercules wrestles with Hydra’s nine heads. Hercules had to find a way to accomplish twelve impossible tasks (the famous "twelve labors of Hercules"). One of those involved fighting the nine-headed snakelike monster, the Hydra. To his dismay, he found out that, each time he cut off one of the Hydra's heads, two would grow back in its place! Fortunately, he also discovered that, if he burned the stump where he had just cut off a head, no new heads would grow, and using that trick, he accomplished the impossible task of defeating the Hydra.
• Sisyphus rolls a huge rock up a hill. Sisyphus was a man who had angered the gods. As a result, they subjected him to an eternal punishment, an impossible task where he was forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to get away from him and roll back down every time he neared the top, requiring him to have to start all over again.
• Orpheus struggles to not turn around. Orpheus was a legendary Greek hero and poet who was endowed with superhuman musical skills: it was said his music could move the hearts of all creatures. Even the hard stones were said to be softened by his music. When his beloved wife, Eurydice, died prematurely from a snake bite, Orpheus descended into the underworld, and so moved the heart of its king, Hades, that Hades was brought to tears, and released Eurydice's soul, to follow Orpheus as he climbed back up the path to the world of the living. Hades set just one condition: Orpheus must not turn around to look at his wife until both of them were back in the world above. As soon as he had reached the upper world, Orpheus immediately turned to look at Eurydice, forgetting in his eagerness that both of them needed to be in the upper world for Hade's condition to be met. As Eurydice had not yet crossed into the upper world, she vanished, this time forever. But for his one tragic mistake, Orpheus would have achieved the impossible task of conquering death.
• David the small fights Goliath the Great. In the Old Testament, David, a shepherd boy (who would later become king), takes on the impossible task of fighting Goliath, a huge giant of a man. David succeeds, not by brute strength, but by being skilled at using a slingshot, which allows him to kill Goliath at a distance, while remaining untouched.
• Galahad wanders in search of the Grail. In Europe in the Middle Ages, the impossible task that captured everyone's imagination was the search for the Holy Grail. Because seeing the Holy Grail required spiritual vision, only a man with the purest soul would be able to find the Grail. Galahad, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, would prove to be that man.
• A hobbit sets out to destroy the One Ring. The "impossible task" lives on in the fantasy tales of our own era! There is no more clearly impossible task in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings than for the weakest, least likely being — Frodo the hobbit — to end up with the task of destroying the most powerful weapon in Middle Earth, the One Ring, before being found and destroyed by its owner, Sauron, the most powerful being in Middle Earth. How that impossible task by Frodo is accomplished (with the help of many others, near and far) is the central tale of The Lord of the Rings.
• And Alice must think of impossible things. In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen asks Alice to believe in something that seems impossible: "Now I’ll give you something to believe. I am just one hundred and one, five months and a day." Alice says, "I can't believe that. . . one can’t believe impossible things." The queen replies: "I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." And, as it would turn out, during her time in Wonderland, Alice would come to believe in many "impossible things": a potion that can make you shrink; a cake that can make you grow; animals that can talk; cats that can disappear; a real, magical place called Wonderland; etc.
• Living in ease while destroying the Earth. In our own time, we too are given "impossible tasks" that we must collectively accomplish. Perhaps the most urgent is climate change. It fits in the mold of the "impossible task" by virtue of the conflicting forces that make it difficult to address. On the one hand, we don't want to destroy the planet. But on the other hand, we nonetheless want the life of ease that was brought about by the industrial revolution (of which climate change is the worst side effect). The hardest countries to convince to come up to this and "do their part" are those whose people aspire to "first world" status (like China and India) and the economic prosperity that accompanies it; but are told by "first world" countries that already are living that life of relative ease that they must not do what those countries did to create a world on the brink: everyone driving their own (polluting) cars, etc. They are told they must be more responsible than those earlier polluting countries ever were, and those countries tend to resent being put in that position.
• Launching a war to secure the right peace. Wars are almost always devastating, and the cost and scars of war negate whatever rationale might have motivated the war. In this sense, securing a "peace" — with the terms you want: more land, more power, etc. — by going to war is an "impossible task": in the course of the war, you will destroy the very thing you are after (the land, the people, etc.) I add this impossible task as a nod to Simon and Garfunkel's version of the song with its anti-war lyrics: this is the sense in which those lyrics could be said to resonate with Scarborough Fair's "impossible tasks": war is itself an impossible task — it destroys the very thing it seeks to secure.
• Crushing her heart just to prove her true love. If we take another look at the lyrics of Scarborough Fair, we can see that the real impossible task is not the three obvious ones laid out in the lyrics. No, the real impossible task is much like going to war to secure the peace you desire: you are making the one whose true love you want jump through impossible hoops, crushing her heart along the way. In so doing, you are ensuring the destruction of the heart of the one you otherwise would hope to have come back to you as your true love. No can do! Of course, it's not clear how serious the man is about his proposal of impossible tasks. The lyrics of Scarborough Fair may be much like saying, "You know when I'll have her back? When hell freezes over!" — in other words: never.

Waltz time. Scarborough Fair is a waltz, in 3/4 time. If you happened to notice that the lyrics I created are full of names with three syllables — Icarus, Hercules, Sysyphus, Orpheus, Galahad — that's why: the three syllables nicely fit the three beats in a measure.

Scarborough Fair. King Henry VIII signed a charter in 1253 that began an annual tradition of a 45-day fair (August 15 - September 29) in the seaside English town of Scarborough. Scarborough Fair was a huge deal in medieval times (for a while): an enormous open-air, trading market that attracted merchants and tradesman from around the country, as well as large crowds of ordinary people.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. It's an important line in the lyrics — "Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme" — appearing as the second line of every verse. And yet no one knows for sure what it means! The most common theory is that these are ingredients in a love potion: parsley is for comfort, sage for strength, rosemary for love, and thyme for courage. The problem with this theory is that Scarborough Fair is not exactly a love song! The man appears to be setting impossible tasks, as though he has no real interest whatsoever in re-kindling a relationship with the woman who was once his "true love". It's more like he's doing everything possible to drive her away! So who can say what "parsley, sage, rosemary, and time" is really about. (Maybe it was added just to spice up the song.)

Cover art.Because the music is Renaissance style, I based the cover art on a Renaissance-style tapestry.