The
Old Songs
Honoring
John Jacob Niles
Guest
poem by Caryl Johnston
In heaven they
will hear your high, sweet
voice—
You, with the large dulcimer on your lap,
Singing the songs you found in the mountains
Before the coal
lords came to topple them.
Songs of love,
distress, betrayal, and loss—
Is there any other
story than this?
The singers came
from Scotland, Ireland, Wales—
Their forebears,
at least—and set the English folksongs
To a minor key:
what began with hope, in those who sailed,
Was delivered here
to sorrow...those folk,
Far from home—exiles
rather than immigrants.
Yankee America,
self-engorged,
Engrossed with
profit, squeezed the people here,
Mined the land,
sheared the mountain tops;
The exiles were
exiled yet another time,
The mountain folk. Nor could the Yankees
Listen to your
music, or hear the old ballads—
Too busy making
money, I suppose.
But the music will
last longer than Yankees ever will,
For it tells of
the heart, that Lord Rendel
Who became Jimmy Randal
somewhere in Carolina,
And ate the fried
eels and parsnips that made him sick...
Though he said his
sweetheart poisoned him,
And asked only to
lie down...
And the Wife of Usher’s Well who
became, mysteriously,
“The Wife of the
Free” or even “The Fine Lady Gay”—
Yet her three sons
died all the same before Christmas,
And poor or
prosperous, she was the same bereft.
And what of the
story that was told all over the world?—
“Lady Ishbel and the Elfin Knight?” There are versions
Of the ballad
everywhere: a bad man attempts to drown a lady,
But she outwits
him, and, returning home, tells the parrot
Not to tell what
she’s been up to...
The English called
him the Outlandish Knight.
So the stories
traveled the oceans, thousands of miles,
And they found
you, who heard the songs and melodies
And made more of
them, and sometimes your own—
Turning the
Appalachian backbone of our nation
Into an instrument
of music.
Caryl Johnston
Explanatory links inserted by David
Martin.
The writer is a native of Birmingham,
Alabama, who lives in Philadelphia. This
poem is from her 2023 collection of poems, Storyteller
in Times Square.