Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
JOAN BAEZ – One I Had A Sweetheart (Fontana EP, 1963)
As I was just 5 years old when this record was released so I obviously didn’t buy it myself. I grabbed it off my elder brother when he was having a clear out.
The quality of the disc is pretty bad , a couple of scratches and major surface noise but this adds character. The sleeve notes are by an anonymous Vanguard Recordings scribe who waxes lyrical about the healing power of folk music. Quoting Shakespeare he (she?) gushes: “Perhaps we turn to folk music because we feel too ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’ by the standards of our world, where to be cool is to be wise, and to avoid complications (such as other peoples’s troubles) is the road to suburbia and its house so fine, a world where love is a sometime thing and the voice of the turtle-dove is hushed in the shadow of the mushroom cloud”.
Joan Baez is praised for her ability to draw emotional depth from our “shared fund of experience” which in the case of this disc consists of renditions of four traditional songs. Two feature dead lovers, one is about a dead dog and one is about being spurned by a cad.
From the brief flurry of applause, the title track was recorded live somewhere though nothing on the sleeve indicates when and where. “One I had a sweetheart and now I have none” is the self explanatory message of this song.
The Trees They Do Grow High is about an arranged marriage between a 24-year-old woman and a boy half her age. It’s in the form of a dialogue with her dad, understandably pissed off about the situation. She comes to terms with it because he is the handsome son of a Lord. She reflects philosophically that and “he’s young but he daily grows”. The boy/man fathers a child and then promptly dies at the age of 16. Life can be cruel.
Wildwood Flower is a song made popular by The Carter Family whose version is far superior.
Old Blue is about a faithful dog who ups and dies. The singer hopes to be reunited with him in heaven.
On the songs Joan Baez accompanies herself on acoustic guitar and sings in her plaintive, lovelorn fashion. It’s a screechy love it or hate it style that contemporary female artists like Marissa Nadler and Josephine Foster have adopted as their own.
