The Water is Wide
trad
I got pretty good value out of The Pete Seeger songbook. This was one of the songs I had never heard, but the words appealed. I first played the melody on the flute until I could sing it with some confidence.
The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er
And meither have I wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I
A ship there is and she sails the sea
She's loaded deep as deep can be
But not so deep as the love I'm in
I know not if I sink or swim
I leaned my back against an oak
Thinking it was a trusty tree
But first it bent and then it broke
So did my love prove false to me
I reached my hand into some soft bush
Thinking the sweetest flower to find
I pricked my finger to the bone
And left the sweetest flower behind
Oh love is handsome and love is kind
Gay as a jewel when first it is new
But love grows old and waxes cold
And fades away like the morning dew
Pete Seeger Songbook
In the introduction to this songbook Pete Seeger writes:
“…If you love one of these songs, you can make it your own by singing it; through the years it will become part of your life as little by little you change the tune in subtle ways, or add or subtract verses. . . . . . Try these out, turn them over, look at them from several angles. Taste ‘em. On these pages they are in a state of suspended animation. It takes singers to bring them to life.”
Some of the songs in Song’n’Stories I have tried to make my own. Others, I will always associate with other singers who have made it their own, and it is a homage to them that I sing them or include their lyrics.
The Pete Seeger songbook was my folk music bible when I was first learning guitar and trying to be a folksinger. I bought the book in Melbourne, probably in 1965. Its major drawcard for me was the familiarity. Pete Seeger was a household name in America when I was growing up. Many of the songs were either on recordings we had, or we had learned them in school, or they were being sung on radio and cropping up on The Grand Ol’ Oprey, which we watched on Grandma and Grandpa’s tiny little black-and-white blondwood cabinet TV.
There’s a lot of history to being told here. Each song is accompanied by a short comment or acknowledgement and a black-and-white image. These small touches fill out the stories a little, and certainly made me wonder more about where they came from and what the real truth may have been.
Some, such as The Water is Wide, are Child ballads. Some, such as Study War No More, are spirituals which were reborn as protest songs of the 60s. Some, such as Strangest Dream, are protest songs written contemporaneously.
Some made it into mainstream music – The Everly Brothers recorded Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feetin the 50s; Eric Burdon and The Animals had a big hit with House of the Rising Sun; Linda Ronstadt has versions of I Ride an Old Paint and I Never Will Marry on her album Simple Dreams.
The tunes of some of them have been used with contemporary lyrics, such as The Twelfth of Never recorded by Johnny Mathis among others, which uses the tune of The Riddle Song, and Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side, which uses the tune of the Irish ballad The Patriot Game. That's not in this book, but it's another example of how the folk music gets around.
Recurring names are Huddie Leadbetter, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax, Stephen Foster – all legends of American folk music.
Pete Seeger pulled them all together and shared them with the rest of America, giving them wide audience and a new presence.
