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Ep. 130
This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re spending an episode with memory itself — twenty-five years on from September 11th, right at the point where a shared national memory starts becoming history for the people who never lived through it, even as it stays close and present for everyone who did — and we let three of the earliest recorded sound era’s own records do the talking: “Ben Bolt,” a mid-19th-century parlor ballad that’s really just a list of everyone the narrator has outlived, still popular enough in 1908 for Victor to cut a brand-new version sixty years after it was written; “Long, Long Ago,” a song so deliberately vague — no names, no place, no year — that it became one of the most popular songs in America a decade after it was written and kept getting recycled by every generation after (it eventually became Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” in 1942); and, closing somewhere unexpected, Paul Lincke’s “Birthday Serenade,” a lighthearted German instrumental with nothing to do with loss at all, picked on purpose because this episode happens to be recorded on my own daughter’s birthday — a reminder that in the middle of an episode about grief and history, new memories are still being made, today, right now.
Oh don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile And trembled with fear at your frown. In the old church yard in the valley, Ben Bolt In a corner obscure and alone They have fitted a slab of granite so gray And sweet Alice lies under the stone They have fitted a slab of granite so gray And sweet Alice lies under the stone
Oh don’t you remember the wood, Ben Bolt Near the green sunny slope of the hill Where oft we have sung beneath its wide spreading shade And kept time to the click of the mill? The mill has fone to decay, Ben Bolt And a quiet now reigns all around See, the old rustic porch, with its roses so sweet Lies scattered and fallen to the ground See, the old rustic porch, with its roses so sweet Lies scattered and fallen to the ground
And don’t you remember the school, Ben Bolt And the master so kind and so true, And the little nook by the clear running brook, Where we gathered the flowers as they grew? On the masters grave grows the grass, Ben Bolt, And the running little brook is now dry, And of all the friends who were schoolmates then, There remain, Ben but you and I, And of all the friends who were schoolmates then, There remain, Ben but you and I
Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago: Sing me the songs I delighted to hear, Long, long ago long ago: Now you are gone my grief is remov’d, Let me forget that so long you have rov’d, Let me believe that you love as you lov’d, Long, long ago, long ago:
Do you remember the path where we met, Long long ago, long long ago. Ah yes you told me you ne’er would forget, Long long ago, long ago. Then to all others my smile you prefer’d, Love when you spoke gave a charm to each word, Still my heart treasures the praises I heard, Long long ago, long ago.
Thought by your kindness my fond hopes were rais’d, Long long ago, long long ago, You by more eloquent lips have been prais’d, Long long ago, long ago, But by long absence your truth has been tried, Still to your accents I listen with pride, Blest as I was when I sat by your side, Long long ago, long ago.