Yeats’ poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, is the source of the golden apples reference. It starts, ‘I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head.’ That was divine inspiration, I’ve always thought. The poem popped into my head the other day and so I dug out this record. The liner notes say Collins has ‘clean, fresh beauty, gamine manner, and vivacious stage presence’ and get more sexist and patronizing from there. I’ll say it: Judy Collins had a wonderful voice. I have five more of her albums to play through to show it.
Great Selchie of Shule Skerry is the strangest story in a song so far. It starts with a woman nursing a baby, wondering where it came from, and ends with a her husband killing a seal that was the baby’s father. This album has a song named Fannerio that so far as I can tell has nothing in common with the Grateful Dead song Dire Wolf that mentions the backwash of Fannerio.
converselyspeaking 