My first song.

One week -- yes, ONE WEEK after obtaining my guitar I am playing my first song.

I hardly left the house today. I did, however, go across the street to Mecca Music and Books, with the intent of seeking out guitarists whom I knew to have played Gretsches -- the best I could manage was Chet Atkins in arrangements of popular Hollywood songs. Not what I'd had in mind at all, but still sufficient to open my ears to some of the sonic capabilities of my guitar in the hands of a master.

Somehow or other I stumble across an album by a band I'd never heard of -- "Traffic" -- titled "John Barleycorn Must Die". As anyone who's ever been to an AA meeting knows, the name "John Barleycorn" figures prominently in the book they use in such meetings. The mere mention of his name is usually sufficient to make eyes roll back in peoples' heads as though suddenly everyone in the room is gripped by the same epileptic seizure. "Oh gawd", the thinking seems to go, "this again -- that corny midwestern businessman's talk from the 'thirties".

In point of fact, the legend of John Barleycorn goes back at least four hundred years in English literature. Imagine my surprise on discovering this. The back of the album has a blurb about the folk song, of which over 140 variants are known to exist. The oldest surviving copy of the lyrics were apparently printed by one Mr. H. Gorson, who died in 1641.

That places the commitment of this song to paper exactly at the point in English history that most amazes me. The standardization of the English language through nascent print media was well underway, while reading any author's intent became increasingly perilous thanks to the complex evolving political intrigues surrounding James I, Cromwell's Commonwealth, and eventually the Restoration of James II to the Throne. No written literature from this period is transparent. It is the era of Donne and Milton. The writing of the court and city became the basis for all literature in the English language, as the rise of the printing press allowed the cultural focus to rapidly shift from life in the countryside to London.

John Barleycorn, far from being a stolid, moralistic, midwestern personification of "drink" was in fact nothing less than a mythical archetype in the same class as the ancient Egyptian's Osiris. To make a long story short: the agrarian god figure is killed, hacked to bits, buried in the ground, raised back to life by the sun and the midsummer rains, grows to maturity at which point he's cut down at the knees, stabbed through the heart, tied to a cart, skinned alive, ground between stones, and still manages comes back in such a way that people depend on him for their very livelihoods. It's a song about life and death and cruelty and nourishment and folly from the cyclic perspective of an ancient agrarian society.

The origins of the song aren't known. Even if it was (as the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs asserts it may be) "the creation of an antiquarian revivalist", it is still a very old song:

There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all.

They let him stand 'til Mid-Summer's Day
When he looked both pale and wan;
Then little Sir John grew a long, long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee;
They rolled him and tied him around the waist,
And served him barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
To pierce him to the heart,
But the loader did serve him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him 'round and around the field
'Til they came unto a barn,
And there they took a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crab-tree sticks
To split him skin from bone,
But the miller did serve him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

There's little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And there's brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman cannot hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker cannot mend his pots
Without John Barleycorn.

An alternate version of the song by Robert Burns naturally ends with the singers all drinking a toast to Scotland.

What got me, though, at first, was not the lyrics. Oh sure, I bought it 'cause I thought it'd be an interesting conversation piece if I ever have someone from the groups visit me at home, because it was a novelty of sorts, an in-joke. What got me is the fact that it only seemed to have four chords for most of it.

Sure sounds like an A minor.

Pull out the guitar. Let's check.

Yep. That sure is A minor. I wonder if that's a D. And if that there's an E.

Yep. Yep.

A few minutes later with Google I've got it all on paper. Chords and lyrics and tablatures and all. I've never read "tabs" in my life, but listen to the music looking at 'em and knowing how the guitar's set up and it makes sense. I mess around with it and now I'm working on transitions and right-hand stuff.

One week into having a guitar, an instrument that baffled and frustrated me just by having six strings, I've got it *down* and am even starting to get up to speed. The song on the record's at a walking tempo, but for me it's practically a hailstorm of notes. I play along with what I can, then turn the record player off and play it over -- SLOWLY. It starts to sound like music. And it's those same three chords that amazed me the first night I had the guitar.

A-minor.

E-minor.

D-major.

And C-major, just to make things interesting.