So my next lesson will be the third week of April after the Easter break. I'm currently assigned the Paul Simon arrangement of Scarborough Fair - very pretty but the guitar counterpoint needs to be played very fast to keep up with the vocal tempo while the Baroque arpegios provide little melody guidance, with the difficulties augmented by those little filler notes Simon introduces to make it more 'interesting'. I think I should be trying to sing to it, rather than just stagger through the score.
My most recent assignment in my fingerstyle guitar lessons is to learn the Paul Simon guitar backing for 'Scarborough Fair'. I naturally turned to Youtube to listen to the track - yes, it's intricate and beautiful and eerie and haunting.
But what about the lyrics...? I realised I'd never properly listened to the narrative counterpoint before. Baffled, I asked ChatGPT for an explanation.
"The song is a splice — half medieval riddle, half 1960s lament — and the join is not original to the folk tradition. It is Paul Simon’s intervention.
1. The older ballad: impossible tasks and estranged lovers
Scarborough Fair descends from a much older English and Scottish ballad, often catalogued as The Elfin Knight. The structure is simple and slightly uncanny: a man — or sometimes a woman — sets the other a series of impossible tasks as the price of reconciliation.
Make me a shirt without seams.
Plough me an acre between salt water and sea sand.
Reap it with a sickle of leather.
These are not agricultural instructions; they are logical traps. The subtext is: you can’t do this, so we’re finished. In some variants the other party replies with equally impossible counter-tasks, restoring a kind of equilibrium. It is courtship turned into a duel of paradoxes.
The herbal refrain — parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme — is older still, probably a floating mnemonic or symbolic tag, sometimes glossed as remembrance, strength, fidelity, and so on. But really it works more as atmosphere than doctrine.
2. The Martin Carthy connection
In the early 1960s, Martin Carthy was performing a stark, modal arrangement of the song in the British folk revival. Paul Simon heard this during his time in London and effectively borrowed the structure and guitar setting. That part — melody, modality, fingerstyle pattern — is traditional by way of Carthy.
3. The counterpoint: Simon’s addition
The second voice — the one that begins “On the side of a hill, in the deep forest green...” — is not traditional. That is Simon’s addition.
It is a separate anti-war lyric, often referred to as Canticle. Simon had already been working with lines from an earlier song, The Side of a Hill, and he wove them in as a counter-melody. The technique — two independent texts sung simultaneously — is closer to Renaissance polyphony than to a straightforward folk ballad.
So you end up with two different structures laid over one another:
Voice 2: historical, directional — soldiers, generals, graves, the machinery of war.
The effect is not really narrative but juxtaposition. The old world of riddling lovers floats above a modern world of mechanised death. They do not resolve into each other; they rub against each other.
4. Why it works
The pairing is not arbitrary. Both strands deal, in their different idioms, with futility.
The lover’s tasks cannot be completed.
The war achieves nothing; the soldiers march towards oblivion for causes already hollowed out.
Simon’s real stroke was to notice that a seventeenth-century emotional stalemate and a twentieth-century geopolitical stalemate share the same skeleton: human effort expended under conditions that make fulfilment impossible.
5. Conclusion
The war lyric was not part of the original Scarborough Fair. It was a 1960s graft by Paul Simon: elegant, audacious, and in truth the thing that turns the piece from a beautiful folk relic into something much stranger and more durable. Without it, you have a riddle. With it, you have a meditation on futility across centuries."
The world trundles along and attempts to provoke me - but I don't rise to the bait. Nothing has impelled me to the keyboard. So in the absence of inspiration, let me tell you that I have persisted in the guitar (it must be all of three days now).
As I audit the cobwebby ruins of my youthful craft, I discover that my chord placement is now poor. All the usual neophyte errors: buzzing, clunking and muffling. So at the price of fingertip-pain and forearm soreness I am seeking good form above all.
Secondly I am paying attention to fingerpicking: initially choosing the correct chord-bass-string for the thumb while plucking the top three strings without looking at them .. consistently, and in the right order.
Finally, I'm focusing on Paul Simon's "America" (from the songbook above). This is, astonishingly, scored in E♭ - can you imagine anything worse for guitar? Why not score it in C and use a capo if we needed to raise the pitch? Anyway, I transposed all the chords to C in the interests of my own sanity.
"America" is a beautiful, plaintive, elegiac song and it achieves these effects by esoteric chords such as major sevenths and ninths. So my chord-vocabulary is receiving attention.
Little and often is my mantra: you may get a video in a few weeks, once I can get through it at all.
It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
.. and there again ..
A man walks down the street
It's a street in a strange world
Maybe it's the Third World
Maybe it's his first time around
He doesn't speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man.
We all like travelling in foreign parts, but let's face it, some of them are pretty dire.
Not all of us can afford, or would want to be accompanied by, a phalanx of bodyguards. So let's think about this: why would some random bad guys in a bad part of the world not want to rob you and leave you for dead?
If they could.
I think what might stop them is fear of retribution, so let's give them some good reasons. Vengeance Ltd recruits former special forces and top operational support guys. As a client, you are required to carry at all times audio/video sensors plus GPS tracker. All this stuff is linked in real time to their HQ.
You also wear a somewhat conspicuous "V" badge and carry a Vengeance Ltd laminated card. They want the bad guys to know you're a client.
If the worst happens, there's not much they can do in medias res. They're not bodyguards.
Vengeance Ltd - helping out with your perfect holiday
The clue is in the name. They will relentlessly hunt down and bring terminal retribution to your assailants. They do not give up. The few times they had to do this were quite well-publicised: they have a good rep.
I think you would feel quite protected - and as a volume business, their rates are quite affordable.
---
Did I mention the heart-rate monitor? It can be quite difficult, instrumentation-wise, to distinguish between a holdup and an episode of passion. That's when they need to cross-check the video feed. They say it's all done by a real smart AI ... so no worries then.
---
For experts, this is an example of bourgeois commodification of pre-capitalist naturalistic social relations. Or in English, everyone used to belong to a clan or a tribe. If someone did you harm, your kinfolk would serve out retribution.
But for capitalism to work properly, we had to dispense with the clans ...
