My, my, my

When I first heard the song Delilah, in the late 1960s...

<parenthesis subject="Uncertainty over date">
Wikipedia has the song recorded by Tom Jones in December 1967 and winning an Ivor Novello Award in 1968, but the footnote to the win links to an irrelevant page; and while the song's writers did win an Ivor Novello Award in 1968, it was not for Delilah (it was for the execrable The Last Waltz (what could the judges have been thinking of?). The same two writers (lyricist and composer) won the Ivor Novello Award for 'Britain's International Song of the Year' with Delilah (International? Why?) in 1969. So I may have heard the song  in December 1967, but it could have been much later (not that it matters)
</parenthesis>

... I  assumed that the 'My, my, my' was a variant. of 'Goodness me'. This was a fairly naive interpretation, I admit, but the song was (and is, in my view) trivial and undeserving of anything better; the lyricist wanted a makeweight to balance 'Why, why, why?', and 'My, my, my' was the best they could do.

But the latest edition of Antisocial has made me think again. That episode is all about the context of songs involving murder, and changing attitudes to them, centring on the fuss surrounding the singing of Delilah. It is, if you haven't heard it (and if you haven't I'd say there were better things you could do with your time than to make good that lack of experience), a murder ballad (oh yes, it's an official genre) about a man killing his lover for sleeping with someone else.

She stood there laughing

I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more

Murder ballads involve various victims and killers: in Bruton Town the killers are two brothers:

'I think our servant courts our sister

I think they have in mind to wed.

I'll put an end to all their courtship.

I'll send him silent to his grave.'

The murdered servant appears in her dreams, and blabs:

'Your two brothers killed me cruelly,
In such a place you may me find.'

<literary-aside>
If you know the Keats poem Isabella, or the pot of basil it's broadly the same story, and dates back to Bocaccio (if not before).
</literary-aside>

In Cruel Sister it's one sister killing another (over a knight, wouldn't you know?) by pushing her into the sea:

'Your own true love that I'll have and more...

But thou shalt never come ashore.'

In Frankie and Johnny it's the woman (Frankie) killing the man... and so on. Sex is usually involved, and the man is often the aggressor. And one speaker on that edition of Antisocial points out that this sort of violence isn't the exclusive province of The Great Unwashed: Carmen involves a murder of passion.

<tangent>

And high culture infects other areas: a recent edition of Radio 3 Breakfast was slumming it for a moment, playing Joan Baez singing El preso número nueve, and the presenter said it was about a man going to the Underworld to find his 'true love'. Now maybe the sleeve notes gave this impression to the announcer. I rather think though that she (no names, no pack-drill, though if you were having Alpen for breakfast you'd be only two letters short of her name) had romantical notions inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice.

The prisoner in question is about to be shot for the double murder of his love (anything but 'true') and his rival. He tells his confessor 

'Padre, no me arrepiento...

Voy a seguir sus passos

Voy a buscarlos al más allà' 

He's unrepentant (which, as any Catholic will tell you – at least in those less morally flexible times – meant he accepted that he was not going to be absolved). They had sinned in their adultery, he had sinned in his murder, and he didn't want absolution; he wanted a ticket to Hell so that he could  follow them al más allà and make their eternal lives (deaths) a misery. (OK, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but cut the poor bloke a bit of slack; he was upset.)
</tangent>

So, with all this talk of domestic violence, and dodgy statistics (which may lead to an update at some stage) I've realized that 'My, my, my Delilah' is an assertion of possession (which 'justifies' his behaving like a man possessed (geddit?)).

But I must do some note-bashing for this: 

Just over a month to go...

b

Update: 2023.02.15.14:50 – Added PS

PS

I first sang Monteverdi's Beatus Vir in CCCCCC (that's Corpus Christi College Cambridge Chapel Choir)...

<autobiographical-note>
(which was the first real choir I sang in, apart from my school's "VIth Form Choir", which was less a choir than a scam to bulk out our UCCA form – predecessor of UCAS – and my primary school's contribution to a massed children's choir that sang Jerusalem at Ealing Town Hall in the late 1950s)
</autobiographical-note>

... in 1971. It sticks in my mind for three reasons:

• I sang one of the soprano lines, as in those unenlightened days there were no women in the choir and the baritones sang the soprano lines (at their pitch). 
• I was standing rather precariously on a bench (and even now the refrain Beatus vir qui timet dominum makes my legs tremble). The bench also contributed to the amplification of...
• ... the disturbance caused by my foot-tapping, which a fellow baritone told me was 'not the sort of thing a chap did'

Update: 2023.02.19.19:30 – Added PPS

PPS

I've been thinking about that man on death row (El preso número nueve). I gave him too much credit for clarity of thought when I said he wanted to go to Hell; he thought he was going to heaven (at least until his time for judgement): yo sé que allá en el cielo el ser supremo nos juzgará ('I know that up there in heaven the supreme being will judge us'); he just assumed that the supreme being would share his warped view of what's right: a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. In fact he shares with the singer of Delilah the same self justifying 'it was all I could take' attitude: Ardió en su pecho el rencor/E no se pudo aguantar ('Anger flared up in his breast and he couldn't stop himself' – not unlike Tom Jones' 'Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn't take any more'). 

And just what happened at the scene of the crime? The lyrics say el preso... iba la noche del duelo...and there are no prizes for guessing what duelo means. On a first hearing I thought he just saw the two together (...al mirar a su amor en brazos de su rival...), lost it, and killed them both. But a duel is one against one isn't it? So did he find the two, have his one-on-one, and then kill her (with malice aforethought, execution style)?

Perhaps I'm over-thinking this...

Update: 2023.03.10.16.00 – Added PPPS

PPPS
You may have noticed that one of the works in tomorrow week's concert is <ching> Beatus Vir (well,. the programme just says Beatus Vir, but ever since this realization (read on for details) I have come to regard the <ching> as an important part of the title.

When I first saw the score for this piece it struck me that it would have made sense to start the syllable Be- on the up beat to a new bar ...

<parenthesis>
(I'm not sure whether  Monteverdi cared much about the concept of bars; but the idea was curent – if fairly novel – in his day. Anyway, I imagine it's safe to assume that the barlines in the current published score are editorial.)
</parenthesis>

So why does the piece start with a <ching> on the harpsichord (catching the sopranos napping if they're not careful)?

And, over 50 years after I first saw and wondered about this, it's finally come to me. If the Be- did  fall on the up beat to a new bar the word Vir would fall on the fourth beat, which is no place for a butch word like Vir (='man').

....[C]onsider: 1+2+3+4+. The 1 and 3 are the strong beats and the 2 and 4 are the weaker beats. But the subdivided beats represented by the + are even weaker. The concept of stress in both music and in lyric has to do with meter. In a sequence of notes of equal length, some parts of the sequence are perceived as having a stronger emphasis.
Source

When the piece starts with a <ching>, Vir falls naturally on the strongest beat of the second bar. I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of difference  to the way the music is perceived (after all, this Vir is Joe Blogs [albeit a fairly devout one], as opposed to the person identified in Ecce homo, so he doesn't especially merit a strong syllable), but it's satisfying to know why the editor did it