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Rating: Imagine a summer evening and little girls sitting on the porch of a country house...
Imagine their graceful and shrill voices heatedly debating.
And, above all, think back to that season when time seemed infinite or as if suspended in an eternal present...
Because, to be honest, time, during that season, didn't really exist at all...
Ah, surely you also have memories of those wonderful childhood discussions where the desire to express oneself goes hand in hand with awe.
Where mystery and innocence walk arm in arm.
It was like that for those little girls, I suppose...
Ah, I swear, I would have loved to be there with them, maybe hidden.
Because eavesdropping is beautiful. But to do so, I would have needed a time machine.
Yes, because that scene and that discussion date back to the thirties...
The thirties in America, Kentucky to be precise, in the Appalachian Mountains area...
But what was the subject of the debate? Oh, it was a magical, mysterious song... The story of a traveler lost in those places where no soul can show you the way.
And discuss and discuss, those little girls never found the solution.
Neither that evening, nor ever...
Better this way, and for two reasons. The first is that mysteries are not meant to be solved, but to fascinate.
And the second, which is another mystery, one of those little girls would only discover it many years later, in England, when she became a musician and researcher, she went to England in search of the origins of American folk music.
About that song, which is "Nottamun Town", a taboo prevailed, revealing its meaning was equivalent to losing all one's fortune.
Jean Ritchie then did more, adding two verses to the text she knew, which were inspired by a vision in the woods.
It's fantastic that a wise researcher would see a parade of ghosts, almost like Emily to Syd...
The versions of this song, which our Jean was the first to record, are countless.
Hers is perhaps the most beautiful... crystalline voice, the deep echo of the dulcimer, the battle between grace and dust...
And that text that seems like a tarot reading... the king, the queen, life, death, the knight, the musician, the mime...
Jean Ritchie, "mother of folk"...
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