Too-ral li-ooral li-addity

I've been thinking about Botany Bay recently.

For some reason I started singing it about two days ago, and for some reason I actually sang it right for the first time in my life. It was like an epiphany. Have you ever done something one way your entire life, tried to do it differently on a complete whim and realised that's the way you should have been doing it all along?

And yet, I realise now that I've had the wrong idea about the song because every version of it I've ever heard was also wrong, as were the music teachers and primary school teachers who would get us to play the tune in class many long years ago.

Why, just this morning, when I finished my baritone horn lesson (receiving, not giving) I walked into another class room where the teacher was telling her class to play Botany Bay with "swashbuckle", and immediately launched into what I'd called an oom-pa-pa version of the tune to illustrate what she wanted.

It's the same way I was taught. Instead of "too-ra-li oo-ra-li addity" (or tooral liooral liaddity, as I've seen it written) being the sort of lovely lilting sound most songs with "too-ra-li" type lyrics are given, it may as be "oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa".

I don't know how, or when, or why, but Botany Bay has been decreed some sort of up-tempo drinking song, and is invariably performed with the gusto usually given to Blow the Man Down and the kinds of sea-shanty you'd sing in the pub after a hard day's work.

Maybe that's the way it was originally performed all those years ago when it started out as a number in a musical burlesque (Little Jack Sheppard), but there are usually soft quiet songs in burlesques as well as the more up-tempo numbers - and when it was adopted as a folk song, it should have taken on the charm of its own lyrics.

Besides, it's not a shanty. It doesn't have any of the qualities of a sea-shanty, and it shouldn't be treated like one. I think it's a ballad. If you look closely it's this lovely, lilting, I'm-miserable-and-I-want-to-go-home ballad.

I mean, think about it, it's a song about poor, weak, lonely, depressed convicts - sent on the boat-ride from hell to the other side of the world, knowing that the odds they'll get home alive are very slim, and all because they mugged a guy and stole something small and meaningless.

If you take a walk down the streets of Campbell Town in Tasmania, you can read some of the crimes convicts were deported for, and how long they were banished from their homes and families. The crimes were things like stealing shoes or food (sometimes more serious crimes like sheep stealing and the like), and the sentences were anywhere from seven years to life.

The trip from England to Australia took more than six months on their fastest ships (which weren't usually used for transporting convicts), and for the duration the convicts were locked in an area that was dark, damp, lice infested and putrid with the smell of their own body-waste. Food was less than basic - and often filled with weevils and other insects. Many died on the journey. All came off the ships covered with sores and riddled with illnesses.

Sure, it was written years after the whole convict thing was over, and it may have written for the amusement of people who probably thought convicts were terribly funny - but it still seems like cry from the heart from lonely, downtrodden, desperate men and you loose all of that if you sing it with too much gusto. It should not be sung (or played) with the kind of happy frivolity one would hear from Blow the Man Down. It's a song of pain and misery, and should be sung with the same kind of soft, gentle, lingering caress that is given to war ballads like Aura Lee.

You should sing it like you've been at sea for months, you're feeling homesick, and the rhythm of the ocean is making the boat sway in that way that would rock you to sleep if only it didn't make you want to throw up.

And yet, every time I've ever heard it played, the notes are clipped short instead of lingered on, the the tune is kept bright and up-tempo instead of gentle and soft. I don't know, maybe it's been that way all along. It just seems like such a waste. It should be pathos, rather than bathos.

I'd actually gone off the song because I found the "oom-pa-pa" nature of the tune a bit annoying and overly simplistic. As a lovely, "too-ra-li" ballad, though, it's really quite pretty.

I don't know why I started singing it like that the other day. I think it's because I had been humming the tune to Aura Lee earlier, and I was just in a ballad frame of mind.

Some of the verses don't quite fit with the "lovely ballad" concept of the song, but they can work and, alternatively, you don't seem to loose anything by dropping them. The song gains a lot by cutting to the heart of the remaining lyrics instead of playing it for 'yuks'.

Or maybe it's just me. But next time you feel compelled to sing the song, sing it slow and pretty. It feels good.