Scarborough Fair: A Love Song Built from Impossible Tasks

Bourrée: The Old Tune That Went Electric

Bach’s Bourrée in E minor is a small piece with unusually long legs. This episode follows how the fifth movement of the Suite in E minor, BWV 996, escaped the world of Baroque dance and became a practical tool for modern musicians: a guitar lesson, a riff, a bass line, a joke, a rock chorus, and a way of learning how moving parts fit together. The story begins in the late 1960s, with Ian Anderson listening through the floor as a neighbour repeatedly failed to get past the difficult part of the piece. Anderson never heard the ending, but he heard enough. Soon Jethro Tull turned Bach into Bourée, with Glenn Cornick’s bass dancing around the flute. From there, the episode traces the tune through John Williams, The Beatles’ Blackbird, Bakerloo, Leo Kottke, Jimmy Page, Tenacious D, Paul McCartney’s Jenny Wren, and Alter Bridge. Along the way, it asks why some old music survives not by being protected, but by being used. The episode ends with a new version titled I’m Going Electric.

Nobody: The Saddest Joke in the Room

Nobody is a comic song built around one brutal answer. Written by Alex Rogers and Bert Williams, published in 1905, and made famous by Williams in 1906, the song seems at first like antique vaudeville: a man asks the world for help, sympathy, friendship, romance, or basic recognition, and the answer is always the same. Nobody. But the joke is darker than it sounds. Williams performed inside a theatrical world shaped by blackface and racist convention, and that history cannot be polished away. At the same time, he turned the market’s degrading language into something sharper, quieter, and stranger: deadpan as survival, comedy as accusation. This episode follows Nobody from early Tin Pan Alley recordings to Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Pearl Bailey, Nina Simone, The Muppets, Johnny Cash, and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Along the way, the punchline changes shape. In one voice it is nostalgia. In another, pride. In another, social diagnosis. The saddest part is that the answer still makes sense. The beautiful part is that every time someone sings it, “nobody” becomes untrue for a moment.

Over the Hills and Far Away: A Song for Leaving, Longing, and Finding Your Place

Three songs. One title. Almost nothing else in common. Over the Hills and Far Away can mean escape, adventure, exile, longing, or the place your mind goes when your body is stuck somewhere ordinary. This episode follows that phrase across three very different lives. The oldest version goes back at least to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. In one form, it is a love complaint. In another, it becomes a recruiting song, promising money, clothes, and the possibility of returning as a gentleman. John Gay then uses the tune in The Beggar’s Opera, where “far away” becomes both romance and exile. The second Over the Hills and Far Away belongs to Led Zeppelin: a 1973 song born from the band’s acoustic period in the Welsh hills. The third is Gary Moore’s 1986 rock song about love, secrecy, and prison, later transformed by metal, folk, and Ukrainian mountain air. The episode asks why this simple phrase keeps attracting new stories, and why “far away” can mean both escape and loss.

Per Tyrsson’s Daughters: The Murder Ballad That Built a Church

Per Tyrsson’s Daughters is a murder ballad that explains a place. The song, known in Swedish as Töres döttrar i Wänge, gives an origin story to Kärna Church in Östergötland and to the springs associated with Vänge. It takes a real landscape, a church, a quiet yard, strange springs, and answers the question folk songs love most: what happened here? The answer is murder, miracle, and memory. This episode follows the ballad as both an origin song and a murder ballad: a story in which ordinary movement, walking to church, walking home, suddenly becomes irreversible. One important Swedish manuscript witness dates from the 1670s, with a note saying the song was sung in Kärna parish on June 1, 1673. Centuries later, the song finds new lives through Jan Hammarlund, Falconer’s folk-metal version, and related English and Scottish ballads such as Babylon and The Bonnie Banks o Fordie. Along the way, the episode asks why places need stories, and why some places seem to remember violence long after people would rather forget.

House of the Rising Sun: The Building That Ruins Everyone

The House of the Rising Sun is a song about a building. In New Orleans. They call it the Rising Sun. It ruins people. Most people know the song from The Animals’ 1964 recording, with Hilton Valentine’s unforgettable guitar, Alan Price’s organ, and Eric Burdon singing as if there is no tomorrow. That version became definitive. But the song is much older, stranger, and harder to pin down. No one fully agrees what the “house” is. A brothel, a prison, a gambling house, a tavern, a hotel, or simply a symbolic place where bad decisions become fate. In some versions, the narrator is a woman ruined by seduction or prostitution. In others, a man ruined by gambling, drink, or prison. This episode traces the song from Appalachian field recordings and early blues versions to Lead Belly, Joan Baez, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and finally The Animals, whose one-take recording turned an old warning into one of the great doors in rock history.