RUE LANE

Allow me to turn your attention to London, 1727, where originates the oldest song in this collection: “Rue Lane.” The original melody of the song is attributed to Virginia Lombardi, a rail-thin Italian tailor and hobbyist songwriter who had a peculiar practice of making herself lightheaded. Several times a day she would crouch down for as long as she could tolerate it, her rear resting on her heels. Then she would stand up and feel the blood stay in her legs. She did this so much it eventually caused hallucinations. When concerned relatives found out that she haunted particular cemeteries looking for body parts, she was sent off to an institution in Lincolnshire. One foggy night, a guard, himself an amateur composer, jotted down the tune, having overheard Lombardi singing it alone in her cell in alternating moods and styles throughout the day and night. It was he who first published the melody, though under his own name. Shortly afterwards, he too went completely insane. It wasn’t until Count Oslo Trimble incorporated the song into his comic operetta The Haunts of Henrietta in 1920 that the song attained its modest following.Trimble reworked the lyric to tell the story of a sad man whose lover is killed in a car accident. The poor man spends his days cleaning and beautifying the lane behind his house so that her ghost may comfortably make nightly rounds up and down the lane. This simple, melancholy tune sat well with the English public during the inter-war period, and soon the song won a warm place in the English folksong canon. It’s interesting to note that Trimble had to be hospitalized with advanced stages of schizophrenia shortly after the song’s reluctant inclusion in Volume XV of the popular retrospective Cursed English Folksongs of the 1720s.

Vocals: Michael Johnson
Piano/Accordion: Jenny Conlee

Recorded in 2002 at Type Foundry in Portland, OR. Engineered and mixed by Adam Selzer. Mastered by Michael Johnson and Chad Crouch.