Once there was a way to get back homeward

Sleep pretty darling do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby

The voice comes in already pushing, and they are words telling someone to go to sleep sung as though you had to be heard from a long way off, with the throat leaning and pulling on cry until it sounds about to break, and it does not break, but I stay there waiting for it anyway and the next time round I wait again.

He wanted it that way, he worked on the strength of the vocal precisely because the theme was gentle, “such a gentle theme, so I worked on the strength of the vocal on it”.

The words are not his, they are the first stanza of a lullaby from 1603, a Cradle Song inside the play Patient Grissil, and he finds it at his father’s house in Liverpool, open on the piano stand in his stepsister Ruth’s music book, “my stepsister Ruth’s piano book was up on the stand”, except that he cannot read music, “I couldn’t remember the old tune, so I just started playing my own tune to it”, and so he sits down and makes one up. That is the image that stays on me longest out of the whole song, someone at the piano in his father’s house with words in front of him he can read and music he cannot, making his own instead.

Three things get rounded off nearly everywhere, namely that the play is not by Thomas Dekker alone but Henry Chettle and William Haughton sign it with him, that he almost certainly meets that text in a nineteenth-century songbook rather than in Elizabethan theatre, and that he changes two words, because where Dekker writes sleep, pretty wantons, which back then means lively children, he sings sleep pretty darling, while where Dekker has golden slumbers kiss your eyes he sings fill your eyes, which is a heavier hand on a sleeping face.

Then there is a line that was not there in 1603 and it is the first one you hear, Once there was a way to get back homeward, everything else is borrowed and that one he wrote himself, and they record it on 2 July 1969 when Lennon is not there because the day before he went off the road in Scotland, so there are three of them in the room, piano and voice, Harrison’s bass, Starr’s drums.

The drums come in on Golden slumbers fill your eyes and put down a heavy foot while the voice, instead of dropping, climbs, and on 15 August thirty musicians arranged by George Martin go on top and the room widens all at once, and that is exactly where I want to turn it up.

A lullaby is sung quietly, close to someone about to fall asleep. This one is sung loud instead, the way you sing to someone who can no longer hear you. With everything you have inside.

Cover image: Bruna Mannucci, “Girasoli”, oil on canvas — https://brunamannucci.it/opere/girasoli/