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Listening to The Ballad of Billy Kershaw always gets my imagination going, creating pictures of the characters and the situations but I always wonder just what is the moral of Billy’s Ballad? What do you all think? Is it that if we get the chance, especially if we are ordinary or even disadvantaged, we should experience the talents of a master craftsman/woman and not consider it unfaithful but enlightening? Or what?
Ah, now: therein hangs a question. This is a topic which went on for some length on an earlier version of this board and I think that the discussion is long gone (although no doubt someone will prove me wrong). For the life of me I can’t remember the various theories proposed although I do recall that agreement was never reached!
Ian
Yes, this was subject of extended discussion on one of the discussion boards and was revisited at length during the ‘post show indian’ in Holmfirth. The only thing we seemed to agree on, on both occasions, was that there were several/ many interpretations of the song, particularly the last verse, some people sing the last verse, some don’t and despite strongly held theories on the meaning of it all, no-one was able to convince the others that their theory was correct.
Doesn’t answer the question, I know, but there you go!I agree: this is one we’ll never sort out. We argued at some length about the meaning of the pronouns in the final two verses – who are "we" and "us" and the various "you"s – and if we couldn’t agree on who Jake was referring to, there was no chance that we would agree on what he meant! We also failed to agree on exactly what the "moral" was, and whether there was any special meaning to the "mea culpa" beyond a general association with Jake’s Catholic background. Some people felt all this was blindingly obvious, but they didn’t always agree, while others felt there was lots of ambiguity.
I think we were inclined to agree that it wasn’t in Jake’s nature to intentionally cause offence to or gratuitously insult anyone who finds the song "extravagant, or trite, Offensive, irrelevant, or untrue"; but that made the apparent change of attitude towards the end harder to understand, not easier, and, try as we might, we couldn’t agree on its significance.
And there, I feel, it will stay. Make of it what you will, enjoy it if you can. Sing it all, or leave off the last two verse or two.
Post edited by: KeithD, at: 2006/05/30 09:27
I think the key phrase for The Ballad of Billy Kershaw is ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Much as we appreciate it in the simplest thing, we can also be intimidated by beauty. We see a beautiful girl and a lot of us think ‘but what could she possibly see in me? She deserves someone as beautiful as her.’ She may not think she’s beautiful just as you do not think you might be beautiful but you have decided that she is. You beheld her beauty. Now, ‘women melted and surrendered when they looked into his eyes’ – women, that is; not just the ugly ones, women generally. But I suspect Billy thought he was ugly, too and reckoned that if he was going to give love to women, they should be ugly, like him – a hunchback with a hair-lip. He might have felt more on an even keel with ugly women – the beautiful ones intimidated him, maybe and he felt he was undeserving of them.
This is where the moral ‘that might well apply to you’ comes in; Jake seems to be saying that a great many of us feel that we are not beautiful and would feel more at home with a non-beautiful lover; we’d stand a better chance, we could both share our ugliness, we could relax and enjoy it and no-one would say to us ‘what’s a beautiful women like her doing with an ugly sod like you?’. People can be cruel, and insults like this, of course, stem from similar lackings in self-confidence in the beautiful department.
Billy Kershaw would never behold the ‘sacred flame’ in his breast or probably didn’t even know that he had it – but the women saw it when they looked into his eyes, they beheld it. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how will we ever know if we are beautiful or not? I would refer you to Socrates’ dissertation of Love in Plato’s Symposium.
As a crudism – the balancing factor in Jake’s hypothesis – Billy Kershaw seems to do pretty well in the scoring department and, hell, if we all think we’re probably a bit ugly there’s a hell of a lot of sex waiting out there and why shouldn’t we all get some of it, eh, lads? As for Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa’ at the end of the song, Jake seems to be saying that he feels he’s one of the non-beautiful, too – but what the hell!
This is not a politically incorrect song by any stretch of the imagination.
I may sound like a pompous fatuous philosophising plonker here, I know, but this – after much thought – has been my ‘take’ on the song. Best regards, DavidI hope you don’t mind me reopening this four-year-old thread.
Jake’s intentions in the last verse seem quite clear to me. Society will f*ck the disadvantaged, and he’s as guilty as any. What Billy did only for mutual pleasure, the rest of us will do to the weak, the shy, and the social misfit – “systematically”, “more regular, and always twice as hard”.
Mea culpa.
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