Men of Good Fortune

[MJG196]

...generously released to members of this forum all that time ago, before the bootleg appeared.

God bless Rosie Lee.

[iaredatsun]

...generously released to members of this forum all that time ago, before the bootleg appeared.

God bless Rosie Lee.

Heheh.

[hkmartin]

It's streaming now. I got an email over Bandcamp.

NOW STREAMING: “Men of Good Fortune” - a previously unreleased demo recording from Lou Reed - appearing on Words & Music, May 1965, out September 16th. This is not the song from Reed’s 1973 album Berlin (“Men of good fortune, often cause empires to fall / While men of poor beginnings, often can’t do anything at all”). It’s played carefully with a modal pull that takes you down into a story that can’t have a happy ending. The melody wraps around itself creating that minor-key sense of entrapment. It’s an everyday tragedy of class and the terror of being born into your own death.

link.lightintheattic.net/menofgoodfortune

“‘Men of Good Fortune’ has every trademark of one of the traditional Child Ballads from England and Scotland dating back for centuries and passed on from person to person,” says archivists Jason Stern and Don Fleming. “They had rarely been documented in print but were finally compiled in Francis James Child’s landmark book, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898. The Child Ballads were a great source of inspiration for folk artists in the early 1960s, with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Fairport Convention borrowing heavily from the book. Child Ballad #2, ‘The Elfin Knight,’ through a series of other singers, informed Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Scarborough Fair’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country.’ Child Ballad #2 and many others include a ‘maiden’ or ‘maid,’ as Reed portrays himself in the song. It’s notable how the words to this version of ‘Men of Good Fortune’ could seemingly fit right in as a variant of a Child Ballad, but it doesn’t appear to borrow lines from the book or other songs, traditional or popular. Reed sings and plays the song alone.”