Stable Lad, The

DESCRIPTION: "When Cobb and Co. ran coaches from the Buller to the Grey, I went for a livery stable lad in a halt down Westport way" and loves a red-haired dancer at the European tavern. He hopes to earn enough marry her. But she dies and is buried in Charleston
AUTHOR: Words: Peter Cape (1926-1979) / Music: Phil Garland
EARLIEST DATE: 1982 (recording, Graham Wilson)
KEYWORDS: horse worker love courting dancing death burial separation
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Garland-FacesInTheFirelight-NZ, pp. 87, 228, "(The Stable Lad)" (1 text plus an excerpt)
ADDITIONAL: Roger Steele, editor, _An Ordinary Joker: The Life and Songs of Peter Cape_ (book with accompanying CD), Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2001, pp. 76-77, "The Stable Lad" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [674 words]: This is not, to my knowledge, traditional in New Zealand. But it arguably is traditional "worldwide" -- because I learned it in Richfield, Minnesota, from another Minnesotan who had learned it while visiting New Zealand. Only later did I find it on record, and I'm not sure my source ever heard a recording of it, either. I've also heard some moderately significant oral variations in the text. Indeed, it appears from the text printed by Steele that the verse I've always heard as the first verse (the verse beginning "When Cobb and Co. ran coaches from the Buller to the Grey") was only used at the end in Peter Cape's original version.
All that adds up to a very weak foothold in tradition, to be sure. But it is an absolutely terrific song -- a sorrowful but skilled lyric with a sad but beautiful tune. I'm hoping that it will survive.
It is almost certainly the Peter Cape song best known outside New Zealand, although "Taumarunui" and one or two others may be better known in New Zealand. It is also somewhat unusual for a Cape song that it is neither comic (e.g. "Talking Dog") nor mock-tragic ("Taumarunui"). (The only other serious Cape song I've heard that is the purely sad "Black Matai.")
Garland-FacesInTheFirelight-NZ, pp. 227-228, tells a funny story about this. Cape originally wrote it as a poem, "The Stable Boy." Someone copied it down; this copy ended up in the hands of Elsie Locke. Phil Garland found it in her collection, liked it, and decided to set it to music, changing the title to "The Stable Lad" as he set his tune. He recorded it without talking to Peter Cape, whom he did not then know. Cape heard the song on the radio and thought, "By Jove that sounds familiar. I wonder if I wrote that." So Cape called the radio station and asked if he wrote his own song! Fortunately, Cape liked what Garland had done with his text. (As he should have.) They eventually met, and Garland reports that he treasured the moment.
According to the bio included in Cape/Steele, p. 20, Peter Cape knew only three guitar chords, and so ended up often setting his words to tunes that he couldn't sing very well, or that were not very strong; although he sometimes set his own tunes, his most successful songs were often ones where others supplied the tunes (Phil Garland set "The Stable Lad"; Don Toms set "Black Matai"; Pat Rogers set "Taumarunui." All three, especially the first and the last, almost require four chords -- the minor second for the former, the major second for the latter).
Incidentally, the version recorded by Gordon Bok gets it wrong in several particulars (including errors in the tune); it loses a little along the way, but it's more evidence of oral transmission.
It turns out that there are several errors in the song, including in the first line. The road from Buller to the Greymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, was not completed until 1929, so Cobb and Co. (an Australian coach company) never did run coaches on it; the company had gone out of business half a decade before that (according to Ell, p. 46, the last coach in New Zealand ran in 1923; Murphy, p. 71, says its last Australian coach ran in Queensland in 1924). And supposedly dancing in bars was illegal at this time. But the Buller and Grey rivers are of course still there, and Westport, Charleston, Murchison, and Greymouth were real towns, and so was the European Hotel (there is a photo in Garland-FacesInTheFirelight-NZ), which lasted from the 1860s to the 1960s -- by which time the town of Charleston, no longer sustained by mining, had disappeared. (Google Maps still shows a "Charleston European Pub," but it's an obviously modern building. There are a few houses labeled "Charleston," too, but not really the old town.)
The line in the fifth verse about tak(ing) his "girl up on the box" has real significance. Ell, p. 56, says that "Passengers vied to sit on the 'box seat' beside the driver." By taking his girl up there, he was both giving her the place of honor and possibly giving up some money as well. - RBW
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