There are few celebrities one does not weary of. David Mitchell, the comedian, is one; Cerys Matthews, the former singer in Catatonia, is another. (I can’t think of any others. Cricketer Andrew Flintoff, perhaps?) Hook, Line and Singer, when it appeared in hardback, was a top 10 bestseller, according to Penguin, and unless they are sneakily hiding some relevant words like “in the Sheet Music charts”, then a degree of author’s fame would appear to have been one of the factors that propelled it into the big league.
But the other is its sheer charm and simplicity. The subtitle says it all; and the book is the perfect enactment of the idea. I don’t really see how it could have been done better, except perhaps if Matthews had pointed out that “O Christmas Tree” has the same tune as “The Red Flag”. (And, as a flitter through Wikipedia informs me, the state songs of Florida, Maryland, Michigan and Iowa, too.)
So this is how it goes: the book, large enough and bound cunningly to fit on a music stand without its spine breaking, has on the right hand side of its pages the music (treble clef melody line only) and lyrics, and on the left a short note by Matthews that tells us a bit about the song, or her life, most often her childhood, or both. Most of the songs are to be sung to, and then with and by children. Her introduction begins with a memory of driving in Pembrokeshire in 1973, when she would have been about four years old. A sow, being pulled in an open trailer by a tractor in front of the car she was in, jumped out, broke its leg and hobbled off with the farmer in pursuit. The family’s instant reaction? To start singing “Mochyn Du”, or “Black Pig” – which is about, as the accompanying note explains, a dead pig.
Other childhood songs here include “Hickory, Dickory, Dock”. I thought there wasn’t much to say about this, but Matthews reminds us that in the ancient shepherds’ counting system of Westmoreland, the words for eight, nine and 10 are “hevera”, “devera” and “dick”. There are also songs without music: “Round and Round the Garden”, “This Little Piggy”. They deserve inclusion because they are spoken in very particular ways; they are at the tidal point, as it were, where speech becomes music.
This is just one of the ways the book is more instructive than it might look at first sight. And while the songs may be familiar, they are not wholly so: I didn’t know the full, sad story of “My Old Man Said Follow the Van” – I thought it was just a jolly Cockney knees-up. In fact, it’s about eviction and loss, both literal and metaphorical: the loss of childhood due to poverty. I didn’t realise “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” was composed as late as 1971, and I didn’t know that Matthews’s sister lost all her teeth in a childhood accident and that Cerys coveted her dentures. Irrelevant? Maybe. Bizarre and yet strangely charming? Yes.
There is, then, a very broad range to Hook, Line and Singer: the songs span centuries and cover the globe. Matthews’s talent for languages means she is not afraid to give us songs from other countries: “Alouette”, “Fhir a’ bháta”, “Cielito lindo”, “On Top of Old Smokey” (there are lots of American songs). There’s something so wide-ranging, so generous and so democratic about this collection that although there must be plenty, I can’t think of a song that should be in here but isn’t. Even the title, once you think about it for a second, isn’t as irritating as it initially seems.
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