Song: “Ghost of John” by the Hound + the Fox, Forest Mountain Hymnal
Children’s folk songs and nursery rhymes are notoriously ghoulish and macabre. The one cited most often is “Ring Around the Rosie,” which is sometimes incorrectly thought to refer to the medieval Black Death (although it likely dates to the early 1800s). But there are plenty more to take its place! A notable entry is “Three Blind Mice,” about three treasonous Protestant revolutionaries that Bloody Mary burned at the stake. “Baa Baa Black Sheep” is the plea of a young shepherd burdened with a fourteenth-century king’s greedy wool tax. Then you have Humpty Dumpty irreparably falling off the ledge and the Rockabye Baby cradle dropping from the branches. It ain’t easy bein’ six, huh?
And yet out of this gruesome repertoire, one song stands head and shoulders above the rest for scaring small children absolutely shitless at night: “Ghost of John,” a charming four-part modal round about a decomposing corpse. In case you were eating glue that day in back of your second-grade music classroom, here are the lyrics:
Have you seen the ghost of John?
Long white bones with the skin all gone
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?
The origins of this song are pretty murky- it’s thought to have originated in Western Europe and migrated with early Appalachian settlers to the New World, where it was sung in the hills of Kentucky. But one thing we know for certain is that it’s old. It could date back to the Great Plague of London in 1665, the last major epidemic of bubonic plague, or possibly an even earlier time. Nobody’s one hundred percent sure where it came from. But we sure as hell know where it ended up: your elementary school music class textbook!
On its face, “Ghost of John” is a stunner- a gorgeous, haunting (haha) melody sung in plaintive rounds with sparse and eerie lyrics. It hasn’t received much attention as a serious folk song because it’s been relegated to the land of “Row Row Row Your Boat.” This piece is typically performed by large groups of sticky-fingered, off-key young’uns at Halloween assemblies wearing little Chewbacca costumes. For a long time, the only professionally recorded versions of “Ghost of John” were high-pitched, chiming singsongs on YouTube by children’s musicians.
Thankfully over the last decade, two husband-and-wife duos have given this spectral, chilling tune the treatment it deserves. The Fox + the Hound, a group covering traditional European and American early folk, layers their elaborate harmonies over a lush backdrop. Nashville’s Forest Mountain Hymnal adds a decidedly Blue Ridge twist with a spare banjo accompaniment. Both versions begin with solo verses before swirling into two-part modal rounds. They’re two quite different interpretations, but both worth a listen as part of the definitive revival of “Ghost of John.”
Just don’t play it for the kids.
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