By Matthew Hough
There are many cases of musicians with homonymic names, including jazz performers Bill Evans (pianist, 1929-1980) and Bill Evans (saxophonist, 1958-), and composers John Adams and John Luther Adams. In the following paragraphs, I discuss musical examples by artists comprising three such pairs.
Nancy Wilson – “Guess Who I Saw Today” (1960)
The arrangement here works for me: no real solos and clearly defined instrumental roles, including the absence of the piano during the bridge (1:56-2:29). Wilson’s performance, particularly the memorable way she sings the cascading titular line at 1:01 and 2:31, is stunning.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Heart – “Stranded” (1990)
Nancy Wilson sings a powerful lead vocal on this track from Heart’s Brigade album (produced by Richie Zito, who also produced Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” and Bad English’s “When I See You Smile”). The chorus features one of the great uses of the I-V-ii-IV pattern, evoking the chorus of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” (with which “Stranded” shares the key of G major following the half step “pump-up” modulation at 2:55).
Click here to view the embedded video.
Patti Smith – “Free Money” (1975)
From her first album Horses (produced by John Cale of the original Velvet Undergound), this track features Smith’s distinctive mix of song and spoken word. I enjoy Smith’s vocalizations as well as the arrangement, which features a somewhat gradual buildup of instrumental forces. The accompaniment begins with piano; the bass and drums enter at 0:30 and rhythm guitars at 0:48. A double time feel begins at 1:01, followed by an uneasy, repeating eighth note gesture in the drums beginning at 1:33. Additional vocal tracks enter at 2:24 and a lead guitar comes in at 3:08.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Scandal – “Goodbye To You” (1982)
Featuring lead vocals by Patty Smyth, this song preceded Scandal’s bigger 1984 hit “The Warrior.” (Both became karaoke staples long ago.) The background vocals on this track are nicely placed in 1:18-1:31 and 2:48-2:56. The decision to elide Smyth’s voice with the synth lead beginning at 1:48 provides a smooth transition into the solo section, which ends with what are possibly my favorite two seconds of the song, from 2:19-2:21.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Jo Jones Trio – “When Your Lover Has Gone” (1958)
Also featuring Ray Bryant (piano) and Tommy Bryant (bass), this track features Jones’ uniquely colorful cymbal playing. I especially enjoy Jones’ contribution during the last chorus, beginning at 2:32.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Sonny Clark Trio – “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” (1957)
With “Philly” Joe Jones (drums) and Paul Chambers (bass). Jones is in top form here with pianist Sonny Clark and frequent rhythm section mate Paul Chambers. The group’s interplay during Chambers’ solo (2:31-3:21) is particularly engaging, as Jones and Clark create a subtle interplay within the accompaniment.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Have you ever confused musicians or artists with similar names? Tell us about it in the comments below!
A version of this article originally appeared on Music! Musical Musings from Matthew Hough.
Matthew Hough is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His music can be heard on Original Abstractions and is published by Hough House. He is also a Grove Music Online contributor. You can follow him on Twitter at @houghmatthew. He is a contributor to Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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Cat Tale
By Michael Hall
Greenwillow (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-191516-1
Ages 6-10
On shelves August 28th
When we are old and gray and the stars gleam a little less brightly in the wide firmament above our heads, I have no doubt that there will STILL be children’s librarians out there debating the merits (or lack thereof) of picture books designed with older child readers in mind. To bring this subject up is akin to throwing a lit match on diesel soaked tinder, but what the heck. You see, walk into any decent library and you’ll find a picture book section teaming with fantastic 32-48 page titles that simply do not circulate. And why? Because of the standard belief, sometimes by children, sometimes by adults, that when you reach a certain age you “outgrow” picture books. As if they were a pair of shoes liable to give you blisters if you kept them around too long. This is, naturally, bupkis. Picture books are appropriate for all ages, really (and if you don’t believe me why don’t I just introduce you to a little number I know called The Woolvs in the Sitee). So the fact that a book like Michael Hall’s Cat Tale exists pleases on both the 6-year-old level as well as the 10-year-old level should surprise few. Wielding homonyms like weapons, Hall brings his artistic sensibilities (to say nothing of his love of controlled chaos) to the wordplay realm and the end result is that everyone’s a winner for it.
Meet Lillian, Tilly and William J. Three little cats that are out for a day. In rhyming verse we watch as at first their adventures are small. “They pack some books and kitty chews. They chose a spot. They spot some ewes.” As the book continues they cats become more adventuresome. “They train a duck to duck a shoe. They shoo a truly naughty gnu.” Yet the words begin to get tangled and the cats are in a state. Should they use a rock to squash a berry or use a squash to bury a rock or (after a pause) use their paws to rock a squashberry? Finally everything gets too crazy and the cats find their way out thanks to their tails/tales.
Like many people, when I think of homonyms in works of children’s literature my mind instantly leaps to good old Amelia Bedelia. She continues to reign as the homonym queen to this day. After all, without them she wouldn’t get confused in the slightest. Hall could have done a storyline very much like Amelia’s. The cats could have just wandered about and gotten confused about the difference between boarding a plane and getting to plane a board. Ho and also hum. Instead, Hall takes a risk. He actually connects the sentences and uses his illustrations to make seemingly disparate phrases relate to one another. Now the text reads, “They flee a steer. They steer a plane. They plane a board. They board a train.” All this makes sense in the book since we see the progression from place to place. Note too that just to ratchet up the challenge a little, Hall is making this book rhyme on top of everything else. That’s sort of explained on the title page (Hall wastes no time) where it reads, “From word to word they find their way, Lillian, Tilly, and William J.” Interesting that Hall went with “Lillian” rather than “Lily” since “Lily and Tilly and William J.” has its own nice rhythm. There’s no denying how satisfying it is to begin with a Lillian and end with a William, though. Even if they don’t rhyme precisely.
When Hall wrote his previous book The Perfect Square there was wit on display but it seemed to be mostly of the visual variety. Cat Tale doles out the wit a little more on the verbal end of the spectrum, but there’s no denying that the art is also just great. As with the aforementioned Perfect Square Hall’s art consists of acrylic painted textures and paper cutouts that were combined digitally. Not that you can tell where the computer came in or how it was used. The colors in this book don’t have that faux clip-art coloring so often found in slapdash computer art. Instead it looks like Hall took out his sponge and his brightest hues and created something truly lovely. From the vibrant orange of the train to the deep and satisfying blue of the steer, there’s a method to Hall’s madness. A beautiful sumptuous method.
There is admittedly one moment in the book where I got seriously confused, so I wonder how it’ll fly with the pre-adolescent set. To be fair, that’s sort of the whole point of the spread. As the cats go along the homonyms gets crazier and crazier until there’s a virtual explosion of cats, steer, gnus, ducks, cars, shoes, ewes, you name it. The trouble is that I couldn’t make the mental leap from that image to the next one involving the cats’ tails. I know it makes sense on a practical level, but I felt like the transition was a bit too rough. Something a bit slower, a bit more staid, could have suited the storyline a little better.
I know a librarian who uses older picture books for her 2-3rd grade parent/child bookclub. It’s as good a solution as any I know to get those book circulating, that’s for sure. Of course, my dearest hope is that teachers discover this book as well. With the rise of interest in the Core Curriculum, folks need to remember that teaching homonyms doesn’t have to be rote and dull as dishwater. It can involve naughty gnus and rocked squashberries! A visual feast and too clever by half, Hall’s latest begs to be read aloud and pored over. A little book that deserves all the attention it can receive. Teachers, parents, librarians, and booksellers, take note.
On shelves August 28th.
Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.
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By Anatoly Liberman
Long ago I wrote a column with the title “Tit for Tat.” Engl. tip for tap also existed at one time. Words like tip, tap, top, tick, tack, tock, tit, tat, tot, as well as those with voiced endings like tid- (compare tidbit), tad, and tod (“bush; fox”), are ideal candidates for sound imitative coinages. One of the Swedish calls to hens is tup-tup-tuppa (tup “rooster”). The Russian for “knock-knock” is took-took-took, whereas top-top means “thump-thump.” The symbolic value of such words is equally obvious. Tip and tit designate small objects, while the things called tap and tat must be big. All this is perfectly clear. But an etymologist is expected to provide more than a bird’s eye of the origin of every word, and this is where the Devil, whose favorite abode is the details, shows his ugly head, horns and all. For example, tup is “rooster” in Swedish but “uncastrated ram” in English (whence the verb tup “to copulate,” memorable from Othello). Are we dealing with an ancient, undifferentiated name for a male animal that acquired one meaning in Swedish and another in English or with a sound complex applied to the rooster and the ram by chance? Was the idea of copulation foremost in the minds of those animal breeders who dealt with mammals and fowl (after all, tup is as expressive and energetic as our beloved F-word, and rooster is merely a polite substitute for cock). These and many similar questions are hard to answer, mainly because the list of the nouns and verbs to be explored has vague contours. Tit ~ tat ~ tot remind us of tut-tut, which in turn resembles dud. The so-called nasalized variants also suggest themselves: dimp(le), dump, thump, tumble, and a host of others. They multiply like maggots, have partly overlapping meanings, pretend to be related, but refuse to divulge their pedigree.
Another aggravating factor is the rampant homonymy among such words. First comes tip “a pointed end” (alongside the verb to tip, as in Chaucer’s tipped with horn). It is supposed to have reached England from Scandinavia, for its ancestor did not turn up in Old English. The Old Icelandic form was typpi, evidently from tuppi “top.” It is nice to know that when you look at tip long enough, you discover top. Northern (or Low) German also had tip, but this form, like its English equivalent, was recorded late, so that we cannot judge to what extent (if at all) it enjoyed popularity in England and interacted with the Scandinavian form. Thus, tip is top. Next we notice the verb tip, whose original meaning was “to pat,” and realize that tip is also tap (anyway, tap is simply pat read from right to left). This verb had a strange history. It surfaced in a most respectable 13th century book, then disappeared for 400 years, reemerged in thieves’ cant, and stayed in honest people’s usage with the sense “to strike lightly,” as in the following sentence from Swift (cited in The Century Dictionary; Swift detested the newfangled monosyllabic slang of his time): “A third rogue tips me by the elbow.” Perhaps it is the same verb as in tipped with horn (tap “touch with a point”?), but there is no knowing.
Tip also means “overturn” (a tip-cart in British English corresponds to the American dump truck), and it too may be of Scandinavian descent. But it emerged in texts so late (in the 17th century) that its “prehistory” is beyond reconstruction. In close proximity to tip we find tipple and tipsy. Tippler seems to have preceded tipple. If such is the order of these words’ appearance in language and not only in our texts, then the verb is a back formation from the noun (like beg from beggar and sculpt from sculptor). Presumably, a tipsy person is unsteady on his legs (in this delicate situation, we will not say his or her and avoid using their). The suffix -sy is not productive, even though it occurs in a few adjectives, such as topsy-turvy, and deceptively in clumsy, flimsy, and so forth. The circumstances in which tipsy sprang up remain unclear, especially because a tipsy person, unlike somebody who is three sheets in the wind, cannot serve as the embodiment of unsteadiness. Regional Norwegian has tippa “drink in small quantities” and tipla “drink slowly.” Verbs with the suffix -le (they tend to refer to recurring action) are called frequentative. In English, babble, cackle, and the like are usually of northern German or Dutch origin. In the Scandinavian languages, such formations exist too; however, some frequentative verbs are probably native English (thus, gobble seems to be from gob). Be that as it may be, tipla is a frequentative extension of tippa. A tippler sips liquor, that is, indulges in what is called tippa. (I wish we had the noun sippler.) The idea of smallness is unmistakable in tippa, but the connection with tipping and tapping is not. Tap “faucet” provides no help, for its basic meaning is “plug.”
The most interesting part of the story is the origin of tip “to give advice” and tip “gratuity.” In principle, it is not too difficult to derive tip “advise in a small way” from tip “touch,” and tip “gratuity” from “thing ‘tipped’ into a hand.” For Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary appeared in 1755, tip “give” was “a low word.” Colloquial and slangy phrases with the verb tip were frequent, and some of them are still around: “tip me your daddle or flipper” (hand), “tip me a hog” (shilling), “tip him a wink” (advice), “tip the traveler” (humbug a guest at an inn with travelers’ yarns), “tip the double” (decamp),“tip the grampus” (an old seafaring phrase: “duck a skulker for being asleep on his watch”), “tip a stave” (sing), “tip one’s rags a gallop” (run away; thieves’ slang), to mention a few. It is the predominantly “low” sphere in which this meaning of the verb tip flourished and a sudden explosion of its use in the second half of the 16th century that make the idea of a straight line from tip “touch, tap; turn over” to tip “give” suspect. One wonders whether we have to look for a missing link in northern German slang. German etymological dictionaries are cautious. In the entries on the cognates of tip, tap, and top, we read that the origin of those words is unknown or known insufficiently.
Given the verb tip “provide” (almost anything from money to information), tip “gratuity” constitutes no problem. More often verbs are formed from nouns, but occasionally the process goes in the opposite direction. Two other etymologies of the noun sound improbable. One connects tip with stipend, that is, stip or stips, minus initial s. The other goes back to the following story (I quote from Leo Pap’s 1982 article): “One day at the Cheshire Cheese tavern in London’s Fleet Street—that famous hangout of Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Boswell, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and some other men of letters who had constituted themselves into a Literary Club—a waiter hung a small wooden money box onto the wall near the dining room entrance. On this box, which evidently was in imitation of the receptacles customarily displayed in private houses at Christmas and on visiting days during the year, for donations which the servant staff expected from guests or from the master’s own family—on the box the waiter painted the words TO INSURE PROMPTNESS. The idea, of course, was that entering guests who wanted to be assured of speedy service might do well to drop a tinkling little penny or halfpenny in the box, so as to shoot some joyful energy into the servitor’s tired legs. Similar collection boxes went up in other coffeehouses and hostelries in town; and soon the motto on the box could safely be reduced to the mere initials, T.I.P. Before long, the T.I.P box was commonly referred to as the tip box, whence tip.” Although Pap doubts that the story was “fabricated out of whole cloth,” he does not believe that this is how the word tip came into being. It is indeed a cock and bull story, good enough only to “tip a traveler.” In my experience, all etymologies that refer to common words as acronyms (F.U.C.K. and its ilk) are wrong. Apparently, tip as everybody understood in the days of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds, was “decoded” into T.I.P. and “glossed” as to insure promptness.
There is one more hitch in the etymology of tip. In several European languages, a gratuity of this sort goes under the name of drink money (German Trinkgeld, French pourboire, etc.), with the intimation that the servitor will drink it up. Engl. tip “a draught of liquor” has been recorded (and let us not forget tippler and tipsy). It is possible but not very probable that two factors contributed to the rise of tip “gratuity”: the money could have been “tipped” into the waiter’s hand, and he could have used it to drink the giver’s health. Ever since the word struck root in the language, waiters have been tapping their patrons’ pockets, and patrons have been tipping waiters. We have perfected the system: add 10%, add 15%, or eat free but give (tip) a “donation.”
Anatoly Liberman is the author of
Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins,
The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to
[email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
You get us excited about homonyms and then want the book to be pored over. This can bring nothing but (soggy) trouble.
I wish I could say I got that but it took me a good three minutes. Well played, ma.
This sounds like just the sort of book I like to take along for school visits. I’ll be looking for it.
Put straight on my wish list! My eldest *delights* in homonyms and making jokes out of them so I can see one happy 7 year old on the horizon.
In our public library we have a sign over our Picture book section that says “Everybody Books”. This term was recommended by a 3rd grade teacher from our local public school and I have to say I like it. Whether or not it has increased our circulation in that area I cannot say, but I hope it has encouraged readers of all ages to browse the picture book collection.