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Authors: Greil Marcus
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removes his animal head to lead a fleet of ships. “And we sailed,” he repeats five times, “away from Denmark, way up to Caledonia.”
Caledonia is not just a misspelling of “Caldonia,” a number-one race music hit for Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five in 1945 and a blues standard ever after—even if, purposefully misspelling the name, Morrison recorded a happily delirious version of the tune and put it out as a single in 1974, with his band credited as the Caledonia Soul Express: “CALDONIA! CALDONIA!” he shouted, as so many had before him, “ WHAT MAKES YOUR BIG HEAD SO HARD! ” No, Morrison will explain if you ask, as he
explained to Jonathan Cott, “Caledonia used to be Scotland. This funny thing happened a long time ago—a lot of people from Northern Ireland went over to Scotland to settle, and vice versa. They changed spaces ... So a lot of people from Northern Ireland are of Scottish descent. And my name suggests that I am.” 4 But, Morrison would sometimes say, there was more to it than that. In the early seventies, as he tried to find a name for what he did, settling for a time on “Caledonia soul music,” he came upon the notion that finally the blues came not from Africa but from Scotland. The true source of the blues was in the border ballads and folk songs, from “The Cuckoo” to “Barbara Allen,” from “She Moves through the Fair” to “Nottamun Town,” that, carried by settlers from Britain to the Appalachians, made up the oldest, deepest, and most persistent American music there is—“Real American Music,” as Emma Bell Miles, an educated, middle-class city lady turned mountain woman, wrote in 1904 in Harper’s . Thus, Morrison might whisper, in a song or in an interview, he was always an American, just as, his ancestors sailing from Scandinavia to Scotland, he
was fated to become Irish. That here came from there, that there are no separations, that all parts of himself and his music are one. Picking up the notion from Morrison, Mark Knopfler might have caught it best by throwing it away. There’s a Scottish piper and highland drums in his 2000 “What It Is,” a heartbreakingly hard-boiled history lesson—when he bends the line “The ghost of Dirty Dick is still in search of Little Nell” against a thief-in-the-night fiddle part, it breaks my heart, anyway—and buried in Knopfler’s muttering is “the Caledonian blues.” When in 1970, at the heart of Moondance , the album that brought Morrison an audience that would stay with him, he let the words “Ere the bonnie boat was won / As we sailed into the mystic” float the music, this might have been what he meant.
The most remarkable aspect of this crackpot theory is that it might be true. Certainly that is how the Virginia novelist Sharyn McCrumb sees it. “The first Appalachian journey,” she writes, citing the geologist Kevin Dann’s 1988 study Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in the Americas , “was the one made by the mountains themselves.”
The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty
million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart, at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.
The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers. People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach
Caledonia is not just a misspelling of “Caldonia,” a number-one race music hit for Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five in 1945 and a blues standard ever after—even if, purposefully misspelling the name, Morrison recorded a happily delirious version of the tune and put it out as a single in 1974, with his band credited as the Caledonia Soul Express: “CALDONIA! CALDONIA!” he shouted, as so many had before him, “ WHAT MAKES YOUR BIG HEAD SO HARD! ” No, Morrison will explain if you ask, as he
explained to Jonathan Cott, “Caledonia used to be Scotland. This funny thing happened a long time ago—a lot of people from Northern Ireland went over to Scotland to settle, and vice versa. They changed spaces ... So a lot of people from Northern Ireland are of Scottish descent. And my name suggests that I am.” 4 But, Morrison would sometimes say, there was more to it than that. In the early seventies, as he tried to find a name for what he did, settling for a time on “Caledonia soul music,” he came upon the notion that finally the blues came not from Africa but from Scotland. The true source of the blues was in the border ballads and folk songs, from “The Cuckoo” to “Barbara Allen,” from “She Moves through the Fair” to “Nottamun Town,” that, carried by settlers from Britain to the Appalachians, made up the oldest, deepest, and most persistent American music there is—“Real American Music,” as Emma Bell Miles, an educated, middle-class city lady turned mountain woman, wrote in 1904 in Harper’s . Thus, Morrison might whisper, in a song or in an interview, he was always an American, just as, his ancestors sailing from Scandinavia to Scotland, he
was fated to become Irish. That here came from there, that there are no separations, that all parts of himself and his music are one. Picking up the notion from Morrison, Mark Knopfler might have caught it best by throwing it away. There’s a Scottish piper and highland drums in his 2000 “What It Is,” a heartbreakingly hard-boiled history lesson—when he bends the line “The ghost of Dirty Dick is still in search of Little Nell” against a thief-in-the-night fiddle part, it breaks my heart, anyway—and buried in Knopfler’s muttering is “the Caledonian blues.” When in 1970, at the heart of Moondance , the album that brought Morrison an audience that would stay with him, he let the words “Ere the bonnie boat was won / As we sailed into the mystic” float the music, this might have been what he meant.
The most remarkable aspect of this crackpot theory is that it might be true. Certainly that is how the Virginia novelist Sharyn McCrumb sees it. “The first Appalachian journey,” she writes, citing the geologist Kevin Dann’s 1988 study Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in the Americas , “was the one made by the mountains themselves.”
The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty
million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart, at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.
The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers. People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach
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