The Wishing Wife, and a Dog’s Life

The neat thing about Pandora is that I hear songs I would never have heard otherwise. The weird thing about Pandora is that some of those songs are…odd.

When Joseph Susanka brought Julie Fowlis to my attention and I added her to my Irish Traditional station (yeah, OK, she’s Scottish. Deal.) a number of other voices came with here, and one of them was Kate Rusby. I’m not that familiar with Rusby’s work, but she has a soft melancholy voice and seems to mostly sing soft, melancholy songs. Consequently, I was surprised to hear the following tune, which is cheerful and upbeat in a soft, melancholy sort of way:

I heard it a couple of times, and the words began to register; and I began to pay attention. And see, here’s the deal. It’s about a woman whose husband is a real piece of work, a spoiled, rude, greedy, selfish, Philistine with no positive traits to be seen. She finds a wishing well, and wishes to the powers that be that her husband would be (in successive verses) small, kind, and smiling.

And the next morning she wakes up and is filled with joy to find—well, heck, here’s the verse:

That night they fell asleep within the comfort of that bed
A strange wind was whispering just what the wife had said
In the morning where the man had laid
there was a dog instead
and his wife cried for joy in the morning!

Yep; she wished for her husband to become a dog, and it’s just exactly what she wanted.

“Humph!” says the husband. “Humph!” A bad husband is a pain, but a good husband is way better than a dog.

I’d pass this off as merely a goofy song if I weren’t hearing about so many people here in California who seem to be getting dogs and cats instead of having children.

It’s pleasant to listen to, though, if you don’t think too hard.