Internal rhyme in ‘The Boy with a Moon and Star on His Head’, Cat Stevens, 1972

Abstract

The Boy with a Moon and Star on His Head' was written and recorded by Cat Stevens in 1972. This paper briefly examines the song's subject matter, before analysing its musical structure and that of the words to the song. As well as the standard pattern of end rhyme, a pattern of internal rhyme is also analysed, using tools derived from literary analysis. The words to the song are transcribed by a method which mediates between transcription of the words that make it look like a poem and the words as they appear in sheet music. Finally, the song's pattern of internal rhyme is placed into a context that includes songs as well as poems, suggesting that the song is an exception that suggests a rule for words in the singer-song at the time of the song's appearance.In 1972 Robert Christgau reviewed the album Catch Bull at Four by Cat Stevens, devoting his review, entirely and unusually, to a single song, the second of 10 songs divided equally between the record's two vinyl sides:Reading the lyric of 'The Boy with the Moon and Star on His Head', I was impressed by how unpretentiously it simulated early English poetry. But when I listeneda widely recommended method for that perception of songs -I noticed affectations like 'the naked earth beneath us and the universe above', and winced at the next-to-last couplet, which ends with a weak word for the sake of a weak rhyme. Then I browsed in Norman Ault's [1928] anthology of Elizabethan lyrics. Forget it, Cat. C 1 Popular Music (2012) Volume 31/3.

Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition

“…Despite these and many other comments from musicians, scholars of poetry seem far more willing to discuss these links than musicologists, certainly judging by the number of books about poetry that include discussion of song lyrics when compared to the way musicologists tend to downplay lyrics. Dai Griffiths is one of the few musicologists to draw on theories and philosophies of poetry when writing about music (Griffiths 2003, 2012, 2013), emphasising the importance of understanding how lyrics occupy the verbal space of the song, and proposing different ways of transcribing lyrics as prose or paragraph, using varied font sizes and a ‘hard right margin’ in addition to the hard left margin used in the presentation of poetry. For all the richness of Griffiths's musicological detail, for us his transcriptions offer key insights into the way song lyrics encapsulate a song's architectural structure.…”

“…Musicologists of the popular song have tended to address these questions by offering interpretations derived from intense personal listening to recordings. The writings of Richard Middleton (1990, 2000), Allan Moore (2012), Philip Tagg (1991), Susan McClary (1991), Dai Griffiths (2003, 2012), Sheila Whiteley (1992) and David Brackett (2000), to name some of the most significant, is dominated by the method of critical listening. Although occasionally highlighting how a song or style might articulate forms of inequality (class and gender divisions, attitudes to sexuality, pejorative musical expressions of various demonised ‘others’), such arguments have rarely been informed by ‘source studies’ of the practices of songwriters, musicians and composers, as has been the case in the tradition of Western art music, jazz scholarship or studies of the Great American Songbook where exploration of creative practices have been more prevalent (see, for example, Furia 1992; Friedwald 2002).…”