Let the Mermaids Sing

Click the play button to listen to the song!

Thank you for being here! I hope you enjoy this song. It’s one of my favorite dream songs. If you touch the heart or leave a comment, I’ll know you’re out there reading and listening, and that makes my heart go boom, boom, boom!

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When I write a song, I, of course, want to write a really good one – which for me is one that I want to sing and sing again and sing for others. But, putting that aside, I also want to write about something that my mind just won’t let go of – sometimes for years. For instance, for years now I’ve been trying to write about my Cherokee ancestry and my great great grandmother Sarah.

In the last year, I’ve made several singing drafts of a song about Mawmaw. I love making singing drafts where I sing lyrics and a melody I’ve made up on the spot into my voice recorder and see where the song goes. My song “Seventeen of My Own” about my Aunt Laura began this way.

I skirt around songs looking for signs in church sermons, old photographs, census reports, and in my own memories of Appalachia. This is a little dance I do in my head with a story that’s really dear to me.

That’s all going on in the background of my daily life of laundry, museum visits, writing articles, and brushing my teeth. And then I walk into an antique shop, see a collection of objects, and a song jumps the line. It just insists on being written immediately and it doesn’t care that other ideas were in line first.

That’s what happened when I wrote “Let The Mermaids Sing” while I was visiting my friends Sarah and Alfred in York several years ago. They used to live around the corner from a vintage shop called Greybear. I had a history with that shop. Alfred and I had seen a tin rocking horse there that I wanted to buy for Sarah but it was super expensive. So, Alfred, Billy Kemp, and I wrote a song about the tin horse and the boat in Sarah’s bathroom, and more. It’s called “Guaranteed to Sail” and you can hear it on my Heart of the Mountain record.

My second Greybear-inspired song came from when I saw two china figurines (which I now own (of course) with no legs who were meant to be sewn to pincushion skirts. They’d lost their pincushion skirts and were simply swimming in a bowl.

The shop had mermaid bookends, a bear on a wheeled cart, cabbage and asparagus-shaped bowls, ceramic rabbits and sheep, a glove-maker’s hand, a phrenologist’s head, and tiny pink boxes holding old filmstrips of Paris. And, most intriguingly, I saw, for the first time ever, a vintage Oliver butterfly typewriter with hexagonal keys. This shop was like the inside of my brain!

When I went to sleep that night, I dreamed the words to a song involving all of these objects and I quickly wrote the lyrics down in the middle of the night. After breakfast, I shared the lyrics with Alfred and then I went out to do whatever it was I had planned to do in York. That afternoon, he played me a melody he’d written to go with my words. We got to work on refining the lyrics and melody together and we had a song.

Then lockdown happened. After people were able to gather again, we performed the song for the one and only time at the Bromborough Folk Club on the Wirral near Liverpool. And even though our performance is a bit over-excited in tempo and imperfect, I’m sharing it with you because I just love this song so much. I think you can hear how much we enjoyed singing it.

I love the idea that all of the objects in the antique shop had a story and were quietly living out their own theater. It takes me back to childhood and creating stories with Barbie, Raggedy Ann, my sister’s He-Man collection, Tinker Toys, and household things like tea-cups, handkerchiefs, and a vegetable steamer (makes a great spaceship).

You’ll find the lyrics below and I hope you enjoy this peek into the drama of the antique shop residents!1

Last weekend, I had a dream-come-true event where I transformed myself into a doll doctor at Porter Flea Summer Market! My heart leapt every time someone came up and adopted a bear or a doll who I’d saved from landfill. A woman even brought her Bitty-Baby whose leg had been pulled off. Now, she can pass her childhood doll down to her own four-year-old daughter. Happiness! And Saturday the 13th was World Doll Day, so how fitting.

I’ll be having a free doll & bear repair day2 at the Factory in Franklin on Saturday, July 18th, thanks to my friends at Experimart where I’m an artist in residence this summer. I’ll also have rescue bears (plus other species) and dolls who I’ve washed and mended ready for adoption. Noon to five. See you there!

Here are some photos from my weekend as a doll doctor. I still can’t get over it! You can read about my doll and bear repair service here.

That’s all the news from me for now. Thank you for traveling with me into the antique shop in York and over to the doll hospital in Nashville.

Your friend,

Jeni

P.S. If you’re in Nashville and you’re a knitter, you would love the monthly knitting gathering at Modern Daily Knitting headquarters. The next meet-up is on Sunday, July 26th from 3-5 pm. Last time, some of us even brought bears, American Girl Dolls, and Tiny Tears in need of TLC. I actually did some knitting, too!

Let The Mermaids Sing
Two mermaids lean with purpose
against ancient nautical texts –
their cast iron fishy figures
alluring to the bearded sex.
Two torsos swim in a dish
waiting for night to descend
to view the films of Paris
and dream of lower limbs.
Won’t you send my love a letter?
Tell her to come home please.
Tell her I wrote it specially
on a typewriter with hexagonal keys.
Roll my letter up in paper,
tie it with some string,
put it in a bottle,
and let the mermaids sing.
Tra-la la-la la
The rabbit dines on cabbage
eyeing the asparagus plate.
He’s wary of the nearby sheep
whose appetite grows great.
The grey bear acts as lookout
from the top of his linen press,
scouting likely suitors
in the Micklegate address.
The palmist’s hand says nothing,
resents the phrenologist’s head,
disagrees with the latest assessment
of how the man was read.
Let us greet him first
the crafty mermaids plea.
If we doubt his character
we’ll roll him all up in the sea.
Written by Jeni Hankins and Alfred John Hickling
World premier recorded LIVE at Bromborough Folk Club, The Wirral
by Dave Burrows
February 19, 2020
Jeni Hankins – Vocals
Alfred Hickling – Vocals and Guitar