Speranza
"Aura Lee" is a Civil War song about a maiden.
It was
written by W. W. Fosdick and composed by George R. Poulton in 1861.
Aura Lea, Aura Lea,
Maid with golden hair;
Sunshine came along with thee,
And swallows in the air.
When the blackbird in
the Spring,
'On the willow tree,
Sat and rocked, I heard him
sing,
Singing Aura Lea.
In thy blush the rose was born,
Music,
when you spake,
Through thine azure eye the morn,
Sparkling seemed to
break.
Aura Lea, Aura Lea,
Birds of crimson wing,
Never song have sung
to me,
As in that sweet spring.
Aura Lea! the bird may
flee,
The willow's golden hair
Swing through winter fitfully,
On the
stormy air.
Yet if thy blue eyes I see,
Gloom will soon depart;
For to
me, sweet Aura Lea
Is sunshine through the heart.
When the
mistletoe was green,
Midst the winter's snows,
Sunshine in thy face was
seen,
Kissing lips of rose.
Aura Lea, Aura Lea,
Take my golden
ring;
Love and light return with thee,
And swallows with the spring.
"Aura
Lee" was memorably sung by Frances Farmer and a male chorus in the 1936 film
Come and Get It, based on Edna Ferber's novel.
Diana Muldaur sings the song
to David Carradine in the episode "The Elixir" of Kung Fu.
The Elvis Presley
song "Love Me Tender" (lyric by Ken Darby) is a derivative adaptation of this
song.
A later Presley recording for the film The Trouble with Girls entitled
"Violet (Flower of N.Y.U.)" also used the melody of "Aura Lea".
The
television cavalry comedy F Troop used a variation of the song to welcome saloon
singer Laura Lee in the episode "She's Only a Build in a Girdled Cage" (cf.
"She's only a bird in a gilded cage").
The television western The Young
Riders used the song in its series finale, which took place in 1861 and showed
how the American Civil War was affecting its characters' lives.
There is also
a version of "Aura Lea" called "Army Blue" associated with the U.S. Military
Academy.
In "Army Blue," lyrics specific to the academy, written by George T.
Olmstead, an 1865 graduate of the academy, are sung to the original melody.
It
is the running theme music in the background of the 1954 John Ford film The Long
Gray Line.
Allan Sherman topicalized the song with this polio-based
version:
Every time you take vaccine
take it Aura Lea (Gricean pun on
"orally")
As you know the other way is more painfully!"
The 1983 film "Trading Places" includes Ivy League stockbrokers at
their racquet club singing a sexualized parody of this song about their college
days and their fraternity's conquest of various women on locations at campus,
with the refrain changed to "Constance Frye."
The television show How I Met
Your Mother 2009 episode (season 5 episode 22) "Robots Versus Wrestlers",
features Ted Mosby at an upper-class party singing the Trading Places Constance
Fry version along with film director Peter Bogdanovich and New York Times
crossword editor Will Shortz.
Categories:
American folk songs
Songs of the American Civil
War
Folk song stubs
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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