Acres, folks, acres. Diamonds and dildos got covered in my 8/26 posting “Acres of dildos”. Then from Wendy Thrash on Facebook the next day, more acres that I probably should have talked about in the first place. WT wrote:
Sorry, but as an old Seattleite this forces me to think of Acres of Clams
and referred to a Folk Music Blog posting, “The Songs of Ivar Haglund” by Jacqui Sandor on 5/28/19. I was just going to post WT’s note as a comment on my posting here, but then it occurred to me that “Acres of Clams” might not be familiar to everyone, and even if you know about the folk song (a text climaxing in acres of clams, set to an old Irish jig tune), the note might not have transported your imagination to Seattle, or, indeed, to Ivar Haglund. It might just have been baffling.
So now I will take you into a gigantic morass of the folk song world — in which, however, shines the canonical “Acres of Clams” text, which ends up being about Puget Sound (where Seattle is located), where clams abound, and where there’s a seafood restaurant founded by folksinger Ivar Haglund named Ivar’s Acres of Clams. You see, it does hang together. (And, despite the previous dildos, the clams in question are — surprise! — not lady-parts, but edible bivalves.)
The morass is a consequence of the fact that an extraordinary number of texts have been set to that same jig tune — possibly more than to any other folk tune — and then both the tune and all those texts have been popularly known by names that are phrases from the texts (you’ll see a small sampling of these names in a moment). Even the canonical clam text (from about 150 years ago) is so popular that virtually every folksinger who performs it alters the text to fit their own interests, passions, aims, and politics.
To set the stage, from the HistoryLink site:
(#1) From “Ivar Haglund opens Ivar’s Acres of Clams at Pier 54 in July 1946” by David Wilma on 6/19/00
(more…)
