The Private Canon: "Two Little Boys"

This post is part of a series.
I'm at an age when I've apparently stored up enough associations and memories that I can easily bust out crying at songs that aren't sad at all—the title song of Singin' in the Rain, to give an easy example, or Radiohead's "Airbag," or Tom T. Hall's "I Love."

But there are some tearjerkers that have always worked on me exactly as intended, and I can't shake their power no matter how often I hear them: Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," say, or the "Chava Ballet Sequence" from Fiddler, or Springsteen's "My Father's House" (not to mention two other tunes I considered while writing this post, that led me to give them their own due in the past few days).

One that I still face with trepidation is "Two Little Boys," whose grab for the heartstrings is about as subtle as a silent film melodrama, but which, in a rendition by Yorkshire's Deighton Family I first heard on a folk/country/roots sampler, always gets its hooks in me ruthlessly. I'm not sure how to itemize its tearduct-disabling arsenal; it could be the scratchy, avuncular lead vocals of dad Dave, churning away on his organ-grinder melodeon with the impassive determination of a street performer who happens to have gathered a full band around him, or the faintly Lilliputian trot of the band arrangement, which gives the whole thing a kind of delicate but stately storybook pathos—though if I had to pinpoint one musical ace in the hole, it would be the keening Irish flute of daughter Maya, tootling plaintively over the top throughout.

It's possible, though, that I'm just a sucker for the hoary, sentimental tale at the song's center, which the Deightons happen to pull off with unfakeable sincerity. It couldn't be simpler: The boys of the title play soldiers on wooden horses, and when one's horse breaks, the other boy selflessly, cheerfully welcomes his friend onto his own with these words:

You think I could leave you crying
When there's room on my horse for you?
Climb up here, Joe, and stop your crying
It'll go just as fast with two

Then the song helpfully tells us exactly where it's going. The hero says:

When we grow up we'll both be soldiers
Our horses will not be toys
Then maybe you will remember
When we were two little boys

And before we know it there we are, after "long years had past," on a battlefield, and Joe is lying wounded when he hears a familiar voice:

You think I could leave you dying
When there's room on my horse for you?
Climb up here, Joe, and we'll soon be flying
To the ranks of boys in blue

All right, all right, cheap theatrics, you might justly say. We intuitively know what's coming—a mirror of the first "maybe you will remember" with an "I do remember." What puts it over for me, I think, is a bit of stoic indirection, a la "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which never quite comes out and states the obvious, "I'm crying over here!" If I'm on the edge of my seat with "leave you dying," it's the final four lines of "Two Little Boys" that gut me:

Can't you see that I'm all a-tremble?
It may be the flash and the noise
Or maybe because I remember
When we were two little boys

The Deightons twist the knife further by repeating those last two lines three times. I'm a wreck by the end of it, it never fails.

Though the song sounds as timeless as a folk song, it's actually music hall tune from 1902, and its central story is variously attributed to Juliana Horatio Ewing's children's book Jackanapes and a true story from the Boer War. It became a No. 1 hit in 1969 for the singer Rolf Harris, heard by Vietnam War-era audiences as an anti-war song. I really can't stand this version, honestly:

Its sickly sweetness is probably what inspired this unhinged punk rendition by Splodgenessabounds, in which the climactic battlefield trembling looks a lot more like shellshock than nostalgia:

This early 1900s version is a lot closer to what the Deightons will later do with it, though it's still got a few cutesy music hall harmonies that to my ear only point up the song's twee artifice:

There's one other edge the Deightons have over the older versions, and it's so small it may be hard to catch, but I'd argue it's crucial. In the original song, both boys are named, because, crucially, they trade roles in the drama. In Billy Murray's rendition, Joe is the distraught little boy and Jack the fallen solider, and in Rolf Harris's it's the reverse—Jack cries, Joe dies. This means there's a tidy element of payback to the song: Joe rescues Jack as a boy, and Jack does the same for Joe later when it really counts.

But Dave Deighton sings "Climb up here, Joe," in both chapters of the tale (so do Splodgenessabounds, interestingly). This subtle but seismic change means that an unnamed rescuer saves Joe in both cases. And what the song loses in neat brotherly symmetry, it gains in this rueful rhyming repetition: first as horseplay, then as tragedy. Indeed, the fact that the rescuer is unnamed and is the only one who speaks in the lyric makes it more firmly his song. It is almost as if his boastful admonition to young Joe in the first half, "Maybe you will remember," comes back to haunt him in the second half—for now it is he who is fated to remember their childhood bond as his friend slips away.

Can't you see why I'm all a-tremble?

Here's a sweet, companionable live version, recorded a year before the fiddler at the far left, Kathleen Deighton, died of cancer.