Monday, February 20, 2017

The Vipers Skiffle Group's "If I Had a Hammer"

A couple weeks ago, I listened to a two-disc compilation album of the Vipers Skiffle Group, and I noticed something about the line "All over this land" that ends each verse of "If I Had a Hammer."  I'm pretty sure it's:


"All" is sung to those first four notes.  There's a melisma (C C' A G), and the first two notes span an octave.  Those two features are a musical representation of the breadth that's in the lyric itself.  The singer/speaker "would ring out love" at all of those pitches in that octave.