How Good It Is

How Good It Is


112–Rhiannon

April 05, 2020

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Or, The Episode Where I Can't Speak Welsh.

There's an old Doonesbury strip (Aug 1977) where rock star Jimmy Thudpucker is sitting on Bob Dylan's porch, chatting with Dylan (who appears as a disembodied voice coming from inside the house), and they're discussing the fact that then-President Jimmy Carter has just called him, looking for a quote to use during his next presidential chat with the public. Apparently the President thinks very highly of Dylan, who doesn't necessarily agree with this assessment:

And there's a little bit of this with the Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac song "Rhiannon": Nicks saw the name in a book and was taken with it, so she began to write a song centered around the image that the name presented to her. In fact, she began a series of songs about the Rhiannon that she had in her head.

Later on, she discovered that Rhiannon was a Welsh goddess whose attributes dovetailed rather nicely with the character she'd envisioned in her head. So when the song became a hit, she began to attribute the song as being about "a Welsh witch" (I can barely type that--no wonder I had trouble saying it). But the fact is, she knew nothing about the Welsh mythology when she first wrote the song.

That doesn't take away from the overall quality of the song, but it does, at least a little bit, suck away some of the mystique that Nicks attached to it during the live performance, methinks.

Click here for a transcript of this episode.

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