Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I’ve sung folk music all my life, and the folk tradition of modifying music to fit the moment fertilized my transformative fandom tendencies.

sasha_feather posted about "Major Tom (coming home)" by Peter Schilling. She commented, "This song rules it's a fix-it fanfic." It was my introduction to the song, and it totally fixes the canon, David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

( canon and fix it on YouTube, with lyrics )

I was primed to delight in that song, because I’d snuck onto BlueSky for a minute (ha! 48 minutes) and found Annalee Flower Horne’s fabulous commentary on Donald Trump’s felony convictions, to the tune "How Can I Keep From Singing?" (This was good news old enough I risked exposure. Please don’t update me).

My life goes on in endless song
Above earth's pain and friction
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
That hails a new conviction.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear those verdicts ringing
They sound an echo in my feed—
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear
And hear the jury judge them
When friends rejoice both far and near
How could I dare begrudge them?
In bad hotel and golf course vile
Our words to him are ringing:
Your daddy never loved you dude,
You've never heard of winning

What though my faith in systems dies
The jury's truth, it liveth
What though he's still that fucking guy,
Three dozen counts, they giveth
No storm can shake my schadenfreude
While this I'm a capella'n:
Where e're he walks on God's Green Earth
That fucking guy's a felon

https://bsky.app/profile/flowerhorne.com/post/3ktqinod2i42z

To learn the melody, check out Rise Up and Sing’s Music Box entry. An extensive Mudcat.org discussion shows the fuzzy history of the original lyrics and subsequent modifications. (Mudcat is the forum for the useful Digital Tradition Folk Song Database.)

Do you have any fixit songs you treasure? Is there a specific twist and tumble in the folk tradition that gives you joy?