Usually our entries are historical obscurities, but this verb is not yet in the formal lexicon, has only entered language via online circulation, yet has still inspired recent music and its definition harks back to great traditions. It appears to mean to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination, so for example, you could coddiwomple to the shops or into town.
Yet coddiwomple, while being comically evocative of style, seems to indicate a state of mind as much as being a verb, and could arguably have related meanings to words from other languages and origins. The Greek hodiphile is a noun meaning someone who loves to travel. Also from the Greek, peripatetic is a a person who spends all their time wandering, but this could also refer to a type of job – a travelling salesman, or a peripatetic nurse or teacher who visits patients in their homes or travels to different institutions. But with more carefree vagueness, the French flâneur means someone who strolls aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and the surroundings. And here are two from German: novaturient, an adjective meaning desirous to alter your life and the feeling that pushes you to travel; and resfeber – the restless race of the traveller’s heart before the journey begins, when anxiety and anticipation are tangled together.
Coddiwomple is certainly a comical, wonderfully sounding word, and has something of an onomatopoeic quality – aimless, carefree, eccentrically English. But what of musical examples?
The relatively recent band Coddiwomple, made up of Nicolas Lapourest (guitar), Olivier Mellano (guitar), and G.W. Sok created a fabulously offbeat album of narrative and unusual sounds, The Walk and Other Stories on the À Tant Rêver Du Roi label:
And here are two other new Coddiwomple songs from other sources:
“The spirit of the song beats down on everyone
Hold it close
Let it come undone, fall into its life.”
Then there’s Marxist Wisehearts’ song Coddiwomple (Together)
Or Nostalgia For The Light’s Coddiwomple:
Mariah Mennie and guitarist Nick Faller created this original work in collaboration with guitarist Luis Medina in Ottoway, Toronto:
And there’s even a compilation album, Coddiwomple Womping:
But to coddiwomple, at least as far as the meaning suggests is far from new, and the act it describes has been inspirational to songs from the nomadic, or itinerant lifestyle from medieval minstrels to Traveller and gypsy traditions to the great early songsters in America from the 1870s or bluesman in the early 1900s. Here are a few examples to show it in other forms.
Big Bill Broonzy’s Key to the Highway was recorded in 1940, capturing the wandering spirit:
I've got the key to the highway
Billed out and bound to go
I'm gonna leave here, runnin'
Because walkin' is most too slow
Blind Willie McTell, an extraorindary character, famous sang Travelin' Blues, capturing itinerancy on the railway line during the Depression era. Here’a great finger-picking later recording, previously profiled on Song of the Day:
So I'm goin' away, leavin' today
I'm gonna bring my baby back
If that eight wheel driver
Don't jump the railroad track
Mississippi John Hurt playing You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley has religious overtones, but also shows a restlessness that is probably not carefree at all:
Inspired by these artists and more, let’s also have some Woodie Guthrie with I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore, again another itinerant dustbowl Depression-era song:
I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roamin' 'round
Just a wandrin' worker, I go from town to town
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore
My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore
Elsewhere, in 1941 Edith Piaf’s sang the wonderful Le Vagabond, a tale of itinerant homelessness:
Much later, Townes Van Zandt also sang Highway Kind, poetically capturing the restless spirit of the road:
My days, they are the highway kind
They only come to leave
But the leavin’ I don’t mind
Its the comin’ that I crave.
Pour the sun upon the ground
Stand to throw a shadow
Watch it grow into a night
And fill the spinnin' sky.
Simon & Garfunkel’s America tells a wonderfully evocative story of seeking a better life, travelling to no particular place across the great western landscape by bus:
Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies
And we walked off to look for America
Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America
Meanwhile it’s hard to beat the vivid lyrics of Tom Waits’ Shiver Me Timbers:
I'm leaving my family, I'm leaving all my friends
My body's at home, but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front-page sky
My tears are salt water, and the moon's full and high …
And the fog's lifting, and the sand's shifting, and I'm drifting on out
And old Captain Ahab, he ain't got nothing on me
So come and swallow me, follow me, I'm traveling alone
Blue water's my daughter, I'm gonna skip like a stone
Of a very different style, Donna Summer’s 1980 hit The Wanderer reaches different wanderlust territory:
And so it's up and out
And on and off the road
Won't have no troubles
'Cause the whole world
Is my home
No need to worry
'Cause I seldom am alone
'Cause I'm wanderer
I'm a wanderer
But finally, let’s go full gypsy with the fabulous Romanian band Fanfare Ciocărlia with their version of the jazz classic, Caravan:
So then care to ample anywhere to find any more coddiwomple-inspired music? Please feel free to share any further examples in songs, instrumentals, on albums, film, art or other contexts in comments below.
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