By The Landlord
“Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” – Aesop
“Sins, like chickens, come home to roost.” – Charles W. Chesnutt
“Many dinosaurs were smaller than chickens.” – Ken Ham
“Be more duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.” – Michael Caine
“When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?” – Douglas Coupland
Clucking, strutting, shimmying, scratching, and of course crowing at dawn, there's something mesmerically musical, stylishly, curiously, comically cool about chickens. They have undoubted, eccentric charisma.
Whether it's the cute cheep-cheep of newly hatched chicks from a clutch, the wiggle and bustle of fluffily feathered hens, or the crafty, combative, concupiscent confidence of cocky young cockerel, adult cock or swaggering rooster, with their rhythmic, angular neck turns, their swivelling eyes, their undeniable dance movement, they are a fascinating throwback, an evolved dinosaur, ugly-beautiful, funny yet scary, with their wobbly crests, aura of softness and sharpness, claws, beaks and resplendent colours.
So then, this week it's time to give free range, and of course that's an important phrase in the history of animal husbandrie, to songs not only about chickens, but also other poultry, especially also turkeys, but perhaps also ducks and geese, partridges to pigeons, guinea fowl to pheasants, all with in the broad bracket of poultry, vastly popular and highly manageable domesticated birds raised for eggs, meat or feathers. It's going to be a fun musical game. Bear in mind that in the past we’ve done songs about eggs, though while there’s some overlap, they also nest in different places.
Of course many songs will stir them into the musical recipe as a tasty food source, but hopefully many others will capture their qualities and characteristics when they are very much alive, across the genres from blues and R&B to funk and beyond. Some songs might mimic their style. And of course there are broods and flocks and chatterings and gaggles – or for pheasants, a bouquet, covey, nide, or nye and, most appropriately of all, a band or pigeons – of metaphors that will also come into play, fair or fowl.
Hen will we see you again?
Additionally in the chicken world, there are also other evocative names at various stages of their lives, from capons to chucks, pullets and yardbirds, and colourful subspecies that might crop up from spangled hamburghs to cinnamon cochin hens, buff cochins to game bantams, all of which might be keywords to scratch around with.
But as for metaphors and cultural associations, are chickens aggressive and sturdy, or a symbol of the cowardly? They seem to cover both extremes. There are fighting cocks, but there's also playing chicken, or running around like headless chickens. As a species they are both incredibly numerous and successful, but also fragile and vulnerable to predators.
They've been battered into horrible, hellishly unhealthy farming practices, and dubiously sacrificed in the name of superstition. They are the alarm clocks of the morning and a system of early warning. in Ancient Greece, so high in esteem was the rooster, it was believed that even lions were afraid of them. The poet Cratinus (mid-5th century BC, according to the later Greek author Athenaeus) calls the chicken "the Persian alarm".
And the mythological basilisk or cockatrice is depicted as a reptile-like creature with the upper body of a rooster. There's your dinosaur connection right there.
A cockatrice overdoor at Belvedere Castle (1869) in New York's Central Park
So you don’t really want to cross chicken, even though a chicken might cross a road. Meanwhile in France, the Gallic rooster, aka le coq gaulois, is a national symbol faith, pride and hope:
Grille du Coq: Gallic rooster on the garden gate of the Élysée Palace in Paris, the official residence of the President of the French Republic.
The rooster is one of the creatures of the Chinese zodiac, and in East Asian cultures is seen as variously sacred but also sacrificial, subject to fights and cruelty. Meanwhile in Vietnam, paintings Đại cát of the Đông Hồ painting line is often hung in the house by Vietnamese people to pray for good luck.
Đại cát: Vietnamese good luck for humans, though not necessarily for the chicken
So culturally chickens are quite contradictory. That mix of scariness and ferocity, but and vulnerability, also comes in Shakespeare. In Macbeth, Macduff contemplates the horrendous magnitude murder of his family with this metaphor :
O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
Meanwhile, in Romeo & Juliet, the crestfallen star-crossed latter remarks:
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but 'Ay,'
And that bare vowel 'I' shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice
Turkeys are arguably even weirder, perhaps more extreme versions of the chicken, a sort of wobbly aberration of far too much wrinkly skin and feather, fattened up and slaughtered in their millions for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but also in the US, subject to the oddball tradition of one being “pardoned” by the president, such as Peas, the one chosen by Donald Trump in 2018. Mind you, being singled out by the fumbling, sweaty hand of the buffanty Orange One was probably a fate worse than dinner.
Peas, peas me. Peas the turkey is spared with a presidential pardon at White House Thanksgiving in 2018, for which he might have given thanks, though perhaps not for the dubious honour of being picked out by Donald Trump. He’s always preferred blondes
But where else will your poultry attention turn? To pigeon fancying or racing? They might fly away but they also return, and hopefully not into a pie. How about then Commando, a heroic pigeon used in service with the British armed forces during the Second World War to carry crucial intelligence, flying 90 dangerous missions during the war, and received the Dickin Medal (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross) for three particularly important ones in 1945. That’s the bird with the word:
Pigeon English: the heroic Commando at ease
Might you also turn your fowl play to domestic geese and ducks? Let's see how it goes, and whether such an idea walks the walk or takes flight, but no doubt chickens and turkeys will likely rule most of the musical roost.
Managing all fair and fowl practice this week, to ultimately lay out and turn your suggestions into playlists (also noting that there has been the overlapping but notably different topic of eggs), is the ever knowledgeable Nicko! Place your songs in the hen pen below for deadlines at 11pm on Monday UK time, for playlists published next week.
Poultry matters …
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