The Widow's Horse
"The Widow's Horse" is a folk ballad written and recorded by the American singer Hal Westover in 1984, about the popular story of the 1956 Talas Riots. Westover re-recorded it for the 1993 charity compilation Swift Hooves.[1]
Production
The 1993 version was recorded live in one take in a small room: one man and one acoustic guitar, a fingerpicked minor-key pattern with a hard thumbed bass string, and a hoarse, low voice. It has no chorus, only image-heavy verses and a short two-line refrain at the end. The Iradi group Kök Bel recorded an Iradi cover, "Jesir Aty", in 1995.[1]
Themes
Westover wrote the song from the story of the riots as Iradi émigrés told it in Chicago, and it tells the story in pictures rather than as a narrative. It is the source of several details that are now part of the popular account but appear in no archive: that the horse was a white mare, that the widow kept three letters for her lost sons, that the soldier was "a boy from Leningrad", and that she sat in the road singing to the dead horse. Voice of America played the song in the 1980s, and it reached the Iradi SSR on copied cassettes.[1][2]
Lyrics
Verse
Morning on the mountain, cold upon the stone
Poplars standin' sentry where the old men sleep alone
The war had come back hungry and it took her every son
Three letters in a drawer, and a white mare left to run
Verse
Red flags on the market and the rifles in a row
A boy from Leningrad, sixteen, with nowhere else to go
One word she didn't answer, one shot the sparrows heard
And the poplar down came falling like a snow without a word
Verse
Blood upon the cobbles, steam upon the hide
The mare that pulled her apples lying broken on her side
And the widow in the roadway with her black scarf round her head
Singin' to the white mare like a cradle for the dead
Verse
Shoulder after shoulder, hand after hand
A thousand silent fathers standin' where the widow stands
Bread in every pocket and a stone in every fist
And the iron in the mornin' and the moon behind the mist
Verse
Trains toward the winter, smoke across the plain
Fathers in the boxcars and their names washed out with rain
The papers in the gutter say it never came to pass
But there's a white mare grazin' in the churchyard grass
Refrain
Leave the widow's horse alone
Leave the widow's horse alone
References
- ^ Talas State University Press (2018). Steppe Ballads: American Song and Iradi Country-Folk, 1980–2010, pp. 50–56.
- ^ Central Asian Music Review (2019). 'Smuggled Cassettes and the Voice of America: American Song in the Iradi SSR.' Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 15–38.