Baby Birch
Posted: 28 Jul 2013, 17:00
Hello! I've been reading through the forums here for a while now, but I've never posted before or anything, so here goes.
I was looking at the older threads on this website and I ended up reading a thread about whether or not Baby Birch is about abortion, and it got me thinking about this part of the song:
"There is a blacksmith,
and there is a shepherd,
and there is a butcher-boy,
and there is a barber, who's cutting
and cutting away at my only joy."
I get the impression that most people think that the barber Joanna mentions is cutting her hair, but I don't think that is the case. I used to wonder what on earth the speaker getting her hair cut had to do with the rest of the song, and the lyric always seemed kind of random. But you know, I recently remembered that I've been told that in the olden days barbers not only cut hair, they performed surgeries. So because of this I have come to believe that the "only joy" the narrator refers to is not her hair, but rather her baby. I just wanted to bring this up, because I wasn't sure if other people had thought of this. Whenever people talk about this song and why they believe it is/isn't about abortion, they never really mention this line, which seems odd to me because it is a very key line if you look at it as the barber being a surgeon, not a hair-cutter.
I was looking at the older threads on this website and I ended up reading a thread about whether or not Baby Birch is about abortion, and it got me thinking about this part of the song:
"There is a blacksmith,
and there is a shepherd,
and there is a butcher-boy,
and there is a barber, who's cutting
and cutting away at my only joy."
I get the impression that most people think that the barber Joanna mentions is cutting her hair, but I don't think that is the case. I used to wonder what on earth the speaker getting her hair cut had to do with the rest of the song, and the lyric always seemed kind of random. But you know, I recently remembered that I've been told that in the olden days barbers not only cut hair, they performed surgeries. So because of this I have come to believe that the "only joy" the narrator refers to is not her hair, but rather her baby. I just wanted to bring this up, because I wasn't sure if other people had thought of this. Whenever people talk about this song and why they believe it is/isn't about abortion, they never really mention this line, which seems odd to me because it is a very key line if you look at it as the barber being a surgeon, not a hair-cutter.