(Editors note: This is a more extended followup to a question I posed based on the Nextdoor village site, based on a commentator’s comparison of Stairway to Heaven lyrics, to the violence and looting in the Twin Cities following shootings of Black men by police officers. Quora also had a hint that such meaning would be valued).
The particular verse he cited of the Led Zeppelin song reads: If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now. It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen.” I asked if anyone knew the religious reference being made in the last phrase, and gave the hint that its origins predate Christianity. So here goes.
The verse refers to a pagan religious practice to honor the earth with each coming of spring, and with it renewal. Like so many of their traditions, Christians co-oped the celebration and formed it around Mother Mary, and much less so Mother Earth. Use of the term hedgerow is apt because of the direct connotation to invoke nature. This is a time of the season for not “bustle” and confusion, but cleansing and the spiritual orderliness that comes from “the piper calling us to reason.”
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A buddy of mine who knows his music, in part because of an Asperger’s streak, and indeed may soon report on such in these pages, was unsure about the meaning until being told the May Queen ending reference. Then it came clear. I seem to recall that he was fingering a rosary at the time. Far from the reply by another commentator on Nextdoor, who simply murmured, “what??????”
Super-friendly super-singer Robert Plant, in some of the many in-concert recordings, introduces the already lengthy anthem — which has several versions of minutes-long guitar solos that are craftsman-like and border on the heavenly — by saying “this is a song of hope,” echoing the themes that could be parallels to today’s violence. “And a new day will dawn, for those who stand long, and the forests (again one of the many nature references), will echo with laughter.” Then the commentary, inserted between verses because of its importance, “laughter, do you do you remember laughter?”
There are other rock songs that deal with both Christianity and Paganism simultaneously. One of the more recent, featuring a lamentation to go to meet God in the mansion he has prepared without a long wait in this earthly realm, is by Audioslave: “In your house I long to be. Room by room patiently … I will pray to the gods and the angels, like a Pagan, to anyone who will take me to heaven.” The super-group’s singer, the late Chris Cornell, was using this as a side project to get out his religious feelings, which built on and really were not much different than those with his main band, the decades old Soundgarden, which featured grunge and beyond.
Even more noteworthy of this religious tandem is the song The Wicker Man by Iron Maiden, with a good half-dozen such extended spirituality-based metaphors, many right from the Bible but it doesn’t stop there, but it is far too complex and multifaceted to be addressed now. And also Rainbow in Man on the Silver Mountain, and Judas Priest in Exciter, refer to a cleansing by fire that leads to growth, by an unnamed deity.
So I will close with the speak-for-itself words of none other that The Ozz Man, in his post-Black Sabbath and Randy guitar great period of 40-some years ago, and long before it was mainstream and popular by Christians to refer to God as Mother, unless in some seminaries, but the feminine side of God the Father and even Jesus since has been proclaimed to include things such as nurturing of the land and its stewardship. So here without further ado is Revelation (Mother Earth): “Mother please forgive them, for they know not what they do, looking back in history’s books we see its nothing new, please let my mother live. Heaven is for heroes and hell is full of fools, stupidity, no will to live by breaking God’s own rules, please let my mother live. Father, of all Creation, it seems we’re all doing wrong, taking seems to be breaking and it won’t take too long. Children of the future, watching empires fall, free from the final judging the destruction of all …” In the second half of the ballad turned metal, Steal Away, The Night, Ozzy gives his answer on how to obtain salvation.
Much more such analysis coming over time, on this and other related fronts. Joe.