Vipers Skiffle Group's "If I Had a Hammer"

I just finished listening to the second disc of the two-CD set of the Vipers Skiffle Group that I started yester-day.  I noticed some articulations of some lines in "If I Had a Hammer."  They're not consistently employed in every verse, but there are some melismas on "all" and "land" in the recurring line "All over this land," musically portraying the inclusiveness.  Similarly, the "all" in the line "All over this land" that ends each verse spans an octave (of C notes), which demonstrates the encompassing mentioned in the lyric itself.

Viper Skiffle Group's "The Wild Colonial Boy"

I'm not sure if I noticed this before or not, but I certainly haven't written about it.  In Viper Skiffle Group's "The Wild Colonial Boy," there's an interruption in the drum part in the middle of the lines "Well, he fired a shot at Kelly" and "Then he fired a shot at Fitzroy too."  Throughout the verses, there's a kind of shuffle that I think is played with brushes, but after the "fired a shot" phrases, there's a sudden hit, apparently to portray those shots.

Lonnie Donegan's Original Hits of the Skiffle Explosion

In listening to all of this music, I've discovered (and then started paying attention to) ways in which trains are portrayed musically.  To-day I listened to a compilation album of Lonnie Donegan and other skiffle artists titled Original Hits of the Skiffle Explosion (the first two discs are Donegan, and the third is a variety of other artists), and I discovered that "Rock Island Line" - a song about a railroad line - has certain musical elements that emulate trains.  Some of the background vocals contain "woo!"s, which sound like the train whistle, and the washboard mimics the sound of the wheels against the rails.

Some of the other songs on this collection are about trains and also feature train-influenced sounds.

"Wabash Cannonball" emulates the wheels-on-rails sounds with what I think is a snare drum played with brushes (I might be wrong on that; like I've said before, I know next to nothing about percussion), and some of Donegan's vocals are rather whistle-like, especially "call" in the line "hear the lonesome hobos call" near the end.

In "Wreck of the Old '97," the snare drum effect is also used, and the guitar part after the line "the whistle broke into a scream" mimics the whistle.

The guitar-as-whistle and washboard-as-wheels is also used on the Vipers Skiffle Group's "Streamline Train."  Additionally, it emulates a train in starting out slow and then increasing tempo, like a train increasing in speed, before slowing down at the end.

Johnny Duncan & The Bluegrass Boys' "Last Train to San Fernando" also employs the tempo variations at the beginning and the end to sound train-like, and the repetitions of "last train" at the end are a bit like a train whistle.  And at the very end, there's a vocal imitation of a train sound.

Vipers Skiffle Group's "The Ash Grove"

This morning, I listened to Vipers Skiffle Group's Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O.  One of the songs included is "The Ash Grove."  I recognized the melody of this; it's a slight variation of the melody for the hymn "Sent forth by God's Blessing."  In the hymnal, the title of the melody is listed as "The Ash Grove."  The melody that the Vipers use is slightly different from what's in the hymnal, and obviously the words are completely different.

I looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently "The Ash Grove" is a melody that's used with quite a few sets of lyrics.  The Vipers use the words written by Thomas Oliphant, although the liner notes lists it as just "traditional" and "public domain."

I think this is only the second or third time I've listened to this album, and I have a vague recollection of recognizing this melody, but I don't think I actually looked into it last time.  So now I have.