“Thought/Dreams”
By Michael Gray (2025)
“Time brings to his deserted cot
No tidings of his after lot;
But his weal or woe is still the theme
Of my daily thought, and my nightly dream.”
Poor Alice is not proud or coy;
But her heart is with her minstrel boy.
This is from the thirty-first stanza of “The Legend of the Haunted Tree” by the early nineteenth century Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, MP and poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed, from his Legends and Tales collection, first published in 1828. But nine years earlier, the Shetland poet Dorothea Primrose Campbell (whose life was a lot tougher than her name suggests) had published these lines, from her poem “Midnight Scene”:
She sings of many a gallant tar,
That oft had brav’d the dubious war,
Returning home to greet once more
His lov’d and long-lost native shore,
And fly to her whose image dear
In ev’ry toil had yet been near;
Like some attending angel-pow’r
Had sooth’d him in each fearful hour,
When battle rag’d, or hurtling storm
Howl’d o’er the vessel’s dusky form,
And still had cheer’d with sacred beam
His daily thought and nightly dream.
I found these two when I looked for the origin of this highlighted, memorable line after being surprised to find it in the text of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Trumpet-Major – and the reason I was surprised to see it there, and why it leapt out at me from the page, was because I knew it already, and well, from Richard Rabbit Brown’s extraordinary voice singing it in his great 1927 track “James Alley Blues,” the first track he ever recorded:
You’re my daily thought and my nightly dream.
Now Bob Dylan doesn’t use that line – though I’m surprised he hasn’t – though he had heard of Brown while still a teenager. But he sings other “James Alley Blues” lines at Big Pink in 1967, and he offers a strong reverberation of it in his own song “Mississippi” many decades later. (Both talk of coming from the country and coping with life in town; and both cite a mule.)
Brown, “James Alley Blues,” 1927:
I’ve been givin’ you sugar for sugar, let you get salt for salt
I’ll give you sugar for sugar, let you get salt for salt
And if you can’t get ‘long with me well it’s your own fault
Dylan, “Crash on the Levee (Down In The Flood),” 1967:
Well, it’s sugar for sugar
And salt for salt
If you go down in the flood
It’s gonna be your own fault.
I doubt Rabbit Brown (or any of us) ever read Dorothea Primrose Campbell or Winthrop Mackworth Praed, so I’m wondering: was “daily thought and nightly dream” a common expression in early nineteenth-century England – hence the Thomas Hardy usage (1880) within what was his one historical novel? And if so, did it pass from that common usage into early twentieth-century folk parlance? Or did it arrive there from a poem/lyric containing it having been included in some anthology of nineteenth-century songs? And if so, perhaps it came from there to Rabbit Brown.
What suggests that perhaps he did read it there, having perhaps been more literate than we may have assumed, is that not only is it no commonstock line: it occurs in no other pre-war blues track known to me or to the pre-eminent blues historian Tony Russell. And this despite its lengthy begging to be made into a line of popular song.
PS. Dylan sings the word “daily” only in the traditional song “Young But Daily Growing,” and “nightly” only in the dire “Neighborhood Bully.”
