How do you fix a bucket with straw?

And how do you remember to switch off the tap? Sunday musical excursion #46.

In Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio, there comes a point where Geppetto is so sick that Pinocchio goes to a farmer to ask for some milk for him. Those were the remedies of that age: wholesome food.

The farmer demands payment, and Pinocchio has no money. The farmer thinks the matter over and comes up with a bargain: his donkey is dying and cannot work any more, but the farmer needs a hundred buckets of water every day. If Pinocchio will draw a hundred buckets of water from the well every day, the farmer will give him the milk.

Pinocchio asks if he may see the donkey, and the farmer agrees. As Pinocchio approaches the animal, it brays with woe. In a flash, Pinocchio recognises it: it is the boy Lucignolo, his friend from schooldays with whom he played truant in Toyland. Children who don’t go to school become donkeys. It’s just one of the many heart-breaking scenes in Collodi’s children’s story. Pinocchio makes his final promise as a puppet: I’ll be the most hard-working puppet ever! and, with that, he sets to, to haul in the farmer’s water.

Today, our musical excursion is an old, familiar, children’s rhyme, to sing around the campfire and to laugh at and enjoy. But behind it is, likewise, a sombre message: everything, but everything is connected.

Not a hundred buckets, but a few, nonetheless: I draw water out of the 3,000-litre reservoir that my house’s builder thought to incorporate for rainwater under the driveway, and I pour it into the cistern of my downstairs toilet. To remind me of the means by which so many others live in poorer parts of the world. It saves me money, it is a useful redeployment of the water that falls from the sky, it avoids the leakages by which so much fresh water is simply wasted because of cracked mains pipes or by taps that, because of their convenience, are so often wantonly left running. I have lived in the era in which water changed: from being a freely available, plentiful commodity, to being a soiled, polluted chemically altered product for commercial exploitation. Well, under my driveway, it’s still freely available.

At the time when Odetta and Harry Belafonte got together, water still—it seems—needed to be fetched. In a bucket. As long, according to Belafonte, as the bucket had no hole. All buckets have a hole: it’s how you fill them. I’m really not sure how you would mend the hole in a bucket with straw, but it seems a feasible idea for the two parties to the song. Whilst everyone can see the punchline coming with Harry’s question, “With what shall I wet it?” (including Harry himself) the laughter is nonetheless riotous when he repeats, with the song’s last line, its first. Clearly Odetta is unaware that you can wet a whetstone with oil. But then, with what would Harry have fetched that?

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A Hole in the Bucket

Written around 1700 as Heinrich und Liese in the collection of German folk songs Bergliederbüchlein (Little Book of Mountain Songs).

Performed by Harry Belafonte and Odetta at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1960