Musical interpretations by Various
Curiously, many Americans imagine Mrs. RAVOON to have originated in traditional song: in the sleevenotes of his 1976 album Across The Blue Mountains the folk singer Harry Tuft reminisced
Tom Mastin came to the Green Spider, a coffee house in existence in Denver from the late '50's through the mid-'60's, I guess it was in 1962 or '63. From him I taped two songs made from poems: "Calico Pie" by Edward Lear and "Mrs. RAVOON" which Tom said is an old English rhyme.
It must therefore have been Mastin who appended, besides a chorus, the apocryphal penultimate verse:
I went to an amateur butcher I know
For the gut of a cat for my violin bow,
But I never imagined I'd pay my next tune
On the shuddering entrails of Mrs. RAVOON.
Tuft's version exists in digital form only as a brief fragment:
Happily erstwhile sea captain Kendall Morse covered Tuft's interpretation verbatim, and can be heard as a complete rendition:
