Two more Napoleonics this week, plus a song by the dreadfully underrated Peter Blegvad.
The bonny bunch of roses has been one of my favourite songs since I first heard it played by Nic Jones (it’s the second track on his second album). I don’t promise this is that good, but did Nic Jones use a D whistle and an ambient drone in A? I think not.
Boney’s lamentation, oddly enough, is the third track on Nic Jones’s second album. Unaccompanied, straight through, no messing. (The tune is also known as the Princess Royal, among other things.)
As for The Unborn Byron, this is a sort of surrealist companion piece to the last verse of The bonny bunch of roses. It’s a tender, beautiful song in which an unborn baby tells his mother that he’ll be remembered when he’s dead – as, of course, he is. One voice (recorded in two rooms), one flute.
Fifty-Two Folk Songs 