For week 21’s recordings, I merrily forgot all about going back to unaccompanied singing and made with the melodica, whistles, recorder, drums and (for the first time) zither. What can I say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
These songs share the same basic plot, which you can also find in Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; boy meets girl, girl has supernatural powers, boy discovers he’s bitten off more than he can chew.
True Thomas is a frustratingly partial retelling of an old Scottish folk tale; some great bits, but some big gaps as well. Accompanied on all of the above apart from the zither.
The late Jackie Leven’s The keys to the forest is a song like few others. The narrator’s blissed-out awakening in the penultimate verse is haunting and genuinely shocking – and I awoke and found me here…? Mostly unaccompanied, some zither.
Fifty-Two Folk Songs 