Category Archives: Red

Week 52! We’ve made it to the end of the year.

The 52nd and final (weekly) folk song is Banks of Yarrow; you probably know it as The Banks of Green Willow. Unaccompanied, after Debra Cowan.

Also this week: Ballad of accounting, a stark and rather Brechtian song by Ewan MacColl. Unaccompanied but for multi-tracking, after Tony Capstick.

And finally: Who’s the fool now? Thereby hangs a tale. Unaccompanied but for the massed ranks of the Beech singers.

Two last thoughts for anyone who’s made it this far. Firstly, don’t go away! There’s more to come, albeit probably not at the same workrate I’ve kept up for most of the last year. Secondly and more importantly, thankyou – many thanks for reading, listening and downloading.

Be seeing you!

Week 51 has turned out to be two weeks long. Sorry about that – we went away for a week, and my best efforts to build up a backlog were defeated by various factors (choosing new songs with fiddly tunes, taking up new instruments, etc).

Here, anyway, are three songs for week 51; the songs for week 52 – the very last weekly songs – will follow some time in the next seven days.

What all these songs have in common is that the singers whose recordings I learned them from are among the real giants of the 60s/70s revival. Geordie is learnt from Peter Bellamy, who recorded it – or a very similar song called Georgie – in 1968. Gilderoy – which may be related to Geordie – was recorded by Shirley and Dolly Collins in 1978. Maid on the Shore, finally, was recorded by Martin Carthy (and Swarb) on Carthy’s Second Album back in 1966. Having (just about) learnt to play the tune on concertina, my respect for Swarb’s fiddle-playing is if anything even higher than it was already.

This week’s songs are a load of nonsense. I think nonsense is a great neglected tradition in English poetry, and nonsense songs like the first two of these are a big part of it. Also, they’re fun.

The grey goose and gander (sung here with vocal harmonies) is a silly song from nineteenth-century Yorkshire. It’s a lot of fun, particularly when sung (in the words of the man who collected it) “in the kitchens of quiet publichouses”, or indeed in the side rooms of busy ones.

When I set off for Turkey (sung here with drums, concertina, recorder, some more concertina, flute, G whistle, zither and ukulele) is an exorbitant song of lies and boasts, each line sillier and more unbelievable than the one before. Which you could also say about the arrangement.

A hard rain’s a-gonna fall, lastly, is a long song (presented here in a short form) which takes the “and another thing” form of songs like the previous one and infuses it with the visionary urgency and rage of a lot of Dylan’s earlier work. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with nuclear war, and I still think it’s a hard rain that’s gonna fall.

Three unaccompanied songs this week, just for a change, all of them on a moorland theme.

Queen among the heather is a slightly romanticised account of a socially awkward encounter on the Scottish moors; a popular theme, to judge from the number of variants that exist.

Now westlin winds is one of Robert Burns’s most beautiful poems (a.k.a. “Song composed in August”); all about love and nature and bloodsports (he’s in favour of two of these).

Jake Thackray’s Old Molly Metcalfe is about someone else you might meet on the moors; her story doesn’t end well.

I completed this week’s recordings on the 5th of August; the lead song could only be Brigg Fair. It’s sung here with a bit of contemporary ambient sound and a brief excerpt from an everyday story of country folk.

General Wolfe is a song I already knew, but fell in love all over again on hearing Jo Freya’s Traditional Songs of England (reviewed here). Accompaniment is mainly concertina drones.

The green cockade is a Cornish version of a widespread enlistment song (other colours of cockade are available). Concertina chords this time, and more thanks to Jo Freya.

As well as concertina, all three of these songs feature recorder: specifically, a maple Moeck recorder which I acquired recently. It’s a ‘school’ model, so not a high-end instrument, but it’s got a lovely tone; it’s entirely displaced my old Aulos and is well on the way to supplanting my Tony Dixon D whistle. My “concertina and recorder” period begins!