Category Archives: Singer

22 April 2012 · 8:57 pm

AS29: The Dolphin

This is a maritime ballad dating back to the eighteenth century and sung more recently by Sam Larner, among others. I learned it from a recording by the late Tony Capstick, who was a consistently great interpreter of songs and a very variable comedian; it’s a great shame that he’s now remembered (when he’s remembered at all) as a comic rather than a singer.

The drum-and-drone arrangement just grew, as they tend to. One of these days I’ll probably get a guitar and just use that for chords and rhythm, like most people do. But where would the fun be in that?

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Filed under folk song, Tony Capstick, traditional

14 April 2012 · 9:44 pm

AS28: On board the ‘Kangaroo’

A silly, frivolous song of love and loss, which was originally a music-hall number by Harry Clifton (who also wrote The Calico Printer’s Clerk and Polly Perkins, among many others). Since escaping into the wild, it’s lost some of the class markers which originally made for broad comedy (e.g. cockneyisms and the use of trademarks); the effect is to give the character singing a degree of dignity which he can’t originally have had. The song is still pleasantly daft, though.

I got this from Tony Rose’s album Bare Bones and recorded it on a whim – it was a spur-of-the-moment decision this morning. Tony Rose gave this a jolly and rather beautiful accompaniment on concertina; this wasn’t an option for me, so I reached for the melodica, plus a whistle or two. The arrangement just sort of grew.

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Filed under folk song, Tony Rose, traditional

8 April 2012 · 5:39 pm

AS25: When I was in my prime

There’s a whole family of songs associating flower imagery with heartbreak and loss of innocence, variously featuring grass, roses, willow, thyme and rue (the last two coming with fairly unsubtle wordplay). This and the next are both examples, although they aren’t in any obvious sense variants on the same song.

I learned this song from Jacqui McShee’s unaccompanied recording on the Pentangle album Cruel Sister; I remember being particularly struck by the lack of a copyright credit on the label. (No need: there was no composition and no arrangement, just a traditional song.) I also liked McShee’s controlled, restrained delivery: the song was rendered in exactly the same way, verse by verse, with exactly the same ornamentation and almost no change of emphasis or volume. I liked it, but I haven’t emulated it. There’s even accompaniment (flute, mostly recorded in the bathroom).

The key signature of this one had me puzzled – it appears to be in F, but an F/C drone sounded totally wrong, and D/A for D minor wasn’t much better. It turns out it’s in G Dorian, i.e. a scale from G to G played with one flat. The drone you hear (on recorder) is G and D, or rather D, G and D.

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Filed under folk song, Jacqui McShee, traditional

8 April 2012 · 5:26 pm

AS26: Let no man steal your thyme

This is one of the briefer examples of this family of songs, as sung by Jean Redpath and subsequently Anne Briggs. There’s little or no overlap with When I was in my prime, showing how much variation can develop in a group of songs over the years. I particularly like the way the nature imagery is developed in the last verse – “Woman is a branchy tree and man a single wand“; concise and to the point.

Sung in the open air – six feet up in the air, in fact – unaccompanied except for birdsong.

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Filed under Anne Briggs, folk song, Jean Redpath, traditional

31 March 2012 · 10:14 pm

FS30: I live not where I love

I’ve never heard a recorded version of this song. Like When a man’s in love, it’s a song I learned after hearing it sung at my local singaround, in this case by the estimable Dave Bishop.

This is more or less the version sung by Jean Redpath, from which most post-revival versions of this song derive. A seventeenth-century original has been identified, but in most respects it isn’t worth going back to – it’s rather wordy and ornate, and generally looks like a song in need of folk-processing. I liked a few bits of it, though, so I used half of one verse and a few verse-endings.

The tune is a very old pipe tune called (among other things) Sir John Fenwick’s. The accompaniment is melodica, recorder and zither; that includes the weird noisy bits (the nature of which will be clarified if you listen right to the end). The idea was to mark a transition between sections with a bit of musical noise, essentially.

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Filed under Dave Bishop, folk song, Jean Redpath, traditional

25 March 2012 · 11:42 am

FS29: One night as I lay on my bed

A night-visiting song, and one of the finest (and simplest).

An extraordinarily powerful and memorable tune, coupled with verses in which nothing much happens – except that the speaker’s girlfriend first shuts him out and then lets him in. Which for him, of course, is the most important thing in the world.

Like a couple of other songs I’ve put up recently, this song very effectively conveys a sense of being utterly consumed with love (and lust); unlike those songs, this one’s actually written that way (I was so oppressed I could take no rest…). It’s been described as having “the most discreet ending of any folk song”, but I’m not sure how much to make of that; I think it’s a good ending, but it doesn’t exactly leave the audience in suspense. Personally I prefer this to those old songs that actually do describe what happens next, if only because they don’t usually describe it anyway – you generally get a verse of formulaic nudges and winks (“and what we did I never shall declare” or words to that effect). Besides, once she’s let him into her bedroom the story is basically over – what they do next is up to them. We leave the speaker crossing the threshold, still entranced with lust.

This is another song recorded by Tony Rose on Bare Bones; my version is fairly close to his. I’ve listened to a few versions, but for me that recording is the simplest and best.

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Filed under folk song, Tony Rose, traditional

25 March 2012 · 11:42 am

AS22: When a man’s in love

This is a song I’d heard a few times at my local singaround, sung by the brilliant Sue van Gaalen, before I ever thought about learning it or even identifying it. I enjoyed Sue’s version so much that it seemed best just to leave the song as one of hers and enjoy it when it came round.

Then curiosity got the better of me, assisted by John Kelly’s performance of the song – which, unusually, he sings unaccompanied – on his second album For honour and promotion. John’s version confirmed to me just what a beautiful tune this is. When I’d decided to do One night as I lay on my bed for this week, this was the obvious choice to accompany it.

The song was collected by Sam Henry in the 1920s and appears in his Songs of the People collection. Sam Henry’s text is quite different from the version usually sung, which came from the singing of Paddy Tunney. In fact there are two or three different post-revival versions, which may go back to different sources or may just have been knocked about in the singing. I took advantage of this to put together a version I liked; it’s seven verses (one longer!) and taken about half from the usual version, a bit less than half from Sam Henry and a few lines from another, completely unsourced, version I found knocking about online (“farewell my favourite girl” was from this version; call it a tribute). Once I’d learnt the song I realised that it wasn’t quite the paean to all-consuming love I’d thought it was; really it’s more like “When a man wants to speed things up a bit”. Beautiful tune, though.

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Filed under folk song, Sam Henry, Sue van Gaalen, traditional

17 March 2012 · 6:26 pm

FS28: The streams of lovely Nancy

I’m on a mission this week: I’m hoping to disentangle this song from Come all you little streamers for once and for all. It hasn’t been easy – the temptation to go into “So come all you little streamers” at the end of this one was intense, but I resisted.

This song is clearly a relic of some earlier and more coherent song, but what that one was is a mystery. It shares one verse with CAYLS and nowadays is usually padded out with two more, but that seems to be a post-Revival practice; I’ve looked at several broadside versions and not seen any sign of the ship from the Indies, etc. But the broadsides weren’t much more use in terms of getting back to the original song, as they padded it out with verses from the Manchester Angel insead. At most there only seem to be three verses definitely associated with this song, plus one shared with CAYLS. So I’ve sung them, and tweaked the wording of the shared verse (following a broadside copy) to make it as different as possible.

The tune is the one used by John Kelly on For honour and promotion; it’s a belter. He doesn’t play drums, but then I don’t play harmonium.

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, lovely Nancy, traditional

17 March 2012 · 6:25 pm

AS20: Come all you little streamers

Someone on Mudcat remarked once that they liked some of Shirley Collins’s stuff, but they couldn’t stand the sound of her singing backed by Dolly on piano – it sounded like a primary-school teacher accompanying herself on the school piano.

Personally I love Shirley and Dolly’s recordings, especially those ones – and for precisely that reason. This is a song which I learned from just such a recording; my zither part is a faint, distant, inept echo of Dolly Collins’s piano part. I love this song dearly and no, I don’t know what it’s about.

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Filed under folk song, Shirley Collins, traditional

17 March 2012 · 6:24 pm

AS21: The banks of the Mossom

A wonderful song which I know from Shirley Collins’s version. It’s another song where it’s not entirely clear whether it’s a woman that we’re singing about or a place (“down by some shady Nancy”?) The overall effect, as with Master Kilby, is of somebody so deeply in love that they can’t even think straight – everything reminds him of lovely Nancy, from the lark to the birds in the trees and even the trees themselves. Of course, it wasn’t written like that or with that effect in mind; as with Master Kilby, what we’re looking at is a song pieced together from half-forgotten memories, with frequent use of repetition in this case to fill the gaps. But at least it means we’ve got half (a quarter?) of the words of a song, and a terrific tune to go with it.

The original plan with this one was to sing it unaccompanied, recorded in the open air. I tried it once, with slightly disappointing results; although I heard quite a bit of bird song while I was singing, including the scolding of a pair of great tits who came to see what I was doing, nothing got picked up. Also, by the time I listened to it back I’d decided I would dub on a bit of accompaniment after all, and it turned out I’d spontaneously pitched it in the interesting key of Db. So I went back out in the garden and sang it in D. By this time there wasn’t a bird in sight, although in the first few seconds you can faintly hear the sound of my next door neighbour using an angle grinder. Hey ho.

Having learnt it from Shirley Collins I’ve automatically pitched this song high before, and decided to go to the other end of my range for this recording. As for the accompaniment, it just grew.

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Filed under folk song, lovely Nancy, Shirley Collins, traditional