Category Archives: Singer

A two-part arrangement this time; the second vocal part is partly copied from Heather Wood’s line on the Young Tradition’s version and partly made up. The drone is melodica, looped; the double-tracked whistle is two separate recordings, one in each channel. I learned (and scored) this in G, only to discover that when I tried to sing it my voice was automatically adjusting it down to Gb by the end of the first refrain. This version is sung in F (and even then it gets a bit squeaky at times – must work on the top end).

I learned this from the version sung by Shirley Collins and Heather Wood on the Holly Bears the Crown. (This is why I only sing five of the seven verses – that, and the feeling that it was getting quite long enough.) The album is credited to the Young Tradition with Shirley and Dolly Collins, and the arrangement on this track is credited accordingly to Collins/Collins/Wood/Wood/Bellamy. However, the only musicians are Shirley Collins and Heather Wood (vocals) with Roddy Skeaping (bass viol); my guess would be that it’s either a Collins/Collins arrangement or Collins/Collins/Wood. It certainly has a kind of Dolly Collins ring to it – there’s a particular quality to her arrangements, a kind of rich plainness. Less, to a point, is definitely more.

If Christmas is a time to celebrate a baby being born, Advent must be a time to celebrate a pregnant woman.

This is an anonymous medieval poem which subsequently entered the tradition; the arrangement here is after Dolly Collins. For a ten-line poem, the imagery here is surprisingly dense and complex. The first line alone refers to Mary as a “maiden” (i.e. virgin) who was “matchless” (without a mate), a tautology which works to draw attention to everything that was unusual about this particular maiden: she did have a partner (Joseph), but conceived as a virgin, making her both a mother without a mate and a unique – matchless – maiden. Packing that lot into five words is pretty good going. There is plenty more to comment on; I’ll just note the way that the central six lines enact a gradual approach to Mary asleep in her bed, parallelled with images of successive stages of growth. It’s clever stuff.

Not many people sing in Middle English these days, and even fewer can understand it. If you modernise a piece like this, on the other hand, I think you need to do it properly. Most renderings of this poem fall between two stools, partially modernising the language and leaving Mary as a maiden that is “makeless” – a word that means nothing to us. I’ve compromised by singing the modern English, while also singing the Middle English (using period pronunciation). As well as two voices and flute, there’s a reed organ drone on there and a bit of melodica.