Category Archives: Singer

14 October 2011 · 3:27 pm

NS07: Danny Deever

Another Bellamy setting of a Kipling poem. The poem, which is said to be based on a true story, vividly brings out the horror of a public hanging – a contorted black shape, a whimpering cry, men shivering and fainting as they watch. But it’s not anti-hanging; it’s not even anti- this particular hanging, except in the sense of pitying what the poor man has been reduced to. The nearest thing to a narrative voice in the poem is the voice carrying the refrains (“For they’re hanging Danny Deever” and so on) – and that third voice makes it quite clear what we’re to think of Danny Deever:

They’re hanging Danny Deever – you must mark him to his place,
He shot a comrade sleeping, you must look him in the face
Nine hundred of his county and the regiment’s disgrace
They’re hanging Danny Deever in the morning.

(Gawd love yer, Rudyard, but I ain’t reproducin’ your bloomin’ vernacular punctuation for nuffink.)

Nine hundred of his county and the regiment’s disgrace – that line is at the heart of the poem, and really explains what it’s doing. To execute a man is a terrible thing; to turn out first thing in the morning, stand at attention and watch a man being executed is a terrible experience. But, in the world of the poem, it’s what the soldiers must do, when one of their number disgraces them; it’s another burden that they take on themselves. Which is a nasty theme, frankly – the self-pity of the strong, the thug’s troubled conscience – and would make for a nasty poem. I think what just about rescues this poem – making it both brutal and humane, instead of just brutally sentimental – is the vividness of Danny’s suffering and the fellow-feeling of his comrades. In this poem as in My boy Jack, Kipling’s compulsion to turn all the dials up to eleven results in something both moving and troubling.

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Filed under not a folk song, O my name is, Peter Bellamy, Rudyard Kipling

6 October 2011 · 10:13 pm

FS06: The London Waterman

This appears to be a folk-processed version of a song that was written in 1774, although the differences are so great that it could almost be a different song. The ‘waterman’ is a ferryman: before the great bridge-building period of the nineteenth century, if you didn’t cross the Thames on London Bridge itself your best option was to find a waterman who’d row you over in his wherry. (The picture on the Bandcamp page shows the only surviving wherryman’s seat – stone benches for the watermen to rest between fares used to be a common piece of riverside street furniture. The seat’s been relocated, but it’s survived two centuries and more – like the song.)

I got this song from Peter Bellamy’s recording. Learning it – and learning how to sing it, which is slightly different – helped me understand why Bellamy sang the way he did, with that pouncing, declamatory attack on the lines. The short answer is that he did it because it works – it really gets you under the skin of the song. Also, taking a song by the scruff like this is fun – and it’s not pretty, which for some of us at least is a virtue. (My son heard me practising this song and said, “Well, Dad, you definitely sing merry.”)

Plus, this week, a tune! I go to a local singaround and tunes session, held on alternate weeks with overlapping participants. Something that’s particularly enjoyable is fitting a tune to a song – apart from anything else, it lets us sneak some songs in when we’re playing tunes. So we regularly segue from “Waters of Tyne” into Sir John Fenwick’s, for example. We’ve never yet done the Waterman and the Morris tune Constant Billy, which I’ve put together here, but I think it could work. I might have to work on the high notes, though – when I came to put the recordings together it turned out that my voice had rather lazily pitched the song in F rather than the more demanding G, so I had to process the whistle digitally to make it come out in the right key. (It was that or go out and buy an F whistle, and it was raining.)

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Filed under folk song, Peter Bellamy, traditional

6 October 2011 · 10:12 pm

AS02: Spencer the Rover

Being a parent has its advantages:

And my children came around me with their prittle-prattling stories,
With their prittle-prattling stories to drive care away

While I’ve never walked out on my family and gone rambling around Rotherham, I love this song and feel a definite identification with Spencer; I’m glad it works out for him.

The definitive version of this song has to be John Kelly’s, most of which you can hear here. John started gigging in 1968(!), but for a variety of reasons has only recently started recording. His second album came out recently; if it’s anything like his first album, “Come all you wild young men“, it’ll be an essential purchase. (Like the old K-Tel albums, it’s not available in any shops, unfortunately – to get your hands on it you’ll need to contact John, or better still see him live.)

Like the Waterman, this is also an example of fitting a tune to a song: two tunes in this case, Three Rusty Swords and the Dusty Miller. There are a bunch of these tunes; they’re relatively simple to play, until you try playing them one after another at blazing speed. For reasons that escape me, they’re (a) known as hornpipes, despite being (b) in 3/2; and although they’re in 3/2, they’re (c) invariably played at the aforesaid blazing speed. Not easy, then, but fun – particularly when you’re in a large enough group that nobody can hear your bum notes!

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, traditional

29 September 2011 · 7:48 pm

FS05: Lemany

I feel as if I’ve known this song forever. I haven’t, by any means – I heard it for the first time about two years ago, and only learned it properly when Jon Boden featured it on AFSAD (although see NS06). Perhaps it’s more that I feel as if that this song has been there forever.

I love the sinuous, looping melody, and the way it combines a keening, yearning urgency (particularly strong in Jon Boden’s version) with a kind of bedazzled stillness; the overall effect is genuinely magical, almost incantatory. The folk-garbling of the lyrics has resulted in some lines that make no sense whatsoever, as it often does, but in this case it’s startlingly beautiful nonsense:

And she’s played it all over, all on her pipes of ivory
So early in the morning, at the break of day

This version is indebted to Jon Boden (as ever), but also to Jim Moray’s remarkable version; thanks also to Dave Bishop, one of my local folk heroes, whose rendition was the first I heard. But I couldn’t really find my way into it as a singer until I heard Tony Rose’s version on Bare Bones, which handles those ‘feminine’ line endings particularly well. I also thought it needed slowing down, without making the pace a funereal plod. What all this added up to was singing it in 3/4. I don’t often change the time on songs I sing, but in this case I think it works. See what you think.

(Incidentally, I don’t credit Bellamy on this occasion because I haven’t actually heard his version. Yet!)

Update May 2013 On reflection I decided that the 3/4 time was a mistake, and if it was going to be a slow 4/4, it was going to be a slow 4/4 and that was all there was to it. Again, see what you think.

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Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, Tony Rose, traditional

23 September 2011 · 10:32 am

FS04: The cruel mother

Child 20 (or similar). This is another song that exists in many variants, and another one which tells a heart-wrenching story without pointing a moral. Emily Portman’s comment quoted here

Rather than damning the protagonist as a cruel mother I think of her as a desperate woman caught in the trappings of a time when illegitimate pregnancy could result in being outcast from family and society.

seems valid but beside the point: the song doesn’t excuse the mother, but it doesn’t exactly damn her either. (She’s literally damned, but not for being an evil person.) As I read it, the song simply says that she dealt with an unwanted pregnancy by killing her babies, and that this was a dreadful thing – for her as well as for them. It’s probably a meaningless juxtaposition, but I do like the way the refrain runs on from the last verse in this version:

While you must drag out the fires of hell
Down by the greenwood side-i-o

At the end of the song, I think that’s exactly what she’s doing.

The tune here came from Jon Boden on AFSAD, and the words may have done too – certainly none of the sources I’ve looked at are an exact match to the words I sing. Folk process innit. (I couldn’t be doing with spending seven years ringing bells like a whale in the wood, or whatever it was.) I tried to keep the refrain as plain, unadorned and (above all) consistent as possible. I generally try to get the speaking voice into my delivery of folk songs, particularly the really old ones like this one, but refrains are an exception: I think they should work like a musical phrase that keeps coming round again, almost mechanically, to frame the story as it progresses.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, Jon Boden, traditional

16 September 2011 · 4:36 pm

FS03: The Unfortunate Lass

Two cautionary tales this week.

This song is one of many, many variants – its cousins include Maid Struck Down In Her Prime, The Unfortunate Rake, Pills of White Mercury, Streets of Laredo, When I Was On Horseback and the St James Infirmary Blues. The plot, if that’s the word, is always the same: the song is the deathbed speech of someone who’s dying of VD. To modern ears the song seems curiously bald in the way the story is told: we hear that a young man (or woman) is suffering horribly and about to die, we hear what’s killing him or her, but all the obvious conclusions – how sad it is and what a dreadful warning – are left to us to draw. To my mind this lack of either sentiment or censoriousness is one of the key distinguishing factors of traditional songs: they may show us what to think, but they don’t tell. It can make for some incredibly powerful lines – in this song, think of the awful, casual bleakness of

Send for the doctor although it’s too late

In my experience, the contemporary songs that can stand comparison with traditional songs often have this quality, too – see today’s Richard Thompson number.

Although I’ve known When I Was On Horseback for years, I’d never heard this song until Jon Boden did it on A Folk Song A Day. As soon as I heard it I knew I was going to have to learn it. I may have slowed it down a bit, in an effort to give the 6/8 time some of the plodding grimness of the St James Infirmary Blues, but essentially this arrangement is after Jon’s.

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Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, traditional

16 September 2011 · 4:17 pm

NS04: Down where the drunkards roll

I had a chance to experiment with dynamics on this one. I took my cue from Tony Rose’s version: in his reading, some passages are lightly-voiced, almost spoken, while others are sung with a deliberation and solemnity that’s almost (but not quite) over the top. The challenge was to cover that kind of expressive range while also holding the song together and keeping the tempo audible (something I always try to do with the songs I sing unaccompanied; I don’t like hearing singers go ‘off the clock’).

There’s a bit towards the end, in the repeat of the first verse, where I sound ‘bleary-eyed’ myself – not intentional! A ‘Method’ reading of the song would be interesting, but probably more for the singer than the audience.

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Filed under not a folk song, Richard Thompson, Tony Rose

9 September 2011 · 10:36 pm

FS02: The death of Bill Brown

“The death of Bill Brown” is an eighteenth-century song about an encounter between a gamekeeper and two poachers. The gamekeeper, Tom Green, shot and killed one of the poachers; his friend, who is supposed to be singing this song, went back the next night and shot Tom Green.

I learned the song from Peter Bellamy’s version; you can see him performing it here. Bellamy (or his source) doctored the song fairly extensively, particularly the melody: as collected it had quite a jolly upbeat tune, complete with a fol-de-rol refrain. I think Bellamy’s minor-key tune and his aggressive, declamatory reading fit the song much better, so I followed him.

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Filed under folk song, O my name is, Peter Bellamy, traditional

9 September 2011 · 10:35 pm

NS02: Us poor fellows

This is a song by Peter Bellamy, from his wonderful ballad opera The Transports. If you haven’t got a copy, get one now. As I said at my main blog last year,

Most folkies, even those most immersed in the traditional repertoire, never turn out more than a couple of songs which can be sung alongside traditional songs and not stand out. Exceptions are rare and striking (Tawney, MacColl, Dylan before he got bored and moved on). In The Transports, Bellamy basically wrote a whole album of them (a double album in its time – the CD version is 75 minutes long). Not only do his songs sound like long-lost traditional ballads, they each have a place in the plot of the opera – and in most cases advance it.

“Us poor fellows” is the first full song in The Transports; it’s sung by the father of one of the main characters. I’m not going to say any more than that, except that most of the other songs are just as good (and sound just as much like long-lost broadside ballads). This version owes more to Tony Rose’s version of the song (on his album Poor Fellows) than to Nic Jones’s reading in the original version of The Transports, simply because I heard one before the other. But the words and the tune are Bellamy’s. And very fine they are.

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Filed under not a folk song, Peter Bellamy

9 September 2011 · 10:27 pm

NS03: My boy Jack

One of the things Peter Bellamy did particularly well was write (and perform) settings of Rudyard Kipling’s poetry. Kipling’s an extraordinarily rich writer – far more so than you might think at first glance; it’s hard for us to get past all those grandiose Capital Letters and exhortations! ending in exclamation marks! But stick with it and you find yourself dealing with someone who’s not shallow, one-sided or inhumane – in short, someone who’s already thought of most of the objections you were about to make.

That’s not to say that his poetry doesn’t present problems for us now. “Big steamers” is all about how Britain needs maritime superiority in order to keep the supply routes from the colonies open; “Our fathers of old” is a hymn in praise of ignorant determination; “Cold iron” is a sick and muddled fantasy conflating feudal submission with Christian humility. He was what he was, and he was a man of the British Empire in its pomp. But he wasn’t shallow, one-sided or inhumane.

This poem is a case in point. The Kipling Society has very effectively debunked the persistent myth that this poem had something to do with the death of Kipling’s son John, who had gone missing in a land battle a year earlier (and who, in any case, was never known as ‘Jack’). Setting that aside, we’re looking at a poem for the sailors lost in the battle of Jutland, and their parents, waiting for the good news which had not come and never would (for what is sunk will hardly swim). As that line suggests, there’s a brutality to this poem, a touch of gallows humour, as well as a mood of genuine grief. What’s harder to handle, now, is the turn to a patriotic resolution (hold your head up all the more), and the call to take comfort in the thought that your son, although dead, had at least died bravely (he did not shame his kind). This seems still more brutal, until you think of the alternative to dying bravely – to imagine your son dying in terror and despair would be much worse. The patriotism of the poem, on the other hand, is quite genuine, but it does come close to being undercut in those closing lines: your duty as a parent is to give children to that wind blowing and that tide? If courage is always the repression of terror, in this poem the achievement of the repression is on a knife-edge and the fear is still palpable.

And here’s me singing it, very much in the style of Peter Bellamy.

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Filed under not a folk song, Peter Bellamy, Rudyard Kipling