Category Archives: Shirley Collins

Gilderoy is a song that mutated when it crossed the Scottish border. Gilderoy (or his historical original) was a raider and an outlaw, but this fact isn’t greatly emphasised in the original – perhaps because it was common knowledge. Once the song gets into the English oral tradition, ‘Gilderoy’ becomes no more than a name and his criminal propensities get lost altogether. This makes for a rather puzzling song; in most of the English texts our man appears to have been hanged for having sex with his fiancee, which seems something of an over-reaction even by eighteenth-century standards.

If we go back to the Scottish song, the livestock thefts by which Gilderoy made his living do make an appearance, but the song remains a bit of a puzzle. In its original form it’s essentially an elegy for a particularly well-dressed gangster – one who was so handsome they even hanged him higher than the rest. One explanation I’ve seen is that it was written as a parody of Geordie; this would make a rather dry kind of sense if you mentally cross out ‘Gilderoy’ and substitute ‘Al Capone’ (or the contemporary gangster of your choice).

I learned it from Shirley and Dolly Collins’s recording, but here I’m singing a slightly different version, which goes heavy on the looks and charm but does at least mention the thieving. In this version of the song I think the mood is the main thing: thief or no thief, he was my one true heart’s delight… and now he’s dead.

This is only the second song here (after Searching for lambs) that I learned from Shirley Collins’s wonderful Anthems in Eden. The arrangement – voice and not much else – follows Shirley Collins’s, although the harmonies are my own.

Perhaps not the saddest song I know, but certainly the saddest song about a haircut.

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.

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.