Category Archives: Child ballad

20 January 2012 · 8:30 pm

AS11: Sir Patrick Spens

This is also the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.

I came to this one relatively recently, via a rediscovered recording of Peter Bellamy’s Maritime England Suite (I very nearly wrote “Sir Peter Bellamy” there, and God knows he would have deserved it). It’s one of the versions of the song where Sir Patrick & crew make it to Norway (or Norrowa’) but are wrecked on the way home. With that in mind, I particularly like the way it skips straight from the King’s broad letter to the trouble in the Norwegian court; you can imagine some audiences thinking Wait a minute, he got to Norway? The tune is apparently from Ewan MacColl, possibly from a traditional source and possibly not; according to a post on this Mudcat thread, Bellamy only discovered after recording it that the tune might have been MacColl’s own, and didn’t take it well.

The Maritime England version features Dolly Collins’s piano and Ursula Pank’s cello – and Bellamy’s voice, of course. That’s rather a lot for anyone to live up to. On the other hand, if I was overawed by the greats all the time I’d never get anything sung – and the worst thing you can do with these songs is not sing them. So here it is.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, O my name is, Peter Bellamy

25 November 2011 · 10:41 pm

FS13: Young Waters

Child 94. One of the more laconic of the big ballads, and beautifully constructed. In the very first verse

The queen looked over the castle wall and beheld both dale and down
And then she saw Young Waters come riding into town

and from that moment everybody’s doomed, more or less. I particularly like the way that Young Waters’s marital status – a fairly crucial variable, in the circumstances – is withheld almost until the last line of the last verse: poor old Lady Waters only comes in when she’s being haled off to the heading hill.

This version is, of course, heavily indebted to June Tabor’s version on her first album, complete with the eldritch drone of the Rocksichord. I have no Rocksichord (does anyone?) but I managed quite a decent chordal accompaniment on the melodica (which was played straight through, without any looping). Plus drumming (a pair of bongoes bought in my teens and never played in public), and recorder – when you play the track, do hang on for the recorder. First percussion in 52fs; also the first use of harmony. There were six tracks in all, and it took bloody ages to fit them all together; I think it was worth it, though.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, June Tabor, O my name is, traditional

17 November 2011 · 10:40 pm

FS12: The two sisters

Or rather, the Two Sisters part 1. (The miller is present and correct, but his treatment of the corpse is mercenary rather than ghoulish.)

This is a simplified version of Jim Moray’s arrangement of this version of Child 10, with two extra verses which I don’t think I made up, although I couldn’t say where they’re from. (There are things I don’t like about Jim Moray’s album Sweet England, but the texts and the melodies aren’t among them.) When you first hear this song, the repeats seem to take up so much time that you think it’s going to go on for hours, but in fact it fairly whips along – and ends rather abruptly.

There are quite a lot of vocal tracks on here; by the last verse I think the total is up to eight. It’s all in unison or at most in octaves; harmonising is still an undiscovered country to me, although I’m hoping to remedy that quite soon.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, Jim Moray, traditional

17 November 2011 · 10:30 pm

AS07: The wind and the rain

Or: the Two Sisters, part 2.

This song has an interesting history. The American folksinger Kilby Snow reconstructed it from memory, having heard it sung by his late father. It seems likely that what his father was singing was closer to the Two Sisters as we know it, and that it was Kilby Snow himself who effectively turned it into a murder ballad – but a murder ballad with a miller and a one-tune fiddle.

As far as the recording goes, check it out: live accompaniment! Taking my cue from Johnny Collins’s version of this song, I back the refrain with three chords on a B/C melodeon (thanks to my friend Ged for the loan). This rudimentary musical backing is a first not only for 52fs but for me – I’ve literally never played anything to accompany myself before. I’m not keen on the whole business of playing different notes on push and pull – I think it either clicks with you or it doesn’t – but I’ve got to admit it works well for these chords.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, traditional

21 October 2011 · 10:23 pm

FS08: Hughie the Graeme

Time for a tribute to one of my very favourite singers of traditional songs, and one who’s generally overlooked these days: Tony Capstick. He’s remembered, when he’s remembered at all, as a comedy-folkie from the Billy Connolly/Jasper Carrott/Mike Harding school, who (like them) eventually hung up the guitar and found stardom in comedy. This is half-true, but I think Capstick was a real loss to the folk scene – not least as an interpreter of traditional songs. This is a case in point; it appears as the last track on his second album Punch and Judy Man, in an arrangement that could pass for Horslips – all weird time signatures and electric guitar solos.

I haven’t emulated that arrangement – to put it another way, it’s taken me two years to stop emulating it – but what I have tried to take from Capstick’s singing is his timekeeping. Accompanying himself, he would let the guitar keep the beat and sing all around it, but unaccompanied he would nail every bar. There are worse ways to sing.

The song’s a terrific, defiant gallows speech, carrying on from Lord Allenwater last week. Again, I’ve skipped some of the more outlandish parts of the lyric – if you want Hughie the Graeme jumping fifteen feet from a standing start, I’m afraid you’ll have to sing it yourself. These lyrics are partly Child, partly Burns, partly MacColl and probably part Capstick. It doesn’t make much odds; there are lots of variants of this one, but they don’t fall very far from the tree.

Unaccompanied again – could have done with a drone, perhaps, or a bit of variation? Maybe next week.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, O my name is, Tony Capstick, traditional

14 October 2011 · 3:44 pm

AS03: Lord Allenwater

Child 208 (as Lord Derwentwater). This is a song about the execution of a Jacobite – the same Lord Derwentwater whose dying words are supposed to be recorded in the ‘Farewell’. I learned the song from Shirley and Dolly Collins’s marvellous version on the album For as many as will, although at first I found it hard to get to make it work in the absence of trumpets and a portative organ. I was heavily influenced by Patti Reid’s unaccompanied Lord Derwentwater (thanks, Martin); I also rummaged fairly freely in variants of Child 208 for a set of verses I was happy with. In the Collinses’ Lord Allenwater, for example, our man denies being a traitor and then proclaims his loyalty to King George, which is not only historically inaccurate but turns a noble gesture of defiance into something a bit feeble. There are versions where Lord D.’s severed head speaks, and others where his headless body stands up and walks, neither of which miracles would really have the desired effect on a modern audience; I was briefly tempted to include both of them, but ended up leaving them out. I did keep the business with the letter, despite it being an obvious lift from Sir Patrick Spens. Folk process innit.

This is one of my favourite songs; I hope I’ve done it justice.

Update 31/8/13 Now re-recorded; still no trumpets or portative organ, but there is flute and concertina. Otherwise my thoughts about the song are unchanged – and this time round I think I have done it justice.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, O my name is, Shirley Collins, 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

7 September 2011 · 7:25 am

FS01: Lord Bateman

The second or third time I heard this song, I completely lost track of time. When silence fell, Bateman having finally married his Sophia and vowed never again to range the ocean, I shook my head like a dog waking up; I’d heard every note, but it felt as if I’d been sitting there for hours. (It was Nic Jones’s version, which comes in at a little under seven minutes, but even so.) Something about the steady forward motion of the story coupled with the swinging repetitions and returns of the melody… I’m drifting off now just thinking about it. Using repetition is something folk music teaches you, I think. James Yorkston once said the two bands he’d most like to play in were Planxty and Can, and in many ways they’re not that far apart.

The song is my version of Nic Jones’s version of one of the many versions of Child 52 (most of which aren’t about anyone called Bateman), with the tune borrowed from Joseph Taylor’s version, some lyrics borrowed from Jim Moray’s version and the musical influence of Dave Bishop. (I think that’s everyone.) It’s unusual among the old ballads in having a happy ending; really, the narrative doesn’t have much drama in it at all, or not by modern standards – I guess at the time it was composed the idea of Sophia packing up all of her gay gay clothing and making it all the way from Turkey to Northumberland was a marvel in itself.

Anyway, here it is; see what you think. (I can’t promise to induce a trance state.)

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, Nic Jones, O my name is, traditional