Category Archives: folk song

2 November 2011 · 3:22 pm

AS05: Plains of Waterloo

One of the many Napoleonic folksongs which are namechecked in the previous song!

Probably needs no introduction; anyone who’s heard June Tabor’s rendition on Airs and Graces will (a) love the song and (b) be able to tell where I got it from. Other interpretations are available (Shirley and Dolly Collins’s is quite something) – but I think June T. put a stamp on the song that’s pretty much indelible. This is certainly a post-Tabor interpretation, perhaps with the time signature laid down a bit more firmly.

Practising this, I came to the firm conclusion that Willie Smith’s handling of the reunion leaves a lot to be desired. If this weren’t such a great song it would be crying out for a joke ending –

And when she saw the token she fell into my arms, crying
“You utter bastard! What do you think you’re playing at? I thought you were dead!”

Maybe not. I do think the narrator’s a bit of a creep, though; I don’t know if this comes across!

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Filed under folk song, June Tabor, the deeds of great Napoleon, 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

21 October 2011 · 10:23 pm

AS04: Sam Hall

More gallows defiance. While I’m giving credit where it’s due, this one (like Spencer) came to me from John Kelly’s excellent first album. The original of the song was a chimneysweep and petty thief called Jack Hall, who (the story goes) was hanged alongside a notorious highwayman; the highwayman drew a crowd, and Jack Hall took the opportunity to put in a few boasts of his own.

A lot of versions of this song are openly angry and defiant, with repetitions of the “Damn your eyes!” line. What I liked about John’s version (and tried to emulate here) was the way that it gently brings out the emptiness of “Sam”‘s claims to fame. The ‘cows’ line is typical; apparently ‘cow’ was thieves’ slang for a sixpence, meaning that Sam was boasting about having robbed a grand total of £1. (Some versions have ‘twenty pounds’, which loses this point.) You can almost hear the self-doubt and despair that were below the surface. (Perhaps. Maybe that’s just the way we like to tell the story nowadays.)

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, O my name is, traditional

14 October 2011 · 4:22 pm

FS07: Derwentwater’s farewell

This is four verses (1, 3, 4 and 6) of a six-verse poem, written by one Robert Surtees in 1807 to a pre-existing tune. Surtees sent it to James Hogg for publication, presenting it as a folk survival of a ballad composed by the Jacobite Lord Derwentwater on the eve of his execution in 1716. It started life as a forgery, in other words. However, it did enter the tradition later on – although people are generally even more selective that I was about which verses they sing – and the tune is now generally known by the name of the song.

Execution by beheading is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but beyond that I don’t have much sympathy for Lord D and his family; being Catholic is one thing, but declaring for Charles I and James III in the space of 70 years just seems like asking for trouble. In any case, his father’s ancient seat had only been Chez Radclyffe for ninety-odd years (his great-great-grandfather had married the Dilston heiress in 1621 and died in 1622) – and a stranger never did call the place his, as it was left to rot shortly after the execution. (Derwentwater couldn’t have known this, of course, but Surtees could.) Still, nice tune.

Plus! for the first time!! instrumental backing!!! Through the magic of multi-tracking, I accompany myself here on a Bontempi reed organ with a noisy fan and six dead keys. (The keys are important because they narrow the range of the instrument, which meant that I couldn’t play the whole tune in the key I wanted; I had to play it in G and pitch-shift the recording into D. If you listen carefully to the beginning of the track, you can hear the fan being pitch-shifted.) The accompaniment is mostly a drone, but I begin by picking out the tune. I wanted to give the impression of playing it quite badly, although it’s quite an artificial impression – in reality I’m much more likely to get the wrong notes and grind to a halt than just to play the right notes slowly. Towards the end you can hear the tune again, this time on whistle (not pitch-shifted). And right at the end you can hear… well, you find out.

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Filed under folk song, 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

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

23 September 2011 · 10:31 am

AS01: Over the hills and far away

This sounds much better with a big chorus, so feel free to join in. Like the Cruel Mother, this is a Landfall song. Don’t be fooled by the suspiciously authentic-sounding references to Queen Anne (r. 1702-14) – it really is an old song (it’s in Pills to Purge Melancholy, published 1706). I find it heartbreakingly sad; the wistful tune, with that repeated dying fall on the last line, seems at odds with the gung-ho sentiment of the words. It’s not exactly an eighteenth-century Army Dreamers, but you can’t help remembering that a lot of them wouldn’t return, with full honour or otherwise – and suspecting that the people who sang it at the time knew it too. Or perhaps it’s just that we just sing it far too slow these days.

I was planning to use an earlier recording, put down while I had a cold and was getting weepy and emotional at the drop of a hat; I really belted out that chorus, I can tell you. Unfortunately by the end of the song I was singigg “Queen Adde commadds add we obey”, which spoiled the effect rather.

Admin note: up to now we’ve had two weeks with one folk song (FS) and one not-a-folk-song (NS), and one week with one FS and two NS. If this goes on I’ll end up with more non-folk songs on this site than folk, which wasn’t the idea at all. On the other hand, I do want to keep the 1-52 numbering system for both folk songs and weeks. My solution is to introduce a third category: AS, or also-a-folk-song. (No, it doesn’t make much sense. Humour me!)

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Filed under folk song, traditional