Category Archives: folk song

27 May 2012 · 11:07 am

FS38: I would that the wars were all done

I started going to folk clubs regularly a bit before the invasion of Iraq. At that stage I only had a handful of songs I was really confident of, one of which was Billy Bragg’s “Between the wars”. I never really liked it – a bit grandiose, a bit sententious, and what was that bit about moderation doing there? Then the War on Terror kicked off properly, and nobody could claim we were “between the wars” any more. Ill wind eh?

This, anyway, is a sweetly pretty song about love and conscription, full of stock imagery, overcooked descriptions and patriotic sentiments. It’s rescued by the refrain, which is raw and hard-edged in its simplicity:

I would that the wars were well over
I would that the wars were all done

And – now that we’re not between the wars – who doesn’t?

Partly recorded in the open air. Accompaniment: concertina and recorder.

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Filed under folk song, traditional

27 May 2012 · 10:54 am

AS33: High Germanie

This is more or less the Pentangle version of this song, complete with appropriately martial drumming and whistle. Thematically it’s quite similar to the Lowlands of Holland – colliding love and war by the use of conscription and imprecise geography – but with a very different mood. The unpromising situation of being called up to fight and finding your girlfriend’s pregnant sounds quite idyllic around the middle of the song, although reality returns towards the end.

Accompaniment: drums, whistle, concertina drone. My voice pitched this in B minor, which is OK for a D whistle in terms of accidentals but lousy in terms of range; the whistle break was actually recorded in E minor and pitch-shifted digitally.

I found the pace of this one a bit brisk, not so much for hitting the notes as for getting the expression in. Listening afterwards to a recording of Phoebe Smith – from whom it was collected – I found that she took it at about half the speed; it makes it a very different song. Another time.

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27 May 2012 · 10:30 am

AS34: The weary cutters

I was planning two songs for this week, but when I was doing some recording the other day this song crept up on me, and I realised what a good fit it was for the current ‘conscription’ theme.

Maddy Prior sings this, accompanied only by several other Maddy Priors, on Steeleye’s 1975 album Commoners’ Crown; I was impressed (it was only the first or second time I’d heard a folk song sung unaccompanied). It’s also the first song I ever sang in public*; I didn’t feel it went terribly well, and it was another twenty years(!) before I started singing out regularly. (Bit of a waste really, but there you go.)

Working it up for this recording I looked into the history of the song; it seemed incomplete. Apparently Maddy Prior got it from Ray Fisher, and the words we’ve got here are pretty much all there is. The tune is from a distant memory of the Steeleye Span version; I’ve put the 3/4 time back in and written some new harmonies. (Top tip for home recording: turn the volume on harmony vocals right down. When they’re about half the level of the lead they blend.)

*Unless you count an unfunny Victorian parody of the Witches’ song from the Scottish play, set to the tune of My Favourite Things, and frankly I’d rather forget that (although I haven’t managed yet).

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Filed under folk song, Maddy Prior, traditional

20 May 2012 · 5:06 pm

FS37: The lowlands of Holland

This is a song I only learned this week; in fact I only heard it for the second time this week, on playing Martin Carthy’s Second Album (which I’d bought a while back, played once and forgotten about). I was already planning to do Shirt and Comb, along with another conscription song, but I had no idea it had such a direct traditional ancestor. The extraordinary tune was a bonus.

It’s a strange, almost fairytale-like song: however short of men the navy was, it’s hard to imagine any bold sea captain haling a man out of his bed on his wedding night, as this one does. The geography is sketchy to say the least, and the final verse seems to have floated in from another song entirely (possibly Clerk Sanders). And yet the whole thing works beautifully.

Martin Carthy accompanied himself on guitar when he sang this, but I thought the tune was chunky enough to be taken unaccompanied. I also slowed it down; this took a bit of nerve – it always feels as if you’re going to lose the audience’s attention – but I think it worked. See what you think.

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Filed under folk song, Martin Carthy, traditional

13 May 2012 · 8:37 pm

FS36: Two pretty boys

Back to Bellamy for a remarkable setting of Child 49 (“Twa Brothers”), derived from the singing of Lucy Stewart.

When I hear a really strong and distinctive singer, my style still tends to get warped by their influence – and there are few stronger or more distinctive than Peter Bellamy. This song is sung very much the way Bellamy sang it; I can’t imagine a better way of doing it.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, Peter Bellamy

13 May 2012 · 8:30 pm

AS32: Son Davie

Child 13. Also – and more commonly – known as ‘Edward’, although the only source in which it has that (distinctly un-Scottish) name is a thoroughly literary version, rewritten in fake medieval Scots (Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid) by an unknown hand.

The tune and most of the words are after Nic Jones, although I went back to Child & made some modifications myself. I first learned the song from a recording by James Yorkston; he and Kieran Hebden (no less) slowed it down and gave it an eerie, sepulchral production, the better to get the point across that someone has been murdered!!1!! I don’t know; it seems to me now that this (i.e. Nic Jones’s) arrangement, with its jaunty tune and cheerily un-emotive delivery, frames the song just as well if not better. There’s a certain bluntness about a lot of traditional songs: they don’t ease you in or give you many signposts. You won’t necessarily know what you’re getting just from the tune or even from the first couple of lines – so you’d better be prepared for what you might get if you keep listening.

Accompaniment: D whistle, drums, concertina.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, James Yorkston, Nic Jones

6 May 2012 · 9:21 pm

FS35: William Taylor

This is a revenge ballad, and quite a satisfying one; you can’t help feeling William Taylor gets what’s coming to him, although it is a bit rough on the new girlfriend. The “woman cross-dressing to go on board ship” trope sits rather oddly in this song; apart from anything else, the captain doesn’t turn a hair when our heroine asks after her “true love”, so either he’s quite extraordinarily broad-minded for the period or she’s changed back into women‘s apparel by this point. We also have to presume that the ship hasn’t actually left port when all this is happening – and what is William doing out walking with his “lady gay” at the crack of dawn anyway? (Coming home from a club?) Perhaps it doesn’t bear too much analysis.

My source for this was John Kelly; this is the fourth 52fs song which also appears on John’s album For honour and promotion, and may well not be the last. I considered doing the (more usual?) brisker version of the tune, but decided to try taking it at John’s pace. Instrumentation: bongoes, double-tracked zither.

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

6 May 2012 · 9:21 pm

AS31: The ghost song

This is a reasonably slavish copy of Peter Bellamy’s rendering of this song, which I think was based fairly closely on how Sam Larner sang it. It’s also known as “Pretty Polly” and “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter”, but Sam Larner called it “the ghost song”, so I’m sticking to that. It’s an extraordinary tune, which took a fair bit of learning.

The lyrics are unusual, particularly in the English tradition; it’s a murder ballad (not a particularly thriving genre on this side of the Atlantic), but one with a supernatural ending. The belief that a ship could not make way if there was a murderer on board was widely held – see also “William Glenn” – and in any case made a good plot element. The apparition of Polly at the end seems quite corporeal; I get the impression that the idea of ghosts as insubstantial phantasms is quite a modern one, perhaps only dating back to the rise of spiritualism. To judge from songs like the Wife of Usher’s Well or the Suffolk Miracle, pre-modern ghosts might appear and disappear unpredictably, but they would seem quite solidly human in between times.

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Filed under folk song, Peter Bellamy, traditional

29 April 2012 · 8:15 pm

FS34: The lofty tall ship

Child 250, or similar; from the singing of Sam Larner, filtered through Martin Carthy.

The phrase ‘lofty tall ship’ crops up in the Dolphin; at one time I imagine most ships in song were both lofty and tall. As far as I know this is the only one that makes it into the title of a ballad, though. This is one of the shorter folk-processed versions of the ballad of Henry Martin, which is itself a pruned and folk-processed version of an enormously long ballad about the sixteenth-century pirate Andrew Barton; Peter Bellamy sang a version of Andrew Barton as part of his Maritime England Suite.

Concertina update: I still can’t play it (the instrumental break towards the end is played on melodica). But it does produce a very nice drone (Bb and Eb on this occasion).

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, traditional

29 April 2012 · 8:13 pm

AS30: Lowlands

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.

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Filed under folk song, Shirley Collins, traditional