Category Archives: folk song

25 March 2012 · 11:42 am

FS29: One night as I lay on my bed

A night-visiting song, and one of the finest (and simplest).

An extraordinarily powerful and memorable tune, coupled with verses in which nothing much happens – except that the speaker’s girlfriend first shuts him out and then lets him in. Which for him, of course, is the most important thing in the world.

Like a couple of other songs I’ve put up recently, this song very effectively conveys a sense of being utterly consumed with love (and lust); unlike those songs, this one’s actually written that way (I was so oppressed I could take no rest…). It’s been described as having “the most discreet ending of any folk song”, but I’m not sure how much to make of that; I think it’s a good ending, but it doesn’t exactly leave the audience in suspense. Personally I prefer this to those old songs that actually do describe what happens next, if only because they don’t usually describe it anyway – you generally get a verse of formulaic nudges and winks (“and what we did I never shall declare” or words to that effect). Besides, once she’s let him into her bedroom the story is basically over – what they do next is up to them. We leave the speaker crossing the threshold, still entranced with lust.

This is another song recorded by Tony Rose on Bare Bones; my version is fairly close to his. I’ve listened to a few versions, but for me that recording is the simplest and best.

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Filed under folk song, Tony Rose, traditional

25 March 2012 · 11:42 am

AS22: When a man’s in love

This is a song I’d heard a few times at my local singaround, sung by the brilliant Sue van Gaalen, before I ever thought about learning it or even identifying it. I enjoyed Sue’s version so much that it seemed best just to leave the song as one of hers and enjoy it when it came round.

Then curiosity got the better of me, assisted by John Kelly’s performance of the song – which, unusually, he sings unaccompanied – on his second album For honour and promotion. John’s version confirmed to me just what a beautiful tune this is. When I’d decided to do One night as I lay on my bed for this week, this was the obvious choice to accompany it.

The song was collected by Sam Henry in the 1920s and appears in his Songs of the People collection. Sam Henry’s text is quite different from the version usually sung, which came from the singing of Paddy Tunney. In fact there are two or three different post-revival versions, which may go back to different sources or may just have been knocked about in the singing. I took advantage of this to put together a version I liked; it’s seven verses (one longer!) and taken about half from the usual version, a bit less than half from Sam Henry and a few lines from another, completely unsourced, version I found knocking about online (“farewell my favourite girl” was from this version; call it a tribute). Once I’d learnt the song I realised that it wasn’t quite the paean to all-consuming love I’d thought it was; really it’s more like “When a man wants to speed things up a bit”. Beautiful tune, though.

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Filed under folk song, Sam Henry, Sue van Gaalen, traditional

25 March 2012 · 11:41 am

AS23: Out of the window

This is an odd song with an unprepossessing title; it’s also known as “Our wedding day”, which is prettier but less accurate. It’s another one from Sam Henry, and in its own way another night-visiting song, although without the happy ending.

If you don’t know this song, you’ll almost certainly recognise the second verse. The exact relationship between this song and the much more famous “She moved through the fair” is unclear; I’m of the school of thought that the “dead love” in SMTTF was a later addition, and that the original scenario was one of heartbreak rather than bereavement, but who knows.

I’ve never heard a recorded version of this one; I learned it myself from Sam Henry’s dots. The instrumentation is all zither, including the low-pitched thing that sounds a bit like a koto.

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Filed under folk song, Sam Henry, traditional

17 March 2012 · 6:26 pm

FS28: The streams of lovely Nancy

I’m on a mission this week: I’m hoping to disentangle this song from Come all you little streamers for once and for all. It hasn’t been easy – the temptation to go into “So come all you little streamers” at the end of this one was intense, but I resisted.

This song is clearly a relic of some earlier and more coherent song, but what that one was is a mystery. It shares one verse with CAYLS and nowadays is usually padded out with two more, but that seems to be a post-Revival practice; I’ve looked at several broadside versions and not seen any sign of the ship from the Indies, etc. But the broadsides weren’t much more use in terms of getting back to the original song, as they padded it out with verses from the Manchester Angel insead. At most there only seem to be three verses definitely associated with this song, plus one shared with CAYLS. So I’ve sung them, and tweaked the wording of the shared verse (following a broadside copy) to make it as different as possible.

The tune is the one used by John Kelly on For honour and promotion; it’s a belter. He doesn’t play drums, but then I don’t play harmonium.

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, lovely Nancy, traditional

17 March 2012 · 6:25 pm

AS20: Come all you little streamers

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.

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17 March 2012 · 6:24 pm

AS21: The banks of the Mossom

A wonderful song which I know from Shirley Collins’s version. It’s another song where it’s not entirely clear whether it’s a woman that we’re singing about or a place (“down by some shady Nancy”?) The overall effect, as with Master Kilby, is of somebody so deeply in love that they can’t even think straight – everything reminds him of lovely Nancy, from the lark to the birds in the trees and even the trees themselves. Of course, it wasn’t written like that or with that effect in mind; as with Master Kilby, what we’re looking at is a song pieced together from half-forgotten memories, with frequent use of repetition in this case to fill the gaps. But at least it means we’ve got half (a quarter?) of the words of a song, and a terrific tune to go with it.

The original plan with this one was to sing it unaccompanied, recorded in the open air. I tried it once, with slightly disappointing results; although I heard quite a bit of bird song while I was singing, including the scolding of a pair of great tits who came to see what I was doing, nothing got picked up. Also, by the time I listened to it back I’d decided I would dub on a bit of accompaniment after all, and it turned out I’d spontaneously pitched it in the interesting key of Db. So I went back out in the garden and sang it in D. By this time there wasn’t a bird in sight, although in the first few seconds you can faintly hear the sound of my next door neighbour using an angle grinder. Hey ho.

Having learnt it from Shirley Collins I’ve automatically pitched this song high before, and decided to go to the other end of my range for this recording. As for the accompaniment, it just grew.

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Filed under folk song, lovely Nancy, Shirley Collins, traditional

10 March 2012 · 11:25 pm

FS27: Searching for lambs

One of the great English folk songs, with some lines that remain magical however often you hear them. Influenced by Tony Rose’s rendering and by Shirley Collins’s wonderful treatment of this song as part of the “Anthems in Eden” suite; no song lives up to that title better than this one.

Accompaniment: melodica, zither, D whistle. Generally I pitch tunes wherever they’re most comfortable, but when I tried that with this one it seemed to be in Bb minor (or possibly Db major), which would have been a swine to play on the keyboard and more or less impossible on whistle. So I braced myself and ratcheted it up a tone and a half to A minor (or C major), which is much more congenial. (There aren’t any Fs, for anyone who was wondering.)

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Filed under folk song, Shirley Collins, Tony Rose, traditional

10 March 2012 · 11:24 pm

AS18: Master Kilby

In the heat of the day when the sun shines so freely
I met Master Kilby so fine and so gay.

What’s that about? Well, probably not all that much. Cecil Sharp, who collected this the only time it was collected, suggested that it was a fragment of a music-hall song (it certainly ends rather abruptly) and that the titular character was originally Master Cupid. That would work.

Like most people, I got this from Nic Jones’s recording, which is almost completely unlike this one. (I’ve gone back to the original lyrics, though.) Both the tune – which may be a fragment – and the lyrics – which definitely are – give this song an unresolved, yearning quality. At the end of the song the lovely Nancy (it’s her again) is asking for more and so are we – it evokes the insatiable, besotted quality of first love (or lust) very effectively.

Accompaniment is mostly melodica, but I would like to draw attention to the vocal drone employed on this track. I think it works rather well.

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Filed under folk song, lovely Nancy, Nic Jones, traditional

10 March 2012 · 11:24 pm

AS19: Cupid’s Garden

I was baffled by this one the first time I heard it – we seem to go from classical mythology to a sailor parting with his true love in a matter of seconds – but it’s actually not that mysterious. In the eighteenth century there was a popular London pleasure garden called Cuper’s Gardens; its merits as a place where young men and maidens do meet their sweethearts (to quote another song entirely) gave it the nickname of “Cupid’s Garden”. So this song is describing nothing more or less than an attempted pickup followed by a successful ditto. (Interesting that the more compliant girl is named as “lovely Nancy”; she got around, if the songs are anything to go by.)

The penultimate verse is taken from a version of the song collected on the Isle of Wight; it makes more sense than the more usual version, taken from the version preserved by the Coppers. I like the wordplay of the last couple of lines, too.

I’ve been on an accompaniment binge this week, but inspiration failed for this one; straight through, unaccompanied, no messing.

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Filed under folk song, lovely Nancy, traditional

3 March 2012 · 11:27 pm

FS26: Mary Hamilton

The lead song for this week is Mary Hamilton, also known (in fragmentary form) as The Four Maries.

I only came across this song relatively recently, on John Kelly’s excellent second album For Honour and Promotion, but I was immediately taken with it. Like a number of my favourite folksongs, it ends with several verses of defiant gallows rhetoric, but in this case it’s wrapped up with an hauntingly childlike little rhyme:

Yest’reen the Queen had four Maries
Tonight she’ll have but three.
There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me.

The real Mary Hamilton evades identification, along with the real Patrick Spens and the real Hughie the Graeme. Mary Queen of Scots did in fact have four maids named Marie, two of whom were Marie Seaton and Marie Beaton; the names obviously lodged in people’s minds. (The other two were Marie Fleming and Marie Livingston.)

Singing this unaccompanied, I had trouble getting John’s tune to work; I ended up using the tune that’s generally used for Willie o’ Winsbury (see how all this fits together?), only in 4/4 rather than 6/8. Properly speaking, this is the tune to False Foodrage rather than Willie o’ Winsbury; one of these days I’ll dig out the original tune to Wo’W and set False Foodrage to it.

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