Category Archives: folk song

13 December 2011 · 6:56 pm

AS08: The Boar’s Head Carol

I’ve always loved this song, and I’m particularly pleased with the way this recording’s come out, so off you go and listen to it.

Perhaps it’s because I did Latin O Level – rephrase that, it’s definitely because I did Latin O Level – but I’ve always had a soft spot for macaronics, songs that dip in and out of other languages (usually Latin). Unto Us A Child Is Born is another seasonal example. In case your Latin’s getting a bit rusty, the chorus here translates as “I bring in the boar’s head, giving thanks to the Lord”; the single lines of Latin at the end of the each verse translate as “as many as are at the feast”, “[let us] serve it with a song” and “in the royal hall”. The last line of all means “it is served with mustard”(!).

For the arrangement, I had a copy of the sheet music with four vocal parts, but in the end I only used it for part of one line; the rest of the harmonies I either got from Jon Boden & friends’ AFSAD rendition or made up myself. Writing them out, and playing them against each other with Noteworthy, was essential; some combinations that look fine on the stave sound dreadful when played.

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Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, traditional

5 December 2011 · 11:18 pm

FS14: A maiden that is matchless

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.

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Filed under folk song, Shirley Collins, traditional

26 November 2011 · 1:05 pm

Indigo extras: The House of the Rising Sun (parts 1 and 2)

Two versions of this well-known song appear as hidden ‘bonus tracks’ on the 52 Folk Songs – Indigo virtual album.

The House of the Rising Sun (part 1) takes off from Dave Van Ronk’s uniquely chilling version of the song. It’s interesting to check out older recordings of this song; they often seem positively cheerful, jaunty even. Not Dave Van Ronk’s rendition, which vividly evokes the dying girl’s last gasps over an ominous descending bassline. It’s really quite good. This version started as a straightish take on that version of the song, but then grew: it features quite a lot of melodica and some double-tracked vocals, and begins with a drum solo (I like to think of this track as my “Moving away from the pulsebeat”). Augustus Pablo and the Burundi drummers jamming with Faust would probably sound nothing like this.

As for The House of the Rising Sun (part 2), this is my take on a version of the song that John Otway did when I saw him live some years ago. The great man had spotted that the leisurely pace of the song (in its post-Animals form) left large gaps between successive lines – gaps that seemed designed to permit feeds from the audience:

There is a house in New Orleans
– What’s it called?
It’s called the Rising Sun…

I don’t think I’ve seen anything funnier in my life. (Perhaps you had to be there.)

On this version, I played no instruments and didn’t sing all the vocals.

These two tracks are not now available for listening online; they can only be heard as part of a download of the 52 Folk Songs – Indigo album.

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Filed under Dave Van Ronk, folk song, Indigo, John Otway, traditional

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

11 November 2011 · 8:24 pm

FS11: The death of Nelson

This song has a surprisingly tangled history, which you can read about here. Peter Bellamy sang all three verses of the Richard Grainger version, but dropped the chorus and bulked it out with two verses from a completely different song (“Nelson’s Monument”). Subsequently, fuller versions of the song have appeared, from whatever source; a number of people have sung another five-verse version, with one verse before Grainger’s three and one after. I sing Bellamy’s version, but without the first of the two verses from “Nelson’s Monument”.

Alles klar? Everyone still here?

This for me was one of those songs where one line sticks in your head and can’t be budged until you’ve learnt the whole song; in this case it was

There is no reprieve, there is no relief – great Nelson, he is dead.

Quite brutally grim. The commander doesn’t say “it’s bad news, lads”; he says “I know you’re hoping this isn’t true, but it is”. Then he says it again. As for the track, there’s no arrangement to speak of and no multi-tracking: just a couple of minutes of big voice for you.

PS Writing this on Armistice Day, I see that my unerring knack for missing significant dates hasn’t deserted me – On the twenty-first of October (Trafalgar Day) I was posting Sam Hall. Oh well.

PPS The picture on the Bandcamp page is a portrait of Nelson, and one which Nelson himself thought was a particularly good likeness. He wasn’t a vain man.

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Filed under folk song, Peter Bellamy, traditional

4 November 2011 · 4:15 pm

FS10: The bonny bunch of roses

Into double figures with my favourite Napoleon song, and one of my favourite traditional songs on any subject.

I learned it from Nic Jones’s recording, although it took a while to work out what the time signature was supposed to be. I tend to be quite tight in terms of timekeeping, which isn’t always a good thing; the more free-floating approach Nic Jones took to this song showed me how effective it could be to mess with the rhythm a bit, as in the extra beat I throw in to the last line of the first verse (“Conversing with young Napoleon…”)

“Young Napoleon” was Napoleon II, although he was never really Napoleon II of anywhere; in theory he was the King of Rome, among other things, but I don’t think Rome knew much about it. He died of TB at the age of 21. You can see his portrait at the Bandcamp page for this song. There’s something childlike about the way the singer tells the terrible story of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, and promises to succeed where he failed “in spite of all the universe”. And then that awful last verse – there can’t be many situations more heartbreaking than a young man talking to his mother from his deathbed (she was only 40 when he died). I’m particularly fond of a line that was probably only put in for the sake of the rhyme:

Had I lived I might have been clever

I find this incredibly poignant – the idea that Napoleon II died thinking that he’d been a bit of an idiot, and if only he’d had a few more years he could have sorted himself out. Not everyone agrees; Tony Capstick changed the line to “I could have been brave”. It seems in character – I don’t get the feeling Capstick had much admiration for clever people. (His version is also very good, and uses a completely different tune. Maybe later in the year.)

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Filed under folk song, Nic Jones, the deeds of great Napoleon, Tony Capstick, traditional

4 November 2011 · 4:14 pm

AS06: Boney’s lamentation

Another one from Nic Jones’s second album, done pretty much as he did it but with more metrical regularity (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). I do like to be able to hear the tune, which in this case is the Princess Royal (also known as Nelson’s Praise, among other names).

If there was a broadside original to this, it’s been worn pretty smooth by the folk process: I don’t suppose the singer this was collected from had any idea who Bellew (Beaulieu?) and Wurmer were, or for that matter if it was Wurmer’s will that was subdued or Wurmer’s Hill where they were subdued. The history is correspondingly sketchy – the last verse alone ranges from Leipzig to Mount Mark (Montmartre?) without pausing for breath. It doesn’t matter – the images are amazing. The use of language reminds me of nothing so much as a reggae MC using as many polysyllables as possible and ending every line with “-ation”; words like “confiscated” and “capitulation” are thwacked down like a trump card. “We marched them forth in inveterate streams” – find me a better line than that.

I checked a couple of different versions when I learned this, and discovered that Nic Jones had (for whatever reason) used a slightly sanitised version, where Napoleon bids farewell to his “royal spouse”. An earlier text uses a different word, and it rhymes with “adore” in the next line. But that’s the only sign of the hostility you would have thought English writers would feel towards Napoleon and the French; in fact, the Emperor himself is presented as a heroic figure, whose lamentation we can sympathise with. Odd.

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Filed under folk song, Nic Jones, the deeds of great Napoleon, traditional

2 November 2011 · 3:42 pm

FS09: Grand conversation on Napoleon

Songs about Napoleon – in particular, heroic songs about Napoleon – are one of the curiosities of the English traditional repertoire: he was, after all, somewhere between Osama bin Laden and Hitler in terms of the threat he seemed to pose to Britain. (This song has an odd gear-change in the final verse, where the anonymous author seems to have decided he needs to emphasise his patriotic credentials.) I don’t think this is about folk radicalism, with singers essentially backing Boney against the British ruling class; it’s a nice idea, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence in the songs. I suspect it was just the appeal of a good story – and Napoleon did have a really good story.

This song is a bit of an oddity in itself. It’s very “written” in style, taking quite an effort to learn and sing – I’ve seen several broadside copies, all pretty much identical, which suggests that it started as a broadside ballad and never went much further. On the other hand, the repeating final line of each verse makes no sense at all, and appears to be an oral-tradition mangling of the tag of an earlier song, The Grand Conversation Under The Rose. The tune is interesting, too; it seems to be related to the “Magpie’s Nest”/”Cuckoo’s Nest” family of dance tunes, and perhaps to the Liverpool Hornpipe. I’ve appended the tune of “The Bedmaking” – another “Cuckoo’s Nest” variant – to show how many similarities there are between two apparently very different tunes. This song also has the great merit of introducing the songs I’m going to be putting up over the next two weeks, in most cases by name!

My interpretation is after Tony Rose, although with the hornpipe-ish timing of the original dance tune brought more to the fore. I play the tune here on the flute; it’s not my favourite folk instrument, but it does have the great virtue of being chromatic – which is handy when you’ve got a tune that wavers between the keys of G and F. Drone by Bontempi, as always; no post-processing apart from edits and looping.

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Filed under folk song, the deeds of great Napoleon, Tony Rose, traditional