Category Archives: traditional

As Reinhard documents, this song is based on a true story and can consequently be dated with unusual precision: the Saturday in question was the 11th of January 1834.

Beyond that I can’t tell you much about the song, except to say that it shows a very striking combination of impersonality and aching grief. (Singer-songwriters take note: sad things have happened to you, but something sadder has almost certainly happened to someone else. You’re alive, for one thing.) I first heard it on the Woodbine and Ivy Band’s CD (reviewed here); Olivia Chaney’s rendition is one of the highlights of the album. My accompaniment is one of the more fiddly concertina arrangements I’ve come up with so far, supplemented with a bit of double-tracked zither.

This was originally going to be a recording of the well-known shanty “Blood red roses” (Go down, you blood-red roses!). Then I did some research – or rather, I found out about the research other people had been doing, notably the estimable Gibb Schreffler (“Gibb Sahib” on Mudcat). It seems that “Blood red roses” first appeared in the 1956 film Moby Dick, sung by a shantyman played by A. L. Lloyd (no less). There are a few older sources – not many; it’s an obscure song in any form – but none of them include “blood red roses” or the phrase “go down”. The endless speculation about the meaning and relevance of those blood-red roses – a poetic image for the blood fountaining from a stricken whale? a reference to the red coats of the eighteenth-century British Army? an oblique reference to the “bonny bunch of roses” of Napoleonic fame? – seems to have been founded on nothing more meaningful or traditional than a rewrite by Bert Lloyd.

As for “Come down you bunch of roses”, it seems to have been based on a West Indian children’s game (a singing game with the refrain “Come down with a bunch of roses” was recorded in 1962). Shanty writers worked with whatever was to hand – the not at all family-friendly “Little Sally Racket” also seems to have started life in the playground. Asking what the roses meant is a bit like asking for the meaning of the socks in “While shepherds washed their socks by night” – there was this song, and it got twisted to use as a shanty, and, er, that’s it. Having said that, perhaps the appeal of the phrase in this context has to do with the contrast between the flower imagery and the masculine job of hauling on a rope; a shantyman singing “Oh you pinks and posies!” is a bit like a sergeant major saying “Come on, you great fairies, put your backs into it!” (Perhaps we should sing it as “pinks and pansies”. Or perhaps not.)

As well as making the refrain more mysterious and exciting, Bert Lloyd seems to have detached it from its original verses, which – backing up the ‘singing game’ theory – were very largely about girls and food, and very little about whales and bad weather. In this respect I chickened out; my refrain has different words and a different tune from the standard revival version of “Blood red roses” (not bad for a single line of six words), but my verses are pretty much what you’d expect. Many thanks to Gibb Schreffler for the work he put into researching and recording this song.

As well as harmony vocals there’s a bit of musique concrète on here by way of percussion; I stamped on a wood floor, stuck my hand in a jug of water and rattled oven shelves, among other things. It keeps me off the streets.

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.