Category Archives: 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

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

22 April 2012 · 9:10 pm

FS33: The valiant sailor

I’ve bought a concertina! (English system, secondhand; it’s a Lachenal tutor (for those who know about these things), 100+ years old, thoroughly refurbed 20-30 years ago & checked over the other day). It’s a beautiful instrument – the best purchase I’ve made in years.

The only problem is that I can’t play it yet. I have managed to get a few chords out of it, though, as you can hear on this song. (Four, to be precise: G, D, C and A minor.)

This song has a double debt to John Kelly, who I’ve namedropped a couple of times recently. I learned it from him in the first place – it’s the opening track, and one of the standouts, on his first album Come all you wild young men. This arrangement, slowing it right down to bring out the sadness of the story, is a departure from John’s – but it’s based on what he did to Greenland Whale Fisheries on his second album. I’ve got a weakness for really sad songs, and GWF has always been just a bit hearty for me (“There’s a whale! There’s a whale! There’s a whale-fish! he cried”); John’s arrangement is a revelation. I don’t think anyone’s ever criticised this song for being too cheerful, but I think this slow, still arrangement is quite effective all the same. See what you think.

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, traditional

22 April 2012 · 8:57 pm

AS29: The Dolphin

This is a maritime ballad dating back to the eighteenth century and sung more recently by Sam Larner, among others. I learned it from a recording by the late Tony Capstick, who was a consistently great interpreter of songs and a very variable comedian; it’s a great shame that he’s now remembered (when he’s remembered at all) as a comic rather than a singer.

The drum-and-drone arrangement just grew, as they tend to. One of these days I’ll probably get a guitar and just use that for chords and rhythm, like most people do. But where would the fun be in that?

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Filed under folk song, Tony Capstick, traditional

14 April 2012 · 10:32 pm

FS32: Blackwaterside

I originally learned this song from Anne Briggs’s recording, which I found simultaneously inspiring and frustrating – the latter because I couldn’t see a way to break the song out of her arrangement, with the song framed quite tightly and squarely in the guitar part. Sue van Gaalen’s unaccompanied version helped me get to grips with the song, as did Rapunzel and Sedayne’s version on their album. Ironically, what I’ve ended up with here is closer to Anne Briggs’s version than to either of those.

Apart from a semi-improvised D whistle part, the accompaniment you hear on this one is all played on zither (the righthand channel as well as the lefthand one). I love the almost mechanical regularity of a simple repeated pattern like this, ticking quietly away in the background of a song. The arrangement is indebted to Jon Hopkins’s work on his and King Creosote’s album Diamond Mine – lovely singing, amazing production, shame about the songs. (When’s Kenny going to do a Folk Songs?)

It’s difficult to know what to say about this song, other than that it’s one of the greats, and – if you haven’t done so already – there are lots of other versions you can hear. In some ways folk has more of an affinity with classical music than with pop – the repertoire’s there, the question is what you’re going to do with it. Here’s what I’ve done with this one.

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