Category Archives: traditional

14 April 2012 · 9:53 pm

AS27: The outlandish dream

An outlandish knight…

Right, got it.

…he dreamed a dream…

No, wait – he did what?

This is sometimes catalogued as “The outlandish knight”, confusingly enough, but also crops up under a number of other names; Martin Carthy’s recorded it as “A Cornish young man”. I got the idea and the tune from Andy Turner’s rather fine A Folk Song A Week site; the words are from a broadside on the Bodleian Web site. It’s an odd little song about love, social class and chastity, with a slightly improbable happy ending; I don’t know the significance of the move with the ring and the guinea, and why a kiss is like a stone in a sling remains a mystery. And what our friend(?) the outlandish knight is doing in there is anyone’s guess.

Like Andy, I sang this one unaccompanied; I thought that was how it wanted to be.

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14 April 2012 · 9:44 pm

AS28: On board the ‘Kangaroo’

A silly, frivolous song of love and loss, which was originally a music-hall number by Harry Clifton (who also wrote The Calico Printer’s Clerk and Polly Perkins, among many others). Since escaping into the wild, it’s lost some of the class markers which originally made for broad comedy (e.g. cockneyisms and the use of trademarks); the effect is to give the character singing a degree of dignity which he can’t originally have had. The song is still pleasantly daft, though.

I got this from Tony Rose’s album Bare Bones and recorded it on a whim – it was a spur-of-the-moment decision this morning. Tony Rose gave this a jolly and rather beautiful accompaniment on concertina; this wasn’t an option for me, so I reached for the melodica, plus a whistle or two. The arrangement just sort of grew.

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8 April 2012 · 6:00 pm

FS31: Once I had a sweetheart

Thanks to Pentangle (and my older sister), this is one of the first folk songs I ever heard. It’s also about the third or fourth I ever sang in public, and one of the songs that first gave me the courage to go to a folk club; I remember singing it while I was waiting for a bus in Salford, some time in the 90s, and thinking “that ought to be traditional enough for ’em…“. In most cases “The Air That I Breathe” would have been traditional enough for ’em, but I wasn’t to know.

Editorially this seems to be Pentangle’s own work; it puts together some verses from an American ballad with some from the English song As Sylvie Was Walking. The first verse resembles Green Grow the Laurels, but there doesn’t seem to be any overlap apart from that.

The arrangement is after Pentangle, at least in the sense that I wanted drums, a bass line and some trebly accents over the top. Instrumentation: bongoes, melodica, zither – two tracks of each, as it happens. The zither’s not much cop for playing live, but if you play it flat on a table for extra resonance it records surprisingly well, particularly if you set the microphone gain to High.

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8 April 2012 · 5:39 pm

AS25: When I was in my prime

There’s a whole family of songs associating flower imagery with heartbreak and loss of innocence, variously featuring grass, roses, willow, thyme and rue (the last two coming with fairly unsubtle wordplay). This and the next are both examples, although they aren’t in any obvious sense variants on the same song.

I learned this song from Jacqui McShee’s unaccompanied recording on the Pentangle album Cruel Sister; I remember being particularly struck by the lack of a copyright credit on the label. (No need: there was no composition and no arrangement, just a traditional song.) I also liked McShee’s controlled, restrained delivery: the song was rendered in exactly the same way, verse by verse, with exactly the same ornamentation and almost no change of emphasis or volume. I liked it, but I haven’t emulated it. There’s even accompaniment (flute, mostly recorded in the bathroom).

The key signature of this one had me puzzled – it appears to be in F, but an F/C drone sounded totally wrong, and D/A for D minor wasn’t much better. It turns out it’s in G Dorian, i.e. a scale from G to G played with one flat. The drone you hear (on recorder) is G and D, or rather D, G and D.

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8 April 2012 · 5:26 pm

AS26: Let no man steal your thyme

This is one of the briefer examples of this family of songs, as sung by Jean Redpath and subsequently Anne Briggs. There’s little or no overlap with When I was in my prime, showing how much variation can develop in a group of songs over the years. I particularly like the way the nature imagery is developed in the last verse – “Woman is a branchy tree and man a single wand“; concise and to the point.

Sung in the open air – six feet up in the air, in fact – unaccompanied except for birdsong.

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31 March 2012 · 10:14 pm

FS30: I live not where I love

I’ve never heard a recorded version of this song. Like When a man’s in love, it’s a song I learned after hearing it sung at my local singaround, in this case by the estimable Dave Bishop.

This is more or less the version sung by Jean Redpath, from which most post-revival versions of this song derive. A seventeenth-century original has been identified, but in most respects it isn’t worth going back to – it’s rather wordy and ornate, and generally looks like a song in need of folk-processing. I liked a few bits of it, though, so I used half of one verse and a few verse-endings.

The tune is a very old pipe tune called (among other things) Sir John Fenwick’s. The accompaniment is melodica, recorder and zither; that includes the weird noisy bits (the nature of which will be clarified if you listen right to the end). The idea was to mark a transition between sections with a bit of musical noise, essentially.

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31 March 2012 · 10:06 pm

AS24: My bonny boy

Like a lot of people, I fell in love with the singing of Anne Briggs when I was first getting into folk songs. Since then I’ve fallen quite decisively out of love with it, for whatever reason, but I wouldn’t deny that she recorded definitive versions of some traditional songs.

This being one of them. I’ve gone back to the version collected by Gardiner (in Marrow Bones) for the words, but I’ve kept Anne Briggs’ extraordinary tune and her last verse (“I’ll walk with that boy now and then”). This verse wasn’t in the Gardiner version, but (I’ve since discovered) it descends with only minor modifications from a seventeenth-century broadside ballad called “Cupid’s Trepan”. (Strange but true!)

I’ve made one further change to the words, to avoid suggesting that the singer is a girl. Normally I don’t mind a quick change of sex (or age) for the sake of a song – there are an awful lot more songs about teenage girls than there are about middle-aged men, after all. In this case, though, I thought it was more interesting to leave open the possibility that the singer actually was a middle-aged man. See what you think.

Accompaniment: well, there’s actually a flute in the song – how could I resist? Ethereal drone: melodica, heavily treated.

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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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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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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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