Category Archives: 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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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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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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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

3 March 2012 · 11:27 pm

AS16: John from the Isle of Man

This is a variant of Willie o’ Winsbury, and one which departs from the usual storyline further than most. In this one the daughter isn’t pregnant and the father objects to “young John” on the general principle of protecting his daughter from excessive male attention. (There’s also the unusual detail of the boyfriend being called John and coming from the Isle of Man.) When they meet, of course, the King is so impressed by young John’s good looks that he drops his objections.

Both the tune and the phrasing are from a recording made by Robert Cinnamond (1884-1968), who had a large repertoire of songs learned from his father and grandmother. His delivery of this song – particularly the heavily dotted 4/4 rhythm and the emphatic swoops on unstressed syllables – was too distinctive not to imitate; I expect it’ll seep into the way I sing other songs.

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

3 March 2012 · 11:27 pm

AS17: Tom the Barber

This is another Willie o’ Winsbury variant, with the same essential structure as most: King returns from abroad to find his daughter pregnant, he asks who the father is with a view to having him expelled or executed, but on meeting him is so impressed with his good looks that he immediately offers his daughter’s hand in marriage and a share of the kingdom. The consistent final twist is that the daughter’s lover is not only a bit of all right but also loaded, and has no interest in the kingdom part of the deal. It’s a father’s wish-fulfilment fantasy in some ways, although the passage where the King effectively says he quite fancies young Willie himself seems a bit excessive. A ‘Barber’ in this case is probably a Berber, or at least someone hailing from Barbary in North Africa. It’s hard to believe that his skin would have been ‘white as milk’ in the circumstances – but then, it’s not as if your disbelief hadn’t been suspended already.

This version was collected by Cecil Sharp, who seems to have excised the crucial verse; it was a bit racy by his standards. (I’ve put it back in.) I learned it from Tony Rose’s recording(s), although I couldn’t get on with his tune. The tune I use here is essentially the tune to which John Kelly sings Mary Hamilton, although – as with that song – I found it easier to sing it in 4/4 rather than 6/8.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, O my name is, Tony Rose, traditional

25 February 2012 · 12:01 pm

FS25: George Collins

An odd and rather creepy song: George Collins kisses a ‘pretty maid’; George Collins dies; his girlfriend dies, and so do five other women. The end.

Bert Lloyd argued, I think correctly, that Child 42 (Clerk Colvill) and 85 (Lady Alice) are fuller versions of the first and second halves of this song, which in turn implies that this song once existed in a much longer and more detailed form. What we can draw from Clerk Colvill is that the ‘pretty maid’ was no such thing, but a malevolent mermaid or other supernatural being, who first enchanted and then poisoned the central character. Incidentally, I don’t think the text gives much support to the feminist reading mentioned on this Mudcat thread, according to which Clerk Colvill was cheating on both his wife and the mermaid, who was only taking a justified, if slightly excessive, revenge. There’s not a lot of sisterly solidarity in the old ballads, and where it does exist it doesn’t tend to include mermaids. Why everyone around Clerk Colvill or George Collins promptly drops dead is less clear; this may have been a later addition, in the general spirit of having people die for love. (Or, as Jack suggested on that thread, there may have been a subtext involving syphilis.)

I learned this from Tony Rose’s recording on Bare Bones. Given the subject matter, I wasn’t very happy with the lilting, dreamy melody Tony Rose used – it works well for him, but I found the contrast between what I was singing and how I was singing it too uncomfortable. I used the melody in Classic English Folk Songs (formerly the EBPFS), but changed the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8, added a repeat and put in a mixolydian flattened seventh to make it slightly darker (it’s the first syllable of ‘pretty’ in ‘fair pretty maid’). There’s something a bit nagging and uncomfortable about all the instrumental tracks I’ve used here – melodica, drone and an old Generation high-G whistle; again, this felt right for the song. (This is folk song, lad – nobody ever said it would be fun.)

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