Category Archives: 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

2 November 2011 · 3:22 pm

AS05: Plains of Waterloo

One of the many Napoleonic folksongs which are namechecked in the previous song!

Probably needs no introduction; anyone who’s heard June Tabor’s rendition on Airs and Graces will (a) love the song and (b) be able to tell where I got it from. Other interpretations are available (Shirley and Dolly Collins’s is quite something) – but I think June T. put a stamp on the song that’s pretty much indelible. This is certainly a post-Tabor interpretation, perhaps with the time signature laid down a bit more firmly.

Practising this, I came to the firm conclusion that Willie Smith’s handling of the reunion leaves a lot to be desired. If this weren’t such a great song it would be crying out for a joke ending –

And when she saw the token she fell into my arms, crying
“You utter bastard! What do you think you’re playing at? I thought you were dead!”

Maybe not. I do think the narrator’s a bit of a creep, though; I don’t know if this comes across!

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Filed under folk song, June Tabor, the deeds of great Napoleon, traditional

21 October 2011 · 10:23 pm

FS08: Hughie the Graeme

Time for a tribute to one of my very favourite singers of traditional songs, and one who’s generally overlooked these days: Tony Capstick. He’s remembered, when he’s remembered at all, as a comedy-folkie from the Billy Connolly/Jasper Carrott/Mike Harding school, who (like them) eventually hung up the guitar and found stardom in comedy. This is half-true, but I think Capstick was a real loss to the folk scene – not least as an interpreter of traditional songs. This is a case in point; it appears as the last track on his second album Punch and Judy Man, in an arrangement that could pass for Horslips – all weird time signatures and electric guitar solos.

I haven’t emulated that arrangement – to put it another way, it’s taken me two years to stop emulating it – but what I have tried to take from Capstick’s singing is his timekeeping. Accompanying himself, he would let the guitar keep the beat and sing all around it, but unaccompanied he would nail every bar. There are worse ways to sing.

The song’s a terrific, defiant gallows speech, carrying on from Lord Allenwater last week. Again, I’ve skipped some of the more outlandish parts of the lyric – if you want Hughie the Graeme jumping fifteen feet from a standing start, I’m afraid you’ll have to sing it yourself. These lyrics are partly Child, partly Burns, partly MacColl and probably part Capstick. It doesn’t make much odds; there are lots of variants of this one, but they don’t fall very far from the tree.

Unaccompanied again – could have done with a drone, perhaps, or a bit of variation? Maybe next week.

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

21 October 2011 · 10:23 pm

AS04: Sam Hall

More gallows defiance. While I’m giving credit where it’s due, this one (like Spencer) came to me from John Kelly’s excellent first album. The original of the song was a chimneysweep and petty thief called Jack Hall, who (the story goes) was hanged alongside a notorious highwayman; the highwayman drew a crowd, and Jack Hall took the opportunity to put in a few boasts of his own.

A lot of versions of this song are openly angry and defiant, with repetitions of the “Damn your eyes!” line. What I liked about John’s version (and tried to emulate here) was the way that it gently brings out the emptiness of “Sam”‘s claims to fame. The ‘cows’ line is typical; apparently ‘cow’ was thieves’ slang for a sixpence, meaning that Sam was boasting about having robbed a grand total of £1. (Some versions have ‘twenty pounds’, which loses this point.) You can almost hear the self-doubt and despair that were below the surface. (Perhaps. Maybe that’s just the way we like to tell the story nowadays.)

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, O my name is, traditional

14 October 2011 · 4:22 pm

FS07: Derwentwater’s farewell

This is four verses (1, 3, 4 and 6) of a six-verse poem, written by one Robert Surtees in 1807 to a pre-existing tune. Surtees sent it to James Hogg for publication, presenting it as a folk survival of a ballad composed by the Jacobite Lord Derwentwater on the eve of his execution in 1716. It started life as a forgery, in other words. However, it did enter the tradition later on – although people are generally even more selective that I was about which verses they sing – and the tune is now generally known by the name of the song.

Execution by beheading is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but beyond that I don’t have much sympathy for Lord D and his family; being Catholic is one thing, but declaring for Charles I and James III in the space of 70 years just seems like asking for trouble. In any case, his father’s ancient seat had only been Chez Radclyffe for ninety-odd years (his great-great-grandfather had married the Dilston heiress in 1621 and died in 1622) – and a stranger never did call the place his, as it was left to rot shortly after the execution. (Derwentwater couldn’t have known this, of course, but Surtees could.) Still, nice tune.

Plus! for the first time!! instrumental backing!!! Through the magic of multi-tracking, I accompany myself here on a Bontempi reed organ with a noisy fan and six dead keys. (The keys are important because they narrow the range of the instrument, which meant that I couldn’t play the whole tune in the key I wanted; I had to play it in G and pitch-shift the recording into D. If you listen carefully to the beginning of the track, you can hear the fan being pitch-shifted.) The accompaniment is mostly a drone, but I begin by picking out the tune. I wanted to give the impression of playing it quite badly, although it’s quite an artificial impression – in reality I’m much more likely to get the wrong notes and grind to a halt than just to play the right notes slowly. Towards the end you can hear the tune again, this time on whistle (not pitch-shifted). And right at the end you can hear… well, you find out.

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Filed under folk song, traditional