Category Archives: traditional

14 October 2011 · 3:44 pm

AS03: Lord Allenwater

Child 208 (as Lord Derwentwater). This is a song about the execution of a Jacobite – the same Lord Derwentwater whose dying words are supposed to be recorded in the ‘Farewell’. I learned the song from Shirley and Dolly Collins’s marvellous version on the album For as many as will, although at first I found it hard to get to make it work in the absence of trumpets and a portative organ. I was heavily influenced by Patti Reid’s unaccompanied Lord Derwentwater (thanks, Martin); I also rummaged fairly freely in variants of Child 208 for a set of verses I was happy with. In the Collinses’ Lord Allenwater, for example, our man denies being a traitor and then proclaims his loyalty to King George, which is not only historically inaccurate but turns a noble gesture of defiance into something a bit feeble. There are versions where Lord D.’s severed head speaks, and others where his headless body stands up and walks, neither of which miracles would really have the desired effect on a modern audience; I was briefly tempted to include both of them, but ended up leaving them out. I did keep the business with the letter, despite it being an obvious lift from Sir Patrick Spens. Folk process innit.

This is one of my favourite songs; I hope I’ve done it justice.

Update 31/8/13 Now re-recorded; still no trumpets or portative organ, but there is flute and concertina. Otherwise my thoughts about the song are unchanged – and this time round I think I have done it justice.

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

6 October 2011 · 10:13 pm

FS06: The London Waterman

This appears to be a folk-processed version of a song that was written in 1774, although the differences are so great that it could almost be a different song. The ‘waterman’ is a ferryman: before the great bridge-building period of the nineteenth century, if you didn’t cross the Thames on London Bridge itself your best option was to find a waterman who’d row you over in his wherry. (The picture on the Bandcamp page shows the only surviving wherryman’s seat – stone benches for the watermen to rest between fares used to be a common piece of riverside street furniture. The seat’s been relocated, but it’s survived two centuries and more – like the song.)

I got this song from Peter Bellamy’s recording. Learning it – and learning how to sing it, which is slightly different – helped me understand why Bellamy sang the way he did, with that pouncing, declamatory attack on the lines. The short answer is that he did it because it works – it really gets you under the skin of the song. Also, taking a song by the scruff like this is fun – and it’s not pretty, which for some of us at least is a virtue. (My son heard me practising this song and said, “Well, Dad, you definitely sing merry.”)

Plus, this week, a tune! I go to a local singaround and tunes session, held on alternate weeks with overlapping participants. Something that’s particularly enjoyable is fitting a tune to a song – apart from anything else, it lets us sneak some songs in when we’re playing tunes. So we regularly segue from “Waters of Tyne” into Sir John Fenwick’s, for example. We’ve never yet done the Waterman and the Morris tune Constant Billy, which I’ve put together here, but I think it could work. I might have to work on the high notes, though – when I came to put the recordings together it turned out that my voice had rather lazily pitched the song in F rather than the more demanding G, so I had to process the whistle digitally to make it come out in the right key. (It was that or go out and buy an F whistle, and it was raining.)

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Filed under folk song, Peter Bellamy, traditional

6 October 2011 · 10:12 pm

AS02: Spencer the Rover

Being a parent has its advantages:

And my children came around me with their prittle-prattling stories,
With their prittle-prattling stories to drive care away

While I’ve never walked out on my family and gone rambling around Rotherham, I love this song and feel a definite identification with Spencer; I’m glad it works out for him.

The definitive version of this song has to be John Kelly’s, most of which you can hear here. John started gigging in 1968(!), but for a variety of reasons has only recently started recording. His second album came out recently; if it’s anything like his first album, “Come all you wild young men“, it’ll be an essential purchase. (Like the old K-Tel albums, it’s not available in any shops, unfortunately – to get your hands on it you’ll need to contact John, or better still see him live.)

Like the Waterman, this is also an example of fitting a tune to a song: two tunes in this case, Three Rusty Swords and the Dusty Miller. There are a bunch of these tunes; they’re relatively simple to play, until you try playing them one after another at blazing speed. For reasons that escape me, they’re (a) known as hornpipes, despite being (b) in 3/2; and although they’re in 3/2, they’re (c) invariably played at the aforesaid blazing speed. Not easy, then, but fun – particularly when you’re in a large enough group that nobody can hear your bum notes!

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Filed under folk song, John Kelly, traditional

29 September 2011 · 7:48 pm

FS05: Lemany

I feel as if I’ve known this song forever. I haven’t, by any means – I heard it for the first time about two years ago, and only learned it properly when Jon Boden featured it on AFSAD (although see NS06). Perhaps it’s more that I feel as if that this song has been there forever.

I love the sinuous, looping melody, and the way it combines a keening, yearning urgency (particularly strong in Jon Boden’s version) with a kind of bedazzled stillness; the overall effect is genuinely magical, almost incantatory. The folk-garbling of the lyrics has resulted in some lines that make no sense whatsoever, as it often does, but in this case it’s startlingly beautiful nonsense:

And she’s played it all over, all on her pipes of ivory
So early in the morning, at the break of day

This version is indebted to Jon Boden (as ever), but also to Jim Moray’s remarkable version; thanks also to Dave Bishop, one of my local folk heroes, whose rendition was the first I heard. But I couldn’t really find my way into it as a singer until I heard Tony Rose’s version on Bare Bones, which handles those ‘feminine’ line endings particularly well. I also thought it needed slowing down, without making the pace a funereal plod. What all this added up to was singing it in 3/4. I don’t often change the time on songs I sing, but in this case I think it works. See what you think.

(Incidentally, I don’t credit Bellamy on this occasion because I haven’t actually heard his version. Yet!)

Update May 2013 On reflection I decided that the 3/4 time was a mistake, and if it was going to be a slow 4/4, it was going to be a slow 4/4 and that was all there was to it. Again, see what you think.

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Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, Tony Rose, traditional

23 September 2011 · 10:32 am

FS04: The cruel mother

Child 20 (or similar). This is another song that exists in many variants, and another one which tells a heart-wrenching story without pointing a moral. Emily Portman’s comment quoted here

Rather than damning the protagonist as a cruel mother I think of her as a desperate woman caught in the trappings of a time when illegitimate pregnancy could result in being outcast from family and society.

seems valid but beside the point: the song doesn’t excuse the mother, but it doesn’t exactly damn her either. (She’s literally damned, but not for being an evil person.) As I read it, the song simply says that she dealt with an unwanted pregnancy by killing her babies, and that this was a dreadful thing – for her as well as for them. It’s probably a meaningless juxtaposition, but I do like the way the refrain runs on from the last verse in this version:

While you must drag out the fires of hell
Down by the greenwood side-i-o

At the end of the song, I think that’s exactly what she’s doing.

The tune here came from Jon Boden on AFSAD, and the words may have done too – certainly none of the sources I’ve looked at are an exact match to the words I sing. Folk process innit. (I couldn’t be doing with spending seven years ringing bells like a whale in the wood, or whatever it was.) I tried to keep the refrain as plain, unadorned and (above all) consistent as possible. I generally try to get the speaking voice into my delivery of folk songs, particularly the really old ones like this one, but refrains are an exception: I think they should work like a musical phrase that keeps coming round again, almost mechanically, to frame the story as it progresses.

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Filed under Child ballad, folk song, Jon Boden, traditional

23 September 2011 · 10:31 am

AS01: Over the hills and far away

This sounds much better with a big chorus, so feel free to join in. Like the Cruel Mother, this is a Landfall song. Don’t be fooled by the suspiciously authentic-sounding references to Queen Anne (r. 1702-14) – it really is an old song (it’s in Pills to Purge Melancholy, published 1706). I find it heartbreakingly sad; the wistful tune, with that repeated dying fall on the last line, seems at odds with the gung-ho sentiment of the words. It’s not exactly an eighteenth-century Army Dreamers, but you can’t help remembering that a lot of them wouldn’t return, with full honour or otherwise – and suspecting that the people who sang it at the time knew it too. Or perhaps it’s just that we just sing it far too slow these days.

I was planning to use an earlier recording, put down while I had a cold and was getting weepy and emotional at the drop of a hat; I really belted out that chorus, I can tell you. Unfortunately by the end of the song I was singigg “Queen Adde commadds add we obey”, which spoiled the effect rather.

Admin note: up to now we’ve had two weeks with one folk song (FS) and one not-a-folk-song (NS), and one week with one FS and two NS. If this goes on I’ll end up with more non-folk songs on this site than folk, which wasn’t the idea at all. On the other hand, I do want to keep the 1-52 numbering system for both folk songs and weeks. My solution is to introduce a third category: AS, or also-a-folk-song. (No, it doesn’t make much sense. Humour me!)

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Filed under folk song, traditional

16 September 2011 · 4:36 pm

FS03: The Unfortunate Lass

Two cautionary tales this week.

This song is one of many, many variants – its cousins include Maid Struck Down In Her Prime, The Unfortunate Rake, Pills of White Mercury, Streets of Laredo, When I Was On Horseback and the St James Infirmary Blues. The plot, if that’s the word, is always the same: the song is the deathbed speech of someone who’s dying of VD. To modern ears the song seems curiously bald in the way the story is told: we hear that a young man (or woman) is suffering horribly and about to die, we hear what’s killing him or her, but all the obvious conclusions – how sad it is and what a dreadful warning – are left to us to draw. To my mind this lack of either sentiment or censoriousness is one of the key distinguishing factors of traditional songs: they may show us what to think, but they don’t tell. It can make for some incredibly powerful lines – in this song, think of the awful, casual bleakness of

Send for the doctor although it’s too late

In my experience, the contemporary songs that can stand comparison with traditional songs often have this quality, too – see today’s Richard Thompson number.

Although I’ve known When I Was On Horseback for years, I’d never heard this song until Jon Boden did it on A Folk Song A Day. As soon as I heard it I knew I was going to have to learn it. I may have slowed it down a bit, in an effort to give the 6/8 time some of the plodding grimness of the St James Infirmary Blues, but essentially this arrangement is after Jon’s.

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Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, traditional

9 September 2011 · 10:36 pm

FS02: The death of Bill Brown

“The death of Bill Brown” is an eighteenth-century song about an encounter between a gamekeeper and two poachers. The gamekeeper, Tom Green, shot and killed one of the poachers; his friend, who is supposed to be singing this song, went back the next night and shot Tom Green.

I learned the song from Peter Bellamy’s version; you can see him performing it here. Bellamy (or his source) doctored the song fairly extensively, particularly the melody: as collected it had quite a jolly upbeat tune, complete with a fol-de-rol refrain. I think Bellamy’s minor-key tune and his aggressive, declamatory reading fit the song much better, so I followed him.

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Filed under folk song, O my name is, Peter Bellamy, traditional

7 September 2011 · 7:25 am

FS01: Lord Bateman

The second or third time I heard this song, I completely lost track of time. When silence fell, Bateman having finally married his Sophia and vowed never again to range the ocean, I shook my head like a dog waking up; I’d heard every note, but it felt as if I’d been sitting there for hours. (It was Nic Jones’s version, which comes in at a little under seven minutes, but even so.) Something about the steady forward motion of the story coupled with the swinging repetitions and returns of the melody… I’m drifting off now just thinking about it. Using repetition is something folk music teaches you, I think. James Yorkston once said the two bands he’d most like to play in were Planxty and Can, and in many ways they’re not that far apart.

The song is my version of Nic Jones’s version of one of the many versions of Child 52 (most of which aren’t about anyone called Bateman), with the tune borrowed from Joseph Taylor’s version, some lyrics borrowed from Jim Moray’s version and the musical influence of Dave Bishop. (I think that’s everyone.) It’s unusual among the old ballads in having a happy ending; really, the narrative doesn’t have much drama in it at all, or not by modern standards – I guess at the time it was composed the idea of Sophia packing up all of her gay gay clothing and making it all the way from Turkey to Northumberland was a marvel in itself.

Anyway, here it is; see what you think. (I can’t promise to induce a trance state.)

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