Fifty-Two Folk Songs

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.

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.

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.