Despite the title, this is an original composition – one of mine, in other words, and the first I’ve graced this project with. Possibly also the last.
I’ve written some straight songs (he said, very reluctantly) but… this isn’t one of them. Except inasmuch as it’s a deep and meaningful examination of the experience of waiting to go on at a folk club, while someone does an unexpectedly long version of Sir P. S. (I never did get on that night, either. Ha!)
Daft, I call it.
Filed under all my own unaided, not a folk song
Week 19, and we approach the end of the seasonal white album with two January songs.
In the month of January is a beautiful Irish song; I bracket it with “When a man’s in love”, though they may be totally unconnected. This is after the singing of Sarah Makem and others. A lot of my ornamentation is after June Tabor; Sarah Makem’s influence is probably most audible on the swoops on some unstressed syllables. (That’s for any singers reading this. For everyone else, I just hope you like the song.)
Dave Goulder’s song The January man is one of my personal exceptions to the rule that there are no modern folk songs. This may not be a folk song, but the words and music make it sound like one, and it’s sung by folk singers who learn it from other folk singers. It’s a fine song, anyway, and deserves to be sung this and every January.
Filed under white
An Irish song from the singing of Sarah Makem.
Learning this, I went to the length of notating the rolls, trills, swoops and other decorations applied to this song by different singers: Sarah Makem, of course, but also June Tabor and Jon Boden. On close listening, it turned out that Jon Boden hardly did anything to it, and Sarah Makem herself was quite restrained. What was even more interesting was that the words (and syllables) where Sarah Makem ornamented the tune were, as often as not, words that June Tabor left alone. I began by trying to copy June Tabor’s reading of the song, then tried to follow Sarah Makem, and finally gave up and did something that isn’t quite like either of them.
The other thing I was planning to emulate was Jon Boden’s strikingly plain & sparing concertina accompaniment. As it turned out, working out the chords wasn’t so simple (I suspect the playing isn’t as plain as it sounds), and I ended up with just voice and drone. Maybe another time.
As folk songs go, this is the real thing; a glorious song, up there with Lemady and Searching for lambs.
Filed under folk song, Jon Boden, June Tabor, Sarah Makem, traditional
A contemporary song for the turning of the year. It was written by Dave Goulder (whose birthday is January 1st) in 1969.
I’m very sceptical of the idea that anything we write today – or anything that anyone has written since the coming of the radio and the Victrola – can be considered a “folk song”. Show me a “Fiddler’s Green” or a “Rolling Home” (or a “S_____s of L_____”) and I’ll show you a song that works well for the kind of person who goes to the kind of places where folk songs are sung. Which isn’t the same thing at all, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.
But a song like this gives my scepticism a forceful nudge. It’s a song that genuinely feels as if it’s been around forever. Quiet and plain-spoken, carefully worded (“he sees the Spring”/”looks through the snow”), with lines that are resonant and enduringly strange (what is “the man inside the man”?), it shares many of the qualities of the old songs. Forty-odd years on, it’s still being sung, and I think it deserves to be sung for many Januarys yet.
Filed under Dave Goulder, not a folk song
We mark the end of the Christmas period – and approach the end of the white album of seasonal songs – with two house-visiting songs.
The King is a song from the old post-Christmas custom of shooting a wren and displaying its body for luck. (The past is a foreign country.) Sung here in four-part harmony.
Poor old horse is a house-visiting song from the north of England; the ‘old horse’ would collapse and die towards the end, then spring back to life (and go on to the next house, presumably). Sung here without any harmonising, but with quite a lot of multi-tracking. The tune at the beginning and end is Scan Tester’s The Man in the Moon.
Filed under white
Folk song 18 has variously titles including “The King”, “The Wren” and “Please to see the King”. It’s a house-visiting song, based on the old custom of hunting and killing a wren on St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day). Mythically the wren was the king of the birds; the story goes that young men would kill a wren, wrap it in cloth and put it in a box, then take it around the houses offering to let people see “the king”. (An awful lot of folk customs become easier to understand when we factor in the universal urge among young men to get dressed up after work and have a laugh.) The song has some affinities with The Cutty Wren, which derives from the same custom; the “powder and shot” verse is very similar.
“Old Christmas” in the last verse may refer to Old Christmas, i.e. Christmas before the clocks went back in 1752. Alternatively, it may just be a meaningless one-syllable intensifier – “old Christmas” as in “my old friend”, “the Old Bill”, “old Cary Grant” etc. It’s hard to be sure, since the eleven-day discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars in 1752 almost exactly matches the twelve days of the Christmas church holiday itself; either way, Twelfth Night marks the point where Christmas is over. As indeed it is now. What the reference to Twelfth Night is doing in a Boxing Day house-visiting song is another matter; they wouldn’t have used an eleven-day-old dead wren, would they?
It’s a short song, anyway – if you’d pressed Play to begin with you would have heard it by now. Here it’s sung unaccompanied, in four-part harmony; I wrote the harmonies myself, with a little assistance from the Steeleye Span version. (I’m still finding it hard to hear harmonies – writing them from scratch is much easier.) I was toying with the idea of dubbing in a sound file containing the words “Rock on, Tommy!” in verse 4, but I couldn’t find one; you’ll just have to imagine it.
Filed under folk song, traditional
This is an old mummers’ song for house visiting at the turn of the year, marking the death of the old year, then heralding the birth of the new one when the horse springs back to life.
Well, sort of. It was sung for several years, in parts of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, by people going around the houses at the turn of the year carrying an ‘oss’ – a horse’s skull on a stick, sometimes with drapery to enable one of the group to provide the horse’s ‘body’. But ‘several’ doesn’t mean thousands or even hundreds of years; the slightly overheated antiquarian speculations identifying the horse with Odin’s steed Sleipnir – and the blacksmith who puts in an appearance towards the end with Thor – can probably be ignored. The thing is, the song itself isn’t at all old: it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century as a broadside ballad, and seems to have been just a song about an old horse before the mummers got hold of it.
But it’s a likeable song, and anything to do with mumming and house visiting is appropriate for this corner of the year. I learned it from John Kirkpatrick’s version, which he seems to have pieced together from three or four different variants with a bit of patching-up and a few new lines. Purist that I am, I took out the new material as far as possible and put the mummers’ last verse back in.
Although I liked the John Kirkpatrick version well enough to learn the song from it, I was always slightly irked by the Albionian jolliness of it, and I was wondering about doing something slightly different with it. Then I heard the wonderful take on the (closely-related) Old Grye Song on Rapunzel and Sedayne‘s album (you can hear an earlier version here) and got some ideas. My version isn’t as radical as theirs or as accomplished, but it wouldn’t have sounded the same without it – so thanks, R&S!
Three or four melodica parts, two D whistles, umpty-three vocals but no harmonies. Top recording tip: to split one voice into two (verses 5 and 7), split the stereo track into two, one for each channel, and insert a 0.05 second delay in one of them. It has to be a twentieth of a second: any more and you hear the delay, any less and you can’t hear the difference. I’ve put the song together with Scan Tester’s tune The Man in the Moon, just because I thought they would work well together.
Filed under folk song, traditional
Two more Christmas songs – I’m taking the view that it’s still Christmas until we get to Twelfth Night. These are both religious (in rather different ways) and both feature multi-part harmonies. These particular songs also have a personal connection.
38 years ago, I heard an extraordinary song on Top of the Pops. As a direct result I became a huge fan of Steeleye Span (and a vague admirer of Shirley Collins, June Tabor and the Albions), and learned several traditional songs that I still know. A few years later punk came along, but that’s another story.
8 years ago, I heard an extraordinary song on Mixing It. As a direct result I discovered Anne Briggs and Nic Jones, which led in turn to Tony Rose, Shirley Collins (again), June Tabor (again), Peter Bellamy… and the journey continues.
These are two landmarks in my personal discovery of folk, in other words. Hope I’ve done them justice!
Filed under white
Also known as “On Christmas Day”, but why use that title when you can use this one?
A curious song in many ways (from the title on down), this has only ever been collected from three people, two of whom (Esther Smith and May Bradley) later turned out to be mother and daughter. It seems to be of Traveller origin, which may explain the hazy geography and the lack of sympathy for someone with a lifestyle rooted in the soil. The Christianity is a bit on the idiosyncratic side, too, although it’s true that ploughing is traditionally verboten from Christmas Day until the first Monday after Twelfth Night (Plough Monday).
I got this one from James Yorkston’s recording on the “Someplace Simple” EP (which was also my introduction to Rosemary Lane); his arrangement features harmonium drones and two-part harmony, and makes the song sound so peculiar that Robert Sandall on Mixing It confidently labelled it as a modern pastiche. On this recording you can hear one voice, one instrument (the trusty melodica), self-written three-part harmonies and multi-tracking out the wazoo; I knew it was finished when the last verse started making my flesh creep. And a merry fifth day of Christmas to one and all. (Easy on the farm labour, though.)
Filed under folk song, traditional
I got this one from… well, where do you think?
As I wrote somewhere else a few years ago, when someone was soliciting Maddy Prior stories:
After I’d complained about the wallpaper in my room for some time, my parents agreed that I could strip it and repaint, during the next school holidays. Since the paper was now officially condemned, I felt free to add an extra layer of decoration, mainly consisting of lines from favourite songs in laborious swirly lettering.
Pride of place, though, went to a single word in six-inch capitals, placed there remind me of something truly extraordinary that I’d recently seen on Top of the Pops. It was a remarkable performance of a unique piece of music – at once pure and raw, intricate and earthy, delicate and strident, and made up of nothing more than the human voice. There were four voices interweaving like the threads of a tapestry, and above them there was a a fifth voice rising high and clear, sounding like moonlight through a monastery window. It was unforgettable; it still is.
And so I went up to my room and wrote on the wall, in capital letters six inches high:
GALDETE!
(Yes, well, that’s what it sounded like, OK?)
Four-part harmony, as written, with a couple of extra voices in octaves (towards the end), plus a bit of whistle.
Filed under not a folk song
Fifty-Two Folk Songs 