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

11 November 2011 · 8:20 pm

NS10: St Helena lullaby

This is Peter Bellamy’s setting of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “A St Helena lullaby”, recorded by Bellamy as “St Helena”. I’m using the longer title in case I want to record the trad “St Helena” further down the line (“Now Napoleon, he has done with his wars and his fighting…”).

These days Kipling is a hard writer to get to like; the problem isn’t so much his robust British imperialism (which doesn’t pervade everything he wrote, and in any case is often more ambiguous than it seems) as his style – all Initial Caps and Exhortations! One of these days someone will discover he was actually manic-depressive, and we’ll be able to detect a hectic anxiety behind all those Exclamation Marks! – that would do his reputation no end of good.

Anyway, this poem is very Kipling, for good and ill. It sums up the life of Napoleon using the conceit of looking in on key scenes in his life, asking each time “how far to St Helena…?” I particularly like the very last line, visualising the Emperor in his tomb as a troublesome child tucked up in bed – after all your traipsing, child, lie still! (Oops, spoilers.) There’s an odd sort of rhetorical double-bluff here – the image belittles Napoleon, but does it so exorbitantly that the effect is the reverse, drawing attention to just how great a figure he was.

The voices are all me, and there’s only one whistle (a cheapo Generation high G). There was going to be drumming, but my current system of recording everything separately and layering it together isn’t great for matching unaccompanied singing to a repeated drum pattern. Maybe a metronome should be the next investment!

I may pick up one of the other Napoleon songs later on (“St Helena”, “Dream of Napoleon”, the other tune for “Bonny Bunch of Roses”…), but this is the last one for now. Hope you’ve enjoyed them.

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Filed under not a folk song, Peter Bellamy, Rudyard Kipling, the deeds of great Napoleon

4 November 2011 · 4:16 pm

Week 10: The bonny bunch of roses, Boney’s lamentation, The unborn Byron

Two more Napoleonics this week, plus a song by the dreadfully underrated Peter Blegvad.

The bonny bunch of roses has been one of my favourite songs since I first heard it played by Nic Jones (it’s the second track on his second album). I don’t promise this is that good, but did Nic Jones use a D whistle and an ambient drone in A? I think not.

Boney’s lamentation, oddly enough, is the third track on Nic Jones’s second album. Unaccompanied, straight through, no messing. (The tune is also known as the Princess Royal, among other things.)

As for The Unborn Byron, this is a sort of surrealist companion piece to the last verse of The bonny bunch of roses. It’s a tender, beautiful song in which an unborn baby tells his mother that he’ll be remembered when he’s dead – as, of course, he is. One voice (recorded in two rooms), one flute.

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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

4 November 2011 · 4:13 pm

NS09: The unborn Byron

As I said in the notes to the Bonny Bunch of Roses, the idea of a young man on his deathbed saying goodbye to his mother is dreadfully poignant. This is a happier counterpart: an unborn baby talking (telepathically?) to his mother and looking forward to great things:

Spread the word: tomorrow morn
A future poet shall be born

(I want to quote the whole thing now.)

If you’ve had children, you’ll know that every baby is a tyrant; every baby is a megalomaniac, who wants the world and wants it now. And every baby is bound for glory; every baby is going to sweep the whole world along and prevail in spite of all the universe. This song captures some of that glorious sense of hope and purpose and power – and makes it true.

The picture at the Bandcamp page for this song, incidentally, isn’t Byron; it’s Napoleon II, Emperor of France and King of Rome, modelled as a baby.

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Filed under not a folk song, O my name is, Peter Blegvad

2 November 2011 · 3:53 pm

Week 9: Grand conversation on Napoleon, Plains of Waterloo

Week 9 has been a long time coming – sorry about that. Hopefully normal service will be resumed for week 10. (The 52fs week runs Thursday to Wednesday, so it won’t take long to find out!)

This week and the next couple of weeks I’m going to be dipping into the repertoire of songs on Napoleon, perhaps with a couple on Nelson for balance.

The Grand Conversation on Napoleon is an odd song, as wordy as the title implies but with a distinctive (and fiddly) tune spanning two octaves. After the song – backed with a Bontempi drone – I play through the tune on flute, then run it into a version of the dance tune “The cuckoo’s nest”; they’re closer than might appear.

Plains of Waterloo looks, indirectly, at the human cost of the events described in the previous song. (It’s also one of the songs that the Grand Conversation tends to spark off in singarounds.) It’s unaccompanied, and very much in the footsteps of June Tabor.

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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 · 10:31 pm

Week 8: Hughie the Graeme, Sam Hall, Serenity

Two gallows songs this week, following on from Lord Allenwater last week, plus a third song which is… connected.

Hughie the Graeme is a Child ballad commemorating the execution of a border outlaw and his defiance on the gallows. My arrangement derives ultimately from MacColl’s, but it’s heavily influenced by Tony Capstick – a really great folksinger in his day.

Sam Hall is from the other end of the country and the other end of the social scale; it’s an eighteenth-century broadside ballad in an odd sort of mock-heroic style. The old songs don’t wear their emotions on their sleeve; there’s horror and ridicule in this song, but they’re not spelt out.

As for Serenity… ah, Serenity. Check it out.

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Filed under Indigo