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

21 October 2011 · 10:23 pm

NS08: Serenity

Not a folk song in any shape or form; not really a song at all, just two and a quarter verses with a recurring last line. To put it another way, it’s the theme from Joss Whedon’s daft, doomed, brilliant space western series Firefly.

What’s it doing here? Consider if you will the folkloric identification of Hughie the Graeme as a border reiver, a savage outlaw operating on the fringes of English settlement; and who were the Big Bad in Firefly?

That’s circumstantial, admittedly, but then look at that recurring last line:

You can’t take the sky from me

and remember what H. the G. says to his father:

Though they bereave me of my life
They cannot take the heavens from me

Coincidence? I think not.

Also, I really like the song. Theme. Whatever.

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14 October 2011 · 4:34 pm

Week 7: Derwentwater’s farewell, Lord Allenwater and Danny Deever

Week 7, and the first week of the Indigo album (a theme may be emerging). The plan for this album is to release the tracks week by week, and release the album as a whole – complete with extras and hidden tracks – at the end of the seventh week.

FS07 is Derwentwater’s Farewell: a poem written in 1807, to a pre-existing tune, in the style of the real Lord D’s last words before his execution as a Jacobite. You can hear more about the execution in Lord Allenwater, a heroic account of Lord D’s last ride and his defiance on the scaffold. Danny Deever, finally, is a poem by Rudyard Kipling set to the tune of Derwentwater’s Farewell by Peter Bellamy; the setting works remarkably well, as Bellamy’s settings often do.

The second and third of these are unaccompanied as per usual, but Derwentwater’s Farewell features whistle, reed organ and a great deal of messing about with Audacity. I think it works rather well, particularly the beginning and end (the middle is mostly just me singing, which is less interesting on a technical level). See what you think.

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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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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

14 October 2011 · 3:27 pm

NS07: Danny Deever

Another Bellamy setting of a Kipling poem. The poem, which is said to be based on a true story, vividly brings out the horror of a public hanging – a contorted black shape, a whimpering cry, men shivering and fainting as they watch. But it’s not anti-hanging; it’s not even anti- this particular hanging, except in the sense of pitying what the poor man has been reduced to. The nearest thing to a narrative voice in the poem is the voice carrying the refrains (“For they’re hanging Danny Deever” and so on) – and that third voice makes it quite clear what we’re to think of Danny Deever:

They’re hanging Danny Deever – you must mark him to his place,
He shot a comrade sleeping, you must look him in the face
Nine hundred of his county and the regiment’s disgrace
They’re hanging Danny Deever in the morning.

(Gawd love yer, Rudyard, but I ain’t reproducin’ your bloomin’ vernacular punctuation for nuffink.)

Nine hundred of his county and the regiment’s disgrace – that line is at the heart of the poem, and really explains what it’s doing. To execute a man is a terrible thing; to turn out first thing in the morning, stand at attention and watch a man being executed is a terrible experience. But, in the world of the poem, it’s what the soldiers must do, when one of their number disgraces them; it’s another burden that they take on themselves. Which is a nasty theme, frankly – the self-pity of the strong, the thug’s troubled conscience – and would make for a nasty poem. I think what just about rescues this poem – making it both brutal and humane, instead of just brutally sentimental – is the vividness of Danny’s suffering and the fellow-feeling of his comrades. In this poem as in My boy Jack, Kipling’s compulsion to turn all the dials up to eleven results in something both moving and troubling.

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Filed under not a folk song, O my name is, Peter Bellamy, Rudyard Kipling

9 October 2011 · 2:57 pm

52fs: the album (Violet)

Announcing 52fs – the Violet Album.

So far on 52 Folk Songs I’ve recorded and uploaded 14 songs and two tunes, mostly but not exclusively traditional:

1        Lord Bateman (FS01)
2        The Death of Bill Brown (FS02)
3        The Unfortunate Lass (FS03)
4        The Cruel Mother (FS04)
5        Over the hills and far away
6        There are bad times just around the corner
7        My boy Jack
8        Us poor fellows
9        Down where the drunkards roll
10       Lemany (FS05)
11       Child among the weeds
12       Hegemony
13       The London Waterman (FS06) + Constant Billy
14       Spencer the Rover + Three Rusty Swords / The Dusty Miller

All of these tracks, together with a PDF file containing full lyrics plus assorted pictures, comments, musings and afterthoughts, can now be downloaded in the form of 52 Folk Songs – Violet.

52 Folk Songs – Violet is the first in a series of eight virtual ‘albums’ that will be appearing over the year. It’s yours for a token payment of 52p (you see what I did there).

Alternatively you can download the tracks individually and pay nothing at all, or just listen online.

Share and enjoy!

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6 October 2011 · 10:15 pm

Week 6: The London Waterman (with Constant Billy) and Spencer the Rover (with two hornpipes)

FS06 is the London Waterman; it’s joined by another folk song, Spencer the Rover. I used sometimes to apologise for singing songs in the person of a heartbroken young maiden, saying that there weren’t many traditional songs about happily married middle-aged men. Well, there aren’t many, but there are some – and here are two of them. This week I’ve also added on a couple of whistle tunes which I thought went together well with the songs.

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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