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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29 September 2011 · 7:59 pm

Week 5: Lemany (Sweet Lemonie, Limady etc), Child Among the Weeds and Hegemony

FS05 is Lemany: my take on a strange, beautiful song that was preserved by the Coppers.

Also this week: Lal Waterson’s amazing song Child Among the Weeds, which I’ve only recently been able to get through without choking up. Plus Scritti Politti’s Hegemony. What’s the connection? Read on!

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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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29 September 2011 · 7:48 pm

NS05: Child among the weeds

A song by Lal Waterson and Chris Collins from Bright Phoebus, Lal and Mike Waterson’s criminally under-appreciated album of self-composed songs.

There aren’t many contemporary songs which inspire the same kind of awe in me as “Lemany”, but this is one of them. There’s a more direct connection, too. One of the strange, incantatory lines in the first half of “Lemany” goes like this:

The sun is just a-glimmering:
Arise, my dear

And here’s a line from the middle section of this song, sung on the record by Bob Davenport (the main verses are sung by Lal):

The day has only just begun,
The silver sun is shining.
Wake up, wake up everyone!
The day is only dazzling!

The line from “Lemany” is clearly there in the background; I think Lal’s line actually betters it.

I was wary of doing this song – there are some extraordinarily powerful lines; there’s one in particular which tends to make me cry when I hear it or see it written down, so actually singing it was quite a challenge. I got through it, though. There isn’t as big a contrast between the verses and the middle section as there is on the record, for obvious reasons; what I did do was put together two different recordings, self-as-Lal and self-as-Bob. Wonders of technology eh?

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Filed under Lal Waterson, not a folk song

29 September 2011 · 7:47 pm

NS06: Hegemony

Well now. In the glorious period just after punk, I wasn’t into folk music. What I was into was the glorious period after punk, when it seemed as if the music scene as we’d known it was being replaced by an upsurge of spontaneous creativity and communication. Anyone who had something to say could say it, by getting 500 singles pressed and sending them out to be sold at 50p a time – and everyone had something to say. It was an exhilarating period, and one with massive potential for both artistic and political radicalism: for a while, the idea of selling out for major label deals and TOTP slots seemed to be irrelevant, and that meant that musicians could start making their own language.

Nobody did more to open up the idea of self-made music than the Desperate Bicycles (more on them another time, maybe) – and nobody did more to follow it through than Scritti Politti. On Scritti Politti’s second or possibly third release you can hear this song: one of the most powerful expressions of the ferociously determined radicalism with which Green Gartside approached his music, and – sadly – the corner into which he painted himself. Spend too long making your own language, after all, and you end up with no one to talk to. As I wrote on my other blog:

Green has dismissed the recordings of this period as “some anti-produced labour of negativity, kind of structurally unsound and exposed, by design and default … evocative of extraordinary times and a bit winceworthy”. For all that he’s the artist, that seems more like a list of symptoms than a description of the condition. I think something like “Hegemony” is best seen as the product of an attempt to fuse three things – the music, the politics, the personal sense of urgency and wrongness – which didn’t really belong together and certainly didn’t fit together.

So what’s this song doing here? Listen to the tune and all will be revealed. The title should give it away: this isn’t a new song at all, but post-punk Gramscian remake of “Lemany”. It turns out that the anxiously self-deconstructing racket of Scritti Politti’s early work was built on a long familiarity with English folk music, the work of Martin Carthy in particular.

After the post-punk project had gone off the rails, Scritti Politti re-emerged as exponents of a kind of machine-tooled white soul; it’s a shame they didn’t go the other way, retracing the bash and clatter of songs like this back to their macrame beat origins and beyond. “Green sings Anthems in Eden” – that I’d pay to hear.

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23 September 2011 · 10:45 am

Week 4: the Cruel Mother and Over the hills and far away

Nearly a year ago the redoubtable Sedayne announced the Landfill project, a 40th anniversary collective re-recording of Martin Carthy’s Landfall. For a variety of reasons the project never really took off, but I thought & still think it was a fine idea. This week’s songs are both Landfall songs; if the project does ever happen, I’d be very happy for them to be Landfill songs.

FS04 is The Cruel Mother: one of many variants of a very old song, listed by Francis Child as ballad 20. Over the hills is probably a bit younger, but it does date back – in its original, more cheerful form – to the reign of Queen Anne; it’s 300 years old, in other words. It still sounds relevant.

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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 · 4:53 pm

Week 3: The unfortunate lass and Down where the drunkards roll

FS03 is The unfortunate lass: one of many variants of a song about premature death: messy, painful, unheroic premature death. Also this week: Richard Thompson’s Down where the drunkards roll. Not a drinking song.

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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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