3 June 2012 · 8:19 pm

FS39: The dark-eyed sailor

We close the third quarter of the year – and the Yellow album – with a “broken token” ballad. It’s quite a literary piece of work (William and Phoebe?), although perhaps less so than this week’s other song. As always, you do wonder quite how much difference the years had made to the true love’s appearance, which in this case seems to have been particularly distinctive. Still, willing suspension of disbelief and all that.

Musically speaking, my approach to this song started with Tony Rose’s version, although as ever the metre is a bit more regular here; it makes quite an interesting 3/4 tune. The accompaniment is one of my more ‘knitted’ efforts, with a single melody line but a lot of textural variation.

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3 June 2012 · 7:18 pm

AS35: Sweet Jenny of the moor

This is another “broken token” ballad. Stylistically it’s very much a written piece of work (“one morn for recreation”, indeed); the repeated rhymes on “moor” seem particularly literary. (Where was this ‘moor’, anyway? Jenny of the Beach would have been more accurate; rhymes might have been a problem, though.) The briskness with which the writer gets through the key points of the plot is also striking – the audience could obviously be assumed to know what was going on.

Accompanied on English concertina, with a quick burst of C whistle towards the end. I learned it from Tony Rose’s version, which is well worth tracking down – he could really play that box.

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27 May 2012 · 11:18 am

Week 38: I would that the wars were all done, High Germanie, The weary cutters

Week 38 eh? Where does the time go? (There’s a song there somewhere.)

Three conscription songs this week. The most sentimental & the most “written”-sounding is I would that the wars were all done; I’m not that keen on the verses, but the refrain makes up for it. Accompanied with two-note concertina chords; partly sung in mid-air.

High Germanie continues the recent sub-theme of sketchy European geography. (As I understand it “High” Germany was roughly what we now call Germany – Low Germany being the Netherlands – so the relative elevations are at least consistent. I don’t know which wars these were, though – or whether they were two separate conflicts or one that spread across the whole area.) I followed Pentangle in this version, perhaps too closely; I might try it again more slowly some time.

The weary cutters, lastly, is a short, sad song, sung by a mother whose son has been conscripted (“They’ve pressed him far away foreign”). Unlike most of these songs, I’ve known this one for, basically, ever; I’m fonder of it than I realised. Sung with (self-composed) harmonies.

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27 May 2012 · 11:07 am

FS38: I would that the wars were all done

I started going to folk clubs regularly a bit before the invasion of Iraq. At that stage I only had a handful of songs I was really confident of, one of which was Billy Bragg’s “Between the wars”. I never really liked it – a bit grandiose, a bit sententious, and what was that bit about moderation doing there? Then the War on Terror kicked off properly, and nobody could claim we were “between the wars” any more. Ill wind eh?

This, anyway, is a sweetly pretty song about love and conscription, full of stock imagery, overcooked descriptions and patriotic sentiments. It’s rescued by the refrain, which is raw and hard-edged in its simplicity:

I would that the wars were well over
I would that the wars were all done

And – now that we’re not between the wars – who doesn’t?

Partly recorded in the open air. Accompaniment: concertina and recorder.

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27 May 2012 · 10:54 am

AS33: High Germanie

This is more or less the Pentangle version of this song, complete with appropriately martial drumming and whistle. Thematically it’s quite similar to the Lowlands of Holland – colliding love and war by the use of conscription and imprecise geography – but with a very different mood. The unpromising situation of being called up to fight and finding your girlfriend’s pregnant sounds quite idyllic around the middle of the song, although reality returns towards the end.

Accompaniment: drums, whistle, concertina drone. My voice pitched this in B minor, which is OK for a D whistle in terms of accidentals but lousy in terms of range; the whistle break was actually recorded in E minor and pitch-shifted digitally.

I found the pace of this one a bit brisk, not so much for hitting the notes as for getting the expression in. Listening afterwards to a recording of Phoebe Smith – from whom it was collected – I found that she took it at about half the speed; it makes it a very different song. Another time.

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27 May 2012 · 10:30 am

AS34: The weary cutters

I was planning two songs for this week, but when I was doing some recording the other day this song crept up on me, and I realised what a good fit it was for the current ‘conscription’ theme.

Maddy Prior sings this, accompanied only by several other Maddy Priors, on Steeleye’s 1975 album Commoners’ Crown; I was impressed (it was only the first or second time I’d heard a folk song sung unaccompanied). It’s also the first song I ever sang in public*; I didn’t feel it went terribly well, and it was another twenty years(!) before I started singing out regularly. (Bit of a waste really, but there you go.)

Working it up for this recording I looked into the history of the song; it seemed incomplete. Apparently Maddy Prior got it from Ray Fisher, and the words we’ve got here are pretty much all there is. The tune is from a distant memory of the Steeleye Span version; I’ve put the 3/4 time back in and written some new harmonies. (Top tip for home recording: turn the volume on harmony vocals right down. When they’re about half the level of the lead they blend.)

*Unless you count an unfunny Victorian parody of the Witches’ song from the Scottish play, set to the tune of My Favourite Things, and frankly I’d rather forget that (although I haven’t managed yet).

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20 May 2012 · 5:13 pm

Week 37: The lowlands of Holland, Shirt and comb

Conscription songs this week – in fact, two closely-related conscription songs.

The lowlands of Holland is a strange, almost dreamlike song – a great example of the way the folk process polishes away extraneous elements of a song (like the bits that make it all fit together) leaving only words and sound. After Martin Carthy; sung unaccompanied.

Shirt and comb, my first non-traditional song in a while, is a song by the great Peter Blegvad on a very similar theme; a kind of contemporary answer-song, in fact. Sung with drums, C whistle and I/V chords on English concertina.

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20 May 2012 · 5:06 pm

FS37: The lowlands of Holland

This is a song I only learned this week; in fact I only heard it for the second time this week, on playing Martin Carthy’s Second Album (which I’d bought a while back, played once and forgotten about). I was already planning to do Shirt and Comb, along with another conscription song, but I had no idea it had such a direct traditional ancestor. The extraordinary tune was a bonus.

It’s a strange, almost fairytale-like song: however short of men the navy was, it’s hard to imagine any bold sea captain haling a man out of his bed on his wedding night, as this one does. The geography is sketchy to say the least, and the final verse seems to have floated in from another song entirely (possibly Clerk Sanders). And yet the whole thing works beautifully.

Martin Carthy accompanied himself on guitar when he sang this, but I thought the tune was chunky enough to be taken unaccompanied. I also slowed it down; this took a bit of nerve – it always feels as if you’re going to lose the audience’s attention – but I think it worked. See what you think.

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20 May 2012 · 4:55 pm

NS19: Shirt and comb

Peter Blegvad – or, to give him his full title, The Woefully Underrated Peter Blegvad – has pursued two musical careers concurrently, as an intransigent seeker after avant-garde obsessions and as a witty and intelligent singer-songwriter; his work covers the spectrum from unforgettable to unlistenable. (Where his career as a cartoonist fits in with all of this is anybody’s guess.)

He also appears to know a bit of folk music, although to my knowledge he’s only ever recorded one folk song (an American variant of the Wife of Usher’s Well, after Buell Kazee). Folk-as-in-traditional songs are actually quite far removed from the usual styles and approaches of folk-as-in-singer-songwriter. The most obvious difference is that stuff happens in traditional songs, without much explicit attention to how everybody feels. (A traditional singer might retort, I’m singing about someone who’s been ambushed by thieves/caught in flagrante/sentenced to hang – how do you think he feels?) Nothing much tends to happen in your average singer-songwriter song, whereas there’s a lot of attention to the singer’s feelings. Which means that the two genres, which are apparently so close (not least because they’re both called ‘folk’), are actually quite hard to bring together.

What Peter Blegvad’s done here is interesting: he’s taken a classic folksong scenario, complete with tropes from the Lowlands of Holland, and rewritten it from the inside. Our man has been conscripted, he’s having to leave his wife – and dissuade her from dragging up and tagging along, as women are traditionally wont to do – and this is how it feels. I also think it’s a great song.

You can find the original on Peter Blegvad’s album King Strut and other stories; Eddi Reader has also covered it, although she changed the lyrics around a bit so as not to tell it in the first person. I recorded it without listening to the original again, and discovered too late that I’d changed the tune without realising – so apologies to Peter, as well as thanks. Instrumentation: drums, C whistle (I’m playing the song in F), English concertina.

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13 May 2012 · 8:48 pm

Week 36: Two pretty boys, Son Davie

For week 36 I’m staying with violent death and going back to Child ballads.

Two pretty boys, generally known as Two brothers (Child 49), is a song about senseless violence. Almost everything in the story is left unexplained; it’s been suggested that it may go back to a sixteenth-century shooting. It’s sung unaccompanied (and after Bellamy).

Son Davie, more widely known as Edward (Child 13), is all about the aftermath of a killing; it’s a song on the general theme of “murder will out”. Some variants of Two brothers feature the distinctive “what’s that blood?” verses, creating the impression that these two might have originally been part of a single ballad telling the whole story of a murder, but this is misleading: older versions don’t have these extra verses, suggesting that they drifted in from this ballad at a later date. The tune used here is after Nic Jones; it’s sung with whistle, drums and (briefly) concertina.

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