Week 20 – Banks of the Bann

To kick off 2012, here’s an Irish love song learned from Shirley Collins’ folk-rock classic No Roses. Shirley learned it from A.L.Lloyd, who had recorded the song on his album The Best of A.L. Lloyd. The sleeve notes to that LP describe it thus:

The pearl of separation song, not so much for its text as for its grand and graceful tune. The words seem like an amiable specimen of poetry made in the 10th century [sic - clearly a typo - should be 18th century I think] by some tattered heir of a bardic tradition. The tune sounds as if it may be at least a century older, composed at a time when the folk harpers and fiddlers were becoming aquainted with Händel and Corelli. The River Bann is in north-eastern Ireland. The song was doubtless brought to England by Ulster labourers. I’ve not seen a printed set of it.

(thanks to http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~zierke/lloyd/songs/banksofthebann.html for this information)

In fact, you can see some printed copies from the nineteenth century on the Bodleian Ballads site – search for “the Brown girl”.

The Banks of the Bann

Andy Turner: vocal, C/G anglo-concertina

Week 9 – The little ball of yarn

My first Irish song – in fact the first song so far not to have been collected in Southern England. I learned this from Peter Kennedy’s massive tome Folksongs of Britain & Ireland, which at the end of the 1970s I had on almost permanent loan from my local library (I think I got it as soon as it was added to stock, and nobody else knew it was there!). Kennedy collected the song, with Sean O’Boyle, from a young Irish traveller, Winnie Ryan. Peter Kennedy describes it thus

A group of travellers from Southern Ireland, singing around a camp-fire in Belfast in July 1952, resulted in some remarkable recordings of their style from the pretty young tinker girls. By the early hours of the morning, the men were under the spell of the Guinness, leaving the younger girls, some breast-feeding as they sang, tightly grasping the microphone one-by-one, and competing with each other in their display of vocal decorations in the love-songs.

sleevenotes to Folktrax cassette FTX-166 Blackwaterside: Irish Tinker Singers
http://folktrax-archive.org/menus/cassprogs/166tinkers1.htm

The three young women were Mary Doran (21), Winnie Ryan (19) and Lal Smith (23). Of these I’m afraid to say that Lal Smith is the only one who appears to feature in my record collection (a stunning ‘Bold English Navvy’ on Songs of Seduction). Pretty sure I have heard Mary Doran singing as well, but don’t think I’ve ever heard Winnie Ryan.

Kennedy notes in the Folksongs of Britain & Ireland that he’s completed the words from versions of the song from English singers Tom Willett and Charlie Wills.

The Little Ball of Yarn