Week 131 – Epsom Races

George Attrill, from the Copper Family website (in the book Songs and Southern Breezes the photo from which this is taken is listed as “by courtesy of George Garland, Petworth”).

This song was collected by Bob Copper in the 1950s, and it was included in his book  Songs and Southern Breezes. Bob had the song from George Attrill, road-mender of Fittleworth in Sussex.

George was a completely natural and unaffected singer. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves and braces, shoulders squared and head tilted slightly back, and sang out loud and bold. His words were clear and a strong West Sussex accent made all his songs a joy to hear.

You can hear Bob’s recording of George Attrill singing ‘Epsom Races’ (under the title of ‘The Broken-Down Gentleman’) on You Never Heard So Sweet, one of the more recent additions to Topic’s Voice of the People series. The song seems to have been widely collected in Southern England, but also further North – Frank Kidson had a version from his faithful correspondent Charles Lolley from Leeds, while Percy Grainger recorded a version (‘When I Was Young in My Youthful Ways’) in Lincolnshire, from the great Joseph Taylor. Surprisingly, there don’t seem to be any broadside versions listed under this Roud number – but I’m sure it must have appeared on a printed ballad sheet though; it seems to have very much the same sort of period feel as ‘Limbo’.

The tune at the end is one of my own, and the only one, as far as I recall, which I’ve consciously written as a morris tune. I wrote it in 1983 or 84 during my brief sojourn in Newcastle on Tyne. The title ‘Pigs and Whistles’, however, had been hanging around in the recesses of my mind for some while, having come across the phrase in my Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, with the definition “wrack and ruin”. The OED has two meanings: “fragments, pieces; odds and ends, trivial things”, with “to go to pigs and whistles” defined as “to fall into ruin or disrepair” (Now rare). The examples of the phrase in use are all Scottish, but range from 1794 to 2001. It’s a morris tune which noone has ever danced to. So if any sides out there are in need of a new tune for a corner dance with slows, please help yourself.

Epsom Races / Pigs and Whistles

Andy Turner: vocals, C/G anglo-concertina

Week 130 – The Flower of Sweet Strabane

Here’s a little gem of a song for Valentine’s Day. I learned this from the singing of the incomparable Johnny Moynihan on the second De Danann LP, Selected Jigs Reels And Songs. Pretty sure he also sang it when I saw the band live at the University of Kent in Canterbury in 1978. Hopefully Nick Passmore, who was one of the support acts for that concert, will be able to confirm this.

Googling around in connection with this week’s post, I came across a film of the band in concert from 1976 on YouTube. This song doesn’t feature, but there’s a couple of others from Johnny Moynihan which never made it onto a De Danann record.

‘The Flower of Sweet Strabane’ did feature, however, on this Wednesday’s Radio 2 Folk Show, in a lovely unaccompanied performance from the Irish traveller Margaret Barry (the notes to Selected Jigs Reels And Songs say “The song was given to us by Margaret Barry or Eamonn O’Doherty or somebody like that”). And Margaret Barry featured memorably in a fantastic programme broadcast later the same night on Radio 2: David Attenborough and the Natural History of Folk. This recounted his association sixty years ago, as a young BBC television producer, with Alan Lomax, in putting together the six-part Song Hunter series. This was a series of live broadcasts and, as was common BBC practice until much later, was unfortunately never recorded. But the radio programme included some fine recordings from the same era, posthumous recollections from Peter Kennedy and Bob Copper on their song-collecting adventures, very-much-still-here contributions from Reg Hall (who as a young squaddie managed to get a pass into the corporals’ mess so he could watch the programmes, and was duly bowled over by them). And, holding it all together, David Attenborough himself, demonstrating what a very fine, warm, intelligent, and actually rather funny human being he is. If you haven’t heard the programme do make sure you catch it on the iPlayer – just a few days left.

The Flower of Sweet Strabane

Week 129 – Jack Williams

Another robber meets a sticky end…

Here’s a very first outing for a song which I’ve only just learned. I discovered it a few years ago on a visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, leafing through the bound volumes of Cecil Sharp’s Folk Tunes and Folk Words. I think I first came across the song as noted from Harry Richards of Curry Rivel in Somerset, then sought out a fuller version, which led me to this version, from Mrs Elizabeth Smitherd (or is it Smilhard?) of Tewkesbury.

I am a boatman, noted by Cecil Sharp from Mrs Elizabeth Smitherd, Tewkesbury, 11 Apr 1908. Image copyright EFDSS.

I have collated Mrs Smitherd’s words with texts from several sources – broadside printings from the Bodleian’s collection (such as the one shown below), and North American versions including one from Ballads and sea songs from Nova Scotia by William Roy Mackenzie, the words of which are reproduced on this Mudcat thread. A bit further down that same thread, Malcolm Douglas says “The song had reached America by at least 1835, when it appeared in The Forget Me Not Songster, between The Rambling Soldier and Canada I O.” And you can now see that version (in an 1840 printing) online, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

You can find several broadside versions of the song at Ballads Online and in the Full English archive.

Jack Williams, the boatman, from the Bodleian Broadside collection, Printed by J.K. Pollock, North Shields, between 1815 and 1855.

As for the oral tradition, the Full English site has three versions collected in the early twentieth century by Sharp, one by Alfred Williams and one by George Butterworth, all from Southern England.

Most versions have a happy ending, but I just don’t buy that. No convincing explanation is given as to how Jack Williams manages to break free from prison, just “and then I escaped”. So in my version, I’m afraid, he is left not only complaining about his perfidious lover, but contemplating an unhappy fate.

Jack Williams

Week 128 – Salisbury Plain

When the EFDSS republished the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs as Classic English Folk Songs, they got it just about right. Certainly it’s the classic collection of English folk songs, and as a result of their inclusion in the book many of the songs in it have become staples of the folk revival. And there are some real gems: ‘All Things Are Quite Silent’, ‘The Blacksmith’, ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘The Grey Cock’, ’Lovely Joan’…

I’d put ‘Salisbury Plain’ right up there with the best of them: for me it’s the epitome of a classic English folk song. It has a fantastic modal tune, and the words are wonderfully evocative. The male lead, though a rogue, is clearly something of a charmer

As I walked over Salisbury Plain,
Oh, there I met a scamping young blade.
He kissed me and enticèd me so
Till along with him I was forced for to go.

Clearly you could interpret the word “forced” to mean that the narrator was subject to physical coercion. But the way I read the song, she was just swept off her feet, and ultimately found the scamping young blade irresistible.

And the last verse – especially the slightly oblique last line – is, well, classic.

Read the expanded notes on the song in Classic English Folk Songs however, and you soon realise that, not for the first time, this classic owes more than a little to the editorial interventions of A.L.Lloyd. The Penguin edition makes clear that the tune given was collected by Vaughan Williams from Mr and Mrs Verrall, from Horsham in 1904, while RVW had the words from their near neighbour, Henry Burstow (incidentally, can this really be the first song I’ve posted here from the great Henry Burstow? shameful, if so). But now we learn that

the editors have modified Mr Burstow’s text in places, and omitted the final verse:

So now young men a warning take by me,
And never keep those flash girls company,
For if that you do you will rue,
And you will die upon the high drop at last.

Well it’s good to have the full facts available, and it would appear that it’s fairly easy to determine the extent of Bert Lloyd’s intervention here – which is sadly not the case with many of the other songs he introduced to the folk scene (‘Reynardine’, ‘Weaver and the Factory Maid’, ‘Recruited Collier’ and ‘Lucy Wan’ spring to mind). And while one can regret that Lloyd was often less than transparent when he “improved” a traditional song, it’s hard to fault his artistic judgement – in most cases it seems he really did improve on the originals. There’s nothing wrong with Henry Burstow’s final verse, but I have no hesitation in saying this song is more effective without it.

Incidentally, I first heard this song sung unaccompanied by Martin Carthy on the LP Prince Heathen, and I’d rate it as one of the finest performances of Martin’s recording career.

Salisbury Plain, collected by Vaughan Williams from Mr and Mrs Verrall. Image copyright EFDSS.

Salisbury Plain, verse 5, collected by Vaughan Williams from Mr and Mrs Verrall. Image copyright EFDSS.

Salisbury Plain