Week 245 – Dido, Bendigo

Learned from Mike Waterson, on The Watersons’ eponymous 1966 LP (the red one).

As A.L.Lloyd pointed out in his sleevenotes “the name of the sporting duke may vary, the list of hounds stays much the same”. Although, in the three broadside versions which you can find on Broadside Ballads Online, the second hound’s name is not Bendigo but Spendigo, or Spandigo.

The Sportsman’s Companion – including ‘Dido, a favourite hunting song’. Printed by Pitts of Seven Dials, London, between 1819 and 1844. From Broadside Ballads Online.

There was a time when I used to sing this quite a lot at Oyster Morris music sessions. But up until a few weeks ago, when I decided to revive the song for this blog, I probably hadn’t sung it for twenty years or more. And I have to confess that it took me a while to remember which fox went for its cover and which for the river, and what their respective fates were. In fact, as a result of a simple mishearing of what Mike Waterson was singing, I think I must always have reordered the sequence of events. The Watersons’ third verse – according to this transcription at least – runs

Well the next fox being old and his trials fast a-dawning,
He’s made straight away for the river.
Well the fox he has jumped in but an hound jumped after him:
It was Traveller who straited him forever.

Actually the line on the Yorkshire Garland site seems to make more sense

It was Traveller a-striding in for ever.

and listening again to the Watersons version, I think what Mike sang was

It was Traveller who strided him for ever.

Either way, I’ve always sung

It was Traveller destroyed his life forever.

After which, of course, there was no possibility of said fox running across the plain in the next verse. Hence my reordering of the verses.

Dido, Bendigo

Week 244 – Fare thee well dearest Nancy

I learned this from the singing of Fi and Jo Fraser on the Old Swan Band’s second LP, Old Swan Brand.  Although the release date given on the sleeve of that record is 1978, my recollection is that it didn’t actually come out until much later, around 1980 or 1981. I bought my copy at the Bracknell  Folk Festival in, I’m fairly sure, 1982. It was a secondhand copy. A signed, secondhand copy. Which always rather amused me: presumably someone saw the band, and enjoyed their music so much that they not only bought a copy of the record, but got the band to sign it; only to find, when they got it home, that it really wasn’t what they were expecting. Actually, that’s quite feasible, as the signatures on the cover are those of the Swan Band circa 1981 (including Richard Valentine, and “the invisible Paul Burgess”), and the band had a rather different sound by then – much fuller with the addition of the piano and. dare I say it, rather more polished. Also, it’s possible that the purchaser liked the tunes, but couldn’t stand all that singing…

Anyway, I was pleased to give the record a home, and I was particularly taken with this song. I imagine that the record originally had, or was intended to have, a booklet or insert giving details of the provenance of all the songs and tunes. My secondhand copy had none, and neither did the second copy which I inherited from my Mum last year. So maybe this was cut as a result of Free Reed’s financial problems at the time. Whatever the reason, the lack of an insert meant I had no information about where Jo and Fi got this song from (and I’ve never got round to asking either of them).

This was one of the songs I used to sing with Chris Wood in the 1980s, and I remember Chris saying that he thought they’d probably learned it from Mick Hanly’s A Kiss In The Morning Early. That’s one of those classic 1970s LPs which, for some reason, I’m pretty sure I never heard. Poking around on Mudcat and elsewhere, it seems that most of the songs on that album came from Colm O Lochlainn’s book More Irish Street Ballads. But Hanly seems to have used a different tune to the one found in O Lochlainn, and indeed O Lochlainn’s verses may well have been collated from various sources, such as printed broadsides.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter – it’s just a great song. So thanks Jo and Fi.

The sailor’s adieu. Broadside printed by J Pitts of Seven Dials, between 1819 and 1844. From Broadside Ballads Online.

Fare thee well dearest Nancy

Week 243 – When Spring Comes In

It has felt truly Spring-like this week, which prompted me to record this song for the blog. The song seemed rather less appropriate when I woke up today to find it was a cold, grey, wet morning – apparently it had been snowing earlier – but I decided not to let that put me off and, indeed, like many a dark and a cloudy morning, it has turned out to be an OK sort of afternoon.

My friend Mike and I used to sing this together having learned it circa 1979 from Bob Copper’s book A Song for every Season – at that point we’d not actually heard the Coppers singing it. In later years this is a song which I’d often sing on a night out with my friend (and occasional commenter on this blog) Adrian. Unfortunately nights out and sing-songs with Adrian happen all too rarely these days, but this is a song which I can’t really envisage not being sung in harmony. So, with the help of Audacity, Dropbox and an iPad, here’s me singing with a bunch of doppelgangers (quintuplegangers?). With a bit more time, this could have been quite a lot more polished. But I didn’t have more time and, besides, I don’t think it suffers too much from the slightly ramshackle feel (or the fact that I was making up most of the harmonies as I went along).

You can hear Bob and Ron Copper singing this on the Topic CD Come Write Me Down: Early Recordings of the Copper Family of Rottingdean. It was also included on the 1995 CD Coppersongs 2: The Living Tradition of the Copper Family, sung by Bob, John, Lynne and Jon Dudley And there’s a 1971 recording of Bob, John and Lynne singing it at the Lewes Folk Club on the British Library website.

When Spring Comes In

Andy Turner – vocals

Week 242 – Long Looked For Come At Last

I learned this from Caroline Jackson-Houlston. She and I used to sing it together – performing as Flash Company – in the early 1980s, and it’s one of several songs from that period which she and I both retain in our individual repertoires. Mind you, Caroline has always made quite clear what her reaction would be, if a suitor buggered off for a year then came back claiming “you’re the one I really want” – and it wouldn’t be to drag him off to church.

I still have Caroline’s typed copy of the words. Unusually, they don’t give her source, but looking at the Full English it must be this version from the 85 year old William Winter, collected at Andover by H. Balfour Gardiner, and which forms the basis of the version printed in Frank Purslow’s The Wanton Seed.

‘Abroad as I was a-walking’ from the Gardiner MSS, via the Full English

Long Looked For Come At Last

Andy Turner – vocal, C/G anglo-concertina

Week 241 – Do Me Ama

One of the good things about maintaining this blog is that it’s made me remember songs which I used to sing thirty or even forty years ago, and which I have neglected – often unfairly – for twenty or thirty years, or maybe even longer.

This is one such. I first heard it in the late 1970s on the 1967 LP Byker Hill by Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick. Martin’s sleevenotes to the LP say

It is, incidentally, the only song I have ever learned on one hearing only (without the aid of tape-recorder or pencil and paper).

He doesn’t say who he got it from, but I should think there’s a strong likelihood that it was Bert Lloyd.

I can’t claim to have learned the song at one hearing, but I think I did just absorb the words back in the seventies, rather than having to write them down and learn them. I sang it around the house at the time, then forgot about it until a few weeks ago – at which point, again, I was able to recall the words without recourse to printed (or online) versions. Having revived the song, I’m now planning not to forget about it again.

Do Me Ama