For several months now, Fay Hield has been managing – no, let’s say curating – the #TradSongTues hashtag on Twitter. Every week a new theme is suggested, then on Tuesday anyone is free to post links to songs linked to that theme. So far, in best Blue Peter style, I’ve been posting links to previous entries on this blog, but I thought it was time to record something specially for the weekly Twitter gathering.
This week’s theme is poetry. While many traditional songs are very poetic, as far as I can recall, I have previously recorded only one setting of an actual poem – Billy Bragg’s setting of Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Man He Killed’. Despite my intentions at the time, I’ve never got round to learning that one by heart. Here’s a setting of a John Clare poem, and again I’m reading the words off a sheet of paper. But in this case (like ‘Boxing Day’ and ‘The Widow that keeps the Cock Inn’) not only have I not learned the words; frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever really had any intention of learning the words. Still, as I said in reference to those other two songs, since I made up the tune, if I don’t sing it, nobody will.
I was first alerted to John Clare (in relation to folk music at any rate) by the setting of his ‘The Cellar Door’ on the LP No Relation by Royston Wood and Heather Wood. As a student I started to investigate his poetry, and discovered, for instance, that the title of the Watersons’ For pence and spicy ale was taken from a Clare poem (‘Christmas’, part of ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’). This one, with its talk of the ploughman’s love for a milkmaid, seemed like a suitable candidate to be turned into a song – although traditional songs tend not to have this slightly awkward 10-line structure. I’m not sure if I actually ‘composed’ the tune, or just assembled sequences of notes which I’d encountered in various traditional song tunes. In fact, what I sing now may not be the tune I originally made up – I never wrote it down or recorded it, but 36 years on, I think this is pretty close to what I intended to sing back then.
You can find the words online in various places. I think I copied them out from The Later Poems of John Clare edited by Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield.
Crow in the Willow: Solitary crow perched in a willow tree. Image copyright Suzanne Goodwin.
The Crow Sat On The Willow
A Folk Song a Week 