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.
To welcome in 2014, here’s one of my favourites, and almost certainly the only traditional song I know to mention a pair of opera glasses.
I can no longer remember whether I first heard ‘Down by the Seaside’ sung by Shirley Collins on her album Adieu to Old England, or from Shirley’s source, George Maynard, via the Topic LP Ye Subjects of England. I suspect that I heard both of those records at around the same time, having borrowed them from my local public library in Kent, in the late 1970s. It would have been a few years later that I worked out the concertina accompaniment. It must have been one of the first accompaniments that I learned to play, but I’ve not consciously changed it in the intervening 30-odd years. You can check out a 1990 recording of the song on my album Love Death and the Cossack.
This turns out to be one of those songs which have only ever been collected from one traditional singer – although Mike Yates has apparently unearthed a printed source, in the shape of a “chapbook printed c.1820 by J Fraser of Stirling as The Sailor’s Loss” (from the notes to the Musical Traditions CD, Just Another Saturday Night).
‘Saint Stephen’: a song about a man who gets stoned on Boxing Day…
I first heard this carol on the Peter Bellamy LP The Fox Jumps Over the Parson’s Gate, and was then pleased to find the words in The Oxford Book of Carols. My friend Mike and I used to sing this in the late seventies. As I recall, he sang the bass line as printed in the book. I revived it in the early days of Magpie Lane: it’s on our 1995 CD Wassail, with Di Whitehead playing a rather funky cello line of which I was very proud at the time.
St Stephen – from William Sandys “Christmas-tide, Its History, Festivities and Carols, With Their Music” (London: 1852), via hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com
‘Saint Stephen’ is, appropriately enough, number 26 in the book. On the previous page is ‘Rejoice and be merry’, under the title ‘A Gallery Carol’. This is one of two pieces in The Oxford Book of Carols “from an old church-gallery book, discovered in Dorset… by the Rev. L.J.T. Darwall”. The musical setting given is, as I understand it, by co-editor Martin Shaw; it’s a shame that the original harmonies from the church gallery book have not been preserved.
I have a feeling that I sang this one year in a carol service with my school choir, although it’s possible that – having spotted songs like ‘King Herod and the Cock’ and ‘King Pharim’, which I knew from Watersons LPs – I may just have picked this out, leafing through the book, as a carol worth investigating. Either way, I’ve been meaning to learn it for 35 years or more, and have finally got round to it.
Paolo Uccello – Stoning of St Stephen, from Wikimedia Commons.
Dave Townsend found this carol in a handwritten manuscript compiled around 1814 by James Bridcut, from the village of Marsh Baldon, about 5 miles South of Oxford. It is one of many fine and rousing pieces included in Dave’s recently published Oxfordshire Carols (£8.50 from Serpent Press, and highly recommended). We’ve been singing ‘The Shepherds Amazed’ probably for twenty years now with the Christminster Singers, and it’s been a joy, the last two Sundays, to sing at workshops run by Dave using material from the new book. The noise made by forty-odd people blasting out ‘Lyngham’ or ‘High Let Us Swell’ in a confined space reminded me, if I needed reminding, of the visceral power of massed voices, and of how much I enjoy unrestrained choral singing. It was pretty special, too, to sing half a dozen carols in the atrium of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (I was standing more or less where the woman is standing, at the foot of the kouros in this picture).
Dave’s notes to this song say that the carol was first published in John Geary’s Fifteen Psalm Tunes, 1781. Geary was organist at Caldecote in Warwickshire. I see – from hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com that, like last week’s carol, ‘The Shepherds Amazed’ was included in Bramley and Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old(with a completely different minor key tune); and also in the Rev. Edgar Pettman’s The Westminster Carol Book, 1899 (with a different tune again). Although different from each other, all three tunes are in 3/4 time.
In James Bridcut’s book the carol is written out as tune plus bass for the verses, then in four parts for the chorus. My concertina part retains the chordal structure of the piece, without attempting to recreate individual vocal lines.
The Shepherds Amazed by Gilbert Spencer, Leeds Art Gallery.
It’s December 1st, it’s the first Sunday in advent, and I’ve spent the afternoon singing West Gallery carols: I think the time has come when I can start posting some Christmas songs to this blog.
I learned this one from Maddy Prior and June Tabor’s Silly Sisters LP. That album was released in 1976. I suspect that I was given it as a birthday present the following year, and have no doubt that the carol was in our repertoire that Christmas when my friend Mike and I went out “wassailing” around Ashford and Saltwood in Kent. Actually, it’s not particularly Christmassy – in fact, given that it ends with Christ’s crucifixion and ascension to “wear the crown of Heaven”, I suppose it could be classed as an Easter carol.
Seven seems to be the standard number of Joys. But with Magpie Lane we do a ‘Nine Joys’ collected by Vaughan Williams in Essex, while Tim Van Eyken does a Cornish ‘Twelve Joys’, and ten was also apparently an acceptable numbner. I had a recollection that at one point the number of joys reached fifteen, and the members of Magpie Lane have passed many a happy hour trying work out what the rhymes might be for thirteen, fourteen and fifteen (other than “contrived”). But alas, having just read through the very detailed and informative notes to the song in The New Oxford Book of Carols, it seems I may have made that up.
The notes to Silly Sisters say that Maddy and June had the song from lovely Cornish singer Vic Legg. Their version is basically the same as that in the Oxford Book of Carols, which was actually reproduced from Christmas Carols New and Old (1867) by the Reverend H. R. Bramley, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Dr. John Stainer, organist at the same college. It’s also pretty much the same as the version collected by Cecil Sharp from the Kentish singer James Beale’s daughter Alice Harden in 1911 (one of three carols Sharp had from her).
Seven Joys Of Mary, collected by Cecil Sharp from Alice Harding. From the Full English archive.
I learned this from the singing and playing of Suffolk fiddler Harkie Nesling, on the Topic LP The Earl Soham Slog.
The song was also included on the Veteran CD Good Hearted Fellows. Mike Yates notes
The term ‘Teddy Bear’ was first coined sometime around November, 1902, when American President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was hunting in Mississippi. He had failed to shoot
anything, so friends captured a bear, which they tethered to a tree, and invited him to shoot it. Roosevelt’s reply: ‘Spare the bear. I will not shoot a tethered animal,’ soon became common knowledge and later that month Clifford & Rose Michtom of Brooklyn produced a soft bear which they called‘Teddy’. I would suspect that Harkie Nesling’s tune and short text probably date from the period 1902 up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, a time when Teddy Bears were very much in vogue and millions were sold in Europe and America. At least one other similar piece can be dated to 1907: this is Be My Little Teddy Bear by Vincent Bryan (best known for writing In the Sweet Bye and Bye) and Max Hoffman. Sadly, though, this is not the song that Harkie sings.
Last September I went to Cecil Sharp House to see Nic Jones be presented with his EFDSS Gold Badge and – much later in the proceedings than many of us would have liked – to hear him sing a few songs. This was the first time I had seen Nic perform in over 3o years; for many younger members of the audience it was the first time they’d ever seen him perform. To be honest, we’d have cheered him to the rafters just for being there, but – mirabile dictu – after 30 years away from performing, the moment he started singing it was clear that he hadn’t lost the old magic. Backed, magnificently, by his son Joe on guitar, and Belinda O’Hooley on piano, he began his set with ‘Master Kilby’. A wonderful moment, and I don’t mind admitting that a tear bedimm’d my eye.
And what a wonderful song this is. To quote the late Malcolm Douglas on Mudcat
So far as can be told, Master Kilby has been found once only in tradition; Cecil Sharp noted it from Harry Richards of Curry Rivel in Somerset, in January of 1909. That’s all we know; it doesn’t seem to have been published on broadside sheets.
Benjamin Britten published an “art music” arrangement of it, but you can be pretty sure that anyone who sings it now learned it from Nic Jones’ recording, at one remove or another.
Actually, looking at the records on the Full English site (at http://www.vwml.org/roudnumber/1434) it seems that Sharp first took this song down from Harry Richards on 29th July 1904, then went back and noted the song again – with a slightly fuller set of words – on 6th January 1909. Well, it’s a song that is well worth collecting twice.
I had messed around with it over the years, but never with any real intention of working up a proper arrangement. But just after Christmas I had another go at it, and discovered that if I moved the song down from G to F, it fitted rather nicely on the concertina. At the time I tweeted “I think I’ve just worked out a concertina accompaniment for Master Kilby. Very exciting.”
(to which my son, elsewhere in the house, sent the laconic reply “I heard”)
I made a point of going back to the tune and words as collected from Harry Richards, rather than learning the song from a Nic Jones record. But all the same, it’s only now, six months on, that the song is beginning to feel like part of my repertoire, rather than a Nic Jones cover version.
Postwar folk song commentators and activists such as A.L. Lloyd seized on industrial folk song – ‘Blackleg Miner’, ‘Four Loom Weaver’, ‘Coal Owner and the Pitman’s Wife’ and the like – as the product of a proletariat engaged in class struggle. Their Marxist beliefs would, I suppose, have predisposed them against expecting to find similar material coming out of the rural working class, and this was probably just as well – I can think of very few examples of traditional country songs raging against the social order. (Even in poaching songs, while there are often complaints about the “hard-hearted judges”, it is the gamekeepers – the agents of the landowning classes, rather than the landowners themselves – who are usually perceived as the enemy).
This song, judging by the number of times it has been collected in England and beyond, seems to have been hugely popular. Not only does it not challenge the status quo, but invites us to join in blessing the noble gentleman who – most improbably – bestows “fifty five good acres” on the hardworking labouring man. Although actually traditional singers do seem to have toned down somewhat the obsequious nature of the song as found in printed broadsides, such as Good Lord Fauconbridge’s generous gift, printed by J. Pitts of London, between 1819 and 1844, of which this is the final verse.
No tongue was able in full to express
In depth of their joy and true thankfulness
Then many a courtsey and bow to the ground
Such noblemen there are few to be found
This particular version was collected by Cecil Sharp at Hamstreet in Kent, in September 1908. Not being an authority on Sharp’s handwriting, I’d be hard-pressed to say if he meant to record the singer’s name as Clarke Lankhurst or Lonkhurst (or even Larkhurst). In fact it was almost certainly Clarke Lonkhurst, who the local Kelly’s Directory lists as landlord of the Duke’s Head at Hamstreet. George Frampton, who has researched all of the singers Sharp encountered on this collecting trip, has established that Mr Lonkhurst also worked as a carrier, and was a keen sportsman – playing football and cricket, and a member of the Mid-Kent Stag Hunt. He has also found – just to add even more confusion to the matter of his surname – that in the 1901 Census he is listed as Clarke Longhurst, age 37, born at Dunkirk near Faversham [Correction 20/09/2023: in 1901 he was a licensed victualler – probably of the Woodman’s Hall, Boughton Under Blean, near Dunkirk – but his birth place is given as Orlestone]. There are Longhursts from Romney Marsh in my family tree, on my mother’s side, so it’s just possible that this singer is a distant relation of mine.
“I have been using your Embrocation for Capped Elbew with great benefit. — Clarke Lonkhurst, Duke’s Head Hotel, Hamstreet, Ashford, Kent, July 29th, 1908.” ]
Clarke Lonkhurst only sang four verses of this song; I followed my usual practice of completing the words by borrowing verses from the Copper Family version. Had I held on a little, I would have come across a pretty complete set of words collected in 1942 by Francis Collinson from Harry Barling of South Willesborough, Ashford, Kent. This Mr Barling was most likely the same Harry Barling who is listed in the 1901 Census as a Carrier General, living at Aldington, born at Ruckinge; and in the 1881 Census as living at the “Good Intent”, Aldington Frith – i.e. from very much the same part of the world, and a similar age, as Clarke Lonkhurst. The singers’ tunes are almost identical except that Harry Barling’s is in 4/4 and Clarke Lonkhurst’s in 6/8.
Including a song collected by Cecil Sharp gives me the opportunity to mention the EFDSS’s Full English archive, launched a couple of weeks ago. I’ve not, unfortunately, had very much time to explore the site as yet, but it is without doubt an incredible resource – both for researchers, and for those on the look-out for new versions of old songs.
It builds on the Take Six archive, which presented digital images of the collections of Collinson, Butterworth, Blunt, Hammond, Gardiner and Gilchrist. Now we also have access to the work of relatively little-known collectors such as Harry Albino and Frank Sidgwick through to the big names: Lucy Broadwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams and, of course, Cecil James Sharp. The whole thing has been thoroughly and professionally catalogued and indexed, and even looks quite cool – whatever has happened to the DEAFASS we used to love to malign in the past!
As you’ll see, each record has a permament URL, to make it easy to refer others to a specific record. And there are some nice little features, like the ability to refer to a simple URL to point to all the versions of a particular Roud number e.g. this song would be www.vwml.org/roudnumber/19 – just substitute the Roud number of your choice.
The first Magpie Lane album, The Oxford Ramble, was released just over 20 years ago, and we played our very first concert, in the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, on 3rd May – May Bank Holiday Monday – 1993. We will be returning to the Holywell tomorrow for a 20th anniversary concert, where we will be joined by former members of the band, and a number of special guests. Twenty years ago this was the final song of the night, and it is giving away no secrets, I suspect, if I say that this song will also feature in our concert tomorrow.
I learned the song from Forty Long Miles: twenty-three English folk songs from the collection of Janet Heatley Blunt, edited by Tony Foxworthy and published by Galliard / EFDSS in 1976.
Swalcliffe (pronounced sway-cliff) is a village near Banbury in North Oxfordshire. The words of the carol were noted by Miss Annie Norris around 1840 from the singing of a group of children in the village. The words were passed onto the collector – and Adderbury resident – Janet Blunt in 1908, and she finally collected a tune for the song from Mrs Woolgrove of Swalcliffe, and Mrs Lynes of Sibford, at Sibford fete, July 1921 (this information, and much more about music-making in Adderbury, can be found in Michael Pickering’s book Village Song and Culture).
You can now find Miss Blunt’s notes on the Take Six archive – see below.
May Day Song from the Janet Heatley Blunt collection, via the EFDSS Full English archive
Man is but a man, his life’s but a span
He is much like a flower
He’s here today and he’s gone tomorrow
So he’s all gone down in an hour
Twenty years ago when I sang those words they really struck home, as I knew that my Dad was dying of cancer. What I didn’t realise was that he would indeed be “gone tomorrow” – he died the very next day. He never got to see Magpie Lane, but he did hear The Oxford Ramble – on cassette – just before he died. Apparently he liked the second side best, because he said it had more of me on it. That comment is so typical of both my parents!
So here’s to my Dad, and all the friends and good times I’ve had these last twenty years with Magpie Lane.
The video below is neither hi-fi nor hi-res, but it’s what we’ve got. If you’re coming to see us tomorrow night, I hope you enjoy it as much as we intend to.
Swalcliffe May Day Carol
Magpie Lane
Andy Turner: vocal, G/D anglo-concertina
Ian Giles: vocal, big bass drum
Tom Bower: vocal, side drum
Jo Acty: vocal
Pete Acty: mandola
Mat Green: fiddle
Chris Leslie: fiddle
Isobel Dams: cello
Throughout my student days at Oxford I sang in various harmony groups with Caroline Jackson-Houlston. At one point we were a quartet with Jane Sinclair and Mike Eaton, but in my final year they had both left Oxford – Jane had graduated, and Mike was having a year abroad. Caroline and I carried on as a duo and, as I recall, it was only at this point that we adopted the name Flash Company. So this was our signature tune – and actually I think it was the only song in our repertoire that wasn’t unaccompanied.
At the time, if asked, I would probably have said that we sang Percy Webb’s version – the title track from the 1974 Topic LP Flash Company: Traditional Singers from Suffolk and Essex. But in fact I suspect that Caroline put the words together from various sources, and we were also almost certainly influenced by June Tabor and Martin Simpson’s recording, recently released at the time on their A Cut Above album.
When I left Oxford I found that the concertina accompaniment put it in a singable key for me, and as I’ve never had an enormous number of chorus songs in my repertoire, I’ve carried on doing it (occasionally) ever since.
A Folk Song a Week 
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