Week 137 – Van Diemen’s Land

Learned from the singing of Walter Pardon, via his debut LP, A Proper Sort. And it’s a particularly fine performance by Walter as well – you can hear the same recording, made in 1974 by Bill Leader and Peter Bellamy, on Farewell, My Own Dear Native Land (The Voice of the People Volume 4).

Van Diemen’s Land, in case anyone is unaware, was the former name for Tasmania. I retain Walter Pardon’s pronunciation of “Die-man” rather than the more usual “Dee-man”. There are actually two related, but distinct, songs which share the title Van Diemen’s Land. Roy Palmer believes that this one – Roud 221, originally Young Henry the Poacher – may have been a sequel to the original Van Diemen’s Land,  Roud 519. Writing in the Folk Music Journal in 1976, Roy argued that both songs were prompted by two major trials of poachers in Warwickshire, in 1829. This followed the enactment of  a new law in 1828 which stated that “if three men were found in a wood, and one of them carried a gun or bludgeon, all were liable to be transported for fourteen years” (FMJ Vol 3 No 2, p161). This ballad in particular, Roy says, appears to have been influenced by the events in Warwickshire.

Young Henry the poacher – ballad sheet printed by H Such between 1863 and 1885; from the Bodleian collection via Ballads Online.

I have a very distinct memory of singing this song at “One for Ron”, an event held to celebrate the life of Sussex singer Ron Spicer, a year or so after his death. There was a massive singaround in the afternoon – it must have gone on for around 3 hours, but there were so many singers present that hardly anyone got the chance to sing more than one song. When I got to the chorus of this one, I started to sing it in my normal way

Young men, all now beware
Lest you are drawn into a snare

But I quickly realised that a stronger force was at work in the room. In the far corner sat the mighty Gordon Hall – a big man, with a big voice. Gordon never liked to rush a song, and his way of singing the chorus was more like

Young men, a—-ll now bewa——re [pause]
Lest you are drawn int–o a sna——-re

There was nothing to do but go with the flow, and sing it at Gordon’s pace. Which was, clearly, the right way to sing it!

Van Diemen’s Land

Week 125 – Old Brown’s Daughter

A song from my favourite traditional singer, Walter Pardon, and one which I’ve been neglecting for far too long.

At the Traditional Song Forum Broadside Day at Cecil Sharp House a couple of years ago I was surprised to find that this song (albeit with a completely different tune) is very popular in Newfoundland – indeed is regarded by many Newfies as a local composition. In fact it is a British music hall song written by the George W. Hunt (1839-1904) and sung on the halls by Alfred ‘The Great’ Vance;  this Mudcat thread throws a lot of light on the song’s origins.

Vance’s New Song Of Old Brown’s Daughter – from the EFDSS Full English archive

I remember the suggestion being made that it might be possible to date the song by the use of the word “galvanised” in the third verse, but actually I think that’s a red herring. Luigi Galvani was conducting his experiments in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it was in 1771 that he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs could be made to twitch by applying a spark of electrical current. The OED has the word ‘galvanized’ being used in this literal sense as early as 1802 (“The heat is likewise increased in the part which is galvanised.”) and 1820 (“The lungs of the galvanized rabbit had some blotches on their surface”) – both examples from The Medical and Physical Journal; I also rather like Sydney Smith’s “Galvanise a frog, don’t galvanise a tiger”  from 1825.

As for the metaphorical use of the word, the earliest known use seems to be from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, from 1853 “Her approach always galvanized him to new and spasmodic life”.

The song is almost certainly later than that. Based on the last line – “By jingo next election I will put up as MP” – I’d always thought that it probably dated from the time of the 1884 Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote for the first time to (some of) the rural working class. But I was forgetting that, although Walter Pardon was a rural singer, this song is almost certainly from a more urban milieu. So a better bet would seem to be the Representation of the People Act of 1867. That gave the vote to some urban / industrial working men for the first time, and changes which followed in its wake made it (theoretically) possible for working men to enter Parliament. The first two working class MPs, Thomas Burt and Alexander MacDonald, both miners’ leaders, were elected (for Morpeth and Stafford respectively) in 1874.

In fact, evidence is given on that Mudcat thread mentioned above, that this song predates working men actually being sent to Parliament – there’s a reference to it in Vance’s Last Great Hits in Era Magazine, Sunday December 4^th 1870. So at that stage, I suppose, the idea of a working chap becoming an MP was not an impossibility, but still something so unlikely as to be faintly preposterous. That’s the sense I get from the last verse of the song, in any case.

Walter Pardon learned the song – and it’s worth noting that the tune is different not only from the Newfoundland version, but also from that on the printed sheet music – from his uncle, Billy Gee “who, in his turn, learned it from a local man at one of the regular singing sessions following an Agricultural Workers Union meeting in North Walsham, Norfolk some time around the end of the 19th century” (thanks to Jim Carroll, for that, via Mudcat). It was included on – indeed it provided the title for – Walter’s first LP, A Proper Sort. Both that, and his other record on Leader, Our Side of the Baulk, have of course been unavailable for many years. Most of the songs on them have been made available through other collectors’ recordings on CDs on Topic and Rod Stradling’s Musical Traditions label. But ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’ never seems to have made it onto CD. Perhaps Bill Leader and Peter Bellamy were the only people to have recorded Walter singing it.

Old Brown’s Daughter – sheet music from the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music

Old Brown’s Daughter

Week 60 – The Rambling Blade

Only the second song I’ve posted so far from my favourite traditional singer, Walter Pardon – but this was his favourite song.

I first saw Walter sing in 1980, at the first Downs Festival of Traditional Singing, held that year in Newbury. I’d already heard the two LPs of Walter’s songs which were then available on the Leader label, A Proper Sort and Our Side of the Baulk, and it was clear from those recordings that he was a very fine singer. But what really appealed to me when I saw him was the unshowy way in which he sang his songs. In particular, I remember a singaround with everyone sitting in a circle, and each singing a song in turn. When it was Walter’s turn he stood up, launched straight into his song without any preamble, and sat down almost before the last note had died away. A quiet, private, unassuming man (from what I can tell – I never knew him), he demonstrated that you could sing in an undemonstrative way, without any overt display of emotion, and yet put a song across in a totally effective and engaging way.

Walter Pardon – photograph by John Howson, from http://www.eatmt.org.uk

I saw him twice more, I think. Once at a Library lecture in Cecil Sharp House when, having battled with the Friday night traffic coming up from Kent, we actually only got to see him sing a handful of songs – but one of those was ’The Rambling Blade’, and I distinctly remember him saying this was his favourite song. And then Carol and I went to see him at the Herga folk club in the summer of 1988 (I remember the date because it was just a couple of weeks after we’d got married). Our car was in danger of breaking down, I seem to remember, but I’m really glad we made the trip and got to hear him singing over the course of a full evening.

This song, of course, turns up in many guises – ‘Newlyn Town’, ‘The Flash Lad’, ‘Adieu, Adieu’ etc. etc. But there’s a particularly fine period feel to Walter’s version, with its references to “Ned Fielding” (the novelist Henry Fielding founded the Bow Street Runners in 1749, and his blind younger half-brother John is credited with turning them into London’s first effective police force).

This song appears on the Leader LP A Proper Sort (long unavailable of course, like everything else from the Leader / Trailer catalogue) and was also included on the excellent Topic CD A World Without Horses.

The Rambling Blade

Week 15 – One Cold Morning in December / The Drunkard and the Pig

December is here, and before I launch into a slew of Christmas Carols, here’s a couple of comic songs set in December, and where the narrator ends up in the gutter.

‘One Cold Morning in December’ is from my favourite traditional singer, Walter Pardon of Knapton in Norfolk. I learned it from the Topic LP A Country Life, but you can now find it on Voice of the People Volume 15: As Me and My Love Sat Courting. The song has not been collected from any other traditional singer.

I first heard ‘The Drunkard and the Pig’ sung – many years ago – by Doug Hudson of Tundra. The final line (rather like the line “Someone called out: Daddy, don’t go down the mine!” from ‘Rawtenstall Annual Fair’) stayed with me, even though I couldn’t remember the rest of the song. So I was very glad to find it included in Roy Palmer’s A Taste of Ale, and even more pleased when Magpie Lane were asked to record a CD to go with the book, so that I got the chance to record the song. Roy doesn’t print a tune, but notes that it’s to be sung to the tune of ‘The Wonderful Crocodile’. I took my recollection of ‘The Wonderful Crocodile’ and bent it a bit to fit these words. It’s very satisfying to sing; if you only have 30 seconds to spare and are desperate to burst into song, this is a good one to have in your repertoire!

One Cold Morning in December

 The Drunkard and the Pig