Hello everyone,

This 'project' only came about by my own love of the songs and the recordings made by people such as Mr Yates, and many others. I have been a keen listener and purchaser of many collections over the years, and have been greatly informed and inspired by The Traditional Music Hour amongst many musicians.
I took up playing the 5-string banjo about 7 years ago and many of the melodies I had been listening to seemed to fall into place quite easily on this instrument (many chords are implied within the tune, and this is enhanced due to the resonances of the open banjo tuning). I found myself quite naturally being able to play these songs. This is as natural as hearing a song and wanting to sing it - and is of course the way songs are handed down and left to evolve and live on in a healthy folk tradition. It only came about by chance, that one day I happened to be listening to Harry Cox singing 'knife in the window' and my banjo happened to be in the same key (capo6 open g), led me to trying, and I stress to play along. This was nothing more than a hobby, a way for me to feel closer to the songs. It also became a way of feeling closer to my English origins, and grew into (I see now) as a rather naïve purely fan-driven project to make people more aware of these songs and recordings. I did a handful of house gigs with lyrics projected onto walls (and the translations) and the reaction was generally warm (in that the humour and tragedy came across and people could engage in the songs - leading people to discover that there even was such a thing as traditional music the other side of the channel from anywhere other than Ireland). I must stress that the scale of this is miniscule - a handful of people were at these gigs, and that I'm not at all trying to improve on these songs. I prefer the original unaccompanied versions completely, and have always directed people to the sources. My bandcamp page had catalogue numbers, recordist's names, dates etc and I always urged people to seek out the originals.

Basically at the end of last year I was asked if I'd like to try and record something for some friends who wanted to make (by hand) cassettes to be distributed to friends and acquaintances around Christmas time. I hastily cobbled together this album in 4 weeks(also to serve as a couple of xmas prezzies for my parents to be honest). I think I went well overboard with the addition of instrumentation with hindsight, and was a mistake. There was never any commercial intent, however I did make 5 Cdrs and sent them to various people for reactions/comments, and started carrying out research into who owned what in terms of rights. I was in contact with someone from Topic (he quoted me a price), and the Alan Lomax Foundation (who didn't mind the concept), I managed to get the email of a son of one of the recordists who said I could use the recording (he didn't like my accompaniment), I tried to find out about the Peter Kennedy attributed recordings (he seems to have put his name to many alan lomax recordings, by the way). Anyway, all that was to find out about the legality of it all with the naïve idea to maybe approach a real label with this idea. Anyway the whole complexity of it all and various correspondence with musicians, led me to give up on that idea - too disheartened, and it struck home that these voices had real backgrounds and the recordists had real intentions to preserve these moments in time. I've only skimmed through this thread, as to be honest, it has been a bit of an emotional and tearful shock, but I'd just like to say again that, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spoil the songs for people(I don't want to state the obvious, but drawing a moustache on the mona lisa defaces the painting, but these recordings are copies and the original moments of beauty remain intact).

Anyway, I've told Celebration to delete their page. I've stopped the whole idea. If any money has been gained from this tell me where I can send it (Cecil Sharp house?)If ever I bring myself to play traditional songs again I will sing it myself (not a pretty prospect!)and everyone in France can go back to their Mumford and sons albums, blissfully unaware that there is such a thing as traditional singing.

Apologies again

Sam