We're stepping into the murky realms of subjectivity here. ALL lyrics are going to be meaningful to someone if only by association. My personal view is that messages get in the way of the music (No message! Too many messages! - Harry Partch, from the libretto for The Dreamer thatRemains).

One of the things that attracted me to Traditional Song in the first place was its complete LACK of meaning. As a boy of 14 I sat irate in a roomful of ten earnest folkies utterly baffled as why their guest would follow the uncluttered narrative of something so pure as The Plains of Waterloo with the dogma-laden ghastly heavy-handedness of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda/i>. As a juxtaposition it makes a lot of assumptions, but I bought her LP anyway - still have it, the very lovely (for the most part) Airs and Graces.

In my youth the lyrics I was happiest with were things like The Revealing Science of God or Living in the Heart of the Beast in which I fancied lurked something utterly profound but ultimately unsayable (I still do!). This led, in time, to my passions for the songs of Joy Division and The Fall who rarely sang about anything yet summed up the entire crumbling epoch of the UK in the late 70s / early 80s. I'm a huge fan of Robert Wyatt but once he gets political, I switch off, just as I seem to have spent much of my festival life of the early 80s walking out of Billy Bragg sets in a state of utter dismay in search of something less proscriptive lyrically and musically more engaging and / or revolutionary in an actual sense. Exceptions prove rules though, I've been recently buying up some of those amazing Fela Kuti re-issues (£7 a pop at Fopp & HMV! Don't miss out!) who I first saw at Glastonbury in 84 when I ran to the stage at the beginning of their set thinking Sun Ra had just landed. What I saw was none the less amazing & Fela never pulled his punches lyrically - but the music, my God! The fecking music!

Bona Fide Traditional Folk Song / Ballad is different experience; hearing it sung by Bona Fide Tradition Singers is a different experience again, or seeing it in Glorious Broadside replete with cryptic woodcuts that frame the inner mystique of the thing perfectly - and which the Good Soldier would dismiss as 'commercial'. Ha! As if! But then, I'm moved by Wigan singer Sid Hague singing his self-penned folk songs about rock 'n' roll, nativity plays and country parks; there is a purity of mind here that can't be faked, like Alfred Wallis in song form; Folk Art (if you must) free of pretension and assumption. Such a rare thing in this day and age.

Forgive me, it's half eight on a Saturday morning & I'm just out of bed, but I'm gonna post this anyway, right now before I get onto a rant about Why Ballad Singing Is NOT and Never Should Be Storytelling, and why the language & imagery of such things are more important than the narrative, and how the human mind creates its own unique & profound relationships with the most simple of images anyway, which is why Wichita Lineman is still the best song ever written, ever, and why Camus was right when he said...

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened

...as quoted, of course, on the cover of Scott 4. Scott Walker! My God! Another perfect lyricist who buries his meaning beyond recognition in his images. Who'd have thought this was about a soldier praying over the corpse of Che Guevara?

Save the crops and the bodies
from illness
from pestilence hunger and war
I journey each night like a Saint
to stand on this straw floor
our uniforms are loose
they look flimsy
night black shadows
under the peaks of our caps
shaved up to Augost
I still hear them singing
babaloo
babaloo...

Or that this featured the ghosts of Elvis and his still-born twin brother, Jesse, looking over ground zero of 9/11?

Nose holes caked in black cocaine
Pow! Pow!
No one holds a match to your skin
No dupe
No chiming
A way off miles off
No needle through a glove
Famine is a tall tower
A building left in the night
Jesse are you listening?
It casts its ruins in shadows
Under Memphis moonlight
Jesse are you listening?
Six feet of foetus
Flung at sparrows in the sky
Put yourself in my shoes
A kiss, wet, muzzle
A clouded eye
No stars to flush it out
Famine is a tall tower
A building left in the night
Jesse are you listening?

Puts a shiver up my spine just reading it! And tear in my eye at the perfect poetic beauty of the thing, which is what it's all about anyway, though I'd defy anyone to get away with either of those in their local singaround.