The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #125951 Message #2802197
Posted By: Jim Carroll
03-Jan-10 - 12:10 PM
Thread Name: Taking on the Big Boys? - classic big long ballads
Subject: RE: Taking on the Big Boys? - classic big long ballads
Four square singing
Richard; that's exactly what I'm talking about - put far simpler than I did.
Pip - ok if you can confine it to practice, but I find that it is exactly then when you develop your singing habits. I know this from when I return to songs I learned in the early days when all my singing was four square. I actually abandoned one of my favourite songs 'Go To Sea No More' because of it, and am only now getting it back the way I want it.
With respect to Anne Briggs, who I admired very much, I would guess her breathing at the ends of lines is more to do with her singing in head-voice which takes twice as much breath as natural voice, forcing her to take more breaths.
Thanks for input.
And now for something completely different:
One of the things I noticed about ballad singing, my own included in the early days when I was singing regularly, was the tendency to concentrate on the spectacular to the detriment of the subtle.
I have always had a fondness for supernatural songs and tales, yet I found myself seeking out and choosing to sing and listen to the ones that had as their main subject, the eerie and unworldly and tending to overlook those where he supernatural was there, but taken for granted by the ballad makers and singers. Ballads like 'King Henry' and 'Willie's Fatal Visit' can be entertaining enough in their way; a little 'Grand Guignol' for my taste, but that's me. Nowadays I find they don't compare to say, 'The Grey Cock', which, when you examine it, is fundamentally about the final parting of two lovers, one of whom just happens to be dead. Having spent the night with her dead lover, the heroine doesn't run screaming to the nearest mad-house when she finds she's been sleeping with a corpse, as she would in a Hammer or Roger Corman Film. Rather, she asks him to hang around, and the final, apocalyptically phrased refusal verse must be one of the most spectacularly beautiful in the whole of ballad poetry:
"Oh Willie dear, oh handsome Willie,
Whenever will I see you again?"
"When the fish do fly, love, and the seas run dry love,
And the rocks they melt in the heat of the sun".
It's like comparing the two films on the same subject made in the nineties; the rather heavy-handed 'Ghost', where the villain is dragged screaming down to Hell by shadowy demons, and the, IMO, far superior 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' which has the over-mourned husband coming back to life with a few of his dead mates, watching old classic films on the television and complaining about the cold, then returning to whence he came, leaving his wife to get on with her life.
The same is true of 'The Unquiet Grave'; there is nothing bizarre or frightening about a grieving woman having a conversation with her dead lover and trying to persuade him to let her join him.
Both of these songs, while placed in a supernatural setting, are really about the suffering of and coping with great loss, a subject as significant today as ever it was.
I believe that the ballads; the folk song repertoire as a whole really, no matter what setting they are presented in, are basically commentaries on the human condition; that's why, I believe they still have something to say.
Jim Carroll