The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #155128 Message #3647856
Posted By: Jim Carroll
03-Aug-14 - 03:17 AM
Thread Name: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
"when you say never the same way twice do you mean tune variations or different verses?"
Altered air every performance - in most cases, not radically so - as I said, all around a basic tune structure
Tom was a remarkable, creative singer singer - long dead now.
C.C.E. Issued an album of his songs entitled 'Tom Pháidín Tom' and there is a track of him on their excellent cassette/book, 'Irish Traditional Songs and Singers', but paty from those and the 'Voice of the People' track, nothing.
Traditional singing at its best, in my opinion.
"Bert believed in variation as the sort of death throws of British song tradition"
I can't remember having come across this; I would tend towards Vic's belief.
It's often forgotten that nearly all the recordings we have of English songs were made when the song tradition was in decline and the songs were being remembered and repeated from way back.
"He tried to relate what Albert Lord and others had discovered in the Balkans to Anna Brown's "
It was Buchan's examples (4, I seem to remember) which was the Achilles Heel to his theory, but I'm not sure that 'shot down in flames' is any more reliable a statement than his.
The sad fact is that, apart from some mainly generally unavailable work in the U.S., there has been very little consideration give to traditional singers as anything other than repositories of songs - we certainly know almost zilch of what they thought about their songs and how they approached them - the 'natural as birdsong' image has never really gone away.
Pat and I wrote an article on Walter Pardon for Tom Munnelly's festscrift which we entitled, 'A Simple Countryman?' (note the question-mark).
We chose the title from an argument we one had with a well-known researcher who, when we told him that Walter had very strong opinions on his songs, what they meant to him, how he identified with them and categorised them from his music hall and Victorian songs, how old he believed they were..... told us, "but he's only a simple countryman - he must have been 'got at".
I've always found this a fairly general attitude and I believe it to have lost us a great deal of important information.
If Buchan was "wrong", it was certainly not based on what the singers have told us.
Phil
I think yours is an excellent summing up of how I felt about Harker - I think I reached page 50, then abandoned it for years, I eventually forced myself to finish it without changing my opinion of it.
I remember my disappointment when it first came out - I've always believed that the work of Sharp and the early collectors needed re-examination, but not in that, rather ungracious way.
We have recently acquired two of David Gregory's books but haven't had the time to read them properly yet - they look more promising; I was impressed with the couple of articles he wrote for The canadian Folksong Journal.
I've always thought of Bert and the great folksong schizophrenic, never quite deciding what camp to put his foot in.
When I was editing the short-lived 'The Lark' magazine for The Singers Club, I got a friend to interview him for a potential article.
Bert spoke for over an hour, then the following day, phoned my friend and asked for a transcript of the interview, so he could 'check on some things' - he returned it with a load of alterations.
Sadly, the magazine didn't survive long enough for it to be published.
Jim Carroll