"The Tenant Farmer?"
Hi Annie - I read your question just before I went to bed, it's been bugging me all night - thanks a bunch!!
I've sung the song since the first time I heard it back in the early 80s and have in the back of my mind that I'd asked him about the tune, and he told me he'd just kicked various tunes around in his head till he came up with it.
I woke up this morning with the idea that he'd based it on Willie Cameron's 'Tattie Liftin' Time' - the structure fits, the opening lines roughly coincide musically and the date of composition would be around the time that they were working on the English and Scots Travellers songbook.
When I first moved to London they invited me to stay with them until I found work and somewhere to live
Ewan was working on new songs at the time and he would take a tune and wander round the house whistling and humming it under his breath until he had it to satisfaction - the habit used to drive me demented!
As the note says, the song was written after a Hogmanay party in their cottage in Sandiford, outside Locherbie - they'd been talking to local farmers who told them about the circumstances which gave rise to the idea.
They used to let people they knew stay there when it wasn't in use; Pat and I stopped there on a couple of occasions and we were fascinated by the huge ordnance survey map they had pinned up on the wall pinpointing the location of all the ballads located in the area.
Using it as a guide, we visited Caterhaugh, Wamphrey, Yarrow, Ettrick, Hermitage.... including a wonderful scramble up the side of the Grey Mare's Tail to St Mary's Loch in the pissing rain - good days.
When I re-started singing a few years ago I sang Tenant Farmer at our regular music sit-in session in town - it was fairly crowded and I was standing next to an elderly farming couple at the bar.
When I reached the verse about the family being evicted, the old man roared in my ear, "the bastards" - worth a thousand ovations; land ownership is still a very sore point in Ireland.
During the time I was staying with them in the sixties I became very friendly with Ewan's mother, Betsy - she was more or less chair-bound and I used to sit in her room talking to her, particularly about the time the family first moved to Salford - fascinating.
She had a Minah Bird for company which she had tried to teach to whistle 'The Internationale' but hadn't quite managed,
At first I found Betsy's accent fairly hard going and it really wasn't helped by that **** bird whistling the first eight notes (not quite the full line) of a revolutionary classic - something else I had to get used to.
Jim Carroll