The Imagined Village - update.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: GUEST,Sharp eye for bullshit
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 06:12 AM

"Tam Lin is about fornication with Fairies."

And how many times did Sharp or anyone else collect Tam Lin from a traditional singer? Bronson lists only three credible versions, and none of them from England.

"He was quite selective in what he collected, and chose to present."

So he found lots of versions of Tam Lin and songs complaining about poverty, but deliberately suppressed them? As did, presumably, all the other collectors from that day to this? Hard Times of Old England is a "particular Copper favourite" only in the eyes of people seeking evidence that the rural working class sang protest songs about their condition; in terms of Copper repertoire it is an aberration. Tam Lin and Hard Times of Old England are both, in their different ways, more appealing to the ears of a 21st Century urbanite than Buttercup Joe or The Farmer's Boy, but the latter are more representative of what country singers actually liked to sing. Sometimes the truth is inconvenient.

Everyone who comes to this music from the outside imagines their own version of the village. A village in which the locals went around singing "Tam Lin" represents a far greater leap of the imagination than anything Cecil Sharp might have dreamed up.

This may well be an exciting project, but it isn't well served by its publicists coming up with such sloppy misrepresentation.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 06:11 AM

This must be some kind of record. A guest has launched in with what looks like an irrelevant comment which often leads the thread into the no-where land of personal abuse and argument and that was post 10!

I have listened to Cold Hailey Rainy Night and it sounds great - go to the website and have a listen.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: GUEST,Dan
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 05:27 AM

...not that many, which I think is the point. He was quite selective in what he collected, and chose to present. The book Imagined Village argues that the foundation of the folk revival of the early 1900s was based on a very one-sided and incomplete account of tradition. Read the book - it explains all better than a few posts on a forum ever will.

Tam Lin is about fornication with Fairies. And theres plenty of songs about Poverty.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: GUEST,Sharp eye for bullshit
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 10:14 PM

>> When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country's history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries. <<

Er.... exactly how many songs did Cecil Sharp collect about "fornication with faeries"? Or poverty, for that matter?

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 07:39 AM

I'm hoping to see it in Northampton and/or Leicester.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Mrs_Annie
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 07:05 AM

This is so exciting. I really hope I can get to one of the concerts.

To answer Les, in the original post, it says this near the end:

"After the album's release in September "

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: GUEST,Jim Moray
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 05:49 AM

The album had been in the works for a few years by the time I met Simon - it was actually how we first met - and that was in 2001...

I'm eager to hear it for all sorts of reasons.

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 05:02 AM

So is it a complete album ready for release?

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 03:17 AM

It is at least three years since Simon Emmerson put the Carthy/Weller Barleycorn on the deck at a fRoots event and caused a stampede of intrigued observers eager to find out what it was. More bits have been recorded here and there as and when he could get the various busy participants together.

Hurrah for the Gloworms, hello Laurel!

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 03:11 AM

Has it been a while in the making?

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 03:08 AM

It's being launched at WOMAD.
And about bloody time!

Subject: RE: The Imagined Village - update.
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 02:44 AM

Sounds amazing - I guess it is an album that is available now?

Subject: The Imagined Village - update.
From: GUEST,news bearer
Date: 20 Jun 07 - 05:26 PM

This from the Realworld site. Looks like the project has come together at last. Any thoughts?



Every age re-invents the past to its own fancy. When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country's history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries.

Later, when the rock generation embraced the folk tradition, it was precisely these sexual and supernatural elements that appealed to singers and players like Anne Briggs, Fairport Convention and Robert Plant. Albion became, as it was to William Blake, a land of mystery and wonder. Later, in the 1980s, with acts like Billy Bragg, The Levellers and The Pogues, folk became a defiant snub to an authoritarian government.

The resurgence of folk in the new century, a hundred years after Cecil Sharp became riveted by the sight of Morris dancers, remains a work in progress. Already, though, new times are finding fresh resonance within folk's age-old contours. The music's darker strains, its murder ballads and pirate yarns, have been pulled to the fore – witness the recent Rogue's Gallery project - while in an age of corporate governance, the fact that folk is not 'owned' by anybody is cheering.

Folk has also become an inevitable part of the current search for English identity. That's English as opposed to British, for once Wales and Scotland had reclaimed their flags and history – a process accelerated by an Eighties government largely elected by England that rode roughshod across the lands across the border – it was only a matter of time before the St. George's flag superseded the Union Jack.

But what is Englishness? That question has already provoked a swathe of books, mostly by Tory diehards - Roger Scruton's England, An Elegy and Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain for example - though Billy Bragg's The Progressive Patriot has recently joined the fray, arguing, like Orwell before him, that patriotism is not necessarily the refuge of rascals. Bragg's point is that there is a distinctly English tradition that belongs not to royalists and imperialists, but to the people, a tradition that runs from The Diggers to The Clash.

It is in this context that Simon Emmerson's The Imagined Village arrives, its name borrowed from Georgina Boyes' book about the Edwardian folk boom. The project – for once that over-worked term is appropriate – reflects Simon's passions as both musician and cultural activist. Gathering together an array of brilliant and challenging voices, and setting them in a musical framework that honours the past while updating it with breathtaking confidence, The Imagined Village is arguably the most ambitious re-invention of the English folk tradition since Fairports' Liege and Lief.

In part, the album reflects Simon's extraordinary journey as a musician. With his roots in the political, post-punk era, Simon first created Working Week, whose blend of jazz, soul and Latin helped define an Eighties whose intelligence was at odds with the decade's Duran-style pop. Later he produced world musicians like Baaba Maal and Manu Dibango, before founding the Afro-Celt Sound System, a daring fusion of musical cultures and an ensemble that remains a festival favourite to this day.

Simon's interest in folk goes back to his days as a Camden town squatter, when he and fellow squatters Scritti Politti would go to nearby Cecil Sharp House to see Martin Carthy play. More recently, the African and Asian musicians with whom Simon worked often quizzed him about his musical roots. Re-awakening to the idea of an English tradition - a process fed by relocating from London to Dorset - Simon started assembling The Imagined Village, a record that would open the book of traditional song to honour modern-day England in all its diversity.

So it is that 'Cold Hailey Rainy Night', a song first published 200 years ago arrives on a rippling sitar and 'Tam Lyn', a ballad whose roots stretch into the fifteenth century, is retold against a backdrop of hissing electro-reggae. The story of 'Tam Lyn' is likewise hauled into the modern age by dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, its tale of a teenage girl seduced by a demon lover transposed to urban clubland. 'Instead of her lover coming from faerie land, I have him coming from a foreign country as an asylum seeker,' says Benjamin. 'Both ways he's an alien.'

While 'Tam Lyn' swaps the magical realm for the gritty here-and-now, folk's phantasmagorical strain is well represented elsewhere. Yorkshire (?) group Tunng, a leading light on the UK nu-folk scene, included a song about a woman being turned into a hare on their last album. Here they bring their quirky electronica and droll take on the pagan tradition to 'Death and Maiden', a lesson in how to survive an encounter with the Grim Reaper.

'John Barleycorn', a number that's been a cornerstone of English folk music for the last century, also gets a definitive update. Back in the 1960s, folk trailblazers Martin Carthy and his brother-in-law Mike Waterson both renewed the song - a celebration of the fertility cycle (especially as it applies to the creation of ale) - on their early albums. Their versions in turn inspired rock band Traffic to cover it for 1969's John Barleycorn album, which is where Paul Weller picked up on it…the folk tradition in action.

The version here brings Weller together with Martin Carthy and his daughter Eliza for a fiery tour de force that slips between acoustic and swirling beats. Eliza's distinctive vocals and fiddle playing show up on several other tracks.

The stellar cast that inhabits Simon Emmerson's Imagined Village says much about the appeal of the concept (and Simon's enthusiasm). Along with the Carthy clan is the Copper Family, the celebrated dynasty of Sussex singers who have celebrated English folk song down the dynasties, and who add their ringing voices to several tracks here.

'Hard Times of Old England', a particular Copper favourite, gets a make-over from Billy Bragg (another Dorset resident), who brings the song's lament to bear on contemporary rural issues – empty holiday homes, closing post offices, the crisis in agriculture. Chris Wood, another stalwart of the folk scene, adds his vocal and instrumental talents to 'Welcome Sailor', a sparse, moving duet with singer Sheila Chandra, and 'Cold Haily Rainy Night'. Both are historic songs evoking a bygone England but still carrying timeless themes of love, lust and betrayal (and weather!). A rowdier side of tradition – the abandon of dance - is maintained by the ceilidh medley by Tiger Moth and Gloworms, respectively elder and younger representatives of a thriving live scene.

Emmerson's 'Pilsden Pen' draws on another strand of English music, the lush, orchestral romanticism of Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. Named after a Dorset Iron Age settlement, the track evokes the history-sodden Wessex landscape, a musical equivalent of the visionary paintings of Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. The threat posed to such landscapes is made clear in the opening ''Ouses, 'Ouses, 'Ouses', where John Copper talks about the bond between the land and its inhabitants.

One thing that makes The Imagined Village such a delight, is the way it interweaves such traditional considerations with the sounds and voices of today's era. Fiddles and squeezebox breathe easily alongside electronica and ambient effects. Simon, no stranger to eclectic fusions, is joined by members of world beat troupe Transglobal Underground – Shema Mukherjee on sitar and Tim Whelan on arrangements- by Johnny Kalsi's dhol drums and by the translucent vocals of Sheila Chandra.

It's an astonishing line-up and a stunning album. The Imagined Village becomes a thrilling live show later this summer, when The Imagined Village is showcased at WOMAD, now fittingly relocated to the heart of England. After the album's release in September comes a tour in November.

The concert show includes stellar cast including Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, Sheila Chandra and Chris Wood backed by a band featuring Simon Emmerson, Richard Evans, Johnny Kalsi, Francis Hylton, Andy Gangadeen, Shema Mukherjee and Barney Morse Jones.

Special guests including The Young Copper Family, The Dhol Foundation, Morris Offspring and the Gloworms will join the party at WOMAD and for some of the tour dates. Benjamin Zephaniah and John Copper will appear on screen.