English Folk - Peasants to Professors

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:39 AM

You see, you're doing it again....minutia...splitting the facts, the words in atoms....

"This is something which Lizzie don't understand, and I think, never will. "

Please read my post above where I say how much I DO understand that for some folks, facts bring in far more to the song. I understand how you think, but you refuse, or perhaps are simply unable, to understand how I think.

Colours, magic, sounds, words, skies, seas, fishermen, miners, bal maidens, weather, worry, hard times, good times, high times, low times, weddings, funerals, rivers, streams, tors and prisons, exiles and immigrants, tall ships and ploughs...YES!

Dates, titles, collectors names..NOPE!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:09 AM

"I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!"

I've read this posting of Lizzie's about four times and I still can't make sense of it. If she's talking about the people who originally wrote the songs which we nowadays call folk songs, I suggest she takes a trawl through some of the songs in Denis Zimmerman's book on Irish political broadsides. (No I'm not going to get up from my desk on this sweltering hot day and dig out the title.)

Just on the score of peasant and pedant, Victorian/Edwardian collectors may have romantically described the people they collected from as peasants. However, the term peasantry means a system of near subsistence agriculture, whereby people rent pieces of land, and use money from the sales of the crops they grow almost exclusively to pay the rent.

The people Sharp and co. collected from were in the main agricultural wage labourers. IE., they worked the land for an employer in exchange for wages. In other words it would have been more accurate to describe them as a rural working class.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:08 AM

I think that Eliza's comments supra, and that of Dave Hanson (1st June 10.25 a.m.) says it all as far as Mad Lizzie is concerned.

For some of us, intellectual discussion on, and analysis of, the song, its provenance and history, enhances the enjoyment.

It certainly does and did for me, and I am in Jim Carroll's debt over this.

This is something which Lizzie don't understand, and I think, never will.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 05:00 AM

"Don't you think that it might have been more honest to supply us with this information at the start of this thread? If you have some sort of disability, I sympathise with you but that doesn't mean that everyone should automatically fall in line with you."

I've rabbitted on for years that I come from a dyslexic family. Pay attention at the back! ;0) Er...dyslexia is NOT a disability folks...Quite the opposite...It's absolute magic!

What is a disability is those who have brains that for some strange reason seem to have been disabled from hearing the beauty, without it being smothered in facts, and who demand that everyone knows every fact about every song, else they don't really 'love' the music.

Total rubbish.

I do the magic part....the songs whisk me away...and in no time at all, I'm away being that doxy, or pining for my Love...

I've just had the most ***amazing*** conversation with the surveyor who came to look at my house...but I need to start a new thread about it! Whoa, you are sooo not going to believe this! (she disappears off to tip tap like crazy)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:52 AM

"Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public."

Hang on though, you've all been nattering away about A L Lloyd saying that you can't trust anything he said.

Which would probably have been fine with Lloyd himself.

This isn't about trusting an authority, it's about learning to think. Lloyd shows you some ways of thinking about folk songs which will lead you to understand things about those songs, and about the world they were created in and comment on, which you wouldn't have come up with by yourself. Of course there are mistakes - it was written 50 years ago - but it's a start, a first step which you seem very unwilling to take.

It's not at all difficult to read, either.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: glueman
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:32 AM

The dominant tradition within the revival works on the assumption songs are only appreciated fully by concerted study. Historiography is however only one means of consumption. There is no reason to suppose folk songs aren't defined by their immediacy or that traditional performances didn't draw upon general empathy to open out specific meanings.

You can in short, just dig the music and appreciate its antiquity. That the revival was rooted in specific intellectual positions and taken up by the educated middle classes does not mean the wider public cannot find equally valid ways of appreciating traditional songs, or should have that subjectivity undermined by a cadre of 'informed' arbiters of taste and understanding.

I find Lizzie's approach to folk music refreshing even while disagreeing with some of her conclusions.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:29 AM

"Besides, I fall asleep when I read, it goes with the dyslexic brain pattern..I also don't recall dates, people's names etc...they've always eluded me."

So YOU have a problem with "dates, people's names etc." Don't you think that it might have been more honest to supply us with this information at the start of this thread? If you have some sort of disability, I sympathise with you but that doesn't mean that everyone should automatically fall in line with you. That's like me denigrating other peoples' interest in sport because I happen to be knock-kneed and can't run as well as everyone else.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:29 AM

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

From 1984 by George Orwell

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:06 AM

Great to hear someone's keeping up the traditions Lizzie... ;-)
A traditional ferret costume (Sans turnips..)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Mary Brennan
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:05 AM

Lizzie, you're not a peasant. You're middle class, as are most of the Guardians of the Tradition. The Tradition has its roots in the working classes.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:00 AM

I have my best ferret outfit on today. :0)

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:30 AM

"While the first white fellas to see them might have considered the Motu ignorant, subsequent experience has taught us otherwise. That experience could be brought to bear on our understanding of peasants wear[ing] the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper[ing] around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?"

Aha Rowan, intriguing anthropological analogy. So you appear to be implying that there may perhaps be some approximation of 'meaning' and furthermore that those peasants even 'understood' themselves, the ancestral meaning contained in their naive attempts at song?
Interesting, though I'm more tempted by the theory posited below, that these hearty be-turnip'd rustics intuited their songs by direct animistic communion with the powers of nature...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:23 AM

"Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public."


Hang on though, you've all been nattering away about A L Lloyd saying that you can't trust anything he said...Sheesh, make yer minds up. :0)

Besides, I fall asleep when I read, it goes with the dyslexic brain pattern..I also don't recall dates, people's names etc...they've always eluded me.

I can recall, a few years back, seeing a certain traditional group performing. Before every single song, out came the facts, who it was collected by, from whom, from where and when....It drove me bats..I wriggled and jiggled around, desperate just to hear the songs...

I appreciate that many in that audience would have gobbled up those facts, digested them and kept them for a meal later on, to be enjoyed and savoured.....but my brain spits it all out...My brain takes home the songs themselves, along with the colour of the sky, the gurgling rivers, the sheep in the fields, the fishermen, the soldiers, their loves, their losses...It takes home the emotions, the colours, the smells, the sounds.

When I leave a concert, I take home the film.

Facts jump out of my brain, replaced with pictures. I take home the ancestors themselves, sitting in their cottages and their pubs, telling their stories...

It's why I love listening to John Tams, because he paints those pictures around the facts, he 'rambles' on in his sweet way, knowing that all the while, he's teaching, teaching, laying down the colours for the films that follow.

Dave, you told me once that you've taught dyslexic students. Well, with all due respect, you don't really understand the dyslexic mind, because in so many of us, facts lie scattered on the floor, along with dates, names and times....whilst all around us are vibrant colours, scents, sounds and movements...all around us lie the 'inside' of the songs.

For me, the academic side comes wayyyyyyyy behind the beauty side.

I'd rather not tell you that what you're talking is complete ******, as you said to me, because I understand you love all that part of it.

I love the songs. Plain and simple.

But then...I'm a peasant, so the songs run through me and touch me in a very different way.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:14 AM

"I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!"
You really need to decide what you are talking about - your foot-in-mouth is causing much confusion - not least in your own mind, it would appear.
"I'm talking about the kind of er...discussion that's going on in "Kate's thread"
Kate who - don't think you mean Kate Lee?
"do you really think the ploughboys would have cared a hoot about what AL did, or didn't,"
Don't know really - never met any ploughboys - did you? Come to think of it, Burns was a ploughboy, and a folk song collector- wonder how that fits in with your 'ignorant and disinterested peasant' philosophy! Lloyd and Williams' 'Penguin Book' has been a source of much pleasure and information down the years and, as Jack has already mentioned, 'Folk Song in England' did a tremendous job in fleshing out the subject - what's your problem???   
None of the source singers we met would have cared too much for what Kate Rusby did or didn't do - does that affect her singing?
Walter Pardon was a carpenter in North Norfolk; he was well-read and articulate, about his songs and was more articulate on the subject than anybody I have ever met - read what he had to say about singing and songs sometime.
Please can you tell us on what you base the 'ignorant and disinterested' picture of the traditional singer, on - I've never met one like that.
Personally I've never understood the insistence from some people that we remain ignorant about the music that takes up so much of our lives over the years - nobody is insisting that you go out and read a book so why should you insist that we all put our minds into neutral?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,eliza c
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:59 PM

good grief

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rowan
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:25 PM

Lots of curious comments in this thread but I thought the following was worth giving a response;
Didn't those peasants wear the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Ferrets weren't common in PNG (neither were turnips; I don't think either is present there yet) and so didn't appear in traditional PNG cultural expressions but their counterparts (pigs' teeth, bird plumage and various plant parts) certainly did. And the Motu could, up to a few years ago, recount the details of their ancestral lineages back for at least 1200 years, with some aspects corroborated by dating volcanic eruptions scientifically.

While the first white fellas to see them might have considered the Motu ignorant, subsequent experience has taught us otherwise. That experience could be brought to bear on our understanding of peasants wear[ing] the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper[ing] around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:07 PM

Lizzie, a number of people have pointed out that you are talking total bollocks as usual.

All of these people have spent time with traditional singers, source singers, song-carriers, call them what you will.

Do me a favour and tell them they don't know what they are talking about compared to your in-depth knowledge.

Go on Lizzie - I dare you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jack Campin
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:03 PM

I'm talking about those who FIRST sang the songs, in the FIRST place. After all, the first ever chap/chapess who hummed a tune, then put words to it, was the FIRST ever Singer Songwriter, who of course, The Professors sniff even more loudly over.

Once, the songs were sung because of joy, or heartbreak...They weren't analysed to the nth degree, dissected, dismembered, discussed...nor were the personalities who 'collected' the songs, because back then, they'd not been collected and put into museums, talked of in hallowed tones...they were just sung!

Those are the people I'm talking about, the ones who sung the songs for the sheer joy.

Lizzie, if you went away and read A.L. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" ...

... several times, until you get it ...

... you would not make such a spectacle of yourself in public.

I would bet serious money that every single one of your idols has done exactly that.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 06:36 PM

Helllooeeee......

I'm not talking about 'traditional singers'....Lawdy! Lawdy!

I'm talking about those who FIRST sang the songs, in the FIRST place. After all, the first ever chap/chapess who hummed a tune, then put words to it, was the FIRST ever Singer Songwriter, who of course, The Professors sniff even more loudly over.

Once, the songs were sung because of joy, or heartbreak...They weren't analysed to the nth degree, dissected, dismembered, discussed...nor were the personalities who 'collected' the songs, because back then, they'd not been collected and put into museums, talked of in hallowed tones...they were just sung!

Those are the people I'm talking about, the ones who sung the songs for the sheer joy.

I know about Bob Copper and the others and I wasn't trying to insult them..heck I LOVED that documentary on Bob, the one made shortly before he died....

I'm talking about the kind of er...discussion that's going on in Kate's thread about A.L. Lloyd and co...I mean...at the end of the day, do you really think the ploughboys would have cared a hoot about what AL did, or didn't, do? No, they'd have just sung the songs and had done with it...

Probably
Possibly
Maybe

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 06:18 PM

Rifleman, d'you know "Flat Earth" by Patterson Jordan Dipper? If not, beg, steal or borrow a copy. You can't buy it any more for love nor money, more's the pity. Ralphie is assured his place in folk history on the back of this CD alone...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:45 PM

Well. I think I qualify as a performer!!!
Getting on for 40 years of it now!!!

ummm ...did anyone ever tell you that it's not the quantity of time spent, but the quality of time spent?

Get over yourself Ralphie!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:39 PM

"The "peasant" in the title of this thread just about sums up Lizzie's attitude to them - just needs the prefix "ignorant" in front of it to make it perfect."

Didn't those peasants wear the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:28 PM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
"Or The Elliotts of Birtley"
"Or the Leggs."
Or Walter Pardon, Texas Gladden,Tom Lenihan, Mikeen McCarthy......
It is incredibly patronising and demeaning to suggest that traditional singers "just sang the songs - without giving a shit" The "peasant" in the title of this thread just about sums up Lizzie's attitude to them - just needs the prefix "ignorant" in front of it to make it perfect.
Around this area, up to the mid 20th century, singers were not only singing the old songs, but were still making up new ones about the events taking place at the time - 'The Rineen Ambush', 'Mac And Shanahan', 'The West Clare Railway', 'The Bobbed Hair', The Wreck of The Leon',' 'The Quilty Burning', 'The Quern Bay Disaster', 'The Drunken Bear'.... countless local songs. So not only did they understand the historical significance of the old songs, but they were recording their history in their songs - much of which would have been unimportant or 'inconvenient' to set down in any other way.
I would be interested to learn where Lizzie got her information about the 'unconcious' traditional singer - but won't hold my breath.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 02:37 PM

Lizzie Cornish. "...these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them..."

Brian Peters. "You never met Bob Copper, then."

Sorry, but that comment of Lizzie's has been bugging me ever since this thread started, and it goes way beyond Bob Copper's burgeoning knowledge. Traditional singers in fact seldom had a scholarly knowledge of the songs they sang. But as anyone who ever talked to Paddy Tunney or Willie Scott or Fred Jordan will realise, they invariably had a detailed understanding of the folk history of their surroundings, and the parts which songs played in that history.

A few examples:

- Betsy Whyte's comment at the end of Young Johnson (Child 88). The Muckle Sangs. Greentrax CDTRAX 9005
- A fascinating weekend which I once spent with Joe Rae of Bigholm in Ayrshire. What that man didn't know about Ayrshire, and about the songs he sang could have been written down on the back of a postage stamp.
- An equally fascinating morning spent with John Kennedy during which he talked in great detail about the songs and folkways of Culleybackey in Antrim.
- A five hour long interview which Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger conducted in 1964, and which I edited for Musical Traditions magazine. It can be read at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm . Yes there are places in it where Heaney obviously feels pushed to come up with an answer, and the information he come out with is often inaccurate. But could someone who (in a different context), said the following, seriously be accused of not giving a shite about the history? "What I wanted to find out more than anything else was; why do people have to suffer? Why was there two acres of land and twenty five acres of rock? And why was there such a thing as somebody with a thousand acres to run their hounds and horses through the fields and collect their money after them? What did they do to deserve it? I suddenly hated the people who did it, you know, oh, the history...." And in case you think Joe Heaney was a one off, Connemara is replete with people who share just that kind of knowledge
- The huge amount of actuality material which MacColl and Seeger collected from the Elliotts of Birtley.
- The even more monumental collection of material which they recorded from The Stewarts of Blair. (Both sets of recordings are in the National Sound Archive, and in Ruskin College library of Oxford University by the way.)
- An interview between Harry Cox and Alan Lomax in which Harry talks with bitter eloquence about the game laws and about the treatment of poachers.

Traditional singers seldom retailed the kind of history you'd find in textbooks. But to accuse these people of not giving a shite about the history of the songs they sang is to demean their intelligence and to undervalue the importance of their artistry. It is in effect to accuse them of singing songs they could not have understood.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 11:37 AM

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:48 AM

was me of course. calling in from another computer.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 11:09 AM

Yes, Hanson, I see you and curmudgeon are drawing attention yourselves. Double troll alert!

A bit like the pot calling the kettle black isn't it?

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Reinhard
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:56 AM

Thank you, Surreysinger. I just answered in a PM.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:48 AM

And - blatant plug - The Elliots of Birtley will feature in the first half of my radio show "Thank Goodness IT's Folk" this coming Friday morning.

Have a listen Lizzie.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:35 AM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
"Or The Elliotts of Birtley"

Or the Leggs.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:25 AM

Lizzie Dripping, oops sorry, Cornish, starts threads like this to bring attention to herself, good or bad it doesn't matter it's about HER.

Dave H

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 10:16 AM

Reinhard: "I usually trust what I find in the respective album's sleeve notes. When I'm told that this is imprecise I will gladly amend it"

Yeah, and you're not alone. I'd imagine most people will tend to trust such statements made on recordings by professional folk artists. All the more reason why professional folk artists and telly producers etc. disseminating both the music and info. on the music, have a responsibility both to enthusiasts who buy their records and to the people who made those songs in the first place, to ensure their published information on the songs is accurate and up to date.

In view of the need to make amendments from time to time, you could include a clearly visible disclaimer somewhere on the page explaining precisely what you just have, and that information on some of the reproduced sleeve notes might be out of date in some instances? But as I said before, the sleevenotes you include describing these revival singers own responses to the songs and their history, make interesting reading.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 09:53 AM

"You never met Bob Copper, then."
Or The Elliotts of Birtley

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Morris-ey
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 09:43 AM

I quite like one of Lizzie's favourites: Professor John Tams - a great teacher according to Lizzie, but, thankfully he does not lecture...

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 08:54 AM

I've PM'd Reinhard to apologise personally, and to discuss one or two other points. (Re the point made about it being a German site,incidentally, I hasten to add that this was intended to indicate that it had nothing to do with a Surrey folk arts impresario, which might have been inferred from it's name ... and nothing more than that). My apologies again.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 07:22 AM

> Your statement seems to imply that just because this is a German site it can't be any good. Thank you very much for your constructive criticism.

Sorry Reinhard - mea culpa - that was a very poor choice of words on my part. There was no implied criticism about the source of your site - purely an indication that, as with many other sites, the source of that song was wrongly attributed. (Mike Harding made a similar mistake on his Radio programme the other week). My apologies.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Brian Peters
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 05:31 AM

From the original post:

"How do you know that the songs collected by The Collectors are the original versions of the songs?"

We don't, and nobody ever said that they were. It's interesting to compare different versions, though.

"...these songs were sung by people who didn't give a shite about the history of them..."

You never met Bob Copper, then.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: theleveller
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 03:59 AM

As is usually the case in discussions like this, it's not a case of either/or. Traditional songs work on two levels: as songs and as social commentary . What brought me to the songs in the first place was the history behind them and I want to know the background of the songs I hear and sing.

Many contemporary singer/songwriters in the folk genre base their songs on historical events – often undertaking a great deal of research to get the details correct. It's what I do with many of the songs I write. Reg Meuross is particularly fascinated by the background to the 'story' songs he writes. For instance, we recently had a discussion about the nature of 'fustian' apropos the fustian coat that Dick wears in his song 'Lizzie Loved a Highwayman'. This led me to discover a now largely forgotten strike in Hebden Bridge, a fustian-weaving centre, that started in 1906, lasted over 2 years and had greater social implications than the Miners' Strike of the 1980s. Great material for a song.

Some friends of mine, the folk duo Brother Crow, write and perform wonderful songs often based on some of the murkier aspects of history from their native Weardale. At Ryedale Folk Weekend they gave a multimedia presentation based around their research into the background of some of their songs. It was absolutely fascinating (if, at times, harrowing) and brought the songs into even greater perspective. These guys are not 'professors'; they're fine musicians who want to know as much as possible about the background of their songs. Their research and the song they produced recently led to the restoration and rededication of a monument to a forgotten local hero, Tom Barton, who attempted to pull a child from a burning house.

Surely the whole point of folk songs is that they are more than just songs – they are our history, our roots, an oral history as seen from a different perspective to the educated classes who wrote the history book, and they deserve to be preserved as such.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Reinhard
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 01:49 AM

Surreysinger wrote:
See this link for Lucy's own words about the song. The site you have used is a German one, and like many others repeats the error regarding the actual collector.

Your statement seems to imply that just because this is a German site it can't be any good. Thank you very much for your constructive criticism.

My website is a fan website for a few revival singers, nothing more. I try to add a bit of information to the songs and I usually trust what I find in the respective album's sleeve notes. When I'm told that this is imprecise I will glady amend it as I did in this case. Thank you.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Anglo
Date: 01 Jun 09 - 12:27 AM

I'd like to bring this thread back to its beginning. Lizzie darling, you and I have never conversed before though through this forum I know of your love for certain pop-folk singers. I played your first KR cut linked on your very first post to see what you were espousing now, and heard a song plainly sung, with a bit of a Celtic Twilight feel in the mercifully sparse accompaniment. (I do not dislike, KR, I own a few of her CDs). But that paarticular song is that I missed when it was first written and recorded some 20 or so years ago, I believe, but it struck me with some immediacy when I heard the recording by Peta Webb & Ken Hall. THAT one forced me to sit up and listen to the words. KR's doesn't. And that for me is what folk music is about, professors or not.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 07:25 PM

> I hope that makes sense !
Certainly does!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 31 May 09 - 05:43 PM

How nice to see the massive support for the "roots" approach.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 05:15 PM

"However, dodgy site to choose for accurate information."

I'm sure you're right there. And again illustrates the continuence of misinformation, which no doubt abounds, and which - if your going to say anything at all, aught to be avoided.

Though the reason I linked, was specifically to illustrate how different revival singers have commented on the history of the same song, *and* also adapted it.

I used Poor Murdered Woman as an example, because I'm learning it and, and because I enjoyed reading Shirley Collins own response to the songs history. I hope that makes sense!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:15 PM

Sorry - you got your response in first there!! [grin]

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:15 PM

However, dodgy site to choose for accurate information. The song wasn't actually collected by Lucy Broadwood herself - it was submitted to her by the Rev Charles J Shebbeare, who was the actual collector, and then published in her collection "Traditional Songs and Carols". See this link for Lucy's own words about the song. The site you have used is a German one, and like many others repeats the error regarding the actual collector.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:09 PM

Yeah, I wondered if it might not be strictly 'traditional'. Though I've also seen some debate about that particular issue with known authorship.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Surreysinger
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:06 PM

Good song to choose, Crow Sister - based on a real event, newspaper clippings of the period available. Some might say not a traditional song exactly, as we know exactly who wrote it !

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 May 09 - 04:02 PM

For my own part, if anything, knowing the history of the song adds a dimension of intimacy which brings you closer to the err 'peasant' (as that's the term in the OP) origins of the song itself. Otherwise it's just a nice pretty girl or boy singing some oldy worldy sounding song.

In fact what can also be nice, is reading what different revival singers have to say about the same traditional song that they've each sung (one of the reasons I quite like to peruse the following website), and the way it affected them individually. Take for example one song I've started learning: Poor Murdered Woman The artists who recorded this song, are themselves interested in knowing and speaking about their responses to the history of the song, I found Shirley Collins sleeve notes especially interesting. Note also the variations listed.

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: curmudgeon
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:41 PM

I don't think Terry was referring to this thread per se, but rather similar threads/Mudcat in general - Tom

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:38 PM

Well. I think I qualify as a performer!!!
Getting on for 40 years of it now!!!

Subject: RE: English Folk - Peasants to Professors
From: Folkiedave
Date: 31 May 09 - 03:36 PM

"Each generation has their own influences. It's how tradition goes on, it's how it marches on. The music itself you can do whatever you want with it, it's very forgiving." - Norma Waterson, taken from Eliza Carthy's 'My Music' video - (see seperate thread)

Lizzie - Since that precisely cotradicts what you were saying at the start of this thread I stand by what I said. You talk round spherical objects.

Jim,

I take your point and you are right of course - it was a two way process. I was trying to emphasise that we didn't recognise the influence of broadsides in the past as much as we do now.