Nominations for 'new' traditional songs

Subject: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Larry The Radio Guy
Date: 22 May 10 - 01:52 AM

Traditional songs are, according to the experts, songs that have lived on, are spread through an "oral tradition" where many different versions may prevail, and nobody really knows for sure who wrote it. Right?   So, at one time, these songs were introduced by somebody. I'm curious about the qualities that lead to some songs becoming traditional and others going into the scrap heap (or even worse, being designated "pop" songs).

I'd like to hear mudcat contributers vote for a relatively recent song that, say, 50 years from now, could be considered "traditional". If you don't like predicting, give a song that you would LIKE to see enter into an oral tradition.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 22 May 10 - 02:37 AM

It's already happened, certain songs by Ewan MacColl, Cyril Tawney and others have been absorbed into the tradition, MacColl had been known to ' collect ' his own songs from traditional singers, Shoals of Herring has become a traditional Irish song called ' Shores of Erin '

Dave H

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Anne Neilson
Date: 22 May 10 - 03:58 AM

"Yellow on the Broom" by Adam McNaughtan is probably halfway there in the acceptance process.
He wrote it after bring asked to review the book of the same name, written by Betsy Whyte (a Scottish Traveller, singer and storyteller). Betsy described her childhood, but the focus of the book was her mother's story - coming from a family which travelled the year round, she married into a family of Travellers which wintered in the town and she yearned for the first appearance of flower on the broom shrub in Spring, as that was the signal to go back out on the road.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 May 10 - 04:03 AM

On this side of the pond, I'd say "We Shall Overcome" qualifies.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GRex
Date: 22 May 10 - 05:01 AM

I think that Dave Webber's "Bonnet and Shawl" already sounds traditional.

       GRex

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: treewind
Date: 22 May 10 - 06:08 AM

"If I were you, young man, I'd leave local songs for local people to sing"
(or words to that effect)

Pastow resident to Dave Webber, after the latter had just sung the May song that he wrote and which had been enthusiastically adopted by the locals in the ensuing years.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Leadfingers
Date: 22 May 10 - 06:10 AM

Keith Marsden's 'Bring Us A Barrel' - ALREADY called traditional by a lot of people - His own fault , as after he wrote it , he felt he shouldnt call it a contemporary song so used to introduce it to his Audience as 'Trad'

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 22 May 10 - 08:43 AM

Yellow Submarine
Singing in the Rain
My Way
Love Me Tender
One Love

and no doubt lots more...

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 22 May 10 - 08:50 AM

May I Have this Dance for the Rest of my Life
Didn't I Dance in my Day
Stairway to Heaven

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 22 May 10 - 08:55 AM

"Geronimo's Cadillac" - compulsively singable. Bob

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 22 May 10 - 09:32 AM

During a concert Cyril Tawney introduced ' Sally Free And Easy ' as one of his own songs, he overheard a matelot on the front row saying to his mate ' the lying bugger, I heard that song in Hong Kong years ago '

Dave H

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: JedMarum
Date: 22 May 10 - 09:42 AM

I second it; "Yellow on the Broom" by Adam McNaughtan!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Rob Naylor
Date: 22 May 10 - 11:42 AM

I'd like to see Bob Kenward's "Man of Kent" become "traditional".

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: old git
Date: 22 May 10 - 12:02 PM

Peter Bond's "Joe Peel"
A whole lot of Keith Marsden's songs

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: old git
Date: 22 May 10 - 12:04 PM

Stan Roger's "Mary Ellen Carter" and lots more of his

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Larry The Radio Guy
Date: 22 May 10 - 12:16 PM

How about Long Black Veil by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkins. So many different versions--all of them so different (and often better) from the original Danny Dill recording--which barely anybody's heard.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Emma B
Date: 22 May 10 - 12:29 PM

Fiddler's Green

I heard someone introduce this as a 'traditional Irish folk song' once when John was in the audience

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: The Sandman
Date: 22 May 10 - 12:35 PM

I had a wheelbarrow but the wheel fell off.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,CupOfTea at work, cookieless
Date: 22 May 10 - 01:32 PM

An automatic nomination should go to any song that's been cited as "traditional" within the writer's lifetime. One that comes to mind immediately is Si Kahn's Aragon Mill. His Wild Rose of the Mountain has an oh-so-trad feel, too. I've seen a doofus on You Tube list "One, I Love" as being a "traditional Irish song popularized by American Jean Richie" rather than crediting it to her as writer/composer.

Woody Guthrie wrote a fair few that have become traditional, particularly within the "went-to-camp-learned-it-there" group like me. Plane Wreck At Los Gatos/Deportee, Pastures of Plenty, Do Re Me, Pretty Boy Floyd, Roll on Columbia, and of course, This Land is Your Land

Pete Seeger's own songs presented in the same style as traditional material were absorbed as such by plenty of folks. Get Up & Go, Where Have all the Flowers Gone (with last verse by Joe Hickerson), If I Had a Hammer (with Lee Hayes), Turn! Turn! Turn!- just the tip of the iceberg.

Stan Rogers wrote for the ages, for a certainty: Mary Ellen Carter, Barrett's Privateers, Northwest Passage.

Even moreso, Gordon Bok's songs are timeless: Turning toward the Morning, Hearth and Fire... and on and on So many writers who are strong in their traditional roots - as most of those I mention- can write things that can stand for years: Tommy Makem's Four Green Fields - I get into the Irish and Scottish writers and I could be coming up with a list long as my arm!

Some songs I think SHOULD become traditional, for the sheer number of covers also make me wonder if they might miss becoming that because of OVERexposure (Not that bloody song again!): Eric Bogle's Green Fields of France, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. Kate Wolf's Give Yourself to Love, Bob Franke's Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over, Sidney Carter's Lord of the Dance, Sally Rogers' Lovely Agnes.

It'd be interesting to know what's being sung around campfires these days and by younger folks in general. I wonder what impact in the US the songs in "Rise up Singing" will have on what endures into the tradition & if it hastens the transition of something from "pop/popular"music to "folk/traditional" - which is likely a whole OTHER thread...

I'm glad it wasn't specified how many nominations we each get! This had me thinking all morning.

Joanne in Cleveland

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: mg
Date: 22 May 10 - 01:56 PM

I think most of what Pete St. John has written. mg

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 22 May 10 - 02:09 PM

Pete St John definately has the gift of writing traditional songs, and ALL Woody's songs will become traditional in time.

Dave H

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 22 May 10 - 02:19 PM

'You'll never walk alone', Gerry Marsden, sung by tens of thousands on a weekly basis. 'Old Faithful' sung by thousands on a weekly basis.
'Fields of Athenry' sung by tens of thousands on a weekly basis, during the season! And many others of that ilk.

Any pop song that lingers on a generation AFTER it was written, without having to undergo a 'REVIVAL'.

An American pop song written in 1908 that entered oral tradition in Britain, but I don't think it survived in America. 'My Brudda Sylvest'

Jimmy Kennedy's 'Hokey Cokey' from WWII, albeit based on earlier European songs.

Many parodies on pop songs, some of them bawdy.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 09:48 PM

The names of Peter Coe ('Joseph Baker'), Bob Pegg ('Rise Up Jock'), Peter Bellamy ('The Transports'), Eric Bogle ('The Band Played Waltzing Matilda'), Cyril Tawney ('Sally Free & Easy'), Ewan MacColl ('Ballad Of Derek Bentley'), come much to mind in context of this thread.

I once asked A L Lloyd [see my interview with him, "The Donkey & the Zebra" in Folk Review Sept 1974], whether Liverpool FC crowds had not turned the song You'll Never Walk Alone from Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical Carousel,[adduced above by Steve Gardham, who however surprisingly attributes it to singer Gerry Marsden rather than to its composer & lyricist!] into a folk song. "Folk in function but not in form'" Bert said. I asked whether, in folksong, the function did not define the form to some extent. "To some extent," he repeated firmly; and the subject dropped.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Clontarf83
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 11:38 PM

Aragon Mill
Peat bog soldiers
Millworker (James Taylor)
Jolly beggarman (Makem--lots of his stuff)
Will think of more

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: mousethief
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 11:42 PM

All God's Creatures Got a Place in the Choir (Bill Staines)

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: mousethief
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 11:43 PM

The Final Trawl

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: michaelr
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 01:40 AM

Steve Tilston's "Slip Jigs and Reels".

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 03:05 AM

"Sullivan's John"

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 04:07 AM

Whence "Sullivan's John", then, Dave? The Dubliners IIRC sing it as 'traditional'.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 05:05 AM

Seems to me there's a great deal of wishful thinking going on here.
Tradition is not just repetition - it's a bit more complex than that; nor does it have anything to do with what the songs 'sounds' like.
Sullivan's John has a claim to 'tradition' because it was born into a community that could identify with it, make it their own and claim it represents their way of life in some way.
Rogers and Hammerstein's You'll Never Walk Alone, made for an Broadway musical, has about as much to do with the lives of the people of my home town as does Mongolian throat singing.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 05:18 AM

Maybe, Jim ~~ but it has a lot to do with the people whose home town happens to be Liverpool & who support the city team rather than Everton or Tranmere Rovers.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,S.T.M.
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 05:19 AM

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
The Grey Funnel Line
Dimming of the Day

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 05:26 AM

The Dreamend and The Drowned - by Reg Meuross

From Reg Meuross:

"This song is about Betty Corrigan, an unmarried girl from the island of Hoy, who fell pregnant by a sailor in the late 19th century. When the sailor failed to return Betty was banished from her village to the desolate moor. The isolation drove her mad and she committed suicide before the child was born. She was buried on the moor in un-consecrated ground. Her body was later exhumed by mistake and found to be incredibly well-preserved owing to the peat soil. (It's said that the sailors dressed her up and took her to the mess room to scare the other sailors although I doubt this.) On realising her sad fate, the sailor who found her paid for a headstone and had her buried on the moor.

The song is the title of a new compilation of my unreleased songs, compiled by Stephen Jordan at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and soon to be released."

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 05:30 AM

Moreover, Jim, re Never Walk Alone: it has become part of a regular ritual, sung by people, many of whom are probably unaware of its origin, on specific occasions ~~ or, rather, a repeated specific occasion, a match in which Liverpool FC are playing. It could almost, it seems to me, be included in a reissue of the old Caedmon/Topic Folk Songs Of Britain set, volume 9, Songs Of Ceremony.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 06:19 AM

"but it has a lot to do with the people whose home town happens to be Liverpool"
No it doesn't Mike: it is something repeated at a football match, same as 'Land of Hope and Glory' is repeated at the last night of the proms.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 06:20 AM

Or maybe that is something that should have been included in the Caedmon series?
Jim Carroll

Subject: Lyr Add: NEWELL HIGHWAY (John Warner)
From: freda underhill
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 06:49 AM

NEWELL HIGHWAY
John Warner (1985)

This song celebrates the Warrumbungle Ranges in inland NSW. John first heard the tune, C.H.H. Parry's melody for the hymn 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,' in his earliest childhood as a theme to a BBC radio programme, and it is adapted here from that memory.

Awake before the dawn within the spires of range
Where magpies ornate melodies
Engrave the chilly morning breeze
Beneath the towering stone,
Beneath the towering stone.

On nights of silver moon too rich to waste on sleep
In silence make your way to seek
The choirs of frog in swamp and creek
That sing beneath the stars,
That sing beneath the stars.

Out on the western plain beside the roaring road
Where trucks snarl by without a care
Are billabongs with ibis there
And wedge-tailed eagles soar,
And wedge-tailed eagles soar.

All you who love the earth
And make her ways your choice
Cry out against the noise of trade
Demand that silence should be made
So that all might hear her voice,
Her ancient, matchless voice.

Subject: Lyr Add: ANDERSON'S COAST (John Warner)
From: freda underhill
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 06:55 AM

"Anderson's Coast" by John Warner, here sung by James Fagan and Nancy Kerr

Australian singer John Warner writes evocative and beautifully poetic songs, many drawing on Australian colonial history. Anderson's Coast concerns of a group of convicts who escaped Van Diemen's Land in a stolen ship, only to be wrecked by the notorious Bass Strait waves on the Gippsland coast (in Victoria). The explorer Strzlecki and his small band stumbled out of dense rainforest and encountered the marooned men. Strzlecki would probably have perished had it not been for his Koori guide Charlie Tarra and this group of convicts who led him to Anderson, a pioneer settler who ran cattle on the South Gippsland coast. Apparently the convicts were pardoned for their contribution to the explorer's survival.

Old Bass Strait roars like some great mill race
And where are you, my Annie?
But the same moon shines on this lonely place
As shone one day on my Annie's face.
But Annie dear, don't wait for me,
I fear I shall not return to thee
There's naught to do but endure my fate
And watch the moon, the lonely moon
Light the breakers on wild Bass Strait.
We stole a vessel and all her gear
And from Van Diemen's we north did steer
'Till Bass Strait's wild waves wrecked us here.
And somewhere west Port Melbourne lies
Through swamps infested with snakes and flies
The fool who walks there surely dies.
We hail no ship though the time it drags
Our chain gang walk and our government rags
All mark us out as Van Diemen's lags,
We fled the lash and the chafing chain
We fled hard labour and brutal pain
And here we are and here remain.

Subject: Lyr Add: THE PEOPLE HAVE SONGS (Miguel Heatwole)
From: freda underhill
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 07:00 AM

The People Have Songs
written & sung by Miguel Heatwole, Sydney.

Here voices are tuned to each other in gladness
To all here in common affection belongs
Here joy and laughter meet keening and sadness
Here tyranny's cursed for the people have songs

Let us set the room ringing with the sound of our singing
When we come to the end let us hold the chord long
Hear the harmonies rise and all close our eyes
'Til the last cadence dies the people have songs

Here is war parting sweethearts
Here are strong sweating sailors
And poets for beauty who ardently long
Here are people at work singing loud at their labours
Here are marriage and drinking for the people have songs

Respect for each other gives each one a hearing
And whether the voice be uncertain or strong
We listen with love if the heart is endearing
Supported in harmony the people have songs

Disdaining oppression like others before us
Our gentleness angered by history's wrongs
Our tradition endures, and our voices in chorus
Are lifted in hope for the people have songs!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Desi C
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 08:15 AM

The Times They are A-Changing, The Contender, Fields Of Athenry, Dirty Old Town, Greenfields Of France, The Bank PLayed Waltzing Matilda and my own song Singing In Kilkenny

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 08:45 AM

It seems the term 'traditional' is rapidly becoming a dustbin for songs lacking any identification of their own, just like 'folk'.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 09:43 AM

I ask (yet again) about the place of tunes in all this.

Some of the tune titles which are reasonably modern compositions (within the last 30 years) and which get played regularly at sessions - whether you like them or not - are Pete James's "Horizonto", Jay Ungar's "Ashokan Farewell", Tom Anderson's "Da Slockit Light", Joan MacDonald Boes's "The Sweetness of Mary" and quite a few others. Not in the slightest way unknown in origin - but quietly slipping into a 'music traditionally played' category.

Going even further back in time - to look at precedents for such incorporation of modern composition - we have Carolan...

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: treewind
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 09:50 AM

Add Colin Cater's "Penny for the Ploughboys" to the list.
It's already been adopted an a sort of anthem by Old Glory Molly Dancers.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 11:36 AM

Nobody's mentioned 'Changeling's Lullaby' by Gav Davenport of 'Crucible', or 'The Guist Ploughman', by Mike Barber (recorded by Gav's parents Paul and Liz). I've started hearing both around the singarounds over the last couple of years.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Paul Davenport
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 11:39 AM

Thanks for the plug Guest, Yes, Mike's song is doing very well out there and quite a few people think its trad. I must add, that 'Under the Leaves' (words by Gavin, tune by myself) has started appearing all over the place and, according to Dave Webber, raised a few eyebrows at the Ballads seminar at MIT a couple of years ago.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 12:18 PM

@ Jim Carroll, partly:

Given that these days the singing of traditional songs is largely the preserve of people involved in the folk scene than the public at large or regional or workplace communities and so on, there's a sound argument that any song taken up by and mutated within the folk scene is 'traditional' - because it has entered the folk community's own tradition and, in some cases, been sung by people who don't even know that it has a (relatively) recent origin. This could include those Cyril Tawney songs, Keith Marsden songs and Eric Bogle songs mentioned above as well as stuff like "the Testimony of Patience Kershaw", "The Dalesman's Litany" and "Farewell to the Gold". It could also include A.L. Lloyd's often excellent reimaginings of traditional songs. Of course, I know that none of these are traditional in the academic sense (with the exception of Lloyd's work, of course, which is assumed to be traditional because its based on traditional songs), but they might as well be for the thousands of people up and down the country who take immense pleasure in gathering together to sing then. It enriches and entertains us, and that living, breathing understanding and appreciation and unleashing of folk music is for many of us overwhelmingly more important in our lives than the narrow academic study of folk music, important though that also is. I suspect when we gather to sing, academic definitions are not - and should not be - at the forefront of our minds.

One song I'd love to see enter the folk scene tradition (as I'll call it to avoid further offence...) is Alasdair Roberts' Farewell Sorrow.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 12:29 PM

MGM - "Sullivan's John" seems to be generally attributed to the traveller Pecker Dunne (see Jim's response) although there appear to be one or two other names thrown in along the way.
I thought it was a traditional song for a few years after I first heard it in the sixties.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 01:06 PM

"Given that these days the singing of traditional songs is largely the preserve of people involved in the folk scene...
So if I set up a 'Elizabethan Madrigal Appreciation Society" and we start composing our own stuff, whatever we come up with will automatically become an Elizabethan madrigal? Hmm, have to think about that one - thought about it - rubbish!
A song (or any artistic) form is defined by much more than where it is performed and by whom. 'Traditional' is about where the song has been and what has happened to it on its journey.
If You'll Never Walk Alone is 'traditional' then so is The Birdie Song and Viva Espania.
Bert Lloyd said it all forty odd years ago when he wrote at the end of Folk Song in England, "If Little Boxes and The Red Flag are folk songs, we need a new term to describe The Outlandish Knight, Searching For Young Lambs and The Coalowner and the Pitman's Wife"; all different forms, different origins, different functions, different historical, social and cultural significance.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,henryp
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 01:20 PM

A song; Unison in Harmony (Jim Boyes); Soaring skywards...

A tune; Margarte's Waltz (Patrick Shuldham Shaw)

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 03:13 PM

Another thing that is now part of the folk scene tradition is Peter Bellamy's settings of Kipling, particularly "Oak, Ash and Thorn" (which Les cracks open once a year at the Beech singaround) and "Sir Richard's Song".

Any community has its own traditions. These days, many communities are communities of interest rather than communities of location or communities of employment. The post-war folk revival is considerably older than me, and as far as I can see, it is a well established community, and one that has its own loosely defined norms, mores and traditions. Taking up and singing newer songs, often created by members of that community, is one of those traditions and a living tradition at that. Its one of the things that keeps things from getting pickled in aspic. Not all of the new songs written by members of that community become part of its tradition, but some most certainly do. I'm sure this would have been similar process to what might have happened to new songs introduced in older, rural communities- none of these songs came fully formed out of the ether. Our modern folk community, is of course aided by new-fangled stuff like this board, Youtube, sound recordings, mass transport and other things people living in previous eras didn't have.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 11:47 PM

Jim: Returning to Walk Alone; I take it you have seen the new thread on Football/Other Sports Songs, OPd by a Liverpool supporter, which starts with ref to our debate over this, on my side.

Best

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 11 Feb 11 - 11:48 PM

... which just proves the accuracy of its title!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 08:56 AM

I'd have thought there "You'll never walk alone" is relevant to any "home town" where people have to get by in bad weather and hard times. The fact that it comes from a musical isn't really significant.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: boldreynard
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 10:47 AM

I'd put forward Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather".

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 11:55 AM

Les Sullivan's "Jutland"
Mike Sparks' "Thirteen florins on the bar"

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Richard I
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 12:53 PM

"Rogers and Hammerstein's You'll Never Walk Alone, made for an Broadway musical, has about as much to do with the lives of the people of my home town as does Mongolian throat singing.
Jim Carroll"

Quite aside from its being sung in the match and before and after in the pub, it's associated with the Hillsborough disaster, sung at memorial events for the Hillsborough victims, and is regularly included in funerals of Liverpool fans.

I'm not interested in pushing for the idea that it should be included in books by folk song collectors (though I have started a seperate thread for football songs), but I would say that the idea that it "has about as much to do with the lives of the people of my home town as does Mongolian throat singing" is demonstrably false. (That is, assuming your home town is Liverpool and Ulaanbaatar, of course.)

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Richard I
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 12:55 PM

Sorry, last line should have read (That is, assuming your home town is Liverpool and NOT Ulaanbaatar, of course.)

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 12:58 PM

"communities of interest"
Communities - or more accurately, groups of common interest have always existed - music halls, Vauxhall Gardens, Gilbert and Sullivan Societies, operatic groups - none of these have had anything to do with traditional music as it has been recorded, archived and documented and performed throught the existence of the present revival.
Yours is not a definition, but an abandoning of any attempt to define what apparently we can expect if we turn up at your club.
Hypothetical case - two clubs; one that exists on Elvis etc. tribute acts, the other where you are body searched for instruments and not permitted to sing anthing later than the end of the 19th century; both describe themselves as ;folk clubs' - are they both 'traditional' - they certainly fit your description as described above? How do they differ from the local light opera society - or don't they? What can we expect as potential punters turning up at your club - or have we no say in what we spend our time and money seeking out?
Your 'communities of interest' don't even have anything in common with each other; they can range from Wagner Societies to Daniel O'Donnell fan clubs - what do you offer any potential audience?
The communities on which the definition of our traditional songs have been, and continues to be based on are groups of people who work, pray, play..... exist together. The songs reflect those experiences held in common. In what way does your (non) definition relate to this? Is there any consensus for your re-definition or have you gone UDI?
Dictionary definition
"Tra-di-tion (trs-dish'n) n. 1. The passing down of elements of a culture from generation to generation, especially by oral communication. 2. a. A mode of thought or behaviour followed by a people continuously from generation to generation; a cultural custom or usage, b. A set of such customs and usages viewed as a coherent body of precedents influencing the present, c. A set of such customs followed in a particular art. 3. A body of unwritten religious precepts. 4. Any time-honoured practice or a set of such practices. 5. Law. The transfer of property to another. [Middle English tradition, a handing down, a surrender, from Old French, from Latin traditio (stem tradition-), from trddere, to hand over: trans-, over + dare, to give.]"
Which part of this does your 'definition represent.
Mike
Read the thread (couple of postings so far) with interest - no argument whatever that sporting songs are being written - there was a collection of the published here in Clare 'Ballads of the Banner', not so long ago.
Whether they are taken up and become traditional remains to be seen; but even if they do, that is a little different to the unaltered repetition of a 1940s Rogers and Hammerstein song on the terraces every week. In your opinion, are Land of Hope and Glory, Viva Espaná and The Birdie Song traditional - if not, why not?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 01:18 PM

Jim, I'm not talking about hypothetical communities of Elvis-lovers waiting to descend on folk clubs! That's a pretty extreme and hyperbolic reaction to the point I'm making. I'm talking about the real community of folk enthusiasts, at whose singarounds, whilst you may mainly hear traditional songs, you will also hear songs written by members of that community that sit alongside the traditional songs rather nicely and have in many cases been taken up and sung by members of that community as part of its own tradition. Is that such a big problem? And if so, why?

I'd have thought its fairly clear that the village/family based music making and transmission culture in the old sense doesn't exist anymore - times have moved on and we don't live relatively isolated lives in small rural communities. We have radio, TV, global recording industries, the internet, celebrity culture and all the rest of it. The conditions and cultural norms of our lives have changed beyond recognition. Using that as any kind of yardstick to measure what folk music is now is surely a hiding to nowhere. The folk scene is now where you tend to hear traditional songs in the UK, but people have creative impulses, as they always have, and will therefore feel compelled to add fresh ingredients to the pot. That is surely a good thing, isn't it?

And yes, as you correctly point out, there are all sorts of communities of interest coming together around lots of different sorts of things. I'm talking about the one that comes together around folk music, not opera or Gilbert and Sullivan. But I suspect you know that already...

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 01:46 PM

Whether a song is properly described as a folk song is one issue, and arguably an interesting one. Whether it is "relevant" is not the same issue.

For example, Mongolian throat singing is, of course a variety of folk singing. That doesn't make it particularly relevant to Liverpool.

"You'll never walk alone" on the other hand is more properly described as a kin dof ecular hymn. But it's words and sentiments, however hackneyed Jim might see them, are highly applicable to the circumstances of those who sing it, and highly relevant, especially in the light of their shared historical associations.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 03:06 PM

Jim: A reminder of what I have related before: when I mentioned, during an interview with Bert Lloyd, Liverpool FC supporters' use of the song in question, & asked if they had thus made it into a folksong, he replied "Folk in function but not in form". You, OTOH, say above that is not what it sounds like that matters [11 Feb 0505 AM], but the use to which it is put [there & in succeeding posts]. So you & he appear to give diametrically opposite, and even mutually contradictory, answers to my question, tho both your answers are in the negative.

So, just perhaps, the truth may lie somewhere in between?

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 03:17 PM

"That's a pretty extreme and hyperbolic reaction to the point I'm making."
Sorry Spleen - what hedge have you been sleeping under - it is not extreme - do you want me to dig out Paul Sweeney's menu of what we will be served up at his club; or any other descriptions of what goes on in clubs describing themselves as 'folk'? From memory, Paul's includes hip-hop (as applied to Lucy Wan by one of our rising young 'folk' stars), heavy metal, opera, jazz.... will dig out the list if you insist. I suggest you trawl through some of the 'talking-horse' postings and see what passes for legitimate fare at some 'folk' clubs.
Going by your own definition - what right have you to suggest that Elvis tributes don't count at a folk club - the club is the community, therefore anything they care to put on is 'traditional' - isn't that what you are suggesting?
The first time I had my attenion drawn to exactly how far the revival has strayed was when a North of England club announced that they had just had a 'Beatles' night.
".....doesn't exist anymore"
No it doesn't, I agree entirely. The communities that once made such music have becom passive recipients of their art and entertainment.
Doesn't mean we can't still enjoy the music they once made and passed on; nor does it mean we can't continue to make music and song using the old models - long may it continue - I've had a lifetime's enjoyment from it. I count as my main musical influence the singer who helped start the present revival, breathed life into 137 of the Child ballads and hundreds of traditional songs and wrote more new songs based on traditional styles than any other single individual on the scene
We are not discusing what we do or what we listen to - we are attempting to define 'traditional'.
In the end this is an academic discussion; traditional song and music is probably as well, if not better archived and documented as any other musical form. Anybody seriously wishing to find out what defines traditional music is free to pick up 'Folk Song in England', or 'The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads', or 'English Folk Songs, Some Conclusions', or 'The Traditional English Ballad' or any other of the many hundreds of works on the subject.
My argumant is not one of personal preference or activity, it's just how we define what we are doing.
There seems to be some sort of a death wish in all of this.
In a few weeks time on the 17th of next month there will be something like 100 youngsters (mostly of school age) in this one street town celebrating St Pat's Day by playing (real) traditional music, most of them to an excellent standard. This hasn't been achieved faffing about attempting to re-define, or even de-define what we mean by 'olk' or 'traditional', but simply by a dedicated few explaining what it is and persuading them how enjoyable it is.
"however hackneyed Jim might see them"
Wasn't aware I'd expressed an opinion on the merits of the song - I quite enjoyed the film and the song worked perfectly in that context - this has nothing to do with my argument.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 03:25 PM

Mike - cross posted
You may well be right that the answer lies between the two; though I didn't always agree with what Bert said; whethr YNWA is traditional or not, I pray I'll never hear it sung at a folk club.
- please answer my last question - is Land of Hope and ....etc..
Gotta go - Casualty's starting!
Jim Carroll.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Richard I
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 03:31 PM

Jim, what about other terrace songs (without Rodgers and Hammerstein origins?)

I'm interested in your answer, as someone who has sung football fans' songs at a singaround.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 03:39 PM

Jim: No re Land Of Hope ~~ Last Night of Proms audience not the same sort of ritual occasion for the same sort of gathering as a Liverpool FC match crowd.

Would not, either, urge Never Walk as in any way 'traditional', despite title of this thread. But arguably as 'folk' by, as it were, adoption, by a different sort of process, still perhaps to be defined. Not, indeed, absolutely sure where I stand on question; which, note, both to Bert & you I expressed simply as a question, without necessarily implying any answer of my own; which, as I say, I am not sure of. A form of Devil's Advocacy, I suppose one might call it.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 04:19 PM

If no one's done so already, can I nominate When All Men Sing by Scowie & Giff?

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 05:24 PM

Pity this has come to focus on what "traditional" means. I think some people here should agree to disagree with others about that.

However we can't avoid definitions and contexts entirely. For example we're not (I think) discussing songs from modern musical shows that continue to be performed in their original context. If they migrate from that context (as "You'll never walk alone" has), they have some claim to have become some sort of tradition. And, after all, some of the songs that we accept as traditional did start life in stage shows.

So I think we're really trying to focus on songs in the folk idiom (whatever that is, which we probably can't entirely agree about either).

Perhaps the original question should be re-phrased. Which fairly-recently-made songs do we expect will pass the test of time and will be being sung 50 years from now (or are already being sung) by many people, in different places, possibly with some "folk-processing" of the words and/or tunes?

Some of the songs that have been mentioned in this thread are being widely sung at present, even to the extent that some of us become sick of hearing them. In another 50 years they may have been forgotten, or they may have been revived. But some seem already pretty firmly established, such as some of McColl's, Tawney's, etc.

Richard

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 05:25 PM

PS - Am I Paul Sweeney?

I still stand by my (empirically falsifiable) Folk as Flotsam thesis - i.e Folk is as Folk does - simply because that's the way things are, as this forum demonstrates. I also believe people should be allowed to do what they want to do, and what burns in their hearts to make them do such things (I'm talking musically here) and that Folk Club Singarounds are a fine place for the impassioned amateur (in the best sense of the word - and the worst, but that's good too) to go along and share it with other impassioned amateurs, whatever it is, hence the eclecticism of what you hear in (many but not all) Folk Clubs these days.

Can I confess that I once performed John Cage's 4'33" as part of a two song floorspot? It was on (or around) 12th August 1992 & I just got up and stood staring the audience into uncomfortable submission, all of whom sat there in a state of increasingly bewildered expectation whilst I timed myself my the clock behind the bar. I ended the performance at 4'44" by paraphrasing Peter Bellamy - "John Cage wrote that," I said, thus releasing the tension with gales of laughter which I silenced with King Orfeo.

Folk longa, vita brevis; too brevis by far.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 05:49 PM

Richard I
Sorry, you'll have to elucidate - was vaccinated against football at a very early age.
I have no problem conceding that these songs have a place in ritual, but I believe our traditional songs were deliberately made and re-made as a deliberately creative part of community life; they are not just repetitions of what went before, but wherever they land, they become part of the expression of those communities, taking on the vernacular and identities, and often theexperiences of the people who sang and listened to them.
We were recording song we believe to have orignated in, say, Scotland, from Irish Travellers who insisted that they were not just Irish, but Traveller songs. For instance, the song 'Mary on the Banks of the Lee'; we were seriously told that it was made by a Traveller whose wife died in a workhouse fire - it wasn't, but it was an indication that the song had taken root.
If someone were to take Y N W A and adapt it , say, You Never Wore Cologne, the parody would have some claim to have moved away from its beginnings, the re-maker would have put his/her own stamp on it. If then it was taken up by the terraces it could be said to have passed into some sort of a tradition.
This, as far as I know, has not happened with the song as it stands. It remains as fixed as Land of Hope and Glory as sung at The Last Night of the Proms (sorry Mike you're going to have to explain the difference between a crowd turning up for a night's entertainment at The Albert Hall, (or on holiday in Spain, or on a stag/hen night in Blackpool) and one at Anfield enjoying watching Liverpool being beaten again - what makes football so special?))
I mentioned 'Ballads of the Banner' earlier - a fascinating anthology of 172 sporting songs, some dating back to the 1800's, right up to the 1990s, when the book was published; all made about famous sporting people, matches, teams.... Even if they were never taken up generally, they have more claim to represent the communities they arose from than does a song from a Broadway Musical.
There are plenty of sporting songs in the tradition to compare them with - surely the difference is obvious?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 06:12 PM

A couple by Bob Coltman seem to fit in there---""Before They Close the Minstrel Show", "Lonesome Robin" and his masterful retelling of the Patrick Spens ballad "Patrick Spencer" in particular.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 06:29 PM

Hi Jim,

You wrote "I mentioned 'Ballads of the Banner' earlier - a fascinating anthology of 172 sporting songs, some dating back to the 1800's, right up to the 1990s, when the book was published; all made about famous sporting people, matches, teams.... Even if they were never taken up generally, they have more claim to represent the communities they arose from than does a song from a Broadway Musical.
There are plenty of sporting songs in the tradition to compare them with - surely the difference is obvious?"

Sure, the difference appears to be that these songs are Celtic and printed in a book!!

Sorry, I'm being facetious. I'll start again. I am interested in songs that are sung as part of the community of fans that join together in support of a football club. For example, I recently put the words for the song "Poor Scouser Tommy", a Liverpool F.C. song, in a thread on sports songs I recently started.

The history of the song appears to be as follows: the second part of the song "I am a Liverpudlian...", sung to the Orange tune 'The Sash', was sung apparently in the 1960s; later (apparently in the 1970s) the first part "Let me tell you the story of a poor boy..." (to the tune of Red River Valley) was added to the song, to make it into a narrative.

Subsequently, there have been arguments over the words (should it be Libyan sun? Arabian sun? I get thrown out quite a lot or I go there quite a lot?), and various accretions about goals scored by Ian Rush.

So the song is not a mechanical reproduction, but a living process that is still heard in most matches. I would say that it's as close to a "traditional" song as I've learned from oral transmission. You'll hear the song sung at pretty much every Liverpool match. (some people say it's sung too fast, of course...)



Now, ok, going back to "You'll never walk alone". This is just as much part of the Liverpool F.C. canon as Poor Scouser Tommy. Ok, it's not something that the fans made up themselves, but still, it's something that's passed on as part of a community and which is meaningful as part of the shared experience of those fans.

Just as a working hypothesis: would you say that a song that emerges from the fans (like "Poor Scouser Tommy") is traditional, whereas a song that is reproduced from another source (like "You'll never walk alone") is not? I hope this is not seen as an unreasonable interrogation. I'm just trying to get at where you draw the line.


Interesting claim that "If someone were to take Y N W A and adapt it , say, You Never Wore Cologne, the parody would have some claim to have moved away from its beginnings, the re-maker would have put his/her own stamp on it. If then it was taken up by the terraces it could be said to have passed into some sort of a tradition." That would suggest that when fans of Chelsea, etc. sing "You'll never get a job" to taunt Liverpool F.C. fans, that has more claim to being part of "the tradition". Which seems unfair somehow!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Ian Gill
Date: 12 Feb 11 - 07:10 PM

'Coal, not Dole'. The spirit is the touchstone. The ability to say what everyone around feels. Martin Carthy said something similar about 'Palaces of Gold' - another nomination.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 02:29 AM

Jim: Surely you can see the difference between the emotional solidarity of a crowd who have turned up to watch THEIR team play a football match, which is their main purpose & the singing an incidental means to reinforce their fidelity to their team [an emotional feeling, believe me, even if you yourself have been, as you say, inoculated against football as an experience]; and a crowd of students who have come to self-consciously* demonstrate their 'studentiness' by sending up the emotions of a song expressing a now-dated patriotism? To put it briefly, the Liverpudlians are singing YNWA with utmost seriousness; the students singing LOHAG are doing the exact opposite.

If you really can't see a distinction, then I have done.

~M~

* This an instance where I think even Fowler would have agreed that a split infinitive best expresses the semantic intention.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:16 AM

"If you really can't see a distinction, then I have done."
Sorry Mike, I can't, I think they are both as set a convention as the days they used to sing 'God Save the Queen' (also seen by a dwindling number as a part of British life) at the cinema, and an expression of "emotional solidarity" at certain times. I don't think I ever heard anything sung with as much (disturbingly vicious) 'emotional solidarity' as I did LOHAG at the time of the sinking of the General Belgrano.
Guest:
If there are songs still being made, taken up and sung on the terraces then they have claim to the tradition; I don't know how many there are and how widespread the reaction is to them, but they are well worth attention. The terraces seem as likely a place to continue to support a tradition as were the schoolyards; I don't know too much about what goes on there nowadays either, but I have been told by teachers that the songs, chants and games that used to happen have been replaced by mobile phones and texting.
It really isn't important that the songs in 'Blood on the Banner' have been gathered and published; many/most of our traditional sporting songs have appeared in print at one time or another. What does make a difference is that some of them started life in print, appeared with the makers name on them and a little (c) so they will always belong to Jimmy Smyth or Peader Kearney or Bryan McMahon, or Joe Hasset or whoever.
BTW - Celtic is a word best avoided in my experience - it tends not to mean too much.
There have been mass movements that have produced songs that might be described as traditional; CND, the 'Troubles' in Ireland and the miners strike spring to mind, but again, modern modern technology has tended to freeze them in the form they were written and placed the owners mark on them. Even by law they are not traditional, they belong to the writer and are not not in public domain. I wonder what would be the reaction of the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate if somebody claimed You'll Never Walk Alone to be in the public domain!
I was interested in your 'You'll never get a job' comment - is it a song, or is it a one line chant? They are different beasts, and are equally worth looking at.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:29 AM

Whoops - did I really write 'Blood on the Banner' in the above posting? A Freudan slip; I meant 'Ballads of the Banner'.
'Blood on the Banner' is an account of the Irish War of Independence in Clare (all the counties in the Republic have nicknames, The Banner County (Clare), The Kingdom (Kerry) etc).
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:34 AM

I have actually long wondered what was the position of the Rodgers & Hammerstein estate. Can they claim a royalty every time the crowd is heard singing YNWA on Match Of The Day or Sky tv? And, if so, do they? And from whom? & do Liverpool pay them anything for having the words inscribed on their gate? And, if not, why not?

You mention CND, Jim. I can claim to be the first person ever to sing The H-Bomb's Thunder, the movement's anthem, written to tune of The Miners' Lifeguard by the sf writer John Brunner, with whom I shared a Hampstead flat in 1957-58. He couldn't sing a note himself, so asked me to sing the first draft out to him to hear how it sounded. It's in DT.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:36 AM

The error is to think of community in an historic, monolithic way. Community of nation or region, for instance, is only preserved by intervention from government, The Arts Council, The Film Council, etc. Now we have the gay community, the writing community and the football community, each developing their own traditions and creating new ones.
Telecommunication developments have allowed for a proliferation of micro communities with more allegiance to their particular identity than old ideas of nation state or work type.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:47 AM

BTW, Jim. Have you ever been to the Last Night Of The Proms? I was a regular prommer in my mid-teens. I went to Last Night several years running in late 40s, from about age 14-17. Even back then, the student element regarded the singing of LOHAG as a big joke, a demonstration of their don't·give·a·toss studently insouciance. It really did bear no resemblance to all those oh-so-earnest Scouse faces on tv singing YNWA, heartily or as if their ♥♥ would break, in triumph or despair dependent on how the 'Pool are doing. I daresay some people reverted atavistically to a former mode at Falklands time; but that wasn't at the Proms, was it?

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:51 AM

... & a cross-ref: see my post on the Webfooted Friends thread, as to how that was fave song for the all-day Last Night queue behind the Albert Hall.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Old Vermin
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 04:59 AM

John Tams' Rolling Home seems to keep going.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 06:04 AM

"Jim. Have you ever been to the Last Night Of The Proms?"
No I haven't, but I tended to watch it on TV.
I don't know how LOHAG was introduced into the proceeings any more than I know how YNWA (via Geryy and the Pacemakers?) ended up on the terraces, but I suspect there is little difference in the motives of the culprits in both cases.
I have to say that the singing at the Albert Hall did bring bile to the throat at the time of the Falklands War.
A confession; I left Liverpool in the mid-sixties and headed east for Manchester because at that time, if you weren't interested in football or the Beatles, there was really little else to hang around for - non-Merseybeat entertainment, work (especially work), decent theatre or cinema.... nowt. Songs like the one in question have always been, for me at least, a part of the campaign to sell Merseyside as a pseudo-independent-republic - a 'feelgood factor' to make a highly anti-establishment people accept the shit that was (and is still being) thrown at them.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 06:53 AM

Some random observations...

The body of song material we call 'traditional' has an unknown authorship. I personally believe that all songs sprang from individual writers/authors/creators - call them what you will - and that, before the advent of recording media, the song collectors and a more general ability to read and write, the songs were 'recorded' in peoples' memories. And, of course, they evolved and changed through that process, in many cases over a long period of time. That evolving process has ceased, and it ceased, ironically, when the collectors and the note-takers and the men and women with notebooks and (later) tape-recorders started their work. I wouldn't care to put a date on that cessation, not knowing enough of the history, but I know, for example, that Bob Copper was out and about with a reel-to-reel tape recorder in Hampshire in the '50s.

In one sense, therefore, the body of work of that particular orally-transmitted nature is fixed for ever and finite, in this country at any rate. Is it to remain fixed and finite? Will singers of the future - of the next 50, 100, 150, 200 years - who want to sing 'traditional' songs be limited to, perhaps, an ever-receding body of work? If so, that might be a sad and proscriptive future for some fine music. If not - then how is that body of work to be added to? Can we not add to it fine songs in the genre whose origins - authors - we happen to know? I quote (and I've quoted it before) Roger Bryant's great song "Cornish Lads", which touches on age-old themes of locality, loss of work, working-class attitudes and problems, sung to a great tune and with beautiful words which touch people's hearts and have meaning for them. A traditional song in all but the fact that we know the author. And - yes - it won't change because it's been written down, recorded and set in stone. Just like all those songs from a previous era which have also now been recorded, written down, collected and set in stone.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Old Vermin
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 07:18 AM

As someone who has managed to vary the words of "Sorrows Away" to "Troubles away".....


Home, Lads, Home has a set text. Do the words already vary? Will they?

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Richard I
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 07:53 AM

Jim, I don't know if there's a complete song known to some fans, but what I've heard sung (by fans of Chelsea, West Ham, and Manchester United, and probably others) is the chorus:

Sign on, Sign on/ With a pen in your hand/ And you'll never get a job/ You'll never get a job

The is a) part of a wider repertoire of "scousers are all theiving/ unemployed" songs that seem to circulate among fans of non-Liverpool teams, and also b) an example of the important practice of taking one team's 'anthem' and turning it against them. Another example of this would be Liverpool fans taking Manchester United's anthem "Glory, glory, Man United" and, in the 1980s, turning it into the 3 verse song "The famous Man United went to Rome to see the Pope", which culminates with the Pope asking "Who the fuck are Man United?" (This song subsequently taken up and abridged by Aston Villa fans)

I would say that in these contexts, the tradition of parodying the other team's song RELIES on the idea of the fans treating the performance of the original song as traditional. But that's just my opinion.


I don't want to stray off topic too much, but I'm sorry to hear about your innoculation against football! It's no doubt impossible to work against this, but I have to say in my experience, I've often found football to be the catalyst to make things happen (I know of music that is sung, political associations that were formed, and magazines that were printed that would never have seen the light of day if it hadn't been for people being brought together in the shared interest of football). I'm not in a position to say whether this is more or less true than the G&S society, as I'm thankfully innoculated against G&S, but I can speak from personal experience by saying that the shared experience of football fans is something that reflects the reality of a community well beyond the match itself...

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Beer
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 08:36 AM

Ron Hynes "Sonny Dream"

"Sonny's Dream is a folk song written by Newfoundlander Ron Hynes in 1976. The song was heard by Hamish Imlach while on a trip to Canada, who modified it somewhat and played it in folk-clubs in Britain. There it was heard by Christy Moore who recorded it and passed it on to other artists in Ireland.[3]

The song is tremendously popular in Atlantic Canada, and has been covered by many other artists, including Hayley Westenra, Stan Rogers, Valdy, Great Big Sea, Jean Redpath,Emmylou Harris and others.
It was named the 41st greatest Canadian song of all time on the 2005 CBC Radio".
Exerpts taken from Wikipedia

ad.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow50JHWW7gQ&feature=related

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 08:51 AM

"I'm sorry to hear about your innoculation against football!"
Must have been all those Manchester City matches I was dragged to by a mate.
Seriously (which is what I've never been able to take football); I have sisters who are identical twins, who live virtually in each other's pockets, rely on each other totally, go everywhere together - and won't speak to each other on Saturday because one supports..... leave you to work out the rest.
Will - am grateful (as usual) for your 'random observations' and go along with most of them, except to say there is no reason why we can't still enjoy traditional songs and to continue to adjust them to our changing times and fashions - that, to my mind, is what the best of our revival singers have done.
I still enjoy Shakespeare's plays even though he hasn't written anything half decent for centuries. Am looking forward to seeing the new 'Tempest' film starring Helen Mirren as 'Prospera'
Nor is there any reason why we can't use the traditional forms to make new songs, though only future generations can decide whether they will turn out to be traditional.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 01:17 PM

Writing future trad. songs sounds a risky preoccupation, like designing a classic car that ends up looking like a Nissan Figaro, all styling cues and nothing from its time.
More likely are songs that don't sound like folk or even 'acoustic' but fit the definition of traditional and will dwell in the lives of the people in future times.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,lively
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 01:43 PM

i take no issue with aknowleging that the 'revival folk scene' represents a tradition in its own right, but i fear spleen cringe is attempting a linguistic sleight of hand when effectively conflating the 'tradition' of the revival folk scene with 'the' tradition of traditional music and song. Yes, the revival fokk scene has its own tradition, but importantly unlike 'the' tradition, it plays no significant part in the greater community beyond the 'folk scene' whatsoever. Otherwise, i concur with glueman: future 'traditional' songs will be tnose which endure in the popular consciousness and thus unlikely to be drawn from the niche contemporary 'folk music genre'.

Subject: Lyr Add: THE SAINT ANNE OF DUNKIRK (Ron Baxter)
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 02:51 PM

The societal conditions of your Old Popular Trad. Folk Song were defined by unavailable technology, oral / aural transmission, & a distinct lack of copyrighting. These songs were crafted by vernacular masters of their art and sang on, remade, free-styled and made afresh with each performance as they ran amock being fruitful & multiplying in their natural habitat. New songs were made in the image of old and away they went throughout the English Speaking Universe and beyond, their idiomatic morphology determined by cultural craft and by what worked best in the vernacular tongue. Few composers names have come down to us though I believe Tommy Armstrong is a contender to be considered as one such Master of the Traditional Idiom (he certainly was more than casually acquainted with it) and perhaps, on another level, Rudyard Kipling was another, but maybe that is an argument for another day. One thing is clear, these songs did not grow on trees, but are as much the work of human craftspersons as the hedges, ditches, drystone walls, capentry, brick-laying, wheelwrighting, coopering, farriering, smithing etc. etc. - extant examples of which are just as masterful, just as traditional and just as anonymous as the Old Songs.

Self-consciously crafting folk songs in the traditional idiom is a perilous business, but as we've seen on this thread & elsewhere people can & do get it right. Ron Baxter has got it right on more than the one occasion, though to what extent his songs have then become Traditional in & of themselves is difficult to say, though I have heard them sung by people who assumed they were singing a traditional song. Is that a sign of something entering the Tradition? Or just lack of information? Was the original craft of Traditional Song determined by its essential oral / aural medium which invariably doesn't carry composer credits or copyright notice? Maybe so, but whatever the case I think there's more to a Traditional Song than the criteria being discussed here; I don't accept either LOHAG & YNWA to be Traditional Songs because the idiom's completely wrong - musicologically they are something else altogether.

*

Anyway, I'd like to nominate Ron Baxter's Saint Anne of Dunkirk as a New Traditional Song because it's the work of a revival master working in the idiom of Trad. Folk Song, and it's a cracking piece. I'll put up a YouTube in the text few days so you can hear the melody I put to it, which, incidentally, arose under my fingertips from the depths of my own creative sub-consciousness which itself taps into the collective wonder of which all individuals are but manifestations of.

The Saint Anne of Dunkirk, Or The Spanish Ship, Being a Tale of Civil Warfare & Ship-Loss, Written by Mr Ron Baxter & Set to Music, in Seance, by Mr Sedayne

The Saint Anne of Dunkirk by the seas much hurt
Seeking a haven limped into the Wyre
There Parliaments soldiers they swarmed aboard her
To steal her canon it was their desire.
But James, Earl of Derby, of the kings army,
Quickly set off with a troupe of horse, boys,
To stop their endeavour and with them to engage.

The Spaniard he swore this isn't my war
But bold Major Sparrow he would not be swayed;
Orders have come - shot, powder and gun -
To Lancaster Castle they must be conveyed.
So wagons he sought for the guns to transport,
And to defend them he called up his men:
Three hundred troupers were at his command.

He marched through Layton, with pike and gun waiting
But when Derby advanced, oh, he sounded retreat;
Streamed on through Carleton, fled on past Poulton,
Though no shot was fired the rout was complete.
The Wyre did ford and with one accord,
They never stopped, boys, 'til Preesall hill top,
Screaming that Derby was hard on their heels.

And so the Saint Anne fell to Derby's hands
But he had no time for the guns to remove;
For far outnumbered and with guns encumbered
If brought into battle the fight he would lose.
So the guns he did spike Major Sparrow to spite,
And as he retired the Saint Anne he fired,
and left her a beacon to blaze in the night.

As a foot-note to this tale, it's said that the Spanish sailors from the Saint Anne were sent out on their way as vagabonds where their existence on the Fylde is unrecorded but for exeption of several graves in the cemetary of St. Michael's-on-Wyre which are known traditionally as The Soldiers Graves and said to contain the bodies of certain of the Spanish crew of the Saint Anne. How and when they died is not recorded, but given the craftsmanship of the graves and their proximity to the church itself respectful burials can be assumed.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 03:48 PM

If we take traditional to mean music that marks significant events or the turning year and lives beyond the era that spawned it, a number of pieces spring to mind. Jeff Beck's version of Hi Ho Silver Lining has outlasted its original market to become a courtship standard for non-metropolitan youngsters and shows no sign of giving up its totemic status in the face of cosmopolitan scorn.

Wedding celebrations have elevated any number of songs into apparently permanent significance, the B-52s Love Shack, Abba's Dancing Queen and Village People's YMCA among them. I expect many such songs to endure beyond the life span of those who can remember their original release.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 06:48 PM

Gav Davenport's Walkley Anthem...

Kitty

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 11 - 11:05 PM

"I don't accept either LOHAG & YNWA to be Traditional Songs because the idiom's completely wrong - musicologically they are something else altogether." ······

So then, Suibhne, you tend more to Bert Lloyd's "folk in function but not in form" distinction, rather than to Jim's assertion that "it is not a matter of how it sounds"?

Have I understood you correctly? If so, why do you come down on that side of the question rather than the other?

I would reiterate that I am, and have always been since my interview with Bert back in 1974, only asking, or perhaps suggesting a possibility, rather than making any actual claim regarding the 'folk' status of YNWA.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 03:57 AM

why do you come down on that side of the question rather than the other?

Because Trad's my bag, daddy-o! And what a fine old idiomatic bag it is...

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 04:15 AM

Most folk revivalists embrace the idiom, it's a performance based form.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Darowyn
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 04:16 AM

"Wedding celebrations have elevated any number of songs into apparently permanent significance, the B-52s Love Shack, Abba's Dancing Queen and Village People's YMCA among them. I expect many such songs to endure beyond the life span of those who can remember their original release. "

That is the trouble with folks!
They will insist on adding customs and ceremonies which fail to meet the approved standards.
It is the duty of every right-minded and properly-educated person to revile and suppress such things, in the fine old tradition of the 19th and early 20th century collectors.
We can't have people making up their own traditions!
"tis flying in the face of nature!"

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 05:58 AM

"That is the trouble with folks!"
Perhaps in future we should just ask Darrowyn when we want to know what the folk are doing - he seems to have cornered the market on the subject
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 06:05 AM

IIRC Darowyn's [only one 'r', Jim: lose a housepoint!] final quote comes from Stella Gibbons' wonderful Mary Webb take-off Cold Comfort Farm, & refers to contraceptives. The quote continues, tho, again IIRC, "Still, it might be worth a try."

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 06:07 AM

Marsahll McLuhan said 'the medium is the message'. That's undoubtedly true of the folk revival. Almost everyone here holds the idiom in deep affection or they wouldn't be on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: John P
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 02:50 PM

Josefins Dopvals

Summertime

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Seonaid
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 03:27 PM

Back to nominations:
How about "She Moved Through the Fair" and "Amazing Grace"?
The one pops up primarily amongst traddies, but the other is all over the place, especially at funerals. (No-one remembers it was written by a reformed slave merchant.)
As to the ongoing what-is-a-trad-song discussion, I'll always go back to the Prairie Home Companion definition of a folk song: it's a song you learned from somebody else and remember the words to, mostly.
Cheers!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 07:15 PM

Ian Bruce sang the Jute Mill Song at the Herga folk club this evening, and reminded us that it was written by Mary Brookbank...

Kitty

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 11:25 PM

... who, Kitty, also wrote "I am a Dundee Lassie", to tune of "The Lass of Fyvie", which is on Topic's great The Iron Muse industrial song compilation.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 07:10 AM

Here's The Saint Anne of Dunkirk: http://soundcloud.com/rapunzel-and-sedayne/st-anne-of-dunkirk

See below for whys & wherefores.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 08:31 AM

"You'll never walk alone"is in 4/4 in "Carousel" but in 6/8 in Gerry Marsden's version: could this be "the folk process"?

"Yellow on the broom" great song, but borrowed the tune from "The Female Drummer": the former is now probably a lot better known than the latter.

"The Last Thing on My Mind": Tom Paxton tells how his daughter was in the audience when someone sang it. She thanked the singer for singing "my dad's song", only to be told it was trad irish! (Much like the John Conolly story re Fiddler's Green).

I'd like to nominate some of Davy Steele's songs, e.g. The Last Trip Home re the change from horsepower to mechanisation on farms, and Farewell to the Haven, re the demise of the fishing industry - and on the same topic, Scott Murray's "Guiding Light". Several of Robin Laing's, Ian McCalman's and Karine Polwart's, especially 'Follow the Heron" which is already sung by just about every community choir in Scotland.

Then for tunes: "Calum's Road" by Donald Shaw, and any number of Phil Cuningham's, John McCusker's and Gordon Duncan's.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Henryp
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 09:17 AM

"The Last Thing on My Mind": Tom Paxton tells how his daughter was in the audience when someone sang it. She thanked the singer for singing "my dad's song", only to be told it was trad irish! (Much like the John Conolly story re Fiddler's Green).
-----------------------------------------------------
The song had passed the acid test. The appropriate response would be; And that's the ultimate tribute to him!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 09:28 AM

I think he was not displeased, as he delights in telling the story!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tootler
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 09:37 AM

[Pedant note]
She was told it was Trad Scottish - She was at St. Andrews University at the time.
[/Pedant note]

I agree he enjoys telling the story, though. He adds that she did manage to persuade the singer, somewhat reluctantly, that it was not trad when she told him who her dad was!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 12:02 PM

"The Last Thing on My Mind":
Never heard it sung in Ireland in 40 years, but maybe I'm moving in the wrong/right circles,
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Charley Noble
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 12:16 PM

I'm mulling over whether any of the poems by C. Fox Smith (1882-1954) that have been adapted for singing will become "traditional." There are many that would be good candidates in terms of structure and tune but only a few that have become anonymous enough so that people actually thought they were traditional.

"Homeward" comes to mind, composed during World War 1 and which resurfaced in the 1970's as an anonymous poem whose location shifted from the Western Front to India. Sarah Morgan spotted it in a military newsletter and adapted it for singing, retitling it "Home, Boys, Home," and it's now been recorded by more than a dozen different groups, and sung at innumerable folk clubs.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 12:49 PM

Jim, sorry to take so long to respond to your response to my response etc - I've been busy writing an article on Canny Fettle (in which you get mentioned, by the way!)...

Anyhow, just a couple of things. I was interested to see your dictionary definition of "traditional" included "Any time-honoured practice or a set of such practices." Now, I know I should probably pause to attempt to define both "time-honoured", "practice" and, for that matter, "any", but it does occur to me that any practice that has been going on for years in the folk scene, such as the writing of new songs in the traditional folk idiom, might be accurately described as one of the traditions of that scene. I do accept your point that such a tradition is different to the older tradition of creating and passing down and mutating songs within a village or region or work community, but as that tradition is almost certainly extinct in the UK, this newer tradition (60 years young!) in the folk community is an interesting developement in its own right and, it might be argued, a tradition in its own right, albeit one that is slightly different to the older defunct folk tradition - largely because of the differences in what constitutes community. It is fascinating to think that for the past 60 years there has been a group of people who self-consciously attempt to write songs that echo and pay homage to the traditional songs of these islands and get taken up and sung by other members of that community, some of whom will not only have not met the author, but not even be aware of their existance. I wonder what this process is, if its not a form of the folk process still alive and kicking in this particular community of interest?

"Going by your own definition - what right have you to suggest that Elvis tributes don't count at a folk club - the club is the community, therefore anything they care to put on is 'traditional' - isn't that what you are suggesting?"

Not at all. For a start off, I'm not attempting to define anything, just to describe something that appears to be actually happening in a particular community - if you accept my description of the folk scene as a community. If its not, it certainly looks and behaves like one! As for Elvis tributes, I would suggest that would be something slightly different to writing new songs in the style of traditional songs. Though, of course, there is an argument that some of Elvis's earliest singles were rooted in the blues and folk traditions of the American south, if different in execution and purpose.

Anyway, I digress. Back to listing great songs, I reckon.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Seonaid
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 04:01 PM

An anthropologist (I believe it was Marston Bates) once observed that you could make almost anything disappear if you tried hard enough to define it.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tootler
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 04:28 PM

Never heard it sung in Ireland in 40 years, but maybe I'm moving in the wrong/right circles,

Possibly because it was never recorded by the Dubliners. ;-)

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 05:26 PM

I would suggest that anyone who thought that 'Last Thing On My Mind' was Irish or Scottish trad. was either (a) completely ignorant of Irish and/or Scottish trad. folk song (not to mention Tom Paxton's output) or (b) a bit 'intellectually challenged'.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 03:41 AM

Reverting to Never Walk Alone ~~

"I have actually long wondered what was the position of the Rodgers & Hammerstein estate. Can they claim a royalty every time the crowd is heard singing You'll Never Walk Alone on Match Of The Day or Sky tv? And, if so, do they? And from whom? & do Liverpool pay them anything for having the words inscribed on their gate? And, if not, why not?"

~ I asked some days, and many posts, ago; but nobody has come up with an answer; so I repeat the question here.

This seems to me a matter of some interest, and I wonder if any Catter out there [we all know that Catters among them comprehensively cover every possible field of human knowledge!] can supply an answer.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 03:55 AM

Michael, having words to a song inscribed on your front door is not a performance of it in public. Neither are the words being printed and doled out to people by having it inscribed there. If I tattooed the words on my chest, I wouldn't have to pay every time I breathed... The law of copyright is odd and pretty complex at times - but not that odd!

As far as the crowds in the Kop are concerned, the spontaneous singing of a song is not a public performance from which the crowd, the club or a TV company is making money. Neither the club nor the TV company has any control over what a football crowd spontaneously sings. Do I pay the PRS a fee for every song I sing out loud as I walk up the High Street to collect my morning paper? I think not.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 04:00 AM

Spleen
Thanks for your response
"in which you get mentioned, by the way"
Moi....! love to read it - be interested to read what you have to say about Canny Fettle.
What you say is true; of course clubs have evolved their own customs, practices, modes of creation... - not sure they can be described as traditions, but I suppose it's as good a name as any as long as it doesn't create the same confusions as the misuse (IMO) of the term 'folk' has. As I said, whether the songs stand the test of time and become 'traditional' in the way our folk repertoire has been recognised and documented (in great detail) remains to be seen.
The problem is that 'traditional' was applied to a specific type of song that drew us all together in the first place and is why we're talking to each other now. Those songs went through a specific process in their creation and development and have come to mean something every bit as specific as 'classical' (I'm aware that even in classical circles there are squabbles over the term). We approach the term with the expectation of finding something that relates directly to what has gone before, not necessarily in form, (though traditional songs of a particular culture do bear certain similarities to one another), but certainly in the way it has evolved, and what that evolution signifies culturally. 'Traditional' carries a whole lot of cultural and historical baggage that goes way beyond its entertainment function; this is what has been researched and documented extensively, and whatever happens on the club scene, it is this that will survive, both in archive form and documentation. It is largely what those of us who have a foot in both camps, as enthusiasts and researchers, have problems with - probably why we're such pains in the arse.
Meant to take up a point made earlier about The Prairie Home Companion definition, but haven't woken up yet, so might come back later.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 04:13 AM

PS;
Meant to say that the only thing that people on the folk scene are guaranteed to have in common is a love of the music, and this can vary wildly from club to club.
I don't believe this comes anywhere near any definition of 'community'.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 04:22 AM

Will ~ Many thanks for your reply.

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 04:52 AM

'Traditional' carries a whole lot of cultural and historical baggage that goes way beyond its entertainment function; this is what has been researched and documented extensively, and whatever happens on the club scene, it is this that will survive, both in archive form and documentation.

Jim - you must be a thought reader! I've been privately mulling over just this very point a number of times recently. (As you can see, I've nothing better to do in retirement). It's very obvious from your own detailed and personal postings here in the past that, in addition to the "cultural and historical" significance of traditional music, it has a very personal and particular significance for you - dare I say almost a liberating one? As you've described it, hearing this stuff for the first time gave a sense of direction and meaning to your life - and correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, not being a huge fan of such cultural and historical significance in song (I should stress that I also love the stuff of tradition but prefer to get my dosage of it from reading) I wonder if there's a danger of the music itself being lost. Might the scholarship and research and authenticity questions make us lose sight of the musical merit or otherwise of the melodies - perhaps forget the part they play in sheer entertainment? You might think it a trivial quibble, but one of the reasons I prefer to play, rather than sing, traditional and not-quite-traditional tunes is that, on the whole, they don't come with any baggage other than their melodies.

I'm not a weaver, nor a blacksmith, nor a shoemaker nor a miner - all those people formed part of my own ancestry in England, Ireland and Scotland but are long gone - and I can't feel it in me to sing songs as though I were one of those people. But playing tunes from all their cultures has a freedom for me that the performance of their songs doesn't. And, as I've said many times before, there's less worry about more recent traditional-style jigs, reels and hornpipes sliding into the canon than there is with songs. This is precisely because tunes aren't loaded with a cultural and historical baggage. You can play them and dance to them without a care in the world.

How many of us now can honestly sing a traditional song as though we were part of the world that it came from? Very few, is my guess. So those that do are almost characters in a sort of historical re-enactment society. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but I have to confess that, for me, the melody is more important than the content.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Paul Davenport
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 05:10 AM

'How many of us now can honestly sing a traditional song as though we were part of the world that it came from?'
This is a question that has been heard many times and not satisfactorily answered in my opinion. The thing is, those worlds extend a lot further than you think. When I was a lad it was estimated that one third of the population of my home town owed their living directly or indirectly to the fishing industry. After the 'Cod War' the population has now dropped by a third! Now that actually totals 100, 000 souls. Thats a hell of a lot of people who were obviously part of that world of the fisherman. Actually I have lived all of my adult life in the Yorkshire coalfield, I have taught miners and their children. I have been harrassed by police during the miners strike, forced from my car and searched in case I was smuggling secondary pickets. When a friend died in an explosion in a coal mine it touched us deeply. I've never been down a mine but, like thousands who've lived in these villages I am a part of that world too. I reckon this is true for countless thousands of people especially when the chips are down and the community has to pull together. I'm not convinced that there's a need to actually be a miner, fisherman, or blacksmith to sing about them, it's more a matter of empathy and closeness to the people around you.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 06:19 AM

Paul - many people can and do sing these oings with feeling and with some sense of personal attachment. I can't. The fact that I've lived in a Sussex village for the past 35 years still doesn't qualify me - on my own terms - to perform a song about being a shepherd on the South Downs with any degree of adequacy. There would always be another me on the shoulder - one with horns - whispering, "Garn - gerroff!"

But the original question wasn't really about personal performance or me or otherwise. It was about the potential danger in treating these songs more as socio-cultural-historical documents, with - sometimes - just a touch of inverted class snobbery, than as entertainment and music for pleasure. I don't think one should aim overly subvert the other.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 06:23 AM

'oings' is, of course, my own personal keyboard dialect for 'songs'!

I should also have added that, if you don't happen to live in a community where such traditions as mining have a significance - London's Bayswater, for example, where I used to live in the late '60s - then the reasons for performing are different again.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 06:29 AM

Both Sides the Tweed

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 06:29 AM

I see what you mean, Will, but can't {obviously as I do sing the songs} sympathise with it. When one sings, it is a performance, just as much as being in a play. One adopts a persona, recognised by convention by both one's audience and oneself, as not being one's own. Your attitude rather reminds me of that of Philip Stubbs, the Elizabethan Puritan in excelsis, to the Theatre; & of Cromwell for same reason closing down all the playhouses under his Commonwealth.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 06:57 AM

You're not quite with me, Michael - perhaps I haven't explained it very well - and I should separate the personal from the polemic. Forget my own personal musical likes. I may not perform many traditional songs for reasons I've made abundantly clear, but I'll perform traditional tunes until the cows come home.

My doubts are about the apparent inability of the Tradition to take in much new material because it's not been honed by the (dread phrase) "folk process" - because it has a known composer, for example - even though it may have some significance for a particular community. New material can never become Traditional because it cannot pass a test which is now unavailable to take. And I'm talking about modern songs which are written in the traditional style and genre. So the great mass of Traditional material - loaded with cultural and historical significance, an important and eloquent Document mainly from the working-class stratum of society - is, in one sense, a closed book.

What I'm trying to say in my convoluted way, is that some separation of music and 'message' may be necessary for the Tradition to remain vibrant and in growth. Perhaps such insignificant tasks as setting new words to old tunes - or old words to new tunes - might help the process.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 07:05 AM

No, sorry Will; but you have not made your reasons "abundantly clear" for not performing traditional songs ~~ not to me, in any event. Still, I am happy to let the matter rest.

Regards

~M~

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 07:20 AM

There you go, Jim... it's only a brief mention, mind you: Steve Turner interview

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 08:12 AM

"There you go, Jim.."
Thanks for that Spleen - ah, those were the days!!!
"Might the scholarship and research and authenticity questions make us lose sight of the musical merit"
I think it might - if you let it.
For me, singing traditional songs is a balance between mastering the mechanics of singing, and understanding and feeling the song, falling down too heavily on one side or the other can be a disaster, espacially if you over-intellectualise your material.
I probably over-quote my favourite saying, from the introduction to Wimberly's Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, but here goes again:
"An American Indian sun-dance or an Australian corroboree is an exciting spectacle for the uninitiated, but for one who understands something of the culture whence it springs it is a hundred fold more heart-moving."
I've always believed that, thanks to an over-concentration on the gathering of songs as 'collectables', rather than what I believe they were - a part of peoples lives, we know virtually nothing about the people who sang them, why they sang them, what made them so important that they were passed on from generation to generation down the centuries... nothing!
There have been tantelising glimpses - Texas Gladden's description of Mary Hamilton going to her execution, Dillard Chandler's desire to 'creep up behind Lord Barnard and stab him...'... but nowhere near enough to build a complete picture.
We spent a large slice of our lives trying to fil in some of the blanks, almost certainly too little, too late, but at least a small taste of what we believe it was all about.
Walter Pardon took us out to his front gate once and pointed to the field opposite and said "That's where the pretty ploughboy used to plough"; not because he believed it but because that's what he saw every time he sang the song. That happened to us several times with singers we recorded, enough to make us believe in the universality of the songs, that they trancended their time and historical and social settings and speak for me - a retired time-served electrician that spent all of my working life in an urban background.
I don't sing regularly any more - not because I have lost interest, but because of my belief in the need to put in sufficient work before you expose your songs to the public; other activities have stopped me doing that. I miss it desperately, but Walter and Mikeen McCarthy and Mary Delaney... and all the others we have been lucky to know have been a more than adequate compensation.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Richard I
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 08:17 AM

In response to Will Fly's interesting remarks
I do wonder about the issue of authenticity, and whether I can really "sing a traditional song as though we were part of the world that it came from".

1) A lot of the songs I learned are songs of the sea, for chanty sings and so on. It's here that I have the biggest sense of "why am I singing this"? I've never really been sailing even for pleasure, much less on a clipper. I know songs about fishing, but I know very little of the reality of fishing. That is not a world I inhabited, nor is it even a world any of my ancestors inhabited. Because I'm from Liverpool, I justify one or two to myself on the grounds that they refer to the place, and therefore have something to do with a sense of place (e.g. Roll, Alabama, Roll is an important reminder of Merseyside's role supporting the Confederacy in the American Civil War), but this isn't necessarily true. The only 'song of the sea' that I can think of as something I learned FROM being in Liverpool, and hearing it song by people I knew (at celebrations etc.) is "The Leaving of Liverpool", which clearly has associations that go well beyond the seafaring life to which the words responded.

2) I do have a big repetoire of songs I learned from family. This, I think, really is a tradition within which I am able to sing and express myself, because I'm passing on stories and songs that my own relatives passed on to me when I was a child. For example, I was sung Coulter's Candy as a lullaby when I was a child; now I sing it to my baby son when he's crying, and it clearly soothes him. The only problem here for me is a geographical one: the songs I'm thinking of here are mostly Scottish, because of having a Scottish father and uncle who sang to me. And so I'm singing songs about Scottish city life even though I'm not from a Scottish city; and to confound the problem, these songs were meant to be sung in an accent that I don't have. So the true songs which reflect the passing on of tradition through the family may, in a way, SOUND fake, even though they're not.

3) On the other hand, there are a number of songs that I've learned from my city of birth (Liverpool) that are not from 'oral tradition' in this kind of way, but definitely do reflect the place in which I grew up in. So here, I think I am singing songs that are part of my world, and I am within their world. But the method by which I learned them wasn't the 'oral tradition' in the strict sense. (An exception here, which I've already raised earlier in this thread, would be football songs which I've learned at the match and in pubs)

4) But there is also a vast swathe of songs that deal with universal issues. Ranging from jealousy to incest to the glories/dangers of drink. Can I sing these songs as though I was part of their world? I don't know. If I sing "The Bitter Withy", for example, I am not part of a cultural setting that is even aware that the willow tree rots from the inside out. However, I was raised Catholic, and I was told apocryphal stories and Jesus' childhood. Moreover, the very English issue of class conflict (Jesus as a poor boy, the rich boys looking donw on him) are meaningful to me and many of the people who've listened to me sing the song. If I sing "Lucy Wan", the reference to a broadsword is an historic anachronism (as it probably was among 19th and early 20th century singers of the song, I guess, although I'm willing to be corrected), but the horror of incest and of murder are still real get reactions from people today... it doesn't go away just because time has moved on (it is probably an immortal taboo). These are songs that I didn't learn strictly from the "oral tradition", but I don't think they're culturally alien to me, because I think the themes they deal with remain relevant.


So, in short, I sing 1) songs that I have no business singing, 2) songs that I learned as a child but that I probably sound silly singing because I have the wrong accent, 3) songs that reflect the place where I grew up, but that I didn't learn as a child, 4) songs that deal with universal themes, but that I didn't learn as a child.

Aside from category 1, I would say that the other 3 categories are 'traditional singing'. But each of them can be contested. Sorry for such a long-winded reflection!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Will Fly
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 08:24 AM

No, sorry Will; but you have not made your reasons "abundantly clear" for not performing traditional songs ~~ not to me, in any event.

Sorry Michael - I was forgetfully referring to another, older thread where we had gone over the business before. You had likened the singing of a song to an actor being given a script - to which I replied that sometimes the actor had to return the script to the agent on the grounds of unsuitability... :-)

I ought to add here, just to clarify matters, that I purposely choose material to sing which has little or no significance to anything. Just fun and frivolity- such is my shallow nature - though I do have a partiality for old Music-Hall material. Frank Crumit's "The Song Of The Prune" shows you how low I can sink.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 08:26 AM

Or any number by Dougie MacLean

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 09:11 AM

What happens when we get a list of 'new traditional' songs we all agree? Do we give a party and sing them all? Do we award a certificate to the first person who chose that song?

What if you nominate someone's song, they get elected and then you think - I don't like him. Can we take the honour back?

This whole business is fraught with peril and uncertainty.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 09:19 AM

By the way, did we ever agree what the 'old tradition' was?

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 09:27 AM

You have an evil sense of humour, Al - and I like it!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 10:31 AM

You're a very good writer and a very witty guy George. I caught your gig at The Sunray FC, which is in the next village.You remind me a bit of how Harvey Andrews was at one stage. Do you know Harvey's work at all? His hay day was a bit before your time maybe.

He used to work with a guy called Graham Cooper who was an incredible musician - keyboards and guitar. It enabled Harvey to give a histrionic sweep to some of his songs - a sort of Jacques Brel feel. I kept thinking as I watched you.....someone like Graham, it might be fun for you.

Anyway...just an idea!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 12:00 PM

Personally, I don't buy the idea that you have to be part of a particular world before you can sing the song. Its interesting that that was an argument that never seemed to apply to all the East Anglian Blues singers of my youth, for a start!

Nevertheless, if such a stricture did apply it would have stopped many of the ploughmen, milk maids, gypsies, fishermen etc. singing many of the ballads in Child's canon, for example, as many of those are about the doings of kings, queens, noble lords and ladies etc.

In addition I doubt whether many singers of 'The Flash Lad' in its many variants had ever been highwaymen and I bet that not all of the singers of 'The Bold Princess Royal' had actually been to sea.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 12:17 PM

Obviously you missed that episode of The Archers where Walter Gabriel said, 'Oooh Ah! me old beauty! I be dying to sing Matty Groves, but that there song be about folks above my class...Oi know me place,me old beauty.'

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 02:40 PM

"I don't buy the idea that you have to be part of a particular world before you can sing the song.
Amen to that.
Folk/traditional songs are narratives that deal with the human condition: that is why they have lasted so long and have more or less taken root wharever they landed.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 04:08 PM

I also agree, which is why there's no point criticising white English kids singing the blues or adopting American rock and roll accents or whatever. Some of the finest music ever written was sung in Latin and barely understood by those singing the vowels and consonents. One adopts a 'strategic voice' to encounter the music.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Seonaid
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 07:58 PM

When a song speaks to you, for whatever reason, you may feel compelled to speak for it. It doens't necessarily depend on your own obvious activities.
Were the crofters part of the king's courts and fairy barrows they sang of? No, but those songs expressed something for them. As long as that expression was important to someone, the songs continued. You can express a lot of your own sorrow in a good sad song, without having to reveal your personal pain or circumstance. It's a useful emotional tool.
Yes, it's also an art form, of which certain singers were (and are) immensely and justifiably proud. But the persistence of the tradition always depended on who else cared. Still does.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 17 Feb 11 - 08:56 PM

Tootler, I know it was St Andrew's University, but the story I heard from the man himself WAS Irish trad! Go to any Scottish session and you will almost certainly hear Irish songs sung as well! (Pedants v pedants it seems! :-) )

Can I add another to the list? "The Earl of March's Daughter" by the too-soon-taken-from-us Lionel McClelland?

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Tootler
Date: 18 Feb 11 - 06:23 AM

He clearly varies his story somewhat as I definitely heard "Scottish" from the man himself.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,Larry Saidman
Date: 25 Nov 11 - 05:26 PM

How about Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds".

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: BobKnight
Date: 25 Nov 11 - 08:00 PM

I write songs in traditional style - have a listen. I believe some are being sung by others.
                                           http://www.youtube.com/bobknightfolk#p/u

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: BobKnight
Date: 25 Nov 11 - 08:02 PM

Ah well - that didn't work.

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: GUEST,888
Date: 25 Nov 11 - 08:56 PM

http://www.youtube.com/bobknightfolk#p/u

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: BobKnight
Date: 26 Nov 11 - 07:15 AM

Thank you guest,888 for making the "live" link. All the best. Bob

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Diva
Date: 26 Nov 11 - 10:31 AM

Any of the songs here would qualify. http://www.thewildbeesnest.ie

Particularly The Dunghill Boy by Fergus Russell

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Diva
Date: 27 Nov 11 - 01:06 PM

Still haven't learned how to do blue clickies!

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: The Sandman
Date: 27 Nov 11 - 01:43 PM

none of them will be traditional until they are processed

Subject: RE: Nominations for 'new' traditional songs
From: Paul Davenport
Date: 28 Nov 11 - 10:40 AM

There's a strong argument that, until the song exists in several different versions, it isn't 'traditional'. Which, of course raises a set of quite interesting question marks. Discuss – but leave me out of it. :-)