Is this murdering a folk song?

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 11:13 AM

Paul
No, but I'd be more tempted to accept LW as a folk song than 'The Ploughboy'.

BTW 'Miller of the Dee' art song also.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Acorn4
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 11:13 AM

....oh, I did use some of the songs from "Singing Together", but not actually singing along to the tapes.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 11:33 AM

People with trained voices and trained musicians have just as much right to perform folk music as the rest of us. Folk Music as music of 'The People' ceased to exist in western society a long time ago, except in a few out of the way backwaters.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 11:40 AM

"A L Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Mike Waterson et al, all of whom I love dearly & all of whom nurture / affect / approximate a Folk Voice rather than sing things straight. Maybe it's not possible to sing straight in this day & age - soon as you open your mouth you're going be singing in a received style." Suibhne above

,.,.,.

Have just got to quote it again,~ sorry. After a folksong evening I did at the Eye Theatre in Suffolk, the critic of the local paper wrote ~~ 'An unpretentious performer, he can talk to the audience in very middle class tones and then, without putting on the folk voice, can still go right into the spirit of a song.'
             Basil Abbott - Norfolk & Suffolk Express - 14 Feb 1992

Nicest thing anybody has ever said about me ~~ well, one of them, anyhow.

~M~

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Acorn4
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 11:40 AM

Of course they have; it's just what impact it has on us at impressionable stages of our lives, I suppose.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 12:01 PM

From the evidence at my disposal I'd say you have The Folk Voice, Michael. Your own of course. No harm in that - though I'd love to hear you sing Butter & Cheese et al in your natural born plummy RP.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 12:42 PM

Ah, as to that, Sean ~~ I take your point. The thing is that singing a song, esp one with a first-person narrative, is a performance: adopting an appropriate character in a first-person song like B&C&A is not quite the same as 'putting on the folk voice', IMO. It is what I do when I act in a play ~~ the last part I played was Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest: he didn't sound exactly like me; but like me imitating my concept of a pompous C19 Anglican vicar. So, the cook's guest in her Norfolk kitchen in B&C&A is not going to sound quite like me either. But that doesn't mean I gave him grace-notes & tremolos, which is what 'the folk voice' means to me; and presumably meant also to that young man 20 years ago reviewing me for the Norfolk & Suffolk Express...

Still ~~ I repeat, I do see what you mean.

~M~

Anyone curious who doesn't know ~~ you can hear that song on my youtube channel ~

http://www.youtube.com/user/mgmyer

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Sandy Mc Lean
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 01:08 PM

This opens a secondary question:
Do some old folksongs deserve to be murdered?
Getting me 'at and running for cover. :-}

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: GUEST,Mawich
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 02:06 PM

I've got a 'trained' voice, although it's not as rigid as some, and I find I like to bring a bit of 'trainedness' as it were to folk songs when I sing them, even though I do loosen things up rather more than I would if I was singing something by Schubert.

Personally I think a variety of ways to sing a song is a good thing, and with that I accept that I won't like some of them. Some of Britten's arrangements of folk songs are really good (to me), although they do have to be sung right, as even within that more prescribed music there are different ways to approach the voice and some ways are (to my ears) Just Plain Wrong.

Also, singing styles change over time. Nobody really sings like Peter Pears and his contemporaries anymore. Our perception of it is distorted by their early recording equipment, but it's clear that underneath is a style of singing that is very much out of favour now.

As it happens I sing folk songs in a kind of baroque style, because that's the kind of music I'm most trained to do and know the most about. When I ornament tunes they tend to be baroque ornaments, and when I sing I often end up with a slightly more 'conversational' style but it's still quite 'early music' in that it's aiming for a pure melodic line with very little use of vibrato and no 'scooping' as my singing teacher calls it. But that's just what I do, and I like how it sounds, and the people at my club seem to as well.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 02:16 PM

Having put one point of view I now present the opposite. At the risk of offending some of my friends, I positively cringe when a twee middle class lady gets up to warble something like 'The Blackleg Miner'.

I'll get me crash helmet!

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: tonyteach1
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 02:21 PM

Re diction - the reason for the exaggerated diction is to be heard at the back of the large theatre or hall. I have sung in huge theatres without a mike and your words have to be crystal clear as do actors. Its a way of projecting the voice and the meaning of the text

Most classical singers do not use mikes or like them except in musical theatre where the sound is huge. This is of course unlike pissy pantywaist folk singers who cannot be heard beyond the third row without a mike stuck down their throat. I am joking of course but it gets boring hearing someone who knows nothing about voice production slagging off a particular style

I find also the thing about the "folk" voice a bit out of touch as most people in my area are from a different ethnic background Many ladies in gospel choirs sing tenor in a beautiful chest voice. Tell them its not proper folk music - there is a massive amount of good world music in London Folk needs to diversify and stop harking back to dear dead Ewan !

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 02:22 PM

in my opinion,yes, but that is just an opinion.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 02:23 PM

correction, it is murdering a song, I dont know if it is a folk song

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Lighter
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 03:43 PM

And "The" Folk Voice is what exactly?

MacColl, Lloyd, Bellamy, Carthy, et al., sound more like each other than they do Perry Como, Elvis, or Pavarotti.

But they don't sound that much alike. And they do sound more like Sam Larner than like Glenn Yarbrough.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 04:11 PM

Yup - individual singers sound different to each other; Folk Voice, Counter Tenor, Xhoomi, Heavy Metal, R&B, Sean Nos, Morecambe Crab Charmers... That's a human thing - we do styles & genres yet cleverly maintain our individual uniqueness.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 05:39 PM

Strangely I reminisce often re the songs we listened to and sang in primary school using 'Singing Together'. I've even been known to pick up the odd copy of ST if the price isn't way over the top. I still sing for my own amusement such pieces as 'The Jolly Wagonner', 'Marianina', 'Once there was a wild rose gay', 'Il etait un petite navire'. The first song I ever sang in a folk club c1965 was the version of 'Sally Brown' I'd learnt in school in the 50s.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: GUEST,SRD
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 05:59 PM

I first knew 'Sally Gardens' from The Bishop of Welling's recitals at Farningham and considered it one of his best. This thread sent me off to Peter Pears' version on youtube. Ok one might want to argue that the poetry of a Victorian Irish playwright doesn't qualify as 'folk music' but I think there's just as much feeling in the Britten/Pears' version as there was in the Bishop's and just as much tradition.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 07:45 PM

Ihe Leicester guitarist Steve Hicks plays a beautiful version of Down by the Sally Gardens.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Joe_F
Date: 13 Feb 12 - 08:27 PM

"Off with his head! He's murdering the time!" All the same, time has gone on, and so have those songs.

The only recordings I have that sound at all like those performances are those of Richard Dyer-Bennett, whom I have enjoyed for 60 years but who does seem a bit precious by now. Still, if people have to sing songs that way in order to take them seriously, that's better than not singing them at all.

It could be worse. It could be rock and roll.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: andrew e
Date: 14 Feb 12 - 12:30 AM

Well it gave Dudley Moore something to make us laugh!

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Acorn4
Date: 14 Feb 12 - 04:30 AM

I bet Peter Pears and Benjamin Britain didn't have a drunk at the back asking them to sing The Wild Rover.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: Will Fly
Date: 14 Feb 12 - 05:17 AM

It could be worse. It could be rock and roll.

Wash your mouth out, you naughty boy! Rock'n roll paid my bills for quite some time, many years ago. Trash it may be - precious it ain't - and to to do it right, so that people dance their socks off, is not easy.

Subject: RE: Is this murdering a folk song?
From: GUEST,Don Wise
Date: 14 Feb 12 - 06:27 AM

re 'The Folk Voice'- this of course includes singers with 'plummy' english RP accents trying to sing american songs in a terribly plummy american accent(e.g. Charles Parker from The Critics Group). Lonnie Donegan's accent was far more convincing. Further, if this 'Voice' is apparently a 'put-on'/'stage' voice, does this mean that,to be authentic, one has to sing in a regional accent and,if you don't have a marked regional accent, you shouldn't sing (folk)songs at all? Should we become vocal chameleons?