Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 30 Mar 15 - 02:29 AM

Obviously, I delight in logging onto Mudcat where I can engage with the lower orders, followed by perambulating towards a folk club in a local hostelry where I can cohort with the proletariat over a glass of cheap beer.

Rather entertaining to hear aspirational banter regarding what is ours by right.







On a more honest note, the '80s me would think me posh. When my boys were young, I used to point out lambs in the fields and shout "Mint sauce!"

Now, with my granddaughter, I shout "Garlic and rosemary!"

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Bert
Date: 30 Mar 15 - 12:34 AM

Of course, if you are not posh then you will be eating buckling and not caviar, because you know that buckling is far superior.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Pauline Lerner
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 10:08 PM

In some ways I could be considered posh. I have a PhD, but not in music, and I was trained as a classical violinist. I still love classical as well as folk music. I used to make pretty good money and live comfortably, but now I'm unemployed and broke. I may be posh. I can't carry a tune, so my fiddle is my voice. I play folk music pretty well. I've heard people who play better and people who play worse. I play in tune, keep the beat, love what I'm doing, and I'm certainly entitled to play.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Dave
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 07:04 AM

Too late I think MGM, these things come in for limited periods, and its all gone from ours. But it will probably be back, possibly next Christmas. Same with lobsters. Keep your eye on the weekly sales booklet they leave out, usually gives one week notice on their specials.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 06:32 AM

Sounds a good deal! Shall nip out to Aldi in Ely & get a jar!.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Dave
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 02:42 AM

Not Cod, not Lumpfish, not Beluga either to be honest, but from a cross-breed of Amur and Kaluga sturgeon. Originally £9.99 a jar, but I got several at £4.99.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 02:39 AM

I was in Azerbaijan a few years ago. If you saw the stinking oil film ridden almost barren cess pool called The Caspian Sea, you might think twice about Beluga.

Mind you. Street sellers in Baku always claim their wares are the very best Beluga and apparently the one outside our friend's apartment block used to supply The Kremlin. Presumably via the same Sony TV box he kept his stock in.....

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 12:23 AM

I suspect that the 'caviar' sold at Aldi will be of the lumpfish, rather than the true Beluga sturgeon, variety -- which is quite palatable, & not a bad imitation at that, flavour-wise. But not that posh!

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Mar 15 - 12:22 AM

ALDI C[od roe]aviar

always read the small print on the back of the lable

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Nixon
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 11:01 PM

LadyJean: The best folk singer I ever heard was a woman who had trained as an opera singer. She had suffered a nervous breakdown and had given up on opera, and pursued a career as a visiting nurse instead. Her folk singing was very rich and soulful, and not a bit like any opera singing I've ever heard.

Dave: your ALDI must be a lot different than mine, if they sell caviar. Maybe I misquoted Nixon on that matter.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: LadyJean
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 06:40 PM

My mother, who was pretty posh, (My friends called her The Duchess.) taught me "Three Old Ladies Got Locked in a Lavatory", and a couple of similar classics.

One of the girls in my school was the daughter of an opera singer. The lady would inflict herself on us once a year in a special assembly that, generally ran through recess. She sang folk songs, but they sounded like opera, with high notes, trills and all the rest. It was hard to understand her, and generally not so great.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Dave
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 03:55 PM

Good, that means that even with the lobsters and the caviar I am not posh.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 03:46 PM

Richard Nixon said, "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal."
And I think he would add, "If they sell it at ALDI, that means it's not posh."

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Dave
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 03:19 PM

Gosh, I didn't realise that buying a lot of smoked salmon made you posh. I buy a lot of smoked salmon. I buy it from Aldi mind you. Does that make me posh?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 27 Nov 14 - 05:43 AM

Or as the late Tony Capstick would say,

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
That floats on high,
Along trees and river banks,
I trod upon a bloke's bare arse,
And heard a woman's voice say thanks.

Anyway, enough of the trials and tribulations of poor Justin. We need to define posh, and perhaps limericks can help us after all.

There was a young man of high station,
Found by a pious relation,
Making love in a ditch
To I won't say a bitch,
But a woman of no reputation.

(There, that's posh because posh people say someone has a reputation as a compliment. Where I come from, saying she has a reputation infers ten bob on the mantelpiece.)

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Gurney
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 11:12 PM

I hope that the Ron Shuttleworth who posted his song up there was Ron from Coventry Mummers, still going strong.
Chris Marden.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 08:20 PM

She was always writing poems,
Wishing she still had her teef
And I think she's very funny
But you don't share my belief.

No you'd rather have your daffies
Willie Wordsworth wrote about,
And this rhyme does fit the meter,
So please go and sing it out.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 01:24 PM

I am too lazy to log out and comment as GUEST: Why wasn't I born black?

Nothing says conspicuous self-consciousness than a middle aged, middle class white woman from Virginia, trying to sing prison and work songs with attempted authenticity. I think I get away with it, because I am in the UK and they are too polite to point out the irony.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 10:31 AM

There's a lot of rehabs down here in the west country,
their bread 'n' butter intake business being druggies from all over the rest of the nation..

Coincidently, a fair few amateur singers & musos on the local scene now have plummy accents... ???

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 10:03 AM

Anyway, the real toffs don't waste money on shrinks, they take a shotgun worth £50 000 and use cartridges costing £2 a pop to reduce pheasants raised at £20 a head to larder meat worth £1 a head.
And in between times they drown a few worms.
Whereas we take instruments costing £2 000 a go, and travel paying fares of £20 a head for a band of 3, to play in windy church halls and the upstairs of pubs for an audience of 3 paying £1 each. Each to our own...

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 09:58 AM

Don't worry, they're on tranks, you can practice to your heart's content PFR, you'll not wake them next door.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 08:48 AM

errrm..ahem.. wayward aristocrats in rehab.. shhhh...

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 08:41 AM

Back of the net!

😜

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 08:33 AM

"how come so many posh people need to spend ££££$$$ on therapy...???"

I thought that was overpaid "celebrities" rather than "posh" people - they are rarely the same people.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 08:24 AM

"It means anybody who doesn't think their whole life is someone else's fault...."

so... how come so many posh people need to spend ££££$$$ on therapy...???

...ooohh.. the sheer anguish of being so rich and so unloved and misunderstood....

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 07:48 AM

It means anybody who doesn't think their whole life is someone else's fault....

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 07:25 AM

I have just listened to that programme on McColl linked to in another discussion. I am from Manchester, not nearby Salford. But in those recordings from the late 1960's he sounds posh to me. Like teachers at school who were from somewhere else.

Or did the OP mean a different sort of posh ?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 07:12 AM

As Bernard Wrigley occasionally pops on Mudcat, I shall honour the bugger with his own words;

Robin Hood could have been a poet,
Had he not taken to his life of crime,
But he wouldn't have been much good,
'Cos he always tried to fit as many words into each line as he possibly could which does tend to bugger up the rhyme.

Anyway...

This isn't about limericks. If we read up, we will see that it is about "She was poor but she was honest."

Different rhyme and meter.

I would also like to take this opportunity to clarify my earlier point in the interest of fandom in general. Pam Ayres has never heard of me, and the only thing we have in common is that I once put an "o" on the end of a line to make it work.

Is she posh? We posh people like to have empathy with the lower orders by pretending to like Pam Ayres whilst secretly reading Wordsworth when nobody is looking.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Hamish
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 07:00 AM

There was a young man from Dublin
Whose poetry never did rhyme
And it ended too soon.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 06:05 AM

There was a young man of Japan
Whose poetry never would scan
When asked why it was
He said it's because
I like to get as many words into the last line as ever I possibly can...

Or was it Haiku?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 05:37 AM

Ah, but it does scan, in the tune associated to "She was poor but she was honest."

That said, dynasty has to be sung fairly quickly. (Comedy is about delivery and cramming syllables is usually a prelude to a punch line.)

He was poor as a banjo-ologist,
Finding rhymes where they just don't scan,
He needs knob gags to make them funny
But Pam Ayres is his biggest fan.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 05:23 AM

Back on topic........well almost.....I don't think I sound posh but was once accused of it. My accent still has traces of Suffolk where I was brought up, tho some people think I come from Devon, same as my husband! Oh, and lost count of the number of people who've said I sound like Pam Ayres!
But with a Scottish mother and 30 years of living in Scotland I do try to sing in Scots: would never think of trying to "translate" or anglicise a song like "Yellow on the Broom" for example. Ye think ye're daein' nae sae bad, then aebody says "why canna ye sing in yer ain accent?" Whit?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 03:57 AM

The reason it's not as good is because it doesn't scan.
(e.g. change 'a fellow amphibian' to 'an amphibian' - I'll leave you to work on the last line)

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 26 Nov 14 - 03:03 AM

You know, I was going to make the water / Waterman connection to take the piss. Never realised you were.. never mind.

He was poor his feet were soggy
Playing on his old guitar
Caught the glance of a fellow amphibian
Started a dynasty, known near and far

See? Not as good without poo or knob gags.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Don Firth
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 11:02 PM

By the way, Alfred Deller was married and had three children.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Don Firth
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 09:35 PM

The story goes that after a concert by the late, famed countertenor Alfred Deller, a woman who had never heard a male alto before came up to him and said, "But sir, you are a—a—a—a eunuch!!"

He peered down at her from his substantial height, his beard and mustache bristling, and in his deep male speaking voice, said, "Madam, I believe the word you are looking for is 'unique!"

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 08:56 PM

Martin "Waterman" Carthy married Norma Waterson. Get it now?

no.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 06:43 PM

On the subject of counter tenor, much of the folk repertoire goes right there. It was born in exactly the same circles as sponsored the real castrati, the likes of Farinelli.

This is one of the more alarming book titles I've seen lately:

The Modern Castrato

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 04:55 PM

How do you access these ▭▭▭▭?

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 01:21 PM

Musket
Martin "Waterman" Carthy married Norma Waterson. Get it now?
His training, by the way, started as a boy chorister in the Chepel Royal - and then he moved to work with Leon Rosselson in the mid 60s.
On the subject of counter tenor, much of the folk repertoire goes right there. It was born in exactly the same circles as sponsored the real castrati, the likes of Farinelli. It starts with Samuel Pepys learning the recorder (always thought that was a reference though to fingering his inflatable pipe, but no...). The whole idiom is riddled with attempts to reach out to the common woman (all these blithering milkmaids being typically champetre straight from Versailles). We even have a number of kinstruments - the hurdy, for example - which would have died if they hadn't been adopted by those circles.
So we might twist the question to point out that the need to classify the corpus as "folk" comes from people who were not "folk". If they were, they would just be "our" songs - as is the case in the Suffolk/Essex tradition. So perhaps the answer is that ONLY posh people sing Folk Songs, normal people just sing and don't give a damn.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 01:19 PM

If your special characters are the same as on my iMac then yes. I have been using smileys with sun glasses (smug bastard Musket) a pile of poo, a donkey (aimed at those who think soldiers are.. Never mind) and various others.

Toilet, joker card, three wise monkeys, the list is endless and relevant.

He was posh but he was silly,
Fumbling on his old iMac
He couldn't find a dodgy smiley
Or a smiling pile of crap

It's the same the whole world over
It's the old that bear the brunt
Of the taunts of good ol' Musket
Creswell's famous silly cunt.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 01:19 PM

"Rather, it's just my usual dislike of any singing that tries to sound like someone else." Well, folk musicians routinely tried to sing like other human beings who were folk musicians. E.g. Stick McGhee was likely trying to sing "Railroad Bill" like his father, and since I don't have any recordings of singer-guitarist George McGhee to listen to, thanks Stick.

Speaking of fathers, Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan sound similar to each other because they were both emulating Woody Guthrie. But Dylan also emulated others with results I like better, e.g. Tom Ashley ("The House Carpenter").

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 12:52 PM

No we're not, Poppo. No I don't. Don't drag me into that particular bit of your bollox again, thank you.

Could you at least describe some [or even one] of the things I'm supposed to see with these ▭▭▭▭ of yours? I mean, do they show smileys or funny faces or any of the things I can find on Misc Symbols on Special Characters at the bottom of the Edit option -- or what?

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 12:37 PM

How are you equipped for wit & wisdom Mike?

Just asking like. A pity you can't see 🐴💤🎶🎵💣🎸😇 or even 🃏🔪🚽. I know you would just love them...

Nothing wrong with counter tenors. You just wonder if the rubber band had slipped a few mills.

So... Can posh people sing folk songs? Well now we are all agreed that folk songs are exactly what I have been saying they are, even Mike and Jim concur now, I can answer the question.

Yes.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 11:45 AM

My computer fulfils all the functions I ask of it, thank you, Poppo. Comprehension of all your manifold facetiousnesses not regarded as indispensable. I simply point out that you are indulging in naught but vanity & vexation of spirit if you desire any of those particular animadversions to have the least effect on me, as I am not equipped to appreciate them.

Live with it.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Steve Shaw countertenorphobe
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 11:44 AM

Yes I know it's really Andreas and that he's a lusty family chap really. Nothing personal but I have this thing about countertenors. I'm 63 and you're entitled to a blind spot when you're 63.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: Musket
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 11:20 AM

Mike. Get yourself a real apple then. My iMac, iPhone and iPad see (and produce) them.

PFR. Chicks dig the whiff of a four star hotel rather than sharing a tent with an oik and his banjo. That's two T shirts in the old collection.

Steve. Trust me, it's Andreas, not Andrea. We dirty rotten stinking capitalists know of what we waffle. Some of his more high brow gear is worth sticking on to impress stuck up cows. (Another T shirt in the collection.)

Gone are the days of Barry White and a brandy & babycham. Glad to have hung my Spurs up a few years ago.

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Steve Shaw botanist
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 10:15 AM

Privet

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST,Steve Shaw
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 10:13 AM

Frogbit, henbit, sheep's-bit, hawkbit...

Subject: RE: Can Posh People Sing Folk Songs?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Nov 14 - 09:55 AM

a flower to rhyme with 'it' - violit?