The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: The Sandman
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 03:25 PM

in my opinion a revival singer who was stylistically closer to tradtional singers from the south of england was Cyril Tawney, compare him to Bob Lewis

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: r.padgett
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 03:12 PM

PB was out of order ~ singers can sing trad songs as they please ~ even badly ~ maybe he was afraid of you getting too good John!

Ray

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 01:56 PM

I wasn't a fan of Peter's singing, but I did like YT. Many moons ago when Adam was a lad, myself and a couple of others, tried to form a folk group, and we tried out a few numbers at Hammersmith Folk Centre in Dalling Road. Well the said PB was in attendance one evening, and after we had performed, he took me to task, for singing one of "his" songs, and asked us not to sing it any more. Now I can't remember what song it was, I can barely remember the names of the other members of the group (George & Charlotte) but I do remember being more than a little put out by his request. It was a traditional song I do know that.

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: GUEST,LynnH
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 01:28 PM

I think it was Percy Grainger who said that the only possible time signature for folk song was 1/4. Offers a lot of flexibility and I would say Pete Bellamy used it!

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: The Sandman
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 01:16 PM

in my opinion Peter did not sound like any east anglian tradtional singer that i can think of, nothing like Cox or Pardon.,He always reminded me of Edith Piaf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Kvu6Kgp88

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 11:46 AM

interesting to hear Bellamy was a big fan of Paddy Tunney. Paddy Tunney is maybe my favourite traditional singer. If I could only ever listen to one folk singer ever again it would be him (well, maybe a toss-up between Paddy and Mississippi John Hurt). I think of the way Tunney sings as almost the polar opposite of how Bellamy sings, very relaxed and conversational. That's not a criticism of Bellamy, it's an observation about style.

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 03 Sep 20 - 04:58 AM

Interesting comments. Thinking about it some more, saying that "the original melody ... gets completely lost" was wrong - the tune of Three Pretty Boys, or Bellamy's version of Lemady, is right there.

What gets lost is the beat. I imagine that PB would snort at the idea that a folk song has a beat in the first place, but I think if you listen to a lot of source singers you can hear how many beats there are in the bar and where the accent falls - even while that structure is being pulled out of shape where the words demand it (3 beats instead of 4 in this line, 5 instead of 4 in that one). To take another 'Revival' singer, Tony Capstick clearly had a metronome in his head - listening to his unaccompanied recordings (Van Diemen's Land, the Scarecrow, Old Molly Metcalf) you can hear where the accent falls at all times, even when he's singing against it.

Bellamy clearly could sing (and write!) a rhythmically regular tune when he wanted to - Down the Moor, Anchor Song. I suppose what intrigues me is that, quite a lot of the time, he didn't want to. And it does make him hard to follow. (I spent about twelve weeks with PB's Lemady: six weeks to learn how he did what he did, six weeks to learn how not to do it - or at least how to keep it in reserve.) But I guess that - as a couple of people have said - when we want guidance on how to sing these songs, it's not interpreters like PB who we should be looking to.

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: r.padgett
Date: 02 Sep 20 - 12:34 PM

I agree with Nick Dow ~ simply when learning songs you should go to source singer ~ as Peter would no doubt originally have done ~ sing in your own voice and not that of Peter Bellamy ~ that is his arrangement

Now just a comment regarding Jon Boden ~ but Jon does sing rather like PB ~ that is up to him and he does have the range to do it!

Ray

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: GUEST,Nick Dow
Date: 02 Sep 20 - 11:13 AM

I met and conversed with Peter many times. He looked after my disabled wife at a festival while I was on tour in Scandinavia.
Firstly I'm very pleased that you have taken the time and trouble to listen so closely to his singing.
I would say that most if not all his delivery was taken from the East Anglican tradition, however he was a great fan of Paddy Tunney, and we talked about him a couple of times. He had a huge vocal range(On board a 98!) and a unique delivery. He was not interested in anybody copying him, he would always guide you to the tradition.
I do remember him referring to a well known singer by name and saying, 'He sings as if he's never heard a traditional singer.' To Peter Bellamy that was a sin.
I think some of the examples you have quoted are stylistic variations to help in the story telling. An old Dorset traditional singer once told me his fathers rule. 'Emphasis makes a song boy!'.
Within the British singing tradition structural variation of the melody is an accepted technique, and sometimes can result in a virtual re-composition of the tune . Listen to Caroline Hughes for a good example, however other singers like his good friend Walter Pardon do not use it at all. The rest is down to musical taste. Bellamy is an acquired taste to some people, a complete turn off to others. He was bursting with talent and is sorely missed.

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: GUEST,Sean O'Shea
Date: 02 Sep 20 - 11:13 AM

The tune for ON BOARD A NINETY EIGHT is not Peter's.
It's practically ADIEU SWEET LOVELY NANCY and Peter credited it so.

Subject: RE: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: Charmion
Date: 02 Sep 20 - 10:54 AM

I would say neither, Phil.

Bellamy was a self-conscious performer, God knows, but I doubt his artistic ego worked quite that way.

I think it more likely that, like many singers working in the traditional idiom, he created the song and his way of singing it without much reference to anyone except his audience, or anything but the lyrics and the story they tell. After that, every performance reflected the original concept.

Also, many singers have a fast-and-loose relationship with metre, which they basically don't need if they sing a capella or accompany themselves. What's an extra beat between friends? Who cares if I cut off the two-beat rest at the end of the line, if there's no guitarist at my elbow to click her tongue in annoyance because I haven't left room for her bass run?

As for the issue of grim songs with bouncy tunes -- well, yer typical ballad tune drops trippingly off the tongue while the lyrics distribute drowned lovers, murdered babies, beheaded wives and defeated armies all over the landscape. That's folk!

Subject: The Irregularity of Peter Bellamy
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 02 Sep 20 - 10:31 AM

Metrical irregularity, that is - although I'm sure the great man was irregular in other ways!

I've learnt several songs from Bellamy's recordings, and - such is the power of his interpretations - I've very often ended up learning them the way he sang them. The trouble is, this sometimes means that you aren't actually learning the tune of the song. Bellamy's delivery has something of the metrical irregularity that you often hear in source singers - sometimes speeding up or slowing down, sometimes hesitating or interrupting themselves, and hardly ever putting in the right length of rest at the end of a stanza - plus an extra layer of declamatory rock and roll theatrics.

The end result is that the original melody, if there was one, gets completely lost; if you were to treat an unaccompanied Bellamy recording as a source text and notate it, instead of a folk song that other people could pick up and sing you'd end up with a contemporary classical piece in several different time signatures or none at all. Compare Bellamy's Death of Bill Brown with Will Noble's - the latter is vivid and conversational in its delivery, but you can still hear where the beat falls.

For another example, where are the accents in Two Pretty Boys? Everywhere and nowhere:

TWO pretty BOYS WERE GOING TO SCHOOL
IN the EVE-NI-i-ing COMING HO-o-ome

Practically every syllable's accented - it's not so much a tune as a proclamation.

I once tried to work out what the tune must originally have sounded like - a fairly quick 6:8, I thought:

TWO pre-tty BOYS were GOING to SCHOOL
in-the EVEning COMing HO-ome

But that sounds rather jolly, which is an odd fit for the lyrics.

The really odd thing about Bellamy's de-metrication strategy is that he even applied it to his own tunes. Look at that great piece of Bellamising, On Board a '98:

Now when I-was-a-boy... and SCARCE... eighTEEN... I DROVE a ROARing trade...

Unsingable by anyone else, or not without immediately sounding as if they're imitating Peter Bellamy.

If that was based on an existing tune, I'd have said the tune 'naturally' wanted to sound more like

NOW when I was-a BOY and SCARCE eighTEEN I DROVE a ROARing TRADE
and so on.

But, again, you end up with a jolly, bouncy number, which clearly wasn't what PB had in mind.

There are exceptions - there are always exceptions - but over quite a lot of his work it just seems as if Bellamy just didn't like metrical accents. You even hear it in Gethsemane - again, a tune of his own. Having sung it a few times I find it benefits from a discreet but definite accent on the 'one':

The GARDen called GethSEMane in PICardy it WAS...

But Bellamy sings it effectively without any accents at all.

I could go on (but won't). Has anyone else noticed this odd characteristic of Bellamy's work? Was he trying to make himself inimitable, or to make the imitations obvious?