Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4

Subject: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Aug 03 - 12:02 PM

"Three Nights Drunk and the Market Tup" on BBC Radio 4 Sept 2 1.00pm.
Field recordings of Yorkshire singers, 1958-78, from the tape collection of Mary & Nigel Huddleston. Also, the book "Songs of the Ridings" from G. A. Pindar & Sons of Scarborough, (UK)£25.00 plus
£6.50 p&p. 200 Yorkshire songs collected by the Huddlestones.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: red max
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 05:34 AM

According to Radio 4's website it's on between 1.30 and 2.00

I'm stranded at work desperately trying to find someone to record this

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 07:36 AM

Blurb reads :-
BBC Radio 4 - Tuesday 02 September (2003)
13:30

Three Nights Drunk & The Market Tup
Clare Jenkins uncovers a treasury of folk songs from across Yorkshire, recorded by a gentleman-landowner and his wife 50 years ago, and featuring such previously unheard songs as Three Nights Drunk, and The Market Tup.

From 1958 to 1978, Hudleston, a Yorkshire landowner now in his late 80s, together with his late wife Mary, recorded around 500 Yorkshire folksongs dating back as far as the 16th Century, which had been curiously overlooked by such pioneering 20th century collectors as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger.

Until the Hudlestons came along, it was widely believed that Yorkshire people simply didn't have a tradition of orally transmitted songs.

Among the songs are Old Matha Gummersal Had a Mule, I'm a Collier By Me Trade, and the Craven Churn-Supper Song - sung into the Hudlestons' hefty reel-to-reel tape recorder, by singers, all now dead, in Todmorden and Whitby, Swinithwaite and Goathland, Calderdale, Wensleydale and Eskdale.

In the early 1990s, Richard Adams and Mark Gordon two young musicians from Scarborough, started painstakingly transcribing them thinking that the project would last a fortnight, it lasted eight years. The result is a book of over 200 of the songs, called Songs of the Ridings. Mark and Richard have included some in their musical repertoire, showing how songs can change organically and live again for a new audience. The collection itself is now housed at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield.

Presented by Clare Jenkins, the programme interweaves songs with the memories and thoughts of those involved, the son of Arthur Wood from Middlesbrough, one of the main contributors, Nigel Hudleston, Mark Gordon and Richard Adams and folklorist Georgina Boyes.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: red max
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 08:14 AM

My lovely wife has overcome her advanced techno-phobia and agreed to record this for me. Woo-hoo!

Does anyone know anything about Mark Gordon and Richard Adams? It'd be interesting to hear what they've recorded

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: nickp
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 09:17 AM

Just heard a snatch of it in the car - fascinating

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Llanfair
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 09:31 AM

I heard it all, Wonderful stuff!!!!

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Watson
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 09:57 AM

It's on the Listen Again page.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: red max
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 10:16 AM

Good stuff. A lot of credit has to go to Mark Gordon and Richard Adams for their work on the material, but did you hear their own rendition at the end? Absolutely bloody awful, I thought. Sorry.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Watson
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 10:29 AM

Just listening to that part now - ghastly!
Fascinating programme nevertheless.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: red max
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 10:37 AM

Definitely. I've been doing some hunting recently for Yorkshire songs, and hopefully this book will be very useful. Considering the wealth of trad material from Lancashire and the North East a large county such as ours has seemed like a relative wasteland up to now

BTW, does anyone know anything about Dave Hillery? His stuff on Trans-Pennine (with Harry Boardman) was excellent

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: nutty
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 11:00 AM

I found the programme very interesting but I must admit I was puzzled ..... How many of the songs collected were actually new? In as much as they had never been collected before. How many had previously been collected by Kidson???

One other question would be .... Are Sheffield University going to make this archive available on line????

And why sue "Songs of the Ridings " as a title when it was the title of a collection of songs and poems by F.W.MOORMAN printed almost a hundred years previously   SEE HERE

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: BanjoRay
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 11:11 AM

A great programme with excellent stuff exept the bit at the end that truly illustrates what is going wrong with some folk music performance these days. Some fine difficult collection work was done, and Mark Gordon and Richard Adams seem to be much better at creating a valuable book than they are at performing the contents.
Cheers
Ray

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: John J
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 11:53 AM

Hello Bron!

John

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Watson
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 12:01 PM

Just a word about "Listen Again" - I don't think this programme will be there for more than one week. It occupies the same slot that held "The Seeds of Love" last week.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 02 Sep 03 - 12:33 PM

NATCECT never has any money, so I should think the prospects of any of the material in their archive being made freely available on the net, or anywhere else, are pretty much zero; except where a particular project like the Traditional Drama Research Group has transcribed documents. Such resources as they have (there isn't even a full-time archivist any more) are better devoted to conservation of the materials than in giving us something for nothing.

The Hudlestone book isn't especially easy to get hold of (see above) as you have to order it from the contract publisher, and the fact that it's ring-bound means that mainstream booksellers won't stock it. That's a pity, and so is the price; but we can't have everything. Apart from Frank Kidson's work (his Traditional Tunes can be got as a facsimile paperback from  Llanerch Press), Steve Gardham's East Riding Songster is still available, though you probably have to get it direct from him. Other than that, the fairly extensive collection made in the early 20th century in South Yorkshire by R.A.A. Gatty is kept at Birmingham Reference Library; very little of the material has ever been published.

To an extent, I'd guess that logistics have been something of a disincentive to collectors, particularly in the North of the county, where geography and demographics would have made the exercise especially difficult. The point made (I think by Georgina Boyes?) that [many] collectors didn't expect to find much in urban areas is true, but far from being the only factor. The advance writeup for the radio programme was rather misleading in its implication that the Hudlestone collection is the only one, though it is certainly important.

I think that James Madison Carpenter collected in Yorkshire in the '30s (along with many other places), but the search routine at the online catalogue seems to be broken, so I can't check. He had a car, though; earlier collectors had to rely mainly on trains and bicycles to get about. His collection probably will be available online eventually, but there are complicated legal permissions to be sorted out first. That project is American-funded, so at least there is money available.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: r.padgett
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 11:54 AM

A lot of watter under t'bridge since the original posting

SOTR by and large unavailable ~ I would point you towards "Yorkshire Garland" song data base

Never hear the songs from original recordings btw

Rau

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: GUEST,John Greaves
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 03:52 PM

I would have liked to hear the Whitby recordings as I knew some of the singers, in fact Audrey Gibbon, Johnnys daughter sang to me as a boy. Also I know the dialect and there are some obvious errors in the transcription of geographic songs due to mishearing our local language! It was a privilege to contribute to the Yorkshire Garland website to keep some of our local stuff alive.

Subject: RE: Yorkshire Folk on BBC 4
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 04:15 PM

I was trying to restrain myself from mentioning the transcriptions, John, but now you mention it, if you want over a thousand mondegreens in one book try to get hold of a copy of the Hudleston book. Dear old Nigel made a promise to his wife before she died that he would get the songs published. Unfortunately he left it rather late and Adams and Gordon had no idea when it came to traditional song and Yorkshire dialect. Luckily many of the songs are available elsewhere and some are available on the Yorkshire Garland site thanks to John and Mick Heywood.