Festive stuff

[Gervase]

I skimmed through Lark Rise on the iPlayer, but clearly am far to unmellowed to appreciate it! A shame about the carols, though. I don't imagine they would have sung Silent Night in a community like that back in the 1890s, and Vaughan Williams didn't publish O Little Town of Bethlehem until 1906.
Oops, I seem to have usurped P.Edant's position!
Time for some Adnam's 'Carbon Neutral' green beer to aid the mellowing, I think...

 

[Nemesis]

Yes - and some Frost and Fire!

http://www.watersoncarthy.com/index.php?module=Album&func=detail&id=52&POSTNUKESID=15dbbb894e9f8e7b7954e1e8518babf5#6

Or:

http://www.folkmusic.net/htmfiles/webrevs/wmcd2029.htm

http://www.watersoncarthy.com/index.php?module=Album&func=detail&id=75

Oh Little Town seems to have courted some controversy recently:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5330939.ece

BUT it might just have been sung before 1906, although I have to say it's not exactly 'in the tradition':

http://www.carols.org.uk/o_little_town_of_bethlehem.htm

 

[Gervase]

There was a nice piece on the Today programme this morning about the Yorkshire carols - it even made John Humphrys twinkle.
I treated myself to "Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man" the other day by Waterson:Carthy, and it has a cracking version of While Shepherds...
There's also a grand version by Maddy Prior on "Carols and Capers", and one by the Albion Band on "A Christmas Present from the Albion Band".
And "Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy" on the Watersons' recording is one of those carols that you just want to bellow at the top of your voice in a packed pub, with all those lovely crunchy harmonies.
More vernacular period music, I say!

 

[Nemesis]

'Sound sound your instruments of joy' is one we have to travel to, we tend to singalong to various tapes. Loved the early Watersons stuff though, never surpassed. (Copper family good, but not as lusty.)

http://www.folkmusic.net/htmfiles/webrevs/tscd564.htm

It's OK sung in a car with roof, but...

When I was a kid we used to have motorbikes and sidecar combinations, not being terribly rich but more than many had! We used to pile in with a tent and very basic equipment go places.

My father was a singer - sang in a male voice choir etc.

I wonder how many villages we have passed through with folk wondering why there was this bloke bellowing trad songs and hymns etc at the top of his voice on a WWII ex WD Norton, with a young female riding pillion joining in?

Struth - Watersons, Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy - all of us getting on a bit now! Not all with us any longer, sadly, but the music lives on, and many happy memories of folk nights in various plces.

 

[Gervase]

Aye, but there's another generation taken up the baton. Eliza Carthy is pretty darned good, and groups like Bellowhead, Balshazar's Feast and Dr Faustus have put a whole new spring into some of the old standards.
And for plain (?), unaccompanied singing, with superb harmonies, Coope, Boyes and Simpson take some beating (they've done some terrific stuff with all generations of the Watersons in the 'Blue Murder' set-up, too).
I love the idea of hurtling around on an old Norton and making the valleys ring. I tend to do it in an old LandRover with the windows down and a puzzled dog (who is useless at harmonising).

PS: Just given Lark Rise a proper viewing after a couple of glasses of claret, and it's not as bad as I first thought. There is something rather, er, unsettling about the though of Dorcas Lane being spanked in purple bombazine, however...

 

[Nemesis]

Well, in our case it was more the hills, I have to say, oop north, many the time we had so many piled in we were put out at the bottom and had to walk while the bike struggled on! Going over the top at Hartside was quite an adventure in those days, as was cooking on the Primus stove ( I still have that).

Yes, the tradition lives on, and we are very lucky indeed that the first degree in trad music is at Newcastle Uni, and at times we get to hear the young 'folkies' playing in the area, as one who misspent her yoof as a Bridge 'folky' it's terrific that it's all still going strong.

http://www.bridgefolkclub.co.uk/

I do recall one wonderful sunny afternoon many decades ago, Hexham Folk Festival, the Watersons singing from the bandstand in the park in Hexham, and as for Martin Carthy, I can recall wet Mondays in winter at a small folk club in South Shields with him, me and very few others (plus the obligatory dog...). They were the days!

I still have this album:
http://www.watersoncarthy.com/index.php?module=Album&func=detail&id=23



There you see - I knew that the Christmas spirit would get to you in the end! I do wonder if the instruments played would have been quite what village singers would have had, but suspend your disbelief... I did actually see people collecting a Christmas tree yesterday with a carriage and pair.

Actually, I thought the story for 'Lark Rise' quite good, in the tradition of gentle Christmas short ghost stories. Yes all vey sanitised rural life, not much mention of the workhouse, but it's fiction dahlings.

 

[Nemesis]

Interesting!

http://www.christmas.oldcornwall.org/mabe.htm

and - youtube triumphs as ever:

http://www.nme.com/artists/watersons

http://www.nme.com/video/id/yM_1gLvySHw/search

And 'struth - my friend Judy!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=g7LEnDYDgBQ&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F1PLs_FNAEk&feature=related

 

[Gervase]

Illustrious friends indeed!
OK, though, I'll trump that with the original sung in Cornwall: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a0xc-xSeRIQ
And there's more Hark, What Music Fill Creation and Sapphire Throne.
Knocks the spots off Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

 

[Nemesis]

Just found it! Great minds!!!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a0xc-xSeRIQ

 

[Gervase]

...and this version of While Shepherds.. is almost note-for-note the same as the Sheffield version. In North Yorkshire it's done to the tune of Ilkley Moor, and works very well too.

 

[Nemesis]

And:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kgO2JtTgn2M&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7L1KfrO45tc&feature=related

The Copper Family!

 

[Nemesis]

And here's our bit of local tradition, sadly the past couple of years we have been fenced off just in case we get so drunk we fall in the fire, although when the wind blows and the flames swirl around the square it's all still a bit scary!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ5JVBPfqgM&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WejMLpBeAQM&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AdSqwWvSejQ&feature=related

And blimey - Halty makes it global!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MUvitbk2Rlw

 

[Gervase]

The Allendale barl thingy looks fun, and a great use for old Christmas trees. I'll have to see if I can introduce something like that in our village for Calennig. Though why some folk have to wear high-visibility vests when everyone else is wearing high-visibility costumes eludes me! H&S gone mad, as the Daily Wail would doubtless say...
Bizarrely, top of the 'related videos' list on the Tony Storey clip was some mad bint supergluing fag buts to some half-drunk boyfriend. You're a very strange lot in the borders!

 

[Nemesis]

Actually this sound track on this one is a bit more like it - that 'computer generated muzak' in the other vid is far too sedate and tuneful!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Uarrq4aK2hI&feature=related

Actually yes - the H and S thing is very recent, we have managed not to get burnt for all those previous years! It's a lovely night though, all a bit rowdy but nicely so, and some of those taking part carrying the barls have done so for many a year, and handed the tradition on from father to son.

It featured in Country Life this week (OH buys it for the Posh Totty) so maybe we will have a better clarss of drunken reveller this year?


Yes, it's a mad world round here... although we are not really Borders you know. Few miles off.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QgrUPCLm5Us&feature=PlayList&p=9301D0D776D6E84F&playnext=1&index=10

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OxKptl1-b8Q&feature=PlayList&p=E1CEDC578CD7D748&playnext=1&index=84

Round here we have musical instruments, not weapons of war like a bit further up:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ATVcOxJWdFM&feature=related

(Ask Piper - he will tell you if he reads this!)

 

[plumbers mate]

We're a hot headed lot up here.

It's 30+ years since I was at Allendale at New Year - it rained and was a bit smokey but still the sort of spectacle everyone should see sometime.

 

[Nemesis]

From the most recent SALON, the Society of Antiquaries news:

http://www.sal.org.uk/salon/

Meeting report: Christmas Miscellany

Our former General Secretary, Dai Morgan Evans, used to remark on the speed with which innovations become traditions, and it was Dai himself who invented the Christmas Miscellany meeting that is now so firmly embedded as a Society tradition that Christmas does not begin for many Fellows until Burlington House is filled with the spicy scent of mulled wine and mince pies.


At this year’s meeting, there was yet another innovation that might yet become a tradition: the sound of people singing. First Tim Darvill spoke about the origins of the Cirencester Excavation Committee, born in that very room on 16 December 1958, with Professor Ian Richmond, then the Society’s Vice-President, in the Chair. Salon’s editor then spoke about the ‘Golden Years’ of Cirencester archaeology, when excavations in the town served as a nursery for the archaeological careers of many people who are now at the top of the profession.


He observed that Cirencester diggers had once hit the newspaper headlines for their bad behaviour: not sex, nor drugs, not even rock and roll, but folk-singing: as the Daily Sketch (forerunner of the Daily Mail) reported in one 1970s edition, the good people of Cirencester took exception to ‘Diggers’ Ditties’ being sung around the campfire until the early hours of the morning; very early one morning they took revenge by visiting the diggers’ campsite and waking everyone by banging pots and pans. That served as the cue for the first song of the evening — sung to the tune of ‘When this lousy war is over’, the Cirencester diggers’ anthem (written in 1972) concluded with the verse: ‘When this lousy dig is over, there’ll be no more barrowing for me; I’ll go home and put my feet up, and watch Barry Cunliffe on TV’.


Neil Holbrook, Chief Executive of Cotswold Archaeology (CA), the successor body to the Cirencester Excavation Committee, then brought the story up to date showing a map of England (‘or the “Greater Cotswolds”, as CA staff like to call it’) showing all counties where Cotswold Archaeology has worked in the last ten years. Neil concluded by presenting a copy of the newly published Cirencester Excavations Volume VI to our Fellow Alan MacWhirr, in recognition of his service and commitment to the archaeology of Cirencester as Director of Excavations during those golden years.


The serious singing then began with Yvette Staelens, who gave an account of her work following in the footsteps (or, rather, bicycle tracks) of Cecil Sharp, filling in the background to the traditional songs and dances that he collected before the First World War. Fellows all relaxed when Yvette sang one fine example, but furtive glances were shot towards the exit when Yvette announced that it was the turn of Fellows to sing a song. Very soon one could tell which Fellows had been brought up with ‘Singing Together’, campfire songs or Saturday mornings at the ABC Minors — the ones for whom communal singing holds no fears, and who now opened their mouths with gusto to sing ‘The Two Magicians’, a song about a shape-shifting maiden who turns herself into various birds, animals and insects in order to escape the amorous clutches of a ‘nasty, husky, dusky, fusky, musky coal blacksmith’, who outwits her in every verse by changing himself into an appropriate predator.


Judging by the comments after the meeting, the singing was a great success, and Fellows would like more meetings with a musical theme. Given the large number of Fellows who are scholars of music and performers of international renown, it ought to be possible to put on a decent show: perhaps even starting a new tradition of a musical meeting once a year.

(Ah yes - the ABC Minors! Happy days!)

 

[Edwardia]

I refuse to have candle bridge lights, flashing multi-coloured Christmas treelights and any exterior lights whatsoever. This certainly puts me in a minority in my street, which has Santa Stop Here signs, Father Christmasses scaling house walls, and a multitude of twinkling icicle lights etc. Lest I sound Scrooge-like, I insist on the biggest Nordmann we can find and have a long string of small white Christmas lights and as many red or gold baubles as I can cram on.

 

[piper]

Round here we have musical instruments, not weapons of war like a bit further up:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ATVcOxJWdFM&feature=related

(Ask Piper - he will tell you if he reads this!)

He just has - a bit late!

Thanks for the link, Ev hinny. By! Wor Pauline's a canny piper, an' no misteak!

 

[Nemesis]

Shi sortainly is, pet!