A Folk Song a Week

The short version…

Download ‘Shepherds Arise’ from https://andyturner.bandcamp.com/track/shepherds-arise

All proceeds will be donated to Cancer Research UK.

Download the track on Friday 5th December, and every single penny will go to the charity, as Bandcamp will be waiving their usual commission.

The longer version…

For me, Christmas and communal singing have always been inextricably linked. Whether it’s carol singing with friends door to door, busking in Oxford city centre with West Gallery choir the Christminster Singers, taking part in a rousing pub session, or Magpie Lane’s annual Christmas concerts, singing carols lustily with other people is at the heart of what I love about Christmas.

As December 2020 approached, the prospect of a Christmas where we weren’t able to sing with others was not a happy one. So, given that we were having to do almost everything virtually at that time, I decided to assemble a virtual choir. My choice of song was simple – it had to be ‘Shepherds Arise’, from the repertoire of the Copper Family, and my favourite carol since I first encountered it almost 50 years ago. I wrote out an arrangement, prepared a backing track, and invited a bunch of friends to record themselves singing one of other of the parts. Almost everyone I asked came up with the goods. There were people I had sung with at school when I first got interested in folk music; fellow members of Magpie Lane and the Christminster Singers, who I would in normal circumstances have been singing with that Christmas; and a handful of professional singers and musicians who I’ve got to know through the folk scene – Jon Boden, Jackie Oates, Jim Causley, George Sansome and Ian Blake. I stitched together all the parts – there were twenty individual singers in all, some of whom had recorded more than one take – and made the finished track available as Week 300 of my A Folk Song A Week blog. As I wrote at the time

I reckon we’ve captured the spirit of a really good carol-singing session – the kind of session I love to be part of, and which we’ll all be missing this year (although, as one contributor has quite rightly commented, “I ain’t never been to a pub carol-session as tight as that before!!!”).

Five years on, it still sounds good to me, and the track is now being released on Bandcamp as a charity single – all proceeds will be donated to Cancer Research UK.

Download the track from https://andyturner.bandcamp.com/track/shepherds-arise

Download the track on Friday 5th December, and every single penny will go to the charity, as it’s a Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp waive their usual commission.

Why Cancer Research?

We all know someone who has had cancer. Thankfully, with advances in medical science, the chances are we know someone whose cancer has been successfully treated (I’m fortunate in being able to count myself in that group). But sadly most of us will also know at least one person who was not able to defeat the disease. Cancer Research UK is the world’s largest independent cancer research organisation, actively working to prevent, detect and treat over 200 types of cancer.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to the original recording.

Singalong-a-Shepherds

You are encouraged to sing along to the recording at home – or even to download the harmony parts and sing ‘Shepherds Arise’ with your own friends or carolling group. Sheet music, a backing track, and various other resources are all available in this shared Google Drive folder.

There’s also a YouTube video where you can see exactly where you are in the score as you sing along.

50 years a folky? Well, that’s maybe not strictly accurate, but 50 years ago today, on 13^th November 1975, something happened which not only changed my musical tastes, but fundamentally altered the way my life would develop. And it all came from watching Top of the Pops…

I was 15 years old, and although my parents were absolutely not into pop music, I usually tried to watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening. That particular evening the programme started at ten past seven, and was presented by Noel Edmonds (thank you BBC Genome project). The entertainment began with glam-rockers Hello miming to ‘New York Groove’, then George Mccrae miming to ‘I Ain’t Lyin’. This was followed by Pan’s People dancing to ‘This Old Heart Of Mine’ by Rod Stewart, providing a bit of Dadisfaction, as the Chart Music podcast would say. Then we got ‘Happy To Be On An Island In The Sun’ by Demis Roussos, ‘Why Did You Do It’ by Stretch, ‘God’s Gonna Punish You’ by The Tymes, and a video of ‘Darlin’’ by David Cassidy, who, at 25 years old, was already past the peak of his UK teen idol chart success. Following Cassidy came Justin Hayward & John Lodge with ‘Blue Guitar’, ‘Right Back Where We Started From’ by Maxine Nightingale, and ‘All Around My Hat’ by Steeleye Span. To finish, we saw a video of that week’s number 1 (of course), the re-released ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie, and finally ‘Rocky’ by Austin Roberts played over the closing credits.

The foregoing information comes, not from my memory, but from the Top of the Pops Archive online. I have to say, I have very little recollection of most of those songs, although I had bought a 7” vinyl copy of ‘Space Oddity’, with ‘Changes’ and ‘Velvet Goldmine’ on the B-side. The performance which really grabbed my attention that night was, of course, ‘All Around My Hat’. Oddly, I remember thinking “this is folk music”, even though at that time I had very few reference points for knowing what folk music was (I’d seen morris dancing once or twice, I’d probably seen the Spinners on TV – although they never floated my boat – and I’d seen a bunch of sixth formers at school singing ‘The Nutting Girl’). Next day at school, as was customary, the previous night’s TotP provided a basis for start of the day conversation. On saying that I’d really liked the Steeleye Span song, my best friend Mike announced that his Dad had a copy of one of their earlier records, and he’d see if I could borrow it (Mike’s Dad Trevor Eaton was a teacher at the school, and a really good teacher too, although at that point I don’t think I’d ever been in his class). And so it was that a few days later I went home clutching a copy of Steeleye’s 1972 LP Below the Salt. I may not have been hooked after just one listen, but I doubt that it took more than a couple of plays before I’d decided that this was the best thing I’d ever heard. A few days after Christmas, I went to W.H. Smith in Canterbury armed with some Christmas present cash (or more likely, I suppose, a record token) and came home with a copy of the All Around My Hat LP. There’s some jolly good tunes on there (the vocal harmony plus French horn arrangement of ‘Cadgwith Anthem’ is absolutely sublime), but I think I recognised immediately that it wasn’t as good as the less poppy, more folky Below the Salt. A few weeks later, browsing, as I often did, through the record racks in The Turntable (later Richards Records) in Bank Street, Ashford, I found a copy of Ten Man Mop. Sadly this was not the gatefold sleeved original issue, but even so it was still an arresting cover, and the music within was just great. I liked what some people have disliked about the album – the fact that it’s divided roughly 50/50 between tracks that are more or less acoustic, and others where Martin Carthy straps on his electric guitar and the band delivers wonderfully brooding, atmospheric arrangements of songs like ‘Gower Wassail’, ‘Captain Coulston’ or – the greatest of them all – ‘When I was on Horseback’. That record introduced me to Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings, both of whom would crop up over and over again as my explorations of folk music continued, and it remains my favourite Steeleye album to this day.

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about how I moved on from Steeleye Span to Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, The Chieftains, Planxty, and The Watersons (that man Carthy again) before realising that there was no 18+ age limit on joining the local public library’s record section, which meant that I was soon listening to the cream of the 1970s UK folk revival (Carthy, John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris, Nic Jones, Dick Gaughan, Shirley Collins etc. etc.) but also field recordings of singers such as Harry Cox, Thomas Moran, Bob and Ron Copper, and Pop Maynard. And in a lengthy blog post accompanying the song ‘The Barley Raking’ I talked about how I started singing in harmony with my friend Mike – our friendship and singing going very much hand in hand for several formative years (if you really want to immerse yourself in reminiscences about my formative years, and the importance of harmony singing in particular, there’s more in these blog posts: Week 284 – Down in Yon Forest, Week 285 – Shepherds Rejoice).

In other words, I never looked back. And while, as an academic friend expressed it recently, my interest in folk music is not monomaniacal it’s fair to say that in many ways my interest in folk music defines me, and has defined the way my life has developed. (These days you’re as likely to find me listening to Country, or Soul, Reggae, Township Jive or Mbqanga, but when I’m not listening to music, it will almost always be a traditional tune that’s running through my head). Over the years I’ve made many friendships through music, I’ve got to sing and play with a whole range of talented and inspiring musicians and once, briefly, I appeared morris dancing live on Japanese TV (the internet has no record of this, but I believe it to be true!). Oh, and not least, I met my wife through folk music.

But what was it about that Steeleye Top of the Pops appearance that first drew me in? I’ve pondered on this frequently in recent years. My feeling is that, while as an arrangement of a traditional song, Steeleye’s version is, frankly, a bit crass, it helped that the production on the record (by Wombles hitmaker Mike Batt) was very pop-friendly. Sure, they were singing a traditional song, but the track wasn’t so outré that it was ever going to frighten the horses when presented to the Top of the Pops / pop music radio audience of the day, and that may well have made it more palatable to me as well at the time. However, while the accompaniment is pure Glam Rock, the fiddle and mandolin make it distinctive, and I’ve no doubt they helped to attract my intention. But primarily, I think, it would have been the voices that really made a difference. Maddy Prior has never sung in a heavily stylised, idiosyncratic folky way; but her voice is very much that of an English folk singer, not a pop singer. Add in the harmony backing vocals and, while the single doesn’t sound horribly out of place amongst the rest of the Top of the Pops fare, it also undeniably has something extra.

Until a couple of days ago I’d not listed to Hat in years. I’d completely forgotten that it actually starts with the whole band singing unaccompanied in harmony. Now, that sound definitely contributed to making the record stand out, attracting the attention of this 15 year old schoolboy. Subsequently, when listening to Steeleye albums, unaccompanied tracks such as ‘Rosebud in June’, ‘Cadgwith Anthem’ and ‘The King’ were often amongst my favourites (incidentally, another single I bought in 1975 was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which was Number 1 from late November that year into January the next, and one of the things I really liked about the record was the vocal harmony sections).

I’ve not found a video of either of Steeleye’s November 1975 Top of the Pops appearances on the web, but here they are miming ‘All Around My Hat’ in January 1976 on the children’s TV show Crackerjack.

I distinctly remember seeing that performance. I used to visit my grandparents most Friday afternoons on the way home from school and, while I was rather older by then than the intended audience for Crackerjack, the TV would be on, and my ears would definitely have pricked up on hearing Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart announce that Steeleye Span were on the bill.

Anyway, I’ve no idea if these ramblings will be of interest to anyone but me but, in conclusion, thank you Serendipity, and thank you Steeleye Span.

Regular visitors to this site will be aware that I sing quite a number of songs collected in my native county of Kent. My interest in songs and singers from Kent dates back to my 18th birthday when I was given a copy of Maud Karpeles’ collection The Crystal Spring. This book contains the song ‘Stroll Away the Morning Dew’, collected by Cecil Sharp from a singer called James Beale, at Warehorne – a village which I knew reasonably well, and which is just a few miles from Ashford, where I lived. That led me to visit the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, from where I returned with copies of around a dozen songs noted down by Sharp on that same collecting expedition in September 1908 – songs that included ‘The Woodman’s Daughter’ and ‘Cold blow and a rainy night’ from James Beale, and ‘Nobleman and Thresherman’ from Clarke Lonkhurst (who I now know was a distant relation of mine – his grandfather’s brother was the grandfather of one of my great grandmothers!)

While at the VWML I also listened to Peter Kennedy’s recordings of James’ son Albert made in 1954, including ‘The Moon Shines Bright’. This led to me interviewing Albert’s son Charles, and that led me to meet and record Charlie Bridger from Stone-in-Oxney in 1983. Since then I’ve benefitted hugely from the research done by George Frampton while he was living in Kent, and from the availability of the VWML Archive Catalogue online, and from being able to access online genealogical sites…

I’ve long said that my retirement project would be to put together a resource for those interested in songs and singers from Kent, and as my retirement came closer I realised that I’d better get on with it. And so over the last few months I’ve been building a new website, Kent Trad, which is now online at https://kenttrad.org.

The site has been launched as I approached the completion of Phase One – namely to cover songs which were noted down on paper, rather than recorded onto tape. The earliest that I’ve located have been from the 1760s, the most recent were collected in the very early 1950s. The site provides

• biographical details of the singers (including a few whose songs were collected in Sussex, but who had grown up, and almost certainly acquired their repertoire of songs, in Kent)
• transcriptions of the songs themselves (words and/or music, according to what the collector took down), available as downloadable PDFs.

Even for this first phase, I know that there’s more to add – in fact having publicised the site on some local history FaceBook sites I’ve already been given leads which have enabled me to supplement the information I’d originally provided on a couple of singers; while the most recent version of the Roud Index includes a version of ‘Dido Bendigo’ from a singer in Seal near Sevenoaks – this was a new addition to the Roud Index, and there’s no reason to suppose there won’t be more to come in future.

Do have a look at the site. Even if you’re not from Kent, you might find the odd version of a song you’re not familiar with, and fancy learning. And if you spot any errors, or if you have more information which I could add to the website, do please let me know, via [email protected].

Needless to say, the launch of the website has prompted me to record a few more Kentish songs to upload here – the first of these should be coming soon.