Like ‘Official Business’ and ‘Making up the numbers’ this tune materialised during a work meeting. In this case, at Oxford Brookes University. I was working for Reading College at the time (July 2001) and this was an important meeting for the College. But it went on for hours, and hardly any of what was discussed required my involvement, or had any real impact on me. So, inevitably, a tune began to seep out of my unconscious.
I’ve always thought of it as a one-row tune, although it ought to sound OK on an anglo too.
Oh, and like almost everything I’ve recorded for this blog, it should be played slower than this.
Well wouldn’t you know it: you wait ages for a blog post and then three come along all at once. Looking in my digital vaults I found I had a quite a lot of stuff in my “ready to post” folder, so as I have a bit of time this weekend I thought I’d better get some of the tunes out there.
I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I suppose I learned it from the piano and concertina arrangement by Sue Harris and John Kirkpatrick on Plain Capers. Whether played as a song, a waltz, or a morris dance – this is just a lovely little tune.
I started dancing with Oyster Morris just after my 18th birthday, in the autumn of 1978. At the time Oyster men danced a bit of Adderbury, a bit of Bampton, and the three Badby dances printed in Lionel Bacon’s “Black Book”, namely: ‘Beaux of London City (aka ‘Shoorting’), ‘Shepherds’ Hey’ and ‘Old Black Joe’. I returned home after my first year at university to find that Adderbury and Bampton had been ditched in favour of Headington. But then, a couple of years later, Headington had gone as well. Henceforth, Oyster Men would dance only dances from Badby, or dances adapted / composed in the style of Badby. Which turned out to be a really good decision, and one which was far less constraining than one might have thought.
James Locke, one time dancer with Badby Morris. Photo from the Morris Ring Archive.
As well as the three dances in the black book (taken from Cecil Sharp’s Morris Dance Tunes), there were a number of other Badby tunes collected without an accompanying dance. Indeed, Bacon has a second tune for ‘Old Black Joe’, collected by John Black of Oxford University Morris Men. And if you look at the Morris Ring page for Badby you’ll see that there were several more tunes collected there. I’m pretty sure some or all of those tunes were passed over to John Jones, very much the driving force behind the team in the early days, by Roy Dommett, at a weekend workshop he ran for Oyster and Great Western at Selling Village Hall. It was definitely Roy Dommett who made up a dance for ‘Saturday Night’ – which had a really long chorus with no rests for any of the dances, and was incredibly gruelling (and not especially interesting to watch). John Jones took Roy’s idea, and turned it into a very effective coming-on dance. It may also have been Roy who made up a stick dance to ‘Old Black Joe 2’ – the one I play here; if so, it was John who inserted a stick-throwing sequence into the final chorus.
The final tune here is nothing to do with Oyster or Badby. It’s from Headington Quarry, via the poster boy for English anglo-concertina players, William Kimber. The 29th May, of course, is Oak Apple Day, celebrated (although not by me, I have to say) as the date of King Charles II’s return to London at his restoration in 1660.
Old Black Joe / Shooting / 29th of May
Played on C/G anglo-concertina
Edited 18th April to include a photo of Oyster Morris dancing ‘Shooting’ – I knew I’d have one somewhere.
‘Ostindiens velkomst’ is a Danish dance tune – a Sønderhoning in fact – which I learned from my friend Roger Claridge. That would have been back in the late 1980s when we played together in a dance band called The Jeffamati. Roger is a violin repairer and restorer, and a fine, very soulful, player to boot. It was sometime before I realised this was a dance tune – the slow way I play it here is as Roger taught it to me.
Roger Claridge
I was never entirely sure of the tune’s title. I thought it was ‘The East Indiaman’ but when I looked that up online, all I could find was the song of that name which I learned from Singing Together in the sixties, and posted as Week 46 of my A Folk Song A Week blog. So I typed the first few bars of the tune into folktunefinder.com – an incredibly useful resource – and found Welcome to East India. Also known as: Ostindiens velkomst. Now I don’t speak any Danish, but I’m pretty sure a better translation of ‘Ostindiens velkomst’ would be ‘Welcome to the East Indies’.
Incidentally, if you want a laugh, go to the Danish Wikipedia page for Sønderhoning, and accept the automatic translation into English:
The concept of rubbish honey
A “shredding honey” can be three things:
A man from Sønderho
A tune of honey
The dance rubbing
More constructively, if you’d like to hear and see this tune being played for dancing, by actual Danes, check out this video on YouTube.
When I moved back to Oxford in 1987 I was delighted to find that the Wednesday night English music sessions in the Queen’s Head at Eynsham were still going strong. I’d only been able to get out there a few times when I was a student, but now I went every week. Although billed as an “English” session, that described the approach rather than implying that all the tunes played were English. In fact the common repertoire contained tunes from all over the place: New Mexico, Louisiana, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Seychelles. And Sweden. ‘Gärdebylåten’ was one that I really took a shine to. When, back in Kent, I played it to members of Polkabilly, it turned out that at least one other member of the band already knew it – and had another tune, ‘Appelbolåten’, to go with it. I think it was Chris Taylor and/or Chris Wood, and they had these tunes from Will Atkinson and/or Willy Taylor.
Polkabilly with Will Atkinson, Whitby Folk Festival, 1989
So they entered the Polkabilly repertoire. And I started putting them together with the tune I was at that point still calling ‘The East Indiaman’, for solo folk club gigs. I distinctly remember playing them at The Cellar Upstairs in Camden, and afterwards asking Tom Paley how the titles should be spelled and pronounced. At that time I didn’t really know Tom. He was just someone I’d seen at the club playing Swedish fiddle tunes (usually a Swedish fiddle-tune followed by an American fiddle-tune). Later on, I came to realise that he was a living legend. And an amazingly lovely man too. It still feels odd, going to The Cellar Upstairs, or the Islington Folk Club, or the Musical Traditions club, and not seeing Tom sat in his usual chair in the corner. He’s very much missed.
Anyway on that particular evening I remember Tom telling me first of all that, as far as Swedish musicians were concerned, ‘Gärdebylåten’ was a really over-played, hackneyed tune (I don’t care – I still think it’s a great tune!). And then, so I wouldn’t forget he wrote down the tune titles and their pronunciation. And I still have that little piece of paper.
I see that he appears to have changed his mind about the second of the two, and decided that it should be ‘Stockholmslåten’. According to YouTube at any rate, it appears that the tune is known both as ‘Appelbolåten’ and ‘Stockholmslåten’. In either case it should be played considerably slower than I take it here.
One final folk club memory. After I played these at the Black Diamond club in Birmingham the club organiser, Paul Ryan, called out from the back “So what is the Swedish for Charlie Chaplin, then?”. You’ll (probably) get the significance of that remark after you’ve heard the final tune.
When that “name 10 albums that had a really big influence” thing was doing the rounds on Facebook, this was my selection on Day 2. At the time I wrote
This was the first LP I heard by an Irish folk group. I think I was lent a copy by Peter Carlton (it was definitely Pete who introduced me to Planxty – although he wouldn’t actually lend me his copy of The Well Below the Valley, as he said it was one of his most treasured possessions). Of course the Chieftains had been going for years, but I get the impression that it was this album that really raised their profile with the world at large – gatefold sleeve, liner notes by Alan Coren, even a Saturday evening teatime slot on BBC2. And Paddy Moloney started turning up on all kinds of records – most notably as far as I was concerned, on Mike Oldfield’s superb album Ommadawn. Quite rightly too – there’s nothing quite like a set of Irish pipes in the hands of a master piper.
My favourite Chieftains album is definitely Chieftains 3. That has some absolutely wonderful tunes: Delahunty’s Hornpipe, Sonny Brogan’s Mazurka, The March Of The King Of Laois, Lord Inchiquin… and of course the whole thing is rounded off with a great set of slides, one of two tracks to feature the delightful diddling of Pat Kilduff.
There’s also a couple of airs on the album which are led by the concertina playing of flautist Michael Tubridy. ‘The South Wind’ – ‘An Ghaoth Aneas’ – is one of these. And it definitely is played as an air. I was therefore somewhat surprised when I started going to sessions and found that people played it as a waltz. Now I know that taking a tune – from whatever source – and adapting it for the purpose at hand is one of the defining characteristics of the folk tradition. So I shouldn’t complain. I just think it’s a good air, but a rather boring waltz.
Michael Tubridy. Copyright Irish Traditional Music Archive.
The liner notes for Chieftains 3 say that ‘An Ghaoth Aneas’ “is attributed by Bunting to a Clare musician, Donall Meidhreach Mac Conmara”.
According to the Fiddler’s Companion the air, predictably enough, started life as a Gaelic song:
The late fiddler Junior Crehan (1908-1998) told a story about how the air was learned by the west Clare musicians. It seems that a ghost ship was bringing back to Ireland the souls of the Wild Geese (i.e. Irish exiles) who had been killed in battle. As the vessel proceeded around southwest Cork it was driven up the west coast by a southern breeze and the ghosts of the Wild Geese could be heard chanting this tune, which was picked up by musicians on the coast of Clare who witnessed the event.
Last Sunday, after a very busy week, I finally made time to get my concertina out and found myself playing all sorts of tunes I’d not played for ages. Including this one. Having played it once, I decided to get my handheld recorder out and get it down “on tape” (as it were). Must remember to play it more often – it’s a lovely little tune.
Squeezed Out 