Two tunes from Thomas Hardy’s family, both of which are included in the Yetties’ publication, The Musical Heritage Of Thomas Hardy.
‘Moss Roses’ is written out in 3/8, but on Under the Greenwood Tree, the first Mellstock Band LP, the band play it as a jig , and I’ve followed their lead. However this rather more florid version from the East Riding of Yorkshire does show how it could also be played as a waltz.
‘Tars of the Victory’ was part of a favourite Oyster Ceilidh Band set, although they called it ‘News of the Victory’, and played one crucial note at the start of the B music “wrong” (but that’s the folk process). The tune was published by London-based publisher William Campbell in 1808, in Campbell’s 23rd Book of New and Favorite Country Dances, & Strathspey Reels, for the Harp, Piano-Forte & Violin; with their Proper Figures as Danced at Court, Bath, Willis’s, & Hanover Square Rooms &c.
The Brave Tars of the Victory, and the Remains of the Lamented Nelson. Hand-coloured print by Thomas Rowlandson, December 1805. From the Royal Collection Trust.
’93 Not Out’ was written by mouth organ maestro Will Atkinson (born 1908). Regrettably I never heard him play it, but learned it from a slim volume with the catchy title of A Commemorative Book of Will Atkinson’s Tunes and a ‘wee’ Bit More put out in 2003 by Ernie Gordon. Will’s notes in the book say
This tune, as with a great many others, sadly never recorded, came about through my ‘doodling’ with the ‘moothie’. A musical pattern is accidentally formed and the melody is built up from there.
It was fortunate at that precise time in Jan 2001 that Alistair Anderson should pay me a visit at Horsonside, Wooler, and set the tune out to ‘dots’ straight away or else this tune would, like many others before, have drifted away in the wind.
I have to say that the title is as good, if not better, than the tune, one I am extremely proud to have achieved both ways.
I like to hear this tune played as a strict 6/8 March with a stately lilting tempo of a Highland Pipe Band.
Will lived to the ripe old age of 95, and I’m among many who felt a great sense of loss at his parting. There’s an obituary written by Alistair Anderson on the Guardian website.
As regards this tune, I too would like to hear this tune played as a strict 6/8 March with a stately lilting tempo. Listening back to this recording I seem – as so often – to have played it rather faster than I intended.
I wrote ‘The Plastic Turkey’ in December 2003, and looking around for a title seized upon an article by Mark Lawson in the Guardian from a couple of days earlier, where he wrote
In a revelation certain to be taught at schools of democracy and journalism for years to come, it has been revealed that the apparently appetising turkey that President Bush carried towards beaming troops last week in Baghdad had been genetically modified to a degree that would lead even the most profit-hungry farmers to protest. The bird was the kind of model used by butchers and Hollywood set-dressers.
Following this disclosure, the president is, unlike his political prop, stuffed: with a gap in the storyboards for his re-election commercials. A picture intended to say to viewers “The Eagle Has Landed”, in fact spelled out: “This Bird Never Flew.”
The fakery went further. The hoax roast in the president’s hands cannot even be claimed as a symbolic stand-in for the steaming birds that were actually served. Reports say that the US troops were given airline-style meals of pre-packaged meat.
In fact, the story that this was a fake turkey turns out to be fake news, and I’m happy to set the record straight, because actually Trump is right when he says “fake news is the enemy of the people”. It’s just that Trump is a delusional liar, who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it stared him in the face; while the news outlets that he accuses of peddling “fake news” are, by and large, just trying to report objectively to the American people and the world at large. So, anyone reading this who has a vote in the USA, please vote Trump out this November, for all our sakes. Meanwhile, enjoy the tunes!
President George Bush in Baghdad, Thanksgiving 2003, with a *real* turkey
I learned the first tune from the Topic double-CD I Never Played To Many Posh Dances. This features mostly Reg Hall’s recordings of Scan Tester, but also a couple of other Sussex musicians, including Jack Norris from Cuckfield, who played this schottische. Reg Hall writes
At 59, Jack Norris was twenty-odd years younger than his mates.s A foreman joiner and coffin maker by trade, he was friendly and humorous and loved the old songs, and new ones as well. He was a remarkable musician, the melodeon player that appeals to me more than any other I have heard. He could play any song-tune that came into his mind on his double-row C/ C sharp Hohner, and sing at the same time. It was as if the fingering came automatically as he opened his mouth. He was essentially a singer and his repertoire of old-fashioned dance tunes was very small. He had the commonly known Cock O’ The North and Keel Row, and a schottische, Another Cup of Coffee and a Little More Tea, but his best number was another schottische, which Mervyn [Plunkett] named the Brook Street Polka. He was usually reluctant to play his one and only stepdance tune.
The second tune is from English Country Music, the expanded CD reissue of the classic Topic “black album”. This tune, played solo by Walter Bulwer on fiddle, is one of the extra tracks not included on the original 1965 limited release, or the 1976 vinyl reissue. On the CD this is just listed – like the better-known Nos. 2 and 1 – as ‘Untitled Polka’. The attribution as ‘Walter Bulwer’s No. 4’ comes from the East Anglian tunebook, Before the night was out… (well worth buying from the EATMT website, if you don’t already have a copy). Like ‘Silverwings Polka’, this doesn’t really sound like a polka to me, although I’m not sure how I would categorise it – maybe as “barn dance” (which seems to cover a multitude of tune-types) rather than “schottische”).
Walter Bulwer during the ‘English Country Music’ sessions. Photo from the Musical Traditions website.
Squeezed Out 