Three good companions

I write hoping I’ll do it better today than I did yesterday. Mostly it’s just work, sustained by memories of music and knowing that YouTube can open up voices and instruments if things get tough. Or if I need to dawdle.

What caused the folk tune I Know Where I’m Goin’ to flit in? Who first sang it to me: my mother or Mrs LdP? I don’t know. The words are by esteemed Anon and include the affirmative “Some say he’s black but I say he’s bonny.”

Two of my characters, close to an argument, avoid confrontation and discover they like each other. It’s as good a time as any. I make a shocking choice, unleashing a quartet of sleekly dressed God men, singing a different tune, different words, happy to be going to heaven. I wish them a sincere Godspeed and turn to Maureen Hegarty who plaintively announces she has “stockings of silk, shoes of fine green leather”. A simple song but how rare is true simplicity. I can add nothing that would enhance it. Very short at 2 MIN 16 SEC.

From spareness to rich adornment: Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody by the thrilling German mezzo. Brigitte Fassbaender. A rarity in the concert hall since it’s only 14 min 52 sec long and requires a full orchestra and choir. Here it’s cut in two. But at least the second part CHOSEN HERE begins magnificently as the choir swells against the aviational solo voice and Brahms poses for us the tearful question: why did the Romantic period ever need to come to an end?

I believe Brigitte has retired. See her in her lovely pomp PRESENTING THE ROSE to the Sophie to end all Sophies, Lucia Popp, in Rosenkavalier

Folk - audible but undefinable

For me folk is a rag-bag of styles and subjects, some horrible (Morris dancing tunes, exaggerated nasality, primitive violins) and some moving (Crosby Stills and Nash’s eminently marine Southern Cross – see pic, certain banjo methods). I have never asked for a definition, simply used folk as a vague sort of dustbin. Certain folk songs seem to demand humanitarian approval – a bit like sorting garbage into separate bags – and this causes me to get nervous. Musically I like Joan Baez’s Blowing In The Wind but morally her insistence hints at direct debits for charity.

Often folk cries out for fun and the cry is ignored. Pete Seegar’s Little Boxes handles humour lightly and unexpectedly, whereas the sentiments of Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changing are often peevish and short-sighted.

Curiously, real English folk (D’ye Ken John Peel, Lincolnshire Poacher) caught leprosy in the fifties and is now a rarity. Or it may be these songs are victims of a delicate filtering system which favours imperishable melody and persuasive – usually simple – words. Lucy’s favourite earworm (and mine too, come to think of it), Did You Not Hear My Lady, still survives as does the shockingly poignant Tom Bowling.

Folk is most successful when its aims are clear. Down By The Sally Gardens (Love measured by age and experience), Ewan McColl’s The Shoals of Herring (An industry now disappeared), the Kingston Trio’s I Feel So Break-up (Perils of a hangover) all know what they’re about. Singers without real singing voices often opt for folk but usually compensate with some other quality: Kirstie MacColl (pathos), Jake Thackray (humour).

A folk song requiring a trained voice (My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose) ceases to be folk.