A Lancashire Grace

 The Oldham Tinkers have a new album out!

It's their first for 42 years!

Andy Kershaw wrote the sleeve notes for the album.

I bought it because I like their version of a song about Peterloo (which does not appear on this album), and I'd heard a snippet of the first song on the album, Alphin, a gentle song about a hill near Manchester.

I was pleased to find that the album also includes Remember Annie Kenney.  She was a working class Suffragette leader from Saddleworth, close to Oldham, and there is a statue of her in Oldham centre.

Another song, Ten Oldham Men (No Pasaran) commemorates the ten men from Oldham who volunteered for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and Peace Be Upon You (As-salamu Alaykum) celebrates the multi-ethnic background of the Oldham community.  Other songs are settings of dialect poems by Cliff Gerard, Harvey Kershaw and Edwin Waugh, and the album finishes with It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

The artwork on the album, sort of Cubist? in light blue, is by Peter Stanaway.

It's a lovely album, and I hope they don't wait another 42 years to do another one.

Merlin's Isle of Gramarye

There was a record and CD sale in the Buttermarket during Hay Festival, and I always go along to see if there's anything interesting and folky - so this title leapt out at me.

Merlin's Isle of Gramarye is a collection of Kipling's poems from Puck of Pook's Hill, put to traditional music. It's by Peter Bellamy, and apparently it's a second collection (so now I'll be looking out for the first one).
Peter Bellamy is joined on the CD by Dik Cadbury, Nic Jones, Dolly Collins, Peter Hall, Chris Birch and Anthea Bellamy, and the songs include Puck's Song, Eddi's Service (the one where the priest says the service to the animals who are the only congregation in his remote little church), St. Helena, The Song of the Red War Boat, and the Smugglers Song.
I think Kipling would probably have been pleased to hear his words set to English folk music, but I did wonder about some of the choices. For instance, shouldn't the Harp Song of the Dane Women be sung by, well, women?

Many years ago, I became aware of the filk songs of Leslie Fish, and others who then put out cassette tapes through Off Centaur. Leslie Fish also adapted the poems of Kipling, and they're now available on CD - as soon as I re-discovered them, I sent off for them, having lent my precious cassette to a folk singing friend who never returned it.
She does Harp Song of the Dane Women too, and the Song of the Red War Boat which, in her hands, has a more emphatic beat as if the singers really are rowing through a storm to rescue their master. She also does the Roman Centurion's Song (which always brings me to the point of tears), and the Female of the Species, and many more.
I have Our Fathers of Old, where she performs with Joe Bethancourt and Kristoph Klover, and Cold Iron, where she performs with Catherine Cook.

I've known the Leslie Fish tunes for a very long time, so I tend to like them better because of the long familiarity, but the Peter Bellamy songs are an interesting different take on the poems, and I'll be listening to them again.

Fishe or Fowle

I saw a recommendation for a CD on Twitter a while ago, and it sounded interesting enough for me to order the CD.
It's traditional music at its finest, performed by Kate Fletcher and Corwen Broch, on a variety of interesting and obscure instruments such as the Kravik lyre, Trossingen lyre, Saxon lyre, the slovisha gusli (whatever that might be!), Welsh crwth and pibgorn, bagpipes and more. And some fine singing as well. They even include a list of the instrument makers who made the instruments used on the CD - and in the list of people they thank, they include "the trees and animals whose dead bodies made our instruments".
There are two CDs in the sleeve. The first has a variety of songs such as The Seal-Woman's Sea-Joy and other songs about seal-folk, the Song of the Travelling Fairies, and the title track Fishe or Fowle - a song about shape shifting.
The second CD is one long epic The Play o'de Lathie Odivere, sung once with musical accompaniment and once without. The song was first collected in the Orkneys in the 1800s, but the tune was collected in 1938 in Orkney by Professor Otto Andersson of Finland.
It's a quite magical album - it certainly transported me to another world while I was listening - and it can be found at www.ancientmusic.co.uk

Stephen Quigg, Scottish folk singer

I have a cassette (yes, a cassette tape!) which is called Catch Me If You Can, by Stephen Quigg. Way back in 1985, I took my gran on a coach tour to Scotland, and on a couple of nights, when there was no entertainment laid on in the hotel, we went down into the small town (I think we were in Mallaig) to a local pub to listen to a young folk singer.
The set was the same both nights, but we really enjoyed ourselves, and I bought the cassette.
Last Wednesday at the acoustic evening I go to, one of the singers had been singing Scottish songs, and I sang The Dark Island, which I had learned from this cassette. I thought, for a bit of fun, I'd learn the words of Working for McBraynes, the song Stephen Quigg wrote about the ferry company in Scotland, to sing next time George and his friend came along.
So today I picked up the cassette and wondered what had become of Stephen Quigg - had he ever made it as a folk singer? What was he doing now?
I found his website straight away - it's a fairly unusual name, after all - and yes, he did make it as a folk singer. He joined a band called the McCalmans, and now sings with his Danish wife Pernille as The Quiggs. His website is www.stephenquigg.com
So now I'll have to buy some of his back catalogue - and I'm definitely going to learn Working for McBraynes!

Medieval Welsh Instruments

When I first invented the character of Mal Petroc, I made him a harper - because that's what everybody does, when they're seventeen and don't know much about history, and want to write about a musician.
If I was thinking about it today, I could choose from a far larger range of musical instruments, and today I discovered a new one - the pibgyrn! (other spellings are available!)

Here's a selection from the maker Moch Pryderi.

I was at a craft fair called The Big Skill, and one of the stalls was an instrument maker who had one of these. At first, I couldn't work out how to play it, because it seems to have a wide horn on each end. He showed me the reed (like a clarinet) inside the smaller of the two horns, and blew down it. He said it's like a Scottish bagpipe chanter, and can be fixed to a bag in the same way, though with a gentler sound. The pipe in the middle is made of elder wood, and the ends of sheep horn, and it was a thing shepherds could make while they were out on the hills, from readily available materials.
He also had a crwth, which is sort of a medieval Welsh fiddle - but he said that, when he came to make his first crwth he realised that it's a very different instrument to the violin. The bowing technique is different, and the aim seems to be to make a droning background sound for other instruments, such as the pibgyrn, to play melodies over the top. I once heard a crwth player, on Radio 3, and it is a very different sound to a violin - in fact, players back in the middle ages were told that they should not strive for a sweet sound. The chap on Radio 3 was playing as accompaniment to a singer, who must be the only Jamaican lady who can sing in medieval Welsh!

A crwth and pibgyrn

A Free Man on Sunday

Here's another of the byways of history that is easily passed by - the mass trespass of Kinder Scout.
It seems strange now to think of the Ramblers' Association as a radical communist movement! Yet in the late 1920s and 1930s a walk in the countryside could be met by hostile farmers and gamekeepers with shotguns, and there was a militant left wing group of ramblers calling themselves Red Grouse. The working people from the industrial towns of the north wanted to get out on their days off to fresh air and countryside, and the landowners wanted to keep the walkers off their land, even where public footpaths existed.
The differences between the two culminated in the mass trespass on the moorland around Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932. Trespass was not a criminal offence (and still isn't), but half a dozen men were sent to prison for between two and six months after violent scuffles with the gamekeepers who were trying to keep the walkers off the mountain. The moors were kept for grouse shooting at the time, and were owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Undeterred by the threat of prison sentences, ten thousand ramblers gathered a few weeks later for a walk up Winnat's Pass, nearby.

The only way most people get to hear about this now is through Ewan McColl's song The Manchester Rambler, which has the refrain: "I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday" and includes a verse where a walker argues with a gamekeeper:
"well, he called me a louse, and said 'Think of the grouse'". Most of the ramblers who went on the mass trespass came from Manchester.
There's also an excellent children's book about the mass trespass by Fay Sampson called A Free Man on Sunday - she also wrote the Pangur Ban series for children, a Celtic fantasy involving a white cat, an Irish monk and an Irish princess - and a magical dolphin. She's also written Arthurian fantasy and (more unusually) Sumerian fantasy based around the goddess Inanna.
The mass trespass was the first event in the struggle to open up the countryside to the public, and paved the way for the first National Parks, which were created after the Second World War. The Right to Roam is now enshrined in law, in the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act. On the 70th anniversary of the mass trespass, a commemorative walk was held, and the present Duke of Devonshire apologised for the actions of his grandfather in 1932. Benny Rothman, who was one of the leaders of the mass trespass and was sentenced to six months imprisonment for his part in it, lived to see the Right to Roam legislation - he died in 2002 at the age of 90.

Spirit of Albion

There's a record/CD/DVD shop down a local alleyway which often has interesting things in it. The last time I was in there, I caught a glimpse of a film called Spirit of Albion, which featured the music of Damh the Bard. I've been following Damh's blog, on the sidebar as The Bardic Blog, for some time, and I like his music a lot. I've also seen a video of him performing his song "The Sons and Daughters of Robin Hood" at the barricades at Balcombe, during the anti-fracking protests.
At first, I thought it would be a music video, but when I got it home I realised it was a film. It's an extremely low budget film (one of the characters wears her own wedding dress as a costume), and it is based on a youth theatre production - which shows in the way some of it is written, but the story is good enough to transcend the slight "staginess". It was performed at Witchfest, too, and was well received there.

Three people with problems meet in a wood, brought there by the Old Gods, who appear and disappear as the story goes on. The actors playing the gods are excellent - Arianrhod (Lucy Brennan) narrates, and Ceridwen, Herne, the Morrigan and Robin Goodfellow also appear (Joy Tinniswood, Sean George, Joanne Marriott and Redvers G Russell). There are also some battle scenes filmed with re-enactors.
The music is excellent, and really complements the action - I particularly liked Grey and Green, the song about Herne. In fact, I liked the music so much that I went online and downloaded the album after I'd watched the film.
What surprised me about finding the film secondhand in the first place is how new it is. It was only released in May 2012, and there weren't a huge number of copies made. So how did it make its way to a small shop on the Borders of Wales so quickly, I wonder? Maybe I was meant to find it!

However, the good news is that they did well enough that they are now working on a new film, Tales of Albion. Sean George will be returning as Herne (with bigger antlers - they joked that they'd been watering him over the winter!). There's a Scottish section to this one, and also a Robin Hood section, and more information can be found on the Facebook page for Spirit of Albion.

Psalteries

When I was at Llancaiach Fawr the other day, the young man taking the part of the music master played a bowed psaltery for us as he explained about his job of providing music in the house and teaching the daughters of the Colonel. It's a fascinating instrument, triangular, with each string running a bit further up the middle of the instrument to the top, and each string tuned to a single note. It sounds, and looks, wonderfully medieval. I had a vision of myself, sitting on camp when I was tired of spinning, making music by the fire.
When I got home, I did a little research, and found to my disappointment that the bowed psaltery was invented by a German school teacher in 1890.
However, down in the kitchen of the manor house, they had another sort of psaltery on display. This one was known as a "pig's snout" psaltery, and the strings were plucked with a feather or the fingers - and that one really was medieval. There were pictures from medieval manuscripts of people playing them. I had a listen to one being played on YouTube, and it sounds very like a harp - in fact, I saw it referred to as a lap harp as I looked further.
This looked far more promising.
Then I started looking at websites for musical instrument makers. Psalteries count as folk music instruments, and seem to be quite popular in the United States. They also start at a rock bottom price of around £80, plus the postage and packing from the States, which is quite high.
I am not a musician. One of the things that attracted me to the idea of a bowed psaltery is that everyone said that it was extremely easy to play. There is no point in me spending out in excess of £100 for something which will look nice on the shelf, but which I will not be able to get the best use out of as an instrument.
However, similar instruments are marketed as toys. Obviously, they don't produce the same quality of sound, but all I want is something to plunk away at by the campfire - and some of the toy psalteries come with tunes printed out on a piece of paper that you push under the strings, and you follow the dots to make the tune.
I can do that.
It should arrive next week.

Welcome to Sherwood!

It's one of the great foundation myths of England (the other is King Arthur, the just king) - the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, bold Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. He's one of my favourite fictional characters - I grew up loving Errol Flynn and Richard Greene in the role, and I enjoyed the addition of paganism in the 1980s Robin of Sherwood (Richard Carpenter, the creator of Robin of Sherwood, is probably also responsible for all those Muslim characters who have cropped up in films ever since, with his inclusion of Nazir in the band). I was delighted to see Captain Picard as Errol Flynn in the Next Generation episode Qpid (though the best line in that episode went to Worf, and his "Sir, I protest. I am not a Merry Man.")

The point is that there is a strong undercurrent in the British psyche about fairness, and standing up to tyranny and unfair taxes.

That's why I was delighted to stumble across the blog of Damh the Bard, at www.paganmusic.co.uk/blog - it's called The Bardic Blog, and on 2nd April, he posted a free download of a song called The Sons and Daughters of Robin Hood. It's a protest song against our present Sheriffs of Nottingham and Prince Johns, and I think I've found a new favourite folk musician.
His blog is well worth a read, too, for anyone interested in Paganism.