I wish that Ralph McTell's version of his own song was still on youtube. His is one of the silkiest baritones in an musical form. This was something of a later hit for Fairport. It was the only good song on a less than pedestrian recording: Gladys' Leap.
Here it is performed by Fairport, played against clips from Far From the
Madding Crowd, although I suspect that some are also from Tess of the D'Ubervilles. It doesn't matter where they are from, because they work very well.
I stumbled on Fairport Convention while I was studying in Wales in the late 60's. Been following them since. Also crazy about Pentangle. Can't beat a band with Bert Jansch AND John Renbourn in it.!Jaqui McShee singing the high part.
Lord Franklin(traditional)
It was homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew
With one hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek that passage around the pole
Where we poor seamen do sometimes go
Through cruel hardships they mainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo with his skin canoe
Was the only one who ever came through
In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin among his sailors do dwell
And now my burden it gives me pain
For my long lost Franklin I'd cross the main
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live
Louise was written by Paul Siebel, I first heard him in the early 70's through Bonnie Raitt. I love his voice and his fine finger picking.
One of the most evocative songs is My Town of which this critic says:
Quote:
Equally affecting were tunes like the incisive small-town vignette “My Town,” one of the era’s few truly subtle anti-war songs. Siebel says the characters were “maybe second-generation people in America — ‘My town was fathered by orphans’– people who left their roots and are pining away in America.”
A figure of derision in the song is the blindly patriotic “Miss Delia,” but Siebel claims compassion even for her. “Miss Delia is also someone that you know and love, it could be our own mother. That’s part of our makeup also, to raise the flag, fight for our country, and be chauvinistic — what else are you protecting? When you protect your borders, are you being a chauvinist, are you being a patriot? Are you being a fascist, what are you being?”
I just recently put together a Pentangle play list on youtube.
I remember the morning I was awakened by what I thought was incidental music to a Shakespearean play. It was Amazing Blondel playing their Fantasi Lincolnshire on authentic Medieval instruments. You can find the band -- now bald although once with long locks a Merovingian king would have envied -- on youtube where someone commented that their music is "amazingly twee."
At that point, i was already a fan of Fairport Convention (I saw Fairport alum Richard Thompson about two months ago) and Steeleye Span. I would also come to love Malicorne (don't know if Gabriel Yacoub has been back to America since the time I saw him in the early 90s in Cambridge, MA) and Pierre Ben Susan.
My ex-husband and I saw what was perhaps a reunion edition of Pentangle at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge in the late 70s or early 80s. I remember where we lived, so it had to have been after 1978 but before 1983. The band was not getting along that night and it showed. Someone yelled at Jacqui to use a mike and she laughed, then filled the space with her voice on the next number.
About 15 years later, I saw Jacqui and John touring as a duo in a smaller setting. They were older and each had put on weight, which I thought flattered Jacqui who was so reed thin during the Pentangle days. (Someone on youtube, where yokels abound, commented that she had lost her looks, to which another person answered that she is her 60s and can not look like the 24 year old who began singing with Pentangle.) John was expansive and jovial, a sort of English Santa Clause and Jacqui was very approachable. I can only imagine that touring together is tense.
I think bands break up because of the tension of touring and because while partnerships are conducive to creativity, a partnership carried on too long runs out of ideas. "Flower Drum Song" is not "Oklahoma" and I bet that although neither came out and said it, that Lennon and McCarthy became sick of the sight of each other's faces.
I love Cruel Sister: I would drop the needle down on the beginning of this song over and over.
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plainoldme
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Fri 31 Dec, 2010 10:03 am
@panzade,
What panzade said!
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plainoldme
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Fri 31 Dec, 2010 10:03 am
@panzade,
I never heard of Paul Siebel. Thanks for the info. I tried to find out who wrote Louise.
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plainoldme
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Fri 31 Dec, 2010 10:16 am
While we have been talking about great English folk performers, I thought a nice addition would have been a song called Galloways, about the Galloway ponies that worked underground in the mines, written by Jez Lowe. However, Jez does not perform this early song of his much.
Born into a coal mining family from the North of England, Jez is younger than the mighty members of Fairport and Steeleye. He is influenced, however, by the same traditions that influenced the Beetles: English music hall and skiffle. However, in Jez' case, the addition of the traditional ballad takes his music in another direction.
While Galloways does not seem to be on youtube, the Bonnie Barque the Bergen is:
Bill Morrissey, the New England folksinger, played a gig at Passim in Cambridge last night, and sang this song, about winter and a marriage in its winter. If Robert Frost had been a musician instead of a poet, I think he'd have been proud if he'd written it.
