root salad The New Penguin Book
And another Lloyd/Roud connection – a CD of songs from the New Penguin Book. Clare Button gets the low down.
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harles Seeger once said: “a folk song in a book is like a photograph of a bird in flight”. It is performance which gives movement and life to pages of words and music. The New Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs – published last year as an impressive successor to A L Lloyd and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1959 collection – has pages galore, but that doesn’t daunt the musicians who have recorded a selection of the songs. Brian Peters gives me chapter, verse and chorus on tackling the tome.
It began in a quest to be thorough. Receiving a copy of the book to review, Peters set himself the task of singing through the entire volume – no mean feat at 151 songs. So when the notion of a recording arose at Fellside (who had released an assortment from the 1959 Pen- guin), Brian was the obvious candidate. Aside from his zest and erudition as a singer of traditional songs, it certainly helped that he was “probably the only person around at that point who knew the book so intimately, apart from the edi- tors”. Forming a quartet with young English singers Lucy Ward, Bella Hardy and James Findlay, whose differing approaches Peters admired, was the easy bit. Now to whittle down 500 pages to 60 minutes…
The choice of songs and tunes in the (considerably slimmer) 1959 Penguin painted a more arcane and esoteric picture of the English singing tradition than was perhaps the case. The New Penguin editors Steve Roud and Julia Bishop instead want- ed to represent what people actually sang the most by tallying up which songs were collected the most frequently. Brian’s selection for the album (undertaken single- handedly “to avoid chaos”) displays admirable breadth in little space. No com- pilation of genuinely ‘popular’ songs could neglect Barbara Allen, by far and away the most widely collected in the English lan- guage. But as well as the big ballads there is also a good dose of rural bonhomie, plaints and pleas from widows, convicts and other unfortunates, a smidgeon of cross-dressing and a smattering of Benny Hill-humour (you’ll just have to listen to find out). The sixteen songs are divvied up with a cake-cutter’s accuracy: each singer gets an unaccompanied piece, there are some tasty duets and several rollicking col- lective efforts. Sometimes the song alloca- tions are neatly serendipitous: James Find- lay’s Barbara Allen was collected from Charlie Wills, like Findlay a native of Brid- port, Dorset. At other times, Peters cannily offset singer and song: “Lucy has an earthy, direct vocal style and is a great
story teller in song, so I just had to give her a big ballad. Bella has more of a ‘classical folk’ delivery, so I knew she’d do a great job of something like Seeds Of Love, but I also thought I’d give her something a little more music-hall. They’ve all come up with some special performances.”
This healthy sense of play makes for a vivacious listen. The arrangements are bright, energetic, free from any sense of enslavement to the printed particulars. “We remained reasonably faithful to the book”, asserts Peters, “but we didn’t fol- low every dot and dash. The texts are there to be lifted off the page.” Some texts go as far as leaping off, like his dynamic four-part score for the carol The Moon Shines Bright. This is no simple ‘greatest hits’; many versions of songs in the collection differ significantly from those made well-known by singers from the last few decades: Bonny Light Horse- man is probably most known now in the versions by Nic Jones and Tony Rose, but Bella sings a very different set of words and melody. It was great to be able to pre- sent alternative versions of songs that have perhaps become a bit standardised.’ Popularity is always capricious; these songs thrive on reconsideration and renewal.
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ombining comprehensive song notes with an emphasis on ‘singability’, The New Penguin straddles the potentially thorny divide between text-based academe and informal music making. Was there a similarly fine balance to strike on the album? “We didn’t want to alienate the purists but we also didn’t want to put off a younger audience. I knew I wanted to include some unaccompanied and some harmony singing, but I’m not hung up about style or instrumentation. Traditional song is raw material.” This raw material comes to life only in the mouths of singers, and the recordings will hopefully spur others on from page to performance. Brian envisions the album as a “pointer” for those who want to learn more: “I think that there are people who would buy the CD as a sort of sampler of English folk song. Hopefully it will send people to the book from the CD and vice versa”. It remains to be seen whether The New Penguin will function primarily as a work of scholarship or as a practical aid for those wanting to sing the old songs. Either way, this album has set Seeger’s bird in motion: it’s up to the rest of us to keep it airborne. F
www.fellside.com James Findlay, Bella Hardy, Lucy Ward, Brian Peters 23 f
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