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47 f
“So there are other such…” he pauses, hunting for the appro- priate description, “other such ‘gentlemen’ as yourself?”
He says “gentlemen” but his tone implies “perfect idiots”. “Yes, there are others like me. Not many but a few. We’re all folk-song enthusiasts. Song collectors, I suppose.”
“Song collectors?” He nods and slurps his tea to hide a smile. I have an image of how he sees us – as tweed-clad fools, rushing around the countryside with nets like butterfly hunters and speci- men jars stuffed with songs.
“Will you sing?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You can have a song fer summer. A song away from its time and place is jist a purty ditty. Something for little girls ter warble. This is a song calling fer rain ter come before autumn. I need more sun and a bit o’ rain or these ’ere lambs will starve out ’ere on the hillside come winter. This ent no parlour tune. My father sang it ter me, and his father ter ’im. And I ent got no son, so I suppose I’ll ’ave ter sing it ter you. Collector or not. But don’t jist pin my song in a book, so he curls up at the edges like a dead thing.”
“All right,” I say, “I won’t.”
He closes his eyes and starts to sing. He calls to the wind and curses the rain and the sky and the cruelty of fate that leaves him out on the bare hillside while rich men snooze by their fires. His voice shakes with fervour, and there’s an anger, raw and fierce, and he is both the singer and the song. This isn’t a sentimental lament ruing some idealised past but a personal cry. The sound, which seems to grow from the soil itself, is somehow familiar, as though I’ve heard it before and forgotten. I want to catch hold of it, to fix this moment, and then he stops and it’s lost, but so am I.
“Come back in the snow, and I’ll sing yer another,” says Max, laughing, pleased at the effect his singing has had on me and I nod, dazed as a drunken man.
I stumble down the hill, ears ringing with music, both remem- bered and remade, as Max’s melody starts to re-thread its way into another piece, something symphonic, a shout of horns and then the shrill of a flute. It comes to me with a mixture of wonder and relief. I swear I hear a trumpet blasting brightly through the woods. The pleasure is rich and dark. It’s almost as I imagined sex would be. I’ve an idea at last and I think it might be something. I shout at the heather with great whoops of joy. I’ve boasted to girls in Cambridge bars that I’m a song collector and a composer when I’ve never writ- ten anything other than the odd ditty to amuse my brothers – the musical equivalent of a dirty limerick, not exactly a great symphonic work. But, oh God, this is different.
I shudder. Max’s melody moves through me like a pulse, already changing into something else. It has the heart of the shepherd’s tune but it catches in the wind and is blown wide. There’s a ripple of harps and beneath that a syncopated rumble of strings like river water moving through reeds.
I need to write it down. I run. A
nd finally, following the publication of the book, Natasha has launched The Great British Song Map together with a number of folk artists and partners in the South West (songwriter and local folk expert Tim Laycock, Halsway Manor etc ). It’s a community web project encouraging anyone with an interest in folk song and col- lecting to contribute to the map, posting songs, participating in podcasts and communicating their enthusiasm for the project to their followers.