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On the various things you recorded before your first solo album, you’d done songs like Your Baby’s Gone Down The Plughole, and mostly contemporary songs with the Three City Four. But from the solo albums onwards, right the way through, it’s almost like you’d decided what you were going to do for the rest of your musical career…
Well no, I’d always had sympathy with the sort of songs I sing now. The reason for doing those songs on Hootenanny In Lon- don was that they were also in my reper- toire. Wally Whyton was the producer and said, “You will do these kind of songs – you’re the light relief”. And as I said, in a group with Leon, he’s the driving force – you use your energies to support him, because he’s a very interesting man to work with.
But you’ve said that you started out doing American songs around the coffee bars. Was there anybody in particular who was a great influence upon you, made you think “What I really would like to do is this”, or did the songs slowly creep into your repertoire until you realised that was what you wanted to concentrate on?
I can remember on a couple of occa- sions saying “I’ve had enough of them, out with that, this is very interesting.” There was one occasion in 1964, and I’d done the same about three years before that – I made a definite decision. I remember hearing Sovay and thinking “I want to be doing that”, probably it was Bert [Lloyd]. He’d been lurking ever since I was about sixteen, for one reason or another. There’s an element of mystery about it, and Bert was there. Bert was the one I found consis- tently interesting. He did everything; he annoyed, he upset, he did things that you’d think “No, that’s wrong, you can’t do that.” Then you’d find that you’d sub- consciously investigated it and it had stuck right deep in.
But there’s an enormous amount of mysteriousness in it. I went down to the Troubadour for the first time, having heard of the place a year or two before, and for no reason at all I went down there one night, walked in the door and heard this amazing noise. There was this man wrestling with this thing on the stage and
it was Seamus Ennis playing the pipes. Then he played the whistle and he sang, and it just stuck inside. The people that I saw by accident – Jeannie Robertson, Sam Larner – but what’s an accident? As I said, it’s all rather mysterious and I don’t really care to go into it, but for some reason I got drawn towards things. There were definite signposts, and they had a pro- found effect upon me.
The thing I remember about my first contact with traditional music was one of bewilderment. To hear Sam Larner singing Lofty Tall Ship – it’s a really peculiar tune full of funny little shifts. I think it’s gor- geous, but I remember being utterly bewildered by it. It’s the kind of tune that you find in traditional music that just breaks all the rules, but you find yourself completely taken over by it. That’s been an experience that has happened again and again over the years.
More than most singers, you’ve gone out and done your homework, your research, hunted things down and put a lot of songs into the general repertoire that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. Was there anything that originally set you doing that, like for instance wanting a repertoire of good songs that other peo- ple weren’t doing?
Well that was a part of it. But there was this general momentum – I sort of slid into it. I’d find myself with a chunk of repertoire that was redundant, thinking “I’m not really interested in that any more,” and shoving it to one side. I remember going to the Harrogate Festival and standing up and singing Sovay and The Two Magicians, and about four or five other things that I’d just learned and thought “Sod it, I’ll sing them all tonight”. And people came up afterwards and said, “You’ve changed your style, I don’t know if I like it.”
Was it the tunes or the words that had attracted you?
Well, at that time my background was as a chorister – I used to sing skiffle in cof- fee bars, but basically my training was as a chorister. There were rules, and when the choir was given a new piece of music, I could take a piece of Orlando Gibbons or a
The Three City Four: Martin Carthy, Marian MacKenzie, Ralph Trainer, Leon Rosselson
madrigal and sight read it. If you’d have put a folk tune in front of me, I couldn’t have sight read it – my sight reading was- n’t terribly good, but because I knew how Orlando Gibbons worked, I could guess the intervals. I knew more or less from what had happened what was going to happen, like you do if you’re singing a chorus in a folk club for the first time, you know where it’s going to go. But when Sam Larner was singing these tunes like Lofty Tall Ship, I found them bewildering. I got the Penguin book and read The Whalecatchers, which is another bizarre tune, from a man called Henry Hills in Sus- sex. But those tunes stick like a barb and you can’t get shot of them.
And when I heard Louis [Killen]
singing The Flying Cloud, I remember thinking “what a colossal waste of time,” because at that time I really wasn’t aware that songs carried a story that could unfold. A song was a lyric as far as I was concerned then, and if it told a story over six or seven verses, that was OK. Gradually it began to dawn on me that things didn’t have to be three minutes and snappy, for the BBC, but they could actually – and should – take their time to unfold. And I can remember Bert saying in ’64, although I didn’t really understand it at the time, that the remarkable thing is not how long a song is, but how short it is. It’s not forty verses long, it’s forty verses short. If you lis- ten to that song and consider the actual amount of time it’s talking about, the tale it’s unfolding, then if it can do it in forty verses when a film would take three hours, that’s pretty bloody good! And if you have to sit still for a quarter of an hour to listen to it, why don’t you? You’ll do it to a film for several hours, why not accord it the same courtesy?
So words drifted in later on, but that was because of my musical upbringing. It doesn’t occur to people that they can be entertained by having their minds stretched by a long story like Tam Lin or Long Lankin, Prince Heathen, or any one of them. And with a good ballad singer, the twentieth time they hear a song can often be better than the first, because you’re taking part in it. You can’t see Seven Brides For Seven Brothers that many times.
You’re the person who has probably been the most copied on the folk scene over the last two decades, either by just simply contributing songs to the repertoire, or at the other extreme being blatantly imitat- ed by many. How do you feel about peo- ple doing that?
It’s two-fold, isn’t it? On the one hand, you’ve come across a body of infor- mation and you’ve investigated it to a certain extent, and you’ve drawn certain things from it selectively. Fine. And you’ve then recorded it and you’ve become part of that body of information, so you expect that you’re going to be used. That’s OK. But I wish that the peo- ple who do that would actually go back a bit further. Instead of saying “Oh great, another Martin Carthy record,” they’d look at other ones, say Sam Larner or Walter Pardon, Joseph Taylor, any kind of traditional music.
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