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Posted: 04-07-2013 13:12 Post subject:

Sounds interesting:

Jim Causley, Cyprus Well, album review
Folk singer Jim Causley's album Cyprus Well is a lovely musical tribute to Charles Causley, one of England's finest poets.
By Martin Chilton, Culture Editor online
11:26AM BST 04 Jul 2013

When Charles Causley turned 65, such was the regard for him that a group of leading poets – including Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and DM Thomas – contributed to a tribute book of verse. "He was a marvellously resourceful, original poet," said Hughes.

It will be 10 years in November since Causley died, at the age of 86. But he is not forgotten. Singer and pianist Jim Causley, a distant relative whose kin hail from the poet's original family village of Trusham in the Teign Valley, has recorded a lovely folk album, setting 12 of Causley's poems to music.

Causley spent most of his life in Launceston, Cornwall, where he became a teacher, and one of the highlights of the album is the joyful love poem My Young Man's a Cornishman, which includes the lines:

And I shall give him scalded cream,
And starry-gazey pie,
And make him a saffron cake for tea.

The whole album evokes the graceful charm and character of a true English gentleman from a bygone age. And Starry-gazey pie (left), incidentally, is a Cornish dish made of baked pilchards.

Causley was occasionally described as "the children's poet" and although he did write poetry for children, some of the finest in English, this label is unfair. He also wrote plays, short stories and opera librettos and was a prolific editor of collections of poetry. Yet even in his poetry for and about children, he did not patronise or sentimentalise them. He wasn't a primary schoolteacher for three decades for nothing, remarking once: "Children . . . you walk among them at your peril."

Setting the poem Timothy Winters to music has been done before, yet Jim Causley and his fellow folk musicians bring it to life with real zest, his deep baritone voice soaring as he sings:

Timothy Winters comes to school,
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters,
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

You can also hear the droll English humour that must have attracted the praise of Larkin in the lines:

Old Man Winters likes his beer,
And his missus ran off with a bombardier,
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin,
And Timothy's dosed with an aspirin.

The welfare Worker lies awake,
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup,
And slowly goes on growing up.

Cyprus Well was recorded in the house which gives the album its name, on the poet's own piano, which had not been played since the poet touched the keys a decade ago. The piano doesn't sound wonderfully in tune but has a village hall quality that seems fitting.

The album was recorded live and the musicians all bring deft touches to the work. On All Soul’s Day, for example, accompaniment is provided by Ceri Owen Jones’s harp, and Causley's voice blends well with that of Jones and Julie Murphy. Neil Davey (Bouzouki, fiddle), Pete Berryman (guitar), Bob Holland (piano), Keith Marshall (percussion), Carl Allerfeldt (fiddle) and Hilary Coleman (clarinet) all pitch in. On two tracks, Rattler Morgan and Sibard’s Well, the poems are recited rather than sung.

A Song of Truth, which is a poignant re-telling of the Christmas story, is a gentle treat but my favourite was the harmony version of the beautiful poem Who? a moving ode about memory, identity and childhood.

Causley was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, a rare honour, and the singer Jim says: "I did sense an approving presence when we were recording". Well, there's a lot to be approving about with this tribute, which is also helping the Charles Causley Trust in their mission to preserve the poet's Launceston home as a writer's retreat.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/cdreviews/10159170/Jim-Causley-Cyprus-Well-album-review.html

Posted: 25-07-2013 22:52 Post subject:

The Full English: on a mission to revive interest in our musical heritage
A modern-day folk supergroup, featuring Seth Lakeman, Martin Simpson and Fay Hield, has come together to highlight the riches held in the national archive of traditional song
Alexis Petridis
The Guardian, Thursday 25 July 2013 18.00 BST

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in London's Cecil Sharp House is accessed by a pair of swing doors, one of which features a window. The window, librarian Malcolm Taylor tells me, was "the first thing that I did when I took over here. I banged a hole in that door and put a window in." I can't help noticing that it's a bit lopsided. "Yes, it's not even square. It's a very badly done window."

The thing is, he says, it's a kind of symbolic window. The library is steeped in history. It's not just the books and papers it holds: it is the repository of England's national folk music and dance archive, home to documents recording the traditional songs, tunes, dances and customs painstakingly collected in the first half of the 20th century by a variety of enthusiasts including Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp themselves. It has its own place in musical history.

As Taylor points out, the room we are standing in has a strong claim to be called the centre of the 50s and 60s folk revival: "Everybody has come here – Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Martin Carthy, the Watersons. This was the source. This was where they got the songs from. One of the first days I came in, in 1979, Bert Lloyd was standing here. Looked like Paddington Bear." Indeed, when Taylor first arrived at the library as a student he felt intimidated – "I was confronted by these two opaque doors and I found it hard to push them open" – hence the sudden burst of DIY when he became librarian.

The subject of the library's symbolic wonky window has come up because it seems roughly analogous to Taylor's new project, The Full English, a bold Heritage Lottery-funded attempt to make the library's vast archive available to the public online: he talks excitedly about bringing the people's music back to the people. "When we first sat in the pub and discussed the project, I said that what I wanted to do is get this stuff out of this dusty room and made available to communities where it was first made. You'd get people from Lancashire complaining that they were interested in seeing the songs collected in the north-west by Anne Gilchrist, but they couldn't because they were here, in London, a long way away."

An accompanying album and tour draw on the collection and feature a kind of folk supergroup involving, among others, Fay Hield, Seth Lakeman and Martin Simpson: they were only supposed to be playing some songs at the launch party, says Hield, but then: "If you're going to put a set together, you might as well make an album, and then you might as well tour, so now it's turned into a bit of a beast." Very Happy

In which case, it fits perfectly with the database, which has turned out to be a bit of a beast as well. Taylor can wax on at length about the difficulties the project has faced – from securing lottery funding to deciphering the handwriting of the song collectors ("don't get me started") – but he seems understandably delighted with the end result, which allows users to search 19 different collections of traditional song, not merely by title, collector, subject or original singer, but by the location they were originally collected in. "If you think that some of the songs were collected just down the road from you, it sends a bit of a shiver," says Taylor.

"We appreciate and love our old art, our old architecture … but this music has just been neglected for so long," says legendary folk singer Shirley Collins, who moved to London in the 1950s in order to be near the library. Now 77, she has forthright views about everything from the nu-folk scene ("I call it no folk") to how traditional English songs should be sung. "Restraint is something I like, and it's something that's sadly missing in today's world," she sighs. "All this ghastly flashing about and emoting and shrieking." Cool

She notes with sorrow that while the revival of 60s folk in recent years might finally have rid the music of its baleful image problem, it hasn't translated into an increased interest in traditional song: listeners drawn to the sound of Pentangle or Sandy Denny or the remarkable albums Collins made with her late sister Dolly haven't gone on to explore the source material, a state of affairs she hopes The Full English might rectify. "I think, in this present day, when everything is so anodyne and so steamrollered, when everything comes out of one jukebox or whatever, it's marvellous to have this stuff there for people to be aware of. It's like digging out a Bronze Age hoard. Well, not a Bronze Age hoard, but some wonderful archaeological discovery. I really feel it's that important."

To Taylor, The Full English isn't so much a musical resource as a historical one. "The thing about traditional culture and song in particular is that embedded within it are the stories and the lives and the cultures of ordinary people," he says, calling up a selection of songs about Napoleon. A significant proportion of these, you can't help but notice, paint him not as a bogeyman at the head of enemy forces, but in a rather admiring light. "No, Napoleon was a bloody hero," nods Taylor. "There's a lot of radical history in these songs, stuff the establishment didn't want to be known. They're voices from below."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jul/25/full-english-revive-musical-heritage

Posted: 10-10-2013 21:38 Post subject:

I'm listening to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03c4h93/The_Folk_Show_with_Mark_Radcliffe_Show_of_Hands_in_session/

They just played a track by the Young Tradition, a trio I saw live in the 60s, and I gave one of their LPs to my girlfriend for a Xmas present. (Actually, I think her sisters liked it better than her, because they were into a capella* singing!)

Sadly, the two male members of YT have died - doesn't time fly?