I Wish There Was No Prisons Various Performers MTCD372 I Wish There Was No Prisons

I Wish There Was No Prisons Various performers MTCD372 I Wish There Was No Prisons Introduction: During late summer of 2015, Rod Stradling and I decided that it would be a good idea to issue all of the recordings that I had made of the Sussex folksinger Harry Upton on a single CD. Everything was going well until we discovered that we did not have room to include all of Harry’s songs on the single CD Why Can’t it Always be Saturday? (MTCD371). Two songs, Buttercup Joe and The Banks of Sweet Dundee were omitted and so we decided that a follow-up CD, containing these two tracks, would be needed. I also decided that the remaining tracks on this CD should be relevant to Harry and his songs. Accordingly, some of the songs are versions of songs which Harry sang, others are sung by people that Harry knew and, finally, we have songs that Harry would probably have recognised as being the sort of thing that he also liked to sing. Harry Upton was only one of two singers to have been recorded singing the song The Wreck of the Northfleet. The other singer was Johnny Doughty and we have included Johnny’s version here. I also decided to include a version of another of Harry’s songs. This was Young Maria, a version of the song Poison in a Glass of Wine which Harry called Near Arundel Town. I had recorded the song Young Maria from Louise Fuller (later Saunders) and, having made up my mind to have her on the album, I decided to include all of the other songs that I recorded from her. These are Green Grow the Laurels, Hopping Down in Kent, The Molecatcher and her short version of If I Was a Blackbird. Louise loved to sing, but, rather surprisingly, she only had a small repertoire of songs, unlike Harry and some of the other singers heard here. Louise Fuller/Saunders had met Harry Upton at local one-day singarounds in Sussex. He had also met the singer George Spicer and, as I said in the booklet notes to MTCD371, there was some kind of rivalry between the two singers. It seemed only fair that I should include some of George’s songs here and I have chosen versions of The German Clock Maker, Some n’Ham & some n’Eggs and an n’Onion, The Irish Hop-Pole Puller, I Wish There Was No Prisons and The Cunning Cobbler for this CD. Harry, Louise and George were all from Sussex, as were Johnny Doughty, George attrill and Fred Welfare. However, the majority of singers heard here were from the Cotswolds and the Thames Valley, areas where I was also actively song collecting in the 1960s and ‘70s. These singers are Percy Bridges, The Cantwell Family, Alice Green, Cyril Nunn, Freda Palmer, Son Townsend and Bill Whiting. William Harding, from Urchfont in Wiltshire, was slightly to the south of the Thames Valley; which leaves us with Fred Jordan, from Shropshire, and Ruth and Clare Pinner, then young daughters of a friend of mine who lived in the East End of London. Many of the songs heard here are versions of songs that Cecil Sharp would have called folksongs, while others come from the 19th - early 20th century Music Hall. A few songs, The Wreck of the Northfleet, Wonderfully Curious, Hopping Down in Kent and possibly The Ringers, are local songs which have seldom travelled far from their place of origin. To the best of my knowledge Cyril Nunn’s Tucker’s Feast song Wonderfully Curious has only been recorded from this singer. Many of these songs would not have been called 'folksongs' by the well-meaning Cecil Sharp and many of his Edwardian contemporaries. But ideas were changing. In the booklet notes to the Harry Upton CD I gave a quotation, made only a year after Cecil Sharp’s death, by Josiah H Combs and it bears repeating here: The collector should take down all songs that are the sides. In the early and mid-19th century the texts to Cecil exclusive property of the folk, whether they be traditional Sharp’s 'folksongs' appeared over and over on these or modern, of the Child type or not ... the modern folk- sheets and many 20th century singers still kept a few song (I use the word boldly) may one day perhaps have sheets in their homes. But, by the end of the 19th century, the interest for the future student which the traditional musical tastes had begun to change and singers were song now enjoys. Besides … it offers a partial solution increasingly singing songs which had come to them from for the origin of the traditional song. the Music Hall stage. Indeed, by the end of the 19th century printers, like the Such family of London, were In 2010 I wrote an article, titled Wonderfully Curious, for printing more music hall songs and parlour ballads than Musical Traditions. I had, of course, taken the title from so-called folksongs. So it was little wonder that the earlier Cyril Nunn’s fascinating song of the same name. In the songs were beginning to disappear from the repertoire of article I briefly mentioned how song definitions had traditional singers. Then there was the arrival of the radio, changed over the years. Cecil Sharp had defined what which again altered musical dynamics, as did television. constituted a 'folksong' and anything outside that definition Suddenly, musicians and singers could be heard in the could not, therefore, be a 'folksong'. This meant that Sharp home, simply by flicking a switch. and the other collectors omitted a vast number of songs from their collections, songs which were being sung by Yet, as these and many other recordings attest, many older their 'informants'. In the article I said that: songs did survive into the late 20th century. Many may still be being sung today. I often feel, however, that the tradi- These collectors certainly came from a different social tion in England which Cecil Sharp was trying to rescue is background from that of their singers, but they must also now, more or less, over, and that it has been replaced by have found themselves, musically speaking, miles away new generations of singers and storytellers who often from performers who sang in modes that, to begin with, come from different backgrounds and who perform to new were extremely alien to their own musical backgrounds. audiences in different situations and venues. In other Examinations of these collectors' manuscripts have words, as one tradition comes to a close, another one has shown that songs with modal tunes were often given risen to replace it. priority over other songs when it came to publishing the songs, and it is tempting to see such collecting activity as Most of the singers heard on these recordings were in their but a part of the general interest in otherness that then sixties or seventies when I met them and most are no existed in a country with a worldwide Empire. longer with us today. They were proud of their songs and of their ability to sing them so well; and I was pleased to By the 1960s collectors and scholars had finally given up have met them and to have had the opportunity to help trying to define 'folksongs' and, instead, were using Ar- them record these snapshots of their lives. chie Green’s all-embracing term vernacular songs to describe just what it was that singers were actually singing in total. If anything, my own attitude to this type The Singers: of music and song was also influenced in 1999 by some- thing that two American anthropologists said about their Percy Bridges lived in the Oxfordshire village of Ascott- own field of study, but which could equally apply to my under-Wychwood. I called in the village pub one Saturday own: afternoon, looking for singers, and was directed to Percy’s cottage. This was the only song that he appeared to know. Gone are the days of describing discrete, 'authentic' traditions. Welcome, instead, to the exploration of Members of The Cantwell Family had been recorded by change, movement, hybridization, creolization, negotiat- the BBC in the 1950s. I called on their home in Standlake, ed identities, borderlands, and unstable authenticities. Oxon, one Saturday in 1964 and discovered that a family party was in progress. I suggested coming back at a later I concluded my article with the following words: date, but was invited into the kitchen where the men had gathered. They were already singing when I arrived and I sometimes think that it is rather strange to be talking of were quite happy to let me record the songs. Another song witches, of maidens rescued (or, more likely, seduced) from this session, The Yorkshire Blinder, can be heard on by passing knights, of builders who feel the need to spill VTC7CD. human blood and of all the other thousand and one topics that make up the subjects of folksongs. After all, Johnny Doughty (1904-86), originally from Brighton, Sus- we are now living in a post-modern world! And yet, when sex, was living in Camber Sands when we met. Vic Smith Cyril Nunn sang his song Wonderfully Curious to me in interviewed him for BBC Radio Sussex and a transcription his Oxfordshire home I quickly realised that this was a of this lengthy interview can be found on the Musical fitting title not only for Cyril's song, but also for all the Traditions website (article 100).

Load more