Traditional Folk

A blog celebrating tradional (mainly british) folk music. If there's any traditional music you think should be featured, feel free to submit or ask! Run by julienc, formerly by the-antidote-is-orgasm & with sporadic posts by ponderful.

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Steeleye Span - Below the Salt

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Happy Valentines day

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On a fine eve'n fair in the month of Avril

O'er the hill came the man with the blythe sunny smile

And the folks they were throngin' the roads everywhere

Makin' haste to be in at Copshawholme Fair

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If ever there’s a time to start listening to ten minute long folk songs… it is now

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Hard Times of England (Steeleye Span)

Originally an 18th century folk song

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7:03 AM EST November 25, 2020:

Steeleye Span - “Boys of Bedlam" From the album Please to See the King (March 1971)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

The burlap-looking cover was the original; the original Australian issue from a year later used the medieval-looking cover, as did a 1990 US reissue on Shanachie.

The song itself is an interesting one, though it is not of medieval provenance, having been composed as a poem around 1620. “Bedlam” was how the Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the Insane came to be known in the public parlance, and by extension, “Tom O'Bedlam” came to refer to an insane person, or one faking who after release from the hospital, or not, turned to begging.

“For they all go bare and they live by the air And they want no drink and no money”

Evidently Steeleye went away from the historical music, and applied a Breton folk-melody they knew. Versions since use the music Steeleye appropriated almost exclusively.

I’ll also take the space to recommend one of my favorite science fiction novels: Tom O'Bedlam, by Robert Silverberg, the central question of which is whether Tom is faking, or not.

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The Most Hey Nonny No Christmas Hit Ever

You could only get away with this sort of thing in the ‘70s.

Hearing this echoing through the tiled floors and ceilings of local shopping centres over the last few weeks (must be on this year’s Must Have Christmas compilation album or something) is bloody spooky, but in a good way.

(Believe it or not, the song is actually from medieval Finland in origin)

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Humors of Whiskey!

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Visit Original Link

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Joan Baez - House Of The Rising Sun

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Pentangle - Lady Of Carlisle  (Traditional) Solomon’s Seal (1972)

[cozy-hearts]

Come, all you fair and tender girls

That flourish in your prime

Beware, beware, keep your garden fair

Let no man steal your thyme

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Anne Briggs – Blackwater Side 

from Anne Briggs (1971)

Voice like an angel.

The best-known version is a 1952 BBC Archive recording by an Irish Traveller, Mary Doran. Doran’s version was taught to the singer Anne Briggs by A.L. Lloyd. Anne Briggs in turn taught it to singer/guitarist Bert Jansch.

Early in 1965, Briggs and Jansch were performing regularly together in folk clubs and spent most of the daytime at a friend’s flat, collaborating on new songs and the development of complex guitar accompaniments for traditional songs. Anne Briggs has noted that “Everybody up to that point was accompanying traditional songs in a very […] three-chord way. […] It was why I always sang unaccompanied […] but seeing Bert’s freedom from chords, I suddenly realized—this chord stuff, you don’t need it.”

via

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She Moved Through The Fair / Anne Briggs