My latest album-in-progress involves finding a collection of folk songs based around tragic romances - hence the name "dead lovers."
While part of my interest lies in a kind of grim amusement of how common this type of song always has been, I'm also noticing how fascinated people have always been by "true crime" tales and "reality" stories.
The recording portion of the album is all finished! It's ten tracks, mostly just guitar and voice (with a little mandolin overdub here and there) recorded at Paradyme Productions, where I've done some session work in the past. Jake Johnson, the owner and engineer, is a great guy and I can't recommend them enough.
Now I'm working on packaging, liner notes and song order, which I expect to have done soon, and I'll be planning out the next big expensive part of the whole thing, which is getting copies made. I'm running a pre-sale to help with that, basically I've set up a GoFundMe and anyone who kicks in $10 or more will get a copy of the album.
In the mean time, my album release party is planned for November 18 at Bos Meadery, here in Madison.
I also have some cover art, drawn by my daughter Isabella. And yes, there's a werewolf.
Black is The Color (Roud 3103), is a pretty generic broken-heart type song. Person is in love with other person, person can't be with other person, person is sad. It's been interpreted many ways by many different artists and has been kicking around since at least the 1800 in various forms.
It's not even clear that the singer's beloved is actually dead, in the version I sing all that's clear is that he's not going to marry her. She may have rejected him, she may be already be married, she may be sailing away to another country or she may have been eaten by werewolves (as "DeBlass' Rule of Folk Music" states, when the death of a character in a song is unexplained, one can assume they were eaten by one or more werewolves).
More interestingly, however, is how this song illustrates how music travels and changes. In its original version, it likely came from the Lowlands of Scotland. The biggest clue to this is that it mentions going "to the Clyde." Now, I've said before, and it's still true that just because a song mentions a place, there's no reason to assume it's from there, but based on what we know it's a pretty good hypothesis.
From Scotland, it seems to have traveled to the Appalachian region of America (which had a large population of Lowland Scots and Scots-Irish settlers) where in the early 20th Century noted song collector and composer John Jacob Niles decided he didn't like the traditional melody, and wrote his own setting for it. From there it made its way into the popular repertoire, being reinterpreted by a number of Jazz singers including Nina Simone's excellent take.
It also became a staple, like so many of these songs, of the American folk revival, and seems to have made its way back into popularity in the Celtic folk repertoire again through this American influence. The version I learned came through Christy Moore, who in turn learned his from Scottish singer Hamish Imlach. Imlach, apparently having heard the song and, working from an imperfect memory, somewhat revised the melody and lyrics to create the version that he recorded in the 1960s and Moore has been performing ever since.
As for myself, I learned my own version from some guy named Noel in a youth hostel in Galway about 20 years ago. Noel was a big Christy Moore fan (as we should all be) and taught me a couple of simple songs while I spent a few months in Ireland living as a street musician. I've been singing it ever since as a regular part of my repertoire.
