New Project on Patreon!

Like a lot of working musicians, the current global pandemic has cost me pretty much all of my paying gigs (which is fine, as much as I like singing about dead people, keeping as many of you all healthy as possible is a lot more important than me playing shows).
I'm fortunate in that I have a part-time "day job" income, so unlike a lot of my colleagues in the music business, I'll still be able to eat and sleep indoors and all that. It'll be a bit tight for a bit, but we folk-singer types are a hardy bunch and have been historically hard to stamp out.

But I like making music, exploring both traditional stuff and creating new original music, so I'm directing my energy to recorded projects, one of which will be taking some of the content on this blog and turning it into short video essays. I'm also putting some original harp and mandolin compositions online as well, and I'm hosting it all on my Patreon page.

I'm going to start out very simple, talk about the history of the song for a few minutes, then perform a version of it. The videos, which I will probably try to make one or two of a month will be available free to view on Youtube, but Patreon supporters will also get a downloadable audio version of each episode's song for their own enjoyment.

You can see the first video here.

The way I've set up my page is to ask supporters for money only when I post an original composition. So if you subscribe at the $1 level, each time I post an original, you'll give me a buck. When I post traditional folk content, you won't be charged, but you'll still get exclusive access to recorded content.

I plan to try and post two or three originals a month, along with at least one of these video essays. We'll see how it works and how successful it is, but I'm hoping it will both help push me to write more and provide a small revenue stream that I can invest in better recording and video equipment, to give you better production values (my pie-in-the-sky dream for all this is to be able to hire someone who actually knows more about making video than "sit in front of a smartphone and press play" to help with the editing).

Things are weird right now, that's for sure, but I really appreciate all my friends who have given me support over the years, whether financial or moral (or occasionally immoral. You know who you are!).

Whether it's here online, out in coffee shops or just on my own back porch, I'm going to keep singing.

-Matt

Touring the Megopolis!

I'll be heading out to the East Coast next week with a guitar, a mandolin and a box of CDs*, if you want to hear some of these songs live, and don't live in Wisconsin, this is your chance!

I've created a Facebook page with a list of all the tour stops, and I'll be doing a bit of recording and a lot of visiting friends and family in between. I hope to see you there!

*I will also be packing clean socks and underwear, but no Oxford commas because space is tight.

The Cruel Sister Revisited: Extra Nerdy String Instrument Edition

I've written before about variations on everybody's favorite sororicide ballad "The Cruel Sister" (aka "Binnorie," "The Bonny Swans," "The Dreadful Wind and Rain" etc, Roud 8, Child 10).
To sum up the basic story again, if you didn't know: There are two sisters who live in a remote castle by the North Sea. A knight comes courting and favors the younger one, so the jealous older one kills her sister and marries the knight. Some minstrels find the body and make a musical instrument out of it, which then magically reveals the murder.
It's a pretty fun, gruesome story, and a decent bit of music.

Now, when I last wrote about it, I found myself wondering what a harp made out of a dead body would sound like. I wasn't the only one to wonder, and a Finnish luthier named Yrjänä Ermala Soitinrakentaja actually made one  to try it out (he didn't use a dead noblewoman, but a deer carcass and hair from a wig). Turns out, it's not the most sonorous instrument ever.

But as I was working on polishing up my own version of the song something occured to me: the lyrics of this particular version describe the "harp" as having three strings, and being played with a bow. Now, I've played the harp for a while and while there's no reason you couldn't build one with only three strings, you wouldn't be able to play many tunes on it. You COULD sound a droning chord on it to accompany singing, in the style of a classical lyre. So that's one possibility, it could have been a single-chord instrument to accompany singing.

Speaking of lyres, we probably shouldn't necessarily think of this harp as the familiar triangle-frame instrument like the contemporary folk harp I play in the video. While these style instruments certainly did exist when the song likely emerged, there was also a tendency - and still is - to refer to a whole range of plucked string instruments as harps. In modern nomenclature, a harp is an instrument where the strings come out and away from the soundboard, while a lyre is an instrument where the strings run across the soundboard, but in older sources things like Anglo-Saxon lyres were sometimes referred to as "harps." It's very possible that this is what the song refers to.

Another possibility, and one that would tie in nicely with some versions where the harp sings all on its own is that it was actually an Aeolian harp. This is an instrument that, rather than being played by a person, makes sound as the wind blows across the strings. My own harp is prone to this when played at outside events, where the wind can cause the strings to make strange moaning sounds. It's a very interesting and somewhat spooky sound, which would be in keeping with the mood of the song.

In other variations of the song, I could very much believe that the instrument in question was an Aeolian harp. I mean, wind is basically magic anyway, and if this thing made out of bones just started moaning away on its own, I bet someone with a guilty conscience would start to feel a bit haunted.

But in THIS version of the song, the minstrels use a bow to play the alleged harp. So what gives? Well, let's go on a bit of a linguistic diversion for a second. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the triangular harp is referred to as a "clairseach" or "clarsach"  but there is mention of an older small harp referred to as a "cruit." There is a surviving string instrument by that name, though it's most often known by its Welsh name instead, the crwth. The crwth (pronounced like "krooth" if you're wondering), is shaped like a lyre, more or less, and traditionally had six strings, but tuned in unison, so three courses. it has a fretboard, allowing the player to press down on each string to get more than one note out of it, like a guitar or violin, and is played with a bow. It's not really a "harp" but a type of fiddle. 

And looking at the shape of the crwth, one could see a vague resemblance to a rib cage, with the central neck being a kind of "breast bone," so with a little imagination one could picture using an actual sternum to make the fretboard of such an instrument. Actually, it's not uncommon for modern fretted instruments such as guitars or mandolins to have bone components, though usually not human bone as far as I know, so while an instrument entirely from bones would be quite unusual, an instrument with a bone inlay or bridge could pass unremarked until it began to work its magic.

So, to sum up, harp=cruit, cruit=crwth, at least in this particular version of the song.

Dead Lovers online

The album is up and available for purchase on CDBaby through the link here. It should also begin appearing on streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify soon.
Enjoy!

It's About Time!

It's about time! At least, that's what I'm telling myself this week. Tomorrow I'll be celebrating the official release of "Dead Lovers" on CD, with a show/party locally at Bos Meadery here in Madison.

I'm getting the digital version up and available, and it should be ready through various online sources... well, however long it takes. I'll give you an update when that happens.
And I'm still working on booking a bit of an East Coast tour. Between January 5 and 18 or so.

In the mean time, if you do get a copy of the album, you can read the extended liner notes here. I hope to see you this weekend!

Album news, cover art and release date

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.

Caledonia to Carolina and Back: Black is the Color

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.

Sad Songs Say So Much: If I Was A Blackbird

"If I Was A Blackbird" (Roud 387), alternately "I Am A Young Maiden" after the opening line in versions with a female protagonist (the version I'd first heard started "I am a young sailor" which is what I used, but you can plug in any two-syllable word and swap the pronouns to suit yourself) is first recorded in the early 20th Century and is possibly pieced together out of various broadside ballads of the 19th. Its origins are most likely Scottish and/or Irish, as it doesn't seem to have been as popular in England or the Americas, and it mentions "Donnybrook Faire" which was located in Dublin, though just a mention of a place is, of course, no guarantee of origin.
It's a slightly unusual addition to this series, as nobody actually DIES in it, it's simply a really sad and plaintive song. But I like it and it's going to be included on the album anyway, so there you go.

It tells the story of a young lover who is rejected by his/her love, and discouraged from courting them by their parents. And indeed, the protagonist doesn't seem to take any action (such as murder, as we've seen in past entries) but is just really sad about the whole thing. The language, as in many modern love songs, is a bit stalker-y, describing how they would like to follow their (non-reciprocating) true love as a bird and build a nest in the ship's rigging just to be close to them. A bit creepy yes, but after reading of murder, murder and even more murder in past ballads, pretty mild.

I think a more interesting speculation about this song, and various other "pining away in anguish" type ballads, is what function they may have served for the singers and listeners. I can't find the link at the moment (I'll come back and add it in later if I can) but not too long ago I read an article about how a lot of classic country (Hank Williams Sr. etc) dealt with heartbreak and infidelity largely because it was a socially acceptable way for men to express negative emotions. It could be hard to say "I'm not sure how things are going and I have doubts about my relationship" but "I caught my wife with my best friend" is a concrete image that stands in for those other uncomfortable feelings (it's worth noting that a lot of other Country pioneers struggled with alcoholism and very likely depression, so there's that).

By the same token, I suspect that in addition to the very human fascination with crime and gory drama that murder ballads give us, these sad old songs also had another purpose as a channel for negative emotions that balladeers and audiences alike may have had a hard time putting into words. Our terminology for generalized depression is pretty new after all, but depression itself likely isn't, nor are a host of other psychological ills. However, when somebody sings about being heartbroken because their true love dumped them, most folks can relate and it gives a shape to pour those nebulous feelings into (and if you up the ante by having your love die of violence, or illness or werewolves, all the more dramatic and emotionally poignant. After all, we may not have all lost our fiancée to werewolf attack, but a lot of us have had days when we've felt like we have).

And of course, in a lot of traditional cultures, especially among men, expressing too much emotion wasn't always socially acceptable. The allowable range of emotion would probably be limited to "Angry, hungry, drunk, horny or folk song." Thus music, which on one hand has often had such a role in bringing people together in joyful dance and celebration, also served the vital function of providing an outlet for negative and hard to define feelings. I don't know that, with the ever expanding, yet still incomplete, understanding we have of the human mind nowadays that depressing music could be considered the healthiest or most effective form of therapy, but there was a time when it was all we had.

And besides, it seems to be working OK for some modern English singers.

Haunting, Graceful and Gone: She Moved Through the Fair

I've mentioned this one before, and it's one of the classic Dead Lover songs, with versions by dozens of famous artists as well as thousands upon thousands of lesser singers like myself.

"She Moved Through the Fair" (Roud 861) has been kicking around for over a century, though it's hard to tell exactly how MUCH longer, exactly. It seems the currently known set of lyrics were pieced together and written in part by Irish poet and playwright Padraic Colum, but it's likely some version of the song, and certainly the  melody, existed long before that.

Without getting too deep into the music theory, tune is in mixolydian mode, that is based around what would be the fifth tone of a modern "major" scale, giving it an ancient and -to our modern ears - somewhat exotic sound. I can't think of too many late-19th or early-20th Century folk ballads that rely heavily on this mode, but it was common in some older music. This is all pretty much speculation on my part, as I don't have sources to confirm this.

The story of the song is particularly moving, as it fixes on the cheerful parting of young lovers and a subsequent, unnamed tragedy. The singer's beloved tells him that her parents approve of their upcoming marriage, and they part lovingly. "It will not be long, love, till our wedding day" she says. He watches her move gracefully across the fairgrounds, not knowing that it would be the last he would see her alive.

Whatever happens, happens, and his beloved is no more, and in the last verse the narrator tells of his dream, in which his dead lover came to his bedroom and once again repeated her parting words, "it will not be long love, till our wedding day."

It's a lovely melody, and the imagery of her moving across the fairgrounds "like a swan in the evening" is pretty evocative. As such some singers have tried to find ways to present the song without its tragic elements, usually omitting the last verse or more often the next to the last verse and its line "that was the last that I saw of my dear," making the dream sequence one of anticipation rather than pathos. Obviously, I'm not on board with that, and not just because of my affection for Dead Lover songs. The whole feel of the piece is just too dependent on that melancholy, haunting mood to be a cheerful song. If you want a happy song about getting married, go to Scotland, the West of Ireland is the place for ghosts.

Folk Songs and the Headlines

The label "folk music" is a pretty broad one in modern times, often being applied to all sorts of contemporary recorded music that features primarily acoustic instrumentation, or even electrified genres of pop, rock and metal that draw on elements of traditional stories, melodies or instrumentation. 

But for the sake of this blog, I'll stick with the dictionary meaning of music of unknown authorship that's passed down orally through a popular tradition, or music by known authors that has passed into the tradition of folk performance. The bulk of my own repertoire consists of just such music, primarily from English-speaking traditions from Western Europe or North America. Not because I think English-language folk songs are inherently better than those of other traditions, but mostly because I'm too lazy to figure out songs in other tongues. 

But also, I fit the "bearded guy with an acoustic guitar" image so nicely, why fight it? 

While there are new songs being absorbed into the folk tradition all the time (though I suspect current copyright laws slow that down some) the bulk of the material is quite old. And part of what makes it "traditional" music is that, as it's been passed through all the countless hands and voices, it's been changed and polished and re-imagined many different ways. And a lot of it is forgotten or set aside, while things are added, until all that remains are elements that for one reason or another resonate with common feelings and experience. 

A lot of my love for folk songs is rooted in this, how it provides a common thread running from people who lived and died generations ago to our modern selves. And how, while the songs change and evolve much like our lives, we still hold something at the heart of them in common. We may not be a lowly potato farmer conscripted to fight in some colony-grabbing conflict far away (there's a lot of corn and dairy farmers around here too), but we understand the fear and loneliness and the joy of coming home. 

But this blog is, after all, about the darker elements of folk music. The heartbreak, the loss, the pining away and, of course, the murder. 

This too, speaks to something we can relate to and see reflected in our modern lives. Killings committed in a fit of jealous rage, abuse, fights over the attention of a woman or man. And, of course, there's the unrequited attraction. 

In the real world, if you're interested in someone, and they're not interested in you, a fairly normal response is to mope a bit, maybe write a sad poem or song and eventually get on with your life. In a folk song, like Barbara Allen, you also have the option of just dropping dead like William did (as I've said before, these songs are terrible life advice). 

But in both folk songs and the real world, there's a more horrific path that some choose to take. Killing the object of your affection. 

Not long ago I did a blog on "The Banks of the Ohio," and since then I've been practicing it quite a bit to polish it up for recording. At the same time I'd read the news of one of the recent school shootings (and don't think that having to say "one of" in regards to this isn't more heartbreaking than any song I could sing) and read about how the killer apparently had a thing for one of the victims, and was rejected by her, which may have inspired him to shoot up the school. 

The viewpoint character in the song doesn't go on a killing spree, but there's enough in common that it's definitely colored my own feelings towards the song. I'm not going to stop playing it, but I'm definitely more aware of how the events of the thing look in the real world. And it's also got me thinking about just how many old songs there are about men killing women in a sudden fit of rage, or out of jealousy. 

I think this sense of rage and misplaced entitlement we see in young men like the school shooter and other examples of real world monsters was well known to our forebears. And maybe they were aware of the darker parts of our own natures and found a way to safely channel those irrational, violent impulses was through song and story. And maybe also there was the eternal fascination we all have with terrible people and horrific acts. And maybe also there was a bit of a warning in there. And, considering how many times the subject is caught and hanged, there's a desire to make these vicious killers face, in song at least, the consequences and justice that they avoided in real life all too often. 

There's No Kill Like Overkill: Down in the Willow Garden

Suppose you're a father whose son is dating a woman you don't approve of. Perhaps she's got some bad habits, or your son doesn't really love her but is a bit too passive aggressive to break things off, or maybe she's gotten pregnant and now he feels obligated to marry her. What kind of fatherly advice would you offer? Maybe you'd say something like "well, raising a child can be tough, but I'll help out" or "well, you'll have to break things off and live with the consequences" or even "here's a train ticket to the coast, get a job on a ship or something and stop whining."

Of course, none of those make for a compelling folk song. If you're a father in a folk song your advice might be, "just kill her and I'll bail you out." Thus continuing the theme of "Don't Look to Folk Songs For Life Advice" with "Down in the Willow Garden" (Roud 446).

The narrator of the song meets his "love" in the titular willow garden where he serves her poisoned wine, which makes her "fall off to sleep," at which point he runs her through with either a saber or a dagger, and THEN throws her in the river, thus earning the dubious honor of a Murder Ballad Triple Crown by killing her three different ways (wait, was she a werewolf or something? I know silver bullets are a the modern method of killing one, but maybe Appalachian werewolves are less hoity-toity and you can just keep killing them until they run out of lives like a video game boss. I may have to re-evaluate my thoughts on this song later).

Anyway, "Down in the Willow Garden" is an American folk ballad that appeared some time in the late 1800s. It may be based on an even older song, and its alternate name of "Rose Connelly" had made appearances in older material, but it probably didn't take its modern form until after 1889, when William Butler Yeats published his poem "Down By the Sally Gardens" which has an almost identical opening line:

Down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet

Of course Yeats may have copped that line from an older Irish ballad "Ye Rambling Boys of Pleasure," (Roud 386) from which he seems to have stolen... er, drawn inspiration for a number of lines.

Since its initial appearance in recorded music in the 1920s, "Down in the Willow Garden" has become a staple of Bluegrass, Country and Folk singers, and has also been recorded by the likes of Bon Iver, Nick Cave and The Everly Brothers. And, of course, it was performed by Holly Hunter in the Cohen Brothers' "Raising Arizona" as a lullaby.

Jealousy and Regret: The Banks of the Ohio

"The Banks of the Ohio" (Roud 157) is a pretty straightforward song as far as these things go, and, as is often the case with these simpler old songs, its history is nearly impossible to trace. What I can tell is that it showed up in the United States sometime in the late 1800s, and was first recorded in the late 1920s. Beyond that, I haven't come across a direct ancestor in European folklore (though the theme of drowning someone out of romantic jealousy is pretty common), so I'm guessing it's an American original.
The story is simple: the guy ("Willie" in many versions) is in love with a girl who likes him at least enough to walk out with him. He wants her to marry him, she's not into it, so he drowns her and then feels bad about it.

It's been performed and recorded a lot, it's an easy song to play (when one isn't fumbling the F chords because your hand is sore) and the chorus makes for a nice sing-along, it's also been made into at least one delightful web comic adaptation.

Perhaps the distinguishing feature about "The Banks of the Ohio" is the theme of regret. After the murder, the narrator laments how he killed the woman he supposedly loved. There are a number of songs about jealous lovers or competing suitors killing someone in a fit of passion, but usually, if there's any aftermath it's either treated as a moment of grotesque justice as in "Mattie Groves" or something they hide until they get caught as in "The Cruel Sister," whereas our narrator has a moment to realize that losing his temper and drowning a woman was A TERRIBLE IDEA.

I mean, it shouldn't take even a three-and-a-half minute folk song to figure that out, but we live and we learn, right?

Dead Lovers Live!

I've been pretty quiet for a while, but I have been working on music. In fact, next month I'll be performing some of the songs here in Madison, along with some of my favorite local musicians.

Event info can be found on Facebook here, but for those of you who aren't connected:

Matt DeBlass and Friends: The Dead Lovers Project
at Bos Meadery, Saturday Jan. 13 7-9 pm
849 E Washington St, Madison Wisconsin.

It begins!

I've got the start of my first track, Anachie Gordon down. The recording was the easy (for me) part, now for all the digital tweaks and edits.
The unedited track is available for a listen here. 

Plans and Progress

Between the day job and other distractions I haven't gotten as much done on this project as I'd have liked, but such is life!

One of the things that has struck me as I've been looking at material is the sheer number of songs that fall into the Dead Lovers category. That's got me thinking that this might be fun to keep going with beyond a single recording. Also, having done a lot of thinking on overdubbing, digital instruments and the like, I'm realizing what I'd really like to do is try to get an actual band together around performing some of this stuff. 

With that all in mind, what I'm thinking is that I'm going to start small and simple with my initial recording work for what we'll call "Dead Lovers Volume I" and make a fairly traditional folk album out of it. By that I mean fairly live sounding, instrument and voice with minimal editing or overdubs. I figure this will be a fairly harp-driven thing, because... well, harp is good for singing about tragic romances. 

From that, I hope to recruit a few other collaborators who would be interested in the project and take it in a bit more "folk rock" direction. My ideal group would be a trio with with harp, cello and percussion, and include a female vocalist to do harmonies and trade leads on, but I have to see who I can find who thinks this might be fun. I'm hoping with the first recording in hand I can start reaching out to the local music scene to see if anyone else wants to play. 

I'm going to start laying down some basic tracks this week and playing with my minimalist recording setup (a decent USB mic and a basic DAW for now) and will hopefully have some halfway decent audio to post here soon. 

Maimed Lovers (and some notes on instrumentation): Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye

Several of the songs we've explored here have characters die in battle, but what if you want to write a tragic ballad where the lover doesn't die?

In the 19th-Century broadsheet ballad "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" (Roud 3137) the titular Johnny has gone off in the military, leaving his sweetheart behind in Athy, County Kildare, with a newborn child (depending on the version, it may be made clear that they weren't married, and the child may be the result of a "fond farewell" to the young hero). 

Johnny was off in "Sulloon" or Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) which was under British rule at the time and he was seriously wounded. By "seriously" I mean "Anakin Skywalker at the end of Episode III" wounded. Young Johnny lost his arms, legs and eyes in fighting there and was destined to live out the rest of his time as a beggar. It seems likely the fighting references was decades earlier during the Kandyan Wars, or possibly the more recent Matale Rebellion. 

The song was first published in 1867 and is credited to songwriter Joseph B. Geoghegan, who wrote several music hall songs that have passed into the folk tradition. It appears to be a parody of the 1863 Civil War marching song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" by Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore.

 It's sometimes speculated that the much darker "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" was the older song, and the American version was a "cleaned up" take on it, but documents don't seem to bear that out. Personally, I think it's a very believable idea that a songwriter would take a popular marching song and make a grim parody of it by replacing the patriotic optimism with a tale about the gruesome consequences of war. The song also nicely captured a theme of the growing Irish Independence movement: young men from Ireland, itself a nation under British rule, were recruited to go fight and suffer abroad in other British colonies, to help the Crown keep its power. 

Although it's not confirmed, I also suspect that the song influenced Dalton Trumbo's book "Johnny Got His Gun" in which the protagonist suffers a similar fate during fighting in World War I. 

In a lot of later versions, including my own, the last verse of the song has kind of an epilogue:  "they're rolling out the guns again... but they'll never take our sons again," making for a powerful anti-war statement. 

I've actually got two videos to go with this song, to illustrate something that's been on my mind as I make plans for the final recording. In the older one I accompany myself with the harp, the newer I use the guitar. In both I use the traditional tune "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" as an intro. 

In many ways, both versions of the song are pretty similar. Instrument choice does have an effect on the texture of the song, but in both cases the focus should be, for better worse, on my voice. And if I'm recording a multitracked version of it, there's no reason that I can't blend both guitar and harp in the final mix. The choice of instrument has a lot more effect on eventual live performances in support of the recording. 

Both instruments have their pros and cons. I really enjoy playing the harp, and find it much easier to play instrumental pieces on it because, one, I'm more proficient at it, and two, because it's nature makes it easier to play accompanying chords with the left hand while playing  melody with the right. On the other hand, the guitar is better for rhythmic strumming and driving faster songs. It's also easier to travel with, having fewer strings to deal with and a more compact shape. For traveling out of town (say, flying back East) it also has the advantage of being easily fit into a hardshell case (a flight-worthy case for the harp would have to be custom made and cost upwards of $500) and having replacement parts and strings available in any local music shop. 

What may end up happening is that I record this project with a wide variety of instruments, and then take it "on the road" with just a guitar, or guitar and mandolin. It's pretty predictable as far as folk music goes, and I'm honestly not that great a guitar player, but it's a much simpler option. We'll see. 

The Arranging Dilemma

It's been a busy couple months and I haven't added any new songs or updates for a bit, but the Dead Lovers Project will be continuing into the new year, and I'm about ready to start the first recordings.

But I've got to make some decisions first.

Generally, when I've done solo recordings, my goal has been to capture as "live" an experience as possible, with few or no overdubs and only a single instrument and my voice. This is a pretty common way to record traditional folk artists, and it's pretty simple system. You set up a microphone or two, and play the song through several times until you get a take you're happy with. A number of traditional and classical artists record this way still.

Now, when I've worked with a group, there have been several instruments and vocalists involved, and in most cases these were all recorded one at a time. First a "scratch" track would be laid out, usually with guitar and voice, then a better rhythm guitar track, a polished vocal track and then any instrumental overdubs needed. Often there would be extra instrumental tracks to fill out the sound, sometimes involving harmonies and instruments that the group would never be using in a live performance. Afterwards, there would be tuning and tweaking to hide mistakes and fix off notes. This would result in an idealized version of what the song could sound like, and is probably the most common way of recording rock and popular music.

A third way of doing a record, which I've debated trying and never attempted, is for a single artist to record multiple tracks, and maybe even mix in some electronic rhythm tracks. I've thought about venturing into the "folktronica" realm with this sort of thing, updating and modernizing the sound by mixing acoustic and digital instruments together. It would be something new to me, but could lead to some cool results.

Now the first way of recording is well within my comfort zone, and within the capabilities of the equipment I already own. I can run cardiod or condensor microphones directly into my little Tascam recorder and mix it to my computer. I can even do some limited overdubbing this way, and there are free audio programs like Audacity that let me tweak the sound to some degree. My home laptop is... OK for this sort of thing, although it's been getting cranky and noisy lately, but I've done a couple of projects this way.

If I wanted to do a more elaborately mixed and arranged album, I'd need some additional equipment. Digital interfaces that let me record directly to my computer and better software. Or, one thing I've seen some artists work with lately is recording directly to an iPad using a dedicated interface. This has the advantage of portability and simplicity and having a device dedicated to recording and music production would help me keep myself organized (always a difficult task in my case). Whichever way I go about it, I'd need to buy at least a few hundred dollars worth of gear.

Of course, I could also book time at a recording studio, but that gets pricey quickly, and I'd have to have a very clear idea of what I wanted, with less room for experimentation than a home recording.

I still haven't quite figured out what I want to do yet. I still also have a couple songs I'd like to learn, but I could start recording the ones I know well before I finish the learning of the new (to me) ones.

Anyway, that's where my head is at lately! Hopefully I'll have more read progress to post soon.

Happy New Year all!

Dead Lovers in the Machine Age: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

For most of the upcoming recording project (which I'll be starting on soon, I've got a bit of gear to acquire in the next few weeks and then I'll be putting down basic tracks), I'll be focusing on songs from the 1800s, However, it's worth noting that the tradition of Dead Lover ballads is alive and well in modern music as well.

Songs like "Last Kiss," and "Leader of the Pack" adapted the tradition of the departed loved one to the popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming their own genre known as "Teenage Tragedy Songs." The genre waned in popularity by the late 1960s but never quite went away. While a number of these modern songs describe death in battle (particularly in more patriotic offerings), by disease or by drug overdose, the number one killer of sweethearts in songs of the past half-century or so seems to be the automobile.

It's not surprising, as the cars became more common and accessible in the latter half of the 20th Century, traffic fatalities rose steadily, only declining relatively recently. Car crashes were, and still are, one of the prime killers of healthy young people, and carry with them the shock of suddenness and reflect the dark side of the independence that a car offers to teenagers. All pretty dramatic psychological stuff!

This week's song does center around a motor vehicle, but it actually outlives our protagonist.

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a song by Richard Thompson off his 1991 album "Rumor and Sigh." It tells the kind of story that should be familiar to aficionados of all sorts of Dead Lover ballads: a brash young outlaw is in love with a red-haired maiden, but he is mortally wounded in a caper gone wrong and only has time to profess his love for her and offer her a token of his eternal devotion before breathing his last.

The twist, of course, is that it's set in the modern(ish) day, and young James dies of a shotgun blast to the chest during an armed robbery near London, and the "token" he leaves behind is his beloved motorcycle.

Thompson chose that particular vehicle to include in his modernized ballad in particular because of it's rarity and fame. The Black Lightning was the fastest production bike in the world when it was made, and only 30 of them were built in 1952, it was equivalent to the magic sword or elfin steed of earlier stories. It was also distinctly British, which was important to Thompson in setting this particular song in his home country.

It's a wonderful song and it's been covered beautifully by far more worthy artists than myself, but it's well worth picking up the album or listening to a live rendition by the man himself (he's a seriously brilliant guitar player, not just a great songwriter)

It may just be true that nothing beats a '52 Vincent and a red-headed girl.

For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep (Labor Day Special): Three Fishers

In 1851 an Anglican preacher by the name of Charles Kingsley published a poem based on recollections of his childhood in Clovelly, a small coastal town in southwest England mostly populated by herring fishermen and their families. Of course, Kingsley likely had many sunny summer afternoons enjoying the salt air of the seashore, but we're talking Dead Lovers songs here, so his poem was obviously not one of that sort.

Instead, Kingsley recalled a day "when the old bay lay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts stalking across the waves before the northern gale," and the local fleet of tiny herring boats fleeing before the storm trying fruitlessly to make their way between the waves and the rocky coastline while the fishermen's families watched helplessly from shore. "Corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child," he said, "till in one case alone saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before."

As an adult, Kingsley became a priest and author and was involved in the Christian Socialist movement. He was an advocate for the rights of the working class and for protecting them against abuse and exploitation by the wealthy. After being chastised for preaching on the topic, he recalled the dangers and hardships faced by the poor fishermen he knew in his youth, and wrote his famous poem, "Three Fishers." It was set to music shortly thereafter, and became a popular Victorian parlor song. At some point it entered the folk tradition, with the help of Canadian musicians Stan and Garnet Rogers, has become popular again with a slightly different melody than its original setting.

The phrase "Men must work and women must weep," became something of a catchprase in the Victorian labor movement. At the time, of course, many of the most dangerous jobs, including commercial fishing, mining and factory work were done almost exclusively by men (though the pre-union era wasn't exactly a safe time for working class women either), and their wives had to face the possibility that the man they loved and counted on might be killed or crippled at any time, leaving them and their children to face starvation and homelessness.

The song is perhaps so moving because, rather than focus on the struggle of the men caught in the storm, it focuses on the helplessness of those left on the shore. The wives sit up at night keeping the lighthouse flame going with some degree of determination, but you get the sense as "they looked at the squall and they looked at the shower" they knew there was little hope. To me the most chilling line in the whole song is "for the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep." It's a reminder that for these people, poor working class families, there's no gracious period of extended mourning, but yet another day full of chores and tasks ahead of them, children to feed, a house to manage, now made infinitely harder with the loss of a husband. There may be a little sleep to be had when the crying is done, but there will be no rest.

This isn't a song about wealthy women pining away for their suitors or knights bravely dying for love, but people facing a hard and storm-lashed existence, yet still trying to love and support each other. When they're gone all that's left is the moaning of the wind across the sandbar.

Rebellion, Resurrection and Revenge!: The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Some  Dead Lover Ballads feature lovers who were slain in warfare, or found a violent end. In most of these cases the story focuses on the surviving lover grieving for their lost partner and taking a pretty passive "woe is me" stance which is typical of the ballad genre. However in this case the young man narrating the story reacts to the killing of his sweetheart with a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (Roud 2994) is one of those ballads for which we actually have a known author. It was written by poet and scholar Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883) in 1861 about the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798. It tell of a young rebel who is trying to tell his sweetheart that he plans to leave her behind to fight in the rebellion. As they're talking, however, a British (or loyalist militiaman) shoots her and kills her. The young rebel then joins the rebel forces at the Battle of Oulart Hill as they slaughtered a small detachment of the British Army.

The young man then goes on to state that it's more likely than not that he'll be joining his love in the afterlife soon enough. Cheerful stuff!

The history of the many rebellions and the ongoing conflict between the Irish and British colonial rule is long, complicated, and far beyond the scope of a single folk music blog post, but to touch very briefly on what was going on in the 1790s, well, the British were being pretty terrible.

To grossly oversimplify, at the time, anyone Catholic (which included the vast majority of native Irish) had their rights severely restricted. They either couldn't own or were very limited in what land they could have, had not right to public office or to the vote, and were mostly ruled over by a small upper class of British protestant landlords. Around that time the few Catholics with any influence and Protestant sympathizers pushed for better treatment and more representation. They had some success, but achieved nothing near equality and that frustration, along with the influence of the more successful revolutions in America and France, stirred up a rebellion against the British.

France was supposed to lend military support, but various circumstances and crossed signals led to a lot of failures. And in response British forces in Ireland responded with tactics that would make even today's "tough on terror" crowd blanche. British forces burned homes and murdered those suspected of supporting the rebellion, and used torture methods such as half-hanging and pitchcapping (look them up if you want to, but they're not nice things, trust me) to attempt to extract information or (more likely) to intimidate Irish citizens.

In the days leading up to this particular battle, British militiamen burned a number of homes and killed civilians all around the Wexford area. The narrator's sweetheart may have been fictional, but her fate was very much based on real events. Once Irish forces had massed, though, they greatly outnumbered the British, and by holding the high ground and having set up an ambush near the battle lines, they killed almost all of the British troops.

Other encounters during the short-lived uprising didn't go so well and by the autumn of that year the rebellion was over, though resistance to British rule would continue at various level of intensity until the Republic of Ireland had formed in the 20th Century, and beyond in Northern Ireland, which is still under the flag of the United Kingdom, a fact which not everyone who lives there is entirely thrilled about (though, like I said, I'm not going to even try to tell that whole story here).

One important, but easily overlooked bit of symbolism, though, is worth noting. The Irish rebels were sometimes called "Croppy Boys" for their close-cropped haircuts. Often the Irish who were killed in battle, or executed as prisoners would be buried in unmarked mass graves, which were nicknamed "Croppy Holes" A lot of these men carried rations made up of barley grains with them, and after a time the grains that were in the pockets of the dead men would sprout from the ground of the Croppy Holes, which the Irish took as a symbol of how their resistance to British rule would rise, again and again, no matter how many times it was cut down.

The wind through the barley isn't just an example of a pretty rural setting for this story, it's a powerful symbol for a movement that continued beyond the end of our Dead Lovers, and into the modern day.