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Having requested it for Yuletide I've been re-reading and listening to this ballad a lot over the last few weeks, and so I thought I'd write a post about it.
The best thing about folk music is how, with no 'official' or 'original' versions of anything, music or lyrics, there's so much room to reinterpret songs and do them in totally different styles. I love the way that different choices can affect how a song comes across—sometimes really quite small changes that completely alter the mood or add something vital to the meaning, or just little touches that make a great song even better. I have several Spotify playlists where I collect together lots of different recordings of one folk song and compare them. It's great fun.
Anyway, my absolute fave recording of 'Sir Patrick Spens' is the one by June Tabor, who is of course always great. The tune and arrangement are amazingly atmospheric, dramatic and poignant by turns in all the right places, and Tabor really performs the drama and emotion of the lyrics (the way she sings 'when the sky grew dark and the wind grew high, and loud, loud roared the sea' is just <333). I also really like the arrangement of the verses here, especially those all-important last few ones: I think putting the wistful 'long, long may the ladies sit' verse first, and only then revealing the fate of the men they're waiting for with the 'three miles off Aberdeen' verse is much more effective than going the other way round, and the final image of the drowned Sir Patrick 'with the Scots lords at his feet' is a haunting and evocative note to end on.
Another fave is the recording by Wendy Weatherby, which I came across on one of my Spotify trawls. This is another really good tune, in fact I think the best fit I've heard for the mood of the lyrics: it starts out sounding bright and brave like a knight riding off on a quest, skips a beat in the middle of the verse in a way that sounds sort of stumbling and uncertain, then ends on a much more melancholy phrase. Unlike Tabor's version it's also sung in Scots, which is always good (although the rhyming in this song isn't messed up the way it is in a lot of Scots ballads by Anglicising the words). However, I don't like the choices of lyrics here so much: Weatherby includes the version of Sir Patrick's reaction to the letter where he says he's not a sailor, which I don't like just because it doesn't make much sense given the plot, and the order of the final verses puts 'half ower, half ower frae Aberdour' first rather than at the end.
I also like the version by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer (all of the songs on their Child Ballads album are good, actually, especially their 'Willie of Winsbury'), which has another very dramatic 'knight riding off on a quest' sort of tune, with some lovely harmonies and a nice fiddle, and also a good arrangement of lyrics. (I really like how many evocative little details there are in the various versions of this ballad, like the 'feather beds that fluttered on the foam' included here).
It's funny how there are some folk songs with one definitive tune that everyone sings, and others that barely seem to have been recorded with the same tune twice. Sir Patrick Spens is in the second category, and unfortunately the only tune I do know multiple versions of, the one sung by Nic Jones and Martin Carthy, isn't one I like much—I think it sounds far too jolly and light-hearted for such a tragic story, although those recordings are otherwise good. (Lyrical dissonance can suit ballads, of course—there are plenty of recordings of really horrible Child ballads with merry-sounding upbeat tunes that I think work very well, often by Steeleye Span, but I don't think that suits a high-minded noble tragedy the way it does a grim murder ballad).
So there are some of my opinions on folk music! I may do similar posts about other songs and ballads in future, but I thought this was a good one to start with.
The best thing about folk music is how, with no 'official' or 'original' versions of anything, music or lyrics, there's so much room to reinterpret songs and do them in totally different styles. I love the way that different choices can affect how a song comes across—sometimes really quite small changes that completely alter the mood or add something vital to the meaning, or just little touches that make a great song even better. I have several Spotify playlists where I collect together lots of different recordings of one folk song and compare them. It's great fun.
Anyway, my absolute fave recording of 'Sir Patrick Spens' is the one by June Tabor, who is of course always great. The tune and arrangement are amazingly atmospheric, dramatic and poignant by turns in all the right places, and Tabor really performs the drama and emotion of the lyrics (the way she sings 'when the sky grew dark and the wind grew high, and loud, loud roared the sea' is just <333). I also really like the arrangement of the verses here, especially those all-important last few ones: I think putting the wistful 'long, long may the ladies sit' verse first, and only then revealing the fate of the men they're waiting for with the 'three miles off Aberdeen' verse is much more effective than going the other way round, and the final image of the drowned Sir Patrick 'with the Scots lords at his feet' is a haunting and evocative note to end on.
Another fave is the recording by Wendy Weatherby, which I came across on one of my Spotify trawls. This is another really good tune, in fact I think the best fit I've heard for the mood of the lyrics: it starts out sounding bright and brave like a knight riding off on a quest, skips a beat in the middle of the verse in a way that sounds sort of stumbling and uncertain, then ends on a much more melancholy phrase. Unlike Tabor's version it's also sung in Scots, which is always good (although the rhyming in this song isn't messed up the way it is in a lot of Scots ballads by Anglicising the words). However, I don't like the choices of lyrics here so much: Weatherby includes the version of Sir Patrick's reaction to the letter where he says he's not a sailor, which I don't like just because it doesn't make much sense given the plot, and the order of the final verses puts 'half ower, half ower frae Aberdour' first rather than at the end.
I also like the version by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer (all of the songs on their Child Ballads album are good, actually, especially their 'Willie of Winsbury'), which has another very dramatic 'knight riding off on a quest' sort of tune, with some lovely harmonies and a nice fiddle, and also a good arrangement of lyrics. (I really like how many evocative little details there are in the various versions of this ballad, like the 'feather beds that fluttered on the foam' included here).
It's funny how there are some folk songs with one definitive tune that everyone sings, and others that barely seem to have been recorded with the same tune twice. Sir Patrick Spens is in the second category, and unfortunately the only tune I do know multiple versions of, the one sung by Nic Jones and Martin Carthy, isn't one I like much—I think it sounds far too jolly and light-hearted for such a tragic story, although those recordings are otherwise good. (Lyrical dissonance can suit ballads, of course—there are plenty of recordings of really horrible Child ballads with merry-sounding upbeat tunes that I think work very well, often by Steeleye Span, but I don't think that suits a high-minded noble tragedy the way it does a grim murder ballad).
So there are some of my opinions on folk music! I may do similar posts about other songs and ballads in future, but I thought this was a good one to start with.
