regshoe

Challenge #12: Create a Rec Countdown.

How about some ballad recs? A non-comprehensive list of my slightly-less-well-known faves:

272. 'The Holland Handkerchief' or 'The Suffolk Miracle': traditional lyrics; Mainly Norfolk info page; recording by Alasdair Roberts. This is one of my favourite ghost ballads, with very effective use of specific detail for a creepy twist.

215½. 'Annan Water': traditional lyrics; Mainly Norfolk info page; a recording by Kate Rusby. A solemn, touching and rather mysterious tragedy, lovely in its sense of inevitable doom.

213. 'Sir James the Rose': traditional lyrics; recording by Steeleye Span. This one's just a really good adventure story—murder, flight, betrayal, punctilious but rather pointless Honour, a gory ending—and Bob Johnson performs it with the enjoyable gusto he always brings to this kind of song.

14. 'Bonnie Banks o Fordie': traditional lyrics; info from Mainly Norfolk; recording by Old Blind Dogs. A proper bloody murder ballad with a cruelly ironic twist ending; I especially like this tune and arrangement.


Challenge #13: Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before. Done!


Challenge #14: In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

Natural history is a fandom; it also goes well with story-based fandom, I think. So my challenge is in two parts:

1) Find a wild species (anything: bird, wildflower, insect, fungus, etc.) that you can't already identify on sight/sound, and—using whatever suitable resources are available: books, the internet, asking knowledgeable people—identify it.
2) Incorporate this species into a fanwork. E.g. you could describe it in a fic, use it as a motif in a piece of art, make an icon by overlaying a quote from your canon on a photo of it, use a recording of its song in the background of a podfic...


Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

Reading my Yuletide recipient's prompts for the first time! The Warm Hands of Ghosts wasn't something I expected to feel very confident about writing for, but I read those Laura/Pim feelings and ideas and went ':D :D well then, I'm doing this!'. I love how fandom in general and exchanges in particular can do that, and it's nice to think of it while pondering what exchanges I might sign up for this year.

This was written for the pod_together challenge, which luzula suggested doing together. She introduced me to the lovely Burns poem 'Song Composed in August', which has lots of birds and nature imagery in it—here is a particularly beautiful recording of it as a song, which really emphasises the nature/ecological aspect of it—and came up with the idea that the narrator's love interest is actually a bird shapeshifter, which I had a great time developing and writing. Then, of course, both of us liking folk music and podfic being an ideal medium for including songs in a story (and, really, Burns's poems often seem a bit ballad-ish—they're certainly popular with folk singers), I worked various other ballads into the fic, which luzula has sung beautifully in the podfic. :)

I'll Mount the Air on Swallow's Wings (8002 words) by Luzula_podfic, regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Song Composed in August - Robert Burns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Narrator/Peggy (Song Composed in August)
Characters: Narrator (Song Composed in August), Peggy (Song Composed in August)
Additional Tags: Birds, Shapeshifting, Folk Music
Summary:

A holiday to the grouse moors of Scotland provides an opportunity to get to know the local bird life—but things turn out to be a bit more complicated than that.

This ballad is included by Child, not under its own number, but as an appendix to ballad 215, 'Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow, or, the Water o Gamrie'. Both 'Annan Water' and 'Rare Willie' belong to a group of ballads about people meeting their deaths by drowning which, in the way of folk songs, mix up with each other in the evolution of oral tradition, swap verses back and forth and share various important story elements. I imagine it must have been a bit of a headache deciding how to classify them under discrete ballad numbers. The texts of 'Rare Willie' (Child gives eight of them) differ quite a bit from each other, and several have a lot in common with ballad number 216, 'The Mother's Malison, or, Clyde's Water'—but they don't have so very much, besides the basic drowning plot, in common with 'Annan Water'.

Here, our unnamed protagonist is trying to cross the river Annan in order to see his love, Annie. After tiring out one horse and changing to another, he tries to persuade the boatman to take him across the river, but the boatman refuses. Desperate, he resorts to swimming across; the raging water overcomes him, and he drowns. It's a simpler, vaguer plot than 'Rare Willie' and 'Clyde's Water', but contains some lovely imagery and intriguing suggestions, and it's been a favourite of mine for a while, but I didn't know very much about its history and variations—so I decided to find out some more and do a post on it!

( Some opinions and lyrical detail )

I think it's the time of year for ballads—I've been listening to and thinking about them a lot over the last few weeks. I think I said a while ago that I wanted to do some more occasional in-depth posts about the ballads, so here is one, on Child ballad 233, 'Andrew Lammie' or 'Mill o' Tifty's Annie', which is one of my favourites.

The plot, basically: Annie, the miller's daughter at Mill o' Tifty near Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, falls in love with Andrew Lammie, a trumpeter in the employ of Lord Fyvie. Her family disapprove because Andrew is a servant and therefore not good enough for Annie; they escalate from taunting to physical abuse, culminating in her murder by her brother. This story is supposedly historical, although I think the authenticity is a bit doubtful (historical ballads often are!). Like many of the ballads it's a tragic story of doomed love, and I like it for the interesting imagery and the things it has to say about the society it's set in, besides the story and the nice tune.

The first recording I heard was the one by Kate Rusby, which I now think is a bit lacking as an interpretation, but I still like it. It's actually one of the more unique recordings, as can be seen on the chart below—Rusby includes several of the vaguer, more poetic verses from Child texts A and B which are often omitted from more straightforward narrative recordings. I especially like the imagery of her opening two verses, and the final two ('...but now that I must walk alone/For I will not see my dearie' is an understatedly lovely way to end). On the other hand she leaves out so many of the 'narrative' verses that a lot of the detail of the plot is lost, to the point that it becomes difficult to follow. The instrumentation is a bit over the top, but I like her take on the tune (all the recordings I've found use the same basic tune, a lovely classic ballad-y one, but there are lots of small differences and variations on it). Of the more traditional ballad-style recordings my favourite is Jean Redpath's—lovely voice, lovely storytelling in both the choice of verses and the performance.

( Some analysis of recordings of the ballad, and some opinions about it )

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.