Mid-60s London, and one Andrew Loog Oldham, Rolling Stones manager, trawls the city for pretty girls who want to sing. One is Marianne Faithfull. I pass her by like the idle wind, heeding her not.
Another of his finds rose to fame in New York before a long, drug-fuelled decline and an early death. A third lived quietly in the country, raised children and found acclaim only twenty five years later.
Mr Loog Oldham presents :
Nico - I''m Not Sayin
Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In your Mind
Here's a few folkies I missed in the previous posts.
The wonderful Shirley Collins - perhaps an acquired taste but a lasting one.
Big-eyed, quizzical looks and another pure voice - Pentangle's Jacqui McShee.
A woman I could listen to till the cows come home - Mary Black.
Perfect voice for the song - the late Lal Waterson sings 'To Make You Stay". What a pity her "Fine Horseman" is not out there.
Finding an affordable recording of Tex Ritter's 'Old Paint' - and it's got to be the really gritty, primitive version Hank Wangford played on his Radio 2 series "Ghengis Khan Was A Cowboy Too" - is difficult. I have no idea who mmcs122 (aka Molly from Nashville) is, but this version by her is, while not at all gritty, quite charming.
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Various old songs were sung (on my father's side of the family) from tradition.I discovered their pedigree when an aunt heard a BBC archive rec. of Phil Tanner of Gower singing "The sweet primroses" and said, "Why, I know that!"
After my singing it in the pub a few years ago (before all this pesky license stuff) an elderly Irisman said to me "Why, I know that" and proceeded to sing it: his words were earthier, beginning "I set my lips to a bottle of bra-an-dy..."
One of Shirley Collins' LPs was called after that song: she was accompanied on a tiny sweet-toned neo-baroque organ with a beautiful little chiff by her sister Dolly. Together they sounded like a treefull of little singing-birds.
A few years ago at Broadstairs I was surprised to learn from some little folkie paper that the first generation of English folk revivalists took all their material from American political sources, but still called it "folk". Amazing, that, after the Peter Kennedy recordings, which I think helped uncover the amazing Copper family, still going strong: and then came the rediscovery of greats like Harry Cox, some of whose songs were recorded by Peter Bellamy of "Young tradition". I heard that Bellamy came to a tragic end, as the leftish folkies attempted to limit his repertoire and interrupt his performances by objecting to any hunting song - is this true?
His recording of Kipling poems to trad tunes is a brilliant uniting of two traditions: but Kipling seems to me to have traditional melodies and verse-modes at the back of some of his lyrics. He, like his great fellow Sussex man, Hilaire Belloc, who shows a similar influence, must have heard and learned from some of the great trad. singers of the past.
Cerstainly the late great Bob Copper admired Belloc, and compiled a most moving musical recreation of Belloc' song-filled ramble through Sussex, "the Four Men":the BBC would do a great service to lovers of things English by releasing the recording.
There was also a recorded collaboration between Shirley Collins and people like David Munrow and other masters of the revival of renaissance instruments. Unfortunately the contents of the more recent CDs, despite their similar titles like "Anthems in Eden", seem hardly to match the contents of her original LPs! A great shame!
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