for playlist go to: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1SkqOMi5etZmcZ_B4ANc-Xt8VNNjJZg

Hello Thank you for accessing this playlist, ‘Songs From The British Isles’. I hope it has something in it for you to enjoy. 

 I want to talk to you about why I’ve created it. 

I love these songs, I love to sing them, and I want to share them. Now that’s simple enough, isn’t it? Or would be if there wasn’t just a little bit more to it than that. 

 Let’s get one thing out of the way first. 

 I am an old man with a variety of health problems, some but not ALL related to my age. My voice is certainly not what it used to be, and I can’t use it in the way I once could. I had a stroke not so long back and there are some parts of that which still show. So there are reasons why I read the songs off sheets instead of from memory, as I used to do very easily. 

 But so what? I still have an intimate relationship with these songs, and that puts me in line with all those other folk – I think ‘informants’ is the latest way to describe them – who have recorded for folk-song collectors like Cecil Sharp and many others over the last century and a bit. 

 Now I’m glad to say a lot of these ‘informants’ had more or less kept their voices intact, and how strikingly beautiful these can be. But others, I’m afraid not so much. I’m in that class now. 

 But I don’t think it matters too much, because just like them I have more than enough of a voice to carry these songs, and the fact that they are incredible songs just can’t be hidden. They are incredible for two reasons. 

 One, they come in such a huge variety of forms. Yes, they all clearly belong to the same idiom. You know a traditional song when you hear one, because it slots in stylistically with every other traditional song. But that being said, there is no such thing as a typical traditional song, there is no stereotype to hang on to. 

 And think about the stories they tell. The myths, tales, legends, histories, common experiences, all the different dramas of life, whether tragical or comical, all played out in one form or another in these songs. 

 So now we get to the second thing that makes them incredible, and that is how they are DESIGNED to be sung. 

 Now, let’s be clear. I have nothing against songs being accompanied. Accompaniment is crucial in many traditions ROUND THE WORLD, and when done by musicians who understand how the British tradition works it can add to a song considerably. 

 But accompaniments made by people who DON’T understand the tradition can be poison to the songs, killing every song they touch. How, is for another time. So many different ways – but right now my question is, what is it that the people who don’t understand the tradition are missing? 

 Is it just about the WAY they accompany a song, or is it something else? What is the key to this tradition of singing which sets the songs apart from so-called popular song? 

 It couldn’t be more simple. These songs absolutely do not need accompaniment. They are, each and all, complete in themselves. The only instrument which is compulsory is the voice. They’re so self-contained they work perfectly well WITHOUT harmonies, WITHOUT a chordal backing, WITHOUT a laid-down beat. 

 And why would that be? Because these songs are not just tunes with words attached, which is how far too many performers treat them, like pop-songs which exist only so make the performers sound good, or what the performers thinks is good. They are POEMS made to be most effective when they are sung. 

 Of course, it is important to sing the songs MUSICALLY. They’ve got to sound right. But each song has its own meaning, and that meaning lies in the words. 

 The thing is that when you listen to traditional singers for any length of time, you realise – well, I realised as I listened to them – that they all seem to share a single IDEA. And that single idea is tucked away inside all their differences. 

 To begin with, they’re of course all singing in the same idiom, but they don’t sing in the same way. When they sing, as when they speak, their own personalities and characters are on display. Their singing voices are usually an extension of their individual speaking voices, and their choice of songs or the versions they sing them in is entirely a matter for individual taste. 

 So singers are easily identifiable, one from the other, just as everybody is identifiable one from the other in the normal course of everyday living. 

Essentially they are all storytellers, just as we all are. Most of the time, when  we speak, we are describing events, from vital news to trivial gossip. The singers like to tell many of their stories in song, each in in their own way, at their own pace and according to their own taste, just as they do when they talk. And sometimes they make stories too, if the mood so takes them. 

So really, singing is just another way of speaking. Singing is a form of dramatised speech.

But there’s no need at all for special staging. A pub bench will do, or a gate, or an armchair, a kitchen table, or cowshed, field, barn, streetcorner. 

And while It’s good when people listen to you and appreciate what you do, they’re not always necessary. Singing BY yourself can be a joy IN itself, because through singing you are providing your own entertainment, or because singing eases you through your day when you need distraction or sometimes to deal with your emotions at some level. 

 So inevitably songs will be created by people who can think POETICALLY and make their poems musical, without any thought as to what they might sound like with accompaniment. All they need are their own thoughts and the sounds of the world around them. 

 Which means also that since singing is open to everybody, there’s no cost, because there is no need for instruments. The point about that is that playing an instrument is hard work, and in any case open only to those who can afford or inherit one. 

Not that instrumental music is in any way secondary to singing. It’s a marvellous music and we surely need it. I play several instruments myself, above all the fiddle, so I know the huge IMPORTANCE of traditional music. 

 But this that I’m talking about here is singing. And singing, above all other forms of musical expression, is convenient. 

 Now I know singing isn’t only for the solitary. As I’ve already hinted at, it’s great to sing in company, and great to have songs that other people can sing with you, with or without harmonies, and with or without accompaniment. Such singing has always been a staple of social life. 

 It’s certainly something my experience as a teacher taught me, that given the opportunity, which sadly they usually aren’t, given the opportunity to sing genuine traditional songs, just for the pleasure of it, children love them, and learn them as happily and as naturally as they ever learnt to speak. Because singing does not require a special talent, as far too many of my teaching colleagues believed it did. It is as instinctive as speaking. It always has been. Otherwise there are any number of songs that would have been lost to us but for the generations of families who kept them alive. 

 My point here is that traditional songs work at every level, as modern popular songs don’t. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into that now. What I’m saying is, I try to emulate the old singers, the ‘informants’, by adopting what I believe their shared attitude was to these songs, the great central idea. 

 Of course, they weren’t so blatant about it, they didn’t have to be. And it may well be they weren’t really conscious of it either. Except maybe as popular culture became more technological and industrial there were those who became very conscious of it, being confronted with a whole new social reality that simply didn’t gel with theirs. 

Thinl of the countless generations that never had printed, recorded or broadcast music to either contend with or get the advantage from as we do. WE now tend to rely on these for the greater part of our stock of songs and they are deeply influential in the way we sing them. 

Everything THEY got, they got from their own little corner of the world. They fed their imaginations with whatever was to be got from their neighbours, from travelling folk – often, they were travelling folk – from broadsides, which, you’ll recall, tended to provide only texts, no tunes; and their own talents did the rest. Pretty well everything was done face to face, in community with people they knew and who knew them. 

 So the knowledge and understanding of this music which was part of the natural order of their lives I have only learned to properly appreciate through a lifetime of study, practise and thought, as have so many singers who share my twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural background. 

 So what is it I have LEARNT from what these great performers always KNEW? Well, I’ve learned that each and every song I sing is MY song. I own it. I can do what I like with it, sing it as I learned or remembered it, or revise and reshape it if that’s what it takes to make it the song I want to sing. And I can do that as many times or however I like. 

 So whatever the story is, a myth, a tale, a legend, a piece of history, some-one’s life experience, a lesson, a joke, a riddle, I will tell it with all the respect that is due to all the storytellers who told it before me, because I feel bound to acknowledge that what they have created is nothing less than a great gift.

But I will also do what they did, which is, I will tell my stories in my own way, with my own accent and using my own voice, the voice I have always used, my language, the language I have always spoken. 

 So what you hear when you hear me sing any song, whatever that song may be, where-ever and whenever that song came from, is, right at the heart of it, me. You hear me, who I am, what I am. I am not pretending to be some-one else, I am not acting a part. 

Every song I sing is an expression of my feeling, my imagination, and my understanding. Yes I will study these songs, I will learn where they came from, who made them – as far as can be known what they meant to the people who made them. But in the end, I will only sing songs which, in whatever way, for whatever reason, have a significance for me which makes them irresistible. 

 And that, I sincerely believe, is the great lesson, the great IDEA, I have been taught by the wonderful men and women who have gifted us this marvellous tradition and whom I am trying in my own insufficient way to honour. 

 And I am proud to be associated with all those, many of whom I have known, all those who during my lifetime have shown they have learnt the same lesson. As I said at the start, my voice is the only instrument I cannot do without and the only stage I absolutely need is where-ever I happen to be. 

 Here’s a metaphor or, maybe a better term, parable to end with. Wine is expensive but it makes you thirsty, while water is cheap and quenches your thirst. In our world are millions who are so addicted to wine that they have forgotten there is such a thing as water. 

 And that’s it. As I said at the start, simple really. Thanks. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-