Willy's Lady

Willy's Lady is a traditional ballad, Child 6, whose story (I have been told) has its roots in the folklore of Scandinavia as well. This version was learned from the singing of Martin Carthy, who uses a tune which was originally from Breton ("Son ar Chiste" (The Song of Cider)) and was married to "Willy's Lady" by Ray Fisher.

I've shortened the song by removing some of the repeated verses (ballads often follow the speechwriter's rule of tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them) but the full story of curse, bribery, deceit, and redemption is here.

Broken Token

This is probably the earliest of my faux ballads. The "broken token" ballad is a well-known genre in the British ballad repertoire, and they mostly follow the same story line (with minor variations): the sailor will be at sea for some years, so he and his betrothed divide a token of their love (usually a ring) with each keeping half. Some years later, the sailor returns, in disguise, to test his intended by telling her that her lover has died at sea and that she should find a new love. When she doesn't betray him, he reveals his true identity, and they live happily ever after, or at least until the end of the ballad. One well-known broken token ballad performed by Steeleye Span among others is "Dark-Eyed Sailor".

I took the basic story and tried to inject an ounce of reality to it ...

Montana's Hills

My song about chaos theory, with no actual intersections or museums or foreign nations or cats implied.

The lead instrument is a cittern, which is a 10-string octave mandolin, made for me by John Blodgett of Rockland Maine.

Planxty Mannix

First things first: why is this number called "Planxty Mannix" and what in the world is a planxty?

Planx·ty
n.
[Cf. L. plangere to mourn aloud.]
(Mus.) An Irish or Welsh melody for the harp, sometimes of a mournful character.

Actually, the way I've heard it, a "Planxty" is a tune written for someone, such as a benefactor, especially in the case of the blind Irish harpist Turlough O'Carolan, and this is the context in which I use the term.

Planxty Mannix is a compilation of two tunes. The first, which I originally called "Sprigs of Thyme" for no particular reason, is a three-part tune that I composed. While learning it note-by-note, I kept my eyes busy watching the old Mannix detective show on TV with the sound muted. So the song is named in his honor for helping me learn it. The second tune is a traditional Irish tune called the Mooncoin Jig that I originally heard Steeleye Span perform.

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

I visited Sydney in 1985 for a conference. Shortly before I'd arrived, some anti-war protesters had painted anti-nuke slogans on the sidewalks around Circular Quay, which features prominently in this Eric Bogle song about a World War I battle involving the ANZAC brigade from Australia and New Zealand. The juxtapositioning of the slogans and the Circular Quay brought this song to mind.

Recently, during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, I saw a report about the ANZAC soldiers that mentioned that the last surviving veteran of the Gallipoli campaign had passed on, as predicted in the last verse.

Out Standing In His Field

Okay, it's a pun. I do puns. So sue me.

But it's also a serious song about the diminishing role of the family farmer in the modern economy. We saw the farm I grew up on swallowed up by Kendall Park, New Jersey, eventually leaving nothing but an old farmhouse in a small lot on a cul de sac they decided to call Beck Court.

I used to be part of a bluegrass band called Granite Grass, but this song was written about the time I left the group, so it's never received a full-out bluegrass arrangement (I never learned to Scruggs pick the banjo, so I'm frailing for this recording). Someday ...

She's A Waltz

A friend once told me that she liked to think of people's personalities in terms of musical time signatures; someone who is stalwart but rather boring might be a 4/4, a flighty, excitable person could be a 6/8, and a calm, down to earth person would be 3/4, waltz time. My friend was lamenting that she saw herself as 4/4 rather than 3/4, which gave me the title for this song. The song itself came later.

This is the earliest recording of the collection. I recorded it with Cindy Kallet in 1980 on 4-track reel to reel tape, and have always loved both the harmony and guitar accompaniment that Cindy brought to the song, so I was not tempted to re-record it for the CD (aside from adding a bass track).

Cindy was kind enough to give me permission to use the cut on this CD. You can find her website at http://cindykallet.com .

High Ground

The title song for this CD. Though originally I wanted to call it "Listening to Footprints".

Allegory, or a story of a man who lost his boat?

The tricky part of this song is the fact that the verses are in 3/4 time while the bridge and chorus are in 4/4. That wasn't planned, they just worked out that way when they came to me, so the trick was how to join them without making it obvious.

Broken Down Squatter

This song was written in the late 1800s by Charles Flower about the consequences of a severe drought that resulted bank failures and land forfeitures. A "squatter" was a rancher who was renting government land; this particular squatter is left with nothing but Stumpy, his horse.

I Told The Cuckold

Think of this song as Child 81 Version 2 ...

Okay, a bit more detail. In some versions of the British ballad "Mattie Groves" (which dates to the early 1600s), there is a minor character who reveals an adulterous affair to the cuckolded husband, at which point he is told that he would be hanged if he was lying, but would receive lands if he was telling the truth. As it happens, he was telling the truth (with sad results for the lovers involved), but nothing about his reward was ever mentioned.

Don't you just hate loose ends?

So this is my sequel to Mattie Groves, taking up the little foot page's story.

Wife of Usher's Well

A traditional ballad, Child 79. I looked through the Bronson collection of tunes to the Child ballads in search of a tune to use, and didn't find one that I liked, but I found a good set of lyrics and (with some folk processing) used them, then wrote my own melody.

This version was originally recorded for the 40th Anniversary CD of the Folk Song Society of Greater Boston (http://fssgb.org) and was engineered by Steve Friedman of Melville Park Studios (with some co-engineering by me on the overdubs). Tom Benson provided the violin parts, and Lance Levine played bass; at the time Tom, Lance, and I were in a trio called "Mooncoin".

Gamby Knee

I've written several "traditional" British style ballads with a somewhat more contemporary viewpoint; Gamby Knee is one of these. At the time I thought "gamby" was a real word meaning lame, but I guess I fooled Webster.

Gold Tooth

This poem is the prologue to a little book of Down East poems by Ruth Moore that I bought back in the 70s sometime after hearing Gordon Bok do recitation versions of several of the longer poems. The prologue introduces the teller of tales that some would consider "tall". I put the poem to music and have always thought it stands very nicely on its own.

Stagolee

One of a zillion versions of this song. This version is one I originally learned from Daisy Nell, and the chorus is more-or-less the way she sang it. I couldn't remember the verses she used, so I applied another set of versions learned from somewhere or other. The folk process in action!

Ruminations On Song Selection

The songs included in High Ground range from my own contemporary songs to older traditional ballads and tunes. What unites them is that they've been part of my repertoire over several decades. But are they too different from each other to include on a single CD?

One of my live performance heroes has always been Michael Cooney. I once saw him one night of a four-night stint at the "Main Line" coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He was doing three sets a night, and apologized for repeating a song he'd sung two nights earlier in one set. He was sometimes called the one-man folk festival, due to the number of songs and range of styles that he performed.

I'm certainly no Michael Cooney, but one thing I picked up from him was a love of many different kinds of folk music, and this makes it a little difficult for me to identify myself with a single style of genre of folk music.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing (or just a thing). When I put together a set of songs, I may include British ballads from the 17th Century (or faux versions of same that I wrote), bluegrass, Celtic tunes, my own singer-songwriter allegory, Woody Guthrie songs, humorous music hall numbers, or songs by contemporary folk songwriters.

The risk, I suppose, is not finding a consistent audience. This has never been a problem for me in the past, since most of my singing has traditionally been at folk song society events, where the audience by self-selection is interested in a wide range of folk material. But how does it play at the modern Open Mike, where even the feature only gets eight to ten songs, and individual open mikers one or two? I may come across as a bluegrass player one week, a traditional ballad singer another night, a contemporary the next. Is this a problem, or an asset? Do folk singers outside of the comfort zone of the folk song society need a genre?

I'll be finding out as I continue to try different open mikes in the area.

Background to the CD

Post coming ...

What is this forum?

I thought I would experiment with this style of forum as an interesting way to present some more in-depth (without getting silly about it) background or thoughts about the CD and its songs, and if I get really crazy I could turn on comments ...