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Sedayne has sent us this notification of a rather fab sounding project he is putting together for 2011, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Carthy's ground breaking Landfall album. We think this makes a rather excellent companion piece to our own Oak, Ash and Thorn Project and will follow and report on progress with gleeful anticipation. Over to Sedayne...


This is an open invitation to any folk / floor singer, amatuer, semi-pro or pro, anywhere in the world, to contribute to an on-line project in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Carthy's album Landfall.

The Landfill Project - curator: Sedayne.

2011 is the 40th anniversary of many significant albums, not least of which is Martin Carthy's Landfall, with its iconic cover (actually from the Topic re-issue of 1977) declaring the unashamed pastoral nature of the folk scene of 40 years ago. These days, our environmental concerns are perhaps a little different, hence Landfill rather than Landfall. Thus I might ask if there are any visual artists out there who could provide a suitable homage of the 1977 Topic edition of Landfall, but actually depicting a Landfill. I guess the seagulls, rolling contours and ominous skies would be a constant, whilst the proud ploughman would be driving some class of landfill compactor over this artificial landscape.

As for the songs - Landfall is a rugged mix of the traditional & the contemporary, most of which I still hear sung today in clubs and singarounds today, so the initial appeal would be to those floor-singers who have any of these in their regular repertoires and would like to donate a recording.

Here are the songs:

Here's Adieu to All Judges and Juries
Brown Adam (Child 98)
O'er the Hills
Cruel Mother (Child 20)
Cold Haily Windy Night
His Name Is Andrew (Dave Ackles)
The Bold Poachers
Dust to Dust (John Kirkpatrick)
The Broomfield Hill
The January Man (Dave Goulder)

Given that this will be an on-line download edition only, there will be no limit to the amount of people covering each song, giving each their own distinctive spin, variations etc. so - the more the merrier really - accompanied, unaccompanied, solo, groups, come what may. If any singer wishes to cover the entire album they will be more than welcome to do so. Likewise, there will be no limits on the number of visual interpretations of the cover image.

This will be an open venture reflecting the open & democratic nature of the Folk Scene of today. Like a singaround, no money will be involved at an level - time will be given freely and the music will be available for all.

Most importantly, there will be no vetting for quality control at any level other than at the discretion of each singer - it being assumed that if you are prepared to sing a song in a folk club or singaround then it is more than worthy of being featured here.

Home & field recordings heartily encouraged and whilst professional singers are welcome there will be no deference given. The Landfill Project is about ALL folk singers of the English Speaking World & beyond who have been touched by this remarkable album and have been moved to sing the songs themselves.

If the response is good, I will be hosting it as a blogspot throughout 2011 featuring full graphic material and biographical info on each singer with links to the downloadable material and encourage as many Landfall / Landfill themed singarounds as possible throughout the year. If singers wish to make their contributions via YouTube, this will be seen as A Very Good Thing too.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Sedayne 

Anyone interested in contributing to the Landfill Project is welcome to leave a comment on this blog post or send a message via the Folk Police contact page, which we'll pass on to Sedayne.
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This is the new album by the wonderful Dan Haywood's New Hawks, brought to you by our good friends at Timbreland Records. It's a 32 track triple-vinyl album of spooked psychedelia, folk and country rock. Dan's singular vocals, shot through with a warm Black Country twang, manage to invoke the spirit of prime Roy Harper and early John Otway, whilst his songwriting, charting his travels round rural Scotland, somehow manages to sound both unique yet familiar. The vinyl boxed set is a strictly limited edition, though it will be available as a double CD in the new year. We can't recommend this album highly enough - it's already earned its place as one of the Folk Police albums of the year. Order your copy from the Timbreland on-line shop. 

Dan Haywood's New Hawks on Myspace
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King Henry VII & the Shipwrights
Raymond Greenoaken of the excellent Stirrings Magazine, who has written the sleeve notes for The Oak Ash and Thorn Project, our album of new versions of Peter Bellamy's settings of Kipling's Puck songs, has very kindly transcribed the original sleeve notes from Oak, Ash and Thorn and Merlin's Isle of Gramarye, adding his own extensive and illuminating annotations. Feel free to call us obsessive-compulsive Bellamy anoraks if you so desire, but here at Folk Police Towers, we love this stuff.

OAK, ASH AND THORN

 A collection of songs by RUDYARD KIPLING, set and performed in the traditional idiom by PETER BELLAMY with Royston, Wood, Heather Wood, Barry Dransfield and Robin Dransfield.

“Once upon a time, Dan and Una, brother and sister, living in the English country, had the good fortune to meet with Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow, alias Nick o’Lincoln, alias Lob-lie-by-the-fire, the last survivor in England of those whom mortals call Fairies. The proper name, of course, is ‘The People of the Hills.’ This Puck, by means of the magic of Oak, Ash And Thorn, gave the children power--

To see what they should see and hear what they should hear,                 
Though it should have happened three thousand year.

The result was that from time to time, and in different places on the farm and in the fields and the country about, they saw and talked to some rather interesting people. One of these, for instance, was a Knight of the Norman Conquest, another a young Centurion of a Roman Legion stationed in England, another a builder and decorator of King Henry VII’s time; and so on and so forth; as I have tried to explain in a book called Puck of Pook’s Hill…”

From the introduction to Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling.

SIDE ONE

Frankie’s Trade (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied; chorus by Royston Wood, Heather Wood and Robin Dransfield.
Poor Honest Men (Kipling/Traditional) fiddle accompaniment by Barry Dransfield.
Cold Iron (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied.
Sir Richard’s Song (Kipling/Bellamy) self-accompanied on guitar.
The Looking Glass (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied.
Oak, Ash & Thorn (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied; chorus by Royston Wood and Heather Wood.

SIDE TWO

King Henry VII and The Shipwrights (Kipling/Traditional) Fiddle accompaniment by Barry Dransfield.
The Brookland Road (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied.
A Three-Part Song (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied; chorus by Royston Wood and Heather Wood.
The Ballad of Minepit Shaw (Kipling/Bellamy) self-accompanied on guitar.
Our Fathers of Old (Kipling/Bellamy) unaccompanied.
Philadelphia (Kipling/Bellamy) self-accompanied on concertina.

Frankie’s Trade This song comes from the story Simple Simon (R & F), which describes the early adventures of Sir Francis Drake as related by Simon Cheyneys, a 16th century shipbuilder and burgess of the town of Rye. The tune is based on the first line of the well known sea-shanty Go Down Ye Blood Red Roses.

note: PB gave several accounts of the genesis of Oak, Ash And Thorn, and though they differ in a few unimportant details, they are in firm agreement that Frankie’s Trade was the poem that first summoned the muse. Reading it in bed one night in late 1969, PB realised that it was “not a poem, but a sea-shanty”, and tried singing it to various shanty tunes, without complete satisfaction. Go Down Ye Blood Red Roses, however, provided the starting point for his first Kipling setting. By the end of the night he had another fifteen committed to tape. 

Poor Honest Men From A Priest In Spite Of Himself (R & F), the story of a fiddle-playing smuggler, Pharaoh Lee, an Anglo-French Romany engaged in the tax-free tobacco trade between the newly-formed United States of America, and Europe. The tune is Spanish Ladies, a traditional sea song.

note: For PB, this was the clinching proof that Kipling had made most, if not all, of his Puck poems consciously in the form of traditional song. PB was personally convinced that Kipling had the specific example of Spanish Ladies in mind when composing Poor Honest Men, detecting echoes of the song in the text of the poem.

Cold Iron comes from the story Cold Iron (R & F). The text of the song is not derived from the story, but they share a common theme—the magical influence of iron over the lives not only of mortal men, but those of the People of the Hills as well. The tune is not based on any particular folk-song, but if the listener can identify snatches, it would not surprise the composer.

note: I’ve often fancied I can hear a mild resemblance to The White Cockade, a tune PB later used as a model for his setting of A Smuggler’s Song (MIOG). He also, I think, lifted a melodic phrase (in line 3) from The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter, a song that will have been running through his head at the time (he recorded it shortly afterwards on The Fox Jumps Over The Parson’s Gate). This song was one of several Puck settings that he re-recorded towards the end of his life, with a view to making them commercially available again. It was included on the Fellside reissue Mr Bellamy, Mr Kipling And The Tradition (FECD 162).

Sir Richard’s Song The hero of Young Men At The Manor (PPH) is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a young Norman knight in the army of the Conqueror, who after Hastings took seizin of a manor in Sussex. Unlike many of his countrymen, he falls in love with the land, the people, and the Saxon lady whose lands he won. The tune is patterned after that of the Scots ballad The Gardener’s Child.

note:  Another setting re-recorded in 1990 and subsequently reissued on MBMKATT. even towards the end of his career, he could be readily persuaded to sing this at club gigs if he could borrow a guitar.

The Looking Glass concerns Queen Elizabeth the First, and some of the deeds of Good Queen Bess which were not so good. The story from which the poem was taken, Gloriana (R & F), is narrated by Elizabeth herself, the most exalted person whom Puck enabled Dan and Una to meet. The tune is based on a line from Just As The Tide Was A-Flowing.

note: Another setting re-recorded and reissued on MBMKATT. To my ears, the similarity of this setting to any part of Just As The Tide Was A-Flowing is very slight, but may be taken on trust, unlike a couple of PB’s other attributions (see below). It does, however, provide a good example of a highly characteristic feature of Bellamy composition: the cadence on the third above the octave. Many of his tunes include this feature, as do many of the traditional tunes included in his repertoire throughout his career. It’s not a particularly common motif in English traditional song, which tends to limit its melodic compass to a single octave. I feel sure PB’s relish for singing at the upper limits of his range helps to explain this—though it’s quite likely that he was not consciously aware of using it with such frequency (he composed in his head—or on his tongue—and never mastered musical notation). Other examples in the Puck settings are Cold Iron, Sir Richard’s Song, Oak, Ash And Thorn, A Three-Part Song, Puck’s Song, Eddi’s Service, The Bee Boy’s Song, Harp Song Of The Dane Women, Song Of The Men’s Side, St Helena, and A Truthful Song. Significant examples from his traditional repertoire include Maid Of Australia, Down The Moor and Derry Gaol. It also crops up in his melodies for The Transports (eg Leaves In The Woodland, Black And Bitter Night). The Looking Glass was another setting re-recorded and reissued on MBMKATT.

Oak, Ash & Thorn Kipling entitled this poem A Tree Song, and it is to be found in the story Weland’s Sword (PPH). Both the tale and the song set the mood and pattern for all the songs and poems which follow. The tune is intended to recall those of some of the old wassail and ritual songs.

note: This poem has acquired a degree of popularity in neo-pagan circles, by dint of its tree-lore and the anti-clerical sentiments of its final verse. As far as I can make out, however, it’s not usually sung to the PB tune—more’s the pity.

King Henry VII And The Shipwrights Bob Brigandyne, the hero of this witty ballad, is but a minor character in the story to which it is appended—The Wrong Thing (R & F). A traditional tune from Lancashire, The Gallant Frigate Amphitrite, is used here.

note: There were occasions when PB felt confident he’d nailed the exact tune Kipling had in mind when composing a certain poem. Spanish Ladies, above, is one such (though Kipling may, of course, have been working from the text of the song rather than the tune). This one is so snug a fit that he might have been justified in thinking he’d read Kipling’s mind again.

The Brookland Road, together with another poem with a ghostly flavour, The Way Through The Woods, is presented with Marklake Witches (R & F), a story concerning the activities of a Sussex witchmaster, Jerry Gamm. The first line of The Little Black Horse suggested the melody.

note: PB is clearly in error in referencing The Little Black Horse (also known as The Penny Wager) here. There seems to have been an inadvertent cross-pollination with his note to Our Fathers Of Old (below), whose melody is clearly derived from The Little Black Horse. It’s likely, therefore, that it was The Limerick Rake that “leant a little of itself” to the tune for The Brookland Road. Another setting re-recorded and reissued on MBMKATT.

A Three-Part Song, a simple hymn of praise of Sussex, appears with the story Dymchurch Flit (PPH). It is interesting to note that Kipling lived for some years in the village of Rottingdean, where he must certainly have heard the harmonious singing of the Copper family, who have lived there for centuries, and who live there still. A character called ‘Young Copper’ is referred to in Marklake Witches; perhaps this song was written with the Coppers in mind. The tune is loosely based on Jockey To The Fair, an English Morris.

note: PB later tempered his cheerful certitude about Kipling’s having heard Jim and Tom Copper lift their voices in rustic harmony at the turn of the 20th century. “Did he hear the Coppers singing in the Black Horse during his sojourn in Rottingdean?” he asks rhetorically in his commentary Kipling And The Tradition, published in Folk Review in April 1973. The answer, he seems to suggest, is “possibly”. There’s no documentary evidence that Kipling ever popped into the Black Horse during his Rottingdean residency (1897-1902). In his early adulthood he was comfortable with, and curious about, the labouring classes, though after his marriage in 1892 he became more reserved. Nevertheless, the opening line of another story (The Comprehension Of Private Copper, in Traffics And Discoveries (1904)) declares “Private Copper’s father was a Southdown shepherd…”, which certainly suggests he knew of the Coppers and their place in the local community.

The Ballad Of Minepit Shaw is a very Child Ballad-like poem appearing in The Tree Of Justice (R & F), and again the ballad and the story share little but a theme. The words are reminiscent of some of Jean Ritchie’s Appalachian variants of British ballads, and this setting is made with those songs in mind.

note: In view of the remarks above, the suggestive similarity of PB’s tune and that of the North Country comic ballad King Knapperty is probably no more than coincidental…

Our Fathers Of Old comes from A Doctor Of Medicine (R & F), in which the astrologer and herbalist Culpepper tells how his knowledge of the occult helped him cure the plague in Dan and Una’s village during the Civil War between King and Parliament. The Limerick Rake leant a little of itself to the tune.

note: As noted above, the key phrase in this tune comes not from The Limerick Rake but The Little Black Horse. PB recorded the latter the following year on TFJOTPG. 

Philadelphia was the city where, in Brother Square Toes (R & F), Pharaoh Lee (see Poor Honest Men) spent some years before returning to England with his fortune in Virginia tobacco. Whilst in Philadelphia he met George Washington, and the then-exiled Talleyrand, as well as many other people mentioned in the song.  
                                                                                                                        
Kipling tells us—correctly—that there was little in the Philadelphia of his day which showed that it had once been a beautiful city. Today this is even more true. It is fortunate, however, that Kipling’s conclusion is also still true:

The things that truly last when Men and Times have passed
They are all in Pennsylvania this morning!

note: PB offers no hints as to whence he drew the inspiration for his setting, but it’s clear from the shape of the tune that he composed it on the anglo concertina—which he uses on OAT only as accompaniment for this song. Another setting re-recorded and reissued on MBMKATT.

Sleeve Notes : Peter Bellamy
Sleeve drawing : Peter Bellamy
Sleeve Design : Anthea Bellamy
Recorded 1970 at Decca Studios, London
Producer : Frederick Woods
Engineer: Adrian Martins


MERLIN’S ISLE OF GRAMARYE

A further collection of songs by RUDYARD KIPLING, set and performed in the traditional idiom by PETER BELLAMY, with Nic Jones, Dolly Collins, Dik Cadbury, Peter Hall, Chris Birch, Anthea Bellamy, Dave Arthur, Fred Woods and Mike Edmonds.

This is the second collection to be published, by kind permission of Mrs George Bambridge, of my settings of songs from what many believe to be Rudyard Kipling’s finest books, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies. The first collection, entitled Oak, Ash and Thorn (Argo ZFB 11), consisted for the most part of songs written in the styles of various known traditional song forms. To set, for example, an imitation sea-shanty to a convincing sea-shanty-type tune is no difficult task for someone whose repertoire has always contained real sea-shanties. Kipling, however, was not content with imitating known styles, and some of his songs in the two books were bold guesses at the type of songs which might have been sung by people whose verbal culture has long been lost. This record, therefore, contains not only the more obvious ‘folky’ pieces but also four songs which perhaps could have been sung during the Neolithic, Saxon and Viking eras. Right or wrong, Kipling’s verses have somehow always managed to ring with a feeling of authenticity. It is for the listener to decide if my music carries the same conviction.

note: PB was perhaps a trifle over-generous in describing Kipling’s Viking, Saxon and Neolithic songs as “bold guesses” at the original forms; they are, without exception, comfortably within the idiomatic range of 19th-early 20th century English verse. They are, indeed, Kiplingesque through and through. Similarly, PB’s settings of these pieces are “folkier” than he seems to be suggesting—with perhaps one exception (see below).

SIDE ONE

Puck’s Song Kipling/Bellamy  with Nic Jones (fiddle) 2.50
A Smuggler’s Song Kipling/Bellamy in three-part harmony with Chris Birch & Anthea Bellamy 3.09
The Run of the Downs Kipling/Trad. arr. Bellamy with Nic Jones (fiddle) 1.16
Eddi’s Service Kipling/Bellamy Unaccompanied 2.16
The Queen’s Men Kipling/Bellamy Sung by Dik Cadbury (counter-tenor) with Peter Hall (lute) and Dolly Collins (organ) 3.07
The Bee-Boy’s Song Kipling/Bellamy with Nic Jones (fiddle) 1.20
Harp Song of the Dane Women Kipling/Bellamy self-accompanied on guitar, with Dave Arthur (bodhran) 3.02
Song of the Men’s Side Kipling/Bellamy self-accompanied on flints, with Nic Jones, Mike Edmonds and Fred Woods (chorus) 2.17

SIDE TWO

The Heavens Above Us (An Astrologer’s Song) Kipling/Bellamy with Dolly Collins (organ), Dik Cadbury (counter-tenor) and Chris Birch (bass harmony and violin) 4.37
Prophets at Home Kipling/Bellamy with Nic Jones (fiddle) 1.00
Who Shall Judge the Lord? (A Carol) Kipling/Trad. arr. Bellamy Unaccompanied 2.10
St Helena (A St Helena Lullaby) Kipling/Bellamy with Nic Jones (fiddle) 2.50
The Way Through the Woods Kipling/Bellamy Self-accompanied on concertina 1.45
The Bricklayer and the Shipwright (A Truthful Song) Kipling/Bellamy with Nic Jones (fiddle) 3.28
Song of the Red War Boat Kipling/Bellamy with Nic Jones, Fred Woods and Mike Edmonds (chorus) 3.25

Puck’s Song opens the book “Puck of Pook’s Hill”, and sets the theme for all the stories that follow, in that Puck, who has been in England from the very first, is the medium through which history comes to life. The entire piece is in fact a very personal statement on Kipling’s own behalf, explaining his love for England, and particularly for his own corner of his beloved Sussex, through its deep-rooted associations with the past. Most of the features mentioned in the song are still to be seen on or around his property in Burwash, Sussex.

note: PB seems to be admitting here that his approach to the Puck settings was unsystematic, and that, properly, Puck’s Song should stand at the head of the two Puck-themed albums. The final quatrain--

She is not any common Earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare!

—has the force of a spade driven into unbroken ground.

A Smuggler’s Song is one of Kipling’s best loved poems. It presents a somewhat romantic view of the cut-throat Sussex smugglers of the Eighteenth Century. The melody is derived from that of The White Cockade, a song which survives in the repertoire of a family in a village in which Kipling himself lived for a period: the Copper family of Rottingdean, Sussex. The harmonies were arranged by Chris Birch.

note: Another flutter for PB’s pet theory that Kipling was familiar with the singing of the Coppers.

The Run Of The Downs is a lyric tour of Sussex, in the manner of such traditional pieces as A Tour Of The Dales. The tune is taken from the English country dance Morris On, which also leant itself to the Cornish Floral Dance.

note: PB is uncharacteristically careless with titles here. Morris On is of course a morris tune, as the title suggests, and it’s likely that the Floral Dance was the earlier form of the tune rather than a derivation of the morris version. At one point PB toyed with the idea of calling the album The Run Of The Downs.

Eddi’s Service comes from the story The Conversion of St Wilfred (R & F), and takes the form of a ballad concerning the somewhat eccentric piety of a priest of Wilfred’s mission to the South Saxons. The melody stems from that of a much later piece, The Sheffield Apprentice.

note: For what it’s worth, no trace of the secular music of the Saxon period has come down to us. (The earliest surviving English tune is that of the 12th century song Miri It Is.) However much PB’s setting owes to The Sheffield Apprentice, the vaulting ten-step interval between the end of the first line and the beginning of the second is pure PB: no other folk-based composer, I’d wager, would have come up with it.

The Queen’s Men Alternatively titled The Two Cousins, this quasi-Tudor piece is a lament for the two young sea captains who, in the story Gloriana (R & F), are persuaded by the Queen to undertake a fatal mission. The tune is intended to recall those of Elizabethan court songs after the style of Byrd. The accompaniment was arranged by Dolly Collins.

note: Uniquely, this track does not feature the singing of PB at all. Vocal duties were assigned to Dik Cadbury, a classically-trained countertenor perhaps better known as bassist of the ‘70s folk-rockers Decameron.

The Bee-Boy’s Song The bee-boy is the son of old Hobden the hedger, who although simple-minded has an inherited talent for handling swarms. This character is obviously drawn from life, and the bee lore contained in the song is completely authentic, revealing again the thoroughness of Kipling’s research. The story Dymchurch Flit (PPH) explains the supernatural origins of this particular bee-boy’s ability.

note: Old Hobden pops up in various of the Puck stories, and also makes a “guest appearance” in A Diversity Of Creatures (1917) as the subject of the poem The Land (which PB set for the 1982 album Keep On Kipling). The poem accompanies the story Friendly Brook; both song and poem seem to be set in the same Sussex water meadow.

The Harp Song Of The Dane Women is the ritual lamentation of the women who waited through the long months for the return of their men who went a-viking. The setting is guesswork, but derived conceptually from the style of The Lyke Wake Dirge, a north-country funerary song of reputedly Norse origins. The harp found in the Sutton Hoo ship burial was a very rudimentary instrument, capable of little more than a rhythmic strumming to accompany a chant, and the guitar part here is intended to evoke such a sound.

note: It’s hard to see quite what PB means by “conceptually” here, particularly as no tune to The Lyke Wake Dirge survives (the one the Young Tradition used on their self-titled 1966 album was set to it by Hans Fried). Harp Song is arguably one of Kipling’s most formally original and innovative pieces, and PB’s setting and performance are suitably “out  there”—probably the furthest he ever went outside the traditional mainstream.


The Song Of The Men’s Side Guess-work provided both the lyric and the music for this song, purporting as it does to come from Neolithic times! The verses come from the story The Knife and The Naked Chalk (R & F), which tells how a flint-worker of the Sussex downs braves the superstitious terrors which the forest holds for his people. He does this in order to obtain for his tribe ‘magic knives’ from the iron-workers of the Weald, to help them in their struggle for survival against the wolves which yearly decimate them and their flocks. He has to forfeit his right eye to the iron-workers’ gods, and as a result they come to regard him as a god himself. This is the ritual song of his exploit.

note: PB accompanies himself on scraped flints on this track, which is as close as it gets to a putative Neolithic chant. The tune he uses is a subtle modification of the tune he made for Oak, Ash And Thorn on the album of that name.

The Heavens Above Us (An Astrologer’s Song) is the companion piece to Our Fathers Of Old (OA & T), both coming from the story A Doctor Of Medicine (R & F) which concerns the methods and beliefs of the Seventeenth Century herbalist and astrologer Nicholas Culpepper. The organ and counter-tenor parts were arranged by Dolly Collins, and the bass voice and violin scores were added by Chris Birch.

note: Dik Cadbury’s countertenor is deployed again here, but this time as a descant to PB’s own lead vocal.

Prophets At Home From the story Hal o’ the Draft comes this piece of witty moralising in reference to the apathy of his neighbours to the talents of a medieval master-mason.

note: A light piece, but with undeniable resonance for both Kipling and PB. Kipling’s popularity with the reading public was sustained in the face of the most excoriating hostility from English critics, and this long outlasted his death. Similarly, PB’s suicide may have been precipitated in some degree by his return from a deliriously successful American tour to a mostly empty gig diary.

Who Shall Judge The Lord? (A Carol) This is possibly the most convincing of all Kipling’s traditional-styled pieces. It appears at the very end of Rewards and Fairies, thus being the last word in the cycle as Puck’s Song was the first. A traditional tune fits precisely to these verses; whether or not Kipling knew the tune I can’t say, but if he did not, the coincidence is remarkable, because the tune is that of a traditional carol, The Leaves Of Life.

note: In conversation PB was more forthright: he firmly believed it was another instance of his hitting exactly the tune Kipling had in mind.

St Helena (A St Helena Lullaby) The career of Napoleon Buonaparte was a favourite subject for the composers of broadsheets in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, and this piece sits naturally alongside such authentic songs as The Bonny Bunch of Roses and The Grand Conversation. The words come from the story A Priest in Spite of Himself (R & F), and the melody is in part derived from that of The Handsome Cabin Boy.

note: Nothing to note!

The Way Through The Woods is a short descriptive song about a haunted wood, and is the companion piece to The Brookland Road (OA & T). Both come from the (apparently) supernatural story Marklake Witches (R & F). I thought the tune was original, but it has been pointed out that it is suspiciously similar to the Lancashire song Poverty Knock!

note: True in that both tunes share a three-bar motif; other than that the resemblance is glancing. If PB derived his tune from Poverty Knock, consciously or otherwise, he “Bellamised” it in distinctive fashion, widening the range and including phrases that suggest the anglo concertina was again a compositional aid. PB identified strongly with the poem, maintaining he experienced something very similar to what the poem describes—and in the same locality. This was the only piece from MIOG that he subsequently re-recorded; the new recording appears on MBMKATT.

The Bricklayer And The Shipwright (A Truthful Song) Kipling was fascinated by the details of every craft from deep-sea fishing to bridge-building. The point of this song is his recurring theme of how little certain things change over the centuries. It is more than sixty years, however, since the piece was written, and both the trades of this song have since undergone more change than over the previous millennia.

note: Nothing to add, other than to commend the nimble, wristy fiddle accompaniment by Nic Jones. Top!

The Song Of The Red War Boat is another guess, this time at the possible rhymes and sounds of music in the Saxon era. It is the song of the crew of a boat fighting a storm to rescue their overlord who has been shipwrecked. The pagan oarsmen are troubled less by the weather than by the fact that their lord is contemplating Christianity.

note: Despite a change of rhythm, the tune is recognisably one that is shared by a number of calling-on songs associated with mumming plays, most notably the Earsdon Calling-On Song from Northumberland; and also in truncated form by some versions of Ratcliffe Highway.

Produced by Kevin Daly
Recorded by Iain Churches at Decca Studios, London, June 1972
Cover drawing and sleeve notes by Peter Bellamy


closing note: After Merlin's Isle of Gramarye, Peter Bellamy returned only once to the Puck books for his published settings: Cities And Thrones And Powers, from Puck Of Pook’s Hill, closes Keep On Kipling (1982). The third Kipling-themed album, Barrack Room Ballads (1976), drew from Kipling’s collection of that name, supplemented by a further ten settings from the same source on Soldier’s Three, a privately-issued cassette (1990). The two subsequent Kipling albums, Keep On Kipling and Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs (1989), were both drawn from an assortment of Kipling’s works, and a few of these settings are sprinkled around his other releases (The Maritime England Suite (1982) features one—We Have Fed Our Seas—that appears nowhere else). The two dozen or so unpublished settings that he left at his death do however include two from Rewards And Fairies: The Thousandth Man and If–; and one from Puck Of Pook’s Hill: A Pict Song. The only Puck poems that PB did not set are The Runes On Weland’s Sword, Song Of The Fifth River and The Children’s Song, all from POPH, and A Charm from R&F.
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