Pastiche and Weltenschauung

Poststructural Pub
1

Having recently worked out an easy way to record all my old vinyl and cassettes to CD, I’ve been working my way through my box of old tapes, rediscovering all kinds of old friends, sadly neglected ever since I got a car and stopped wearing my walkman everywhere I went.

Among these are a lot of early Martin Carthy records, particularly those with accompaniment by the peerless Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin.

The performances are still stellar, but I can’t help noticing that some of the repertoire isn’t aging well. It’s my suspicion that the ones that clang so loundly are folk songs ‘unearthed’ by Carthy’s former mentor AL Lloyd. As I recall the liner notes to one or other of Carthy’s greatest hits collections of a decade ago, he now says that he thinks that Lloyd may have had a much greater hand in writing the supposedly trad songs he found than he would ever admit.

It’s hard not to agree with Carthy–I can easily name as many as half a dozen songs which seem phony in similar ways.

That’s not what I want to talk about, however. Instead, I’ve been pondering the way that time–even ten or twenty years–seems unerringly to show up the shine of fool’s gold in contrast to the lustre of genuine ore. Counterfeits look so obvious that it seems remarkable that they ever passed, yet it’s clear that pass they did.

So I’m wondering about what that mechanism might be–what can have changed in 20 years to make a successful imposter suddenly stand out as not the real thing at all?

I note that this is as true of songs as of poetry, or indeed of art or antiquities.

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It’s my theory that what’s happening is that these musical imposters reflect without knowing it the Weltenschauung–the tenor of the times–in a way that tboth their composers and their contemporary audience is unaware. We’re all the products of our times, and the set of our ideas is always with us. I suspect that escaping Our Time is one of the most difficult tasks in all the creative arts. From within, these are like the air we breathe–so ubiquitous as to be invisible. We reflect them without knowing it. However, once the Weltenschauung changes, even slightly, the anachronistic ideas stick out like a loud fart at a funeral.

~~

So what is it that betrays Bert Lloyd’s creations? Lloyd appears (to me) to have had a sense of bawdy that can best be described as ‘sniggering’. His songs have a tenor that’s obviously (again, to me) much closer to Austin Powers and the 1960s (or rather, to the attitudes Mike Myers is satyrising) than to the bawdy of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Somewhere in the box of cassettes is the a best of AL Lloyd collection. When I find it, I’ll give it another listen and see if my nose has been leading me in the right direction.

2

One hell of a post.

I had all of those Carthy/Swarbrigg albums on vinyl, back in the day. Most of them I wore out from continous playing, such was the wonder of it all.

I have a few issues with Swarbs playing, both technically and as an accompanist, but Carthy blew me away..and still does to this day.

When I was devouring those albums it did cross my mind that the vast majority of Carthys songs were about seduction and fornication. This I found very.. well.. ..entertaining and amusing.

The songs from the Irish tradition were all about war, violence, martyrs and betrayal.

It opened my eyes to a huge cultural difference between the lives of the rural English, who seemed to be mainly farmers and sailors, and the rural Irish who also happened to be farmers and sailors.

I know that this goes nowhere near addressing the eventual question of your post but I’ll need some time to think about that.

I will look forward to Wombats response, he is a big fan of Carthy and all that stuff in general.

Hopefully this will turn into a very informative and interesting thread.


Thanks for bringing it up :wink:

Slan,
D.

3

You know, it wasn’t obvious until I stopped to think about, but the ability to age gracefully has go to be a core characteristic of ‘genuine’ folk song. That which fails to age gracefully cannot be authentic, I think.

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Anachronistic sex is very hard to get right. And anachronistic innuendo is even worse.


But some fakes seem to pass the test. The Shoals of Herring, for instance.

5

Simon when you say:

the ability to age gracefully has go to be a core characteristic of ‘genuine’ folk song. That which fails to age gracefully cannot be authentic, I think.


I think you’re oversimplifying and maybe idealising a bit and in the process you’re getting the wrong end of the stick.

First I think we should distinguish between the English folk ‘revival’ singers and a living song tradition like for example the one I am most familiar with, that of West Clare (pretty much the singers represented on Around the Hills of Clare )

First of all as you say yourself, the revival singers hand picked songs, from archives and printed collections, that suited their, often highly politicised, approach and the spirit of the times. In that sense their repertoire is not fully representative for the body of ‘folk-song’. And the mechanism of choice assures a more rapid ageing of the repertoire as the times change.

Ofcourse a living songtradition has it fashions too, Dubh referred to the rebel songs which were far far more prevalent when the troubles were in full swing than they are today, over here ‘The Bold Fenian Men’ gets the occasional airing but that’s about it. And with the arrival of the Celtic Tiger economy sad songs of emigration have gone scarce too. The repertoire is to an extend a reflection of the state of society.

‘Folk’ song, in the sense of the living songtradition of ‘the people’ (in itself a term much associated with the revival movement I would think) is a broad field, not limiting itself to ‘folk’ song by any narrow definition. Tom Munnelly, collector of the largest collection of English language song and the greatest living authority on the subject, gives some great examples of repertoire held dear by some of the greatest traditional singers:

And during the singing session in Gleeson’s of Coore I have not only heard the big songs like Ollie Conway’s ‘Yellow Bittern’ or the local popular ones like ‘The Chapel Gates of Cooraclare’, ‘The Lonely Glens of Shanaway’ but also renditions of ‘Red River Valley’, ‘Hard Times’ ‘The Cottage with the Roses ‘round the Door’ and always hilarious renditions in the purest of West Clare style of Ritchie Kavanagh’s ‘A little bit of ‘lastic’ by Vincent Boyle (Kevin Crawford’s uncle).

Folksong in the living tradition ofcourse goes through a process, like instrumental music it undergoes a process of selection, songs and tunes mutate travelling from one singer to another, bits get dropped and bits get added, certain song relevant to the times will get sung, other ones may lay dormant while out of fashion only to re-emerge when relevant again.

I don’t think all ‘folksong’ endures, some songs do, some don’t. What is sung today is not necessarily representative for what was there once and as such can’t act as an indicator of the quality of ‘folksong’ in general. Recording a song makes it static, frozen in time and looking back on any fad or fashion at some remove does tend to cast a different light on things and the pre-occupation with Saucy Sailors and Molecatchers was pretty much a thing of the seventies.

6

So what is the easy way you’ve worked out to record old vinyl and cassettes onto CD? We have a basement full of my husband’s old vinyl. I’d love to get the space back, and he’d love to get the music back.

Thanks!
Myra

7

I use the free audi recording software, Audacity, and a stereo (dunno what they’re called–the red and white plugs) to 1/16th cannon plug patchcord to connect my cassette deck or turntable to the mic socket on my soundcard.

The tapedeck can get plugged straight in, but a turntable needs to get it’s signal boosted with a small pre-amp first. I got mine for $35 at an audio store. (Not knowing this was the source of much frustration, btw).

I hit play on the source and record on audacity, and let the music run. Audacity has a usefull noise reducer that records a sample of ‘noise’ (ie, a couple seconds of supposed silence between tracks) and then scrubs this from the entire file.

After that, I scroll through the file, finding & marking the breaks between tracks with what audacity calls a ‘label’ track. Clicking the cursor down in the right place and hitting cntrl B is all that this requires. Once that’s done, I use the "export multiple’ feature which exports multiple files using the labels to mark the breaks. I can select either .wav, .mp3 or ogg vorbis formats.

I pick .wav. I then use my CD burner software to create a music CD, using the “create from file” command. I select the directory with my new .wav files in it, pick the ones I want, arrange them in order, and then burn the CD.

Done. It takes a little more time than it used to when I was making tapes, but in the end I end up with a standard audio CD I can play anywhere.

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Thanks for that. I might finally get round to converting all my vinyl now.

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thanks for the tips about converting vinyl to CD - yet one more reason for me to love Audacity. So far, I’ve used it to change the pitch on ecordings to one I can play on my whistle; to change the tempo and endless-loop sections of tunes I’m trying to learn; and to play along with distant friends by sending files back and forth and adding new tracks as we go.

Myra

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You can also buy turntables and tape decks that plug into your computer bia USB and will convert to MP3. But they’re probably a more expensive option than the process s1m0n posted.