I haven’t written about music much lately, which probably means that my readership has dwindled from four to one or two…
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that every time I think about what I want to say in my epic Celtic/British Isles Traditional Music and Me, I’m nowhere near a computer. The other is that I haven’t bought much lately, trying to stay true to my plan not to acquire too many CDs per month. I broke down today, though, because the new Delgados’ single, “Girls of Valour,” with a cover of Ewan MacColl’s magnificent “Ballad of Accounting” on the b-side, is available, and I had to have that. Then while I was ordering that, I figured I might as well shell out for the live CD they’re selling only on their site, despite the horrible exchange rate. (There are two iTunes-exclusive EPs at the iTunes Music Store too…but I haven’t bought those. Yet.) And then, because the LynxPod has been playing Kate Rusby at least twice a day lately, I decided to pick up one of her early CDs, Sleepless. It was cheaper new at my favorite online retailer than it was used at Half.com or Amazon, happily.
So I went a little wild, but hey, I hadn’t bought a single CD in at least three weeks! (Instead, I indulged myself by finding old but mint copies of two favorite books from my childhood: The Witch’s Daughter by well-known children’s (and adult) author Nina Bawden, a wonderful, slightly magical, and ultimately sad story set in the Outer Hebrides, and a much more obscure book, We Danced in Bloomsbury Square, by a prolific British writer whose real name was Mabel Esther Allan but who wrote this book and a few others under the more exotic name Jean Estoril. It’s about twin sisters from Birkenhead (across the Mersey from Liverpool) who get scholarships to a prestigious ballet school in London; the beautiful blonde twin is a first choice for the scholarship, while the dark-haired, brooding twin, who narrates, has to squeak in as an alternate. I usually tend to think that my love affair with that part of the world began when my parents sent me to acting camp in England the summer I turned 14 (in lieu of the much more expensive summer experience that I really wanted–a trip to study French intensively by living with a French family through a program called the Experiment in International Living), but when I think back, I guess it started much earlier, with the children’s and young adult books set in England that I devoured whenever I could. I remember that We Danced in Bloomsbury Square was one that my dad picked up from the review slush pile at the magazine where he worked; the used copy I picked up on Amazon has the same cover, and when I took it out of the package, I got chills. “There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away,” indeed. (And unfortunately, that poem, which I used to love, is one of the many Emily Dickinson poems that you can sing to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I’ll never forgive the person who taught me that trick…)
Fortunately, I’m not aware of anything on the immediate CD release horizon that I absolutely have to buy…but I’d be happy to be disabused of that notion, so if you’re reading this, tell me what you’re listening to now and what you’re looking forward to among new releases. I want to know.
I’m sure the Delgados stuff is going to take a few weeks to arrive, but I’m just speechless with excitement about hearing them do “Ballad of Accounting.” British folk legend Dick Gaughan first made it well-known, I guess, but I know it first and foremost from Songlines, the first solo album by the magnificent Karan Casey, former lead singer of Solas. Karan, who will figure prominently in the forthcoming epic referred to above, loves a good political/class struggle song—that album also features her wonderful a capella cover, with John Doyle duetting, of UK politico-folkie Leon Rosselson’s brilliant “The World Turned Upside Down,” about the Diggers, which is a story so remarkable that I’ll save it for another day, or you could just read about it yourself. But back to “Ballad of Accounting”: with, or perhaps in spite of, her impossibly light but never ethereal classically-trained soprano, she manages to capture all the bite and rage of the song. The accounting referred to in the title is not the kind that CPAs do, of course, but rather the idea of accounting for a life: “Did you alter the face of the city?/Make any change in the world you found?” and “Did you ever demand any answers?/
The who and the what and the reason why?” and…oh, I’ll just post the full lyric:
“Ballad of Accounting” by Ewan MacColl
In the morning we built the city
In the afternoon walked through its streets
Evening saw us leaving
We wandered through our days as if they would never end
All of us imagined we had endless time to spend
We hardly saw the crossroads and small attention gave
To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave
Did you learn to dream in the morning?
Abandon dreams in the afternoon?
Wait without hope in the evening?
Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?
Did you alter the face of the city?
Did you make any change in the world you found?
Or did you observe all the warnings?
Did you read the trespass notices, did you keep off the grass?
Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?
Did you learn to keep your mouth shut, were you seen and never heard?
Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word?
Did you ever demand any answers?
The who and the what and the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy? Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight?
What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men?
Pretty great stuff, no? I can’t wait to hear the Delgados do it.