Album: Sharper than the Thorn

Sleeve Notes to Sharper than the Thorn:

For some time it's been my intention to devote a recording to the glories of the English song tradition. Inevitably, a few interlopers have crept in, but its the English songs that are the core of this record.

Lay The Bent To The Bonny Broom is a ballad that can be traced back over 500 years. Later versions turn the story into a cosy and rather poetical romance, but I dug deeper to put the Devil back where he belongs. "Bent", by the way, is a sort of grass, though some would give it a more Freudian symbolism.

The Banks Of Sweet Primroses comes from Phil Tanner, one of the greatest traditional singers ever recorded, who at the age of 87 retained enviable range, power and accuracy, and sang with unsurpassed joy. The song is a common broadside, but Phil's idiosyncratic rhythm gives it irresistible swing.

From the same source comes the pirate ballad Henry Martin; I've done my best to capture his singing style, but you should hear the real thing!

Sheepcrook And Black Dog, collected by Vaughan Williams in Sussex, looks at first like harmless pastoralism but is actually about warm love gone cold, despair and the threat of suicide. Most of us have been there at some point.

The late and great Harry Boardman sang Cold Stringy Pie regularly during my formative years in Manchester folk clubs. It's from Yorkshire, and tells of the munificence, philanthropy and haute cuisine commonly associated with that county.

The Dragoon's Ride appeared on the Roy Harris LP Champions of Folly in the 1970s, and comes from Devon courtesy of Baring-Gould's collection; the betrayal and hurt come through more strongly than in other versions of the song. Roy's enthusiasm and guidance have been a huge help to me, and several of the songs are here thanks to him.

Old Man is linked to English tradition, at least some of the words originating in a children's rhyme from the Furness area. It was given to me by Angela Gradwell, a beacon of commitment and inspiration who was still singing right up to her death at the age of 89, and it was Angela who supplied the haunting tune.

Y Pren Ar Y Bryn is my pitch for oral tradition cred, having come down in my Dad's family and been sung on every one of our car journeys back to the old home in South Wales. Its a version of the ubiquitous nest-on-the¬branch-on-the-tree-on-the-hill story, culminating sumptuously in a bed made from the feather of the bird. Siwsann George kindly helped me over a few pronunciation stumbles.

Kemp Owyne is a sword 'n' sorcery ballad from 19th century Aberdeenshire, with links to Icelandic sagas and the usual fairy story themes of transmogrific¬ation and wicked stepmothers.

The only new song is Stand Up, a burningly positive piece from that great songwriter, Jim Woodland; take it as it finds you.

The tunes are either from Northern English tradition or my head. Jockey To The Fair is a well-known Cotswold morris tune, but here appears in the slightly stretched form played by Joseph Kershaw, Saddleworth fiddler of the 1800s.

Spoted Borders (his spelling) was Kershaw's too.

The Insomniac was composed while lying awake in the small hours, when most of my better ideas are hatched;

Northern Frisk is tune no.1 in the book of the same title compiled by my mate (and bottomless source of great Northern tunes) Jamie Knowles.

From Jamie I also got Peg Huglestone's and the Lakeland tune The Green Ship, while Whitehaven Volunteers is in his Northern Lass book.

I learned Come Let Us Dance And Sing from Alistair Anderson in a pub session, reinforced by a recording of Northumbrian accordionist Tom Edmondson.

Finally, The Mill Race was composed on Paul Morris' front porch in Cambridge, Ontario, especially for my closing spot at the festival of that name - a spot that was in fact rained out just before I was due onstage. Bah! Still, the name stuck.

Brian Peters sings and plays guitar, anglo¬concertina, melodeon, fiddle (Pren Ar Y Bryn and Stand Up), double bass, mandolin and percussion.
Eliza Carthy does all the other fiddle parts and sings harmony on Sweet Primroses.
Jenny Coxon plays hammered dulcimer and step dances.
Margaret Peters sings harmony on Bonny Broom.
Gordon Tyrrall plays guitar on the First Chill set, flute on the .waltzes, and guitar/ backing vox on Stand Up.

Album: Different Tongues

Buy from Harbour Town Records

Sleeve Notes to Different Tongues:

Listeners familiar with my previous recorded output will be aware that I tend to veer haphazardly between CDs concentrating on song and ones full of instrumentals, and between relatively sparse orchestration and a cast of several. This album is the most song-oriented I've made for some time, and I've employed a few friends to help out As well as longtime co-conspirators like Gordon Tyrrall and Dave Pope, you'll hear my son Chris's first excursion into a studio, and a lot of great work from Jeff Davis (Fiddle, Mandocello), one of my favourite North American musicians, who happened to be on tour at the time of recording (OK, I admit I arranged the recording around his tour). Jeff is more used to traditional American music than English, so Cyril Poacher songs and 3:2 hornpipes posed him an interesting challenge, which he rose to magnificently, despite being forbidden to pick his banjo. I hope that these - mostly - old songs, whether unaccom¬panied ballad or full-on band arrangement, will grip your attention in the way they do mine.

Notes on the songs and tunes

Jolly Roving Tar is an American song with English roots I first heard sung by Jeff Davis himself, and learned from Traditional American Folksongs, that wonderful book of treasures collected by Frank and Anne Warner. Their source for this one was Lena Bourne Fish of New Hampshire. It's not found elsewhere in oral tradition, although a song of the same title and similar tune, but with an entirely different set of words, turned up in Old Hampshire (the one in England) in 1906. Jeff and I suspect that Mrs. Fish's version came from a Tin-Pan-Alley parody. "Get up Jack, John sit down" is what the ladies of the streets would say when a sailor's time had expired and it was time to welcome the next customer.

The version of All Around My Hat that became a 1970s folk-rock hit consisted of the words to a different song, grafted on to the melody and chorus we all came to know rather too well. Being a bit of a misery myself, I decided to do it slow and mournful and, with the help of ballad supremo David Atkinson, married a tune collected by Baring-Gould (who had replaced the original lyrics with some dreadful doggerel of his own) to a set of words popular amongst street traders. 1 decided, controversially, to omit the spoken asides between verses, such as "Here's your fine cauliflowers!", which I felt didn't really contribute to the pathos of the story.

Nottingham Castle and The Spa come from manuscripts written down by members of the Winder family, who farmed in Wyresdale, near Lancaster. John Winder was a local dancing master during the 1790s, and the family band played for church services before being made redundant by the installation of an organ, and dances right up into the 20th century.

I'd been looking for years for the right version of that strange and ancient ballad The Outlandish Knight - such a favourite with English country singers - when I happened to shove into my in-car cassette player an old tape called Early In The Month Of Spring featuring Irish travellers encamped under a London flyover when folksong collectors came to call in the 1970s. The version sung by Bill Casidy was so beautiful, spacious and mysterious that I was quite transported by it as I blazed up the M6 at three in the morning, and I decided to sing it more or less as he did. You can find the original on the Musical Traditions CD From Puck to Appleby.

Bold Lovell - which shares with Whisky In The Jar the plot device of a treacherous girlfriend spiking the hero's guns with water (has anyone ever assessed the effectiveness of this in practice?) - is yet another song I hoovered up from Roy Harris's classic 70's LP Champions Of Folly. All these years I'd assumed it to be as English as the rest of the things on that record, but extensive research (i.e. actually reading the sleeve notes) revealed it to be from the Green Mountain Songster, indicating that some Anglo-celtic original wound up in Vermont

The Thomas Watts manuscript from the Peak District of Derbyshire is a source that has yielded rich pickings for some previous albums of mine, and turned up trumps again with "A Hornpipe by Mr. Moore" and The Red Otter. I don't know who Mr. Moore was, nor anything about Thomas Watts, come to that, except that he lived in my neck of the woods and, like the Winders, wrote out a book of good dance tunes and church material round about 200 years ago.

The Bonny Bunch Of Roses-O is based on the version recorded in 1974 from the redoubtable Cyril Poacher, a major figure in the legendary singing sessions at the Ship Inn, Blaxhall, Suffolk Songs celebrating Napoleon abound in the English tradition and are sometimes said to be an indication of popular sympathy for revolutionary France, but The Bonny Bunch (in which the conversant is the short-lived Bonaparte Jr., not the diminutive megalomaniac himself) stresses Napoleon's ultimate failure and could hardly be described as subversive. Mr. Poacher scattered his songs with lyrical idiosyncrasies: I've retained his "bones lie smouldering", but felt that his "converted by young Bonaparte" in the last line of verse 1 suggested some kind of filial evangelism that wouldn't assist the listener's comprehension

Likewise from Cyril Poacher comes Pretty Nancy of Yarmouth, a bleak little song both lyrically and in the beautiful and unusual melody, highlighted here by Jeff's fiddle.

No CD of mine would be complete without some 3:2 hornpipes, and Sailor's Delight is a pretty weird one. Jeff says he doesn't understand it at all, but managed a great mandocello part nonetheless. Cobblers' Hornpipe is a better-known and more conventionally structured tune. I found both in the Winder manuscripts - or, to be precise, the online resource displaying some of the tunes.

Sara Grey and Ellie Ellis used to do Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, and I've always loved it It's another one from the Warners, collected by them on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and traceable back to a composition by W. T. Wrighton and J. E. Carpenter published in 1916.

The village of Delph, in the Pennines to the East of Oldham, about fifteen miles from where I live, was home to Becket Whitehead, weaver, singer and local historian, whose version of that bitter countryman's song The Gallant Poacher was unearthed for me by Malcom Taylor in the Vaughan Williams Library sound archive. Mr. Whitehead sang only two verses (the rest I've added from Brian Bedford Engineer broadside copies), but had some nice individual touches in his melody.

The supernatural ballad of the Two Sisters is centuries old and ubiquitous, with close parallels in Scandinavian folk tale. Frank Kidson, the one collector who sought out folksongs in Northern English urban settings, had this tune and some of the verses a hundred or so years ago from "an Irishman in Liverpool" and I've added additional verses from Aberdeenshire singers visited by the American collector James Madison Carpenter in the 1920s.

Pretty Maggie / Marquis Of Huntley's Reel / The Dead Cow are further Winder tunes, although the latter two were probably Scots rather than Lancastrian in origin, Marquis of Huntley being known elsewhere as a strathspey, and the last tune bearing the alternative title Jackie Stewart's Reel. The notion of such a lively tune being played over the corpse of a much-loved heifer was, however, irre¬sistible, so The Dead Cow it is.

Richard Thompson is a songwriter much covered by singers on the folk scene, probably because we tend to prefer songs with decent lyrics and good tunes, and he is a reliable source of both. Waltzing's For Dreamers is a lovely song from one of his 1980s recordings, though sadly he didn't play it either time I went to see him this year.

This leads straight into a waltz (clever programming, eh?). The Water's Edge is one of mine, composed in 2001 during a sojourn at Pinewoods Camp, Massachusetts, U.S.A., where there is a lot of water lying around in the form of various large ponds, which are nice to sit at the edge of.

Brian Peters: Vocal, Guitar, Melodeon, Anglo Concertina, Percussion
Jeff Davis: Fiddle, Mondocello
Gordon Tyrrall: Guitar (1,2,14,15), Backin Vocal
Dave Pope: Guitar (3,13), Bass
Chris Peters: Alto Sax

 

Bio:

Brian Peters is a performer of traditional folk music who combines a high level of skill on three different instruments with a great voice and an energetic stage presence. He's a leading English squeezebox player, doubling on melodeon (button accordion) and anglo concertina, a fine guitarist well-versed in open tunings, and a passionate singer who can convey drama or emotion, while his carefully-constructed accompaniments blend adventure and sophistication. Described as "One of British folk music's finest ambassadors", Brian started out in the folk clubs of England and has taken his performances to stages all over the world, touring regularly in Europe and America, and always retaining a deep commitment to the musical traditions of his native country.

Brian believes strongly in the power and relevance of the old songs and bases his set around them, but he's no diehard, and covers the work of writers from Leon Rosselson to Lyle Lovett and Robin Williamson, as well as contributing songs of his own. He specialises in the great ballads of the British Isles: "Brian Peters plunges deep into the ancient songs, finds their power, mystery, evil, drollery and courage, and brings them to us fresh", declared one American writer.

On the instrumental side, he has been a mover in the creation of a distinct identity for Northern English dance music, researching, playing and teaching rare tunes from centuries-old manuscripts, as well as composing many tunes in traditional style. He's also become known for daring forays into ragtime, blues and rock'n'roll on his squeezeboxes, and his stage set achieves startling variety, without ever betraying his traditional roots.Brian presents his material with warmth and unforced humour to appeal to the casual listener as well as the committed folk fan.

Brian's diary is kept full working regularly in a duo with guitarist/flautist/singer Gordon Tyrrall, playing for dances in the Rising Sun Band, and indulging his more eclectic musical leanings with hillbilly rockers the Rocky Mountain Ploughboys. In the past he played alongside Sara Grey in the Lost Nation Band, and took a leading part in the stage show "The Widow's Uniform".

Brian is in demand as a teacher of instrumental technique and singing skills, having the distinction of teaching both concertina and melodeon at Hands On Music's weekends at Witney, as well as tutoring on residential courses for Folkworks and others, giving workshops at festivals, and teaching adults and children individually. In addition he reviews both traditional English and world music regularly for magazines including "Folk Roots" and The Living Tradition". 

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