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Editorialsthe more or less complete output, now in chronological order
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LogoThe result prompted a new look and colour-scheme for the pages concerned. MT's new 'corporate image' is being used on most of the Festival pages - and I am gradually changing the rest of the site now, having received nothing but congratulatory e-mails from readers. Thanks very much - it's nice to know you're there!
If Radio 4 can do it, so can we! But there will be no 'dumbing down', I promise you.
5.6.98
Advertisement:
Drongo Records - The World's foremost label for Ethno Celtic Trance, New Age and Jungle - Meaningless hype ....... blah, blah, blah ....... Flashing animated GIF Logo ....... blah, blah, blah ....... more meaningless hype ....... blah, blah, blah .......
Well, we hope that not many of them will be like this - but that will be the format. The new computer with CD Writer has to be paid for somehow ...
Our most recent Article, on Topic Records and the WMA is, in fact, but one chapter of Dr Mike Brocken's PhD thesis on 'The British Folk Revival' seen as part of the wider popular music genre. The whole work is likely to be published in commercial book form later this year or next, but he has given us permission to publish it here, first, in its original form. I realise that a few of our readers will feel that there is, perhaps, little more that they wish to know about 'Folk Music' or popular music, and that MT's remit should be restricted to traditional forms.
Nonetheless, I believe that Mike's encyclopaedic work contains a great deal that should be of interest to all of us - any intelligent and well-written work dealing with something which so informs the culture of which we are part (like it or not) must be of interest and value. I also think that - while I don't agree with all of them - his insights into the sociological and philological aspects of the wider world of music are both fascinating and thought provoking.
We are publishing the ten chapters, foreword and bibliography (including a complete Topic Discography in another month or two), as a complete work - and you can find it in a separate Index via the Articles page. I'm sure that most of you will find it very worthwhile reading - I hope so, 'cause it didn't half make my fingers ache - 150,000 words!
Just a brief interjection here, before getting on with the main business. I strongly urge every reader to have a look at the Paddy Canny review in out Latest Batch. What a player! I have never heard a fiddler like him - judge for yourself from this sound clip.
And now - back to the editorial .............
Despite all our trials and tribulations ...
All of these are now available again and, in addition, we are very pleased to announce that we have now started production of a new series in CD format. I've scattered a few Bob Hart sound clips around to give you a taste of both the performance and sound quality
New technology now allows a small organisation like ours to create CDs - one at a time! - via computer, and opens up a whole new vista of potential releases of field recordings, or of re-issues of 78rpm material, for which the size of the market would have made such enterprises impossible only a year or so ago.
Our first release is a double CD of Suffolk singer Bob Hart - of whom the great Cyril Poacher once said:
... he's the best singer I've ever heard, myself - and I reckon I can sing - but I'd give him preference to me, yes I would. I reckon he can sing because it ... it come and he don't raise a hair, it just come like that. He's the best singer I ever heard yet ... I mean it.
and of whom Ginette Dunn commented:
... the nature of Bob's performance, which scarcely utilises any dramatic gesturing or facially expressive devices, but relies on his singing the song in a highly melodic, rhythmic and straightforward manner ... Bob's musicianship is demonstrated: he has perfect breath control, vivacious rhythm and a fluent handling of the narrative. The audience is enthusiastic and it is clear that, because of his formal control over and identification with the song, he does not need extra-vocal devices.The Track Listing is as follows:
| CD number 301 | CD number 302 |
|---|---|
| Come All You Young Fellows (Australia) | What a Funny Little Place to Have One |
| Comrades | Bold General Wolfe |
| His Day's Work was Done | I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen |
| All Jolly Fellows that Follow the Plough | Cod Banging-O |
| A Miner's Dream of Home | Seventeen Come Sunday |
| On the Banks of Allen Water | Silver Threads Among the Gold |
| As I Strolled out to Aylesbury | Paradise Street (Blow the Man Down) |
| Tom Bowling | White Wings |
| Barbara Allen | A Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime |
| The Song of the Thrush | My Little Grey Home in the West |
| A Broadside | The Female Cabinboy |
| One Touch of Nature | Why Shouldn't we Sing |
| The Mermaid | The Scarlet and the Blue |
| Banks of the Sweet Primroses | You Taught me How to Love You |
| Bonny Mary of Argyll | The Drum Went Bang (Flanagan's Band) |
| John Barleycorn | The Foggy Dew |
| City of Laughter, City of Tears | Won't you Buy my Pretty Flowers |
| Michael Larney-O | Break the News to Mother |
| The Bold Princess Royal | The Dark Eyed Sailor |
| The Gypsy's Warning | The Hymns My Mother Used to Sing |
| Jolly Jack the Sailor Lad | While Shepherds Watched |
| Just Before the Battle, Mother | Underneath Her Apron |
| The Farmer's Servant (Rap-a-Tap-Tap) | Let the Rest of the World Go By |
The records contain a compilation of the tapes made by Bill Leader, and by Danny and myself, back in 1969. Full details can be found in a fairly complete version of the booklet text, published as an article in these pages. A full review will be published as soon as it's available.
The double CD - MT CD 301-2 - Bob Hart - A Broadside - is presently available at a special launch price (see 'Sales' below). Details of this and other MT releases can be found in the Products page.
A 10% Royalty on sales will be paid to the Hart family, and profits will help to finance the magazine and fund further CD publications.
for £15.00 to me at the address below, stating the address to which it should be mailed.
Please don't be concerned if it doesn't arrive for a week or so - I really do have to make them one at a time, and it's a two hour job!
This production is conceived with the intention of bringing music which would probably never achieve a commercial publication to the small audience which values it. Collectors with recordings of this sort, who would like to see them published in this way, are welcome to contact the magazine to discuss the possibilities.
Work on a possible MT CD 303 is already in progress.
His completely unsolicited comment ... "A nice set of CDs. I really like them."
27.11.98
Part 2, comprising the Tunstall, Snape, Hasketon, Woodbridge & Wickham Market, Little Glemham and Songs from the Eel's Foot Inn chapters includes an updated discography including Veteran and Topic Voice of the People releases.. You can find Parts 1 and 2 of Sing Say or Pay! in our Articles pages - or go directly to its own Index page from here.
In the Articles, they enable the text to appear in the top part of the screen while the footnotes appear in the bottom - both parts are scrollable and resizeable. In the other five categories, they allow you to look at, say, the review of Volume 2, while a click on a link bar at the side of the page will take you directly to Volume 17, or any other, without having to go back to the Index page first. I hope you will agree, when you try them, that these are worthwhile improvements in ease of use.
However, it is possible that your present browser may not display Frames. If that is the case, may I suggest that you install version 3 of Netscape or Internet Explorer - both of which are available free from numerous sources. Version 4s are much bigger and don't provide anything extra - in terms of being able to view MT, that is. You might also try the Opera browser, available as a 30 day trial - it's very small and fast, but not free - costing around £20, I think. Better still - and this is inside information - HP are about to release a new FREE browser which will be incredibly small, probably available by the New Year.
Arial Narrow is available on the Windows 95 disc(s), from many widely available font collections, and the latest version is downloadable free from the Microsoft website: www.microsoft.com/typography.
Mike and I hope that every record that is known about, right from TRC1, has been included, complete with full track listings, but there are still a few gaps. Any reader with further information about any missing items is encouraged to send it to us for inclusion. This information, plus new releases, will be added to the discography periodically, keeping it premanently up-to-date as far as we can manage it.
7.4.99
Far more important is the way in which the numbers are escalating. When we started, back in September 1997, we got around 75 readers per week. This number grew fairly steadily over the next year to reach around 400 by Sept '98. It had got to 500 by the start of this year - but has almost doubled in the last two months! I have absolutely no idea why - but it's very pleasing.
You won't be surprised to know that most of our visitors are from the UK - some 23% are from UK hosts and 53% from .com, .net and numerical addresses (which could be almost anywhere, though UK and USA are the most likely). USA: 7%, Ireland: 4% and Australia: 3% are the next most common addresses, but we also have readers in such unlikely places as Jugoslavia, Argentina, Malaysia and Hungary. A total of 38 different countries featured in last week's statistics - a warm welcome to you all!
At present, I'm hunting out the tapes that various people have made of him over the years and I have been quite lucky in tracking down several sources - and some 35 songs. One thing which is emerging is that pretty well all of them were made in the decade 1965 to '75. What I'm looking for now is some earlier recordings - he began singing in Blaxhall Ship in 1929, aged 19, and my hope is that someone out there (aside from Peter Kennedy) recorded him as a younger man.
If anyone knows of any such recordings, or has anecdotes, quotes, information of any kind on the man and his music ... I'd be extremely pleased to hear about them - my address and phone number are at the foot of this page. I need your help to make this record as full a portrait of Cyril as the Bob Hart set was of him.
Firstly - the Silex Air Mail series of records, mentioned in the Cheapes page and the Traditional discography are, in fact, nothing to do with the Silex label. They are published by Air Mail Music, a division of Playasound, and their range of 25 budget priced releases are distributed by Harmonia Mundi in the UK and Auvidis in Europe.
This information came to me as a result of having finally broken through the curtain of silence surrounding Harmonia Mundi Distribution. Among other things, I learned that UK readers can get any of the output from the 40+ labels they distribute, via mail order from Dominic Reeves at:
And - contrary to what I was informed by one of our readers, they do distribute Silex.
And lastly - the Session in Stroud mentioned in our Sessions page, is to be on Monday, not Thursday, evenings.
All over the world these days there are probably as many CDs produced by individual singers and players as there are by record companies - it's just one of the many results of the march of technology ... what Peter Wyper and Patsy Touhey did in the first years of this century almost anyone can do today! But making the records is not the same as making them available - or certainly not the same as making them available outside one's own locality. There are some obvious exceptions, but few musicians have found the time, organisation, expertise, necessity ... to set about marketing their products much beyond selling them at gigs.
Into the breach (for Irish musicians, at least), steps Alan O'Leary, an Irishman living in London, who has set up Copperplate Distribution to bring together a selection of such CDs and to make them available as distributed items via specialist record shops, and by Mail Order.
Alan tells me that he plans to be dealing with the following CDs for the moment:
Contact: Copperplate Distribution, 68 Belleville Road, London SW11 6PP. Tel/Fax 0171 585 0357. E-mail: alogren@atlas.co.uk All the CDs are priced 12/99 plus 80p postage.
The Kaiso Newsletters appears here as a frames enabled multi-part article and will be updated as and when further issues are published. I've asked Ray for a Glossary to help explain some of the more arcane areas of Calypso activity.
23.9.99
MT is utterly unfunded and receives no revenue whatsoever except for the small profits from the sales of our cassettes and CDs. Our total income for last year was £1,117, which included several donations from Friends of MT. If you consider that you've been getting a pretty good deal out of the magazine for the past three years, we would very much appreciate your becoming a Friend and making a contribution to help us carry on with the good work.
We don't want to have to make MT viewable by subscription only (a course of action which is open to us) and would far prefer it to be freely available to anyone anywhere in the world who may stumble upon it and become interested by the wonderful music to be found here, and perhaps want to go on and learn more. What we do ask is that those of you who do read it regularly and are enthusiasts for the music should search your consciences and ask yourselves whether becoming a Friend and making a donation to the magazine's funds wouldn't, in fact, be the decent thing to do.
Cheques or banknotes in any currency will be most gratefully received.
24.12.99
As well as being sold mail-order from MT, these CDs are also available through Veteran Tapes in Suffolk. In order for Veteran to continue trading they need to make a profit, and so we have to sell to them at a wholesale price some 40% lower than the retail price. The costs of CD manufacture and booklet printing (roughly 20% of the retail price) remain the same, no matter how many copies we sell.
In the case of the Cyril Poacher release, exactly 50% of the sales have been through Veteran The results of this are:
Dear Webmaster:Somebody out there cares!Congratulations! Your Web site has received the Web Feet Seal of Approval and will appear in 'Web Feet: The Internet Traveler's Desk Reference'. Web Feet is the premier subject guide to the best Web sites for students, researchers, and the general public and is the first comprehensive Web guide that is interactive and updated monthly.
A site is included in Web Feet only if our researchers think it is an outstanding site in its subject area. The Web Feet Seal of Approval tells teachers, librarians, parents, and students that your site is especially valuable for research, teaching, or general interest.
I am extremely loath to publish this CD without a reasonably respectable booklet to go with it - so unless any readers can assist, this project will have to be shelved for a while. Please ask all your friends for information, even if you've never heard of Daisy yourself.
Obviously, I had hoped that this would happen with the first one, but people were clearly dubious about this new venture (or didn't hear about it!), and the offers - like busses - came in a rush after lots of waiting around. We now have some 20 further projects on the cards, all of which have involved some extra work. Mercifully, the next two involve the collaboration of others, so I won't be as overwhelmed with work as I might have been. I think things are far enough advanced with these to be able to tell you about them without too much fear of eventual disappointment.
The first is something of a coup for a small organisation like ours. In 1963/4, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded a series of interviews with Joe Heaney, the outstanding Connemara sean-nós singer, then living in London. The tapes amount to some 5½ hours and include around 35 songs. Peggy has allowed us access to the originals, Dan Quinn has transcribed the entire interview, Éamonn Ó Bróithe has transcribed the songs and done a truly beautiful job of translating the Irish ones into English, Liam Mac Con Iomaire has provided a biography of Joe and Fred McCormick has the unenviable task of coordinating everything, editing, and writing an introduction. The eventual publication, scheduled for May 2000, will be a double CD and very full booklet, plus the entire edited Interview transcript will be published in MT a month or so beforehand - watch this space!
Since this project is not one which could possibly be described as "hoping to bring important music which might never achieve a commercial publication to the small audience which values it", we have decided to forego some of the possibly large profits we might have made from publishing it entirely ourselves. In the interests of getting the records to as wide an audience as possible, we have entered into a licensing and publication agreement with the Topic and Cló Iar-Chonnachta record companies to achieve worldwide distribution. MT will continue to cover the Internet sales.
As mentioned below, it would greatly help us if readers would attempt to to buy from us rather than retail outlets - helping to fund both the continuing publication of the magazine and further CD publication projects.
The second CD will be the long-awaited Daisy Chapman record, which had stalled for a long while due to insufficient information for the booklet. An appeal on Radio Scotland finally put me in touch with Daisy's niece, further recordings came to light - and the project is now back on track with Pete Shepheard coordinating and editing the booklet.
Then a reader put me in touch with someone "who used to take a tape recorder around the pubs in north Sussex in the late-'50s". This seemingly innocent act resulted in my receiving a box of eight 5" reels of tape - jammed full of songs! - all of which need to be copied onto DAT, edited, noise-reduced and stored on CD ready for eventual publication. Pop Maynard, Jim Wilson, George Townshend, Brick Harber, Sarah Porter ... are among those whose singing will see the light of day on the MT label before too long - if I'm spared .........
And if all that were not enough, I foolishly decided to publish the Musical Traditions of the 20th Century CD-ROM - and even more foolishly, said that I'd include some of the articles from the old 'paper' version of the magazine ....... I didn't realise just how many there were! But if the scanner, OCR software and my typing finger hold out, the CD-ROM should be available early in the New Year, price £10.00. Again - watch this space!
We hope that our fourth year will prove even more productive of top quality journalism and music than have the last three. So - once more - Happy Christmas and other appropriate seasonal greeting to all our readers.
Rod and Keith - 24.12.99
Our regular ISP, U-Net, informed me (in breach of their contract) only three days before the subscription fell due for renewal - that we would be required to pay the full commercial rate for their service in future. At £650 + VAT, this is obviously out of the question!
I was luckliy able to find an alternative home of the main site at slightly less than we paid last year - so every dark cloud has a silver wassname! As far as I can tell, the transfer went without a hitch and there was no interuption of service.
However - my E-Mail address is now changed to: rod@mustrad.org.uk
You can possibly imagine just how furious I am about all this. I really hate the shoe-string nature of the operation I am forced to run with MT - not only for all the extra work and worry it causes me, but also because of the way our readers are being messed about. If you share these concerns, please read on ...
MT is utterly unfunded and receives no revenue whatsoever except for the small profits from the sales of our cassettes and CDs. Our total income for last year was £1,117, which included several donations from Friends of MT. If you consider that you've been getting a pretty good deal out of the magazine for the past two and a half years, we would very much appreciate your becoming a Friend and making a contribution to help us carry on with the good work.
We don't want to have to make MT viewable by subscription only (a course of action which is open to us) and would far prefer it to be freely available to anyone anywhere in the world who may stumble upon it and become interested by the wonderful music to be found here, and perhaps want to go on and learn more. What we do ask is that those of you who do read it regularly and are enthusiasts for the music should search your consciences and ask yourselves whether becoming a Friend and making a donation to the magazine's funds wouldn't, in fact, be the decent thing to do.
Cheques or banknotes in any currency will be most gratefully received.
This new record contains 31 tracks - pretty well every song he is ever known to have recorded - and the A5 booklet is very comprehensive, including song notes this time. I think the whole thing is even better than our Bob Hart publication from last year. The track listing is as follows:
| Plenty of Thyme | Australia |
| Running Up and Down Our Stairs | Joe Moggins |
| Green Broom (Broomfield Wager) | The Nutting Girl |
| I'll Be Your Sweetheart | Just a Rose in a Garden of Weeds |
| The Irish Jolting Car | Green Bushes |
| The Black Velvet Band | Two Little Girls in Blue |
| The Great Big Wheel | A Young Man From the Country |
| Bold General Wolfe | A Broadside |
| The Farmer's Boy | Flash Company |
| The Bonny Bunch of Roses | Lamplighting Time in the Valley |
| Fagan the Cobbler | The Maid and the Magpie |
| Captain Ward and the Rainbow | A Sailor and His True Love |
| Your Faithful Sailor Boy | Strolling Round the Town |
| Slap Dab (Whitewash) | Australia - 3 verses only |
| Nancy of Yarmouth | Nancy of Yarmouth - live |
| The Bog Down in the Valley |
The Booklet notes are now available as an Article and further details can be found on our Products page.
The CD-ROM runs without any problems on all computer platforms and operating systems. It contains everything ever published in the on-line version of the magazine - including all the photos and sound clips - in exactly the same configuration as on the Web, so you should have no problems in finding your way around. Also included are various fonts and viewers to enable purchasers without Net access to see the magazine properly for the first time. See the 'Read-Me' file for further details.
The UK price is £10 inclusive of p&p (£8.50 for friends of MT). Foreign readers can pay in their own currency, but we need to make a small extra charge for the transaction and the p&p.
So it is with great pleasure and some relief, that I announce an addition to the Editorial board; Fred McCormick - who has contributed so much excellent journalism to the magazine over the years - has agreed to become a Co-Editor. Fred is currently engaged on the coordination and production of our Joe Heaney double CD, due for launch in May. Full details of this release can be found below.
Fred's acceptance of the job is extremely gratifying; Keith and I are very pleased to welcome him aboard and look forward to his valuable contributions to our continuing efforts in making MT the world's foremost publication on traditional music, in any medium.
Is it really seventeen years ago that I wrote that in the first editorial to Musical Traditions in 1983? The magazine was my brainchild to explore the enormous amount of traditional music then being researched, recorded and presented both at home and abroad and to give me the opportunity to promote some of the performers I held most dear and to give a platform to like-minded enthusiasts to do the same.
Not that MT was at that time at the cutting edge of technology - far from it! In those days articles and reviews, once submitted, were typed up on a word processor by Jacqui (who ran our firm's computer department) for me to photocopy-reduce and then cut and paste (the smell of cowgum still affects me!) Once printed, it was my task to address by hand all the envelopes (from a water damaged consignment I had acquired cheap). Initially this was hardly a time consuming exercise as the original response was fairly underwhelming but gradually interest grew, some fascinating contacts were made and Musical Traditions gradually established itself as a serious contributor to the study of our music. Enthusiastic and knowledgable reviewers such as Chris Smith, Ray Templeton and Keith Chandler could be relied upon, record companies like Topic, Rounder and Arhoolie were most generous and latterly Graeme Kirkham's desk top publishing skills were to prove invaluable.
However a series of domestic disasters and job changes gradually reduced the amount of time and money available to continue with the mag and so when in 1998 Rod approached me with a view to putting MT on the Internet my immediate view was - what the hell? Go for it! But where was the audience and who would write for a journal that no-one had access to? Well, for once my powers of prophesy were completely up the wall, for in the space of a couple of years virtually everyone who wishes to has access to this media and countless excellent articles, reviews and comments have poured forth. Rod's IT skills have astounded me time and again but more so his boundless enthusiasm - and that is the key. Musical Traditions was born out of enthusiasm and, with the ongoing support of current and doubtless future enthusiasts will continue to champion the great musics of the world.
They deserve nothing less.
Keith Summers - 18.1.00
I've just spent a long time getting old material from ten years ago ready for HTML publication - but where are the new articles? Looking back over the recent inclusions I have to go back to April '99 to find the first - Jonathan Stock's piece on Ethnomusicology - which was actually written for MT, and back to December '98 to find one about a traditional performer! This causes me considerable concern! I don't want MT to become little more than a recycling site for old material. I'm very pleased to be able to include articles which are no longer publicly available, but a revised, updated version from a third millennium standpoint would be so much better.
There must be many of our readers who know about a tradition with which they have some connection, or a performer they know (or knew) - and could put together an article which would be of interest to other readers. There must be many of those who have written one for us who could contribute another. I can't offer any financial rewards for your work, but surely the interest of thousands of readers in over 40 countries spread across the face of the globe is something worth considering? Please let me know if you might be able to write something for us.
18.1.00
As something of a contrast, another reader told me, in the second week of February, that the Rounder/Lomax Songs of Seduction CD - the first in the Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales (Caedmon) series - was available through CDNOW. I e-mailed Rounder asking for a review copy.
On the 18th, Rounder's boss-man i/c traditional releases replied that he'd only seen them himself two days before. He suggested that I should get one via Direct Distribution in London, as they'd be over here "very soon". He was clearly correct in this, because, a few days later, another reader told me that he'd come across the CD in a shop in England on Saturday (20th). Pretty efficient distribution there!
However, Rounder's distributors in the UK - Direct (now Proper) - seemed to be entirely in the dark as to these developments and have only just got their review copies. MT's arrived on the 15th of March - some 3½ weeks after I could have bought it over the counter in a UK shop!
What's more, I'm told that several shops now get their Rounder issues from a "distributor in Europe who is much cheaper and quicker than Direct". So if readers continue to find records available in UK shops long before MT reviews them - it may not always be our fault!
If any readers are having problems getting Rounder CDs, they might like to know that Veteran have the following in stock:
Keith Chandler's CD of Scottish music on Beltona 78s has been cancelled because the sound quality of the discs he had access to was not good enough, and too little of the material was what he felt to be traditional. A great pity, since I'd like our output to be wider than the wholly English material we've been able to release so far.
The double CD of Joe Heaney is pretty well ready, but Topic have decided to delay its release until September for scheduling and commercial reasons. I'll keep you informed of the definite release date as soon as it's know.
But the good news is that the George Townshend CD, which I hinted at earlier, is now a reality, as is the double CD of Walter Pardon from Mike Yates' recordings. This release is intended as a supplement, or even a counterbalance, to the Topic A World Without Horses record, and contains pretty well every song he ever recorded not currently available on various CD issues. I'm extremely pleased about this collaboration with Mike - and hope that it will be the first of several ...
13.6.00
Making the assumption that most of our regular readers who want to spend a tenner to free up some hard drive space have already done so, I don't think many people will object if the old articles start appearing here for the benefit of our more casual readership, worldwide. And, since Bampton practices have just started for the new season, I thought I'd begin with Keith Chandler's excellent piece covering 150 years of fiddle playing and morris dancing in that Oxfordshire village. It is now in place on the Articles page.
Except when a new article arrives to interrupt the schedule, one of the old 'paper' articles will appear here each month, until all 30 have been published. June's will be Mike Yates' The Socio-political songs of Walter Pardon - to coincide with the launch of our new double CD, Put a Bit of Powder on it, Father ... the other songs of Walter Pardon.
MT CD 305:
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MT CD 306:
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All prices are inclusive of p&p. The UK price is £15 (£12.50 for friends of MT). Foreign readers can pay in their own currency, but we need to make a small extra charge for the transaction and the p&p.
My pleasure turned to sadness after reading it through several times. Most of the 'bloomers' (to be honest, the numerous serious charges which have been levelled at Mr Kennedy in these pages over the years) are not even mentioned, let alone commented upon. As far as I can see, he only deals with the 'date of Harry Cox's discovery' issue directly, and 'general inaccuracies in the notes' indirectly. He also raises the matter (not mentioned in MT) of "inappropriate artwork" on the Harry Cox CD; namely, the inclusion of the Union flag. He, rightly, "deplores any unnecessary nationalism", but seems unaware that the artwork was also flawed by the, presumably American, assumption that the Union Jack is the English flag. In all three cases he seeks to place the blame and responsibility for these failings upon others.
Now, I have absolutely no doubt that some, even all, of his stories of changes being made by others and of the final version not being what he'd hoped for are absolutely true. But he is - and is publicly acknowledged to be in the booklet notes - the Series Editor for the British part of the Alan Lomax Collection. As such, the responsibility for the final outcome of the project is his.
It seems to me obvious that an important part of that prestigious job is to ensure that the final version is exactly what he'd hoped for - and to insist that he be given the authority to achieve this end. If this authority was not forthcoming, then he should have resigned the post on that ground. He might even have made a public statement about his decision, which we would have been happy to have printed.
As it is, he presumably remains in the post and, equally presumably, we may look forward to further volumes in the series exhibiting the same flaws as those we've seen already.
These copies - the last remaining stock - are now available for sale at £5 including UK p&p to MT readers. Since they are strictly outside the financial sphere of MT on the Net, we would ask any prospective purchasers to contact Keith directly at: keith.summers@virgin.net or at: 49 Crossfield Road, Southend on Sea, Essex SS2 4LS, UK, and to make cheques payable to him.
Thus readers can have access to pretty well all the UK production of traditional music CDs from one place, with just the one letter, e-mail, phone call, and cheque.
It is also hoped that a reciprocal arrangement with Topic can soon be finalised, so that Credit Card purchases of MT records can be made from them. Watch this space for further details.
Moreover, the change in status mentioned above means that I now hope to sell MT records through other mailorder outlets and shops. The reaction from some of these has been that our prices are well below the 'standard' CD price, meaning lower profits than is normal, yet more work and p&p costs because of our A5 size booklets. MT record prices have also remained the same since 1998.
Accordingly, I have decided to raise our prices on August 1st this year. I can't be doing with these silly £11.99 prices - so from that date MT single CDs will cost £12 and doubles £16 - both inclusive of UK p&p. I hope most readers will agree that they still represent extremely good value.
If everything goes to plan, we will have released three single and two double CDs by the end of the year - George Townshend, Walter Pardon, Daisy Chapman, Joe Heaney and the Smith Family. The records side of the operation will be profit-making in a real sense - and thus needs its existence declared to the taxman. Such a declaration would be enormously complicated if it included the non-profit-making magazine aspect of our work. For this and several other more complex reasons, I have decided to separate the two parts - and from the 1st of January this year, the record company and the magazine have been keeping separate accounts and operating independently.
Musical Traditions Records will continue to fund the Magazine as and when necessary.
These copies - the last remaining stock - are now available for sale at £5 including UK p&p to MT readers. Since they are strictly outside the financial sphere of MT on the Net, we would ask any prospective purchasers to contact Keith directly at: keith.summers@virgin.net or at: 49 Crossfield Road, Southend on Sea, Essex SS2 4LS, UK, and to make cheques payable to him.
14.11.00
It now seems fairly clear that the only way anyone in the UK will be able to easily buy some of the truly wonderful music I've reviewed here is if I start selling it myself ... so I shall! Within the next few days, the following CDs will be available from our Records page, along with Topic and our own productions. May I stress that this is not 'difficult' music - if you enjoy the Coppers or the Watersons, you'll love the singing, and if you like British jig-time dance music played by a fiddle-led band, you'll love the music!
Gloucester's Wiggy Smith and his father, Wisdom, will be quite well known from appearances on various Topic LPs of Traveller songs. His uncles Denny and Biggun (Jabez) however, have never before appeared on record - and the four of them present a fine and broad repertoire of songs, ranging from Lord Bateman and The Cruel Ship's Carpenter, through The Deserter and Oakham Poachers, to Ikey Moses and That Little Old Band of Gold. Even Wiggy's granddaughters, Jean Johns and Rachel Butler contribute a great little playground song, My Boyfriend Gave Me an Apple.
The CD contains pretty well every song (33 in all) that they are known to have recorded - and few of these particular performances have ever before been published. The tapes come from as far back as Peter Shepheard's 1966 recordings of Denny and Biggun, Mike Yates' 1970 recordings of Wiggy and Wisdom, and move right up to date with Gwilym Davies' and Paul Burgess' of Wiggy in 1994-99. The accompanying 24-page A5 booklet describes Wiggy’s life and music in some detail, and contains the texts of all the songs, including complete versions of some of the longer ballads.
As usual, the Notes from this now appear as an Article in these pages, and details and a printable Order Form are to be found on the Records page.
Since it has been decided that the Topic/CIC release of this MT production will not now take place until November - and since we have had it ready for five months and have widely advertised its availability in September - it has been agreed that we should begin to sell it as advertised. Accordingly, it is now available from the MT address and full details appear on the Records page. The Road from Connemara costs £16 (the same as it will from Topic), but our price includes UK p&p.
Once again, we are pleased to be able to offer MT readers a new Topic release ahead of its official launch date. The Bonny Labouring Boy is another lavish VotP-style production - two 78+ minute CDs, 54 tracks and a 60-page booklet housed in a super-sized case. The booklet is really superb: introduction by Reg Hall, song notes by Steve Roud, biography and appeciation by Paul Marsh. Puts our booklets to shame!
It is now available from the MT address and full details and printable order form appear on the Records page. The Bonny Labouring Boy costs £16 (the same as it will from Topic), but our price includes UK p&p.
A happy holiday, a peaceful and musical New year, good stuff to read, great stuff to listen to ... What more do you need? Friends across the world to share it with!
Rod, Keith and Fred - 23.12.00
It is something of a paradox that, as the audience for real traditional music appears to be dwindling, the quantity and quality of what is being published is increasing. In the last couple of years an unprecedented number of extremely important publications have appeared which have dealt with traditional music in a fuller, deeper, wider ... a 'better' way than almost any in the past.
What's more, instant global communications via the Internet have allowed the small number of people actually interested in such things to keep abreast of these developments and in touch with each other. Most of us understand that new standards are constantly being set - and realise that any new publications must live up to these standards. MT reviews should attempt to reflect these developments, since we are now addressing what has become an extremely educated audience.
Like the reviews in any other music magazine, ours tend to fall into a few broad categories:
Personally, I would far rather hear about the possible failings of a CD before I encounter it as an enticing looking, shrink-wrapped (and thus unexaminable) object in my local record shop. I would rather know that the glossily produced booklet actually tells me very little about the music or the performer before I shell out £13 of my hard-earnt!
Rather more difficult to answer is the charge that, since the publication in question really is very good and well worth buying, "Why did your reviewed have to go picking holes in it?" Here, I can only refer back to the point about the constantly improving quality of publications and the standards they inevitably set. Our own Musical Traditions CDs are a case in point - whenever I'm presented with a new project, one of my major worries is that I won't be able to do as good a job on it as I did on some of the previous ones. Also worth remembering is the way in which small flaws in an extremely good piece of work stand out far more annoyingly than they would in a mediocre one.
Anyway - I will continue to publish, indeed to encourage, critical reviews (in the best sense of the word) - though I will try to exercise rather more editorial control over those I consider to be needlessly so ... and attempt to do the same with my own contributions as well! But MT, although an e-zine, is not a fan-zine - and has no intentions of becoming one.
But, as the 'real' Millennium draws to a close, the MT team will have produced four single CDs and five double CDs in 12 months - and, with a bit of luck and a following wind, will have published all but the last of these doubles before December 31st. Nor has the Magazine been neglected - having now grown to a staggering 116Mb in size. This will mean that a big chunk of the older material is going to need shifting to our 'second' site at UK Online - probably in late January. Keep an eye on this Editorial page for further details of when the move takes place and how it will effect you.
For anyone trying to figure out what all those CDs were/are, the list goes like this:
The aforementioned 'fifth' double will be an overview of the Mike Yates Collection and will feature tracks which are no longer available - almost a score of them have never been released before, including three complete Child Ballads he collected only a couple of months ago! It is likely to be available early in 2001, as is the new version of the Musical Traditions CD-ROM, complete with all this year's magazine output.
This might also be a good time to remind readers that the new Gordon Hall CD, all the Topic traditional CDs and a select range of Italian ones are available from us (see our Records page), and to remind overseas readers that all the MT CDs are available for Credit Card purchase from Topic in London (44 [0]20 7263 1240). Ask for Mail Orders.
Also, the last remaining copies of Reg Hall's superb book on Scan Tester, the Sussex anglo concertina player, I Never Played to Many Posh Dances, which was published by MT back in 1990, are now available for sale at £5 including UK p&p to MT readers. Please contact Keith directly at: keith.summers@virgin.net or at: 49 Crossfield Road, Southend on Sea, Essex SS2 4LS, UK, and to make cheques payable to him.
The reason for this is that the sound files associated with the reviews account for more than twice as much space as all the files I will be moving in total. Since all of these older Reviews will have already been read by those of you who were interested anyway, it seems to me unneccesary to go to all the trouble and cost of such a time-consuming and space-hungry transfer.
The only real result of all this will be that any Bookmarks you've created pointing to older Articles or Reviews will no longer work. This does not mean that the file in question no longer exists (they ALL continue to exist!) - merely that it is now in a different place, so you need to go to the Articles or Reviews index page first, to find it.
By the time you read this the move will have been completed and all the links from the magazine's Index pages will have been altered to point to the new file locations. This process usually goes through without too many glitches, but there will inevitably be the occasional missed link somewhere in the 2,000 or so pages - if you do notice a link which isn't working any more, please let me know.
So - in brief: All pre-2000 files are now moved to our other site. If you can't find a file, go to the appropriate Index page and get to it from there. Don't rely on bookmarks for the older material.
18.1.01
MT is extremely pleased and excited at having been selected to make this wonderful music available in the UK. See News and Comment No 21 for more details.
5.2.01
The third MT Supplement is currently in preparation - the writings of world-expert Keith Chandler on Morris Dancing in the English South Midlands 1660-1900 will appear on CD-ROM in mid-2001. This will bring together his two books Ribbons, Bells and Squeaking Fiddles and A Chronological Gazetteer, plus numerous other published and unpublished shorter works on the subject into one essential volume. Every piece has been revised and updated for this new MT publication, reflecting Keith's continuing research into the Morris tradition.
This CD-ROM will be The Morris publication of the decade. I would ask all readers to pass on information about this impending release to any friends interested in the Morris, since many of them will be unaware of MT's existence, and getting the information to them by means of normal publicity methods would be extremely expensive.
Keith has very generously donated all profits from the CD-ROM to MT funds. A Friend indeed!
23.3.01
Some four months ago, I was happy to publish Dáibhí Ó Cróinín's letter responding to Fred McCormick's review, and extremely pleased by its calm tone and magnanimous approach to the matter. As may be imagined, Dáibhí and I exchanged several e-mails over the following few weeks, and my opinion of him was further enhanced by an offer he subsequently made. I'd had the temerity to ask if he fancied contributing anything for publication in MT, and he replied:
"I wonder would you find it useful if I sent the texts of some Bess Cronin songs that I was given when I was in Cúil Aodha a week ago - two or three are 'new' (i.e., either not known to me before or else noted by title in the book from one of her song-lists, but no text then to hand). One or two already in the book, but these (handwritten versions, from a copybook of my father's dated 1939!!) are slightly different."... and added, in a further message:
"Fred mentioned that you might write asking for a listing of the actual sources for the printed texts in my book. I'd be delighted in principle to oblige, but fear that it'll take a while ... I'll be happy to post it on your site. It's work that should be done anyway ..."Naturally, I was delighted that such a positive result might be the outcome of what had, at times, been some rather heated debate in our letters pages. However, I refrained from publicising the fact, as I didn't want to appear to be putting Dáibhí under any obligation to fulfil his kind offer. Despite being very busy with his University work, he took the trouble to keep me informed of developments in the succeeding months.
So I was very surprised by an e-mail from him last week (now published in out Letters page) telling me that he was unhappy about my publication of Mike Brocken's letter:
"[Your] publication of the ignorant and offensive letter by Dr Mike Brocken of Liverpool University seems to me to indicate that there is, in fact, no meaningful moderatorship of the letters at all. I'm at a loss to understand why the views of a self-declared ignoramus in the subject should be given the freedom of your pages ... His comments are just too silly to merit any reply, but in view of the fact that he was allowed to air them at my expense, I must - reluctantly - withdraw my previous offer to publish the newly-discovered Bess Cronin material in your pages."
Nor, to be frank, do I see much in Dr Brocken's letter, or in my publication of it, which could be construed as being 'at Dr Ó Cróinín's expense' - let alone ignorant or offensive. For the most part, it merely reiterates points which have been raised before - and, for the most part, not answered! Let's be specific:
These are the important criticisms which Fred McCormick's review levelled at the book part of The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin. These are the criticisms which Dáibhí Ó Cróinín has failed to even discuss, let alone attempt to answer. Maybe he would now care to do so?
These are also the points which Ó Cróinín's and Moulden's letters have essentially side-tracked - a pity, as I believe they need discussion. The tone of the review has already been discussed, explained and apologised for ... it does not need to be covered further, I think. The MT Letters Page is a forum for people with an interest in traditional music to share their thoughts with other such people. There is no requirement for them to be experts. MT is not an academic Journal and its correspondence pages are not moderated. I will both welcome and publish any contributions discussing some or all of the above matters. That, at least, would be a positive outcome ............
Throughout my life, I've attempted to share my great enthusiasm for (and moderate knowledge of) traditional music in every possible way. One of the results of my re-publication of MT on the Net has been to help others in doing the same. I see this as being positive and helpful. I believe most readers would agree that we all benefit from it.
So I'm sorry that Dáibhí Ó Cróinín has decided to take his ball home. I don't see how it is any way positive or helpful. Nor do I (as yet) see who benefits from it.
9.4.01
The Tommy Talker Bands of the West Riding, by Ronnie Wharton and Arthur Clarke, was the very first article to be published in MT, back in mid-1983. It's an account of what I would call an English folk music rather than a traditional one, and as these are pretty few and far between, it makes very interesting reading.
The other was John Howson's piece on The Barber Family, of Wingfield, Suffolk, which is rather more central to what I know to be the interests of most MT readers.
And then - just like the proverbial London busses - another one turned up! Georgina Boyes offered me a piece on Alice Gomme, who was an influential collector, advocate of the Revival and associate of Sharp. It was her work on children's singing games which convinced Sharp that England wasn't a land without music, but that folksong might still exist here.
I was extremely pleased, as we have very little on women (collectors or singers) in the magazine, so I was glad to have it on that score alone - apart from the fact that it is also well written and interesting. It's a great pleasure to get contributions from writers of Georgina's distinction, and hope for further collaborations in the future.
14.5.01
So, you will now find this piece available here, or via a link in the bottom section of the MT Home Page - under the first of the green divider lines . It is not a 'course' and doesn't include lessons or exercises, but it is - I hope - presented in a logical order, and if the reader follows it through, experimenting with the examples of code I've given, I'm reasonably sure s/he will emerge at the end with a fair level of competence at writing plain, simple HTML Web pages. Little knowledge of the subject is expected, but I do assume a basic understanding of how to access files on a PC.
I hope that those of you who are interested in such things will find it helpful.
2.6.01
True to that intent - though with some trepidation - I'm pleased to be able to publish another long review, this time of the new double CD, My Name is Napoleon Bonaparte, from Frank Harte and Dónal Lunny. The writer in this instance is the co-author of the much-acclaimed Rough Guide to Irish Music, Geoff Wallis - who is also an historian with a long-time interest in Ireland and political history.
As so often seems to be the case, Geoff was happy with the CDs, but not with the booklet notes. As he comments: 'Since such notes have a tendency to enter the canon, it became necessary to challenge their contents.' Readers with an interest in Napoleon, or with Irish history, should find the review a fascinating read.
7.7.01
Joe Rae is an exceptional man. A joiner, who now lives near the small Ayrshire town of Beith, he carries with him a store of folksongs and stories that he inherited from his family and neighbours, including unique versions of classic ballads and ancient Celtic folktales. Ayrshire is not well-known for its folk performers - certainly not as well-known as the North-East of Scotland - and Joe Rae represents a tradition that has all but vanished today.
Joe was born in 1937 into a community of rural farmworkers and shepherds who, for generations, had been responsible for their own entertainment. Many of Joe’s songs came from his grandfather, John Rogerson, a shepherd who had worked in the Galloway Hills. John learnt the rare ballad Achnachie Gordon from a fellow Scot whilst fighting in the Boer War. Other ballads, such as William and Lady Marjorie and Katharine Johnston, came from another shepherd, Edward ‘Ned’ Robertson, who was retired and living in the village of Sorn when Joe knew him.
Many of Joe’s songs and ballads refer to local events - You’ll Gang tae the Pawn was learnt by a young Joe Rae in the ‘jiner’s shop’ where he was apprenticed, while Oor Young Lady relates to the Maxwell Family who have lived in Nithsdale since the time of the Scottish King David the 2nd (1329 to1371) - though some ballads, such as The Bonny Hind, are known throughout Europe.
The area around Beith is scattered with Gaelic place-names, so it should come as no surprise to hear Joe retelling some of his grandfather’s stories of mermaids and kelpies - malevolent underwater creatures - stories that are common to both Ireland and the West Coast of Scotland.
The Broom Blooms Bonny, Joe Rae’s first album, contains a choice part of Joe’s heritage. It will be valued by all who love and appreciate Scottish traditional music and culture; and it is a significant document, and memorial, to a way of life seldom seen today.
The CD and 20-page booklet are priced at £12.00 inc p&p, and can be ordered via our Records page. As usual, the CD's Booklet Notes appear as an Article in these pages.
7.7.01
Danny Stradling has now completed this challenging and lengthy task and her translation appears as an Article in these pages. Now you can not only buy a CD of a superb ballad singer, but also read all about her and see her entire song texts, in English.
Not an easy read in places - but something that everyone really needs to think long and hard about. Do have a look. And I hope you come to value it as much as I do.
Also, since the musics they deal with are mentioned in passing in the Keil article, I've reinstated John Harrison's Damn Society! ... an Introduction to Greek Rembetika and João Dos Santos' The Gangster Reformed ... a study in musical parallels, which looks at the Fado of Lisbon and the Tango of Buenos-Aires as well as the Rembetika of Athens.
Loads of interesting stuff for your summer reading!
28.8.01
One result of this is that I tend to get a great many requests for information about where to buy the CD concerned ... since I have been foolish enough to include my contact details at the foot of every page. Some three years ago, whilst spending far too many happy hours assembling the Traditional Discographies, I decided to include a list of what I hoped would be 'useful addresses' of record companies, distributors, shops, etc, to enable readers to find this information for themselves. This has been kept up to date subsequently, as and when further contact info came to hand. So it's a pity that most of the queries I receive concern information which can be found on the Useful Addresses page - it certainly takes up a considerable amount of my time, trying to find pleasant ways of saying "Well, why not look where I've already put the address you want?" to several people every week.
So - regulars will notice that I'm now including a note to this effect at the head of each review and the Latest Batch page, in an attempt to minimise these pointless requests a little. I do realise that almost everyone who reads this present piece will already know how to find out the address of Rounder, Felmay or whoever - but could I ask you to spread the word about the Useful Addresses page to other, less frequent, readers? They (or even you) might very well find something of interest - or actually useful - there. To make it doubly easy, I've now put a link on the Home Page, too.
11.10.01
18.10.01
I'm very pleased to announce that the CD from Ray Andrews, indicated as a distinct possibility in Geoff Woolfe's recent article, is now a reality. Details and an order form can be found on our Records page, as usual.
Ray Andrews (1922-87) was a well known musician and entertainer in the Bristol area. He learned to play the banjo from his father, who had been a boiler-man in the Navy in the First World War. In the 1930s, Ray was sent as a boy to a teacher, Harold Sharp, who taught him to play in the classic style, a tradition which dates from the mid/late 19th century. Ray won a talent contest at the Theatre Royal Bristol, and performed at variety shows as Bristol’s 'Boy Wonder banjo player'.
After the Second World War, he became a stalwart of the Bristol Banjo Mandolin and Guitar Club, whose band won many national competitions. Ray was well known as a pub and working men’s club musician, and when the BMG orchestra declined, he worked with Erik Ilott (the Bristol Shantyman), and was also involved with a club band, The Swingers, and a charitable concert party, The Volunteers. He taught others to play the banjo, and was interested in a wide range of music. He recorded himself on countless cassette tapes, for his own amusement and for his musical friends. Ray performed solo and with Erik Ilott at a number of Folk Festivals in the 1970s and 1980s and became known beyond the ‘classic’ banjo world.
This CD is made up of a number of Ray's own recordings, some private recordings made at festivals, a few studio tracks, and reissues from a cassette, Banjo Maestro, made in the late 1970s by Erik Ilott. It illustrates Ray’s repertoire, both live and in the studio. We hope you will agree that it gives a flavour of Ray’s approach - as an entertainer who enjoyed playing before an audience, most of whom were new to the English banjo tradition. The CD contains 26 tracks, with a running time of 74 minutes, and is accompanied by a 24 page A5 booklet including a biography of Ray’s life, information on the musicians with whom he worked, and a section on the history of the ‘classic’ banjo in Britain and its origins. Once again, we are able to offer a wealth of material otherwise unavailable on CD, much of which will be entirely new to most listeners. As usual, the CD's Booklet Notes appear as an Article in these pages.
18.10.01
I won't promise, but I shall seriously consider moving all the old material back onto the main site and restoring the sound clips (totalling 20Mb) which had been removed. A job for the New Year - if I still have me strength .......
8.12.01
I'm very pleased to announce that our last CD release for 2001, Kevin and Ellen Mitchell: Have a Drop Mair (MTCD315-6), is now available. The ideal Christmas present for almost everyone, I would have thought! Why not order your copy now and be sure of getting it on time. Details and an order form can be found on our Records page, as usual.
Readers of the CD reviews in Musical Traditions Internet Magazine will know that I, among others, have had cause to criticise the recordings of some of the younger generation of singers - people who are, like myself, to some extent products of the 'second British folk song revival', and of the folk club and festival scene. In far too many cases the singer has come away from the traditional source having learned little beyond the text and a simple approximation of the tune.
But I am also aware that there are a good number of singers who share this heritage, yet are well able to be judged by the same criteria as traditional singers without being the losers by it. For several years, it has been my intention to produce some CDs of such people, as well as of traditional singers - live people as well as dead ones!
However, intentions don't automatically translate into reality: some ideas had to be shelved because commercial labels were considering something similar; some didn't produce enthusiastic responses; and some, like this present one, took far longer than I had anticipated to bring to fruition. This has been much more a function of the distance from Stroud to Glasgow than of any lack of enthusiasm on the part of Kevin, Ellen or myself - they have worked less frequently in the southern half of England than I was expecting, and I have travelled northwards rather less often than in the past. For whatever reasons, it has been almost three and a half years since I first suggested the idea ...
Nonetheless, here we are with MT's first double CD from people who I don't wish to call revivalists - not only has it become a pejorative term, it's also inaccurate - successors might be better. Call them or it what you will; I think it's a superb record!
As usual, the CDs' Booklet Notes appear as an Article in these pages.
Things soon changed, and we outgrew the AOL site in the first eight months - particularly after I found out how to do sound clips! Two years with U-NET followed, and them a final change to our current ISP at NicNames, who have now made their site provision unlimited - so no more old files need be moved to the second site (see below). The entire online magazine now amounts to almost 86Mb!
One of the many things I never dreamed of in 1996 was that I would become a record producer. Keith Summers had produced a number of cassettes for MT, but I certainly wasn't thinking of making any more. Then digital technology took a few strides forward and I found that I could afford the necessary kit to make CD-R publications, and after some help from Paul Marsh, that I could do the whole process myself, at home! The result of that has been a total of 6 single CDs, 6 doubles and a CD-ROM. Another double, a quadruple (truly!) and another CD-ROM are scheduled for early in 2002. Plus there is a very exciting development currently being worked on - and which I'll tell you about in due course, once the details are ironed out.
So it only remains for me to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and an even better New Year than the last, and to assure you that I will do my best to live up to, or exceed, the standards we've set in the past.
22.12.01
As announced below, the new George Dunn double CD, Chainmaker (MTCD317-8) is now available. This great Black Country singer was recorded in the early seventies by Roy Palmer, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker. The CDs contain 51 tracks and are accompanied by a very substantial booklet written by Roy Palmer. Details and an order form can be found on our Records page and, as usual, the CDs' Booklet Notes appear as an Article in these pages. Price is £16.00 inc p&p.
Also, Volume 3 of The Complete Musical Traditions CD-ROM is now out, containing the entire output of the magazine - from the articles in the 'paper' editions of the magazine of 1983 onwards, right up to the last files uploaded to the Website on December 31st 2001. It's an ideal way of accessing the bulk of MT without having to go online, contains a number of articles still not available on the Net, has all the sound clips, saves you a load of disc space (over 108Mb), and only costs a tenner!
Put simply, empty laser printer toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges are used in the 'compatibles' market place and this scheme gives the Hospice at least 50% of their eventual resale value. Thus you can help both the recycling movement and the Hospice at no cost to yourself! I've signed up - and it occurred to me that, as you all have computers, there must be a great many toner and inkjet cartridges ending up in the dustbins of MT readers, which could easily be put to good use.
You can get FREEPOST envelopes for the inkjet cartridges and/or a bin for laser printer toner cartridges which will be collected free when full - or you can post either to me at my address below. For the former, write to Envirocare, FREEPOST SWB 978, Bristol BS1 5ZZ, or you can contact St Peter's Hospice, Bristol Recycling on 0845 458 8822 or e-mail sph@tonerdonor.co.uk for further details of the scheme.
12.1.02
May I ask all site owners with links on MT's Links page to check that your link goes to where it should, and to tell me if your URL is now different to what it was when you first asked me to include it. If a reader tells me of an outdated link, it will be deleted - and I'll need convincing of your integrity before I reinstate it.
This household currently contains three avid fans of more-or-less everything the Coen Brothers have produced to date (we're talking films/movies here, not some little known klezmer combo - lest any of my readers with rather limited horizons should misunderstand). A couple of years ago when the first UK reviews of O Brother Where Art Thou? began to appear, we were surprised to find an only moderately favourable review in the Guardian, and actually looked in a few other papers for something more positive; but to no avail. Further, we discovered that the film had bombed in the States a few months earlier.
Working on the "Sod the critics, I'm sure we'll enjoy it" thesis which has proved reliable so often in the past, we went to see the film and were utterly delighted - most particularly with the sensitive and imaginative use of music (and folk music, at that!) as an integral part of the story. Indeed, we felt that the music was, in truth, one of the main characters in the story. This was particularly surprising in that not one of the several reviews we'd read had mentioned the music at all!
Naturally, we encouraged all our friends to go and see it - as did a great many other people, it seems - and before too long we began to hear that it was gaining some kind of underground cult status; popular despite all the critics had said. Then the CD of the soundtrack came out; began to sell in millions; the film suddenly began appearing on Screen 1 of multiplexes all over the place; Gillian Welch became a star; and the next thing we know is that the CD has won a score of Grammies and other awards. How nice the see the pyramidical hierarchy structure working in reverse for a change - pressure from the grass-roots finally filtering all the way up to the top!
(As an adjunct to that, do go and see the film Down from the Mountain if it's ever on anywhere near you. After the O Brother soundtrack had been recorded, the Coens put on a couple of charity concerts by the performers concerned, and this is the film of one of those concerts, together with lots of stuff of the singers and musicians talking and playing together beforehand. For the music lover, it's even better than O Brother. The Cox Family, in particular, are absolutely superb.)
Then: an article appeared in the New York Times a couple of days ago. It began:
On a mid-September day in 1959, an inmate in the Mississippi State Penitentiary named James Carter led some of his fellow prisoners in singing "Po Lazarus," a bluesy, melancholy old work-song about a man who is hunted and gunned down by a sheriff with a .44. In the course of a long, hard life that followed, Mr Carter, a sharecropper's son, forgot about that day, the song, and the man who captured it on tape, Alan Lomax. Until about two weeks ago, when two people visited him in his Chicago apartment to give him some amazing news - and a $20,000 check.Po Lazarus, you may recall, is the song which is heard over the opening sequence of O Brother Where Art Thou? - a chain gang breaking stone on a country road. The recording is a Lomax original, attributed to 'James Carter and a gang of prisoners'. Mr Carter will earn royalties for being the only named performer on the Lomax recording and, because Po Lazarus is in the public domain, he will also earn songwriter royalties which go to the performer once the copyright expires. T-Bone Burnett, the film's musical director said James Carter's royalties could run "well into the six- figure range." The album has sold five million copies to date and the Grammy triumph is expected to push sales far higher.
James Carter appears to have been one of the lucky few for whom the US penal system actually worked; after four spells in jail he managed to get back into ordinary life, settled down, married a preacher woman, and now lives quietly in moderate prosperity at the centre of a large family in Chicago. The story of how Burnett and Anna Lomax found him is an unusual one in an industry rampant with tales of swindled royalties, corruption and stolen song credits - you can read the whole thing here. My thanks to Derek Schofield for passing it on to me, and for making the world seem, if only momentarily, a much nicer place.
6.3.02
7.2.02
The next MT publication will be Volumes 1 & 2 of Far in the Mountains, Mike Yates' 4-CD Appalachian collection, and it will be ready quite soon. We're intending to package these in a double DVD case (7½" x 5½") with the booklet included inside the case.
Both Mike and I think that this method of packaging is a considerable improvement on the current one:
22.3.02
Far in the Mountains : Volumes 1 & 2 now availableBoth CDs are full of excellent stereo recordings - 80 tracks, 150 minutes - of ballads, songs, tunes and stories, which Mike made in Virginia and North Carolina. As usual, the complete booklet notes are available as an article in these pages, and ordering details and an Order Form are to be found on our records page.
25.4.02
Far in the Mountains : Volumes 3 & 4 now availableBoth CDs are full of excellent stereo recordings - 58 tracks, 149 minutes - of ballads, songs, tunes and stories, which Mike made in North Carolina and Tennessee. As usual, the complete booklet notes are available as an article in these pages, and ordering details and an Order Form are to be found on our records page.
Anyone purchasing all four volumes at the same time can do so at the Set price of £30.00
23.5.02
So it’s now almost exactly 4 years since MT started issuing CDs. In that time a startling 31 discs (8 doubles, 6 singles, plus 4 CD-ROMS and a few peripherals) have emerged from my little wind-powered forge here in Stroud. The recent change to a new packaging format (DVD case with integral booklet) 
prompted me to think that this 4th birthday might be a good time to publish a ‘sampler’ CD ... particularly as one track from each of the 22 records might just about fit on to an 80 minute disc!
The result has been A Catalogue Sampler - 25 tracks and 79 minutes of song, music and a story from: Bob Hart; Cyril Poacher; George Townshend; Walter Pardon; Wiggy Smith; Biggun Smith; Denny Smith; Daisy Chapman; Jim Wilson; Sarah Porter; Pop Maynard; Freda Palmer; Frank Hinchliffe; Joe Rae; Ray Andrews; Kevin Mitchell; Ellen Mitchell; George Dunn; Pug; Allen; Evelyn Ramsey; Doug Wallin; Cas Wallin; Benton Flippen. All of the text for the accompanying 32 page internal booklet is drawn from those accompanying the CDs, suitably edited for this publication.
The selection has to be seen as nothing more than my current favourite tracks; at least one from each release and more from some - but I’ve made no attempt to be representative of any particular singer’s repertoire or style. Even then it has been a very difficult selection and a number of lovely things from the several ‘various performers’ CDs have had to be omitted for lack of space.
A Catalogue Sampler (MTCD319) costs just £10, inc UK p&p.
My hope is that this full and inexpensive sampler may find a wider audience than any of the individual publications have, and may open a few eyes to the riches to be found within MT’s ‘small but very valuable catalogue’.
23.6.02
Part Two is the song and tune notes themselves. These are now complete, and you can find them in the new VotP Suite of pages which contain everything on the site relating to this 20-CD series - reviews, comments, interview, etc, in an interlinked, updated and re-edited format. You'll find the whole thing in a new link off the Home Page.
15.9.02
Canti e Suoni d'ItaliaThe Canti e Suoni d'Italia CD contains selected performances from the 2002 Ponte Caffaro convegno internazionale sulla musica popolare, and is published by the same Compagnia Balarì e Sonadùr di Ponte Caffaro who delighted all who saw them at Sidmouth this year. It has 19 tracks, plays for 71 minutes, and costs just £12.00.
And for those who didn't manage to buy one at Sidmouth, we also have the wonderful Pas en Amúr CD of the Ponte Caffaro carnevale ritual dances from martedi grasso (Mardi Gras) 1993 on sale at the same price.
2.10.02
4.11.02
The result should be considerably faster downloads of these older files. I have left the old files in place on the ukonline site so that readers who have Bookmarked them won't be showering me with "Where's the xxx review gone, then?" e-mails.
In the process, I have generally tidied up the presentation of the older files, added the current logos, headers and bottom-of-page links common to all other MT pages. Finally, I'm in the process of including the remainder of the old 'paper version' articles in the on-line magazine. Most are now there, and the process should be complete by Christmas.
It will be almost inevitable that, somewhere in the process, I will have missed out on changing one or two links. If any reader notices their browser being pointed to web.ukonline.co.uk for a page, please let me know where the offending link is.
16.11.02
Since this was obviously out of the question, I had to quickly start looking for an alternative home for MT - and found one at 1&1 Hosting which offered all the facilities and more than the previous one did, plus a 10Gb traffic limit, for about the same price. The mustrad.org.uk domain name was transferred to them (rather more quickly that I had been told to expect) and then I found that I couldn't access the new site by FTP to upload the magazine's files! My change to a new password had not been implemented, and it took several phone calls to discover the problem.
Anyway, I've now now uploaded the entire site - heartfelt thanks to Roger Grimes for the use of his broadband connection! Please inform me if anything's not available or working properly.
Whilst doing all this uploading, I thought it would be sensible to include all the old articles from the 'paper' editions of MT (as mentioned below), so you should find that everything ever published here is now available, on-line, at the same site. This should result in a much quicker access time for all the pages and, I hope, a better service for all our readers.
Oh - and while I'm at it - please do not use my old mustrad@ukonline.co.uk e-mail address any more; it doesn't get to me now. Always use rod@mustrad.org.uk
10.12.02
So - at last - I've got Credit/Debit Card purchasing facilities available on the Records pages. These are now accessible from a new domain name - mtrecords.co.uk - so you can get directly to them by entering www.mtrecords.co.uk in your browser. Alternately, the Records link anywhere in the magazine will take you there, as usual.
I should explain that, due to the additional costs which Credit/Debit Card purchasing incurs, plus the impending rise in UK postal rates, I can no longer include p&p costs in the catalogue prices of the CDs when bought using plastic - though they still are if you buy with a cheque or cash. So - for Credit/Debit Card purchases only - £1.00 is added to the price of single CDs and £1.50 to doubles, to cover these costs. This is still cheaper than most other sources of these and similar CDs, as far as I can tell.
Put very simply, cheque or cash is cheaper but less convenient and takes a day or two before I get your letter, while Credit or Debit Card is a little more expensive but is more convenient and I know about your order within seconds of your having placed it - the choice is yours. In either case, I will post the CD(s) within 24 hours of knowing about your order.
Why not check out the new site now? ... I'm rather proud of it. And you might just decide that there's something there you've been meaning to buy for some time - but somehow haven't got round to writing the letter.
14.1.03
Jim and Pat have been working with me for the last few months in producing a double CD set (in a DVD case with internal 40-page booklet) including all 15 of the cassette tracks, plus 30 more from the same source. I'm extremely pleased to announce that the result of our labours, From Puck to Appleby (MTCD325-6) is now available - and it really is superb!
As usual, the complete booklet notes, including tracklists, photos and sound clips, is now presented as an Article here. The CDs are available for purchase by cheque, cash or Credit Card from our new Records website at www.mtrecords.co.uk priced £16.00 inc UK p&p. There is a £1.50 surcharge for Card purchases, but it does include foreign p&p.
14.2.03
So I promptly set about digitising it. If only I'd had the modern software I now have back in 1999 when I did all the rest of the old articles ... it took about half an hour for the entire job! So - other readers with an interest in such things will now find the Joe McLawrence article available in these pages. I only hope I didn't miss any others.
20.3.03
Here's Luck to a Man ... (MTCD320) now availableHere's Luck to a Man contains additional material to the presently available Yates recordings on Topic's My Father's the King of the Gypsies (TSCD661). For aficionados, 16 of the 39 tracks are by Mary Ann Haynes!
Like all our new releases, it comes in a DVD case with an integral 36 page booklet, and is priced at only £12.00. You can order your copy, by cheque or credit/debit card, from the Records page.
3.4.03
So when he saw that I'd reinstated the Joe McLawrence article (see below), he asked whether I'd care to add some sound clips. "They may be a bit rough", he added. Well - if this is rough, give me excess of it!
There are now four examples of Joe's excellent playing included and - since the 'kwadril' tradition of St Lucia will probably be new to most readers - I do urge you to go to the article again and check it out ... lovely stuff!
15.4.03
However, the lamentable state of day-time TV has meant that he's not being idle, and several new MT CDs are in their compilation stages down in Southend. But a dysfunctional CD player has temporarily put a brake on this activity and so I had a letter the other day saying "In the meantime I have been sorting out my photo archive and have pulled out the enclosed 'vintage' items for possible inclusion in the old Pictures Page."
No sooner the word than the deed - and you can now find these little gems in thumbnail and full-size form on the aforesaid Pictures Page.
27.6.03
15.4.03
"And I say I did hear horses!" Henry Peacock - 20.7.03
The truly wonderful Italian/Sardinian quartet of Riccardo Tesi, Alberto Balia, Enrico Frongia and Daniele Craighead, first published forse il mare in 1986. This may be the most effective attempt at making European traditional music accessible to the modern listener without recourse to pop or rock gimickry and, more importantly, without diminishing the original stuff in the slightest.
Believe me when I say that anyone, no matter what their tastes, will just love this record.
20.7.03
I would like to publicly thank Tony Engle and Dave Kuznetts of Topic for their help in this respect over the last four years, and hope that readers will realise that both Topic and fRoots magazine have been extremely generous towards MT since its move to the Internet, in offering assistance and facilities. I would like to make it clear that this has been done not out of personal friendship to me, but out of a genuine love of the sort of music we support at MT. I hope all readers will remember this and act accordingly the next time they hear someone disparaging either fRoots or Topic.
22.7.03
Back in 1985, Keith Summers produced his justly acclaimed 5-cassette series of American Old Time music, with sleevenotes by Tony Russell. Some years ago I suggested to Keith that I could now put them all onto CD but, since he still had stocks of the cassettes to sell, it was decided that it would be counterproductive at that time.
'Years rolled on since it happened' and we now find that he has run out of copies of some volumes - so the transfer process was started. Moreover, I have recently bought a piece of noise reduction software which seems to do a pretty good job - given that we can't afford Cedar - and so I have cleaned up the original cassette tracks whilst digitising them.
The results are now available from the MT Records site at £10.00 each or £40.00 for the complete set of five - click on the 'Ex Cassette CDs' catalogue button.
The series comprises:
And Keith asks me to remind readers that he still has lots of copies of Reg Hall's wonderful book on Scan Tester, I Never Played to Many Posh Dances, available for only £5.00 inc p&p.
1.8.03
They were first published in the days of pay-as-you-go ISPs, small hard drives, and before the appearance of the MT CD-ROMs of the entire magazine. Today, with most ISPs offering either free or unlimited access to the Net and so many people taking the Broadband option (several of which are quite a lot cheaper than BT's, by the way), most of the information in the FAQ has become redundant. Similarly, I can't imagine anyone wanting to go through the complicated procedures of setting up a mirror of the site 'by hand' on their hard drive when using one of the many freeware programs available will do it all for them. Or they can set Internet Explorer to 'Work Offline' - or they can get the whole magazine on a CD-ROM for just a tenner!
Accordingly I have now removed both the FAQ and the Mirror pages from the site.
18.8.03
Purchaces priced under £10 are charged 15% for 'Shipping'. The only items under £10 are the Snatch'd from Oblivion CDs at £5 each; these (ordered singly) now attract a shipping charge of only 75p rather than the £1 they did before. Any other order totalling (necessarily) £10 or more is charged at 10% for shipping. The overall effect of these changes mean that small orders cost a little less than they did before; medium sized orders cost either the same or a little more; while larger orders can cost quite a bit less. This more fairly reflects the actual system charges and additional shipping costs I incur for what are, in the main, orders from overseas.
I hope this meets with everyone's approval.
21.9.03
He replied: 'Dear Mr Stradling, I have just read your e-mail. I am at a loss to understand your attitude - it is not as though your website is overburdened with correspondence. You just seem to want to shut up people with whom you disagree. If you will not publish my letter, will you at least make public your refusal so that people will know how you deal with opposing points of view.' So I have.
My own response to his Open Letter, which I thought better to withhold until others better qualified than me had had their say, was as follows:
Firstly to declare my own support for Malcolm Taylor, Georgina Boyes and Vic Gammon, and my distaste for this far-too-frequently employed tactic for gaining attention and academic kudos. Secondly, to suggest that he has misunderstood the intention of Seeds of Love and the nature of the medium in which it appeared. Thirdly to suggest that, however good Bearman's research (and I understand that it is very good), it is, I believe, entirely peripheral to the central understanding of Sharp's work - as is, I believe, all this discussion of his life, politics, motivations, strengths and weaknesses. Particularly since most of them are mere reflections of the time and society from which he came, and should be fairly obvious to anyone examining his work with any seriousness.
Finally - and it's probably just this bloody Centenary - but I've been getting heartily fed up with all the stuff about Sharp recently. What irks me is that nobody appears to have any interest in the people who sang for these collectors or, more importantly in my view, what they sang - the styles, the subtleties, the manner of performance - and how these reflected the subcultures within which they operated.
Because what I want to know about is how, why, when, where and with whom to sing these songs. I want to know about ways of making the singing of these songs more effective, more communicative, more resonant - and the sort of situations we need to set up for these things to happen more easily ... today!
Frankly, the proportion of Sharp's singers who were working class, or whether the Morris Ring was Fascist, etc, is of very little interest to me at all.
22.9.03
Freddy McKay, Billy Harrison and Peta Webb cassettes now on CDIf you visit the MT Records website and click on the 'Ex-Cassette CDs' catalogue button, you will find them, priced £10.00 each, below the American Old Time releases, complete with links to track listings and reviews.
14.10.03
6.10.03
You'll find, for instance, that the Leader catalogue is now both complete and in the right order, and details of the numbering system are explained and, I hope, clarified. Thanks Alistair.
16.10.03
Keith Summers has also discovered an interesting picture of a Very Important Person - it's the top right-hand thumbnail on the Pictures page.
Enjoy!
7.11.03
Hoping to make your seasonal 'prezzie hunt' just that little bit less arduous this year, I am now providing - wait for it ... Yes, Record Tokens!!!!
Well, it may not be such a new idea - but it's new to MT! You can now send that friend/relative who always says "Oh yes, I like folk music,too" whenever you're unwise enough to mention your tastes in music - and who you know very well has nothing but that 1974 Spinners album in their collection - an MT Gift Vulture Voucher, and bring them some of the real thing this Christmas.
MT Gift Vouchers are available in £5, £10, £12 and £16 values, and in two flavours: turquoise (above), which cost their face value and include p&p for the UK; 
and pink, which cost £1.00 more and include p&p for the rest of the world. I should stress that these Gift Vouchers are only redeemable against Musical Traditions CD-Rs and/or CD-ROMs and Snatch'd From Oblivion CD-Rs. They do not exchange for Topic, UWVP, Kyloe, Italian, or any other labels whose CDs we offer in the MT Records catalogue.
They will be available by post from me at the address below, and each will be accompanied by a sheet listing the CDs with which they may be exchanged, and simple instructions for their use. The recipients of your generosity may, of course, send me an additional cheque, should they wish to buy a more expensive item, or more than one.
| Please use this special |  | to make life simpler. |
Seriously - you probably all have someone for whom you ought to buy a present, and who might well like one of the MT CDs, but you're not sure which. Make their day with an MT Gift Token - and don't forget to get a pink one if they live outside the UK.
As a further aid to would-be purchasers, the whole MT Records catalogue is now available in both PDF and HTML formats on a CD, so you can print it off for friends/relatives without Net access. It's free, too!
16.11.03
Having found it not to be too arduous a process, I have decided that I'll be doing the same for all the MT CDs as the current shelf stocks run out and I need to make more.
Currently both the Bob Hart and George Dunn CDs are available in DVD cases, and others will follow as time and sales permit.
1.12.03
This year has been a little calmer than the previous two. Although fourteen CDs have emerged from my little wind-powered forge in 2003 (two doubles, nine singles and a CD-ROM), eight of those singles have been CD re-issues of the old MT Cassettes, and so have not required anything like so much work as new productions do.
It has also been a great relief to find that our web host (1&1 Internet) have not sprung any unexpected horrors on me (as the previous lot did), and so the magazine has been able to develop gently and steadily - and seemingly without too many glitches.
It's always tempting to use this message to tell you about new things in the pipeline but, since these are almost always dependent upon the co-operation of others, I've become a little wary of saying too much in advance in case that co-operation fails to materialise. However, I think I can say that a double CD of Irish songs from Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie's collection looks pretty certain - this is being produced in collaboration with Dublin's Goilín Club. We are also hoping to have a couple of releases from Keith Summers' extensive collection out in the not too distant future. Watch this space!
Looking back over the year's News items, it's profoundly depressing to see how many great traditional performers have died recently - Fred Jordan, Jasper Smith, Will Atkinson, Bob Hobkirk, Paddy Tunney, Snake Chapman, Donald MacLellan ... to name just a few. And we shouldn't forget important collectors like Alan Lomax and Roberto Leydi. All of which sad news just serves to remind me that, aside from the CD releases mentioned above, I don't have a single new CD project featuring a traditional performer in the production pipeline at the moment; ie. nothing from a collector with whom we have not already collaborated.
So, may I suggest a really worthwhile New Year's resolution for 2004? If you know anyone who might have old tapes sitting in their attic, see if you can persuade them to contact me with a view to getting them out on CD, so the rest of the world can share them.
It only remains for me to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and an even better New Year than the last, and to assure you that I will do my best to live up to, or exceed, the standards we've set in the past.
24.12.03
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 266Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
1.1.04
, or we didn't want enough money! So - we were reduced to asking everybody we could think of with a serious interest in traditional music whether they could come up with a donation, however small, to help with the good work. Astonishingly, almost £1000 materialised within a month from the 'Friends of MT', as they became known.
When I started producing CDs of traditional music in 1998, I decided that it was pay-back time and offered substantially reduced prices to Friends wanting to buy the records. Almost inevitably, this produced problems. Some of them didn't ask for the special prices and, if I didn't remember that they were Friends, they got charged the full amount. Then I had to contact them again to explain and say that they now had a credit against their next purchase - and if they didn't buy something else in the near future, it probably got forgotten again by one or the other of us.
But by the year 2000 it became apparent that I was making far more CDs than I'd expected to be, and that the profits from these made any further contributions from Friends unnecessary. I duly pointed this out in an Editorial and donations became less frequent. The last one was made almost a year ago. It is also impossible to make provision for special prices for bona fide Friends on the MT Records website.
So may I now suggest that the Friends of MT scheme has ended as of 31st December 2003? For anyone wishing to contribute towards the future of the magazine and its record company (and who doesn't feel able to do so by writing reviews, articles, etc) may I suggest that you buy a few more MT Records CDs. That way, we all benefit.
14.1.04
Accordingly, I have now added an alphabetical version of the Articles Index, accessible from the Home Page, in the hope that this will make life easier for everyone.
3.2.04
11.3.04
So it came a something of a shock when he sent me two C60 cassettes of the stuff as an indicator of how he wanted his new double CD project to end up.
Even more of a shock was the sheer quality of what was on offer! Anyone who was impressed by Seán Corcoran's Here is a Health cassette will be sure to enjoy what Keith has put together from his six years of intermittent working in the north of Ireland: 1977-1983 recordings of 14 singers from Fermanagh and surrounding areas. It includes the likes of Maggie Murphy, Phil McDermott, James and Paddy Halpin, Mary Ann Connolly, Big John Maguire ... and is titled The Hardy Sons of Dan - football, hunting and other traditional songs from around Lough Erne's shore
I would hasten to assure more sensitive souls that it is the 'other traditional songs' which comprise the great majority of the 37 tracks, and that there are only two football and four hunting songs included - but all are excellent examples of the genre. (The 'Hardy Sons' were the ‘Drumlane Sons of O'Connell’ a Gaelic Football team, formed in 1886, and named after Daniel O’Connell [1775-1847] the Kerry-born politician known as ‘The Liberator’ who founded the Catholic Association in 1823, aiming to secure Catholic Emancipation in Ireland.)
As usual, it comes in a double DVD case with a very informative 40-page integral booklet including lots of colour photos and full song texts. The CDs can be bought from me at the address at the foot of the page, or by credit/debit card from the MT Records website, priced £16.00 inc UK p&p. The booklet contents are also available online here as an article.
12.3.04
Actually, it's a good question! The answer is really to do with the fact that there are so many pages - and most of them, being a bit larger that the web average, contain quite a number of things which ought to be found in a Search. Add to this the fact that I like to be able to make things work the way I want them to - which has meant that I've not considered any of the 'off-site' search engines available (many of which seem very slow).
But technology does advance, and a recently introduced product, called AeroTags Search Expert, appears to do the job I require. It indexes only the parts of the MT site I want it to, and stores it, together with the interrogatory engine, as a couple of Java files on the site itself. This enables me to adjust the way it behaves exactly to my requirements - making the files you're most likely to want appear at the top of the search results, just as Google does. It also seems to be pretty quick about it.
So - you'll now find a 'Search the Entire Site' button at the head of the Home page ... See Part 2 (above) for the current situation.
1.4.04
So you'll now find four buttons: 'Search the Magazine'; 'Search the Articles'; 'Search the Reviews'; and 'Search the Discographies', at the head of the Home page. Click any one of them and you get a blank page with a Search box at the top (plus Help and Back links). Type a word or phrase (see * below) in the box and click the 'Search' button, or hit the Enter key, and you'll quickly be presented with a list of the first 10 matches found. The output is very like the Google one: it tells you the number of matches on this page; the total number of matches; how many pages of 10 there are; and details of each match. These include a Title of the page, the 'hits' this item scores, a Description, and the URL of the page concerned. Both the first and last of these are hyperlinks to the page found.
Regarding the 'hits' mentioned above: if your search word(s) occurs in the 'title', it scores 4; in the 'description', 2; elsewhere in the text ('other') just 1. The results are displayed in descending order of hits - so the most likely suspects come at the top of the list.
* Regarding your 'search phrase'. Firstly, it is case insensitive. Secondly, you can imagine that the ballad 'The Two Brothers' would throw up thousands of instances of these three words; only a few of which would be relevant to you. In this case - where you're looking for a whole phrase rather than several individual words - put a + sign before the first, thus: '+two brothers'. Then you should find what you're looking for quite easily.
Like most Search Engines, the links take you to the page within which your search word/phrase has been found; it is then up to you to find it. Since many of our pages are pretty big, the best course of action is to then use the browser's Find facility - Ctrl+F or Edit/Find (on this page) will do it for you.
I have not indexed the contents of stand-alone single pages or the more obvious Index Pages (like Links, Sessions, Small Ads, etc) because you can see what they contain immediately.
As usual - if you have any problems, please let me know about them.
20.4.04
On the MT Records pages, I've added pop-ups to display the track listings of all our CDs and a drop-down calalogue list, while in the magazine itself there are now a few headers with drop-down menus replacing the old lists of content items which used to disappear from view as soon as you scrolled down the page. The Reviews Index page is a little different, too - the Latest Batch is automatically displayed, and the various geographical Index pages are available from the drop-down menu.
I hope these additions will enhance the ease of use of the website.
14.5.04
It is described by its authors as 'an annotated bibliography of the folk songs of the English-speaking world' and uses the pleasingly broad definition of a ballad - songs in which things happen! Unlike Roud, it is an Internet resource, and so it is free to access, and its on-line search implementation at: www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html is fast and easy to use.
A valid criticism of almost any reference work is 'incompleteness' and - like Roud - it does have holes in its data set. However, being created on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each have different areas of incompleteness, and so each is a useful adjunct to the other. They also treat their base data in different ways: with Roud you're given numerous instances of the occurrence of a single song and have to make your own interpretation of the data; with Waltz, you get a digest of the data in a single coherent statement about the particular song. Depending on the song and how much is known about it, some items can be quite lengthy - and extremely interesting, containing as they do comments by members of the team regarding the provenence and history of the songs.
As well as the on-line search, users can download the complete Index as an HTML file. This is merely all the entries in an alphabetically sorted list, so it is pretty big - over 8MB! On it's own, it isn't particularly useful unless you're prepared to do a great deal of scrolling up and down to find what you want. Accordingly your editor - ever eager to be of use to humankind - has devised a little support application (also in HTML) which minimises the task and so makes the Index file rather simpler to use.
Simply put, it displays a horizontally split screen (the split-point is dragable) with all the song titles in the top half of the screen, and the Index in the bottom. All the titles are hyperlinked to the appropriate point in the Index. Since the titles file is much smaller (only 10,437 lines rather than the 105,035 lines in the Index), it's far easier and quicker to find the title of the song you need. In addition, there's a set of A to Z buttons at the top of the upper window. Click on the, say, D button and the Titles file jumps to the start of the titles beginning with D, thus minimising the scrolling you need to do. Then you merely click on the title in the top window and the Index immediately jumps to the appropriate entry in the bottom one.
If you'd like to try the accessory (it's only 4 files - in a 212Kb ZIP file) it's downloadable here - together with instructions as to how to set it up in the Read-Me file.
14.5.04
These are available from me at the very reasonable price of £5.00 inc p&p, or from the MT Records website.
16.5.04
So the Songbook now exists, and contains some six songs - most of them ballads or ballad-type narrative songs. You can have a look at what we've done here (the URL is: www.mustrad.org.uk/songbook/s_index.htm), and you'll also find a link on our Home Page - down at the bottom, below the first green line.
All the contributors (both putative and actual) have expressed great enthusiasm for the project so - if you're a singer - you might find it interesting too.
23.6.04
Time for a very humble apology, particularly to Mike Yates. Due to some intensive work on the next MT CD project (to be revealed quite soon) back in mid-September, I completely forgot to announce the existence of the last one, which I'd only just finished. I was wondering why it had sold so few copies!
In the process of publishing its review, by Keith Chandler, yesterday, I realised, with some horror, my mistake. So - better late than never ...
MT is pleased to announce it's latest CD publication - The Birds Upon the Tree ... and other traditional songs and tunes (MTCD333). It comprises a further selection from the Mike Yates Collection, featuring Fred Jordan, Packie Manus Byrne, George Fradley, Charlie Bridger, Scan Tester & Rabbidy Baxter, Archer Goode, George Spicer, Bob Blake, Debbie & Pennie Davis, Freda Palmer, Harry Cockerill, Ray Driscoll, Jacquey Gabriel, Alice Francombe, Ivor Hill & family. 22 of the 27 tracks are previously unreleased.
As usual, it comes in a DVD case with a 24 page integral booklet, and costs just £12.00 The complete booklet notes are published as an article in these pages.
11.11.04
Eagle-eyed readers who were wondering about the gap between MTCD329-0 and MTCD333 need puzzle no more. We are proud to announce that our latest CD - Around the Hills of Clare (MTCD331-2) is now available.
This is a compilation of songs and a recitation from Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie's 1973-2004 recordings of 16 singers from west Co Clare, and includes Tom Lenihan, Nora Cleary, Straighty Flanagan, Ollie Conway, Martin Howley ...
Not only is this our second collaboration with Jim and Pat (From Puck to Appleby was the first), but also our second collaboration with another record company (the first being with both Topic and Cló Iar Chonnachta, over the Joe Heaney double CD, back in 2000). In this case we are working with Dublin's An Góilín traditional singers' club, so the CDs also bear the number Góilín 005-6. We did the booklet and packaging, they did the CDs and production/printing. They are selling them in Ireland, whilst we deal with the 'rest of the world' from the MT Records website.
The CDs come in the familliar DVD case together with a 44-page integral booklet. You get 2 CDs, with 47 tracks in total, and 156 minutes of singing - and a recitation! - all for just £16.00 inc. p&p.
The complete booklet notes will be available here as an Article in the near future.
1.12.04
During the course of the removal from Essex to Merseyside, the removals firm which Peta and Fred employed managed to 'lose' two crates of blues LPs ... and then to deny that they had done so. Fortunately, Keith had been meticulous in his collecting, and had all the records' details entered in a database, so it was very easy to prove that some records (some 400 records actually) had not been delivered to Fred's house, and to give the precise details of what they were. Since they were blues records, they have a real and readily disposable value, so it appears very likely that they have been stolen rather than simply lost in transit. Unfortunately, since the removals company will not admit to a theft - or even a loss - Fred cannot go to the Police about the case without some proof of criminality.
This is where you come in; those readers who collect blues and similar records, or who frequent second-hand record stores, websites, fairs, etc, are asked to read Fred's appeal in Recent Letters, to print out the list of 'missing' LPs accessible by a link there, and keep an eye open for any of them in your travels. If you do come across anything suspicious-looking, please contact Fred with the details he asks for. If nothing else, it may enable him to bring the thieves to justice, and to sue the removals firm - who are being completely obstructive of this matter.
Please do all you can to help bring this sickening affair to a rather happier conclusion than is presently the case.
6.12.04
2004 has been a fairly quiet year, all told. After some pretty hectic activity in the first three months to get Keith Summers' Hardy Sons of Dan published whilst he was still here to see it (thanks particularly to Geoff Wallis, Finbar Boyle and Peta Webb for all their hard work), things seemed to get very quiet after his death at the end of March.
I then had another busy patch in late-summer, working on the Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie compilation, Around the Hills of Clare. We were trying to meet a deadline for a launch at the Milltown Malbay singing weekend in October ... I managed my bit but, sadly, technical problems in Ireland resulted in it being a week or so late. This was followed, almost immediately by the Mike Yates compilation, The Birds Upon the Tree. I've been getting my breath back since then ... and am only working on three projects simultaneously at the moment!
On the Magazine front, things have also been fairly quiet. There have been about 70 Reviews and 16 Articles added to the site this year - around two thirds of the normal number. This has been partly due to the paucity of releases of traditional material this year, and partly because the pool of writers I'm able to call upon has been slowly but surely dwindling. Were it not for Roly Brown's sterling efforts on 19th century ballads, things would have been in a sorry state. Fewer people have volunteered new Articles or Enthusiasms ... more people have failed to review the CDs and books I've sent them. I'm not sure of the reasons for this trend, but it's certainly an alarming one.
Looking to the future, it's always tempting to use this message to tell you about new things in the pipeline but, since these are almost always dependent upon the co-operation of others, I've become a little wary of saying too much in advance in case that co-operation fails to materialise. And perhaps because most of the CDs where ready co-operation has been available have already entered MT Records' catalogue, it seems far more difficult to get projects finished these days without months (years, even!) of struggling against logistical and institutional difficulties.
However, I think I can say that a double CD of Aberdeenshire singer Lizzie Higgins looks pretty certain - as do the other two I'm presently working on. I mentioned in last year's Christmas Editorial that we were hoping to have some releases from Keith Summers' extensive collection out in the not too distant future. The Hardy Sons of Dan was the first, and my stated intention remains true but, obviously, Keith's untimely death has meant that his records are now much more difficult, and slower, to produce, particularly in terms of the booklets' contents. Two new releases in Keith's Old-Time Country Music '100' series are currently being worked on by Tony Russell, and I hope they will materialise during the first half of 2005. CDs memorialising Keith's Suffolk collecting will definitely appear, but I can't even begin to envisage a time-scale for their release at this stage.
It only remains for me to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a better New Year than last, and to assure you that I will do all I can to live up to, or exceed, the standards we've set in the past.
24.12.04
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 215Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
2.1.05
That original sampler featured one track from each of the 22 records then published, plus a few extra tracks to fill up an 80 minute CD. Since then another four doubles and a single have been added to the catalogue, so this new 2005 version includes examples from the complete list.
My hope is that this full and inexpensive CD may find a wider audience than any of the individual publications have, and may open a few eyes to the riches to be found within MT's catalogue.
Test-drive 'some of the best collections available of traditional music' available from the MT Records wesite ... one hour and twenty minutes worth for only a tenner!
10.3.05
Accordingly, I have now set out the page as a chronological list, with the most recent new or changed file at the top, and with each item having its date beside it. You can see what I mean here. New items will now always appear at the top of the list, and those older than a couple of months will drop off the bottom as time passes. In addition, I have decided to reinstate the two Discographies and Links page in this listing when appropriate.
I hope that readers will find this arrangement far more helpful in keeping up to date with the site as a whole - even if it does now involve more work for me!
11.3.05
It's a long story, but basically it was because: firstly, several articles have been removed from the site when they have subsequently been commercially published; and secondly, because all the 'old' articles from MT's 'paper' days have been added, two or three at a time, during the period 2000 to 2003. These were all scanned from the originals and converted into HTML back in 2000 and given appropriate numbers then, but these did not necessarily fit into their chronological position in the Articles Index page. Nor did simply counting the number of files in the Articles directory tell me exactly how many there were, since several of the bigger articles have three or four files each, and many have more than one.
So I've now renumbered all the articles to match the order in which they have been added to the website, and am able to tell you that there are exactly 154 of them. Do I hear mutterings of "Get a life!"?
14.3.05
But I heard some news today that got me wondering. Readers may have noticed that my recent review of The Bismarck's new CD included the line '... when I'd again taken up the membership I resigned some 40 years ago!' The membership concerned was that of the EFDSS.
And now sources close the Society inform me that its National Committee will be looking into the future of the FMJ. It seems that at a recent meeting they have agreed to let the next issue be printed, but the following issues look as though they could be on-line only. This, only a couple of days after receiving the minutes of the AGM, wherein I was informed that subscription rates are set to rise next year.
Knowing the general mind-set of MT readers, I guess that most will feel that their annual copy of the FMJ is pretty central to their investment in the EFDSS, and that its removal to an on-line-only availability might well make then think twice about renewing their subscriptions thereafter. They would certainly feel that this change of medium ought to be reflected in a commensurate fall in the subscription rate. And what about those Society members who don't have, or want, a computer and Internet access? Rather obviously, as the editor of an on-line-only magazine, I have no objection in principal to the FMJ's being published in this way but, clearly, since the costs of so doing will be almost nil, I would expect the EFDSS subscription rate to fall accordingly. Moreover, I know very well that many - even most - people do like to have a physical book to refer to and keep on their shelves along with all their other reference materials.
I hear that the FMJ's Editorial Board are 'up in arms about it' and that mass resignations may be in the offing - and I can't say I'm surprised. I wonder what other people think?
For my part, I shall be writing to Jerry West, Chairman of the NC, (at: jerry.west@ntlworld.com), raising my concerns. Maybe some of you will wish to do the same?
16.3.05
Exactly why I cannot fathom, but no one I have asked seems to have any. All the obvious sources who don't want commercial fees have been approached, but only Derek Schofield has been able to provide me with any at all. I had been pinning my hopes on Lizzie's husband, but his house suffered a break-in last year and, inexplicably, his photos were amongst the things stolen.
So, the time has come for a more general cry for help; if anyone out there has any photos of Lizzie - particularly from her earlier years, pre-1975 - please let me know. I can now scan both negative strips and slides, as well as actual photos, and will guarantee to post them back to you within 24 hours of their receipt.
Alternately - if you don't want to trust them to the Post, and have the ability to scan them yourselves - please do so at 300dpi, in colour (even if they're monochrome), and save them as TIFF files. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.
4.4.05
This is particularly true in the case of MT, since it is really the only one of its kind, and people are unsure of how 'heavy' or invasive my editing is. Generally, it's as light as possible; if I foresee problems I discuss them with the writer - as I did with Geoff Wallis in this instance - but I leave the final decision with him/her since, as MT's Home Page states 'The views expressed in all articles, reviews, etc, are those of the author of each piece, not of the Editor.'
When I'm sent a CD for review I have to make a decision about who to send it to. I send it to the person I believe is best capable of writing that particular review. My first choice in the case of Around the Hills of Clare would have been Tom Munnelly - but he was ruled out by his involvement in the project anyway. My second choice was Geoff Wallis, whose knowledge of Irish music is first-rate.
I had no idea that Geoff would find fault with the CD's booklet, since my knowledge of Irish music is pretty basic. Nor was I able to suggest the correction of any of the errors he mentioned, when I was designing the booklet, for that very same reason.
Jim and Pat say that Geoff has his facts wrong. If so, I'm sure plenty of people will be writing to correct him ... and I will publish their letters. Debate is always beneficial.
Jim and Pat have told me that all the other reviews Around the Hills of Clare has received have been glowing - so, in a way, I'm glad of my ignorance, since I might have been tempted to send it to someone less knowledgeable in order to secure another glowing review - which would have been a disservice to us all! If there are errors, then it's the job of a competent reviewer to point them out ... no one is going to learn anything by ignoring them.
As an editor, I can merely select what I consider to be a suitable reviewer ... and then print what s/he writes, without censorship - even when it's uncomfortable to do so!
And it was particularly uncomfortable to print Jim and Pat's letter exactly as written - as they asked me to do (though I did add their names to the end of it, since they had omitted to do so) - with what amounts to a downright libel regarding my own involvement in the project ... but I did, without the censorship they suggest I should have applied to Geoff's review.
They say 'Originally we undertook to put together 'Around The Hills of Clare' on behalf of The Goilín Singers Club in Dublin. At the request of the editor, and with some difficulty, we brought Musical Traditions on board.' This is quite untrue.
Mike Yates, in his review of our previous collaboration, From Puck to Appleby, wrote 'Jim and Pat now have a large collection of recordings. From Puck to Appleby is only the tip of the iceberg. Is there any chance that there will be follow-up CDs? I certainly hope so.' I agreed with his comment, and so subsequently asked Jim and Pat whether there was anything else we could work on together. They told me of the West Clare project they were just starting with the Góilín Club. Jim also asked me for details of how to set out the DTP format for the DVD case booklets I use, and I sent him a very comprehensive guide to doing that. Later I was asked if I would undertake to do the whole presentation side of the project in collaboration with them and the Góilín Club. Discussions ensued with the Góilín's Jerry O'Reilly, and it was agreed that I would produce the booklet, case cover and record labels in PDF format for their printer, whilst they would handle the CD side of things and the eventual manufacture of the finished product. It would be published as a joint Góilín and MT publication, and I would receive some free copies to sell. To reiterate - the Góilín asked me to help with the project!
Their letter goes on 'To say that we now feel that our trust has been betrayed would be an understatement!' I have a coinsiderable number of e-mails both from Jim and Pat and Jerry, praising my layout, thanking me for my work, and expressing their gratitude for getting it done so quickly. No indication of any 'betrayal of trust' to be found. Indeed, I don't quite understand of what this 'trust' might consist. I was asked to design the project's paperwork; I did so - to the evident satisfaction of all concerned. I was never asked to ensure that the finished product should receive a glowing review in MT - nor could I have possibly agreed to do so!
Naturally, I would have prefered that the review had praised it unreservedly (it is, after all, a very good pair of CDs of some lovely singing) - but things don't always work out as we'd hope in this life.
25.4.05
Accordingly, all the Topic items will be removed from the MT Records website as of today. Readers can buy them very easily (and sometimes more cheaply) from: www.topicrecords.co.uk/acatalog/index2.html
I would like to thank Tony and Dave at Topic for their help and collaboration over the years - and to let readers know that three new CDs in their World Series have just been released.
5.5.05
However, as Editor, I feel it is legitimate for me to make my own point of view clear - and without any bitchery, I hope!
I consider Geoff Wallis's review to have been that of someone thoroughly disappointed by aspects of a production he had otherwise greatly enjoyed. I don't see anything dishonest or partial in it, and I believe its criticisms were the result of a desire to put the record straight regarding the many inaccuracies and conjectures included in the booklet.
Further, almost all paper and internet 'folk music' magazines seem to eschew critical comment these days; whether this is through concern for their advertising revenues or through simple ignorance, I do not know. One result of this is that a great deal of nonsense is published in CD booklets, and passed off as 'fact' to the general public. This was particularly the case with a couple of recent 'historical' recordings we have had to criticise, where the often ill-informed and sometimes, frankly, racist booklet notes were described as 'a great history lesson' in one magazine!
I also consider that Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie are far too ready to attribute personal motives to criticism. They cite a difference of opinion in the past between Geoff and Jim as the motivation for the negativity of the review. This competely ignores the very positive review Geoff gave to their previous From Puck to Appleby CD in fRoots.
The subsequent correspondence published in the Letters page has not, in my opinion, refuted any of Geoff's claims regarding the booklet's contents to any significant degree - which makes me assume that they were largely correct. If so, I see no reason why Geoff should be pilloried for revealing other peoples' inadequacies - indeed, this is one of his jobs as an MT reviewer (see our Policy page).
Finally, I'd like to do what, perhaps, others should have done - and say "Thank you" to Geoff Wallis for making me a little more knowledgeable than I was before about Irish music.
8.5.05
I have around a dozen each of Musical Traditions Nos 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, and Keskidee Nos 1, 2 and 3. The magazines are priced at just £2.00 each, and the Scan Tester book at £5.00 - and when these are gone, that will be it! Collectors items at knock-down prices!
Since all these items belong to the estate of the late Keith Summers, not MT Records, all the proceeds of their sale will go to the Keith Summers Memorial Fund - which promotes the Festival and other good causes. Thus I have to ensure that proceeds are kept separate - which is so much easier to do when I have electronic records of the sales. Accordingly, these magazines and book will be available only via the website by credit/debit card purchase.
23.5.05
The most recent rate increase (April 2005) didn't initially seem much worse that previous ones, but it has become apparent that, at the heavier end of the scales, and particularly for overseas deliveries, the increases are really quite substantial. I have just returned from Stroud Post Office having sent a 'Small Packet' to the USA, weighing only 1.4Kg and containing magazines and CDs worth just £28.60 ... yet I was required to pay £13.70 in postal charges! This cannot go on!
So it's been necessary to increase the 'Shipping' rates on the MT Records website by a further 5%. Sorry about this, but there seems no real alternative.
Be aware - for purchasers living in the UK, paying by cheque and using the printable Order Form is now a substantially cheaper option.
10.6.05
We tend to assume that the Internet means instant communication - but then forget than there is so much information there that it's the simplest thing in the world to miss it completely ... for years! This was the case here; Fred McCormick's article on Cantometrics appeared as Article No.002 in the new on-line version of MT back in 1997 - yet Victor only saw it for the first time last month!
He was impressed, saying 'It's an excellent piece of work and deserves a thoughtful, if belated, response'. So I'm very pleased to tell you that his commentary on Fred's original article now appears as a new article in these pages.
Victor went on to say 'I've recently become interested in Cantometrics again thanks to certain new developments in genetic anthropology. Many things which had puzzled Lomax and myself about the distribution of musical styles worldwide are now making sense, thanks to the ability of these researchers to reconstruct some of mankind's earliest migrations from strands of DNA' and pointed me to a web page where he outlines some of the ideas he's been developing.
Whilst I'm no academic myself, I have to tell you that (assuming I've understood the somewhat technical nature of his arguments correctly) there are some truly earth-shattering ideas emerging from the work he's been doing with various genetic anthropology researchers. And I promise you that 'earth-shattering' is not an exaggeration! What's more, he has agreed to try to put together a user-friendly, non-academic version of it in the not-too-distant future, for publication in MT. Watch this space!
24.7.05
Remember, these magazines are available only via the website by credit/debit card purchase.
9.7.05
25.7.05
New Volume 8 Magazine CD-ROM now availableFor anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 242Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
8.1.07
We are now proud to announce what may be seen as its companion volume, a 4-CD set of songs, ballads and tunes from Kentucky and nearby areas, specially compiled by Mark Wilson, editor of the Rounder North American Traditions series.
Volume 1: Come All You Men and Maidens
Volume 2: Cruel Willie
MTCD341-2 + 48 page integral booklet in DVD case, 2CDs, 62 tracks, 140 mins. £16.00
Volume 3: I'll Have a New Life
Volume 4: All I've Got is Done Gone
MTCD343-4 + 44 page integral booklet in DVD case, 2CDs, 62 tracks, 141 mins. £16.00
MTCD341-4 Complete 4-CD Set. £30.00
A 4-CD set, available in 2 parts, of songs, ballads and tunes from Kentucky and nearby areas, from the collections of Mark Wilson, Gus Meade and John Harrod.
Featuring: J P and Annadeene Fraley, Buell Kazee, Sarah Gunning, Jim Garland, Blanche Coldiron, The Dixon Sisters, Asa Martin, Nimrod Workman, Roscoe Holcomb, Snake Chapman, Mary Lozier and many others.
Both double CDs come with huge booklets; introductory articles, notes on the performers and the songs and tunes, complete text transcriptions, and lots of photos. They are available from the MT Records website - www.mtrecords.co.uk - along with the entire catalogue, for credit/debit card purchase, at £16 for each double CD, or £30 for the complete set.
7.2.07
Whilst I have more than sufficient recordings, and most of the booklet notes are done, the only photographs I have are the two of Danny Brazil as found on the Enthusiasm No 14 page.
The two members of the present generation of the family with whom I am in contact are both still parked (after several years), on the side of the road beside land they already own but are not allowed to move their vans on to. Most of their non-essential belongings are in storage ... including any family photos.
So this is a general plea for help - if anyone has any photos of Danny, Harry, or Lemmie Brazil (or of anyone else in that generation) please get in touch with me as soon as possible.
27.3.07
This is issued as a complement to the Veteran Keith Summers VT154CD ... 2 CDs, 75 tracks, 160 mins + 52 page integral booklet telling the story of Keith's Suffolk Collecting in his own inimitable words. Paul Marsh interviewed Keith a few months before his death, and taped his descriptions of his first going to Suffolk and encountering all those wonderful performers for the first time. The verbatim transcription of these tapes comprises the major part of the 52-page booklet (our biggest yet), and it's just like having Keith sitting next to you in the pub, sharing his excitement, enthusiasm for, and eventually love of, these remarkable characters. The booklet really is as good as the records!
Featuring: Jumbo Brightwell, Alec Bloomfield, Bob Scarce, Cyril Poacher, Jimmy Knights, Oscar Woods, Percy Ling, Billy List, Charlie Whiting, Font Watling, Fred Whiting, Eley Went, Fred List, Fred Pearce, Geoff Ling, George Ling, George Woolnough, Harkie Nesling, Reg Reeder and many others.
14.5.07
14.6.07
Apart from the fabulous rates of pay, one of the nicest things about being the top executive of MT Records is that everyone is enthusiastic and grateful for the CDs we publish. People really do email and phone to thank me for the records and the quick service - and this makes all the hard work seem worthwhile. It also lulls one into a false sense of security, and the assumption that everyone is on your side. Sadly, this is not always the case. A couple of recent incidents have rather undermined my feeling that, while the rest of the world may be going to Hell in a handcart, at least the tiny subculture of traditional music enthusiasts are basically a decent, caring and trustworthy lot.
Needless to say, I initiated the eBay complaints procedure and wrote to Mr Tucker - but have had no reply from either. In truth, I don't mind too much; all the singers are dead, so no one's losing out on sales royalties, and I would assume that, at least, some of the songs will be getting back into the communities from which they came.
The slightly amusing irony is that this stupid twat will have the work of copying the CD-Rs and cutting up the cover papers and assembling the final product, plus the cost of the blank CD-Rs, the DVD cases, paper and printing - for a return of £4.99. Had he asked me for half a dozen at trade price, he could have legitimately sold them, complete with the booklets, with no work at all involved, and made more profit that he does with his illegal scam!
If any of you know this Les Tucker, of Davington Road, Dagenham, Essex, email: les28173@yahoo.co.uk you might like to tell him what you think of him.
Two days later, having received the CDs, he cancelled the eCheque! I wrote to him, pointing out that this was theft and asking for either an explanation, the money, or the CDs returned. He has not replied.
I feel that this is the far more serious of the two incidents - plain straightforward theft; a con based on my willingness to trust an existing customer. This person has gained 30 quid ... all the rest of us have lost; clearly I won't be able to offer to trust the rest of my customers again. I think that this is truly depressing ... I imagine that you will, too.
10.6.07
New 3-CD set from The Brazil FamilyA selection of songs, ballads and tunes from the Brazil Family of Gloucester. A unique compilation of the repertoire of a single English Gypsy family, from the collections of Peter Shepheard, Gwilym Davies, Mike Yates, Hamish Henderson and Peter Kennedy. Featuring: Danny Brazil, Harry Brazil, Lemmie Brazil, Hyram Brazil, Tom Brazil, Weenie Brazil, Alice Webb and her son, Angela Brazil, Doris Davies, Joan Taylor, Debbie and Pennie Davies.
In his review, Keith Chandler writes: This really is the most important commercial release showcasing the English tradition to have appeared in many a long day. I cannot stress it enough : absolutely essential.
Pre-production costs have been generously funded by the Greenwich Traditional Musicians Cooperative. As usual, credit/debit card purchasing, full booklet notes, tracklists and review are available on the Records page.
14.7.07
But today's wonderful news is of a completely different order of magnitude - six of the manuscript collections housed in the VWML are to be digitised and made available on the Net (see Latest News for more details). This is really what the EFDSS and its splendid library should be about in the 21st century. My - and, I hope, our - heartiest congratulations to Malcolm Taylor, Pat Kingswell and Judith Hanson, the team who put this grant application together and saw it through to the end after countless hours of painstaking work.
This is 2007's best news so far ... and there's more to come; watch this space!
2.10.07
Topic Records has acquired the rights to the Peter Kennedy recordings and will be working towards releases of as much of the material as is commercially viable. This will obviously take some time but they hope that these releases will happen early in 2009 - Topic's 70th year.My understanding is that Topic will be producing a Voice of the People, part 2 set, drawn mainly from the Peter Kennedy recordings. And if that's not exciting enough for you, I can also reveal that our own Musical Traditions Records will have access to the material not used for the new VotP set to produce a series of new CDs of the same type and to the same standards as our existing CD releases of traditional material.
After all the doom-laden predictions about the eventual fate of the Kennedy Collection, I think that this outcome has to be seen as the impossible dream come true. Profound thanks and congratulations to all concerned.
30.10.07
Elaine's subsequent assumption about Kennedy not needing to be concerned about the cost of the tape was thus incorrect, and also flies in the face of Kennedy's well-known practice of rarely recording any tune more than once-through from his traditional musician sources.
Another point which we didn't labour in the booklet concerns the keys in which Stephen Baldwin played, and the tempo of his playing. We did make the point that Baldwin, like so many other of the older country musicians, tuned his fiddle one tone flat ... yet the Kennedy recordings are all in the 'standard' keys and played approximately 1/8th faster than the comparable Wortley ones. Now, a tune actually played in F, speeded up by 1/8th, comes out in G! Without overtly stating that Kennedy had speeded up his recordings (which we could not prove), we hoped that readers would be able to draw their own conclusions from this information. If this were true (as I'm certain it is), it might well have a bearing on Elaine's comment that 'he sounds more relaxed in the earlier session.' As any recording engineer will tell you, the easiest way of making a slightly shaky performance sound better is to speed it up a bit!
Kennedy was well-know for his attitude of knowing far better than his sources with regard to what they 'should' have sung or played - he frequently added lines to 3-line verses, removed them from 5-line ones, and put melodies into the 'correct' keys. I am certain that the speed and keys of his Baldwin recordings are just another example of this dubious activity.
4.12.07
We started with the double, Keith Summers in Suffolk - a story to tell; Paul Marsh's superb selection from the Summers Suffolk collection and his wonderful transcription of Keith's conversations telling the first-person story of how it all happened.
Mark Wilson's 4-CD set of Kentucky music and song is, in some ways, a very similar piece of work (although Mark is, happily, still with us to tell the story). Meeting's a Pleasure can also be seen as a companion-piece to Mike Yates' 4-CD set, Far in the Mountains, of Appalachian material we published back in 2002 - two splendid sets of comparatively modern American recordings which clearly show the similarities and differences in folk music and song on either side of the Atlantic.
Most recently, we produced our first 3-CD set ... a project I had been working on for a number of years. The Brazil Family - Down by the Old Riverside is just the sort of thing which MT Records was set up to publish - important music which is unlikely ever to see a commercial release. It was most gratifying to find every one of the reviews were extremely positive ... Keith Chandler wrote: this really is the most important release showcasing the English tradition to have appeared in many a long day. I cannot stress it enough : absolutely essential.
So, nine CDs in a year! - our largest output so far, I think. Nor did we do badly on the magazine front. 2007 has seen the publication of 19 new Articles, 5 Enthusiasms, 3 pages of Letters, 2 pages of News and 31 Reviews. Not a bad year's work.
It's also rather pleasing to note that our efforts are reaching quite a number of people - the website had almost one and a half million visitors in 2007!
Once again, I'll remind you that Musical Traditions Internet Magazine exists to share our love of traditional music and musicians; if you have something to say about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world, please send it to me - the contact information is at the foot of the page.
So - in hopes of an equally active 2008, may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.
23.12.07
New Volume 9 Magazine CD-ROM now availableAnd as you will see from the accompanying cover shot, this is the Quarter Centenary edition ... yes, it has been 25 years since Keith Summers first published a paper magazine called Musical Traditions, back in 1983. Things have grown a little in that quarter of a century: MT now contains 211 Articles; 812 Reviews; 60 Enthusiasms; 21 pages of Letters; 39 pages of News; 2,795 graphics images; 1,366 sound files; plus loads of other things like Links; Obituaries; Mondegreens; Sessions; Picture pages, Discographies ... the list goes on and on.
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 261Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
1.1.08
I haven't got your new CD, but I have an old tape of Baldwin recordings (labelled Upton Bishop 1952), and they are one tune once through, generally, but are also on a down-tuned fiddle, and the G (normal key) tunes come out in F. So, what have I got? Kennedy's original recordings, before he speeded them up?Greg's tape was a compilation of recordings of English fiddlers, passed on to him by Dave Lyth (Lancaster fiddler) 20-odd years ago. It was a copy of a tape he had been given by Keith Chandler. Keith now confirms that, on his old Folktrax cassette, Stephen Baldwin does indeed play one tone lower - just as he did on the Russell Wortley recordings - making it obvious that Peter Kennedy had speeded up the recordings when transferring them to CD format.
I would imagine that it was done to enable players to learn the tunes without having to re-tune their fiddles. I would have no problem with this, provided that CD 115's insert notes made clear what had been done to the recording and why. What seems to me to be extremely dubious is to 'doctor' what purchasers would expect to be an accurate field recording of a traditional player.
This being the case, I have now slowed down the Kennedy recordings by one tone, so they now play in F rather than G, and are at the tempo at which Stephen Baldwin would have originally played them. All new versions of the Musical Traditions CDs will be supplied with these corrected recordings, and I am willing to supply new CDs, gratis, to any customers of mine who bought the Musical Traditions Stephen Baldwin CD.
9.3.08
MT punters may have noticed that contributions from myself have been pretty well non-existent of late. This is due, I'm afraid, to other commitments. These include my Worlds of Trad Internet Radio Station www.live365.com/stations/oneworldmusic which, infinitely rewarding though it has turned out to be, soaks up far more of my time than I could have imagined. On top of that there is the work I've saddled myself with, in cataloguing, digitising and systematising the enormous record collection which nowadays permeates every corner of the McCormick household - see Enthusiasm 47 - the final two paragraphs are most relevent. Also, I'm increasingly fielding requests for advice, assistance and information with various projects, all of which are extremely gratifying and I'm only too happy to help. But there are only twenty four hours in one day, and before the house falls down altogether, I'd like to devote some time to patching it up, taming the garden and doing all the jobs which other retired folk usually end up bored silly with.We should all be grateful, I think, to Fred for the many wonderful pieces of his writing you can find dotted around these pages, and for his onging work of cataloguing and digitising the 7,000 or so items in the McCormick/Summers Collections. Further, we should all be thankful for the splendid Worlds of Trad Internet Radio Station he produces single-handedly. Most of all, we should thank him for his enthusiasm and hard work - and wish him all the very best for the future.Therefore, rather than remain a co-editor on paper (or perhaps that should be cyberspace), I have reluctantly decided to formally withdraw from Musical Traditions. That does not mean that contributions from me will cease altogether, and readers may have noticed that I've managed to squeeze at least one review in of late.
It only remains for me to thank Rod for all his patience and co-operation over the years, and to thank the readers of Musical Traditions for putting up with my copy; over-scholastic and long winded though it may sometimes have seemed.
All the best,
Fred McCormick - 18.7.08
18.7.08
Accordingly, I've been looking around for a replacement for the past month, and have found two possibilities - FreeFind and Search Engine Studio. The former does the job, and is free - but includes advertising, and will also only index the entire site, rather than giving separate searches for the Articles, Reviews, Discographies and Magazine ... which I feel is far more useful. Search Engine Studio will give me far more control over both the indexing and the output, and its 'non-profit discount' makes it affordable for MT.
So you will now find a new Search box at the head of the Home Page - for the present, this is the FreeFind one, but it will be replaced by the better system as soon as I get it set up to my satisfaction. I hope you will put up with the (very few) adverts for a short while.
9.9.08
At the top-right of the Home page is a link labelled 'Search the entire Magazine'; click on this and a new page will appear containing four search boxes - Magazine, Reviews, Articles and Discographies. This serves both to make your searches quicker and more accurate, and reduces the size of the database to be searched. Each search box allows you to search for a word or words, or an exact phrase - equating with AND, OR, or PHRASE logic. The results page displays all the files in each section containing the search term(s). Files containing no useful information, like the various Index pages and framed headers or navigation bars, have not been indexed - neither have the Links and Sessions pages, as they already contain their own alphabetical search facilities.
Since the Articles and Reviews do not always retain the date of original publication, I have arranged for this to be displayed in the results for an Articles or Reviews search. There is no point in doing this for the Magazine or Discography pages, since these are constantly being updated.
I should point out that the MT Search feature (like Google, or any other search engine) only returns the page containing the information you want - not the point in the file where it resides. You still need to read the page to find it, or - in the case of the huge Discography pages, or indeed any large page - to use your browser's 'Find on this page' facility.
The MT Records website is not included in the Search feature; it already has fairly comprehensive search features anyway, and to include it would break the terms of the Search Engine Studio 'non-profit discount' I have been allowed.
I hope this feature makes your use of the magazine easier and more fruitful ... please let me know of any problems. The search databases will be updated when there is any significant addition of material, probably monthly - you should still look at the What's New page to see what's been updated recently.
23.9.08
Nor have we done all that well on the magazine front. 2008 has seen the publication of only 7 new Articles, although one of these was the PDF facsimile republication of a complete book - Reg Hall's wonderful account of the life of Scan Tester, I Never Played to Many Posh Dances. In addition, there have been 2 new Enthusiasms, a large new page of Letters, 2 pages of News and a couple of dozen new Reviews. Not a great deal for a whole year's work, it would seem - but I can only publish what people send me!
All in all, I suppose this has been rather disappointing for Musical Traditions Quarter Centennial year, but it's pleasing to note that our efforts are still reaching quite a number of people - the website had almost 1.3 million visitors in 2008. And I did get to set up a far better site search facility than had been available previously. Onwards!
Once again, I'll remind you that Musical Traditions Internet Magazine exists to share our love of traditional music and musicians; if you have something to say about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world, please send it to me - the contact information is at the foot of the page.
So - in hopes of a far more active 2009, in spite of the credit crunch - may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.
22.12.08
New Volume 10 Magazine CD-ROM now availableAnd as you will see from the accompanying cover shot, this is Volume 10 ... and things have grown a little in those 10 years: MT now contains 218 Articles; 841 Reviews; 62 Enthusiasms; 23 pages of Letters; 42 pages of News; 2,857 graphics images; 1,400 sound files; plus loads of other things like Links; Obituaries; Mondegreens; Sessions; Picture pages, Discographies ... the list goes on and on.
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 514Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
2.1.09
I have come across some sound samples that will not play. Knowing a bit of the technicalities I've had a look at the files and believe they may have gotten corrupted on uploading to the website. You may, of course already know about them.Of course I didn't know about them - the only way I'll find out is if someone like this reader kindly tells me ... so thanks very much. The files he listed had become corrupted somewhere along the line but, luckily, I was able to find earlier versions in my back-ups, and these are now back online.
But strangely - and worryingly - I then found that none of the sound files would play at all on Version 3 of RealPlayer, which I have used for years. Why this should be I have no idea, since they played perfectly well locally (on the computer). I then upgraded to RealPlayer Version 11 and all is now well .
But I do rather worry for you, my readers, who may use earlier versions of RealPlayer, since the error message said 'File Not Found' - which implies that the problem lies with the website rather than the player. Be assured that all the sound files are online, and that if you have any problems playing them, downloading the free Basic version of RealPlayer Version 11 (from http://uk.real.com/) will solve them. I still have no idea about the cause of this problem.
21.1.09
It would seem that we've got to the point where pretty-well all the recordings of traditional performers which are reasonably easy to publish have now been done, and I don't know of any others to try ... if you do, please let me know about them. So maybe I shall start looking at people who I've been calling 'successors' - revivalists who perform traditional material in a traditional way - for future MT Records releases.
Nor have we done all that well on the magazine front. 2009 has seen the publication of 10 new Articles; a few more than last year. In addition, there have been 3 new Enthusiasms, a large new page of Letters, 2 pages of News and 30 new Reviews. Again, a rather better show than last year, but not a great deal for a whole 12 months' work, it would seem - but I can only publish what people send me!
Musical Traditions has now been in existence (in paper and virtual forms) for 26 years, and it's pleasing to note that our efforts are still reaching quite a number of people - the website had almost 1.1 million visitors in 2009. Onwards!
Once again, I'll remind you that Musical Traditions Internet Magazine exists to share our love of traditional music and musicians; if you have something to say about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world, please send it to me - the contact information is at the foot of the page.
So - in hopes of a far more active 2010, in spite of the credit crunch - may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.
23.12.09
New Volume 11 Magazine CD-ROM now availableAnd as you will see from the accompanying cover shot, this is Volume 11 ... and things have grown a little in those 11 years: MT now contains 228 Articles; 890 Reviews; 65 Enthusiasms; 26 pages of Letters; 43 pages of News; 2,999 graphics images; 1,482 sound files; plus loads of other things like Links; Obituaries; Mondegreens; Sessions; Picture pages, Discographies ... the list goes on and on.
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 569Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
1.1.10
So I thought it appropriate to publicly state my profound gratitude to the five gentlemen concerned in all this work, and the many hundreds of hours of research that must have gone into producing these Articles. May their example prompt some other good people to send me record or book reviews, pieces of news or comment, letters, or their writings about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world. Onwards!
12.2.10
Hmm! I've just switched to a new computer and didn't have RealPlayer installed at all, so I downloaded and installed the current version - which then told me that it won't work unless I install a new driver for my sound card. Unfortunately my sound card is several years old and the manufacturer is no longer providing new drivers. Therefore, as far as I can see, I can't use RealPlayer at all.As this may be a problem for other readers as well, I here provide the essence of my reply:What's the objection to making sound clips available in a widely supported format such as MP3?
In a word - bandwidth. When I started MT, back in 1996, my readers had nothing but a slow dial-up connection, so I looked for the best possible sound playing system which was acceptable in these circumstances - and RealAudio was it.
By the time that broadband became widely available in the UK (it still isn't in much of the world, where there are plenty of MT readers) there were some 900 RealAudio soundclips on the site, and in most cases I had no way of re-doing them as MP3s. That aside, I still have the experienced user's aversion to unnecessary bandwidth. As an example:
An 11,659Kb WAV file converts into a 1,056Kb MP3 file, but into a 133Kb RealAudio file - that's one eighth the size of the MP3 file. Most of my readers will be playing our sound clips on the tiny speakers in their computer - and you can hardly tell the difference on them between .ra and .mp3 sound.However, there's another solution to your problem, try the RealPlayer Alternative - Google will find it for you - but you need to un-install your copy of RealPlayer first.
I've just installed this Real Alternative player, and it seems to work just fine ... and it's free. Hope this helps.
22.2.10
Of the 49 CDs in our main '300 series', it's very difficult to know which are the most important. I think that those which present the entire recorded repertoire of a singer, rather than a commercial record company's mediated selection of a dozen or so 'greatest hits', must figure strongly in importance. Likewise those which present a hitherto little known, or poorly represented, singer. I'm pleased to say that quite a number of our CDs fulfil both these criteria. This new May Bradley CD is quite definitely one of these.
Very few people would have even heard of the Gypsy singer from the Welsh Marches, May Bradley, before the publication of Fred Hamer's book, Garners Gay, in 1967. It contained seven of May’s songs: The Outlandish Knight, Sweet Swansea, The Blackbird, Down the Green Groves, On Christmas Day, Cold Blows the Wind, and The Leaves of Life. When the EFDSS published the Garners Gay LP in 1971, it contained only five of these songs, as did the VWML cassette, The Leaves of Life, published in 1989. Many of today's listeners will have only heard the three May Bradley songs on The Voice of the People. This is really very sad, as she’s a stunning singer who really should be far better-known.
It was a considerable surprise to me to find that Mr Hamer actually recorded 26 separate songs from May Bradley; nine of which he recorded twice, and one, three times - making up the 36 track total you’ll find on this CD. As far as we know, she recorded for no one else. We have given what we think are the ‘best’ versions first - then, after a 10 second gap, the 10 duplicate recordings. My judgement as to which are these ‘best’ recordings is, of course, a personal one, and the duplicates should not be considered in any way inferior, or unworthy of your attention.
I started work on compiling this CD almost exactly three years ago, and soon began to wonder if it would ever be published; information on May Bradley proved to be very hard to find. Eventually Keith Chandler stepped in to help with the booklet, and his skills as a fact-hunter have finally brought the project to completion. I am extremely pleased, and proud, to be able to publish it. This is a very important CD - and one which you will certainly enjoy.
10.5.10
Mike decided to take up the challenge, but also suggested: I contacted Roly and said that I would put pen to paper. He replied that he had thought about doing a lengthy review of the Veteran double CD. I have now written my piece and I am wondering if you might like to contact Roly and ask if his piece is ready. If so, then why not print both items together. In fact, how about asking others if they would like to write about Fred, so that we could have several pieces printed together at one time. You probably think it a mad idea ...
Well, I didn't think it a mad idea - but I did think that if I followed Mike's idea to the letter, we might end up with several articles all containing much the same information. So I'm suggesting a similar approach to what we did with the Ten Records that Changed My Life article a few years ago: I publish Mike's article first, and solicit further pieces from others to be added to the first one as time passes.
Accordingly, you'll find Mike Yates' Fred Jordan article online now (as MT250), and I will add Roly's review when he's written it, and any other pieces which any of you care to send me, in due course. C'mon then - time for some action!
15.6.10
22.6.10
Mark Wilson, series editor of Rounder's North American Traditions series (NAT) has made it plain that Rounder is no longer distributing its traditional CDs, but rather selling them cheap(er) from its website, yet making them all-but invisible there ..... Is it paranoia to think that it won't be long before they stop publishing them at all?Well, that time has now come. Rounder has recently been sold to a larger company, and the last three NAT series CDs have appeared with reduced booklets as PDF files. They are briefly reviewed here, together with links to the complete booklet notes which are, as usual, extremely full and informative.
But some exciting news follows. Mark Wilson writes:
Many of our earlier NAT projects can now only be purchased (if at all) as MP3s without notes or documentation. Rod Stradling and I plan to reissue some of these CDs on the Musical Traditions Records label in their original formats, along with several unissued projects, as soon as I find time to collect the original materials together. But it will probably not be possible to reissue the Cape Breton sets in that mode.Mark's final comment refers to the fact that the Cape Breton sets (and some other NAT series CDs) are compilations, and involve numerous performers - and the problem of sending extremely small royalty payments to dozens of people in the States every year will be almost insurmountable.
Nontheless, you can look forward to a substantial number of MT Records' releases of North American traditional music and song in the near future - releases which will equal or better the high standards MT Records has set over the past 12 years.
21.9.10
The first of these new releases features Art Galbraith, a fine Missouri fiddler, accompanied by Gordon McCann on guitar, with Dixie Blossoms (MTCD509). Renowned collector, Vance Randolph, said: "Art Galbraith is the best Ozarks fiddler I have ever heard." Full Details, including track list and booklet notes, can be found on the MT Records' website The price is £12.00.
Since this will be the first of a substantial number of ex-NAT releases, it seemed a good idea to create a new 'series' for them - the '500 Series' - and an equally good idea to include the Mike Yates' Appalachian 4-CD set, Far in the Mountains, and Mark Wilson's Kentucky 4-CD set Meeting's a Pleasure, within it. Accordingly, Far in the Mountains is now renumbered MTCD501-4, and Meeting's a Pleasure is renumbered MTCD505-8, and so Dixie Blossoms is number MTCD509.
Another slight change on the MT Records website is that, since these new NAT records already have their booklet notes available as PDF files, I have decided to use these rather than have to construct new HTML versions. So, when you click on the Booklet Notes link you will get the PDF version. I don't imagine that this will cause a problem for anyone - and it's only on the website; the 500 series CDs will still have the usual printed booklet inside the DVD case, just like the 300 series CDs.
25.10.10
There's also a very significant release of an Irish singer, which I hope should be available some time in 2011 - watch this space!
However, with regard to British performers, it would seem that we've got to the point where pretty-well all the recordings of traditional ones which are available to publish have now been done, and I don't know of any others to try ... if you do, please let me know about them. So maybe I shall start looking at people who I've been calling 'successors' - revivalists who perform traditional material in a traditional way - for future MT Records releases.
On the magazine front, things have been very different. 2010 has seen the publication of an astonishing 40 new Articles - more than in any previous year, I think! There also have been some substantial additions to the Enthusiasms, Letters and News pages, and 37 new Reviews. Congratulations to all those hard working writers.
Musical Traditions has now been in existence (in paper and virtual forms) for 28 years, and it's pleasing to note that our efforts are still reaching quite a number of people - the website again had almost 1.1 million visitors in 2010. Onwards!
Once again, I'll remind you that Musical Traditions Internet Magazine exists to share our love of traditional music and musicians; if you have something to say about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world, please send it to me - the contact information is at the foot of the page.
So - in hopes of an even more active 2011, and in spite of all the cuts - may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.
23.12.10
New Volume 12 Magazine CD-ROM now availableAnd as you will see from the accompanying cover shot, this is Volume 12 ... and things have grown a little in those 12 years: MT now contains 260 Articles; 920 Reviews; 65 Enthusiasms; 26 pages of Letters; 43 pages of News; 3,200 graphics images; 1,593 sound files; plus loads of other things like Links; Obituaries; Mondegreens; Sessions; Picture pages, Discographies ... the list goes on and on.
This year I've included a copy of the Real Alternative media player, since a number of readers have had problems with the 'proper' RealPlayer no longer working with the Version 3 RealAudio sound files we use. It works very well - but you need to uninstall the RealPlayer plug-in first. I've also included a compendium of all the Editorial pieces from 2000 to the present - since they give a good idea of the sorts of things which have concerned us over the years.
For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the half a Gigabyte of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.
Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!
3.1.11
But I recently noticed - when setting up a new computer - that these archives only extend back to the year 2000. Whatever happened to the others? You may recall that MT actually started it's virtual life on Christmas Eve 1996 - so there's three years worth of information missing. No hope of finding stuff from the old AOL, UK Online or U-Net sites. I also discovered that I don't have copies of the first three CD-ROM versions of the magazine, where, it's possible, some of the information may reside. What to do?
I tried emailing everyone who'd ever bought a copy of the CD-ROM, but found that most people - unsurprisingly - junk the old one when they buy a new one; although one reader told me that he has them all and will put them in the post - thanks Steve Harrison! However, that only takes me back to 1999. Prior to the CD-ROM, I had been making floppy disks of the magazine using the old InfoCourier system, for people without Net access. Did anyone still have copies of these? It didn't seen very likely.
But today I had an email from Jeroen Nijhof, who told me that much of the early MT stuff can be found on The Wayback Machine, at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mustrad.org.uk What a fantastic resource! Not everything is there, but it does take us back to July 1998 - and I don't think we're going to get those first 18 months back, unless someone does stll have those early InfoCourier floppies!
Putting together the 'more-or-less complete Editorial compilation' has reminded me what a lot of interesting stuff happened over the years and, in the hope that some of you might find it interesting too, I've decided to put it online, with a link on the Home Page - down at the bottom, so you don't confuse it with the current Editorial! Or you can look at it from here.
5.1.11
However, this re-publication involved getting permission from the Angela Carter estate, which was readily granted - but not on a permanent basis, only for 6 months. Accordingly, it will be removed in July 2011.
26.1.11
MT Records' third NAT Series re-release now availableThe third of these new releases features Morgan MacQuarrie, the fine Cape Breton fiddler, accompanied by Gordon MacLean on piano, with Over the Cabot Trail (MTCD511).
Mark Wilson has written: The music on this remarkable CD represents that increasingly singular anomaly: the artistry of a performer whose musical aesthetic has been almost entirely shaped by an immersion within a localized traditional culture. Morgan himself never made any attempt to modify his playing to [the modern styles] - only the old Scottish sound of back country Inverness County appealed to him. He continuously polished his skills over a lifetime of very active playing. As such, he represents as sterling an exponent of Cape Breton’s unique 'old style' Scottish music as can be found anywhere.
Full Details, including track list and booklet notes, can be found on the MT Records' website The price is £12.00.
30.1.11
She has at last been moved to an ordinary ward, but the journey back to normality will be a long climb; of course if she could climb there'd be no problem, but after 12 weeks in bed there's not much of her body that has any muscle power at all. And having had a tracheostomy in her throat for most of that time, she's not even talking or eating normally yet.
As well as an appalling physical and emotional situation for the family, there is the little matter of finance when the breadwinners are unable to work (Martin has only been able to do 3 or 4 gigs in all that time!). Some of their friends in music - being able now to think about the future rather than just the present - have realised what an awful extra burden this has/will consitute, and are organising benefit events. Keep your eyes and your purses open, and please consider the possiblities for your club or organisation. We will try to liaise with all such organisers, and with Alan Bearman, their Agent, to see that things go smoothly, and don't clash with each other. If you do consider organising some kind of benefit event, please let us know.
Rod and Danny Stradling - 3.2.11
rod@mustrad.org.uk or danny@mustrad.org.uk
In addition, there is now a PayPal 'Donate' button on the page - for people who'd like to contribute, but aren't in a position to organise anything. It will also be useful for anyone living outside the UK to make a donation, or who are organising events abroad, and need to send the proceeds in their own currency - it will be converted to GBP Sterling via PayPal.
Go to the Norma Waterson benefit events Page
MT Records' fourth NAT Series re-release now availableThe fourth of these new releases features Nimrod Workman, the extraordinary West Virginia singer, with Mother Jones' Will (MTCD512). The Journal of American Folklore described him thus: One of Appalachia's most celebrated traditional singers and symbolically linked the region's idealized past with the reality of its ongoing political struggles.
Tracks 1 - 18 originally appeared on Rounder LP 0076 in 1976, a further 8 have been added to this 2011 production. Full Details, including track list, booklet notes and reviews, can be found on the MT Records' website The price is £12.00.
9.5.11
MT Records' first new release of 2011 now availableThis CD may be seen as a companion-piece to our 2005 release, Stephen Baldwin: "Here's one you'll like, I think" - traditional fiddle tunes from the Forest of Dean (MTCD334) - although Fred Whiting was a fiddler from Suffolk, rather than Gloucestershire - and it has been compiled and edited by the same Philip Heath-Coleman.
Although some of Fred's music is available on CD elsewhere, and on the British Library website, we have tried to make up this CD of as many recordings as possible that have never before been published. The record contains 42 tracks, with a 69 minute duration, and comes with a 20 page integral booklet in a DVD case.
MT's founder, Keith Summers wrote: Fred Whiting's exploitation of his exposure to traditional musicians and music outside his immediate milieu made him that rare thing, a modern traditional musician, of the kind which was common in Ireland and Irish communities elsewhere, but almost completely unheard of in England outside the northeast. His neglect is also in part due to that uniqueness: in England traditional music is regarded very much as their own common property by its modern enthusiasts, who don't know what to do with exceptionally musical traditional players like Fred Whiting.
Full Details, including track list, booklet notes and reviews, can be found on the MT Records' website The price is £12.00.
14.6.11
He ended his message with the question: 'What's the objection to making sound clips available in a widely supported format such as MP3?'
I explained that when I started MT, back in 1996, my readers had nothing but a slow dial-up connection, so I looked for the best possible sound playing system which was acceptable in these circumstances - and RealAudio was it. By the time that broadband became widely available there were already some 900 RealAudio soundclips on the site, and in most cases I had no way of re-doing them as MP3s. Also, another of my objections was that using MP3 soundclips pops up Windows Media Player, obscuring what you're trying to read!
However, since the announcement of the provision of high-speed broadband throughout the country (and the discovery that Bampton has it already!) I think that a reconsideration of MP3 is probably in order. This has also been prompted by a contributor telling me about the Google inline MP3 player - which gives the reader a very complete control over the playing of the soundclip, and doesn't obscure the text. A slight problem is that a recent version of Adobe's Flash Player needs to be installed - but I guess that most readers will already be so equipped.
Here's an example using Fred Whiting playing his Old Time Polka, from his new CD on MT Records (see below). Please let me know if there are any problems with using this player, as I've already used it in a couple of reviews, and am intending to do so for all new soundclips in the magazine.
21.6.11
Also thanks for the substantial financial contributions which you all made, making it possible for Martin to stay by Norma's bedside for almost the entire time she was there. This lengthy stay was, by the way, a stark reminder of the selfless dedication of ALL those nurses in all the hospitals, and especially those in the ICU in Warrington.
We would both like also to thank Rod and Danny who - entirely unbidden - took on the task of co-ordinating the fund raising for our benefit - No, don't delete this bit Rod (or Danny). You are true friends.
We also would like to express our thanks for the letters of condolence which were sent on the death of Michael. He was full of life almost up to the end. We shall miss him, as I am sure will all the folk community.
Thank you. All of you.
Now we know what we had always supposed: that Norma is not just the best female singer on the English scene, but also the most loved; and just how lucky we all are to be a part of such a community of kind, generous and loving people.
18.7.11
But by the time that most of the sound recordings of traditional performers were made, collectors had realised their predecessors' mistakes - and the recordings made it possible to hear exactly what was sung or played. Or did they?
Because almost everyone, amateur or professional, made their own decisions about what to actually record, and what to ignore, of their informants' repertoires. Moreover, a number of collectors can be quoted as saying, approximately: "S/he soon realised what sort of songs I was interested in, and thereafter only offered them for recording."
Then, when record companies began issuing these recordings, they also made decisions about which items of those that the collectors offered them would make a suitable, and saleable, LP or CD ... products which rarely exceeded 45 minutes duration! Thus, the question at the head of this piece ... how much did we know of what else the traditional singers actually sang, when there had been so much selection and mediation along the way?
When I published the first MT CD of Bob Hart, back in 1998, I had access to about 60 recordings of him, and it seemed a shame to omit any of them, so I made it a double CD - mainly because I was fond of Bob and liked his singing! Only later did I realise that it was really rather important to include as much as possible of a performer's recorded work - and avoid the mediation which had been the usual practice of record producers up to that point. All further MT releases continued this practice - to include all (or as much as was reasonably practicable) of a performer's recorded repertoire. I believe that only this approach affords the performers the proper respect they are rightfully due.
The reason behind this little outburst is that MT Records have just released a CD of a Shropshire singer named Bill Smith. Bill was a farm worker (and briefly a farmer in his own right), and a contemporary of Fred Jordan. Bill's son, Andrew, decided to record him in the late-1970s. Andrew wasn't a song collector, and didn't choose what to record and what to omit - he just recorded what Bill remembered: songs, recitations, stories, jokes ... The mediation of past collectors and record producers is clearly demonstrated by the fact that Steve Roud had to allocate no fewer than 21 new Roud numbers for items you'll find on this CD.
This makes this CD perhaps the only available example of the completely unmediated repertoire of an ordinary countryman, from the centre of England, in the middle of the 20th century. I think that this fact makes Bill Smith: a country life (MTCD351) one of the most important CDs we have ever produced! I hope you will agree.
To give you a taste of what's in store, here's the tracklist:
Duration: 79:23
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Over the Garden Wall
Tommy Suet's Ball
The Cat's Got the Weasel - Jew's Harp
The Outlandish Knight
Henry My Son
Creeping Jane
AII of a Sudden He Stopped
l Reckon I Missed My Chancel - Story
l'm Billy Muggins
The Cuckoo
Ram She Ad-a-dee
Ram She Ad-a-dee 1958
The Children's Home
Seventeen Come Sunday
Seventeen Come Sunday 1958
AII Been Havin' a Go
Young Sailor Cut Down
Banks of Sweet Dundee
The Camera Boy
An Old German Clockmaker
The Bramble Briar
PC49
The Cinderella
A Group of Young Soldiers
The Willow Tree
Jack Bostock's Whisky - Story
The Irish Girl
A Drunken Family
lt's A Pretty Melody
Coming from a Music Hall
Barbara Ellen
Christmas Day in the Workhouse
Come Lasses and Lads
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Don't Send My Boy to Prison
Down the Road
Flanagan
lf There Wasn't Any Women in theWorld
lt's a Lie
My Name is John Giles
AII Jolly Good Fellows
Little Fish
McCaffery
Prisoners in the War - Story
Old Mrs Biggar
Ours Is A Nice House
Pistol - a dreadful old joke
Ring Ting-a-ling
l'm Sixty Three
Some Folks Sing Like a Lark
Ten Little Fingers
The Little Shirt My Mother Made for Me
The Agricultural Show
The Circus Tent
The Cobbler
The Mountain and the Squirrel - Fable
The Nightingale
ln These Hard Times
Three Men Went a-Hunting
The Village Pump
The Two Magicians
Wheel the P'rambulator, John
Your Sweetheart Grace
Will the Angels Play their Harps for Me?
Khaki Trousers
Wheezy Anna
22.8.11
This CD is, I must freely admit, a bit of a surprise to find on the Musical Traditions Records label. A set of texts, few older than the 20th century, all with known authors, set to tunes composed during the last couple of decades by a known composer, who also sings them! But I promise you - if you like traditional English songs - you will absolutely love everything you hear on this CD. Wonderful, colourful, often passionate lyrics, coupled with some of the most glorious tunes you'll have heard for years. Added to that the fact that Harry Langston is a terrific singer who has fully overcome the 'curse' of a beautiful voice.
The Booklet Notes to the CD appear as an Article in these pages, so you can check out the sound clips there, if you don't believe me!
Harry wrote all the tunes to these songs himself, and also wrote the words to the song Accrington Pals. We have been fortunate to have had Harry as a regular at the Stroud singing sessions for many years, and I'm delighted to be able to share our good fortune wilth you.
Duration:
73:56
Track List:
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Recall to Weavers
The Blackburn Poachers
Tackler Joe Proposes
It’s Nobbut Me
What Could Aw Say
Friends are Few when Fooak are Poor
A Lift Upon the Way
Coal Pit Lane
Accrington Pals
Pendle Sally
My Garden (Posey Joe)
Shuttle-Kissin’
Manchester Song (Rich Man - Poor Man)
A Song of Windmill Land
Scatter Your Crumbs
Love
The Coaler
My Piece is o’ bu’ Woven Eawt (A Weaver’s Prayer)
1:25
5:30
3:08
2:44
6:55
3:59
3:46
2:21
6:41
5:47
4:05
2:36
2:24
4:47
1:44
6:03
4:37
4:16
Buy this splendid CD from the MT Records website, only £12.00.
27.9.11
The 2007 Brazil Family 3-CD Set (MTCD345-7) and the new Sarah Makem 3-CD Set (MTCD353-5) have been presented, together with their booklets, in a 3-disc DVD case. I have been dissatisfied with the quality of these cases for some time, but have been unable to find anything better - apart from the Amaray case which is grey, not black, and extremely expensive.
But my regular blank disc supplier, River Pro Audio, have now come up with a good alternative at a more affordable price - picture on right.
The only 'problem' is that this case requires that the booklet has to be taken out of the case before the first of the CDs can be removed. Given that I hope that most purchasers would wish to actually read the booklet in the first instance, I don't really consider this to be too much of a problem. It will certaily be a nice change from having to send replacement cases to customers with broken ones.
If any reader knows of a better quality 3-CD case of the same design that I used before, and at a reasonable price (less than 40p.), I'd be pleased to hear about them.
3.11.11
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