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News and Comment No 33 |
22.4.05
I have just been informed by our accounts department here that the collection following Bob's funeral and the A Toast to Bob event amassed a net total of £3,400. We also took £1,300 in sales. So once again, many thanks for all your support. I hope you all agree it was a fitting memorial to Bob. Best wishes,
Malcolm Taylor - 14.4.05
VWML Librarian, EFDSS
'Down the Wires' - Matthew Parris uncovers the remarkable story of the first sound broadcasting service to operate in Britain. Uning telephone lines to pipe audio from theatres, opera houses and news events into homes, the Electrophone had a major impact. Included here are rare, recently restored archive recordings from this lost era of radio broadcasting, providing a hitherto unheard glimpse of life in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Roy Hudd and Georgina Boyes provide comment on Music Hall and songs from the First World War.
30.3.05
£5.50 including membership. £5 members. £3.50 concessions.
30.3.05
It was a privilege to have got to know him well over the past twenty years or so. His funeral is at 10am on Monday in Belfast, St Luke's, Twinbrook and then to Milltown cemetery.
Geoff Harden - 27.3.05
There is a very fine biography of the man at: www.iol.ie/~ronolan/maguire.html
Keith Summers (1948-2004) was a keen recorder of traditional musicians and singers, from Suffolk to Fermanagh to Black music traditions in London, as well as being a Blues enthusiast, founder of Musical Traditions magazine and a good ol' boy.
It was one of his last requests that some musical events should be held in his memory, and the first will take place over the weekend of 20th-22nd May, at The King and Queen, 1 Foley Street, London W1P 7LE, home of the Musical Traditions Club, of which Keith was co-founder in 1990. Saturday will feature tributes to Keith and a singing session based on Keith’s last-published recordings, The Hardy Sons of Dan. (For those who did not know him, look at the Keith Summers memorial page)
Tickets will be in short supply , contact Peta Webb and Ken Hall on 0208-340-0530 or at petawebken@aol.com
15.3.05
27.2.05
A day of music and song to celebrate the life of Bob Copper. Saturday 2nd April, 2005, at Cecil Sharp House
All proceeds in aid of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
Tickets £20 all day; £15 afternoon only; £15 evening only (concessions 15, 12 & 12 respectively). Available from EFDSS.
Tickets and further info: EFDSS, 2 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 7AY. Tel: 020-7485 2206; fax: 020-7284 0534; email: ethel@efdss.org
10.2.05
Edgemount Farm, Lumb Lane, High Bradfield, Sheffield
Featuring some of the best traditional singers and musicians.
Those invited include:
28.1.05
27.1.05
Sheila Miller - 19.1.05
Sid is to be cremated on Thursday, 27th January at Gilroes in Leicester. Unfortunately, owing to the small size of the venue, attendance at this ceremony will have to be limited to family and closest friends only.
Following the cremation, however, there will be an 'event' at the Y Theatre, 7 East Street, Leicester LE1 6EY, from about 3.30 onwards. There is a map giving the location of the Y at www.ents24.com/web/venue/14841/Leicester/Y_Theatre.html
Martin Donohoe - 19.1.05
Mike Yates - 16.1.05
This decision must be reversed. Please contact: Humphrey Smith, Director, Sam Smiths Brewery, Tadcaster, LS24 9SB. Tel: 01937 832225 Main Office. Maybe you could send a copy to Tony Blair!
Tell Mr Smith why the live music scene (especially folk music) is so valuable to our culture and heritage and why it must be allowed to continue. Many young and older people start of their music careers in the folk clubs - I started mine in Nellies! We cannot afford to lose this resource.
Sam Smiths do not have an email address - or not one that they are owning up to - so letters look like being the only way.
Chris Wade - 12.1.05
Resident Performers: Peta Webb, Ken Hall, Gail Williams, Jim Younger, Bob Wakeling, Andrew King, Felicity Greenland
Some dates of interest:
6.1.05
A chance to hear four people who have made significant contributions to the documenting of traditional culture in Britain and Ireland talking about their life and work. The day will include contributions from:
In the afternoon, we will also be attending the:
For Life & Times, contact Steve Roud: sroud@btinternet.com or 01825 766751
For the Fred Jordan Memorial, contact: Peta Webb, Assistant Librarian: peta@efdss.org Tel +44 (0)20 7485 2206. Ext 21 Fax +44 (0)20 7284 0534
3.1.05
Further info at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~tinvic
29.12.04
A full and detailed obituary can be found at: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=593183&host=3&dir=271
15.12.04
Paul Saville Duncan, the grandson of the great Scottish folksong collector, the Reverend James Bruce Duncan, died at Kings Lynn on 24 November 2004. Born in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire in 1920, he was educated at Nottingham High School and before and after Army service, at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. He followed a teaching career at Mill Hill School, becoming a Director of Education. His father, Dr Ernest Paul Duncan (MB Aberdeen 1911), had died young in 1925 after being demobbed from the RAMC from war service in Mesopotamia in 1917. Ernest and his sister Katharine had been the only survivors of the Reverend Duncan’s family when the U P minister joined Gavin Greig, schoolmaster at Whitehill, New Deer, in 1905 in the search for ‘what remained’ of the traditional music and song of the North-East commissioned by the New Spalding Club.
We now know that this world-famous duo were to amass over 3000 texts and tunes before Greig died in 1914 and Duncan in 1917, but without ever having managed to get their huge collection into print. The country was on a war footing, and their material was meantime preserved in Aberdeen University’s archives, with only the great classical ballads it contained, such as Sir Patrick Spens (some 13% of the total collection), published as the internationally acclaimed Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballads Airs collected in Aberdeenshire by the late Gavin Greig, edited by Alexander Keith for the Buchan Club in 1925. The University, unfortunately, had no success thereafter in gaining funding to publish the remaining songs, for the impression had been gained that all those of any value were in Last Leaves. Worse still, in 1921 Katharine Duncan had taken away her father’s notebooks, claiming they were family property. Many of Duncan’s songs had indeed come from his family, and Katharine (a secretary herself) may well also have been concerned by the entries of ‘doubtful’ verses and songs that he had made in shorthand.
The collection itself thus remained incomplete until Katharine’s death in 1959, when, to everyone’s relief, the missing notebooks were found in her bank box and restored to the archives. There the collection was consulted by a number of research workers such as James Carpenter from Harvard, Hamish Henderson and Peter Hall, but, sadly, did not play a great part in the folk song revival.
In 1964, however, Paul Duncan took his grandfather’s notebooks to the English Folk Dance and Song Society, where their worth was immediately recognised and a joint project with the University of Aberdeen and the School of Scottish Studies to publish the entire Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection was soon under way. The EFDSS provided the first editor, Patrick Shuldham-Shaw, who died in 1977, leaving Dr Emily Lyle of the School of Scottish Studies with the onerous task of seeing the project through to completion - eight superb volumes (AUP, later Mercat Press) in 2002.
This was, admittedly, a hundred years after the project had first been mooted by the New Spalding Club, but had it not been for the persistence and determination of Duncan’s grandson, Paul Duncan, one of the finest collections of traditional song ever made might not have seen the light of day in its glorious entirety. Scotland alone should be eternally grateful to him.
Ian A Olson - 3.12.04
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, but also our second collaboration with another record company; in this case we are working with Dublin's An Góilín traditional singers' club, so the CDs also bear the number Góilín 005-6. 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 familiar 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 are also available here as an Article.
1.12.04
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