dark earth rising what song was kate listening to
Like all good stories, folk music is largely about three things: sex activity, expiry and politics. There might be a lot of carousing along the way, and there may be some discussion of farming or the occasional comedic skit to tickle your fancy, but the primary themes remain constant and they are always delivered with rude gusto.
So, as nosotros head towards this year'southward Radio 2 Folk Awards, here are 10 examples of songs that go beyond the bounds of human decency (and are all the better for information technology):
Alert: contains some developed themes.
i. Died for Love
Matters of the heart have a addiction of turning blood-red, raw and bloody in traditional songs, and then it goes with Died for Love, also known as A Sailor's Life, Sweet William, and Willie the Assuming Sailor Boy (and performed by anybody from Fairport Convention to The Watersons). Information technology'due south a tale of a woman pining for her true love who has set out to sea and not returned. Desperate to find him, she sets out to bounding main herself and meets the Queen's ship. She asks if they have seen William, and after some give-and-take over the cutting and colour of his coat and pilus, they tell her he has drowned.
Some versions of the song end hither, but Died for Love (as performed hither by Martin and Eliza Carthy) continues, with a verse in which her father enters her sleeping accommodation to find her "hanging by a rope", with a note fastened to her chest asking him to bury her with marble stones at her caput and feet, with a snow-white dove in the middle, "just to let the world know that I died for love."
2. The Cruel Mother
This queasy tale of infanticide has been sung by everyone from Cecilia Costello to The Dubliners (who recorded a version called Weile Weile Waile) and Nancy Kerr. It concerns a woman who kills her two new-built-in children with a knife. But the blade becomes unwashable - the more than she wipes it, the "more than red" information technology grows. She then meets two babies in the entrance to a church building, and tells them she'd treat them wonderfully if they were hers. They turn out to be the ghosts of her children, who tell her that she's bound for hell.
3. The Unquiet Grave
Also known as I True Beloved and Cold Blows the Air current (as performed to a higher place past Bellowhead), this is a song of mourning that takes a dark plough into gothic nihilism. A woman throws herself on the grave of her true love, drastic for one concluding kiss to salvage her grief. Her passion is such that, afterwards a year-long graveside vigil, her human being rises upwards to speak to her, then that he tin truly residue in peace. She begs for a kiss, but he warns her that his lips are "cold as the clay" and that a kiss from him would finish her life besides.
In the Shirley Collins version, he then explains that their beloved, while it was one time "the fairest bloom that e'er was seen / Has withered to the stem", going on to add: "The stalk is withered dry, true beloved / So must our hearts decay / Then rest yourself content, my dear / Till God calls you abroad". Which is the kind of stark bulletin from the hereafter that you never really got in Ghost.
4. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
This account of the decease of a black hotel worker is drawn from contemporary history - Bob Dylan wrote it nigh every bit soon as the court case had ended - and withal it has a theme that runs as far dorsum through folk music history every bit the texts allow us to see. It'southward about people in the higher echelons of society abusing those who are lower down and appearing to get away with information technology. In this case, information technology's 24-twelvemonth-old tobacco plantation owner William Zantzinger, who rapped Hattie Carroll with his cane for non serving his drinkable fast enough. She collapsed and died of heart failure, and he received a six-month jail sentence.
In this documentary, made by Howard Sounes, author of Downwards the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, nosotros find out more about the case from kickoff hand witnesses, and even hear from Zantzinger himself, who turns out not to be much of a Dylan fan.
5. Common cold Haily Rainy Night
There are plenty of folk songs that warn young women against the reputation-shredding advances of lecherous men, from the straight O Soldier Won't You lot Ally Me to the poetic Let No Man Steal Your Thyme. Cold Haily Rainy Night (or Cold Blow and a Rainy Night, Permit Me In This Ae Nicht and even The Laird o' Windy Wa's) has retained its potency equally a stark dissimilarity betwixt what people will say to get what they want, and how they will deport once they get it.
The song - as performed by Jeannie Robertson, Steeleye Span, Planxty and The Imagined Village - tells the story of a handsome soldier or traveller stuck outside the window of a young adult female on a rotten evening. He begs to come inside to get warm ("oh my hat is frozen to my caput, my anxiety are similar ii lumps of lead"), and despite the risk of discovery, she eventually lets him in and one thing leads to another. She proposes marriage, simply he's not interested, puts his chapeau back on and heads out into the tempest, leaving her reputation in tatters.
6. The Knoxville Daughter
Also known as Hanged I Shall Be, The Oxford Tragedy, The Oxford Daughter, The Wexford Daughter, The Butcher Male child and many others, this vocal - variants of which appointment back to the 1700s - is one of many murder ballads in the folk catechism that follow a similar blueprint. A man spots a woman he likes the wait of, then he takes her to a remote location to pitch woo, only kills her instead. So the guilt starts.
In The Knoxville Girl, sung by, among others, The Lemonheads, Elvis Costello and Nick Cavern (who knows a thing or ii nearly murder ballads), the vocalist hits the object of his affections with a stick, many times, although earlier variants have her stabbed with a knife, and and then drowned for adept measure out. Each version tends to finish in a similar mode, with the singer realising he's bound for prison, and possibly the gallows, and also well-nigh certainly for eternal damnation.
vii. Matty Groves
Settle down, this is what they call a page-turner. Matty Groves (every bit sung here by Ben Nicholls) is the story of a boyfriend who catches the eye of the local lord'due south married woman - in Sandy Denny's version of the song with Fairport Convention, he's Lord Donald, but the names and song titles modify often. Matty at first refuses her advances, and so capitulates, only one of Lord Donald'southward servants has told his primary.
Outraged, the Lord finds the couple in bed, and insists that Matty fight. Matty, who is naked, strikes the first blow, but is immediately killed, and Lord Donald then asks his wife which of the two she prefers. She says dead Matty, so Lord Donald kills her also, and buries the ii lovers in the same grave, with her on pinnacle, because she'south posher. See? Sex, death and politics.
8. Oh Decease
Also known as Conversations with Expiry, this song comes from the Appalachian mountains, wellspring of country music. Written largely by Lloyd Chandler, there are two key versions (amid many pop covers), one in the belatedly 1920s by banjo thespian Dock Boggs, and the a capella version in 2000 by bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, for the film O Blood brother, Where Fine art Thou?
It's the song of a desperate, ill person begging for their life, with Death himself boasting that he will close the torso downwardly, and why? Elementary: "I'm Expiry I come to take the soul / Leave the body and leave it common cold / To describe up the flesh off of the frame / Dirt and worm both have a claim."
9. Hanging on the Erstwhile Barbed Wire
Equally Joan Bakewell explains in this report, the 1960s musical Oh! What A Lovely War retold the history of the First Globe State of war using popular songs of the fourth dimension every bit a darkly comic fashion of satirically retelling the story of the conflict. But this vocal from the 1918 trenches didn't make the cut, probably because information technology portrays the bureaucracy of army life in quite a fell light. Each verse offers a chance to notice where representatives of a particular rank might exist institute - from sergeant down to private - with the officers described as being variously "lying on the canteen floor" to "miles and miles behind the line". Past contrast, the poor privates (or battalion, depending on the version of the song) tin can be institute "hanging on the old barbed wire".
The vocal was pop with the soldiers (but not their commanding officers) during the latter days of the war, and was recreated by Chumbawamba for their a capella collection of insurrectionary old folk tunes, English Rebel Songs 1381–1984.
10. On Morecambe Bay
Equally nosotros've seen, folk music works exceptionally well at putting across the personal side of a story with political ramifications, and this is only as true when it's sung about a recent result. In 2004, at least 21 illegally employed Chinese migrant workers died while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, when they were caught by the incoming tide. The human side of this preventable tragedy was captured in the vocal On Morecambe Bay, by Kevin Littlewood, which has been memorably covered past Christy Moore, thanks to the intervention of Mike Harding (equally Christy reveals in this interview with Cerys Matthews).
From the starting time verse, he finds himself wishing he could accept stepped forwards to warn them, the way "our mothers" warned local children, that you tin can't outrun the tide, and so introduces this poetic refrain: "For the tide is The Devil, it will run you lot out of breath / Race y'all to the seashore, hunt you lot to your expiry / The tide is the very Devil and the Devil has its day / On the lonely crinkle banks of Morecambe Bay."
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Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/8beeaac5-064c-4406-9e85-d42cebf9a53b
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