Avail Yourself The New Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs Devised By Steve Roud Released As Hardbound

truly marvellous compendium of traditional folk songs with their provenance and commentaries on each, I know some because of the folkrock boom of the earlys when bands such as Fairport Convention, Gryphon amp Steeleye Span reworked amp revisited them.
Yes indeed, the general setup of The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs is wonderful, is in fact almost perfect with Steve Roud and Julia Bishops detailed and informative introductions, a thematically arranged vast array of English or rather British folksongs that feature not only the lyrics but also and very much appreciatively present the accompanying musical scores, and all topped off with informationally detailed endnotes on each of the included songs and a rich and expansive bibliography, as well as a discography.
But both personally and academically, I rather think that if the editors, if Steve Roud and Julia Bishop would make their notes on the included folksongs into footnotes instead of endnotes, I do believe that this would render The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs a bit more reader and user friendly.
Since now, if you want to read the note on a given song, you have to go to the back of the book and it certainly would in my opinion be much easier if for each of the featured folksongs, the notes about it would immediately follow instead of having all of the notes be located right before the bibliographic materials of The New Penguin Book of English Folksongs, almost like a bit of an index.


But my appreciation and my enjoyment of The New Penguin Book of Folksongs notwithstanding, I do find it a bit strange that Steve Stroud and Julia Bishop have not included any specific work songs like for examples sea shanties and that most seasonal celebration and childrens songs are also not making their appearances.
And yes, Steve Stroud pointing out in the general introduction that sea shanties, seasonal ditties and songs geared to children have not been made part of The New Penguin Book of Folksongs is simply and utterly insufficient for me, as I absolutely want to know and even need to know the specific reasons as to why.
Therefore, while generally The New Penguin Book of English Folksongs is a solid four for me and will also be a book to revisit, to read over and over again, that in particular sea shanties are missing and with no real reasons for this being presented, it certainly does bother me and enough so to lower my ranking for The New Penguin Book of Folksongs from four to three as I absolutely do adore sea shanties and was kind of expecting them to be featured and definitely do want to know what has caused Steve Stroud and Julia Bishop to not include them.
Folk music is a bitterly fought over territory, The original peasants who knew this folk stuff were located and taken into protective custody by some Victorian clerics and given the third degree until they sang like canaries.
The clerics then deleted anything that looked like smut and published some of it for thrusting young schoolboys and schoolgirls to sing before they took jobs with the Foreign and Colonial Service and died of dysentery and malaria.
Meanwhile some communists began to complain that all this folk was reactionary wimping about love and saucy milkmaids and lords and ladies with cranberries growing out of their brains, and pointed out that factory workers and miners had also made up folk about blacklegs getting their guts spilt.
Then other communists, ones with typewriters, said that vicarfolk was all made up by Percy Grainger and Sabine BaringGould who used to beat each other's bare flesh with glove puppets.
Folk song Au contraire, I think you mean fake song! they said, Then some people claiming to be Bob Dylan said that folk was still happening and they proved it too, Then some marketing departments decided it was a good label to stick on anyone who wasn't actively taking heroin, because a label of folk guaranteed that an album would sell at leastcopies.
So people who once leaned against a pile of unsold Joan Baez albums while they were not waiting for their man were now called folk.
It didn't matter that they'd all written their own songs and played them on saxophones, it was folk if the marketing department said so.


Enough of that, Let us see if we can actually define folk,

The intro to this brand spanking new nottobeconfusedwithold Penguin Book divides all of music into three areas classical, popular, and folk, So you know what classical music is, right, and popular is anything composed which isn't classical, which ranges from Roll Out the Barrel to California Gurls feat Snoop Dogg.
Everything else is folk. No one knows who wrote it, The toothless old character in the Dog and Partridge used to sing it if you call that singinguntil he died of extreme old age in.


I agree with this, All that "contemporary folk" is actually acoustic popular music, This puts me in the position of saying that if Richard Thompson's band wails away doing a ten minute version of Cold Haily Windy Night with three blasting electric solos from Richard, that's folk, but Martin Carthy singing "January Man" unaccompanied isn't because we know that Phil Coulter wrote it.


But I say substance not style, Faugh to all woolly definitions, and all woolly bullies too,

This is a lovely collection, The first Penguin Book of English Folk Songs was put together by Ralph VaughanWilliams and Bert Lloyd in, The "English" part was deliberate, as at the time folkies in England were being swamped with other traditions, Scottish, Irish and American, English stuff was being ignored, it wasn't perceived to be sexy enough, At the time American folk was fuelling the skiffle craze which inspired the young John Lennon to get a guitar, not surprising as skiffle was like folkpunk and the Scottish and Irish stuff has brilliant instrumental accompaniment, which everyone loved.
Whereas the austere English tradition is unaccompanied singing, You can see how that could be shoved aside,

This new collection retains the Englishness of the first but changes its selection criteria completely, VaughanWillians and Lloyd were looking for the "best" songs, but Steve Round and Julia Bishop have included the most popular that is, the most widely collected songs collected from actual folk singers, that is.
There areof them. They have let the people choose the contents, Each comes with a printed melody and detailed notes, So this book is a treasure for folkies,

This is two verses of a folk song,

In Nottamun town, not a soul would look up
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town

I sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone
Ten thousand stood round me and yet I was alone
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born
Used for research for my fourth novel which features a lot of English folk music.
Really interesting introduction, and a good selection of songs with detailed information about each, I perhaps would have preferred the information to be following the songs rather than at the end, Near the end ofI experienced a brief, inexplicable fascination with English folk songs, one which probably had its roots in my high school years.
A small group of friends in the theatre, band and choir programs, spurred on by "Whose Line Is It Anyway" and the popularity of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, would sing lively and often salty shanties and drinking songs as we went about our backstage business.
Years later, seeing the origin of so many of these songs, a look at their histories, and the way the folk singing tradition developed opened my eyes and made me appreciate those memories even more.
Even more than the academicallyinclined "Folk Song in England," Steve Roud's work here is essential for any music, poetry or anthropology lover, Excellent reference to songs, great history This is a marvelous book for the songs themselves as you'd imagine!, especially with the melodies printed, too, but the real joy here are the notes.
You'll learn where the songs were collected, what the context historically and socially is, which earlier songs they may have been based upon, whether the songs were sung by women or men, and where, geographically, the songs originated and flourished.


Only the Kindle edition is easily available via Amazon I would have preferred a paper copy and my only real complaint is that skipping back from the notes to the songs is a simple prospect, but getting to the notes from the songs is not.
I found myself reading the notes at the end, getting the history and the context, then clicking over to the songthen back to the notes.
A little unwieldy, but doable, Out of theEnglish folk songs featured I have aboutin my collection and I found it useful to make a playlist of them and read the tradtional words

and some background about when and where the song was first recorded.
Just like a classical book, it reminded me of the living fossilised links between the past and present, Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies, Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain, for we've received orders for to sail for old England but we hope in a short while to see you again.
One of the great English popular art forms, the folk song can be painful, satirical, erotic, dramatic, rueful or funny, They have thrived when sung on a whim to a handful of friends in a pub they have bewitched generations of English composers who have set them for everything from solo violin to full orchestra they are sung in concerts, festivals, weddings, funerals and with nobody to hear but the singer.
This magical new collection brings together all the classic folk songs as well as many lesserknown discoveries, complete with music and annotations on their original sources and meaning.
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