Sunday 15 February 2009

A picture from our St. George's concert last November

I don't know where the time goes, we are already half way through February. Next Saturday sees our first rehearsal of the year in preparation for our concert in Hunton in May. It will be good to get playing together again. Apart from going over the songs we did at our last concerts we will be looking at some new songs to add to the repertoire for our forthcoming gigs and possibly for our next album.
Having thought I wouldn't be ready to write anything for a while I find I have a couple of new ideas in development. The most recent tune I came up with suggested a fairly traditional theme for the words - "As I walked out one May morning..." sort of thing. The next thing would be to think of a story to tell. Something about pirate gold came to mind. Also the phrase "lowlands low" kept coming into my mind as I hummed through the verses. I decided to google 'lowlands low' and see what came up - the last resort when you get stuck - in my case the first resort.

This brought up a number of tradition song lyrics and in particular the song "Edwin in the Lowlands Low" which had been recorded by various people such as Martin Carthy, Steeleye Span and my hero, Peter Bellamy under the varying titles of "Young Emma", "Edwin" and "Edmund in the Lowlands" respectively. The subject matter covers gold, young lovers, cruel parents, murder and insanity and no happy ending for any of the protaganists - so just right for a Childe Rolande song and we can say it's not our fault as it is traditional. As with most traditional songs there are many variants of the song lyrics. I have chosen the version from the 'Penguin Book of English Folk Songs' as the starting point for our interpretation. I thought to call it "Lowlands Low".
John