Music Arcades: Alasdair Roberts: No Earthly Man

Here's something I wrote after my (much anticipated) first experience of seeing Alasdair Roberts at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 2003:

By Sunday evening, Yonder Mountain String Band were playing their third set of the festival and had built a substantial reputation. I saw them twice, and they were just the right thing for a festival of this kind. Again I'm not sure if I'd enjoy them as much on record, but live they give off 'authentic' Oh Brother Where Art Thou vibes. The club tent was jumping by the time they finished, so it was a hard act for Alasdair Roberts, alone with his guitar, to follow. He seemed almost apologetic as he worked his way through a set of mostly traditional songs. I wondered if he was adjusting his set-list for the folk festival audience, since Alasdair's web site is noticeably ambivalent about his folk status "Alasdair wouldn't say what they [the Glasgow Herald] wanted him to say in the interview (that he was a 'folk singer' or something)." But exactly a week later I saw Alasdair again in the very different setting of the ICA on the day UK temperatures topped 100F, and he did an acapella performance of more traditional songs.

I've seen Alasdair nine times since then, and know the range of his performances fairly well, so it's interesting to see how I felt when I was still sizing him up. But the reason I mention it here is that the Cambridge set began with Lord Ronald, which also opens this album, released a couple of years later.

Sandwiched chronologically between two albums of Roberts originals (Farewell Sorrow and the sublime Amber Gatherers), this collection of traditional songs may be my least favourite of his solo albums. But his worst is better than best.

Alasdair's sleeve notes acknowledge that three of the songs are Child ballads and give Laws numbers for two others. Sometimes I'm not sure how seriously to take his notes. He infamously wrote a press release for Farewell Sorrow alleging that he was descended from royal gamekeepers and then expressed surprised when some failed to realise he was kidding. So what to make of his account of On the Banks of Red Roses?

This murder ballad is from the singing of Ella Ward of Edinburgh, recorded in 1954. Ella learnt the song from the Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson, who in turn learnt it from a blind singer from Elgin called Blin Jimmy. Blin Jimmy learnt it from the young daughter of a tinker who came collecting songs.

Such a long chain raises an eyebrow (not concerning its length so much as its accurate documentation), but all the named characters actually existed (Blin Jimmy's real name, the web suggests, was James Bowie). So maybe it's all true. I was similarly a little sceptical about the quote attributed to Bob Stewart's book Where is St George? Pagan Imagery in English Folk Song, but I checked that out, and it exists too (Amazon.co.uk sales rank: 2,022,429) — I've just ordered a copy.

I wanted to call The Boy (who is due in five weeks, by the way) Alasdair, after Messrs Roberts and Maclean (the latter from The Clientele), since their music has stopped my heart in its tracks most frequently this century. But Lucy vetoed that. We still have no final agreement on names, just a shortlist of about five.