Music Arcades: Martin Carthy: Signs of Life

Good old Martin Carthy: he doesn't flood us with albums, but just records one, it seems, when he has to get some songs off his chest. He knows, and we know, that his performances are best heard in person in a small venue. As noted in the last Carthy post, these performances are much more frequent than his albums: I've got a ticket to see him with Dave Swarbrick in a few weeks' time.

This wasn't always in the case in Sheffield, however. So I had to make to do with the recordings, like this one.

Odd: a few months ago I went on record with the heresy that maybe some Dylan ballads, like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll were repetitive to the point of being wearisome. Carthy does repetition exceptionally well, though. John Peel used to say that every version of The Famous Flower of Serving Men seemed to repeat longer and longer — and he would be very happy for that trend to continue. His take on Hattie Carroll, included here, never feels like it outstays its welcome.

It makes me think of other Bobsongs that I'd like to hear Carthy doing. Not sure about Highlands, but I think he'd do a brilliant No Time To Think. Bob and Martin were born only three days apart (I can't remember who is the elder) and hung out together when Bob first visited London. Martin probably had a hand in "turning Bob on" to several old folk songs that he borrowed from so directly. Hence The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll could be seen as a kind of repayment. Martin's sleeve notes are generous, even by his standards, "I don't believe that [Bob] has lost any of his power in the intervening years, as a singer or as a writer, and he remains by far, the bravest of the lot, prepared to risk everything, including — and maybe especially — his reputation."

Yes, the more contemporary songs on Carthy's albums are always in the minority, but usually attract most comment. Was he the first to revive the Bee Gees' New York Mine/Mining Disaster, 1941 as a folk protest song — before Chumbawamba did it, I mean? And his version of Heartbreak Hotel (with "baby" updated to "lover" in the first line) plays to a hobby horse of mine, because it captures in miniature a trend a first wrote about in 2004 or 5, after we marked the 50th anniversary of Elvis's first hit. The idea I kept returning to was how this release, which at the time felt like a rupture and a radical break with the past, has, with the passing of time, been tamed so that it blends back into a longer term tradition. This was how I summed it up in the Book,

The factors that have contributed to the musical landscape becoming becalmed are as varied as those that whipped it into a frenzy 50 years ago. To pick a handful of examples: first, the new technology of choice for today's music-makers is sampling. Where electric guitars in the 1950s and the first synthesisers in the 1960s made new and alien sounds (almost literally in the synthesisers' case), sampling and its application in musical mash-ups emphasise continuity and tradition. Notwithstanding the treatments that can be applied to samples, sampling produces sounds that have all been heard before. Demographically, almost all Western societies are ageing, and teenagers inhabit a world that is culturally and economically not that different from the one their parents grew up in, except that there is more of everything to choose from. Older generations have seen new musical 'rebellions' come and go, and, rather than demonise them as folk devils and moral panics, they accept them with a sanguine shrug. Sometimes, as when the Nobel Prize winner for literature Seamus Heaney praised Eminem's verbal energy, high culture openly acknowledges the vitality of new music instead of just moralising about its profanity.

So even Rock'n'Roll doesn’t seem very Rock'n'Roll any more. The emphasis on tradition in rock, pop and dance music means they have almost turned into what they originally threatened to overthrow — folk music. Not folk music as in accordions and pipe-smoking, but folk music as a set of vernacular traditions that interweave with each other, reviving, covering, sampling and stealing musical ideas, buffing them up and re-presenting them in alternative contexts and arrangements. Sounds like the definition of a digital mash-up, doesn't it?

No accordions, but having sexagenarian Martin Carthy MBE buffing up that young white negro's incendiary song as a folk ballad illustrates my point quite nicely.

But I'll leave with you with a good old trad/arr piece, recorded, it says, in Carthy's back garden.

As one of the comments on YouTube has it, "how cool would it be to be his neighbour and hear him playing in his garden?"