Celtic Folk/Rock is my favorite type of music and Steeleye Span is my favorite group, and has been for more than 25 years, but I'll try to keep it short. I won't link to all the albums, but you can get many of them from Amazon here or here and find the lyrics to almost all their songs here. I love the net.
Commoners Crown is their darkest album, which is saying a lot for Steeleye Span, and yet ends with Good Show ad libs. Go fig.
Little Sir High contains no specific reference to the real horror of the song: It's an old ballad called Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter that's been used to perpetuate the Blood Libel against Jews and probably relates to St. Hugh or one of the several saints that were canonized from the lie (and, to my knowledge, since decanonized). The song is bloody enough: Dark and chilling, about a child being cruelly murdered. A disturbing song, suberbly told, even if they've purged anti-semitism from the Britain of the time. Long Lankin is another long song, chillingly dark, about a child being murdered.
One of the biggest culture shocks in listening to the SSpan canon (and then reexaming other folk songs) is how many of them deal with young women, often young mothers, leaving, never to be seen by anyone living again. Are they really tales trying to surpress women who are leaving a bad marriage, or are they old wives' tales (if you'll pardon the expression) trying to explain why a woman is gone after dying in childbirth? Roughly a third of all women died in childbirth prior to the rise of antiseptic medicine in the 1800s and infant mortality was as high as 50% (no, I'm not going to delve further into that: Do your own research), and folk songs like The Foggy, Foggy Dew refer to their death in childbirth more directly. What would happen if a man were called on to explain his wife's disappearance? These were times when they burned witches who didn't drown in the test; superstition and folk tales would be the norm. Demon Lover is about a woman who leaves her husband and child for the riches of a faraway place, which turn out to be Hell. Elf Call, more sympathetically, tells the tale of a woman who has just lost her own child being called to nurse the Elf King's child. A beautiful song, one of my favorites.Bach Goes to Limerick is a gorgeous fugue, with the first part working better than the second when the drums come in and it goes rock. Dogs and Ferrets is another poaching song, done in an odd time signature. Galtee Farmer is another interminable cow song that I could live without. But the album ends quite strongly. Maddy Prior sings both parts of an a cappella duet wherein her lover in pressed into service (ie kidnapped onto a British Navy ship) by the Weary Cutters. This segues into New York Girls, a comment about American sluts, I suppose, which also ends with impressment. A bouncy cautionary tale recorded by many, SSpan managed to persuade Peter Sellers to play "acoustic ukelele". The liner notes of a 1978 compilation aver: "Apart from playing well, Sellers enlivened the session with a stream of ad-libbed Goon humour, some of which was kept in the final mix. The band still have a version that is entirely swamped with manic Goon Show interruptions." I'd keep that, too. As it is, the few lines from Sellers at the end of the album are mildly amusing but a must for the dedicated Goon completist.
Immediately noticeable is the strange cover art of All Around My Hat. This is a piece of art that, alas really only works on the vinyl album cover. First of all, the back of the record (but not the CD) contains the other three members of the band, similarly skewed. Second, the album liner notes are are required to see the art properly. You pull out the inner card, just a little. There are three holes: flip up the edge to look through a whole to see the band member normal; flip down to see the back cover. Was this use of Anamorphic Projection a good idea? What the heck. More important to the success of the album was the producer, Mike Batt, of Womble fame. As mentioned in a previous review, the Wombles became a hit, and the animated series... went on tour. It's rumored that the people inside the Wombles costume were Steeleye Span. They owed him, since this is one of their most successful albums, and the title song was #3 in the British pop charts in December 1975. 'Pop', more than 'rock' describes much of this album, but it really works most of the time.
All Around My Hat sent me scurrying to the college library to find out what the herbal references meant, and whether they were part of the same symbolism as in Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme. Both refer to the loss of a lover, but have slightly different takes on the jilted beau's reaction. The SSpan song has Maddy Prior at her scorned best with rock verses and an a cappella section. Several groups have done Black Jack Davey (or Black Jack David or Gypsy Davy or other variants) from The Incredible String Band to Koerner Ray and Glover, but the SSpan version is my favorite, telling the story of a young woman who runs away with a low class boy in a menial job (he slaps tar, or 'blackjack' on ships) and her father chasing them. Gamble Gold (Robin Hood) is a nice take on part of the legend rarely mentioned (well, I'd never heard of it, before or since). Sum Waves is an incredible violin instrumental. Cadgwith Anthem and Hard Times of Old England are nice vocal arrangements dealing with economics; the first about robbers and the second about merchants. I confess I don't like the other three songs very much, but they do have the occasional bit of lovely harmony and nice arrangement.
*Whew* An entire section devoted to two albums... but two of their best. While All Around My Hat is probably more accessible for the average rock listener and certainly more upbeat, Commoners Crown may be the height of their tight musicianship and storytelling ability.
Dave Romm is a conceptual artist with a radio show and a web site and a very weird CD collection. He reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E here.
Thanks, Dave!
Michael Dare - 'The Life and Death of Captain Preemo'
