Come Sing It Plain…

Martin Carthy

01 : Here’s Adieu to All Judges and Juries
02 : Brown Adam
03 : O’er the Hills
04 : Cruel Mother
05 : Cold Haily Windy Night
06 : His Name Is Andrew
07 : The Bold Poachers
08 : Dust to Dust
09 : The Broomfield Hill
10 : The January Man

First released in the UK 1971 on Philips Records 6308 049

Re-issued 1977 by Topic Records 12TS345

CD issued 1996 by Topic Records TSCD345

Personnel:
Martin Carthy: vocals, guitar

Credits:
Produced by Terry Brown
Recording Engineer: David Voyde

All tracks Traditional, arr. Martin Carthy except:
06 : David Ackles
08 : John Kirkpatrick
10 : Dave Goulder

Sleeve Notes:

The Cruel Mother comes from the singing of Lucy Stewart as collected by the American folklorist Kenneth Goldstein. Apparantly many people quite close to her had no idea that she was a singer until he came along, but with him to coax her, she gradually unbent, and came out with many many songs, a lot of them really fine versions of the ballads.

Cold Haily Windy Night is based on the version collected by Baring Gould in the South West of England. The tune comes from Johnson’s Musical Museum, with a composite text. Although this version may not be very old, in its various parts the idea is as old as the hills, for it is to be found, among other places, in the Song of Songs: “Let me in my love, my dove, my undefiled, for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”

The three modern songs here, His Name Is Andrew, The January Man, and Dust to Dust [Note: the original album sleeve listed this song correctly on the track list but gave the title ‘The Gravediggers Song’ here in the notes. KB], were written by David Ackles, Dave Goulder and John Kirkpatrick. David Ackles is an American who writes songs sounding very like the French chansonniers. Dave Goulder runs a sort of doss-house-cum-mountain rescue service up in Ross-Shire, when he’s not writing songs and poetry or singing in clubs. John Kirkpatrick used to (and, I think, still does) play piano accordion for the Hammersmith Morris Men, as well as doing solo folk club gigs singing.

The tunes for The Broomfield Hill and Brown Adam were written by myself, the former based on a Hebridean tune, which itself is a variant of the tune taken by Marjorie Kennedy Fraser to make the song known around the clubs as Kishmul’s Galley and the latter, as far as I know, not being based on any other tune, but for a song that I wanted to do for years.

The Bold Poachers and Here’s Adieu to All Judges and Juries come from roughly the same time in history, being early 19th century transportation songs from Norfolk and Sussex respectively. They convey, along with O’er the Hills (which hails from the late 17th century), something within the simple factual almost journalistic framework of the writing, more than simple resentment at being forced to leave home, proving for me the truth of the maxim, that it’s not what a song says, necessarily, but what it does that counts. Thousands of songs have very little apparent, but layers and layers underneath. O’er the Hills was taught to me by Geoff Harris at the Brentwood Folk Club.
Martin Carthy, 1971

Reviews:

Q Magazine June 1996 ***
With the Martin Carthy reissue programme finally drawing to its close, these two albums represent perhaps the least essential, or historically less interesting, examples of his solo work, despite his high standards – Bob Dylan and Paul Simon both took from him but only Dylan had the good grace to credit Carthy formally on an album sleeve. 1971’s Landfall wins by a whisker over the Ashley Hutchings-produced Sweet Wivelsfield. Landfall’s contemporary songs like David Ackles’s His Name Is Andrew and John Kirkpatrick’s Dust To Dust sit well beside heavy-duty traditional fare such as Cruel Mother and The Broomfield Hill. 1974’s entirely traditional Sweet Wivelsfield, on the other hand, is more adventurous instrumentally and captures a less winsome voice. All Of A Row, John Barleycorn and Skewbald render it more accessible for newcomers.
Reviewed by Ken Hunt