This song always chokes me (you can hear me losing it in the last verse). A song about fox hunting from the foxes' point of view. It also reminds me of following the Boxing Day hunt with my grandad when I was a nipper. Not that they ever caught anything. Heh.

Playing a tenor guitar (tuned CGDA) that I got in April.

1. Swedish tune/English tune/Speed the Plough
2. Bulgarian tune
3. Spanish Jig (it's English really, lol)

I don't know the titles of half of these, because I learned them from musicians at festivals, sitting around in pubs and playing music. Music may not be a universal language, but it's still quite handy when you haven't got a clue what each other are saying. If you fancy playing along and trying to learn them, they're all in F, apart from the Bulgarian tune which is in D minor.

Unlike English folk song which, as listeners to my other radio shows will know, can be quite bleak in terms of melody and subject matter, English traditional tunes are relentlessly jolly and upbeat. Hence the name "muppet dances." (Cheers, sweetheart. Heh).

All are played on a 1950s vintage Hohner Club IIIM melodeon. I've been playing melodeons since my early teens, so you'd think I'd be a bit better by now.

The three songs in this recording deal with the themes listed in the title, and in that order. They are: -

1. The trees they do grow high
2. Greenland Whale Fisheries
3. The Good Old Way

1. "The trees they do grow high" is an English traditional song, which possibly refers to an historical incident in 18th centruy Scotland, where the union between two noble houses led to the marriage of a 16 year old boy to an older woman. He dies at the age of 18, leaving her to bring up his child. Whatever. I'm sure that kind of thing happened all the time in the olden days.

The version here is based on the singing of Walter Pardon, who was a retired groundskeeper who kept himself entertained by singing songs he'd heard as a young man, mostly from his Uncle Billy. He was "discovered" in the 1970s, and made his first public appearance as a singer in his 70s, carrying on until his voice went. He was an absolutely spellbinding performer, doing all his material unaccompanied. If you were close enough, you could see that he was giving himself goosebumps.

There's lots of recorded versions out there -- I think Kate Rusby's done it for instance -- but usually to a slightly different tune.

2. "Greenland Whale Fisheries" comes from the Waterson family of Hull (now of Robin Hood's Bay). They've changed the plot of the song a bit, so that the captain of the ship is more bothered about not catching the whale than he is about the drowning sailors. Their version has become a lot better-known and widely-performed than the "original," insofar as these songs have "originals."

The Watersons are now half of Waterson:Carthy, and are still recording.

3. "The Good Old Way" is a hymn that dates from the wave of religious enthusiasm that swept England in the 18th century. We don't know who wrote it, but it's a gritty little number, and doesn't strike me as something that was written in a vicarage. I've been singing this song for a long time, and still find it hard to get through that last verse, with it's note of final triumph and reunion ("And far beyond this mortal shore, we'll meet with those who have gone before....") without choking a bit.

All the songs on this recording are accompanied on a 30 key concertina, made by Lachenal & Co in the later part of the 19th century.

English traditional songs are difficult to accompany because they're not designed to be. That's my excuse, anyway. Many of them are not based on conventional musical scales, which means that chords don't fit. The first two songs for instance -- are they major or minor? Anyway, the concertina can be quite handy because you can press buttons at random until you arrive something that hopefully doesn't sound too bad.