Traditional songs like this go back a long way, and their mood and them is often violent.
The song's protagonist is John Barleycorn, a personification of barley and of the beer made from it.
In the song, he suffers indignities, attacks, and death that correspond to the various stages of barley cultivation, such as reaping and malting.
This particular performance of the track is from The Imagined Village.
Here's a performance from Martin Carthy and David Swarbrick - two giants of English folk music who I've had the pleasure of seeing live numerous times, including in small venues in Norwich.
In the climax of the Inside No. 9 episode "Mr King", - SPOILER ALERT - the song is performed by a class of schoolchildren as they prepare to ritualistically sacrifice their teacher for their harvest festival.
“Our music is a blend of east and west, old and new. We’re building on a history and a sound that has been around for thousands of years.”
Galbadrakh Tsendbaatar, AKA Gala
Iron Maiden organised an event called Eddfest last weekend and a band called 'The Hu' were playing. This is not a misspelling of Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend's band....
The band say they didn’t choose their name as a play on the Who’s, but because “hu” is the root word for human being in Mongolian. “We took the name because of the inclusive nature,” Temka said. “It’s not about being Mongolian. It’s about being human.”
There's plenty of classic geography scenery in this video: Black Thunder Part 1
The band’s video for Yuve Yuve Yu likewise stresses the connection between modernity and tradition. It opens with various band members in contemporary settings – an upscale coffee shop in Ulaanbaatar, or at home playing a video game – before Gala opens the door of his urban apartment to enter a vast expanse of mountains and lakes in Mongolia’s remote western region. The images that occupy the rest of the video are so stunning, they could double as a travelogue for the Mongolian tourist board. The band’s second video, for Wolf Totem, unites traditional Mongolian horse riders with leather-clad men on Harleys, suggesting an eastern take on Easy Rider. That connection underscores a bad-ass image that has made the band a natural for metal heads.
This is a wonderful piece of music, composed by William Jackson, one of the members of Ossian.
The music conveys the atmosphere of different elements of the Scottish landscape, and ends with a suite of pieces named after islands including Iona, Islay and Jura.
They were another band I was introduced to while at Huddersfield Polytechnic.
It can be found on many of the usual music streaming services.
William (Billy) Jackson was a key member of Ossian.
Ossian were a superb band, and one of the finest of their era.
They released five excellent albums with a mix of traditional tunes, and I have listened to them for over 40 years.They were another of the bands that I wish I had seen play live.
Two of the members later recorded an album called 'The Misty Mountains' which has some rather beautiful pieces too...
Some live performances for you to savour as well:
and 'The Working Man' from 1990.
Finally, here's the late Tony Cuffe and George Jackson performing 'Jamie Raeburn'.
A search for Ossian will also bring up a very different band with the same name...
I don't do a lot of dancing to be fair, which is a pity.
I'm a bit self conscious.
This means that the few times I've really danced were when I was a lot younger and with some friends back in Yorkshire and particularly where there was some sort of organisation to the dancing, so that everyone was involved. This means a ceilidh, or organised dance. They are also called 'step dances'.
The dance is explained first and then everyone is left to get on with it...
A band that I have certainly danced to is Blowzabella.
This track is called 'The New Jigs'
I've definitely danced to this one - it's called 'Falco'
And here's a final tune that is part of the set they play.
It's the opening track from their album 'The Imagined Village', and starts up above the Chalk Downs of the South Downs.
The band is a fusion mix of traditional musicians, with world music and electronic beats...
It's worth searching YouTube for other clips of their music, which include interpretations of other classic songs. They will appear elsewhere on the blog.
They deserve a place here if only for this CD cover...
It's an EP I have a copy of:
The first track is excellent for considering the multicultural nature of'English' people - one for Reform perhaps.
Released on Real World Records on 23 July 2007.
1. England Half English Meets John Barleycorn - Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy 2. Acres of Ground (Beats Mix) - Eliza Carthy 3. Welcome Sailor - Sheila Chandra and Chris Wood 4. Cold Hailey, Rainy Night (It’s Turned Out Nice Mix) - Transglobal Underground
This book from 2019 is subtitled: People, Music and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Britain.
Over the course of the twentieth century, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams is the piece of music that has come to define the mythical concept of the English countryside, with its babbling brooks and skylarks.
Yet, the landscape is not really an unaffected utopia, but a living, working and occasionally rancorous environment that has forged a nation’s musical personality. On a journey that takes us from post-war poets and artists to the free party scene embraced by the acid house and travelling communities,
Richard King explores how Britain’s history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.
This is a really interesting book on how landscape and nature have influenced composers over the decades.
I am preparing a longer piece on the book for publication later in the year.
It starts with an exploration of the story of the composition of one of the most popular pieces of English music.
Here's a performance specially filmed in... er, Queensland, Australia....
Here's the second guest blog post by Carl Lee, following his earlier post on the Sheffield clank.
Fado – a traditional music with a modern future.
Like so many cultural expressions across and within nations and people, origin stories are often contested, and Fado, the mournful ballad music so intrinsically associated with traditional Portuguese culture, is no exception.
What is clear is that this was a music that grew out of working class communities around the docks of Lisbon, in the early 19th century. It was music of loss and regret, of homesickness on travels to the new world and nostalgia for better times. Up beat and optimistic it is not, with Fado drawn from the Latin word fatum widely translated as meaning fate.
Some suggest Fado’s roots are longer than the early 19th century with it coming to Portugal from its colonies, or from Andalucía’s Arabic tradition. Whatever its cloudy origin story Fado is now a central part of Portuguese culture, so much so that it has been awarded UNESCO intangible cultural heritage status - see January 15th post - and tourists to Portugal soak up its repackaged authenticity in bars and clubs across Portugal, not simply in Lisbon.
Unsurprisingly for a music that grew up in a working class culture, instrumentation in Fado is not extensive with the Portuguese 12 string pear-shaped guitar being prominent. This made Fado a music that required little in the way of resources to deliver and its popularity moved out of the bars of Alfama, the port district with its narrows streets clustered around Lisbon cathedral up the hill to the more bourgeois neighbourhood of Barrio Alto and its more bohemian sensibilities.
Throughout the 20th century Fado was becoming music not just of the working class but also of the growing middle classes and even aristocracy. It then broke out of Portugal in the 1940s with the international recognition of Amália Rodrigues, sometimes know as ‘the queen of Fado’.
Rodrigues grew up living in poverty in the docks area of Lisbon but through her voice, honed in the Fado bars of her city, she became a worldwide star, with acting credits, performances across the world and with Portugal’s leading poets vying to write lyrics for her to sing. Rodrigues' most famous song was internationally know as ‘April in Portugal’ which referenced the central Portuguese university town of Coimbra where a separate tradition of Fado was developed by students, more formal with less poignant longing but a retained sense of nostalgia for past better times.
'April in Portugal'
When Amália Rodrigues died aged 79 in 1999 3 days of national mourning was declared in Portugal.
Although so much Fado today is performed in tourist venues, with a side helping of traditional Portuguese cuisine, it remains central to Portuguese national identity and younger artists such as Carminho have become stars of the genre albeit a genre that now draws in other influences such as pop and jazz.
What may take Fado to a new global audience is the Spanish singer Rosalia whose critically acclaimed 2025 album ‘Lux’ includes a Carminho fado song ‘Memoria’ which Rosalia sings in Portuguese. The lush production and classical music framework of Lux has been much admired with lavish praise coming even from the Vatican whose spokesperson acknowledged the album’s themes of religion, enlightenment and spirituality.
Rosalia - 'Memoria'
Memoria is the penultimate track on an album that is sung in 13 different languages from Japanese to Arabic. It is a Fado that dwells on how much we change over time and whether we remain ‘true’ to whom we were, or are.
“Siempre que me acuerdo de aigo.
Siempre lo recuerdo un poco diferente”
When I remember the past it always changes a bit.
Sources
History of Fado
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
More to come on Rosalia's Lux album in a future blog post.
It also has a list of other less tangible assets which deserve some sort of protection because of their connection with a particular place or region. These run into the hundreds and include a huge range of events and activities which are 'unique' to a place or group, and need protection to avoid dilution - much like the PGI status awarded to some foods which could otherwise be copied.
As you can see from the screen grab above - the 'objects' on the list include costumes, handicrafts, family traditions and rituals as well as dance and poetry.
Music is very well represented on the list.
Have you experienced some of these less well known musical styles or events on your travels? Perhaps you've come across a festival that you weren't expecting and that wasn't promoted particularly, or spent the night in a club when a startling act plays music of a kind that you've never heard before.
Here's a few examples:
- Oud
- Irish harping and the Uillean pipes
- the Hardanger fiddle in Norway
- the Chinese zither (guqin)
- Fado in Portugal
Some of these may well get their moment on the blog as the year progresses.
