The Holy Ground
Posted in Folk Music on Jul 27th, 2008 2 Comments »
When I first went to University in 1964, I immediately joined the “Ballad and Blues” Club. It was actually a folk club, but the title was I suppose, meant to show wider sympathies. There I got to see Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Guy Carawan, the Liverpool Spinners (rather good but somewhat disdained later for their commercialism), the Clancy Brothers and more. Tony Rose was a stalwart of the club at the time.
One of the popular songs at the time was the Irish song “The Holy Ground”. This usually came in after “The Whiskey in the Jar” or some other roaring song, to lower the temperature. Like all the best Irish songs, it’s about longing for home - always the exile’s holy ground - here through the eyes of a girl longing for her lover to return from sea.
Here’s Mary Black singing it.
Brought up a Catholic before the Second Vatican Council means that all my early experiences of worship are of the traditional Latin Mass - and almost ten years as an altar boy meant I officiated at one or more every week. But it must be forty years since I last went to one. The Latin Mass was replaced in the 1970s by the mass in the vernacular. Occasionally I attended versions of the mass on Sunday where some latin was allowed, mainly in the singing, but it was a weak and insipid thing compared with the original.
This is one of the Gershwins’ most unusual and beautiful songs. It is differently constructed from many of their other songs. The chorus is only 18 bars long, compared to the usual 32 bars of the standard popular song. In the standard popular song the 32 bar chorus is often the only thing we ever get to hear. In their original context, a show, revue or musical, they would have come with a verse, at least as an introduction to the song. Verses tend now to get left out. With ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ the chorus itself, beautiful as it is, is not long enough to sustain a performance alone. It needs the verse to make sense of it. Because of this, and more than in any other song I know, the verse is totally integrated with the chorus. The lyrics are below - chorus in italics. The performance is by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins at the piano, from a recording made in 1950.
This is Sophie Tucker, with a voice ten times larger than life, that hits you in technicolour. The song is more belted than sung - the fruit of performing for years in all those large unamplified music halls. It’s not really blue - but as I listen to it images do flash in my mind of those Donald McGill postcards of big women dominating puny men. It’s about female sexual appetite, here at its most menacing.
One of the most remarkable recitals I went to at Wigmore Hall was on 2 April 2001. The pianist was Joanna MacGregor and she was giving a recital of twentieth century works by Samuel Barber, George Crumb and Stravinsky. Ms MacGregor is not conventional - either in appearence or musicianship. She has long twisted, black hair. She wore a trouser suit. In the George Crumb piece you saw her dive into the belly of the piano to pluck and strum the strings inside.
In the early eighties, to escape the dismal surroundings of the Government Offices in Marsham Street where I was working (now mercifully demolished), every Friday lunchtime I would dash across to St John’s Smith Square to catch their broadcast concert. Unusually the concert on 30 October 1983 was packed and I was lucky to get in. I didn’t know who or what I was going to hear till I sat down. It was the American violinist Oscar Shumsky, accompanied by Roger Vignoles on piano. After years of teaching he had decided to return to the concert platform.
Carla Bley from here “Live” album 1981. As Old Fogey, this sort of music oughtn’t to be on my radar. But I heard the Humphrey Lyttelton band play one of her numbers at a concert several years ago, which sent me back to the original. Some of her longer pieces outstay their welcome and she doesn’t always avoid tricksiness or pretentiousness. But at her best, as in Song Sung Long, her music is exciting in the visceral way jazz used to be, before the intellectuals started to make it into an ‘artform’. The trombone player is the magnificent Gary Valente.
