A-Swinging Down the Lane
2015; Volume: 10; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2056-6166
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoThe Willett Family. 2 x CD + 32pp. booklet. Forest Tracks FT2CD KS1, 2013.[pounds sterling]15.00. Adieu to Old England The kit. Family. 2 x CD + 29 pp. bot>1.1ct. Musical Traditions MTCD361-2, 2013. [pounds sterling]16.00. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When Topic Records released the Roving Journeyman LP in 1963, it was something of a milestone since it was the label's first full-length album of field recordings of traditional English singers. Those recordings, featuring 84-year-old Gypsy singer Torn Willett, along with his sons Chris .and Ben, had been made specifically for Topic by Paul Carter and Bill Leader. But they were following up on a lead provided to them by Ken Stubbs, who had visited and recorded the family two or three times in the early 1960s. In recent years, the LP has been made available as a .digital download, while some of Peter Kennedy's 1963 recordings of Tom and Chris are included on Topic's I'm a Romany Rai. Mike Yates's 1970s recordings of Chris Willett have also been included on releases by Topic and Musical Traditions. Until now, however, none of Ken Stubbs's field recordings of the Willetts has been put into the public domain. Bizarrely, these two double CD sets, containing more or less identical recordings, were released within weeks of each other in 2013. This was not the result of some ill-conceived commercial clash between rival publishers, but simply the result of Paul Marsh of Forest Tracks and Rod Stradling of Musical Traditions having worked independently, in ignorance of each other's plans. The Musical Traditions recordings came via Jim Ward, whom Stubbs had allowed, as long ago as 1973, to copy all of his recordings, with permission to have them released in any way he could. Then, in 1980, before going to work in the United States, Stubbs gave his original tapes to his friend Chris Addison, again with encouragement to make them more widely available. Ken Stubbs died in 2008, but not before Paul Marsh had gained his consent to digitize all of the recordings and make them publicly available. A-Swinging Down the Lane is the first release in this programme, and the prospect of eventually having access to all of Stubbs's field recordings is one to excite any lover of southern English country music and song. Readers of this journal will probably be familiar with Musical Traditions' releases of traditional music. The label has a particularly fine track record of releasing recordings of English Gypsy singers. These releases invariably feature substantial, informative booklets, with background details of the singers and their songs, and transcriptions of the song lyrics. The present set is no exception. But, further compounding the difficulty of recommending either of the present releases over the other, exactly the same can be said of the Forest Tracks booklet. The Musical Traditions booklet has rather more background information on the songs--by Paul Marsh's own admission, this is not something that particularly interests him. The Forest Tracks booklet, on the other hand, has more detail on the members of the Willett family, and on Ken Stubbs himself and his work as a collector. Marsh has benefited from having been able to interview Stubbs--late in life admittedly, when health and memory were failing, but he was still able to provide information that helps set the recordings in context. In terms of audio quality, Stubbs's recordings fall short of those made by subsequent collectors, for the simple reason that his equipment was inferior--in particular, because he used a hand-held microphone. …
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