Giving Voice to Traditional Songs , livre ebook

Giving Voice
to Traditional Songs
Giving Voice
to Traditional Songs
JEAN REDPATH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1937–2014
As Told to Mark Brownrigg

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-892-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-893-7 (ebook)
Front cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin
Flourishes: Shutterstock.com , Olga Korneeva
To my friends Thank you for sharing and shaping my life
CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Family and Childhood Years
CHAPTER 2
Flying the Family Flag at University
CHAPTER 3
Flowers and First Steps
CHAPTER 4
A Fun Way of Living
CHAPTER 5
Living on the Road
CHAPTER 6
Moving into New Ventures
CHAPTER 7
My Trusty Friels
CHAPTER 8
Wherever I May Roam
CHAPTER 9
Honors? Have They Got the Right Person?
CHAPTER 10
What Do You Mean “We Have a Problem”?
CHAPTER 11
So Where Did My Journey Take Me?
Postscript
Glossary
Discography
PREFACE
Jean Redpath was a shy Fife lass who became an iconic folk singer—although, as was once said of her, “to describe Jean Redpath a folk singer is akin to describing Michelangelo as an interior decorator.”
This comment is scarcely an exaggeration. Jean sang—and sang superbly—what she knew and liked. She left us with an enormous catalogue of almost seven hundred recorded songs, covering everything from folk, to traditional Scots songs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Scottish “bothy ballads,” and traditional music in several languages; she also loved, sang, and recorded gospel music. In addition, she took time to champion a few recently composed ballads which she believed would be passed through generations of singers to become the traditional songs of tomorrow.
All of this, without reading a note of music. She picked up songs pitch-perfect by ear, then held them firmly in a memory which, for both lyrics and melody, was as retentive as a computer hard disk. That was how she learned as a child, and how she still responded to new discoveries in her seventies.
Despite this huge range of recordings, she was not simply a singer. She taught traditional song at several American and Scottish universities, covering activities ranging from participative group workshops and school outreach programs to formal university courses. She drew her students from, and performed in, many different countries, as far apart as Australia, Hong Kong, and South America.
An unbelievable journey for a shy, very bright girl who rebelled against family plans for her to be the first in the clan to go through university. Instead she left with, famously, five pounds (roughly eleven dollars at that time) in her pocket to sing at a friend’s wedding in California … with no plans beyond that. In the event, she flew to Philadelphia to perform in a coffeehouse, where the manager’s only interest was to keep her “on trial” and unpaid for as long as possible. He later disappeared with the club’s takings, while she hitched a lift to New York and, with her guardian angel working overtime, found space on the floor of a total stranger’s apartment in Greenwich Village. She shared this floor space with six other young hopefuls. Those who could get work sang and filled the fridge with the makings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; those who were still hoping ate them and did the housework and the laundry for the workers.
Jean’s chance came at a hootenanny at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, where she was picked from the audience to sing, then offered a contract for a week’s performances. She slowly built upon this and a second professional contract at the Caffè Lena, where she slept on a camp bed between the tables at night. When she could, she filled the communal fridge. When she couldn’t, she ate from it.
By chance, she was at the right place at the right time. The 1960s folk music revival started in Greenwich Village and spread first to California, then across America, creating a huge wave of interest that underpinned many careers—of which Jean’s was one, unfolding not without pain, and with much uncertainty. Jean said grimly: “I never quite had to sleep on a park bench, but it was close, real close, at times.” As her career evolved, she took to the road, sleeping in all sorts of beds and back-killer sofas, as the people who had booked her tried to look after her. When they couldn’t, and she could afford it, she booked into cheap hotels, including (quite unwittingly) a hooker’s palace. Cue chair wedged at an angle beneath the door handle, a true Fifer, Jean had spent her money and was damned if she would leave before she got her night’s sleep.
She was called in for interviewing at several radio stations—in these days, a pretty young single woman living on the road, with a half empty backpack and nothing but a glorious voice to offer, was a novelty. In true Jean fashion, she charmed with her singing and her humor, both the radio presenters and their audiences. As a result, she had an open invitation to drop in and go “on air” whenever she was traveling through an area—invaluable publicity, helping her to build a career. Which she did, rising steadily until she had performed at all the major folk festivals along with the greats and older seminal figures of folk and traditional music. Likewise, she graduated from singing in clubs to appearing at concert halls in most of the major cities in America and the United Kingdom—and elsewhere, including Australia.
Jean learned many of her songs during her family childhood in Fife, where she was part of a large extended family, most of whom sang or played musical instruments, and all of whom had an encyclopedic knowledge of every form of Scottish song from the “muckle sangs,” or the long traditional saga songs, to the “bothy ballads,” * which were the rough and often salacious songs of ploughmen, shepherds, and the like. Her range of songs grew when she “sang for beer” in pubs with a student group during her studies in Edinburgh, and linked up with Hamish Henderson, professor of Scottish studies, and his invaluable archive of traditional songs. From many thousands of miles away, Hamish did his best to pull strings, call favors, and find her work in the early stages of her career. Jean’s friends stayed loyal, always.
Jean’s handling of an audience was unique, reflecting her background of traditional song performed for family and friends around a homely fireside. Jean was a magician with people and mood. Whether handling twenty fans in a village hall in Thurso, or one hundred in an old wooden church in New England, or two thousand plus in a huge concert arena, she had a way of gathering in her audience around her, creating the same intimate and homely atmosphere for which the songs had been written and performed for centuries. If she felt her audience was too serious, she would sing an upbeat ballad and tell some outrageous personal anecdote which would have them roaring with laughter. Then, by switching to a more serious and somber mood, she could leave them in tears. She was a master entertainer who seldom had a preplanned program but simply made her programs up in response to the mood she found in her audience that night.
Unlike many other busy performers, Jean was scholarly, painstaking, and obsessive in her research. She hunted down the traditional songs, tracing them back through centuries from the great old women singers of the past with their cracked and worn-out voices, who had learned the songs from listening themselves and were now happy to pass them down. Where there were paper references, she explored them, checking detail. Where there were people, she drew them into her performances, always asking “Have you heard a different version of this?” or “Does anyone here happen to know the missing lines/verses in that?” In the Appalachian Mountains, she found old Scots songs which had traveled there with the waves of Scottish immigrants, then been handed down from generation to generation by their descendants. Tracing the variations in lyrics or melody between the cultures fascinated her. She ploughed through reference papers, books, and early recordings, making herself expert on what she sang—and taught. Her liner notes on every song she sang—all 667 of her recordings—usually held a thorough analysis of what the song meant and the historical context in which it had been composed. She was as much an academic expert as a singer.
In particular, she became arguably one of the greatest authorities on the songs of Robert Burns. Apart from her own research, she worked with Donald Low in Scotland to record the huge sweep of known Burns’s songs. In parallel to this, she worked with Serge Hovey in California to research and record Burns’s lyrics to the original melodies he himself had chosen—as opposed to the more familiar tunes which his publisher had substituted with an eye to the potentially larger English audiences. These original melody recordings took twenty years to complete—not least because they were largely funded out of Serge’s and Jean’s pockets (“You d