Eliza Carthy

The Best British folk songs, as chosen by British folk singers

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A brief article and playlist in which British folk singers select their favourite British folk songs and explain what makes them special.

By John Wilks

When we first came to traditional folk music, we stood at the foot of the mountain and wondered at the sheer size of what loomed ahead. There’s just so much of it – we can fully understand why many people might find it daunting and put it much further down their bucket list. As many of our readers will have experienced themselves, however, if you can find an initial foothold then you’ve found your way onto a joyful exploration and adventure that will likely last you a lifetime.

Finding that first chink isn’t easy, though. You might find it by chance – a centuries-old song that grabs you and sticks with you and makes you wonder what else might be out there – or you might find that someone offers you a leg-up.

Over the last few years, we’ve had the great fortune to chat and spend time with some of Britain’s better known folk performers. The thing about folk music and its exponents, of course, is that none of these people are necessarily ‘the best’ at what they do. After all, each have tales about some chap in some pub somewhere who can play the hind legs off all the donkeys, but chose not to make a career out of it, or someone legendary who passed away years ago (but, boy, you shoulda heard them play the spoons).

That said, it’s worth noting that the people who helped us with these articles do make their living by singing traditional folk songs, and probably spend most of their waking hours immersed in some part of that world.

A playlist: Some of the best traditional folk songs

This British Folk Songs Playlist series was intended to be a fortnightly collection of snippets and recommendations from various well-known folk singers living and working in Britain today, each talking about the old ballads and folk songs that inspired them, offering newcomers to the genre a leg-up so that they can find their way forwards. I hope you find it useful.

Included in this list…

‘Clyde Water’: chosen by Jim Moray

Roud number: 91

What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?

“I’m not sure that you can separate the singer from the song at the level that gets under my skin. Part of things being of ‘the oral tradition’ means it deeply matters to me who is singing or playing, and whether they can communicate stuff.

“So my choice would specifically be Nic Jones’ live version of ‘Clyde Water’. He told me that he felt that he missed the mark on the recorded version (recorded as ‘The Drowned Lovers’ on Penguin Eggs) and the arrangement he was playing live just before his accident is one of the greatest pieces of storytelling that I’ve ever heard. It’s available on the Game Set Match compilation, but my favourite recording comes from an Italian bootleg from the ‘Teatro Bonci’ in Cesena.

“Folk singers sometimes have a habit of thinking that singing something slowly makes it more profound (when, actually, it just makes it take longer to get to the important bit). Nic had skills almost comparable with a great Shakespearean actor of knowing which part of a line contains all the weight, and how to pace it so you get caught up in a tidal wave as the story reaches its conclusion. There are other long ballad performances which do that for me (including things by Martin Carthy and June Tabor) but Nic was the master of it and that song is the peak of his ability.

“It’s not a version that you will find in a book in Cecil Sharp House of course – he made it out of parts from different versions and crafted it to fit in his own vocabulary. And that’s what the best people do – they make the song their own truth instead of someone else’s. And thats what traditional music is about for me – finding your own truth in something that other people owned before you came along, and that other people will pick up when you’re done with it.”

Where can you find out more about ‘Clyde Water’? 

As a Child ballad, ‘Clyde Water’ also takes the name ‘The Mother’s Malison’. Child noted three places of origin, including a collection of it from “Mrs Brown’s recitation, apparently in 1800”. Reinhard Zierke notes at least five sound recordings of it before Nic Jones’ performance was released on Penguin Eggs in 1980, so it’s not surprising to find that – as Jim Moray says above – what may be the best-known version is an amalgamation of several others.

If anything, this wonderful recording points to the danger of assuming that ‘a folk song’ sung by a performer is an accurate representation of how it may have been in the past. As we’ll see in our forthcoming interview with folk song historian, Steve Roud (check back next week) – and to pick up on Jim Moray’s point – a performance of a folk song in modern times can only ever be a snapshot of something organic and transitory. The chances of it sounding very much like the original are slim indeed.

Find out more about Jim Moray: jimmoray.co.uk

‘Adieu, Adieu’: chosen by Jack Rutter

Roud number: 490

What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?

“My choice of song is ‘Adieu, Adieu’. It got to me first through The Watersons’ album For Pence and Spicy Ale and also Martin Simpson’s album, Kind Letters, both of which I took out from Huddersfield Library in my mid-teens and both of which are still in my top 10 favourite albums of all time.

“I love the tune so much, and throughout the song’s many versions, interpretations and performances (it’s also known as ‘Newlyn Town’, ‘The Flash Lad’, ‘Wild and Wicked Youth’) I really like the chap’s forthrightness when faced with his oncoming execution. It’s one hell of a cinematic song.”

Where can you find out more about ‘Adieu, Adieu’? 

If you’ve been following the British folk scene closely over the last two decades, you’ll already know this song well. It’s something of a modern Greatest Hit – Reinhard Zierke lists at least 15 professional recordings of it since the year 2000 alone.

The sleeve notes to The Watersons’ version describe it as, “The ace and deuce of robber songs”, noting that, “English, Irish and American versions of it abound.” However, it’s Eliza Carthy who sums it up in the most pithy manner, writing in her sleeve notes to Fishes & Fine Yellow Sand, that this is:

“…the story of the tragic Good Time Boy from Newry Town who just robbed a few people who had far too much of everything. Did them a favour really. Less for them to worry their pretty little heads about. And one does what one has to for one’s girl friend who so likes shopping. Sooo likes it…

These songs of terminal regret were literally two a penny in the 17th to 19th centuries. The ballad writers of the time would sell the songs under the gallows just as the unfortunate crime was getting his or her desserts – just or otherwise – right there and right then. Here in its cradle is the modern music industry.”

Find out more about Jack Rutter: jackruttermusic.com

‘Georgie’: chosen by Nicola Kearey (Stick in the Wheel)

Roud number: 90

What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?

“It was so vital sounding – about a place in London. The woman saying, ‘yeah, I’ll take you all on’. It just had a fierceness I could get behind. I first heard Martin Carthy playing it in his garden for the BBC Folk Britannia programme. That is the only version you want.”

Where can you find out more about ‘Georgie’? 

‘Georgie’ (also known as ‘Geordie’) has been recorded by a great number of people, with Nicola Kearey’s version (on the Stick In the Wheel From Here field recordings compilation) perhaps being the most recent. As usual, a comprehensive list of recorded performances can be found on the Mainly Norfolk website, but key versions include those sung by Martin Carthy (as mentioned above), Sandy Denny, Shirley Collins, Peter Bellamy, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl (at least twice).

While Nicola places her version in London (as do many other singers), approximately 360 entries can be found in the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House relating to this song, with versions having turned up everywhere from London Bridge to Aberdeenshire to Nebraska. Cecil Sharp alone seems to have collected over 20 fragments in places as far flung as Cannington, Somerset, to Villamont, Virginia.

While many singers attribute their version to Cecil Sharp’s collecting of it in East Coker, Somerset (sung to him by a chap named Charles Neville on September 3rd, 1908), A. L. Lloyd felt that it owed its existence to, “several different ballad strains. The ballads in question are a traditional Scottish ballad, the earliest known version dating from the end of the 18th century, and two English broadsides, both of which date from the 17th century.”

As great and robust songs go, it doesn’t get much greater than ‘Georgie’. It’s a marvellous example of one of those wonderfully well-travelled folk songs, able to adapt to most surroundings.

Find out more about Stick in the Wheel: stickinthewheel.com

‘Cariad Cyntaf’: chosen by Ffion Mair of The Foxglove Trio

What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?

“The traditional Welsh love song Cariad Cyntaf is a great song. The lyrics are powerful (lots of hyperbole about how wonderful a woman is – the song title translates into English as ‘First Love’) and the tune has a lot of passion. It’s short and has an irregularly-lengthed last line. These two things mean there’s plenty of scope to play around with timings and arrangements.

It has a special place in my heart because it was when I heard Julie Murphy and Dylan Fowler’s arrangement of this song on their CD Ffawd that I realised how much you can play around with folk songs/tunes. It’s also a special song for the band – we all played versions of it before we formed and our current arrangement came about by playing two previous arrangements on top of each other! It’s one of our most played songs to this day.”

Ffion also keeps a blog focusing on traditional Welsh songs, their origins, their meanings and the performances of them. On the subject of ‘Cariad Cyntaf’ she writes:

“In the song we hear someone telling his lover that he loves her and that he wants to marry her. It’s a monologue so we don’t get to hear her response. I always tell audiences that they have to guess what her answer was to the question about getting married but that the sad melody gives us a clue. But perhaps it’s not a simple matter of unrequited love – perhaps the girl does love him back but something, such as meddling parents, is going to keep them apart which is why the boy is lovesick and the tune is so mournful.”

Where can you find out more about ‘Cariad Cyntaf’?

Tough question, unless you can speak Welsh (drop me a line on Twitter if you can and you have any information). However, a lovely anecdote concerning this song and the Welsh folk song collector, Ruth Lewis, appears in Phyllis Kinney’s book, Welsh Traditional Music. 

“In 1909, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales held in London, J. Lloyd Williams gave a lecture on collecting Welsh folk songs, which resulted in tremendous enthusiasm for this aspect of Welsh traditional life. Despite this, some highly regarded Welsh musicians still maintained that everything of value had already been published, and any other folk tunes that might be discovered would prove to be worthless…

Wherever possible, Ruth Lewis tried to find someone who knew the area and could locate suitable people willing to sing into the phonograph. Sometimes, to get them started, her daughter Kitty would sing a few Welsh airs and with patience they got songs from farmers and blacksmiths, weavers and housewives, including some country-dwellers who could only speak Welsh. In this way they collected a number of songs, some of which were published, but many more can be found in her unpublished collections in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the Welsh National History Museum in St Fagans…

‘Y-Cariad Cyntaf’, with words and music from an earlier period, was transcribed from her phonograph recording of the singing of an Aberystwyth van driver.”

Since the auspicious singing of said Aberystwyth van driver, several people have recorded ‘Cariad Cyntaf’, including Bryn Terfel (performed on the Last Night of the Proms, 2008), Meredydd Evans (a great, scratchy old recording), 9Bach, Elin Manahan Thomas and Wyn Pearson. The Foxglove Trio’s version of the song can be found on their 2013 EP, Like Diamond Glances. 

Find out more about The Foxglove Trio: thefoxglovetrio.wordpress.com

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Eliza Carthy: ‘Folk music is sexy and filthy and at the end of the night you fall over. That’s how I live’

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She was the pink-haired fiddler who punked up folk, but Covid almost sank her and her famous family. Eliza Carthy talks about going broke, bereavement and the healing power of boozy, bawdy music

By Dave Simpson

At the start of this year, things did not look good for the Waterson-Carthy folk dynasty. It was, as Eliza Carthy put it, “struggling to survive”. Her mother, the celebrated singer Norma Waterson, had been unable to tour for a decade after falling into a coma that left her having to re-learn how to walk and talk. She’d never returned to full health and had recently been hospitalised with pneumonia. Meanwhile, Covid lockdowns had deprived the MBE-awarded Eliza and her father, the revered singer-songwriter Martin Carthy, of their means of income. Being self-employed, like many artists, they didn’t qualify for furlough, just a small business grant that lasted six months.

“By the third lockdown,” says Carthy, “we were looking at selling our instruments.”

Then an old agent friend in the US suggested Carthy launch a public appeal for help. “You wouldn’t believe the people who gave us money,” she says. “It’s been comforting and heartbreaking.” Sadly, Waterson passed away in January, aged 82. “We weren’t allowed to see her until the last day,” says Carthy. “And she was gone by then. But we’d been FaceTiming and I got to tell her how much was in the fund. She looked at me and just said: ‘The children are going to be safe. The house is going to be safe.’ And that’s the first time we’d felt like that for a decade.” She reaches for a tissue, to wipe away the tears rolling down her face. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but it’s been really hard.”

We’re sitting in the kitchen of their congenially cluttered family home in Robin Hood’s Bay, a fishing village on the North Yorkshire coast. At the back door, her 81-year-old father – who influenced Bob Dylan and taught Paul Simon to play Scarborough Fair – is feeding chickens. Carthy moved back in 2011, becoming a “part-time carer and single mum”, as well as running her own band. On the wall are posters for NormaFest, the festival she set up in 2015 so her mother could at least perform locally. “She was a classic matriarch – loving but firm,” says Carthy, brightening at this happier memory. “When I moved back, she wanted me here but didn’t want me to touch anything.” She laughs and gestures towards a laptop plonked on a kitchen worktop. “She’d say: ‘This isn’t your office! It’s a food preparation area!’”

Lately, Carthy has thrown herself back into music. This month, she releases Queen of the Whirl, an album of fan favourites chosen by a Twitter poll and re-recorded with her crack band the Restitution, to celebrate the 30 years since she skipped her A-levels to become a professional musician. Her parents led the “folk revival” in the 60s, but Carthy is seeking to refashion the genre for a modern world, fusing traditional and contemporary music with rock guitars, reggae rhythms and sometimes edgy subjects, mixing in the bawdiness and vulnerability she displays in person.

“I object to the Brit-centric definition of folk,” she says, “which is very white and safe and fixated with acoustic instruments.” In her role as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, she has been keen to shake things up, diversity-wise. “To me, Ariana Grande is folk music. Bohemian Rhapsody is folk. I define folk as whatever you can sing in a pub – and for people to be able to join in and be as shit as you like. Folk music isn’t clean. It’s sexy and filthy and at the end of the night you fall over. And that’s how I like to live.”

Quite literally, in some instances. The song Blood on My Boots describes the night her friend, the comedian Stewart Lee, invited her to the premiere of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he co-wrote. After four glasses of champagne, Eliza hit the cold night air and took a tumble. “They found me under a bridge,” she says with a laugh. “I literally had blood on my boots.”

She recalls the first time she picked up the fiddle, in her case one that had belonged to her grandfather. In the nicest possible way, she says: “I didn’t want to be my dad.” Female fiddlers – give or take a Kathryn Tickell or Helen O’Hara – were rarer in the late 80s and 90s, never mind sporting bovver boots and a buzz cut. “Someone said: ‘You’re trading on your youth and beauty.’ I was like: ‘You wot?’” She dyed her hair pink and blue and toured the folk clubs, getting by on four hours’ sleep on couches. “In some ways, it was punk,” she says. “At one point, I woke up in a bed and it was snowing on my face.” In another incident, when her vehicle broke down, she tested the old wives’ tale about sealing a leaky radiator with a dozen eggs. “It didn’t work. We just got a radiator full of scrambled eggs.”

Gradually, after encountering some resistance from the more traditional folk camp, she earned their respect as other younger musicians emerged, such as Seth Lakeman and Jock Tyldesley. “I credit the folk scene for that,” she says. “I think they realised that if they didn’t get new blood, it would just be a case of them waiting for the phone calls telling them another old artist has died. Instead, they let us in and said: ‘Show us what you’ve got.’ Sometimes we fell on our arses and sometimes we didn’t, but the great thing about folk clubs in the 80s and 90s is they held folk up and that’s why my dad still plays the clubs. These people weren’t professional promoters. They were social workers, nurses, teachers – decent people who built stages that kept us all alive.”

After 1998’s Red Rice, often called her “drum’n’bass album”, was nominated for the Mercury prize, as was Anglicana five years later, Warners signed her up, hoping for “a cross between Joni Mitchell and Judy Garland”. They perhaps weren’t expecting such songs as The Company of Men, which begins: “I’ve given blowjobs on couches / To men who didn’t want me any more / Why didn’t they tell me before?”

She laughs at the memory. “It’s interesting encountering your early 20s self. There are certainly things that I’m not prepared to do any more.” As she tells it, she’d been inspired by Ani DiFranco’s songs about “abortions and stuff” which gave her the desire to be “completely honest” about a real life incident. She’d had her heart broken and the line “I don’t want to be one of the beautiful people” is pointed. “I was still in love with him and he said: ‘It doesn’t matter, because we’re the beautiful people.’ I thought: ‘No. I’m a scrubby little asshole from Yorkshire and I don’t like you very much. I’m a punk and you’re an arsehole!’” Her mighty cackle fills the kitchen. When the time came to record the song, she says, another musician walked into the studio. “I thought: ‘Oh Jesus, it’s Nick Cave and I’m singing about blowjobs!’”

She now describes herself as a “carer”. When her band got ripped off and didn’t get paid, she recorded a solo album, 2019’s Restitute, in her bedroom and sold it on the web to compensate them. Lately, she’s been planning her father’s Covid-delayed 80th birthday gig at the Barbican in London, writing her next solo album and – after being further waylaid by the virus – teaching music at her old school in Robin Hood’s Bay. “You can’t put a value on the emotional and spiritual awareness that music brings from an early age,” she says. “Music is mathematics. You can actually learn about the science of how arpeggios affect your nervous system. Music is so undervalued. It can be life-changing.”

By playing it – and reaching out to people again – she’s starting to put this year’s sadnesses behind her. “I found coming out of the pandemic traumatic at first,” she says, “because it reminded me of all the pain and isolation. But whenever we’ve performed, I’ve felt that collectivism again – and laughter and people. The pandemic’s brought up a lot of stuff and I’ve thought: ‘Maybe I should call so-and-so.’ And that’s been really lovely.”

Source: Eliza Carthy: ‘Folk music is sexy and filthy and at the end of the night you fall over. That’s how I live’