The Folk Song Suite

Encapsulating the mood, the emotion of the time, and setting it forth right there in the concert venue, that's what we do, and last time we looked at the strange attractors of nostalgia and patriotism as the domain for a concert band's command. Here today I'm digging a little deeper, off into a topic that occurs over and over with our music, the whole sense of the deeper meaning of a repetoire piece, in this case Ralph Vaughn Williams' military band tapestry called the Folk Song Suite.


Today's film sets this so-typically-English tune where we normally encounter it, as a statement in nostalgic patriotism, an opus from over 'ome, the iconic epitome of England. That's how many approach the work, as a stately grand and respectful thing, woven from ancient quaint folk songs.


The real story, on the other hand, is quite different. To begin with, these are not just any folk songs; most are old baudy ballads, barrack-room tunes of lusty wenches and trickster maidens and the soldiers who woo both!


You see, in the historical perspective, we have Vaughn Williams as a soon-to-retire commander of a post-war peacetime army band, which is to say a squad of bored young men lead by a man with little or nothing to lose.

"But if you come round to my mummy's house, when the moon shines bright and clearly,

I will come down and let you in, and my mummy shall not hear me.



So I went down to her mummy's house, when the moon shone bright and clearly,

She did come down and let me in, and I lay in her arms till morning."

Ok, hardly competitors to Salt'n'Peppa lyrics, but remember, only the soldiers know the real lyrics of the tunes -- to the bystanding public, it is a quaint english ditty they may have heard hummed by grand-dad at work in the garden. We also have Lazarus and Dives which is the familiar barracks tales of Officers vs Enlisted Men where only one of them is going to find St. Peter's favour, There is the Green Bushes which one might parallel to Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree from WWII swing-era, John Barleycorn, a song about beer and the sad-sack Baffled Knight slyly outwitted by the maid of his (lusty) dreams. For the lonely-hearts, My Bonny Boy could well be the lament of the sweethearts left behind, or those yet to be. If you ask me, it's Soldier-Boy material all the way,


Amazon: Ralph Vaughn Williams

Amparito Roca

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqngm76MUPo&hl=en]

We're some days into a chilly spring today, and with half our band away to warm and exotic places, I had traveling shoes in mind. So we're off on the wings of the music, and nothing really trips us off to Spain like Jaime Teixidor's 1925 pasodoble, the always popular Amparito Roca.

The pasodoble! It's so flexible, so fluid and maleable, I had real trouble today choosing the definitive performance. It's a two-step proud bravado march, a tune to take to the streets, a fanfare to usher in your toreadors, or as your prelude to the kill ...

or, if you prefer, as captured here above, as a romantic dance for two :) Your choice.

Amazon: Amparito Roca

MacNamara's Band

A bit of fun to pipe you out of St.Patrick's season, a vintage sing-along cartoon that wades through some other tributes to the annual stereotype festival before it settles into a bouncing-shamrock rendition of Shamus O'Connor's war-time hit.


And what a hit it was too, solid gold for Bing Crosby back in 1945, you can hear (and sing along) that one over at Brownie-locks.


Apropos to our band-book, this song is (a tad satirically) about a community band, from the famed St. Mary's Fife and Drum Band out of Limerick, the four featured McNamara brothers emigrated to the US in the 1900's to form an ex-pat musical unit immortalized here by Bing's hit, and which, after some lyric edits and clensings, begat today's rollicking repertoire anthem to St.Patrick's.


Amazon: MacNamara's Band

Colonel Bogey March

Wikipedia tells us the Col. Bogey is the number one all-time top money-making march, and maybe only narrowly since the author had to slip out of the barracks on the sly and publish it nom-de-plume to keep his royalties. You can read all about it over there on the wiki page, fascinating story.


But I think the REAL story here is that here we have this one scratchy take by the famous Yorkshire Black Dyke Mills band, conducted by Arthur Pierce I'm not exactly sure when (it is similar in spirit and quality of sound to a Henri Miro I've heard from 1920) and the really wonderful thing to note for our opener-post here in the band-book is that here's that march then, and if you flip over to www.blackdykeband.co.uk you'll see that same band today, an unbroken tradition of over a 150 years.


And that, as they say, is what being a community bandsman is all about! It's a thread that weaves through time. From a small private corporation band (many corporations had concert bands back then) to an outfit fit to cut a disk for Paul McCartney and sit in sessions with Peter Gabriel!


Bet you a quid they still kick up a mean Col. Bogey too.


Amazon: Black Dyke Band - Colonel Bogey's March