Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (Vintage Classics) by Angela Carter

Author:Angela Carter [Carter, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Forget the contemporary idiom: the ‘bird in the bush’ has nothing to do with girls up trees. This song has a tune of incomparable, melting beauty; it deals with Lawrence’s sort of sexual tenderness.

Sam Larner, the octogenarian Norfolk singer, speaks like a song, it is his idiom of speech: ‘Lovely! I wished . . . that’s all gone from me now and that’s the reason I don’t care if I live or die now, cause that was the . . . one of the main things I lives for, cause I loved it.’

Here’s a health to the bird in the bush . . .

Lamer spent most of his working life on the sea – it very nearly killed him; yet it gives a false picture of him as a singer to call him a ‘singing fisherman’. In the country, worthwhile singers are treated with respect and admiration; they and their repertoires were –– and in some places still are – the major sources of entertainment in places away from large towns, and so they were cherished and their whims were pandered to and some of them were quite prima donna-ish.

Lamer was at one time a star performer at fishermen’s concerts up and down the eastern seaboard and like all country singers, he is a splendid conscious performer, with spectacular timing and control. Your country singer is by no means just someone who gets up to give a song, all casual-like, as he sups his beer.

Songs that came from his father, from crews of ships he worked, from friends and acquaintances – Sam Lamer sings them in a plain, straightforward ‘let me tell you a tale’ way. He has a repertoire of about sixty-five songs, which seems large enough by any standards but those of the major traditional singer.

Another, and a finer, East Anglian singer, Harry Cox – surely the best of all living singers in the English tradition – has so many songs that people have lost count. His father was visited by some of the early collectors, the pioneers who went out to record and note down words and music from country singers so the songs could be preserved for our entertainment and enlightenment. One day Cox senior told a collector he wasn’t going to sing any more, he was going to retire; however, he had taught all his songs to his boy Harry, who would henceforth take over his position in the community. Whether or not this story is apocryphal, it shows the pride and sense of artistic responsibility of the country singer.

To hear the present Harry Cox is to be immediately aware that one is listening to an artist, and a conscious artist. He does not sing with his heart on his sleeve, as a grotesque parody of folksong like Joan Baez does, he sings from the heart. And a savage song about the brutal ill-treatment of a young boy by a ship’s captain:

With my marline spike I cruelly gagged him,

Because I could not bear to hear

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