Musical Traditions Club dates:
King & Queen, Foley Street, London W1 6DL - Junction of Foley Street/Cleveland Street. Nearest tube Goodge Street. Monthly, Fridays, 8:00 - 11:00 p.m.
Admission: (note new prices) £8, concs. £7 (Members £7, concs £6). On the door, from 7.30.
- Oct 25 - Len Graham (tie-in with Return to Camden)
- Nov 22 - The New Deal String Band
- Dec 13th - Belinda Kempster and Fran Foote
- Jan 17th 2020 - Looking ahead to Burns Night, an evening of Scottish Songs with Tracy Boyle - plus Roger Digby (Concertina) , Liz Giddings (Fiddle) and Tim Normanton (banjo)
For further information see our website: www.mustradclub.co.uk or to leave name & address for membership, ring 020 8340 0530 or contact: peta@mustradclub.co.uk
4.11.19
New MT Records '400 Series' release
Songs of the North Riding (MTCD406-7). This release will make generally available a large number of recordings which were previously scarcely known about. Of the 22 singers to be heard here, only Arthur Wood and Billy Pennock's names are likely to be remotely familiar.
In 1962 Colin S Wharton published his Leeds University degree thesis 'Folk Songs from the North Riding'. This thesis was the culmination of his collecting in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The finished work was 149 pages long and divided into five sections, according to subject matter: Songs of Love and Courtship, Songs from the Farm, Hunting Songs, Occasional Songs, and Songs of Sorrow. This release contains almost all the recordings he made.
It's one of our rare '400 Series' releases (like the Pop Maynard and Martin Carthy ones - the latter being no longer available) with 2 CDs in a double jewel case, and fairly brief notes.
MTCD406-7 2 CDs, 67 tracks, 160 minutes It's now available on the MT Records website, priced just £10.00
Rod Stradling - 20.9.19
Cellar Upstairs Club dates
All our nights are now held in the Calthorpe Arms, 252 Gray's Inn Road, WC1X 8JR (on the corner of Wren Street; 020 7278 4732). King's Cross, Russell Square and Chancery Lane tube stations are about 10 minutes walk away, and various buses go down (and up) Gray's Inn Road. For information, call 020 7281 7700, sheilamiller55@yahoo.co.uk or cellarupstairs@aol.com
- 7 Sept: Leon Rosselson
- 14 Sept: Moira Craig and Ron Taylor
- 21 Sept: Chris Foster
- 28 Sept: Fran Foote and Belinda Kempster
- 5 Oct: Mary Humphreys and Anahata
- 12 Oct: Dónal Maguire
- 19 Oct: Reuben’s Train
- 26 Oct: Robin Gillan
- 2 Nov: Ruth and Sadie Price
- 9 Nov: Alice and David Wylde
- 16 Nov: Allison De Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves
- 23 Nov: Russell Taylor and Gemma Khawaja
- 30 Nov: Kirsty Law
- 7 Dec: Klezmer Klub
- 14 Dec: Said the Maiden
- 4 Jan: Bird in the Belly
Information: 020 7281 7700, sheilamiller55@yahoo.co.uk or www.cellarupstairs.org.uk
Entrance: Members: £6, non-members: £8, except on nights marked *, when it will be £7 and £9.
Membership: £4 for the year
Resident Performers: Gail Williams and Jim Younger, Peta Webb and Ken Hall, Sue Williams & Frankie Cleeve, Bob Wakeling, Katrina Rublowska.
12.8.19
The Maria Marten ballad
Among the purchasers of our most recent CD release, Freda Palmer: Leafield Lass (MTCD375-6), was Tom Pettitt, Affiliate Research Professor at the Centre for Medieval Literature and Cultural Studies Institute at the University of Southern Denmark. Tom has alerted me to something which really ought to have been commented upon in the booklet notes; that the song Maria Marten (Roud 18814) is not the one normally known by this name. Indeed, there have been at least nine broadside ballads dealing with the murder of Maria Marten, although only two appear to have made it into the oral tradition. The 'usual' one (Roud 215), titled The Murder of Maria Marten, which usually has the first line: "Come all you thoughtless young men", was published by many of the main broadside printers and was collected extensively from performance tradition in England in course of the 20th century. Indeed, it was long thought that it was only this version that had passed into oral tradition.
However, another song on the same subject was collected by George Gardiner from George Digweed, of Micheldever, Hampshire, in 1906. Subsequently it was found in the repertoire of both Sally Sloane, of Lithgow, New South Wales, and the Bobbin family, also of New South Wales. Subsequent to that, Mike Yates recorded it from Freda Palmer in 1972. It appears that this song was titled The Suffolk Tragedy, or the Red Barn Murder in its broadside printing, with a first line: "Young lovers all I pray draw near and listen unto me".
Tom Pettitt has very kindly created a special composite document for publication as MT Article 316, of which he writes:
This document and my 'discursive' bibliographies on other murdered sweetheart ballads are available on academia.edu, but access seems increasingly complex, and the fact that there is more than one broadside ballad about Maria Marten seems not to have gained much of a foothold in discussion. I am accordingly grateful to Musical Traditions for facilitating this supplementary mediation. The exercise has also resulted in some updating of the material and the mending of broken links.
I would suggest that this article, together with the links to other works found within it, should tell you pretty-much all you might ever need to know about Maria Marten and her place among the 'murdered sweetheart' ballads. Had I read this first, I wouldn't have written notes about the wrong song in the booklet!
Rod Stradling - 19.4.18
Important! Website security - HTTPS
New versions of web browsers will soon start requiring HTTPS, a secure version of the commonly used HTTP protocol, for websites you visit. You may see a notification like this (right) when you try to visit a site that doesn't use HTTPS.
As with most new things, getting an HTTPS certificate will have a cost - in the case of Musical Traditions Magazine and MT Records, the cost would be £160 in the first year, rising to £320 in the second and subsequent years. Added to that, there would be many hours of re-writing our web pages, and problems for users if I didn't get it perfectly right the first time.
And what benefit would you, as an MT reader, gain? Absolutely nothing, because nothing in the magazine is ineractive, requiring any of your personal details. Purchasers of MT Records' CDs or Downloads also gain nothing because all the financial transactions are dealt with by PayPal - which is a secure HTTPS service.
So - I will not be converting either the Magazine or the Records website to HTTPS because there is nothing here which is insecure. You can click the 'Not Secure' button if/when you see one, without any concern.
Rod Stradling - 22.3.18
