Re: What's a folk song? - A list of them

Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:28:36 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Size: 2,073 bytes

"Tim Rowe" <tim@remove_if_not_spam.digitig.co.uk> wrote in message
news:email-address-deleted...
> On 16 Jul 2003 09:58:07 -0700, email-address-deleted (J. Byron)
> wrote:
>
> >Of course Paul Simon wrote the unusual guitar part that people know,
> >but I figured the melody was the same as in the original. However, one
> >vintage songbook I obtained shows a very different version of the
> >melody. What was Paul's source? Anyone know?
>
> He got it from Martin Carthy. Apparently there was a legal case over
> him not crediting Carthy for the bits that were original, but they
> shook hands and made up a few years later. Stuart Maconie was talking
> about this on R2 a few weeks ago.
The "Paul Simon" guitar part was copied virtually note-for-note from Martin
Carthy; this is a matter of record, extensively explored here and in many
other places in the past. Simon also got the tune and text from Martin; he
in turn, unless memory quite defeats me, got that particular set from the
Yorkshire folk song scholar Frank Kidson's book "Traditional Tunes" (1891).
A few words of no particular consequence were changed; Simon copied those
changes too. Kidson noted:
"The present copy, including the tune, used to be sung by a ballad singer in
Whitby streets twenty or thirty years ago, and is still remembered in the
district."
Paul Simon's contribution to his own recording was the "Canticle" part, a
poem which -again, if memory serves- he had recorded on its own on an
earlier album. The result was a fine piece of work, though most of it was
not his own. That is all resolved, now. There are many traditional versions
of the song, and quite a few tunes, too, so you will certainly find some
which you don't recognise. They go back quite some time, too, so that
probably only a minor deity would be in a position to identify "the
original", I would think.
Malcolm Douglas
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