26 September : Peter Bellamy

(This post has been updated since originally published)

Peter Bellamy released two albums in 1970, The Fox Jumps Over the Parson’s Gate and Oak, Ash and Thorn. Wikipedia says the former was released in 1969, but that’s wrong.

The first of the albums is strictly ‘traditional’ folk: Bellamy accompanies himself on concertina or sings unaccompanied on most tracks, though Barry Dransfield adds fiddle on one track.

For many people, Bellamy’s voice is a problem. Bellamy has a clear tenor voice, which an occasional nasal quality, and a catch in his voice that resembled a tremelo. And he belts the songs out, with no compromise.

Rather like my early reaction to Roger Chapman of Family, I too found Bellamy’s voice offputting at first. Now that I’m older and supposedly wiser (I have my doubts), I found myself enjoying The Fox Jumps Over the Parson’s Gate, which I had not previously heard, a great deal.

One of the emergent themes of this project has been the uselessness of genre labels and their endless proliferation of divisions and subdivisions. There are, notoriously, difficulties in deciding just what constitutes ‘folk’ music before we even begin to think about what constitutes, for example, folk-rock. I like it all, but I have to say I have a lot of time for the traditional (which is hard to define, but you know it when you hear it). Oddly, precisely because it is ‘traditional’, it doesn’t sound dated or of its time at all.

I mention this because questions of ‘genre’ come to the fore with Oak, Ash and Thorn.

Oak, Ash and Thorn was the first in a sequence of recordings Bellamy did of poems by Kipling set to traditional tunes. It isn’t available on any online source I’ve found, but since originally writing this post I have bought the cd, and amended this post accordingly.

I’m not sure if it’s more of a tribute to Kipling, Bellamy, or both, but everything on this album sounds like a song preserved in the tradition or, perhaps, an adapted broadside.

Once again, he’s helped out by Barry Dransfield and also by Royston Wood and Heather Wood with whom Bellamy had formed The Young Tradition. Bellamy also plays some handy acoustic guitar on several tracks. Robin Dransfield adds harmonies on one track. For each song, Bellamy either came up with the tune himself or set the words to an existing tune.

I’ve played it through three times in the five hours since it arrived in the post, and I anticipate it going into rotation in the shed. It has accelerated to near the top of my favourite ‘folk’ albums, I like it that much. Is it a ‘traditional’ folk album or a collection of songs in that idiom? Frankly, I don’t care.

Bellamy, who dropped out of art school to pursue his muse in folk music, was hugely respected at the time, and his recordings of traditional songs and, later, his own songs, continue to inspire folk musicians to this day. Sadly, broke and unable to find work, he took his own life in 1991, aged 47.