Sheep-Crook and Black Dog

Abstract

Caroline Hughes. 2 x CD + 48pp. booklet. Musical Traditions MTCD365-6, 2014.116.00. In the early 1960s, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger visited a Gypsy camp a few miles outside Poole, Dorset, and gained the confidence of the community's matriarch, 'Queen' Caroline Hughes, who allowed them to record her extraordinary repertoire of songs. Sympathetic and meticulous collectors, they included much of her material, accompanied by vivid biographical notes, in the excellent volume Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland. As for the recordings themselves, low-fidelity cassette copies were for years passed between aficionados of traditional song (I still have one myself). It's to the great credit of Musical Traditions and Peggy Seeger--who granted her permission - that these important recordings are now available to all, accompanied by extensive quotations from the book. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caroline Hughes's singing is neither pure nor mellifluous. Nicotine-stained and roughened by years of hard, outdoor living, its rawness isn't easy on the ear, but it's intense and expansive, her deliberate pacing adding potent emotional gravitas to well- known songs like 'If I Were a Blackbird', 'The Butcher Boy', and 'The Running, Running Rue'. There's .a significant difference between these performances and the thirty songs from Peter Kennedy's 1968 visit that surfaced on I'm a Romany Rai (TSCD6782D), over half of which appear here too. By 1968 Mrs Hughes was in failing health (she died in 1971), sounding wearier and sometimes frail. The MacColl/Seeger recordings are stronger, more expressive, and pitched significantly higher; one suspects they are mostly from their first visit (in 1962, or 1963?), rather than a subsequent trip in 1966. It's sometimes claimed that Mrs Hughes's tunes are particularly distinctive; actually, the majority are pretty conventional, but here and there something unusual and beautiful strikes the ear. 'The Cuckoo' has a strange and gorgeous melody, flirting constantly with the seventh of the scale, while The Prentice Boy' - a magnificent and chilling performance - and 'Young but Growing' defy conventional modal assignation through irregular or microtonal pitching of thirds and sevenths. Mrs Hughes's lyrics are notoriously fragmentary; for a double CD running for over 140 minutes to include ninety-one titles indicates the vestigial nature of many items. In the longer pieces, stanzas from different ballads are intercut, character roles changed, and genders reversed, so that even the more coherent stories aren't necessarily conventional. In 'Sheep-Crook and Black Dog'--a fine version with its introductory verse set to a separate melody--the shepherd's lover is deceased rather than deceitful; while in 'The Broomfield Hill' the usually triumphant enchantress is murdered by her narcoleptic lover. Steve Roud, who helped out with the notes, clearly had a tricky task allocating to these textual collages their appropriate index numbers, creating new entries in several cases. …