New York - evergreentrad

09 Feb

Two Recent Radio Interviews

We thought we would share two of our favorite radio interviews we did in the past few months.

The first aired back in November 2013 on WMUK in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We performed in that area in October and had the chance to come in and talk to Cara Lieurance of the wonderful WMUK show The Pure Drop about Irish influence in the music of Great Lakes region folk singers. We also played three songs ourselves: “The Jails of Buffalo,” “The Banks of the Little Eau Pleine” and “How We Got Up to the Woods Last Year.”

Click to hear the interview and live studio performance on WMUK

The second is an interview Brian did on his own this past week with Todd Moe of North Country Public Radio in northern New York. Todd and Brian talked about Brian’s research into the life and music of Michael Cassius Dean and Todd even played a couple clips from the (digitized versions of) wax cylinders made of Dean’s singing in 1924. Not every day that wax cylinders make it on to the radio!

Click to hear Brian Miller’s interview on NCPR (including clips from the lost and found field recordings of Michael Cassius Dean).

03 Jan

Lonesome Hours of Winter (Laws H12)

Oh, the lonesome hours of winter provide both frost and snow,
Dark clouds around us gather, the stormy winds do blow;
You are the girl I have chosen to be my only dear,
But your scornful heart is frozen and fast locked up I fear.

I went one night to see my love, she proved most scornfully,
I asked her if she’d marry me to which she paid no heed;
The night being nearly passed and gone and near the break of day,
I am waiting for my answer, my love, what do you say?

Since you must have an answer, I choose a single life,
I never thought it fitting to ever become your wife;
You may take that for an answer, for myself I will provide,
I have chosen another sweetheart and you I cast aside.

Since you are for a-changing the old one for the new,
Then I will go a-roving, I’ll rove the country through,
Until I find some pretty fair maid so pleasing to my will,
Oh, this world is wide and lonesome, if one don’t, why another will.

I know you have great riches and more you’d like to gain,
You won my young affections which now you do disdain;
Your riches will not last you long, they’ll melt away like snow,
And when poverty will press you, dear, you’ll think of me, I know.

Some folks do seek for pleasure, but I no pleasure find,
The little birds sing sweetly all around on every vine,
The little birds sing sweetly, so pleasing and divine,
And so would my joys be flowing tonight if Nancy was only mine.
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I fell in love with this song recently and it seemed a perfect fit for this time of year. Several versions of this wintery ballad of unrequited love were collected in North America and the song likely originated here as never turned up among singers on other continents. The above text is from Minnesota singer Mike Dean’s songster The Flying Cloud. Unfortunately, Dean’s melody was not (as far as I know) preserved by either recording or transcription.

Fortunately, I was able to track down recordings of two of my favorite northwoods singers doing their versions of the song! The first, Angelo Dornan, is perhaps the most “Irish” sounding northwoods singer I have ever encountered (and he was at least two generations removed from Ireland himself). Dornan was born in southern New Brunswick and learned a treasure trove of beautiful songs from his father and other lumbermen in that area. His leisurely, highly-ornamented singing of the come-all-ye ballads popular in lumber camps stands side by side with the singing of great Ulster singers such as Paddy Tunney and Geordie Hanna. Dornan was recorded by collector Helen Creighton. (Listen to Angelo Dornan’s “Stormy Winds of Winter” here)

This fall, I was treated to another version of the song, this time from “Yankee” John Galusha of Minerva, New York. The Galusha recordings and transcriptions (made by Anne and Frank Warner and also by Marjorie Lansing Porter) make an especially appropriate cross reference for Dean’s songs as Galusha (1859-1950) was born one year after Dean (1858-1931) on just the other side of the Adirondack Mountains from Dean’s own birthplace. Unlike Dean and Dornan, Galusha wasn’t recorded until he was in his eighties. Still, he approaches the songs with a style not far removed from Dornan’s (and one can only guess what he sounded like in his younger days!).

The above melody is my own composite based on recordings of Dornan and Galusha who use variants of the same melody.

05 Dec

Banks of the Nile (Laws N9)

INTRODUCING: NORTHWOODS SONGS on YOUTUBE!

Starting this month, I will be videotaping myself singing the Northwoods Songs song of the month and posting it on Youtube. I am excited to add this new dimension to the column!

Here I am singing Mike Dean’s “Banks of the Nile” while on vacation in the pines of beautiful Bowen Island, British Columbia last week. [Listening now, I realize I have considerably changed the first line of the melody on every verse but the first! The many other variations and deviations are my own creative interpretation as well.]

Hark! hark! the drums are beating, my love, I must away,
I hear the bugle calling, I can no longer stay;
We are ordered out from Portsmouth for many a long mile,
To *[join the British army] on the banks of the Nile.

Oh, Willie dear, don’t leave me here behind to weep and mourn,
So I may curse and rue the day that ever I was born,
For the parting from my sweetheart is like parting from my life,
So stay at home, dear Willie, and I will be your wife.

The Queen she calls for men, love, and I, for one, must go,
The Queen she calls for men, love, I dare not answer No;
We must away to face the foe while cannons roar the while,
To fight with Briton’s heroes on the banks of the Nile.

Then I’ll cut off my yellow hair and go along with you,
I will put on men’s clothing and go see Egypt, too;
I will cherish and protect you through hardship and through toil,
And we’ll comfort one another on the Banks of the Nile.

Your waist it is too slender, love, your fingers are too small,
I am afraid you would not answer when on you I would call,
Your delicate constitution would last but a short while,
Among those sandy deserts on the Banks of the Nile.

Oh, cursed be the cruel war and the hour it first begun,
For it has robbed old Ireland of many a noble son;
It robs us of our sweethearts, protectors of the soil,
And their bodies feed the wild fowls on the Banks of the Nile.

But soon the war will be over and we’ll all be coming home,
Unto our wives and sweethearts we left behind to mourn;
We will kiss them and embrace them with their little winning smile,
And we never will return again to the Banks of the Nile.

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Once again this month we have a song I transcribed from a 1924 recording of Minnesota-based singer Michael Cassius Dean (with the full text taken from Dean’s 1922 songster The Flying Cloud). Versions of “The Banks of the Nile” have been collected all over the English-speaking world. The scenario of the girl pledging to dress as a man to follow her love to war (or sea) will be well-known to anyone familiar with traditional folk song.

As for the historical context, there were several British campaigns in Egypt (and Sudan which is also bisected by the Nile) throughout the 1800s culminating in Britain’s takeover of Egypt in 1882. This song likely dates from early to mid 1800s. Of course, two centuries later, western governments are still sending soldiers to that part of the world and the “cruel war” is far from over.

*Some versions of “The Banks of the Nile” mention the dark skin of the Eqyptian/Sudanese adversaries in the fourth line of the first stanza. Dean’s version does so in a rather offensive way so I opted to borrow a variant fourth line from other versions.