Summer Mixtape #1: There's a Fine Roll of Honour Where the Maypole Once Was

This summer I want just to share music — that is mixtapes — rather than writing about music. If you’re here for the writing about albums I’m sorry — I am too in a sense, and summer is far too short, so this interlude won’t last long. Summer is certainly the high season of mixtapes I’m certain you’ll agree.

I have no particular program or schedule. Only thing is, it is summer — so the music, the tapes, in some sense, they’ll reflect summer. And they’ll come when they come, like the good weather.

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This is a strange one — it’s meant to be set in about 1913 in rural England. At the time that I made it (I’m not totally sure, but I think it was 2013), I was obsessed with traditional ballads (this obsession lasted a few years). That’s because my children liked to be sung to sleep each night and I thought it felt wrong to sing them to sleep with a guitar — so I sang without accompaniment. And singing unaccompanied brings back the older music, the folk songs and ballads and so on, that were my first favorite music and remain, each summer, the songs I return to in my heart.

The real purpose of the mixtape was to showcase the song that makes up half of the mix, the song my children still know as “The Long Song,” a suite of eight ballads stitched together by Shirley Collins into a suite. I memorized and sang the whole thing to them as the last song of the night (when it was time for them to really fall asleep) most nights that summer. A lot of the songs that make up the mixtape are (at least according to my research at the time) songs that Shirley Collins liked — sung or played by musicians she listened to herself.

That said, I lost my records for the mixtape, so I don’t any longer know what is what. I’ve managed to re-discover some of the information, but not all of it.

Hope you enjoy this little bit of ancient rural summertime:

1. The York Waits — Staines Morris (1:23)

2. George Butterworth — Two English Idylls (unsure who performed this) (11:51)

3. Unknown Singer (Maybe Bob Copper?) — The Week Before Easter (3:45)

4. Completely Unknown Instrumental (3:43)

5. Other Completely Unknown Instrumental (1:22)

6. Unknown Singer — Three Maidens A-Milking Did Go (1:38)

7. The Copper Family — The Rose of Allendale (3:40)

8. Shirley Collins & Dolly Collins with the Early Music Consort of London, A Song-Suite (28:10) — (Ballads in the suite are: Searching for Lambs, The Wedding Song, The Blacksmith, Our Captain Cried, Lowlands, Pleasant and Delightful, Whitsun Dance, and The Staines Morris)