Saturday 6 July 2013

Borrowing Ballads




This will be old news to long-time folkies, but I've only just come across the renderings of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads by Peter Bellamy.  It's the main benefit of using a streaming service like Spotify, that you can explore at will corridors of the House of Music that you would not normally enter, not least because the price of entry would be prohibitively high.  True, I often find myself backing out of a (metaphorical) new room fairly quickly, but occasionally I find myself somewhere so congenial I'm amazed Ive never been there before.

Frequent visitors will know about my developing interest in Kipling. You'll know the name, obviously, but  will probably not have actually read much of his output.  I certainly hadn't.  He seems to have suffered the same sort of eclipse in the shadow of a small, over-studied modernist canon as other once well-regarded writers such as Arnold Bennett or Ford Madox Ford, never mind oddballs like John Cowper Powys or W.H. Davies.  I'd swap any amount of D.H. Lawrence for Kipling's best work.  Yes, he was an imperialist, but he's also one of our most imaginative and empathetic writers, with a positively Shakespearean gift for inhabiting the minds of others (what Keats called "negative capability", and that great headologist Granny Weatherwax calls "borrowing"). 

Peter Bellamy's story is a sad one.  I saw him once in a folk club above a pub I used to attend as an underaged drinker around 1971.  It was a startling performance from an extraordinary man.  To say his voice was very loud with a distinctive braying timbre is to put it mildly.  He also had the dress-sense and camp manner of a down-at-heel Restoration fop.  I came to own a couple of albums by his group, The Young Tradition, and had a particular liking for their raucous renderings of sea shanties like "Chicken on a Raft" and "Hanging Johnnie".

Unlike most folkies, Bellamy's interests went wider than the simple performance of songs  -- probably "collected" from someone else's album -- that had somehow emerged from a vaguely-understood "folk culture".  He had an interest in the history and culture that had given rise to broadside ballads, and ultimately this led him down a road that might be called "Victoriana".  He became fascinated by Kipling, who was himself fascinated by the lives of "ordinary" people, and made the intriguing discovery that many of Kipling's "ballads" -- often a tricky read on the page -- would come to life when set to Victorian popular ballad tunes.  Sounds obvious but, like any stroke of genius, it's only obvious in retrospect.

The problem was, not many people could be bothered to follow him down that road at the time.  His alleged masterpiece (I have yet to listen to it) was a ballad-opera called The Transports, which told the story of the first transport ship to land in Australia.  It was well-received, critically, but it was 1977 and people were looking in a completely different direction, musically.  What could have been less fashionable then than a "ballad-opera"?  Bellamy's career dried up, and he eventually committed suicide in 1991, baffled by his own lack of success.

If you know the Barrack-Room Ballads but don't know this work and I have piqued your curiosity, I recommend you listen, if you can, to Bellamy's versions of "Tommy", "Route Marchin'", and "Danny Deever".  No matter how well you know these ballads, I think you'll find that Bellamy's rendering adds considerably to your understanding and enjoyment of Kipling's work.  He has got inside them in a true act of creative "borrowing".

11 comments:

Huw said...

Mike,

Perhaps like many people I knew Kipling more by his cultural standing and reputation than by direct experience of his work. Recently I found myself visiting Batemans, the house where he lived for the last 34 years of his life, and a grand and beautiful place it is (complete with Rolls Royce in the garage). I bought myself Kim afterwards and am thoroughly enjoying it. Perhaps more than normal as I lived in a bazaar in the sub-continent as a child, but it's a good story by any measure. I can see why it's aged though, as so many of the references and cultural assumptions are of a profoundly different era.

Huw

Mike C. said...

Huw,

Have you got an edition with his father's bas-relief illustrations? I've just read "A Little of Myself" (Kipling's autobiographical sketch) and hadn't been aware what an interesting person John Lockwood Kipling had been.

Mike

Huw said...

Mike,

It feels rather incongruous but I'm reading it on my Kindle!

A peculiar resonance has been realising the tray memory game we played in Scouts was based on the book (which I think I'd been told as a child but never quite processed).

Batemans is definitely worth a visit if you're in the area.

Huw

Mike C. said...

Huw,

Yes, the inter-relationship of Scouts (or even more, Cubs) with Kipling is quite deep and yet, as you say, never explained.

I think most of us went through Cubs thinking the Jungle Book was more by way of a "book of the film" than an independent pre-existing text. A later generation, of course, thinks the Jungle Book is primarily a Disney film. As far as I know, Kipling did not write "I Wanna Be Like You", though the nice thing is he could have.

Mike

Huw said...

Mike,

My daughters love the Just So Stories on CD read by Johnny Morris and have been coming to Kipling through that ('they held a palaver, and an indaba, and a punchayet, and a pow-wow' - great stuff).

And of course make no connection with the Jungle Book, although to add an extra meta-textual twist, they've only read the book of the Dinsey film...

Huw

Dave Leeke said...

Mike,

I used to own "The Transports" and my personal favourite track was "Us Poor Fellows" sung by Nic Jones - a huge lost British talent thanks to a horrific traffic accident.

I saw Bellamy during the seventies and must admit that whilst recognising his talent, I also feel that a capella (insert italics)can sometimes leave something to be desired, he was a wonderfully talented man.

Isn't Kipling illegal nowadays?

Mike C. said...

Dave,

I intend to give Transports a listen -- apparently it picked up an enormous reputation once Bellamy was safely dead. There seem to be many tales of him showing other singers a completely blank diary in his final years -- not a single booking.

He was probably the ultimate "finger in the ear" man, which is an acquired taste, and also one which is easily lost, after a mere 15 verses of a full-length ballad.

I will do you the favour of ignoring your Kipling joke, first made by Kipling himself. Sigh. It'll be "Muffin the Mule" next...

Mike

Martyn Cornell said...

"Do you like Dickens?"

"I don't know, I've never been to one."

Mike C. said...

Q: How do you like Elmore Leonard?
A:No, but I've got a dark-brown overcoat!

I know, it's the way I tell 'em!

Mike

Zouk Delors said...

My wife's gone to Switzerland.
Oh? Geneva?
No she neft me.

Dave Leeke said...

Please accept my apologies for starting that. However, he did make exceedingly good cakes.