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".