Tag: All In Due Course

A major influence on English folk and dance for six decades, a stalwart of Muckram Wakes and The New Victory Band, All In Due Course is a tribute with various other singers from the tradition performing his songs. First up are Joe and Will Sartin, aka Patakas, with ‘Tides’, a retread of ‘Just As The Tide Was Flowing’ following the theme of change, the duo returning in the closings stretch with the often-interpreted brewing murder ballad ‘Barleycorn’. Flowing on wheezing violin, Sarah Matthews and Doug Eunson make their first contribution with ‘The Manchester Angel’, the story of a woman wishing to follow her soldier lover, recast here in the context of the Afghanistan war of 2001 onwards. Their second, with Matthews on vocals accompanied by sparse percussion, is ‘Catherine Shaw’, a Watson original but telling a familiar tale of a woman disguising herself as a man to gain access to an exclusively male occupation, here forsaking her position as lady’s chambermaid in Staffordshire to become a miner, travelling the world before being exposed and marrying her gaffer to live in luxury. songs

The stentorian-voiced Keith Kendrick likewise has a brace of songs, joined by Sylvia Needham on Anglo concertina and Sound Tradition adding chorus vocals. for ‘Black Cloud’, an anti-war number based on the shanty ‘Haul Away, Joe’, originally recorded in the context of the Kosovo conflict but here given an Aldermaston nuclear setting. Again with Needham and the Sound Tradition, his other is the ridiculously catchy singalong about working conditions, ‘John Kanaka’, reworked to direct its eyes at the parliamentary expenses scandals of the early 2000s. Kendrick on English accordion and Gill Redmond on cello, the vocal roles are reversed for a third number, ‘Spencer’, an economic downturn reworking of ‘Spencer The Rover’ with our separated hero only seeking the kids on weekends.

The Sound Tradition, Linda, David, Catherine and Moose, get their own unaccompanied turn in the spotlight with three tracks, first, their voices overlapping, ‘Watercress-O’, originating from his grandmother telling of a street cry from the years following WWI, before the strikes of the early 20s put him out of business, sparking the lyrics and arranged here using other street cries made by Thomas Ravenscroft in the early seventeenth century. The second is the 1967 Watson original ‘Night Visiting’, drawing on such genre examples as ‘The Grey Cock’ and ‘I’m A Rover’, our visitor forsaking the wine to spend the night with his sweetheart before returning to his native shore, with third lining up as ‘Lights Of Home’; that takes its departing traveller narrative theme from ‘Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy’ and ‘Swansea Town’. Moose also gets a solo outing with ‘Thomas Handley’, inspired by a Nottingham newspaper account of a poacher falling foul of the gamekeepers and their clubs in the early 1970s.

Lynn Heraud and Pat Archer are accorded three tracks, ‘Back To The Kitchen’, with Redmond on cello, written for Steeltown, an oral history play, the lyrics based on the words of Jessie Fowler who went to work in the steelworks during the Second World War, when her husband was conscripted. The second , ‘The Girl With The Blue Dress On’, also comes from a commissioned project, Age To Age, funded by Bracknell Forest Borough Council that drew on reminiscences from care homes and day centres residents or members, the character in the song emerging from workshops with a local Junior school and the tune borrowing from ‘Belle Of Belfast City’. Their third, with fiddle, melodeon and Iqbal Khan Pathan on tabla.is ‘Lay The Bent’, a Scottish ballad wherein a woman’s constancy is tested by a series of riddles, the refrain being “lay the bent to the bonny broom”.

The last of the double-ups is from Brian Peters, paying tribute to the ‘Nottingham Miners’, another inspired by a local newspaper cutting in the late 70s, Peters on melodeon and set to lively American fiddle tune ‘Frosty Morning’, paired with the five-minute a capella ‘Lovers Leap’, ostensibly setting up the tale of a double suicide following parental obstinacy, except this one ends happily with the eloping lovers escaping to get married in a Peak Forest church, the tune taken from the traditional ‘Cawsand Bay’.

The last of the guest artists is probably the best known, Jim Causley on piano accordion for Watson’s lyrical augmentation of ‘When This Old Hat Was New’, recast to be less about growing older but, referencing the welfare state and the unemployment crisis, the changes in society over the years.

Completing the collection are two rare live recordings of Watson himself, ‘The Navvy’s Tombstone’ from 1983, a memorial to the workers who died building the Settle to Carlisle railway, and from 1984, accompanied by Mike Draper on electric guitar (with a cello overdub), the closing six-minute ‘Dawn Chorus’ about growing older which he notes is his only song to use the verse and middle eight format, rather than the traditional verse and chorus structure.

Forced to retire due to ill health, his last album was in 2009 but All In Due Course serves as a fine reminder of his genius as a traditional-styled writer and interpreter of subjects both political and personal and if it prompts listeners to seek out his own recordings all the better.

Mike Davies

Label website: https://wildgoose.co.uk/product/all-in-due-course/

All In Due Course – sampler: