Tag: Maid On The

In a small Welsh village in the summer of 1976, Jon Loomes recorded what was intended as one last stab, an uncompromising folk record made without concession to fashion or commercial success, However, a fire at the pressing plant destroyed almost the entire run, his label, Bounty Records went bust, master tapes went missing and the album, and Loomes disappeared, entering into the folk world myths of lost masterpieces. However, in the early 1990s, a battered vinyl album surfaced, priced 25p, and now the album, Dust In The Sun, 50 years on from its recording has finally been remastered and reissued.

None of the above is true, but it does make for a great publicity pitch for an album that, recorded in the spirit of the 1970s British folk revival and accompanied by a novel tracing its fictional creation and origins, sees Loomes interpreting a collection of traditional tunes joined by Rachel Crowther on bass, fiddler Tom Kitching, Troisnyx on side drum, Rakoczy on English pipes, recorders and concertina, Gill Loomes-Quinn on hammered dulcimer and Becky Taylor providing uilleann pipes, along with the Llandewi Brefi Coronation Silver Band.

It kicks off in sprightly style with the lolloping ‘Dame Durden’, a song from southern England that describes Durden household where she kept “five servant maids to carry the milking pail” and “five labouring men to manage the spade and flail”, who all paired off in assorted configurations on Valentine’s Day, the results becoming evident come Halloween.

A capstan shanty likely originating in the American south where “the girls all dance to the old banjo”, the sexually euphemistic ‘Roll The Woodpile Down’ takes a spare steady rhythm as it tells how “them Cardiff girls ain’t got no frills/They’re skinny and they’re tight as catfish gills/And they’ll roll your woodpile down”.

Given an intricate fingerpicked treatment with the words tumbling over themselves, ‘Noble Lord Hawkins’, sometimes known as ‘Sir Arthur And Charming Molly’, an amusing tale of a nobleman who chances upon a fair maid who refuses to be his mistress, declaring she’ll “n’er love a married man till his wife dies”, but draws the line at him offing the missus and kids, waiting instead until natural causes take their toll and they wed.

Featuring one of those “ring dong dilly dong, kai ro me” refrains that only a true folkie could embrace, taken at a bustling pace ‘Carrion Crow’ is a nursery song, albeit one with somewhat macabre lyrics in which a tailor show at arrow at the crow, misses and kills the family sow instead, the pace briefly slowing before he puts a positive spin on it contemplating the sausages and ham.

Clocking it at just over six minutes, ‘Bonny Bunch Of Roses’ dates from the 1830s and, warbled to a drone backing before the drums and pipes arrive, takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between Napoleon Bonaparte’s sickly son and his widow, the Empress Mary Louise promising to avenge his dead father by invading Britain, she warning that, like dad’s attempt to take Moscow, it will go badly and he dying before he can act.

Two five -minute tracks play back to back, the first, accompanied by circling fingerpicked notes, being ‘Maid On The Shore’, wherein a young captain lusts after the titular maiden who he pays his crew to bring aboard his ship to he can have his wicked way, only for her, seemingly a siren. to turn the tables, sing them into a deep sleep, make off with the treasure and dash the ship upon the rocks.

Opening with low whistle and taken at a slow walking pace, that’s followed by another shape changer song, ‘Selkie Of Sule Skerry’ a traditional folk song from Orkney and Shetland the tells how a woman has her child taken away by its selkie father, who pays her a nurse’s fee, and is fated to marry a gunner who will harpoon them both, history repeating itself with her daughter fated to be courted by a selkie too.

Anchored by a dancing fiddle, disguise is again at the heart of the jaunty ‘The Female Drummer’, one of any number of songs in the tradition about a woman posing as a man so she can join the armed forces, here a Bedfordshire who joins the Royal Artillery where “none of the other drummers ever took me for a maid”, only to be reassigned to the Tower Of London where her secret’s exposed by the girl who falls for her, refusing her captain’s proposal of marriage because “a man may leave the army, but a soldier he’ll remain…and should the British Army ever want for soldiering men/I’ll put on my hat and feathers and I’ll beat the drum again”. I do kind of suspect that the Jackie Wilson echoing line “it’s reet-petite to beat retreat” is Loomes’s own addition.

History hoists the flag again with the fingerpicked ‘Bold General Wolfe / Brave Wolfe’ which, immortalised in the singing of the Copper Family, is a narrative celebration of James Wolfe, a young Major-General who found fame for his 1759 victory over the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec, although himself being killed in the final moments. It ends with a scampering rendition of a number probably most closely associated with Steeleye Span, ‘The Two Magicians’, yet another shapeshifting tale in which the two characters transform into a variety of animals (not to mention a griddle, a cake, a bed, a coverlet, a ship and its captain and finally a flame) as the one pursues the other to take her maidenhead.

In its spurious blurb, Dust In The Sun is referred to as Loomes’s lost masterpiece. It was never the former, but it may well be the latter.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.jon-loomes.com

‘Maid On The Shore’ – live: