All Along And Down A Lee

Lowestoft Folk Club
April 1967

Dear Martin,

I hope this letter catches you while you are still in Manchester, or if not that Julie will know where to forward it. I am sorry the record has disappointed. The release was mishandled in my opinion. It is a very coherent work, and a regular on my turntable, but you are right, few at the club even know it exists.

Which brings me to your request. I am very sorry but a Saturday night is out of the question. Those are the nights which pay the rent and we must have punters through the door to survive. We are doing every other Tuesday now, and of course a support slot is always yours if you want it.

And while I am dispensing bad news I should tell you (it is better you hear it from me) that we have Kate and John booked in next month. I know the split has been difficult but you understand I cannot take sides. They have the band name, which counts for a lot, and their new release is crowd pleasing stuff even if aficionados like myself will mourn the absence of your guitar.

By way of recompense I am including a song – or parts of one. Sandy found it in T____ (near Whitchurch) sung by a Mrs Bargate in the church hall. She sung for him for half an hour and he let me copy the tape. He was enamoured with some of her melodies but did not care for this one and says I might do with it what I will, so I am sending it to you. The song is a variant of Sir Lionel, or Wild Hog in the Woods – which is originally from that part of the world but more popular in America now. In it Sir Lionel, or some other knight or hunter, encounters a lady in the woods (often a witch) who tells him of a wild boar which he then slays. In some versions he goes on to also slay the lady, or occasionally marry her. It is in Child though I forget where. The story goes back to Arthurian legend but the song is no doubt much younger. It is typically punctuated with fold-de-dols or dilly-dilly-dans or (in this case) all-along-and-down a-lees, and can be a rousing singalong if the performer nails the bloodthirsty glee of it.

The version sung by Mrs Bargate, or rather the parts she remembered, is quite different. I have not been able to transcribe the melody to my satisfaction but she does it at a slow ballad pace, and some of the lyrics are curious. ("She was as old as the tree in which she sat" / "In Light Each Wood (?) she still grieves"). Reassembled it could be a good spooky ballad to suit your style, if you are ever in the area you might even try and find the rest of it.

Yours sincerely,

Ken

---

I was recently returned this letter by Martin's next of kin who found me care of the club (which still goes strong, although the new owners say it is "mostly online now") and it brought back a memory I would have preferred to forget. Very occasionally over the years people have learned I own Martin's guitar and ask if I will sell it. I have always declined in the hope that one day he would offer to buy it back himself. More occasionally still, someone asks me if I know why he quit playing. I do, but I have always refused to tell. Now he has passed however, I see no harm in doing so.

It was over two years after writing the above that we next met and it was a much changed Martin Waters who played a sold out Saturday at the club. His second record was a hit but he looked tired and thin. I suspected he had been living a little hot (and after the lean years who could blame him). He had not replied at the time, which is understandable when a man is on the road, and I only knew for sure he had received the letter when a pre-release copy of the record turned up and there was the song, reassembled and completed, and there was my name being thanked in the liner notes.

We did not get a proper chance to talk until after I had closed the bar and sent the crowd on their way. I complained, in good humour of course, that he had not played the song I had given him.

"I do not play that anymore," he said, and it was only then I saw that what I had taken for tiredness was in fact quit acute distress. "I suppose you did not see her?"

"See who?"

"The old woman. By the wall on the left."

It had been a full house, and a lot of punters had been standing at the back and quite a few I did not recognise, but none had stood out at all.

"Nobody ever does," Martin said.

I went and got us a couple of large gins from behind the bar and told him he'd better tell me the whole story. 

---

Martin had not actually looked at the song when he received my letter. He said because he had not the time, but I suspect he was angry at my denying him a gig. He came back to it when he was home in London after two things happened. First, he realised it was exactly a year since the band had split, or "the argument" as he put it. Second, he received the first royalty check from his album and went to reread what I had said about the release being botched. It was then that the song caught his attention.

He knew the MacColl and Lloyd version but that tune did not work with the lyrics, and neither did any other he tried. A week in the bowels of Cecil Sharp House did not yield a tune either, but it did convince him that the version was previously uncollected, which even back then was a thing as rare as hens teeth. So he borrowed his brother-in-law's car and headed up the A41 to try and find Mrs Bargate.

T____ was a dull flat village in a dull flat part of Shropshire; a brick church, a bus stop, and a slightly rough looking pub. The car had given him trouble since Banbury and at the sight of it's destination, threw in the towel. The engine died just before he was about to stop it and would not start again.

He tried the church and there found the vicar. He was a tall, birdlike vicar, with wire frame glasses and a shock of grey hair that lay flat where a hat had earlier pressed it to his scalp and then flicked up in little horns where it had been given freedom beneath. He assured Martin that yes, he knew Mrs Bargate and would introduce him to her, and that he knew a local man who could repair his car and that he would give him a call. 

Martin helped him set out a table or two, then grabbed his guitar and tape recorder from the car, left the keys in the glove box, and walked with the vicar a short distance to a pebble-dash bungalow.

Mrs Bargate was a lady in her seventies, of stout build but reliant on a walking stick and not very mobile even then. The walk to the door left her out of breath. She was clearly very enamoured of the vicar and, on his introduction, invited Martin to call her Janet, sat him at the dining room table, and offered to make tea, a task in which she would accept no assistance. She slipped into her bedroom while the kettle was boiling and when she reappeared had on fresh lipstick and blusher.

Martin had done this work before and knew that source singers could be guarded, even precious about their songs. He put the tape recorder to one side, where it might be ignored, and he did not introduce himself as a musician but as an amateur historian. "I want to hear the old songs," he said.

"I know all my songs from my Granny," Janet said. "She sang morning, noon and night."

Despite her shortness of breath (and the making of tea brought it on again) Janet had a strong falsetto voice which, if limited in range, was confident and precise. She sang The Lark In The Morning, The Sweet Nightingale, a short version of The Turtle Dove, and an enthusiastic rendition of Teddy Bear's Picnic. After these, concerned that they she was looking tired, Martin realised he was going to have to steer her toward the song he wanted. 

"I wonder if you know this," he said, and took out his guitar and played a few verses of The Bonny Ship the Diamond, being careful not to sound too professional. She did not know it but she knew Scarborough Fair and enjoyed singing along to his accompaniment. He tried the first three verses of Sir Lionel, The MacColl and Lloyd version with the "dilly dilly dan" refrain.

Janet shook her head.

"That surprises me," he said. "It's from around here. How about this?" He played one of the versions he had found in Child, 

Sir Robert Bolton had three sons.
Wind thy horn good hunter...

He saw the recognition in her face and concentrated on his guitar in order to hide his excitement. He sang two more verses and then stopped. "Anything?" he asked.

"You're singing the men's one," she said.

"The men's one?"

"There's two sets of words to that song." Martin bit his tongue, there were dozens. "The men's and the women's."

"Can you sing me the women's."

"Well you weren't supposed to sing it to men, that's what Granny said, but I don't suppose anyone cares these days."

She began to sing, the same opening line, and then stopped.

"You've confused me now. I can't remember the tune."

"Just sing it," Martin said. "You'll remember."

She tried again and got as far as "a wild woman sitting in a tree," but again stopped short. "Now what was it next?" she said. "It's been so long I don't think I can remember."

Martin could have screamed. "Please try," he said through gritted teeth. "I'd love to hear it."

Gradually, through cajoling and encouraging, and filling in missing parts from the versions he knew, Martin helped Janet get through the song. The melody was unusual, and he would have counted himself lucky to get even that on tape, but what really thrilled him were the differences in the lyrics. Unlike the other versions this one seemed to have it that the knight tricked the witch into revealing the wild boar ("such a boar I would but see"), and instead of the line "My pretty spotted pig thou hast slew," Janet sang "My love, my love, thou hast slew," and where one of the versions had the knight kill the boars children "nine or ten of them," Janet was very clear that the knight had killed the more awkwardly phrased "nine of ten of them." Presumably leaving one alive.

Perhaps the strangest difference of all though was the coda, completely unknown to the other versions.

When the wood was quiet and the knight had gone
the wild woman put her head back on
In Light Each Wood she still grieves
and she'll suffer no man beneath her leaves.

Janet was adamant that "Light Each Wood," was the correct lyric, though she did not know the meaning of it.

By the time they had got to the end she was clearly exhausted and Martin, worried that he may have overexerted her, was quick to gather up his belongings and go. He found a small boy waiting outside who said he had been sent by the vicar and his car would not be fixed today and would he like to spend the night at the rectory. He followed the boy there, his mind full of the song.

At the rectory he asked the vicar's wife if there was a room he could practice in. In a small spare bedroom he played back the recording of the song and started to learn it for himself. I don't know if I have made it clear how skilled a player Martin was, one of the best of his generation in fact, so it means something when he said he struggled. He could not make the melody sound right on his guitar, and without that the lyrics would not flow. After a frustrating hour he decided to take a break and try something else. He idly picked his way through some reels and jigs he knew, eventually ending up trying to recall an obscure Morris tune. He could picture where he had learned it, in a pub session in Tewkesbury four or five years before. It was an orphan tune (meaning the dance had been forgotten) - but what was it called and how did it go? He played the first two bars over and over, trusting his fingers to remember. It was a strange tune, with a slightly unsettling feeling. That was it! The Rowling Round, all at once he knew it. And what was more knew it would make the perfect accompaniment to Janet Bargate's song. He played Rowling Round once and then launched into her song and it finally worked. He played it through again, this time bookending the song with the two halves of the Morris tune. Even better. He played it again, and again, and again, a smile spreading across his face as he realised it was going to be brilliant.

At dinner, full of enthusiasm, he explained to the vicar and his wife how rare a find the song was. The vicar seemed doubtful.

"Tell me Mr Waters," he said. "Do you call yourself as a pagan?"

"I don't call myself much in that way," Martin said, not noticing the slightly combative tone in the vicar's voice. "I call myself as a musician."

"A musician who sings pagan songs."

"Are they pagan?"

"Witches in trees and magic boars in the wood. Welcoming in the May-oh and John Barleycorn must die."

"I see you know the tradition."

"Ours is a rural parish. These songs are still sung."

"Then you have answered your question," Martin said. "These are songs of the seasons. They mark the agricultural working year."

"That is a Marxist interpretation if you don't mind my saying," the vicar said, and then continued before Martin could respond. "I doubt you do. You are young and many of the young these days are proud to call themselves communist even if few of them appreciate what it means. But that is normal for any great belief, and communism is a great belief, one cannot deny that – but we were talking about songs. You say they mark the working year but I say they do more. Songs are worship. I know that for sure. They are prayers... beseechments for a successful harvest, for the return of the spring, for safety in the woods.

He took a drink from his glass of water but held up his hand to indicate he wanted no interruption from Martin.

"And why should men not beseech? In times gone by they lived and died by the harvests, and even now a failed crop can mean penury. The important thing is not that they pray, but to whom. This muddled animism is idolatry. You may say a harmless one, but men's souls are not your business, they are mine. The church indulges these songs, but they are the expression of an innate urge which must be carefully shepherded. I ask you to bare this in mind when you sing them."

He picked up his knife and fork and resumed his dinner, the lesson over.

---

The following morning Martin caught a bus to where his car was being fixed, a garage behind a petrol station on the A49. It was a bright summer morning and the flat expanse of Shropshire fields sparkled like a golden ocean. When the mechanic told him that it would take another hour before his car was ready, Martin happily picked up his guitar and walked out into the sun, pleased to have this moment to try out some songs.

The vicar's lecture had given him an idea. He would make an album of the strangest songs in the folk cannon. John Barleycorn would be one. Maybe The Twa Sisters or Willi O' Winsbury, he might even attempt Tam Lin. He would intersperse the songs with Morris tunes, played solo on his guitar, to emphasise how these weird and (yes) pagan songs were part of a uniquely English heritage. Planning this all out in his head he turned off the main road into a shady lane that ran alongside a thin strip of woodland. He only noticed as he hurriedly left a few minutes later that it was called Lighteach Lane.

The lane bent away from the road and as it did Martin noticed something in one of the trees ahead.

"I thought nothing of it," he told me. "Just a large crows nest, or a bin bag caught in the branches. As I got closer I thought it must be an old dress. And then there was a low branch that obscured it so I did not see it again until I was almost underneath it.

He picked up his untouched gin as if to drink it but then put it back on the table again.

"The dress was dark grey, filthy and ragged, and nasty bony feet poked out beneath the hem. And she had tangled grey hair that hung to her waste. And her hands were twisted like tree roots, with dirt caked beneath her fingernails, and her face, her face was... angry. Then there was a crash in the undergrowth and I saw something moving in amongst the trees. Some giant animal. And I just turned and ran.

"And that was it for a while. I sat outside the garage till my car was ready and drove home to London. And I worked on the album and thought I must have caught a bit too much sunshine and been startled by a deer or something. When I played the song live for the first time though I saw her. At the back of the room. Just standing in among the crowd who don't know she's there, filthy and wild, and staring at me all through the show. Just staring.

"I stopped playing the song after the second night but it didn't make any difference, she still came. She stands a little closer to the stage every night but nobody else ever notices her. She's never done anything but she looks so angry I'm scared of what she might do."

He finally drank the gin. "She was almost close enough to reach out and touch me tonight. I don't think I dare do another."