SHIRLEY COLLINS: This is another song that travelled. There was a Lord from the Scottish Borders, the Earl of Derwentwater, and there are several songs about him. This one is a true story about how he was a part of the Jacobite uprising in the early 18th century and therefore a traitor to the King, but he denied it. The story in this song is that he was arrested in London and beheaded, and the axeman says ‘Now there lies the head of a traitor’ but the head answers ‘No’. He denies it again, even after death.
This song, again, made its way to Sussex. In fact, as we eventually found out, it was sung by a great grandmother of Ian Anderson who founded and ran the magazine Folk Roots, or fRoots, until fairly recently. He was so thrilled to find out that he had a great grandmother who sang one of the rarest folk songs in Sussex. I think there was just one version in Sussex and the rest were from much further north.
I love the storytelling. At the start of the song, Lord Allenwater gets a letter from the King that he has to attend to him in London, and he knows almost from the start that he’s not going to be coming back. Then all sorts of things occur to him on his journey south, like his horse stumbling on a stone – signs that make him aware that he’s heading towards his death.
Again, the tune is such a noble tune and fabulous to sing. There’s also that interesting grammar right from the start, ‘The King has wrote a long letter.’ The minute I see things like that in a song, it makes me want to sing it.
BEST FIT: It’s interesting that you’ve chosen these two traditional favourites from For As Many As Will, because actually that album had a few modern touches. For instance, Dolly plays a synthesiser on several songs, and you also did a cover of a song by Richard Thompson, which you’d never done before.
Yes, we recorded his song “Never Again” because it expressed a bit of what I was feeling at the time. Ashley, my then-husband, had kind of wandered off into the land of the theatre and had fallen in love with at least two actors and had left me. So the song felt very personal and I connected with it so strongly. Richard always did write such incredible songs. This one is very tender, I think, and Dolly’s piano was so beautiful to sing with.
So much happened after this album, with you losing your voice and Dolly giving up the recording and performing side of the music, preferring to compose instead.
Although Dolly always really enjoyed writing the arrangements to the songs we’d chosen, she always used to say to me, ‘I’m a composer, I want to write my own work,’ and eventually that’s what she did. She was always more of a homebody than I was. She had this beautiful garden and a young child that she couldn’t bear being away from, and I was losing my voice anyway. So it just happened that we never made another album together. We didn’t depart from each other as sisters, only as singer and arranger, and then there was a long, long period of silence.
I think it’s a really lovely touch that you’ve included a live version of “Hand and Heart” on your new album, which has the original arrangement by Dolly and also lyrics by your Great Uncle Fred.
I have loved this song for so long and I’m really happy that it’s on this album. It was recorded in Australia in 1980. I’d asked Dolly if she’d come with me but she didn’t want to leave her child, so I went alone. I took her arrangements with me hoping that they could be played at the Sydney Opera House concert, where I had a wonderful harpsichord player, Winsome Evans, join me.
For the rest of the bookings I had to sing unaccompanied. I didn’t have my five-string banjo or any other instrument to take with me. I’d had to sell them all because I was so hard up at the time. But by good fortune, Ian Kearey bought ‘the Instrument’ [a unique five-string banjo/dulcimer hybrid] that John Bailey had made for me in 1961, and he still plays it. It’s there on all three Domino albums.
As you say, the words to “Hand and Heart” are written by my Great Uncle Fred, a lovely, lovely man. He was a gas meter reader by day and wrote books under the name of F.C. Ball by night. He was also the biographer of the great working-class writer Richard Tressell and was the one who found the complete original manuscript for The Ragged-Trouser Philanthropists.
Uncle Fred wrote mostly novels, which were set in Sussex, and it was he who played things like Monteverdi and Purcell to me and Dolly on the gramophone at his house. In that way, he introduced us to a wider range of music than we would normally have, because at home we only had the radio, or the wireless as we called it then, and there wasn’t much on there that we wanted to hear.
He wrote the lyrics to this song as a very young man, He was engaged to one young woman but had fallen in love with an art student. In those days, if you broke off an engagement it was called a ‘breach of promise’ and you had to pay compensation to the woman you were not going to marry. His family had no money at all, so he had to let his sweetheart go and marry the woman he was engaged to who he didn’t love anymore.
It’s on the album as a little nod to what I used to be. Since this live recording my voice has dropped a whole octave, but I think it fits in well with the new songs on the album. I’ve also got my dad on the album, on the final piece “Archangel Hill”. It’s a poem that he wrote during the Second World War when he was away with the Royal Artillery, and I think it’s beautiful the way that Ian has brought it to life with the music he has written for it.
It’s a real family affair.
Yes, sort of! Ian is family as well, really. I’ve known him for so long. He and Uncle Fred used to get on so well, having known each other right back in the ‘60s, so I’m really glad to have them both on the album, as well as my dad.