#AFolkSongAFortnight No.1: Hal-an-Tow
 |
(Image: The Hal-an-Tow, Flora Day, Helston, 8th May 1959; copyright Museum of Cornish Life)
This is the first installment of a lockdown project to research, learn, record and write about a new folk song every fortnight, perhaps for the next 12 months. Here's the track:
...It seems apt to start this endeavour in May, undoubtedly the month most associated with the English folk tradition as framed in custom, dance and song. Having missed the May Day weekend itself, this afternoon appears as good a launchpad as any - as the day after what would ordinarily have been ‘Furry Day’ in the Cornish town of Helston, one of the oldest recorded and best-known celebrations in the folk calendar. Sadly, the streets of Helston stood silent this year, as this long-unbroken observance was by necessity paused to adhere to Covid-19 social distancing restrictions.
Furry Day is widely accepted as a remnant of one of the medieval 'fair days', anchored in Helston to 8 May as the feast of Saint Michael, to whom the parish church is dedicated. In local folklore, the name of the town itself derives from a boulder (or 'hell stone') flung by The Devil at The Archangel following a battle for possession of the town; this purported projectile now lies embedded in the yard of the local Angel Hotel (1). Some folklorists consider the festivities to be much older, linking to pre-Christian spring ceremonies (2).
The earliest written account of Furry Day, coming from the Gentleman's Magazine in 1790 (3), already notes a wealth divide in proceedings; the day's central processional 'Floral Dance' was further gentrified by the Victorians (4). The Hal-an-Tow takes the form of an altogether weirder, more raucous folk play, commencing at 7am. Steve Roud contends that this performance is itself a sanitised addition from 1930 (5); but the underpinning song is recognised to extend back beyond oldest known records of Furry Day (6).
Helston Hal-an-Tow, 2016
The lyrics are peculiar to decipher - the full version as sung in Helston (7) takes in Robin Hood and Little John; St George; the Archangel Michael himself; and victory against the Spanish Armada (or over the French). There's also a strange final character called Aunt Mary Mo(y)ses, cited by Sara Hannant (8) and others as a reformation-veiled appearance by the Holy Mother; but whom folk song historian Reginald Nettel identifies, without clear evidence, as the (now absent) 'man-woman of the Helston Dance (9).' Under the influence of Cornish nationalists, more recent performances have added a further, presiding spirit to proceedings - Piran (10), the patron saint of the county (or nation, depending upon your point of view).
The chorus is also the source of much conjecture; Hal-an-Tow is defined by various scholars as deriving from 'heel and toe' - a Morris dance step (11); a 'tow', or garland, for 'halands', the beginning of the month (12); a derivation from the Dutch for 'haul on a rope', arriving here via an earlier shanty sung by Cornish Sailors (13); and many other explanations besides. The specific intention of 'rumbelow' is equally uncertain - as the similarly varied range of dictionary definitions attest (14).
The rest of the chorus is thankfully much less ambiguous, confidently declaring its purpose 'to welcome in the summer/to welcome in the May-O'; and it is this primal power that caused the Watersons to take up 'Hal-an-Tow' for their 1965 debut LP, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs. As for many others, this was the first rendition that I encountered, and will likely be the version most familiar to the majority beyond Cornwall. However, rather than leaving the Helston lyric to speak for itself, the Watersons made several adjustments to accentuate the sense of a pagan rite or incantation.
As well as clipping two lines from the end of each verse, at different points in the mid-1960s the Watersons added two separate, novel quatrains. In the sleeve notes for 2004 boxed set Mighty River of Song, Norma reveals how they found Hal-an-Tow, and also shares the origins of the opening verse they showcase in the 1966 BBC documentary Travelling for a Living (15):
'We got it from As I Roved Out, Peter Kennedy's programme on the Home Service. Lal and I heard somebody singing it there so we never heard the song as it's sung in Helston. It isn't sung the same. We got the words from somewhere, maybe the [English Folk Dance & Song] Society, maybe Tony Foxworthy, and we sort of remembered the tune as it was by these two old men who sung it on As I Roved Out. We put this tune to these words but we didn't think it was complete for some reason so our Michael wrote that first verse, "Since Man has been created". Now people sing it and they think it's part of the Helston song. It's not! In fact we've had people from Helston say "Why do you sing it all wrong?" It was because we didn't know how it was sung basically!' (16)
That opening verse, penned by Mike Waterson, is absent from the Frost and Fire recording; the version there begins with another addition, adapted from these lines in Shakespeare's As You Like It (1599/1603):
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn - It was a crest e'er thou wast born; Thy father's father wore, And thy father bore it. Contrary to the contention by some that these lines from The Bard were incorporated within the Hal-an-Tow in centuries past, Stephen Winick - in a splendid piece of compressed research for a 2017 US Library of Congress blog (17) - convincingly argues that the Watersons and their producer Bert Lloyd encountered the juxtaposition of Shakespeare and the Helston carol on page 55 of Reginald Nettel's intoxicating 1954 study, Sing a Song of England (18). These lines further enhance the sense of both mystery, and of an ever-unfolding tradition tantamount to destiny. The hint of unabashed cuckoldry only emphasises the 'Lord of Misrule' air of wantonness and revelry at the commencement of the Maying.
Hal-an-Tow has been widely sung by others, including Shirley Collins and the Albion Band on No Roses (1971); the Oysterband, in a sprightly and surprisingly Springsteen-esque 1985 version; and both Lisa Knapp and John Boden more recently. Many of these later recordings use aspects of the Waterson's own adaptations, to different degrees.
Some consider these adjustments and adornments to be in some way disrespectful to the people of Helston, who have preserved the song within a vibrant living tradition for at least 230 years, and perhaps far longer. Having worked in heritage for much of my career, I fully understand the deep desire to protect the fidelity of an underlying original. However, I think that to take this approach to folk song is to apply the wrong lens to the situation. As outlined above, the source festivities of Furry Day are an ever-evolving amalgam of convergent customs and inventions, whilst the people of Helston themselves added the verse about Saint Piran shortly after the turn of the millennium.
In 1907's English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (19), Cecil Sharp cites three interacting characteristics within the tradition - continuity, variation and selection. These were refined in 1954, at the seventh international conference of the World Folk Music Council held in Sao Paolo, Brazil - to, respectively, acknowledge the continuity between the present and the past; the variations which spring from the creative impulse of the individual or the group (as well as by accident); and the process of selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives (20).
The Watersons-influenced evolutionary branch of Hal-an-Tow more than passes all of these tests; and, in so doing, contains tightly coiled, potent intertwinings of ancient tradition and contemporary dynamism; fiercely guarded local custom and widely celebrated national treasure; the turning of the seasons; death and renewal; town and forest; war and agriculture; faith and folklore; poetry and magic.
I've used a slightly re-jigged take on the Watersons version to begin my own project - featuring Mike's first verse from Travelling for a Living; then the traditional opening stanza about Robin Hood and Little John; the Shakespeare additions; and the concluding section about 'Saint Mary Moyses'.
My next track will come in about a fortnight; I'll probably resort again to the extensive treasure-trove of English May songs, but I greatly welcome suggestions and requests for other pieces to attempt across the next 12 months - I think I'll need them!
References:
|
This is a great idea, I look forward to following this project.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this Steve - there are a couple of much more ambitious/accomplished precedents - Jon Boden's 'A Folk Song a Day' and Andy Turner's 'A Folk Song a Week', but they're proper folk singers; I'm very much a vocal novice, though a bit more experienced as a writer and researcher - so I hope this will still offer something a little different/of interest, rather than serving as a very pale imitation of the aforementioned!
ReplyDeleteJust saw your comment on the library of Congress blog, and I thought I know that name. Putting it out there sir! Take no scorn. John Lowe
ReplyDelete