Just A Summary

Pretty Saro by pdcawley

I’m a wee bit late writing this because it’s mostly about my summer trip to the Swannanoa Gathering at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina. It just so happened that YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) was held in Asheville this year, the week before the gathering’s Traditional Song Week. Well, I’m a perl hacker. I sing traditional songs. My employer was paying for me to attend YAPC and were willing for me to extend my stay in America by a week. It was a no brainer really.

YAPC was bloody good this year. Perl 5 development is moving forward and the community is buzzing because of it. Lots of “… and we’re hiring” slides. And that’s before we get to the pleasure of catching up with friends that I only see online most of the time. If you’re working in any field that has grassroots conferences associated with it, I can’t recommend attending them highly enough.

On to Swannanoa

At Swannanoa, I met Sheila Kay Adams and immediately switched my schedule to spend as much time singing with her as possible. Sheila’s a seventh generation ballad singer from the Sodom Laurel community in Madison Count. Her “grannie Berzil” Wallin remembered Cecil Sharp coming to Madison County and collecting songs from the family.

Pedigree in singing shouldn’t matter, but it turns out it does. Sheila grew up in a community which was changing, but which still had old ‘love songs’ as an important part of how it understood the world. Today, not so much. People still relate to the world and understand it through songs, but the songs are more likely to be contemporary. Lyrically, many of the love songs that Sheila and her family sing could have been written yesterday, but their performance is radically different from contemporary style. One voice, unaccompanied, a style that requires the listener to concentrate on the song rather than any aspects of production. Not something you’re going to dance to at your wedding, say.

Sheila’s classes, on Meeting House Songs (more later) and her Ballads class with Bobbie McMillon were just wonderful; I won’t forget in a hurry the sound Bobbie singing “A conversation with Death” as a thunderstorm grumbled across the campus in the background. Spine tingling stuff. Sheila’s description of how she learned songs “knee to knee” has been helpful too. The way it would work was that the teacher and student would be sat out on the porch, often doing some chore or another, and the teacher would sing the first verse of a song. The student would sing it back and the teacher would sing the second verse. The student would then sing the first two verses then the teacher would sing the third verse and the student would sing the first three verses and so on, until the student was singing the whole song back to the teacher. A time consuming process to be sure, but it works.

I know this because I learned Pretty Saro from a recording of Sheila’s late husband Jim Taylor, using a variant of the method, “knee to CD” if you like. I’d play the first verse, hit pause and sing it back, play the second verse, pause, repeat the first two… and so on. And in very short order I had the words and tune (up to a point; I listened back to that recording again recently and I’m singing a different tune now) and could start the process of actually learning the song, which involved singing it it lots, listening to other recordings, singing it some more and then taking the song out and trying it out in front of audiences and listening to what works and what doesn’t. I’ve never really finished learning a song; this recording is a snapshot. I hope you enjoy it.

Pretty Saro by pdcawley

I’m a wee bit late writing this because it’s mostly about my summer trip to the Swannanoa Gathering at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina. It just so happened that YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) was held in Asheville this year, the week before the gathering’s Traditional Song Week. Well, I’m a perl hacker. I sing traditional songs. My employer was paying for me to attend YAPC and were willing for me to extend my stay in America by a week. It was a no brainer really.

YAPC was bloody good this year. Perl 5 development is moving forward and the community is buzzing because of it. Lots of “… and we’re hiring” slides. And that’s before we get to the pleasure of catching up with friends that I only see online most of the time. If you’re working in any field that has grassroots conferences associated with it, I can’t recommend attending them highly enough.

On to Swannanoa

At Swannanoa, I met Sheila Kay Adams and immediately switched my schedule to spend as much time singing with her as possible. Sheila’s a seventh generation ballad singer from the Sodom Laurel community in Madison Count. Her “grannie Berzil” Wallin remembered Cecil Sharp coming to Madison County and collecting songs from the family.

Pedigree in singing shouldn’t matter, but it turns out it does. Sheila grew up in a community which was changing, but which still had old ‘love songs’ as an important part of how it understood the world. Today, not so much. People still relate to the world and understand it through songs, but the songs are more likely to be contemporary. Lyrically, many of the love songs that Sheila and her family sing could have been written yesterday, but their performance is radically different from contemporary style. One voice, unaccompanied, a style that requires the listener to concentrate on the song rather than any aspects of production. Not something you’re going to dance to at your wedding, say.

Sheila’s classes, on Meeting House Songs (more later) and her Ballads class with Bobbie McMillon were just wonderful; I won’t forget in a hurry the sound Bobbie singing “A conversation with Death” as a thunderstorm grumbled across the campus in the background. Spine tingling stuff. Sheila’s description of how she learned songs “knee to knee” has been helpful too. The way it would work was that the teacher and student would be sat out on the porch, often doing some chore or another, and the teacher would sing the first verse of a song. The student would sing it back and the teacher would sing the second verse. The student would then sing the first two verses then the teacher would sing the third verse and the student would sing the first three verses and so on, until the student was singing the whole song back to the teacher. A time consuming process to be sure, but it works.

I know this because I learned Pretty Saro from a recording of Sheila’s late husband Jim Taylor, using a variant of the method, “knee to CD” if you like. I’d play the first verse, hit pause and sing it back, play the second verse, pause, repeat the first two… and so on. And in very short order I had the words and tune (up to a point; I listened back to that recording again recently and I’m singing a different tune now) and could start the process of actually learning the song, which involved singing it it lots, listening to other recordings, singing it some more and then taking the song out and trying it out in front of audiences and listening to what works and what doesn’t. I’ve never really finished learning a song; this recording is a snapshot. I hope you enjoy it.

Or… what I did this summer.

Summer as been frantic. Mostly joyous, but frantic.

I had talks accepted at both YAPC and OSCON. Because YAPC was in Asheville, and the Swannanoa Gathering Traditional Song Week fell the week after YAPC, that meant I flew out to Asheville for an intense fortnight of Perl community engagement followed by a week spent singing myself hoarse and being blown away by Sheila Kay Adams’s singing and her stories of mountain life and listening to future stars like Sam Gleaves and inspiring activists like Saro Lynch Thomason. I could write entire posts on every one of those, and that’s before I get on to the magic of watching the sun go down and the fireflies come up from the grass of the Warren Wilson College’s natural amphitheatre. Magical so it was.

On the last night of the gathering, there was a student showcase. Of course, I sang Child of the Library. Rather embarrassingly, I skipped a verse, but the response was great. Several people came up to me afterwards and told me their library stories and, I hope, went home with a determination to help protect their libraries.

Then it was back to the UK for a fortnight before heading off again to OSCON in Portland, OR. I was down to give two talks, one on Higher Order Javascript and a second on Polymorphic Dispatch which proved to be a bear to write. I’d planned to have everything done and dusted and the slides learned by the time I flew out, but spent a huge amount of time blocked on how I was going to present the ideas using a motivating problem that hit the sweet spot between too simple and too complicated. It wasn’t until I arrived in Portland and talked things through with my host, David Wheeler, that I got that worked out. The slides were written in a tearing rush and weren’t as good as I would like them to be. I still owe the talk attendees a full writeup, so I’ll take this opportunity to apologise for the lateness and promise that a writeup will arrive. The Javascript talk was based on one I’ve given before, but I’m starting to realise that it’s a full tutorial masquerading as a short talk. More on that later, I hope.

What with flapping about the unwritten talk, and the 10 minute gap between them, I didn’t really worry overmuch about the Perl lightning talks. It’s been my practice to sing a lightly massaged version of Lou and Peter Berryman’s very splendid song A Chat With Your Mother with tailored verses about different language communities and various Perl luminaries. I had decided to retire it, but at YAPC I came up with a snide verse about myself and another about Larry Wall, so it felt renewed enough to be worth singing this year as well. I ended up singing Child of the Library again.

The response was phenomenal. I’ve been singing it for long enough now that I know it gets people. Hell, when I was writing it, there were verses that were hard to sing because they got me and I was choking up as I tried to sing them. But the lightning talk got a standing ovation. Again people were telling me library stories and I found that the UK isn’t the only country with local governments stupid enough to consider closing libraries, it was happening in the US too. So, fired up by that response, I went to see Sarah Novotny and begged her for five minutes on the OSCON stage before the closing keynote. Bless her, she let me have it.

Pics, or it didn’t happen!

I have proof too! The main stage at O’Reilly events has serious video equipment pointed at it. Because it’s important that people get to see serious talks about known bugs and exploits in wetware. Because my performance wasn’t on the schedule, and I didn’t have a video release all signed and ready to go beforehand, it’s taken a while to get the video available. But last night, that changed, so here I am, in all my corpulent glory. Enjoy. And please, spread this video as far and as wide as you can. Libraries are important.

Lands’ End Mail Order Catalogue by pdcawley

This is by Chris Manners, a Yorkshireman who I met when we were both exiled in Essex. The commute into London from Essex was made so much more bearable if we managed to share it with Chris and Tim Blyth. The day Chris moved back home was a day of mixed feelings, we were sorry to lose his company every but delighted for him too. As well as being good company, Chris is an accomplished singer, guitarist and, as this song proves, songwriter. I’m very pleased that he’s given me permission to record this.

Enjoy.

Open Ears, Open Mind, Open Mouth. Music Making Made Easy

Blurb

Our bodies are the most versatile and sophisticated musical instrument we know. From the complexities of making at beat with our hands and feet to the surprising simplicity of harmony singing, we are all of us musicians.

Abstract

Musicmaking isn’t some kind of sophisticated profession that requires the intervention of gatekeepers and techno priests. You don’t need autotune, you don’t need a record label, you don’t need drums, a guitar or anything else but your hands, feet, ears, brain and mouth to make music that will satisfy you for the rest of your life.

By the end of this talk I promise that, unless you are one of a tiny, tiny minority of people, you’ll not be tone deaf, you’ll be damn near pitch perfect. And you’ll have a song in your head that, unless I have seriously misjudged the people who come to OSCON, you’ll want to teach to everyone you know.

Come along. Clap your hands. Stamp your feet and sing. What have you got to lose?

Over on Twitter, Allison Randal said:

Open source isn't just a licensing/business strategy, it's a better way of producing software and a better way of training developers.

The driving principle of the academic model is to make students fail. The bell curve rules, if all students pass something is "wrong".

The driving principle of open source is to help each developer reach their own greatest potential. Good developers are good for the project.

The goal affects the path. A goal of measuring leads to a very different teaching style than a goal of building contributors.

This chimes with both the programmer and the traditional singer in me. Traditional songs are open source culture. The rules are different - folk song is all about inclusion. The default setting of many British folk clubs is the singaround - a circle of chairs and we go around the room with each person taking a turn to sing or play. Everyone's free to pass, but they will be strongly encouraged to perform in some way or another.

I'm not sure there's a folk club left with the rules of the Blaxhall Ship in Suffolk where

They got Wicketts Richardson to keep order and he'd say "Sing, say, or pay for a gallon of beer" - and you could go round that pub and every one would have a go - not many paid¹

but the ghost of sing, say or pay lingers in the ticket prices with one price for musicians and another, higher one, for audience members.

The traditional songs and tunes of the British Isles were made in a time when there was no music industry in the way we understand it now. Music was a verb more than it was a noun; a communal activity and if you didn't perform, you'd join in with the chorus.

Programming may be a little harder than singing. It's not as if we're born with embedded Linux boxes like we're born with everything we'll ever need to sing, but the capability belongs to everyone who has the equipment and the only way to get really good is to practice. Open source communities live or die by their ability to attract and keep programmers in exactly the same way as musical traditions survive or flourish.

Programs like The X Factor, Pop Idol and their American equivalents both thrill and repel me. It's affirming to see so many people entering auditions but, as Allison points out, goals matter. Those shows aren't about inclusion or developing the talents of everyone, they're about selection - the crueller the better. The message of a Cowell production is that music is hard, not everyone can do it. You're much better off sitting in judgement on the tone deaf and stupid. Leave it to the professionals; music making is only possible with years of training and vast amounts of technology. Don't you worry your pretty little head about a thing, just make sure to buy the single at Christmas.

Bollocks to that!

The music industry is peddling a big lie. You don't have to be a good enough singer to entertain the nation, it's enough that you entertain yourself and your friends. You might well be terrible², but here come the others in the room to join in the chorus and it's all good. If you're singing something everyone knows, you'll likely get supported though the verse too.

The closes source software industry does something similar. In a world of apps and no source, we're reduced to consumers again. Obviously much of the software we consume is enabling us to make other forms of culture, but an important and enriching avenue appears closed to us. When you learn to program, computing takes on a whole other meaning. It stops being a box with a few saws, hammers and drills inside. Now you have the tools to make other tools. Your limitations are your imagination and skill. Again, you don't have to make anything that the world may want to share, so long as it suits your purpose, but you'll get much better if you make the attempt. You'll get better by reading other people's code too.

Listen to this. You’ll not regret it.

Whee! John Spiers and Jon Boden have finally made an album (Songs) that sounds as good as they do live. Not that Through and Through and Bellow are bad albums, it’s just that their playing has improved somewhat since they were recorded. On stage, Jon and John play with an almost telepathic level of communication. Songs captures that magic.

Not content with inflicting my reading of Tamlyn on you all, I’ve recorded a couple more songs

On Monday, we watched part of No Direction Home, Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan. The part that struck me most strongly was an anecdote about the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
One interviewee walked into the Gaslight Coffee Shop and found Dylan playing. They ended up singing You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone together. About half way through the song, he realised that there was a good chance that there’d be nobody around to miss him.

It occurred to me as I watched, and again last night, that I could think of no better way to spend my last night on Earth than singing and playing with friends. And last night I did exactly that.

There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees

I’m finding it very hard to resist the urge to add a couple of bodies hanging from one of them. I wonder if the artist and whoever bought this print realised what they were evoking.