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.

If you’re interested in the repertoire project, here’s my current rules of engagement for recording for it:

• One Song
• One Mic
• One Take (by which I mean no comping or overdubs, not “only one attempt”)

So far, everything has been recorded using FiRe, a dead simple field recording app on the iPhone/iPad and uploaded pretty much directly from the phone to SoundCloud, though I am thinking of switching to using my BandCamp account because, although the player may not be as pretty, the site is free. SoundCloud keeps nagging me to switch to a paid account if I want to do things like make everything downloadable or see more advanced player statistics. Very annoying.

What else? Oh yes, I’m doing this for fun. If I have to fill in a tax return, PRS, MCPS or other annoying form then it stopped being fun. All the recordings will remain free to download and are released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. The songs and tunes themselves will be traditional or, where an author is known, in the public domain.

You’re free to sing them or do anything else you like with them without any reference to me or the sources I credit (but it is considered sporting to credit) and I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. Listening to music is a mere shadow of the pleasures of making it and the great thing about singing is that we’re born with all the equipment we need to do it.

Find a song you like, either from my repertoire project, Jon Boden’s A Folk Song A Day project or a favourite recording and start to sing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never sung before. It doesn’t matter that a music ‘teacher’ may have told you not to sing. It doesn’t matter that you never, ever, want to sing where anyone can hear you.

Just sing. Loudly. You may hate the sound of your voice, your pitching may be all over the place, you may lack confidence. So what? We fix these things through mindful practice, not by deciding that we’re no good. Just sing.

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.