Let’s bend the rules a bit. Of course Crown of Horn is a favourite, but it’s a long way from being forgotten. It’s the record that kick-started my lifelong devotion to folk music and British finger-style guitar.
Come with me, back to the musical dead zone of 1976 and spindly, spotty teenager-dom. Prog has wrapped its cape around itself and vanished over the galaxy’s edge. The blues belong to stringy men in double denim, all wispy beards and endless twelve-bars. The charts are full of matching three-piece suits and ruffle-front shirts, all swaying in unison. Punk, had I only known, was just around the corner. But at the time there seemed no bright prospect anywhere.
I had an old-fashioned radio, like a huge farmhouse loaf with a conker-brown bakelite casing. No FM, just medium and long-wave. But once the valves had warmed up — which took long enough to miss all of Cum on feel the Noize and half of Telegram Sam — the sound it produced was powerful, warm and full-bellied. It sat just behind my bed-head, so after lights-out I could listen to John Peel’s Radio One show with the volume at a whisper.
One night he played The Bedmaking, Crown of Horn track one side one: the story of a chambermaid seduced and abandoned by her employer but spirited enough to fight back:
‘My father he was a good old man / he put me to service when I was very young. / The missis and me, we never could agree, / because that the master he would love me.’
It had a story. It had realism, spine and spite. And it was driven by thunderous, percussive guitar playing that was a smack in the lug to someone more used to Paul Simon tinkling away at For Emily, wherever I may find her.
It was, as they say, a moment.
Where did I go to buy the record? The memory eludes me, but it was probably The Record Bar on Kirkgate in Wakefield, nipping out of school with sixth-form privileges at dinner-time the next day and carrying it home on the bus, cradled like a new baby.
After The Bedmaking there’s Locks and Bolts, a charming story of true love defying parental prohibition. That’s the first of three unaccompanied tracks on the record, with Virginny and William Taylor the Poacher. They’re weak spots, generally; this was the time when Carthy’s singing was at its most heavily stylised. (And parodied: remember Dave Burland’s mickey-take Pinball Wizard?) On Because it’s there, his next album, the vocals were much more relaxed and natural.
But then the guitar’s back for King Knapperty, a high-spirited ick-factor courtship where neither boy nor girl’s very bothered about hygiene; a classic reading of Geordie; and Willie’s Lady. King Willie comes back from foreign parts with a new wife. His mother hates the idea and lays a curse: to be forever in labour but never actually give birth. Willie begs and pleads but the mother holds fast: ‘she shall die and she shall turn to clay / and you will wed with another maid.’ Tension mounts and there’s astonishing momentum to the story and the accompaniment before mother’s tricked into revealing how to undo the spell and all ends happy.
Side two starts with The Worcestershire Wedding, a knockabout tale of seduction with the wastrel boyfriend eventually brought to the altar under threat of a pummelling. (The theme pops up several times on the record: a parent intervening in a romantic relationship; this time it’s more or less happily.) Then The Bonny Lass of Anglesey, a spirited young woman dances all the men who challenge her into the ground . . . a regular occurrence at ceilidhs to this day.
The shortest piece on the record is the instrumental Old Tom of Oxford. It delighted and baffled me in equal measure as I tried to copy and play it but was defeated; without the secret of the CGCDGA guitar tuning, it’s impenetrable. As time went on his rhythmic drive abated and his harmonies grew more sophisticated, but the playing on Crown is Carthy in his absolute pomp: agile, driving, and perfectly adapted to carry the song.
Finally, the only contemporary piece on the record, Leon Rosselson’s Palaces of Gold, written in the aftermath of the 1966 Aberfan tragedy.
‘If the sons of company directors
and judges’ private daughters
had to go to school in a slum school,
dumped by some joker in a damp back alley’
The performance is restrained, dignified and powerful. Those Welsh children were my exact contemporaries, and the memory was still haunting. It woke me to a kind of song-writing I’d not come across before: articulate, political and pointed. Along with Willie’s Lady and Old Tom it’s one of the highlights of the album, in itself and for the way it connects traditional material with today. Things change, it says, but things stay the same; injustice might be new or old but it’s still injustice.
