field haller

[chipss36]

Have been into old fingerpicked blues, as of late, and the bluesmen from around the areas I have grown up in....anyway

many may already know all the led zep connections to the past, some may not?

I like the the guitar work in the 1930s led belly song, think he rocks this song.

this old folk song has even deeper roots to the past...

 

if ya never heard it, take a listen..

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsgGNWlNAfA

[blindboygrunt]

Have been into old fingerpicked blues, as of late, and the bluemen from around the areas I have grown up in....anyway

many may already know all the led zep connections to the past, some may not?

I like the the guitar work in the 1930s led belly song, think he rocks this song.

this old folk song has even deeper roots to the past...

 

if ya never heard it, take a listen..

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsgGNWlNAfA

 

wow

[blindboygrunt]

 

see...... now THATs what its all about!

 

do ya reckon he sat up at night seeing if he could get a bit of paper under his fingerboard ?

 

cool picking huh ? fast fast fast

my favourite version of that is page and plant unledded for mtv unplugged series when they had a hurdy gurdy and everything belting it out .... seriously good groove tbey got going on that particular song

[zombywoof]

That was one of the first songs I tried to learn on guitar back in the early 1960s after my Mom gave me a Leadbelly LP as a birthday present. If you want to know why a big box Stella 12 string fetches $10K and up these days yeah, listen to Leadbelly. Over the years though I let it slip away until I heard Alvis Youngblood Hart lay down a version. Started playing it again the next day.

 

[Fungus]

wow...nice! I have always loved Led Zeppelin's Gallow's Pole......hope to be able to play that one day......

[pfox14]

I had no idea that Zep's "Gallow's Pole" was directly taken from a Lead Belly song. Interesting.

[chipss36]

First off I love zep...but....

there whole first album was pretty much on the verge of blatant plagiarism …..

liner notes had to be changed...

 

sad thing is, what the original artist were paid, compared to the cover acts that followed...lol

such is the music biz...

was Leadbelly the original writer of this song? IMHO, NO its an old folk song with roots, in many places, and variants, like the song “The Maid Freed from the Gallows”

 

zep, and Leadbelly used a man, not a woman in there variants...non the less

 

just think Leadbelly tore it up in this song....

[j45nick]

This song has a long, long history going back hundreds of years. It is a direct descendant of Child Ballad number 95, "The Maid freed From the Gallows" collected by John Jacob Niles as Niles ballad number 39 A, "The Hangman". Its roots actually go back some 500 years, to the time of Chaucer and Elizabeth 1 of England.

 

Serious students of Anglo/Scots ballads should search out the "Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles", published in 1960. In this book he collects the Appalachian variants on the English/Scots ballads that made their way here in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were and still are sung in the mountains and hollows of the southeastern US. Many of these were adapted by slaves, and they developed their own parallel histories, as so many of them were tales of desperation, death, hopelessness, and possible redemption, which is a pretty apt description of a slave's existence.

 

It's really of academic interest to most, but it is an astonishing reference containing more than 100 old ballads and variants thereon. Some of these were among the first, obscure songs I ever learned to play.

 

This is one of them.

[Mojorule]

This song has a long, long history going back hundreds of years. It is a direct descendant of Child Ballad number 95, "The Maid freed From the Gallows" collected by John Jacob Niles as Niles ballad number 39 A, "The Hangman". Its roots actually go back some 500 years, to the time of Chaucer and Elizabeth 1 of England.

 

Serious students of Anglo/Scots ballads should search out the "Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles", published in 1960. In this book he collects the Appalachian variants on the English/Scots ballads that made their way here in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were and still are sung in the mountains and hollows of the southeastern US. Many of these were adapted by slaves, and they developed their own parallel histories, as so many of them were tales of desperation, death, hopelessness, and possible redemption, which is a pretty apt description of a slave's existence.

 

It's really of academic interest to most, but it is an astonishing reference containing more than 100 old ballads and variants thereon. Some of these were among the first, obscure songs I ever learned to play.

 

This is one of them.

 

Old indeed, though there is well over a century's gap between Chaucer's death (1400) and Elizabeth's birth (1533), so I'm not sure it's quite as far back as The Canterbury Tales, Nick.

[zombywoof]

This song has a long, long history going back hundreds of years. It is a direct descendant of Child Ballad number 95, "The Maid freed From the Gallows" collected by John Jacob Niles as Niles ballad number 39 A, "The Hangman". Its roots actually go back some 500 years, to the time of Chaucer and Elizabeth 1 of England.

 

 

There is alot of speculation that Leadbelly learned the song from a folksinger named Richard Bennett in 1938 while in New York.

[j45nick]

Old indeed, though there is well over a century's gap between Chaucer's death (1400) and Elizabeth's birth (1533), so I'm not sure it's quite as far back as The Canterbury Tales, Nick.

 

My bad for compressing English history. The ballad is actually believed to have been composed before Chaucer's time. In his 1928 book "South Carolina Ballads" Reed Smith gives this one an entire chapter by itself. I haven't been able to find a copy of Smith's book, but there is probably some ethno-musical freak here that has it tucked away in his library.

[Del Nilppeznaf]

This song has a long, long history going back hundreds of years. It is a direct descendant of Child Ballad number 95, "The Maid freed From the Gallows" collected by John Jacob Niles as Niles ballad number 39 A, "The Hangman". Its roots actually go back some 500 years, to the time of Chaucer and Elizabeth 1 of England.

 

Serious students of Anglo/Scots ballads should search out the "Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles", published in 1960. In this book he collects the Appalachian variants on the English/Scots ballads that made their way here in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were and still are sung in the mountains and hollows of the southeastern US. Many of these were adapted by slaves, and they developed their own parallel histories, as so many of them were tales of desperation, death, hopelessness, and possible redemption, which is a pretty apt description of a slave's existence.

 

It's really of academic interest to most, but it is an astonishing reference containing more than 100 old ballads and variants thereon. Some of these were among the first, obscure songs I ever learned to play.

 

This is one of them.

Fascinating stuff

[chipss36]

"ethno-musical freak" ??

whats the definition of that?

[j45nick]

"ethno-musical freak" ??

whats the definition of that?

 

Uh, that would be someone like me, except more knowledgeable. Someone with an interest in the cultural history of the music, as well as the music itself.

 

In the late 50's and early 60's, in the early years of the folk boom, there was a huge amount of interest in the traditional Anglo/Scots ballads, particularly as they were transported to and adapted by musicians in the early North American colonies and the early periods of the new United States. Among the very first songs that I played were some of these ancient, traditional ballads, in part because of their subject matter, in part because they were relatively simple musically, and in part because singers like Joan Baez made them come alive.