A Number Of Work

A NUMBER OF WORK – CD INFO

Here is the CD front and back package artwork, the back cover text and the liner notes.

Front cover

Back cover

Back cover text

1 Jacky Tar (3:19)
2 Sheffield Park (3:40)
3 Rigs of London (3:50)
4 The Sheepstealer (1:56)
5 Fly Up My Cock (1:38)
6 The Bonny Bunch of Roses (6:00)
7 Through Bushes and Through Briars (3:44)
8 Cold Haily Rainy Night (2:31)
9 The Wild Wild Berry (3:24)
10 The Cherry Tree Carol (3:25)

All songs traditional / Cooper and Toller except
track 6, George Brown / Cooper and Toller.
VICKY COOPER: vocals, fiddle.
RICHARD TOLLER: vocals, guitar, mandolin, banjo, etc.
Recorded and produced by Richard Toller.
Thanks to Sam Proctor at Lismore Mastering.

Liner notes

  1. Jacky Tar
    Roud 511. Like all English folk songs, this was first heard by us on a recording by Martin Carthy. The source for this version of the widely-collected song about a sailor’s antics on shore is the version sung to Cecil Sharp by William Nott of Meshaw, Devon in 1904.
  2. Sheffield Park
    Roud 860. Sheffield Park is one of those implausible songs in which someone actually dies of a broken heart. We love the 5/4 tune. Our version is based on one collected by Cecil Sharp from William Carpenter in the workhouse at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire. Sharp visited Herefordshire in September 1921 and collected 39 songs and 13 fiddle tunes from 10 workhouse residents. The song also turns up in various southern counties including Sussex, which is where Sheffield Park actually is.
  3. Rigs of London
    Roud 868. “Rigs” are tricks or morally dubious activities. Our version of the Rigs of London comes from Romany singer Betsy Holland. In August 1907 Cecil Sharp (again) met the 27-year old Mrs Holland at a Gypsy camp near Simonsbath on Exmoor in Devon. Sharp described her as “One of the finest folk-singers I have ever come across.” There’s also an excellent version, to a different tune, by Dorset singer Charlie Wills recorded by Bill Leader in 1972. You can go to the the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in London and listen to the recording on the LP ‘Charlie Wills’. The story, popular in English folk song, is of a country lad who travels to the city but doesn’t let himself get taken advantage of by the streetwise city folk; in fact, quite the opposite. We’ve made some adjustments for inflation towards the end of the song.
  4. The Sheepstealer
    Roud 1667. The tune for The Sheepstealer comes from glove-maker Edith Sartin from Corscombe, Dorset and the words from George Dowden of Lackington, also in Dorset. They’re both in the Hammond and Gardiner collection where they date from 1906. Glove-making was a cottage industry with each worker specialising in a particular part of the glove. It would have been monotonous work and singing songs may have helped to pass the time. The song is also known as ‘The Brisk Lad’. Its plot takes place in a time when anyone caught stealing livestock or poaching would have been harshly punished by the legal system, and labourers in Dorset were among the poorest in the England. It’s a kind of defiant and angry protest song set almost entirely in the future tense: our protagonist is telling us what he plans to do. No sheep were actually harmed.
  5. Fly Up My Cock
    Roud 179, Child 248. Vicky learned this night-visiting song from the 1971 recording by Maddy Prior on the Tim Hart and Maddy Prior album Summer Solstice. Variants exist with different titles and this short version is perhaps a fragment of a longer song. There’s also a 1955 recording in the BBC sound archives (and released on a Topic album) of Irish singer Robert Cinnamond doing it (Topic 12T269, You Rambling Boys of Pleasure, Traditional Ballads and Songs from Ulster. It’s not available to buy now, but is on Spotify).
  6. The Bonny Bunch of Roses
    Roud 664. Napoleon Bonaparte was a popular hero in 19th century English folk song, perhaps because the oppressed English working classes saw a Napoleonic victory as a sure-fire route to the sunlit uplands of health, happiness and economic prosperity. The song’s words were written by broadside ballad author George Brown. Brown worked in Seven Dials in London, a rough slum area which was a centre for broadside printing. Some authors unable to make a living from their loftier literary endeavours were forced to write broadsides to sell to printers for a shilling each. J & R. M. Wood’s Typographic Advertiser of 1863 describes the broadside authors thus: “characteristically drunken bards who had to be locked in a room to elicit sober work from them, and who got round their masters by supping strong drink from a straw through the keyhole.” This song is a conversation between Napoleon’s ailing son Francois and his mother, Napoleon’s second wife Marie Louise. It’s a lamentation on living life in the shadow of the reputation of a high-achieving father. The tune comes largely from the New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, where the source is Percy Grainger’s 1906 transcription of George Wray from Brigg, Lincolnshire.
  7. Through Bushes and Through Briars
    Roud 1027. We found this song in the ‘Southern Harvest’ reprint of Frank Purslow’s collection of songs from the Hammond and Gardiner manuscripts. Like the tune for The Sheepstealer, it was sung by George Dowden of Lackington, Dorset in September 1905. Notwithstanding the notes in Southern Harvest, which say “Oral and printed versions vary so little both in tune and text…”, this was a new tune to us for this song. Maybe you’ll see it as a sympathetic depiction of shy people in love, or maybe you’ll get frustrated and want to shout at the two of them to just get on with it.
  8. Cold Haily Rainy Night
    Roud 135. We probably became aware of this night-visiting song from a Steeleye Span recording. We got our version from an old copy of Stephen Sedley’s book, The Seeds of Love. The original source is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s collection where he has a broadside version and a copy he noted down, along with only 81 other songs, from Devon blacksmith John ‘Ginger Jack’ Woodridge.
  9. The Wild Wild Berry
    Roud 24845. A rare example of a song in the English folk canon with just a single source: Ray Driscoll. Ray sang the song to Mike Yates in London in 1989. Ray was born in Ireland in 1922 but moved to England when he was young and was brought up in London. He learned The Wild Wild Berry from an itinerant labourer called Harry Civil while both were living and working in Shropshire. The song is a much pared-down variant of Lord Randal (Roud 10, Child 12) and manages to convey all of the essential facts and feelings of the much longer ballad in three short verses.
  10. The Cherry Tree Carol
    Roud 453, Child 54. The tune for our version of this old carol comes from Mary Anne Clayton of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, collected by Cecil Sharp in 1909. The biblical story appears in New Testament Apocrypha, where the tree is a fig, and then in the Coventry Mystery Plays where it becomes a cherry. The song starts in soap-opera style with Joseph reacting in a predictable manner to his wife’s announcement of her pregnancy, but then gets a bit weird when Jesus starts doing magic and answering Joseph’s questions from inside the womb.