The ongoing search for a durable set of strings that will sound reasonable on my Taylor Big Baby without costing the earth has taken a really surprising turn.

I was putting in an order at StringsDirect.com, who, incidentally, are truly excellent and almost always have your strings with you the next day. I noticed their Legacy strings for £2.99 a set. For three pounds a go, I thought they had to be worth a punt, if only for the sake of curiosity.

And they’re amazingly good. Admittedly they do have a very “phosphor bronze” sound but they sound much better on the Taylor than Martins and various other strings have done. And they seem to be lasting longer with continual bashing from my metal fingerpicks than any other strings have done so far.

So an all-round thumbs-up for Legacy strings!

Here’s a song I was reminded of, in a roundabout way, by performing “On Ilkley Moor ‘Baht ‘At” to the tune of The House Of The Rising Sun last weekend at the Wolverley Summer Of Love festival.

And, just like The House Of The Rising Sun, it’s a song in which a gambler laments his ruined finances, moans about his addictions, and generally shuns company. What a cheery soul he is.

The song has a fabulous tune, and one that can sit quite happily on one chord for a lot of the time.

This version comes from the John Jacob Niles collection “Ballads, Love Songs and Tragic Legends from the Southern Appalachian Mountains” published by Schirmer & Co. He collected it in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and says of it:

Verses collected from workmen engaged by my father between the years of 1910 and 1917. The tune is well known throughout the United States. I am not prepared to say whether it was first sung as a sacred song or as a secular folk-song, like the one given above. “Hallelujah, Thine the Glory” is one of the sacred versions, and “Hallelujah, I’m a Hobo” is a well-known secular version[...]

I’m not entirely sure that the narrator of this version is celebrating his hobo status. I’ve recorded this quite simply - acoustic guitar and Maccann duet concertina with a double tracked vocal in octaves.

Download Jack O’ Diamonds (2.6 MB)

Jack o’ Diamonds, Jack o’ Diamonds, I know you of old
You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver and gold.
My woman is hungry, my children are too
My troubles, Jack o’ Diamonds, were all caused by you

Oh whisky and brandy are no friend to my kind
They shattered my liver and poisoned my mind*
My daddy drunk whisky, my daddy drunk ale
They whopped him with the rawhide and sometimes with a flail

I’ll build me a cabin on yon mountain high
Where the wild birds will cheer me and they fly on by
Go away now young ladies, and let me alone
Cause you know I’m just a poor boy and a long way from home

Jack o’ Diamonds, Jack o’ Diamonds, I know you of old
You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver and gold
Oh I’ve gambled and gambled from sundown till morn
And I’ve got no more money than the day I was born

* Niles has “Hit bothered my poor daddy and troubled my mind”

Dave Townsend has had some trouble with the Royal Mail, so I’m reproducing below a note sent out by him for wide circulation.

HANDS ON MUSIC BOOKINGS
A Message from Dave Townsend

If you recently sent a booking or enquiry to Hands On Music Weekends, PO Box 1162, East Oxford D. O., OX4 4WS, U. K., your letter may have been returned marked “gone away”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Royal Mail payments failed to inform the PO Box office that the annual fee had been paid, and so they closed the Box. I have only just found out, and it has been reinstated, but some bookings will undoubtedly have been returned. The return process can take a week or two, so you may not even know yet. If you have booked for a Hands On Music weekend and have heard nothing, please email me (info@handsonmusic.org.uk) and send it again. If your booking has been returned, please send it in again - the PO Box is now functioning.

Apart from the inconvenience, I am concerned about the message implied by people receiving returned mail marked “gone away”. Royal Mail’s conditions of service exclude any compensation for loss of business, so I am reliant upon the goodwill of as many people as possible to pass on this information to any relevant chat groups or personal contacts. Please tell as many people as you can that Hands On Music Weekends are up and running, that it is business as usual, and that information can be found on the website www.handsonmusic.org.uk.

The internet is a wonderful thing.

Over on MySpace, I decided to chance my arm and ask the very fantastic singing phenomenon Frank Sidebottom if it was OK to record a cover of his song “Free Download” in a music-hall style on concertina as long as I put it up on my website as a free download (costing absolutely nothing).

I’m delighted to say that he said yes… so, as Frank might say, watch this space fantastic fans - you know you should, you really should. Thank you.

I’ll be playing at the Wolverley Festival in Worcestershire, this Saturday, the 23rd of June - early evening (ish) I believe.

It’ll be an acoustic set featuring various concertinas, dulcimer, guitar, and autoharp, with my good mate Bert Priest joining me on various percussive thingummies. It’s a slight change of plan - originally I was going to do some electric stuff as well, but we enjoyed our acoustic rehearsal on the 21st so much that we’re sticking with the songs we had a go at then.

Be warned - there will be a somewhat unusual rendition of “The House of The Rising Sun”…

The two singers who inspire me most are Johnny Cash and Scott Walker, and ever since hearing Cash’s version of Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind on his posthumously-released “American V: A Hundred Highways” album, it’s been simmering away at the back of my mind. It’s a gorgeous song of regret.

I took Cash’s version as a starting point but also had in mind Scott Walker’s singing on recordings like The Walker Brothers’ “No Regrets”, on which he stays well down in his baritone register. It’s not a part of my voice that I use a lot - it’s not all that loud down there and when singing against a concertina it can be a bit hard to project over the top of the instrument.

As for the “arrangement”, I spent a bit of time sorting out a guitar part before deciding that something fairly static would probably suit it better than anything more fussy, so I opted for a simple chordal approach on my Wheatstone Maccann Duet concertina.

Download If You Could Read My Mind (approx 5MB)

Lyrics on Gordon Lightfoot’s official website

As heard previously on Brumcast!

As this recording is now out and about “in the wild” I thought it time I put it up on here too. As I mentioned before in the previous plug for Brumcast, there’s some blurb about the song in this post. I’ve edited out the mildly incomprehensible verse I wrote about the modern art sculpture of a swing that used to adorn the St Chad’s circus roundabout, as most people I played it to hadn’t a clue what I was on about!

The instrumentation on this one is strings-only: acoustic bass guitar, mandolin, acoustic rhythm guitar and acoustic lead guitar. The lead guitar part was played on a Nashville-strung guitar (i.e. the bottom four strings are an octave higher than normal, giving it a really luminous quality) and it’s got loads of reverb on it.

Any of you who are avid fans of The Jesus And Mary Chain might notice that some phrases in the guitar solos are “inspired by” the Mary Chain song “Why’d You Want Me?”

Download I Can’t Find Brummagem (4.9 MB)

The debut album, on Swainsthorpe Records, is now available to buy. Go to the “Buy CDs” page to hear samples and order your copy now!

This weekend (18th-20th of May) saw yet another fabulous Swaledale Squeeze, organised as ever by Jane Edwards. It’s a really special weekend, with concertina players from all over the country - and beyond - descending on a youth hostel in Yorkshire to make music together. The evening sessions carry on well into the night, and I achieved what I think is a personal best this year by staying up until a quarter to five on Sunday morning.

As a result of these late night sessions, Steve Bradley and I have been talking vaguely about doing “a project” for the last couple of years, but the logistics, given that I live in Birmingham and he lives in Durham, aren’t ideal. So this time round we took the opportunity to skip a workshop at Swaledale and record a couple of songs.

Needless to say these recordings are the product of almost no rehearsal time, very little equipment set-up time, and an unhealthy amount of sleep deprivation, so they’re far from perfect; but they were fun to make, and there can be few Pink Floyd covers doing the rounds involving English concertina, Maccann duet concertina, and a foot-operated Shruti Box all recorded in a single take (no overdubs!). So there’s some novelty value at least! The songs are from Roger Waters’s great anti-war Pink Floyd LP, The Final Cut, which you should of course buy from Amazon or somewhere equally suitable if you don’t already own it…

Interestingly, our concertinas were both manufactured within a few years of each other by Wheatstone & Co. and have the same kind of ebony ends, and aside from differences in volume in places, the two instruments blend together so well that it’s difficult to tell them apart, especially when Steve is playing chordally.

Download The Gunner’s Dream (3.5 MB)

Steve Bradley - first vocal, English concertina
Stuart Estell - second vocal, Maccann duet concertina

Download Paranoid Eyes (2.8 MB)

Steve Bradley - English concertina, foot-operated Shruti box
Stuart Estell - vocal, Maccann duet concertina (in instrumental break)

This week’s Brumcast podcast includes a new recording of my version of “I Can’t Find Brummagem” which I recorded recently - it’s played on acoustic guitars, acoustic bass, and mandolin.

It’s not available anywhere else yet, so visit their MySpace and get the podcast feed here: http://www.myspace.com/brumcastbirmingham

The words and a bit of blurb about the song are available on this site