Songs have a home
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.