Matty Groves


Book Description

"As the pair searches the mansion's ancient ledgers, Ringan and Penny begin to suspect that Lady Susanna's death was not as simple as the song suggests, and that the truth may expose a four-hundred-year-old lie."--BOOK JACKET.




Beyond and Before, Updated and Expanded Edition


Book Description

The original edition of Beyond and Before extends an understanding of “progressive rock” by providing a fuller definition of what progressive rock is, was and can be. Called by Record Collector “the most accomplished critical overview yet” of progressive rock and one of their 2011 books of the year, Beyond and Before moves away from the limited consensus that prog rock is exclusively English in origin and that it was destroyed by the advent of punk in 1976. Instead, by tracing its multiple origins and complex transitions, it argues for the integration of jazz and folk into progressive rock and the extension of prog in Kate Bush, Radiohead, Porcupine Tree and many more. This 10-year anniversary revised edition continues to further unpack definitions of progressive rock and includes a brand new chapter focusing on post-conceptual trends in the 2010s through to the contemporary moment. The new edition discusses the complex creativity of progressive metal and folk in greater depth, as well as new fusions of genre that move across global cultures and that rework the extended form and mission of progressive rock, including in recent pop concept albums. All chapters are revised to keep the process of rethinking progressive rock alive and vibrant as a hybrid, open form.




First 50 Folk Songs You Should Play on the Piano


Book Description

(Easy Piano Songbook). 50 great folk favorites simply arranged with lyrics for beginning pianists to learn. Includes: Amazing Grace * Buffalo Gals (Won't You Come Out Tonight?) * Down by the Riverside * Good Night Ladies * Home on the Range * I've Been Working on the Railroad * Kumbaya * Man of Constant Sorrow * Michael Row the Boat Ashore * My Old Kentucky Home * Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen * Oh! Susanna * The Red River Valley * Scarborough Fair * She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain * This Little Light of Mine * Turkey in the Straw * The Wabash Cannon Ball * When the Saints Go Marching In * Yankee Doodle * The Yellow Rose of Texas * and more.




Fairport Convention On Track


Book Description

Fairport Convention are a great British institution – or, at least, they should be. For more than 50 years they have helped to keep traditional music alive and kicking by injecting it with a healthy dose of electric rock ’n’ roll. Their finest albums – including What We Did On Our Holidays and Liege And Lief – are landmarks is the development of British music. In this exhaustive and illuminating book, Kevan Furbank looks at all the studio albums in detail – from their uncertain debut in 1968 to their most recent release, celebrating half a century of music-making. He chronicles the stories behind each recording, touching on the highs and lows, the successes and tragedies, the pleasure and pain, and examines the songwriting, arrangements and traditions that inspired each track. In doing so, he also looks at the contributions made by the many great musicians who have passed through Fairport’s ‘revolving-door’ line-ups, including guitar wizard Richard Thompson, angel-voiced Sandy Denny, demon fiddler Dave Swarbrick and the ‘guv’nor’ of British folk-rock, Ashley Hutchings. Fairport Convention’s musical story is as dramatic as any soap opera. If you have never heard any Fairport this book is the perfect introduction. If you have, you will want to go back and revisit the music this band has made over the last 50 years. Because, in the words of Richard Thompson, it all comes round again.




The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender


Book Description

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry’s impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins’s introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.




Electric Folk


Book Description

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of British musicians rediscovered traditional folk ballads, fusing the old melodies with rock, jazz, and blues styles to create a new genre dubbed "electric folk" or "British folk rock." This revival featured groups such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle and individual performers like Shirley & Dolly Collins, and Richard Thompson. While making music in multiple styles, they had one thing in common: they were all based on traditional English song and dance material. These new arrangements of an old repertoire created a unique musical voice within the popular mainstream. After reasonable commercial success, peaking with Steeleye Span's Top 10 album All Around My Hat, Electric Folk disappeared from mainstream notice in the late 1970s, yet performers continue to create today. In Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, Britta Sweers provides an illuminating history and fascinating analysis of the unique features of the electric folk scene, exploring its musical styles and cultural implications. Drawing on rare historical sources, contemporary music journalism, and first-hand interviews with several of electric folk's most prominent artists, Sweers argues that electric folk is both a result of the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad. Young British "folk-rockers," such as Richard Thompson and Maddy Prior, turned to traditional musical material as a means of asserting their British cultural identity. Yet, unlike many American and British folk revivalists, they were not as interested in the "purity" of folk ballads as in the music's potential for lively interaction with modern styles, instruments, and media. The book also delves into the impact of the British folk rock movement on mainstream pop, American rock music, and neighboring European countries. Ultimately, Sweers creates a richly detailed portrait of the electric folk scene--as cultural phenomenon, commercial entity, and performance style.




English Animals


Book Description

'A beautiful and bold debut' M.J. Hyland, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down It's a long time since I've enjoyed any debut novel as much as English Animals. Its command of tone, narrative and character is so assured, and both its wit and perceptiveness about a certain kind of English life make it a joy to read' Amanda Craig English Animals is a brilliantly assured debut that fans of Nina Stibbe's writing will love. I opened my mouth to say something but she ran up the steps and into the house. I had imagined arriving at the house so many times, but it was never like this. I realised I knew nothing about these people. Richard and Sophie sounded like good names for good people. But they could be anything, they could be completely crazy. When Mirka gets a job in a country house in rural England, she has no idea of the struggle she faces to make sense of a very English couple, and a way of life that is entirely alien to her. Richard and Sophie are chaotic, drunken, frequently outrageous but also warm, generous and kind to Mirka, despite their argumentative and turbulent marriage. Mirka is swiftly commandeered by Richard for his latest money-making enterprise, taxidermy, and soon surpasses him in skill. After a traumatic break two years ago with her family in Slovakia, Mirka finds to her surprise that she is happy at Fairmont Hall. But when she tells Sophie that she is gay, everything she values is put in danger and she must learn the hard way what she really believes in. English Animals is a funny, subversive, poignant and beautifully written novel about a doomed love affair, a certain kind of Englishness and prejudice.




An Evolving Tradition


Book Description

The Child Ballads are a series of over 300 traditional ballads from England and Scotland that, along with their American variants, were anthologized by folklorist Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. An Evolving Tradition is the story of the Child Ballads—the world’s best-known and most highly regarded repository of traditional English folk songs, and the wellspring for approximately 10,000 recordings over the last century, from obscure musicological archives to classic releases from Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Led Zeppelin. Drawing on interviews with numerous scholars and musicians, author Dave Thompson explains what a ballad is, outlines their dominant themes, and recounts how these ballads survived to become a mainstay of field recordings made by Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax, and others as they traveled the English and American countryside in search of old songs. Thompson traverses the entire spectrum of rock, pop, folk, roots, experimental music, industrial, and goth to reveal the remarkable legacy and incalculable influence of the Child Ballads on all manner of modern music.




No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny


Book Description

Clinton Heylin's biography No More Sad Refrains, draws on hours of interviews with Sandy's closest friends and musical collaborators, access to her diaries and unreleased work, to produce a moving portrait of a complex, driven, but fatally flawed genius, who remains the finest female singer-songwriter this country has ever produced.About The Artist Sandy Denny provided the original vocals, alongside Robert Plant, for the classic Led Zeppelin song The Battle Of Evermore. Island Records released a limited edition nineteen CD retrospective of Denny's work in 2010."She was a perfect British folk voice" - Pete Townshend."My favourite singer out of all the British girls that ever were" - Robert Plant About The Author Clinton Heylin is one of the most respected rock historians writing today. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny and Van Morrison. He was nominated for the Ralph J. Gleason award for his Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions.




I've Always Kept a Unicorn


Book Description

I've Always Kept a Unicorn tells the story of Sandy Denny, one of the greatest British singers of her time and the first female singer-songwriter to produce a substantial and enduring body of original songs. Sandy Denny laid down the marker for folk-rock when she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, but her music went far beyond this during the seventies. After leaving Fairport she formed Fotheringay, whose influential eponymous album was released in 1970, before collaborating on a historic one-off recording with Led Zeppelin - the only other vocalist to record with Zeppelin in their entire career - and releasing four solo albums across the course of the decade. Her tragic and untimely death came in 1978. Sandy emerged from the folk scene of the sixties - a world of larger-than-life characters such as Alex Campbell, Jackson C. Frank, Anne Briggs and Australian singer Trevor Lucas, whom she married in 1973. Their story is at the core of Sandy's later life and work, and is told with the assistance of more than sixty of her friends, fellow musicians and contemporaries, one of whom, to paraphrase McCartney on Lennon, observed that she sang like an angel but was no angel.