Parallel Strands

This album brings together two aspects of Martin Graebe:- his ability to write great songs in traditional styles and his skill and patience in researching the songs from the C19th collection of Baring-Gould. Many of the songs are recorded here for the first time since Baring-Gould noted them down and all the arrangements of Martins own songs are new.

Martin Graebe – vocals
Shan Cowan – vocals
Paul Burgess – Fiddle
Jeff Gillett – Guitar and Mandola
Keith Kendrick – English and Anglo Concertina
Barry Lister – Tuba and Trombone
Paul Sartin – Oboe
Paul Wilson – Accordion & Percussion (Granite, Slate and Tom)
additional vocals – Doug Bailey, Lynne Heraud, Barry Lister and Pat Turner

Sabine Baring-Gould

Sabine Baring-Gould (1834 1924) was a pioneering collector of English Traditional songs and a mentor to later collectors such as Cecil Sharp. Though he was also a highly regarded writer and antiquarian, he regarded his collection of songs from the mouths of the ordinary people of Devon and Cornwall, made between 1887 and 1916, to be the crowning achievement of his life. While he published many of these songs during his lifetime in his two major collections Songs of the West and A Garland of Country Song, he acknowledged that because he had been obliged by the need to reach a wide audience, he had found it necessary to edit a number of the songs. Recognising that future students of folk song might be interested in the songs as actually collected, he gave his original Fair Copy (containing 202 songs) and his rough manuscripts to Plymouth Library. These manuscripts, together with a few others (including those sent to F J Child at Harvard) were the basis of study until 1992 when a chance discovery of a large quantity of previously unrecognised material was made. Since that time Martin, and more recently Shan, have been working on these manuscripts to index and transcribe them and to understand their significance. In the process of this research they have also discovered a number of lovely songs.

Introduction

This recording has been a long time in the making. It has been on my To Do list for at least 5 years and I had done some planning for a solo CD but those plans had not been translated into much action. Two years ago I started to sing with Shan and we have both enjoyed performing a growing repertoire of songs from the Baring-Gould collection. When Doug Bailey invited us in the summer of 2004 to make a CD with Wildgoose Records, he wanted to do something that brought that traditional material together with my own songs. (Indeed, his provisional title for the CD was The Two Faces of Martin Graebe!) And so the concept of Parallel Strands was born.

Initially we thought more of the CD might be unaccompanied but we were very pleased to find that a number of musicians, some old friends and some new, were keen to help. Working with musicians in this way was new to us and, it has to be said, some of the things that we naively asked them to do were a bit of a stretch. It has been an real pleasure to work with them and to learn together – we are both grateful to them and awed by their talent. So, my solo, unaccompanied, traditional CD has grown a bit. A number of the songs are here recorded for the first time since Baring-Gould noted them down in the late 19th Century. In the case of my own songs the arrangements are all new. Shan and I have greatly enjoyed putting this collection together for you. We hope that you enjoy listening to it.