08/02/2024
Today’s sketchbookery was inspired by ’s Day 3 prompt for . As you might have noticed, I am very much not doing this in sequence, because I’m a REBEL.
So: Day 3 is “John Ball”, a jolly semi-spiritual-sing-and-stompalong-cry-for-equality from the same guy who brought you the Lord of the Dance (no, no, not Michael Flatley…). I don’t know why, but this one was yelling “typography!” at me, possibly because the lyrics are quite quotable.
I used to play a fair few trad folk nights in my music days, performing my own songs (like I said - REBEL). They were pretty solidly folky but I still got the sense they were frowned upon for not being old standards. I’ll confess, I used to feel like a bit of an intruder in that scene, because I lacked the in-depth knowledge of all these “real” songs that everyone else seemed to know in their bones… I felt like I should have undertaken some kind of scholarly study before playing, so I could fully appreciate the history of it all.
And yet… the more research I did, the more I discovered that at least half of the “standards” were written by blokes in the 60s/70s/80s and are neither ancient nor any more authentic than anything written today… John Ball is one such song - it sounds convincingly old, but in reality it was born the year before me, to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Peasant’s Revolt.
I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say with this particular ramble, except that reverence for the old is lovely until it’s used as a tool to exclude the new. Something like that, anyway.
(PS: special thanks go to today who let me hide out in their basement for a slightly unreasonable amount of time working while our windows at home are being reconstructed…)
