Norma Waterson (1939-2022)

The revered British folksinger Norma Waterson has died. The Guardian has an obituary and a nice appreciation.

Though she recorded contemporary material as a solo artist, she was probably best known as a member of a family ensemble that in its original conformation in the 1960s also included her brother Mike, sister Lal, and a cousin, John Harrison. Norma's husband, the fine guitarist Martin Carthy (who survives her) replaced Harrison beginning in 1975. Later lineups under various names included the couple's daughter, the fiddler Eliza Carthy.

Below are the Watersons (including Martin Carthy) with a rousing a capella hymn demonstrating the group's unique style.



A documentary entitles Travelling for a Living follows the group in their early days.

Music Notes: "Idumea"

Charles Wesley, one of the founding fathers of Methodism, is said to have penned some 6,500 hymns, among them "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." I can't say for sure — not having heard them all — but I suspect he never wrote another as weirdly beautiful as "Idumea":

And am I born to die?
To lay this body down
And as my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?

A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary region of the dead
Where all things are forgot

Soon as from earth I go
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my fortune be

Waked by the trumpet's sound
I from my grave shall rise
And see the judge with glory crowned
And see the flaming skies

The peculiarities begin with the title itself, which seems to have come not from Wesley but from a later arranger. Why "Idumea"? According to reference works, Idumea (or Edom) was an ancient kingdom south of the Dead Sea. It is mentioned in the Bible, though not, as far as I can tell (and I'd welcome an exegesis) in any context that would explain the lyrics above. The noted folklorist A. L. Lloyd, in his liner notes to the version of the song performed by the English folk group the Watersons, thought it unnecessary (or was it impossible?) to explain the allusion.

Then there's the way the song begins: in mid-sentence, in mid-thought. Hymns tend to speak in a collective voice; this one is first-person singular and sounds almost like a monologue spoken in character, along the lines of Spoon River Anthology. Even the hymn's theology seems a tad unorthodox. Christianity, as a religion that offers, in effect, a choice of afterlives, has long alternated in its vernacular forms between a kind of "Joy to the World / God is Love" cheeriness and a darker strain, whether expressed in threats of hellfire and brimstone or in the death-obsessed pessimism of the danse macabre and Blind Willie Johnson's "You Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond." But Wesley's description of

The dreary region of the dead
Where all things are forgot

sounds more like the pagan, antinomian conception of the underworld (peopled by Homer's "exhausted dead") than it does the Christian vision of a place where sinners are sent to be paid back for their misdeeds. Is this because the speaker's voice is supposed to be an ancient, Idumean one? Is it because Wesley, though an evangelist and missionary, was also a classically educated scholar for whom the tropes of Greek and Roman literature would have been part of his intellectual training? Or was Wesley, good Methodist, really a secret Modernist avant la lettre (Pound's Cantos, after all, also begins with "And …")? All the elements are there: cryptic reference to antiquity, fragmented monologue …

According to Lloyd, the hymn fell out of favor in England, but remained popular among parishioners in what he calls "remoter settlements of the Upland Southern states of America." One can only wonder what they made of it.

The above note was originally published in A Common Reader's blog Book Case in 2003. I have dusted it off and revised a few points.

Lal Waterson: To Make You Stay

Mike Waterson's songs on Bright Phoebus, like the title track or "Rubber Band," which contains such whimsical lines as "just like margarine our fame is spreading," tend to be fairly jaunty major-key sing-alongs with simple lyrics. His sister Lal's compositions, on the other hand, are more brooding and cryptic (I can't, for instance, make much sense of "Never the Same," pretty as it is), and they're also odder musically.

"To Make You Stay," which seems to be addressed to a child, is one of the lovelier ones. I'm no musicologist, but the melody, with its chant-like descent and sudden swerve at the end of the verse, doesn't seem to fit conventional Anglo-American song styles at all, and that fact is a tribute to this "folk" artist's originality. (Lal's singing is also much stranger than Mike's, which is earthy and distinctive but nevertheless not unfamiliar.)

Dear, dear, dear, I once had a starling
Dear, dear, dear, a pretty little darling
Dear, dear, dear, but she flew away in the nighttime
From under me right hand

This unofficially posted version, by the way, is not the remastered one recently made available on CD from Domino Recording [and subsequently withdrawn]. The album as a whole is well worth a listen.

Lal & Mike Waterson: The Scarecrow

A beautiful, melancholy song with a sinister twist of child sacrifice in the third verse, "The Scarecrow" first appeared on an LP called Bright Phoebus in 1972. The artists, siblings Lal and Mike Waterson, were one half of the popular English folk quartet the Watersons, who were known for their a cappella renditions of carols and other traditional songs, but the LP, which featured original compositions and instrumental accompaniment, was poorly received at the time and has been largely unavailable since. It has now been remastered and released in the UK by Domino Records. Update (2021): The Domino release is no longer available due to legal action by the copyright holder. There appears to be no current release.

At least one of the other songs on Bright Phoebus ("Child among the Weeds") is said to have been prompted by the stillbirth of one of Lal Waterson's twins. The third verse of "The Scarecrow," however, was reportedly Mike Waterson's contribution.

Frost and Fire

With a few notable exceptions so-called "holiday music" tends to make me cringe. If I'm trapped in a department store in December -- something I naturally try to avoid at all costs -- the sound of "The Little Drummer Boy" or Andy Williams crooning "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is generally enough to send me running for the exits even faster than I normally would. But Frost and Fire, by the superb English vocal quartet known as the Watersons, is no ordinary "holiday" record. In fact it's not entirely a Christmas record at all; befitting its subtitle -- A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs -- it includes Easter and harvest songs as well as Christmas hymns and wassails, few of them familiar to American ears. It's a very English record, and there are no dancing snowmen here (not that I have anything against Frosty, mind you), but Lord Nelson and Napoleon make appearances, along with Herod, a rather malicious boy Jesus (who gets soundly spanked for his misbehavior), and a very large and well-endowed ram. Though most of the songs are at least ostensibly Christian, the record includes such cryptopagan curiosities as "John Barleycorn" (later famously covered by Traffic with vocals by Steve Winwood). It also includes the eerily beautiful "Idumea," written by John Wesley's brother Charles, which has to be the strangest Christian hymn I've ever heard.

In their original configuration, the Watersons were two sisters from Yorkshire, Norma and Lal Waterson, their brother Mike, and their cousin Mike Harrison. After Harrison moved on he was replaced by Norma's husband, the guitarist and folk singer Martin Carthy, who is perhaps best known in the states for having involuntarily loaned his arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" to Paul Simon. Lal Waterson died ten years ago, but a successor group still tours as Waterson: Carthy. Though they are sometimes described as "harmony singers," the term is apparently not apt; according to Paul Adams

They ... rarely achieve four-part harmony. At times only one person is singing a harmony line and the others are in unison. Sometimes they are all in unison but drift into two or three parts at the end of a line. In their case it is the blend of voices which makes it sound like harmony.

Whatever the musicological truth may be, the group's rousing, earthy sound is like nothing else I've ever heard. I don't listen to this record that often, but when the chill weather starts in I invariably reach for it.

The original Frost and Fire LP, which came out in 1965, featured the first quartet and was entirely a cappella, except for a drum beat here and there. The Topic re-issue I own includes six songs from a second LP, Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy, which was originally released in 1977 by the version of the group including Martin Carthy and which features a brass quartet on one cut. Unfortunately this combined release appears to have been discontinued, so the CD currently available only includes the original Frost and Fire.

There's a fine documentary about the Watersons called "Travelling for a Living"; it's included in the group's 2004 retrospective boxed set, Mighty River of Song. Below is an excerpt. It's actually a May Day song, but I couldn't turn up any clips of their Christmas material. No one seems to be sure what if anything the words "Hal-An-Tow" mean.