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Andrew Curry writes: There was some chat on our Facebook group a couple of weeks ago about Richard Thompson’s timeless classic, Beeswing. Thompson’s always denied that it was “about” the fine folk singer Anne Briggs, but much more recently he told the Financial Times writer David Honigman that he had Briggs in mind when he wrote it, along with Vashti Bunyan.
Bunyan, of course, literally walked away from the music business in the 1960s, walking from Kent to the Scottish Hebrides with a horse and wagon and settled in a croft on the remote island of Berneray. The ferry to Berneray was too small for the horse, which had to be left on North Uist.
(Vashti Bunyan at the door of the croft, on the cover of Just Another Diamond Day. Willem Alink/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
But Thompson told Honigman that he was much more influenced by Ted the tramp when living on a smallholding in rural Suffolk :
“This old tramp used to come round every three to six months,” Thompson recalled to me many years later in a London pub, “and he’d stay with us. He was a great old boy. He had amazing stories.” Ted, the tramp, dreamt of settling down in a caravan and putting down roots; he never did.
Honigman’s piece on Beeswing, originally written as part of an FT series, was included in a book called The Life of a Song: Volume Two, a collection of song ‘biographies’ that ranges from Greensleeves to Waterloo Sunset.
As part of that he dipped into some of the cover versions. He’s not a fan of Christy Moore’s version, which Salut! Live’s editor, Colin Randall, picked out at his choice when he wrote our Cover Story on Beeswing—our most popular Cover Story, as it happens.
In contrast, he likes The Futureheads‘ a capella version. Although Salut! Live is predisposed to like Sunderland bands, I’m not that fond of their decision to snip off the last verse, which for my money is critical to the way the song works.
But he also points to an intriguing version of the song by the young Donegal singer Aine O’Boyle. O’Boyle’s not really a folk singer, or at least, the songs on her YouTube channel cover an eclectic range of styles.
But in her respectful version of Beeswing she retells the song from the point of view of Beeswing, giving her a voice rather than having her as the object of male judgment and male regret. Once upon a time this would have been known as a “distaff” version, but I’m not sure that anyone understands what the word distaff means anymore.
Does it work? You can be the judge.
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