Colin Randall writes: first of all, the three of us who bring you Salut! Folk – Andrew Curry, Steve Peck and I – offer our warmest best wishes this Christmas Day.
This site celebrating folk, folk-rock and related genres including the blues, dates from 2007. It was launched as a companion to my Salut! site, essentially the privatisation of a blog I contributed to The Daily Telegraph website as that paper’s Paris correspondent,
It became Salut! Folk after our host Typepad announced it was closing definitively on Sept 30 this year.
The move to WordPress was accomplished by Andrew and his son, Peter, relaunching with the distinctive new look you see now.
For our first Christmas as Salut! Folk, I have again dug out some seasonally relevant music to share with readers.
By accident I came across the Devonian singer Jim Causley talking to the celebrated Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell on BBC Radio 3‘s Music Planet about the medieval Christmas tradition of wassailing, singing door to door and offering seasonal drinks in exchange for gifts.
Christmas Eve, 1842 edition of the Illustrated London News with Santa in a wassail bowl
Wassailing historically developed alongside carol singing. It influenced some of the festive songs we know today as carols, including God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
Here We Come A Wassailing was heard on the radio show. Sixty years have passed since the Watersons applied their full-throated, joyous harmonies on their debut album Frost and Fire, making a good song great. It sounds as fresh as it did in 1965.
Reader’s Digest added detail: “The Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth.
“The wassail bowl itself was a hearty combination of hot ale or beer, apples, spices and mead, just alcoholic enough to warm tingling toes and fingers of the singers,”
According to our old friend AI, actually quite frightening as friends go, the brief explanation of wassail is that it combines “hospitality, good wishes, seasonal drinking and ancient folk belief — a blend of language, music and ritual that has lasted for centuries”.
Causley himself has recorded a number of wassails from different parts of his patch, the West Country. Here is one from Dartmoor.
For something completely, I turn to an artist whose name undeniably qualifies him for inclusion.
Keith Christmas
Keith Christmas is a fine guitarist, singer and songwriter whose original life plan was to be an architect. Instead of designing buildings and monuments, he built a career with much critical acclaim as a musician whose powerful lyrics reflected his love of poetry.
Along the way, he also found time to play at David Bowie’s request on three of the tracks of the Space Oddity album and appear at the first Glastonbury in 1970. Happily, he is still alive at 80 contrary to a dodgy AI reply to a question about him.
I wanted to know if he had recorded any music relevant to the festive season. The answer was very long but boiled down to “winter yes” – though more to do with moods than calendar – but “Christmas no”.
Forest and the Shore, from his 1971 album Pigmy, is a good example:
It takes concentration and possibly patience to appreciate but is worth the effort. And in case that leaves you in need of the music-lover’s equivalent of a dieter craving fish and chips once a fortnight …..
… let me leave you with a richly tuneful, 100 per cent seasonal slice of Steeleye Span. Their uplifting version of The Holly and the Ivy might have be among my Christmas choices last year but was squeezed out by the Unthanks’ irresistible instrumental treatment.
As you tuck in or relax after tucking in, please accept Salut! Folk‘s hearty Christmas greetings.
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