Earlier this month saw the release of “The Trial of Bill Burn Under Martin’s Act”, the ‘snappy’ title of the new EP from Jon Wilks. Below, Jon kindly took some time out to talk us through its delights. Jon will be performing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on August 3rd, at the Cellarful of Folkadelia (3pm) and on the Bulverton Stage (8pm).
At the beginning of the year, I had intended to research and release an obscure traditional folk song each month throughout 2020. Best laid plans, and all that…
Instead, I got slightly sidetracked. Two songs, in particular, caught my attention and, aside from the odd gig and mini-tour here and there, all my spare time went into either researching or arranging these old Black Country gems.
Last year’s album, Midlife, was made up of songs from Birmingham and the Midlands (where I come from), and on the small tour that went with it I started realising what these songs meant to people. Whether down in Bodmin or performing at the Green Note in Camden, I met contingents of displaced Brummies, all keen to tell me how delighted they were to hear these songs again. I had emails from people as far-flung as South Africa and the Southern States telling me how these were songs that their grandparents, emigrated from the Midlands deep in the past, had sung to them as children.
Needless to say, it was all very moving. And, although there are two songs on my new EP that are definitely not from the Midlands, I’ve since found it quite hard to look away. The Midlands, and The Black Country, in particular, seems to have been birthplace to a wealth of unique traditional songs that have been left untouched since the early 1970s.
The Trial of Bill Burn Under Martin’s Act
The new EP takes the extremely snappy title, The Trial of Bill Burn Under Martin’s Act, from the first of these songs. Martin’s Act, it turns out, was a piece of legislation that can be seen as a forerunner to the RSPCA. Richard Martin, an apparently animal-loving MP, successfully moved to pass a law that prevented the beating of cattle in public. Six years later, a group of Dudley men were acquitted for the beating of a bull in the streets. Bulls, it seems, had accidentally been left off the list of animals that constituted cattle.
The story quickly became the source of satire. A tale of abused animals finding their way into court appearances influenced broadside writers and painters alike, and the fleeting legend of Bill Burn was born. A brief Google search will bring you to a painting of the Bill Burn incident, in which his donkey was summoned before the magistrate to “plead its cause”. And so it seems that a song once existed, too.
I found it while flicking through Jon Raven’s seminal book, The Urban & Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham (you all own a copy, right?) and the lyrics leapt off the page. I spent the next few days unsuccessfully trying to track down a tune to go with them. I couldn’t bear to leave them where they were, so I laid them out over my own melody and took the song off on tour with me. Hearing the audience singing those words back to me, probably the first performance of them in public since 1828, was enough to convince me to put out a recording.
Holly Ho
The second song, ‘Holly Ho’, has a very involved story attached to it. I’ve published the seven months of research and fact-finding on my own blog, which you can read here. Suffice to say that it’s one of my favourite traditional songs, mainly because it encapsulates my own understanding of what a folk song is. It was collected in a pub in Halesowen in 1958, and the source singer, Joe Mallen, said that new verses were added by the regulars every time it was sung. Completely organic in its growth, other pubs in the area had different verses, presumably as the regulars stumbled from one watering hole to the next, singing the catchy refrain.
I’m very pleased to have coerced my pals Nick Hart and Mikey Kenney into recording it with me. I love them both as friends and musicians, and each one of them egged me on with the research of this song, either by sending me recordings they had of other source singers performing it or simply by demonstrating similar levels of geekery. I recall an hour-long conversation with Mikey at the Hyde Tavern in Winchester, both of us geeking out over 19th-century songs of the Birmingham waterways with the same hopeless enthusiasm that schoolboys reserve for football. I’ve had similar conversations with Nick on many occasions (we once filmed ourselves geeking out). When you find friends like these, you have to cling on to them dearly.
Who Hung the Monkey?
Elsewhere on the EP, you’ll find ‘Who Hung the Monkey’. I’ve released this before, but for various reasons, the song had to come down from digital platforms. It’s up again now, and a fine little curio it is, too. The story is well-known: in Napoleonic times, the people of Hartlepool supposedly found a monkey washed up on the beach. Having never seen either a monkey or a French spy before, they jumped to the conclusion that the creature was the latter. The monkey suffered a horrible fate, all detailed in gory detail in the song, and the legend subsequently attached itself to the town.
Of course, when you dig down into the history of old songs, things are rarely that simple. During the course of my research, I found that a similar song/tale existed earlier in Aberdeenshire and that it may have been a kind of urban myth that did the rounds, prompted ever onwards by a music hall man called Ned Corvan, to whom the song is most often attributed. Again, I’ve blogged my fingers off on the subject over here.
Leave Her, Johnny
The last song on the EP is the well-known sea shanty, ‘Leave Her, Johnny’. I’ve been playing with this since I first became interested in traditional songs, but had misunderstood the lyrics. Reading them in a book without knowing the tune, I’d initially assumed that the ship in the song was sinking and that the narrative must’ve been maudlin and moribund. It was only much later that I heard rowdy recordings that suggested it was a drinking song for sailors going ashore. Hence the rather wistful style I play it in. Maybe it gives it something a little different. What do you think?
Jon Wilks will be playing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on August 3rd, once at the Cellarful of Folkadelia (3pm) and once on the Bulverton Stage (8pm). He’s doing an extensive UK tour in March of next year. For more info, see www.jonwilks.online
Photo Credit: Shaun Duke