Edward II – Dancing Tunes
Cadiz Music – 12 March 2021
Their second album since reforming in 2016, the Manchester ensemble Edward II have gathered together traditional songs from the Caribbean and, especially, Jamaica, collected by Walter Jekyll and recorded by folklorist and Jamaican dialect activist Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley MBE, aka Miss Lou, all written and sung in English or Jamaican patois.
Generally tagged as calypso, they’re upbeat, playful and, as the album title indicates, danceable tunes, the band reinterpreting them and referencing their English sources, here with guest vocal contributions from Bella Hardy. They kick off with the first of three highly familiar numbers, Day-o, day-o otherwise known as The Banana Boat Song and immortalised by Harry Belafonte (on which this take is based), although, in fact, six different versions charted in the US Top 40 of 1957. A traditional work song sung at the dockside by labourers loading bananas for export, piece work recorded by the tally man of the lyrics.
While Belafonte also recorded it in 1957, the second of the popular evergreens, Yellow Bird actually enjoyed its biggest success with a Hawaiian arrangement by Arthur Lyman that made the Billboard Top 4. The version here, however, is pure Jamaican a la Winston Groovy, albeit the lost love English lyric, by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, bears little relation to the original poem, Choucoune, by Haitian poet Oswald Durant, set to music in the late 1800s. The third, however, Island In The Sun was another huge Belafonte hit and, with its steel drums, became his signature song, the arrangement here owing more to versions by The Paragons and John Holt.
The other selections are more obscure, the first being Linstead Market, the tale of a mother unable to sell her ackee fruit, thereby meaning the kids go hungry, a paradoxically lively number recorded back in the day by Miss Lou herself. Another based on an old folk song and also part of the Belafonte repertoire, Cordelia Brown tells of a mixed-race village girl being bullied on account of having red hair.
Linking back to their previous project about industrial Manchester (interviewed here), Dry Weather Houses, variously recorded by both Bennett and American folk group The Weavers, is a shuffle rhythm work song lament about sub-standard houses that only function when it doesn’t rain and where, if you’re not careful cockroaches will cut your throat in the night. Steel drums and parping brass provide the sparkling colours for Long Time Gal, a boy meets girl (but not as often as he’d like) Mento-styled tale which references Bald Head John Crow, a familiar trouble-making figure in Jamaican folklore.
First recorded in 1926, the skanking Mi’ Donkey Want Water (Hold Em Joe) has not entirely subtle euphemistic lyrics given its essential children’s playground style nature, the version here possibly influenced by the 50s recording by The Sparrow, which brings us to another children’s nursery rhyme, the syncopated rhythm Shake The Papaya Down (a change from bananas) still sung in Caribbean schools today. The collection proper ends with an instrumental version of the Mento traditional River Bank Coverly, again first recorded as a children’s song by Louise Bennett back in 1957. There are, however, three bonus tracks, a near eight-minute calypso dub treatment of Banana Boat Song and ‘nucleus’, aka dub instrumental backing, versions of Hold Em Joe and Yellow Bird, all of which add up to an album that, linking to the last album, nods to the shared hardships of communities some 4000 miles apart but, more importantly, the resolve to dance through the bad times and soak up the sun when it shines. Kick off your shoes and lively up your own dancehall days.
Watch ‘Hold em Joe’ feat. Bella Hardy
Dancing Tunes is out on 12 March – Order via Amazon | Bandcamp