It’s that time of year again – you’ve probably not even thought about Christmas yet, but the seasonal musical offerings are finished, wrapped and heading your way. Bryony Griffith and Alice Jones’s new album Wesselbobs is an early contender for any folkie present list.
Wesselbobs is Bryony and Alice’s second album as a duo, following their 2022 debut A Year Too Late and a Month Too Soon. I described their debut as “traditional folk music at its most beguiling”, and there are plenty of consistencies with their follow-up. The tunes and songs are again from their native Yorkshire, sourced after many hours digging in the archives and lesser-known collections. The new album also treats us again to impeccable playing on fiddle, harmonium, tenor guitar and body percussion, combined with their beautifully complemented, alternating lead vocals and intricate harmonies, all of course in their trademark regional accents.
The album’s opening track is the rousing Early Pearly, a traditional Yorkshire song about an impoverished young sailor returning from sea and not being recognised, which they previously released last Christmas as a charity single. The song was still being sung door to door by children in the 1940s in Ripon at Christmas time in the hope of financial or edible reward. Their version is in part based on Dave Hillery and Harry Boardman’s Haley Paley from their 1971 album Trans Pennine, using the phrase ‘Early Pearly’ instead of ‘Haley Paley’ from the singing of Hull singer Margaret Gardham’s Early Pearly on the Yorkshire Garland website, and with the addition of a chorus. Bryony’s driving fiddle, upbeat unison singing and pumping rhythms from Alice’s harmonium get things off to an appropriately merry start.
The ‘Ollins and the Ivin and The Yorkshire Wassailing Song take us to more familiar festive song territory. The first, The Holly and the Ivy in Yorkshire dialect – “because “ it’s easier to sing holly without an ‘h’!” – has a different tune collected in Huddersfield in the 1940s, with constrained tenor guitar and fiddle, giving the song centre stage. The Yorkshire Wassailing Song has the recognisable Yorkshire Wassail tune and is an amalgam of different versions; the first verse, chorus and ditty at the end are from the apparently posh singing of a Mrs Highstead from Bradford in the Hudleston Collection and are almost identical in The Watersons version, as Here We Come a-Wassailing, on their first 1965 album Frost and Fire. Humming harmonium aptly provides the song’s weave, and there’s no posh accent to be heard.
The Yorkshire Wassailing Song “is one they would have sung while carrying their Wessel-bobs!”. The album’s title, Wesselbobs, refers to a Christmas and New Year custom whereby evergreen boughs, built around a spherical frame (sometimes made of beer barrel hoops), decorated variously with ribbons, fruit, fabric or glass baubles, were carried door to door by Wassailers or carol singers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also known as Wessel-bobs, Wassail-bobs or Wesley-bobs, the practice was most commonly found in West Yorkshire. Bryony and Alice have even been spotted selling their versions of said decorations at their gigs.
Some songs travel a long way in many different directions from their origins, and the beautiful love song I Traced Her Little Footmarks in the Snow is one that Alice dug around to get to the bottom of. Originally a popular music hall song published in 1875, Harry Wright wrote it for his wife, the singer, actress and dancer Nellie Gannon, and it was widely printed as a broadside. It was recorded by Walter Pardon and Yorkshire’s Frank Hinchliffe, and after Ralph Stanley first released a version in 1946, it became a bluegrass standard. Tailor-made for Alice’s alluring singing style, Bryony adds a gorgeous fiddle refrain to tenor guitar accompaniment to make a genuinely delightful track.
Hagman-Heigh is a triumph of exquisite unaccompanied duet singing. It’s another song pieced together from different sources, starting with three verses from a Yorkshire collection and the rest, together with the adapted tune, from Scotland. The sleeve notes include an amusing, maybe controversial reference to the origins of the word that gives the song its title: “The origins of the word ‘Hagmena’, or ‘Hogmanay’, are obscure, and while we don’t want to start a fight, its first official mention as ‘hagnonayse’ can be traced back to 1443…in West Yorskshire.”
Humour features more directly elsewhere on the album, perhaps best represented by Change For A Guinea/The Christmas Tale (song and tune, respectively). A Christmas-time traveller staying at a Manchester inn had an ardent encounter with the inn’s chambermaid, leaving her with a guinea, and, upon returning a year later, ordered goose. Still, instead, the same chambermaid served up a baby on a tray, the product of their previous encounter. He’s not happy when others laugh, so she explains: ‘You gave me a guinea and well I’ve brought you back your change.’ Alice found the song in Yorkshire song collector Frank Kidson’s broadside collection, and it is still popular in the carolling tradition around the Holme Valley in Yorkshire. It’s a romping, fun track, underpinned by Alice’s lively tenor guitar and Bryony’s fabulous driving fiddle on one of many tunes on the album taken from Joshua Jackson’s 1798 manuscript of 500 Yorkshire dance tunes.
The album’s final two songs are further testaments to Bryony and Alice’s considerable efforts to locate and record little and unknown material. The nostalgic Christmas is a poem by the relatively undiscovered Yorkshire poet George. W. Moxon, set to another of Joshua Jackson’s tunes by Bryony, with carol-like vocals and elegant guitar accompaniment. King Christmas, a little-known and possibly never before recorded song, is from Keighley in the late 1800s (composer unknown). An archetypal Christmas celebration song, made to join in with, carried along on warm harmonium chords and hushed, plucked fiddle, is the perfect way to conclude this charming seasonal offering.
Wesselbobs taps a rich vein of Yorkshire winter, Christmas and New Year songs that cast a spotlight on treasured traditions, tales and winter rituals. The songs have been selected and assembled with great care, some local versions of well-known songs, others rare or previously unheard. Refined arrangements, stirring vocals and accompaniment make this an album that any folkie would be happy to find under the tree.
Order Wesselbobs via their website here: https://bryonyandalice.com/
Upcoming Live dates
November 11th – Lewes Saturday Folk Club, East Sussex
December 2nd – Hepworth LIVE!, Holmfirth
December 3rd – Warrington Singers Night, Cheshire
December 8th – The Globe, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
December 9th The Duke of Wellington, Kirkby-in-Ashfield
December 16th – The Grayston Unity, Halifax
December 21st – Crumpsall Folk Club, Manchester
2024
January 17th – The Willows Folk Club, Wrea Green, Preston
January 25th- The Topic Folk Club, Bradford
February 2nd Stapleford Granary, Cambridge
February 16th Nailsea Folk Club
February 26-27th – Costa Blanca Folk Club, Alicante, Spain