Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings’ Parlour Ballads shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history–a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.
Parlour music is a bona fide curio of musical history, and an often overlooked one at that. While its near-contemporary music hall fed the needs of working people and existed as a social as much as an artistic phenomenon, bringing people into pubs and helping to expedite the building of a slew of larger venues, parlour music existed, as its name suggests, entirely within the home. And while music hall’s songs were often risque or bawdy – sometimes nostalgic, but bluntly so – parlour music’s reputation was for gentility, sentimentality and correctness. A new middle class emerged in the nineteenth century, and a sign that you belonged to it was the ownership of a piano and the free time to learn how to play it to a certain level of proficiency. Sheet music became readily available, and parlour songs were suddenly big business.
But despite a reputation as a staid or cloying art form, parlour music was actually a vital and ever-changing part of a folk tradition, one that democratised music – up to a point at least – by making both classical and popular pieces available to people who weren’t necessarily gifted or rich enough to enter a conservatoire. Its roots lie in minstrelsy and in art song, in folk and in opera, but its reach was seemingly unlimited. I remember my grandmother playing the old cowboy tune Red River Valley (written c1890) on the battered upright that had been part of her far-from-middle-class household for decades, and I suppose that was parlour music too.
Parlour music’s place in the folk tradition has never been thoroughly examined or even recognised by the folk music cognoscenti. Jon Boden’s aim with his new album, Parlour Ballads, is to rectify that. His choices don’t shy away from the sentimentality of the genre, but they do attempt to examine the places where parlour music rubbed up closest to traditional folk balladry, and this technique gives the songs a freshness that washes away any sense of the cloying or the overtly mannered. His skill is to create a specific and tangible moods: opening song, On One April Morning, is very much a folk song played in the parlour style, but done so in such a way that it feels stretched out and loose, with Boden’s voice and piano seeming to fall softly. There is something blossomy and pillowy, and a widescreen element not typical to either folk or parlour music. Boden almost seems to be making both genres new.
If anyone is qualified to pull this off, it is Boden and his band, the Remnant Kings. They have been together, on and off, for well over a decade, and Boden’s other band, the immensely popular Bellowhead, came into being twenty years ago. Bellowhead were formed as an experiment, a way to bring a ‘big band’ sound to a folk ensemble, and it was with a similar spirit of genre-splicing that Parlour Ballads was conceived. While that sense of experimentation might not always be immediately apparent, it’s there under the surface. The old broadside Bonny Bunch of Roses is reasonably well-known as a folk song, but the version here has a unique emotional hit thanks not only to the piano but also to Boden’s expressive singing. Other elements – the minimal, pinpoint use of Rob Harbron’s concertina, and Andy Bell’s production, which straddles the boundary between sympathetic and cinematic – come together to create something that sounds both authentic and re-energised.
Boden’s voice has always been his most potent weapon, and here it fills Clock O’Clay, a re-setting of a poem by John Clare, with unabashed tenderness. The songs with the most stripped-back arrangements, like the gentle Merry Mountain Child, allow his distinctive phrasing to come to the fore. The country-tinged Old Brown’s Daughter intercuts its yearning sentiments with surprisingly earthy humour. On these songs, the slightly out-of-tune nature of the piano functions as an extremely potent key to nostalgia. On The London Waterman, which closes the album, the piano waltzes elegantly with the fiddle, augmenting a tender and hopeful ballad.
On Danny Deever, Boden takes a Kipling poem from 1890 and turns it into a sprawling ballad. The subject matter is heartrending, and the way Boden’s voice creaks and cracks on the song’s refrain, ‘O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!’ transcends sentimentality and provides the album with its emotional core. Another high point is Rose of Allendale, one of the few songs on the album that was actually written as a parlour piece. In this case the writer was Charles Jefferys, and he left us with an achingly beautiful love song which found a second life in the 1960s after being preserved in the Copper Family repertoire and finding its way into pubs and folk clubs. It is the perfect example of the cross-pollination between folk and parlour music.
Oggie Man, a rare guitar-based song, is a departure of sorts, but despite its bustle and brevity the general mood is retained thanks to a set of highly idiosyncratic lyrics concerning a Plymouth pasty-seller. It was written by Cyril Tawney in 1959, so its link with parlour music is tangential to say the least, but Boden manages to make the song feel at home even while accentuating its uniqueness.
It wouldn’t be a Jon Boden album without a few surprises. Mortal Cares begins with a flourish of piano that certainly wouldn’t sound out of place if played by a twelve-year-old Victorian child, but soon it’s interrupted by a splash of percussion and an off-kilter arrangement that recalls a noir-ish kind of jazz. The song was originally written to accompany a staging of a play by Restoration writer Aphra Behn, so the influences here stem from all over the place, but Boden makes it work with aplomb. The delightfully dark Prentice Boy is delivered in such a laconic way that the grim details and casual violence of its words take your breath away when you realise what’s going on.
But for the most part, this is an album of gentler concerns. It shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history and acknowledges the changes that all songs – whether part of an established folk tradition or not – have to go through if they are to survive. But more than that, it is a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.
Parlour Ballads (27th September 2024) Hudson Records
Pre-Order/Save: https://hudsonrecords.ffm.to/parlourballads
Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings Live Dates
Wed, Sep 25 – The Witham, Barnard Castle
Thu, Sep 26 – SOLD OUT Live Room, Saltaire
Fri, Sep 27 – Revelation, Ashford, Kent
Sat, Sep 28 – The Sub Rooms, Stroud
Sun, Sep 29 – The Lexington, London
Thu, Mar 20, 2025 – Band On The Wall, Manchester
Ticket Links: https://www.jonboden.com/shows