To mark the 50th Anniversary of Martin Carthy‘s 1976 album ‘Crown of Horn‘, Jon Wilks is releasing his rendition of ‘Geordie’ as a single this Friday, September 4th (Presave/order). While the album originally featured a Moog synthesiser, played by Tony Cox on three songs (although not on ‘Geordie’), it’s Carthy’s angular and percussive playing and wonderful voice that linger at the forefront of the mind. That his distinct style has not only influenced folk musicians but is still shaping English folk music today is a remarkable feat and a cause for celebration.
To call JonWilks a huge admirer of Carthy is something of an understatement, although he will be the first to admit that this relationship with the man has changed since he toured with him in 2023: “somewhere in the months since, he stopped being an influence I studied and became a dear friend.”
Accompanying the single is a wonderful video, filmed at Cheesefoot Head overlooking Winchester by Jon’s wife, Emi. You can watch it below and read some wonderful additional words and insights from Jon.
Jon Wilks on ‘Geordie’ (Fifty Years On)
I can’t remember the first time I heard ‘Geordie’. Aside from the stuff on his debut album, I would say this is the gateway Martin song for me. The original has everything: a great story, a plaintive and disarming melody, and the kind of percussive guitar playing that made his work so distinctive. It seems to have been with me forever, but I only started playing it properly a couple of years ago, and I’ve only just recorded it.
Geordie has been doing the rounds for a very long time. It is Child ballad 209, Roud 90, and it split into two families early on: one from 17th-century English broadsides that travelled through England, Ireland and North America, and a separate Scottish strand that turns up in print later and tells a rather different story. I sing the English one. A narrator crosses London Bridge and hears a woman grieving for Geordie, who’s due to hang. He’s of noble blood, she says, and loved too well for his own good. His crime, depending on who’s singing it and where, amounts to nothing more than poaching a few of the king’s deer and selling them on. She offers up her children to spare his life; the judge tells her she’s too late, and somewhere in most versions someone wishes they were up on the hill with a weapon, ready to fight for him. It’s a small story of huge desperation, which is probably why it’s lasted.
I’ll always remember Martin telling me about learning another variant of the song from the singer Levi Smith. When Levi sang the line ‘Your Geordie shall hang in chains of gold’, he turned to Martin and said, with a glint in his eye, ‘Chains of gold. Now there’s hanging for you.’ It still sends a chill down my spine when I think of it.
I’d picked about at it for some time. The odd half-arsed attempt at the guitar part would turn up on my Instagram, and I never took it any further than that, because it was Martin’s arrangement. His version, from 1976’s Crown of Horn, is so complete, so definitive, that trying to record my own always felt like turning up to a house that was already lived in.
That changed when I joined the Songs of Martin Carthy tour and had to learn it properly. Not just pick at it, but actually learn to play it and sing it in a style that honoured his version. Once it was under my fingers rather than half-remembered, it started to move on its own. Martin always told me to take ideas and run with them. I haven’t run very far with this – I wouldn’t want it to. But there’s a jaunt and a swing in mine now that isn’t in his more metred recording, enough (I hope, probably in vain) that it’s stopped feeling like an impression and started feeling like a song I play.
More than anything, I just loved playing it onstage each night on that tour. It went down very well, too. Enough people asked me where they can hear a recording that I’ve spent the last few weeks actually making one. It’s out on September 4th on all the usual channels.
Production-wise, I play it on my Turnstone Select Series guitar, in DADEAB, which is two semitones up from Martin’s famously complicated tuning. There’s a Victorian pump organ on there too, along with a few aural quirks to keep your ears on their toes.
The video was filmed by my wife Emi, up on Cheesefoot Head near where we live.
It feels right that all of this lands fifty years after Crown of Horn. Some songs just sit there waiting for you to be ready for them. This one had been beckoning to me for some time.
Pre-Save/Order Geordie: https://ffm.to/geordiejonwilks.OWE
Website: https://www.jonwilks.online