Yeats supposed that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. When I first started listening to folk music, it was Irish and very much concerned with the quarrel with others. It was dedicated to the wronged and with the search for finding some way of turning those wrongs on their head. Folk music was redress: it turned the invisible or inconsiderable into main subjects, the vanquished into heroes. It noticed and it took stock of what didn’t find its way into high culture. Of course, it was political, especially in Ireland: it was history as we were taught it in the narrow schoolrooms of nationalism. Its love songs were tainted and its young lovers doomed, but sacrifice for Ireland was always rewarded and the enemy, inevitably, laid low.
Fast forward to New Model Army – “folk music for the nineties” as one friend used to call it – who took the values and preoccupations of British folk and made then chime with music that hadn’t so much been out hill-walking and Morris dancing, as hanging around London street corners, doing oddly ironic things with plaid. In “Green and Grey”, the line “You used to talk about winners and losers all the time, as if that was all there was” offered a kind of slanted critique of the rights and wrongs of folk music, the certainties of its politics and its ringing, but constrictive, confidence.
June Tabor has been singing folk songs for nigh on forty five years. Her first solo album was Airs and Graces, recorded in 1976. Since then, there have been seventeen others. On November 20th, at the RNCM, she sang mostly from her latest, Apples, which came out last year. Although she has been known to sing contemporary art-song material, this concert favoured the traditional over the contemporary, with several songs derived from John Playford’s 1651 publication, The Dancing Master, as well as versions of two Robbie Burns’ songs and a gorgeous, eleventh century song, “Au Pommier Doux” that has three girls under an apple tree mistake the glow of battle for the light of dawn.
Hers is a voice that doesn’t bother much with ornament: there are no runs or capricious grace notes, nothing whimsical or flouncy here. If sincerity is the essence of folk music, then June Tabor’s voice strikes true. There is an authentic simplicity to it, and a passion and intensity that range between poignancy and drama, and are equally confident with both.
Andy Cutting accompanies on accordion, with Mark Emerson on viola, violin and piano. Their style tends towards the spare: often, Cutting would hold a single note behind several lines of Tabor’s song, like a kind of absolute, pure music that didn’t waver or compromise at all.
Tabor’s voice has a kind of monumental quality to it: one of her introductions stressed how important she considers words to be to music, and several of her chosen songs were profoundly narrative: her ballads tell heartfelt stories and of loss and longing, and more occasionally, (as in, “Dancing”) of something a smidgin closer to excitement and fun. Her songs of war, in particular, (dedicated to the four surviving WW1 British servicemen) employ a plaintive, wounded and yet outraged tone that combines the political with the compassionate. This is a voice that knows how to mine the political, not for rhetoric, but for poetry.
Even a song such as “A Place called England” with the class and environmental politics attached to its noticing of “the wastelands of despair”, can’t help but turn around to celebrate the secret gardens and scented roses, the tomatoes and sunflowers visible from a train. The songs Tabor chooses to sing are often engaged, questioning and critical, but they are seldom just that: instead, the quarrel is resolved in music that knows where it comes from and a voice that works the traditional into a tribute to here and now.