Gilderoy

  1. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    "Gilderoy" is an old Scottish broadside ballad, based on a (possibly mythical) highwayman said to have been hung in 1638. The use of the name for a tune is somewhat complicated, as various tunes are in use for the ballad, and the name "Gilderoy" is used for some tunes that do not to me seem to be related to the ballad at all. In the US, Gilderoy mostly seems to be an alternative name for The Red-Haired Boy (and indeed, "Gilderoy" is an anglicised form of the Gaelic for "Red-Haired Boy"), but the similarity of that tune to the sung versions appears to me tentative (possibly because of the speed difference). Other references say that "Star Of The Country Down" and "Salisbury Plain" are both variants of Gilderoy, and I don't think I hear that either.

    Anyway, I have in the past recorded the tune that Nigel Gatherer gives for the song on my Ajr (Link), but have recently encountered a quite different version which I have now recorded on the Mid-Mo with tenor guitar backing. The sheet music is here: Link



    This variant does have some (but not much) resemblance to The Red-Haired Boy, but I'm playing it much slower than one would play that tune, which I think suits it well.

    Martin
  2. GHall
    GHall
    A seldom heard but fun tune to play. I'm playing a Red Valley flat top, and my daughter is playing an A-5 Silverangel.

  3. Bertram Henze
    Bertram Henze
    Great versions all. Greg, that duo is unbeatable, again
  4. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Awhhh so cute! (The vid above)


    https://youtu.be/R7vm7-MWK10

    BTW sorry some of you guys (about the capo). This version is in F/Dm because Mr. Guitar said so!
  5. Gelsenbury
    Gelsenbury
    Great stuff, Simon! What you wrote in the other thread about using the metronome regularly made me think that your fluent playing may come from that. You've invested the work, and it's paying off.
  6. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Fine performance, Simon.
  7. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Thanks D and J, always a pleasure to hear from you, this is probably not as authentic as it could be, but that’s history for you.
    I think it’s cool that the lyrics of the song are about a hungry civil rights activist, and about land rights and racism.
  8. Ginny Aitchison
    Ginny Aitchison
    I really like this one Simon. Super nice playing.
  9. Simon DS
    Simon DS
  10. Christian DP
    Christian DP
    Three nice versions of this Scottish broadside ballad!
  11. Gelsenbury
    Gelsenbury
    I'm just adding a fourth version, which I hope you'll like as well.



    This is another joint effort from John Kelly and me. We've spent quite a long time working on this one and put a lot of work into making decisions about instrumentation, harmony parts, speed, and similar things. It's been a good learning experience for me, and I hope you enjoy the end result.

    On the audio track, John plays octave mandola and guitar. I play mandolin and whistle, and sing the first verse more or less as heard from Ewan MacColl.

    The video shows some of John's recordings of the River Massan near his home. I'm sure you'll agree that he has some awesome scenery where he lives, and the moving images go so well with the tune. Apparently Gilderoy occasionally hid from the strong arm of the law in caves and among the rocks in landscapes such as this. I can just imagine him skulking around the area.

    Incidentally, the waterfalls and rapids of the River Massan have featured in an older video by John, a rendition of his original tune "Glen Massan", recorded with the accordionist Derek Macdonald. Here's that older video:

  12. Frithjof
    Frithjof
    So different but all great videos in this thread!
  13. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    I agree with Frithjof 100% on this.
    Fine playing John, and I like this singing too, Dennis.
    Thanks for opening new horizons -maybe for Christmas I’ll try it out too.
  14. Ginny Aitchison
    Ginny Aitchison
    That was a lot of work by Dennis and John!! Lots of different tracks to try and synchronize. Well worth the effort. Nice ornamentation and some harmony. This should go in your favourites file Dennis.
    Simon, you may be crazy thinking of Christmas so soon..but you are not. I have been shopping locally and on line and already have my Xmas carol for December, well I don't actually have it, but I know which one I'm going to do.
  15. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Thanks, Frithjof, Simon and Ginny. We had a lot of fun with this one, including which instruments to leave out and where to place the sung verse. Dennis has some exotic instruments, as you will know from some of his own postings here on the SAW group. We reckoned that if we began with the singing then listeners would expect the lyrics to continue (and it is a long ballad), so we began instrumentally then brought in the voice. Kudos to Dennis who sang in spite of the tune being in a key that really tested his vocal range.

    It was pure luck that I had gone to Glen Massan on Saturday to film the river after we had had a spell of very wet weather (not in Scotland, surely, I hear you all say!). We were struggling otherwise to think of visual content and Dennis thought that the water in spate would suit the tune and the story of upheaval and fate of the hero.

    Thanks too, Dennis, for link to my 10-year-old video of my waltz. It is already over three years since Derek passed away and he is still very much missed by us all.
  16. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Ha, ha, I cant get over how well Mandogirl88, Mr G.Hall’s daughter plays here, literally amazing !
    Heart-warming to see, thanks!
  17. Richard Carver
    Richard Carver
    I had this one saved up for the next few months when I'll be gardening all waking hours. But the discussion elsewhere on song/tune archetypes prompted me to post it now. I have posted it under the Gilderoy thread since two out of the three tunes I play have that title. All are connected to the tune usually known as Dives and Lazarus, much beloved of Ralph Vaughan Williams who used it three times in his compositions, including Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (hence my cheeky title).

    The three are: Star of the County Down (Ireland), Gilderoy (Scotland) and Guilderoy (SW Pennsylvania, collected by Samuel Bayard from the fiddle playing of Irvin Yaugher Jr). To my ear, these are all very closely related.

  18. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Sweet playing Richard and professionally recorded too.
    I thought that Gilderoy, though it means Red Haired Lad, as a pun also means Golden King, from the Dutch for their currency and Roi from French?
  19. Richard Carver
    Richard Carver
    Thank you, Simon. I'm beginning to get the hang of the recording side.

    I think you are half right - with the Dutch, it's because they are from the House of Orange.
  20. Frithjof
    Frithjof
    Lovely playing, Richard, and an interesting comparison of the three somewhat related tunes.
  21. Richard Carver
    Richard Carver
    Thank you, Frithjof. But I get the impression you are not totally convinced of the connection between the tunes...
  22. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Which connections are you thinking about, Richard? - title, divergent title meanings/symbols, political/nationalist history, associated cultures, rhythm, melody and phrasing, associated instruments/finger flow, harmony, dynamics, timbre/tone color, texture, form, style (and from which culture), tempo or (or and) expression?
  23. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Has this thread suddenly been hijacked by an AI chatbot, I wonder?
  24. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    The "Dives and Lazarus" tune has famously been used in many many folk and broadside ballads and various newer songs. Wikipedia has it as one of the tunes for Gilderoy. I'm just not entirely convinced it's this variant of Gilderoy. Matching tunes and words of folk ballads is a minefield: the same tune was used for many different sets of words and equally the same words were used to many different tunes. Picking out which tune is a variant and which is unrelated is not always straightforward.

    For what it's worth, June Tabor recorded a great version of the actual "Dives And Lazarus" ballad with the Oyster Band on their classic album "Freedom and Rain": Link.

    Whatever the connection between the tunes, your recording is very nice indeed -- great playing and the tunes flow nicely into each other.

    Martin
  25. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    No cheating with dictionaries either, John.
    I have to say I believe that AI has some incredibly good uses. I feel my brain expanding already, and that’s only a week of use.

    I’d concur with Martin here, another issue is that these tunes are from the aural tradition. How many tunes in our tradition come from shipwrecked foreigners or isolated villagers and are then edited, improved and printed? How many wonderfully crooked tunes (to fit the flow of the lyrics) have been straightened out?

    The idea of ‘source’ and expansion is always to me a bit suspect. I think it’s easier to look at it as a huge horizontal structure.

    To illustrate the issue: it’s like someone saying they are directly related to someone else in the fifteenth century. That’s fifteen generations away, and if each generation had 5 children, that’s maybe 2 million people.

    I really like the embellishments in your playing Richard, they give it an interesting, authentic atmosphere.
  26. Richard Carver
    Richard Carver
    Thank you all for your positive comments.

    Martin, I think June Tabor is probably my favourite English folk singer. As to whether, these are the same tune, we can probably agree to differ. I lack the analytical skills to properly explain my reasoning, but I think if you remove the dotted rhythm from the Scottish version (my favourite of the three, actually), you have something that is very close to Star of the County Down, which is in turn very close to Dives and Lazarus.

    By the way, Martin, on your point about tunes being picked up for songs, I realised as I was playing the Pennsylvania Guilderoy that Leon Rosselson had used it almost note-for-note for one of his songs.

    On the broader point about the relationship of tunes, I have no expertise at all, though I have been reading the musicological literature on the subject, prompted by my research into migration (and by extension the migration of music). Simon, you are absolutely right that the tradition is aural, until very recently, and this makes it hard to pin down. Before people started collecting folk tunes a century or so ago the only evidence was in tunebooks, which are of course snapshots, and probably a bit tidied up for people to play in their drawing rooms. There is indeed a horizontal connection, but a vertical one too. Samuel Bayard would, I think, have disagreed with your genealogical analogy, even though it is an appealing one. He maintained that there were a relatively small number of "tune families" (small, that is, relative to the number of tunes) in British and Irish traditional music. Likewise, Cecil Sharp was insistent on the idea of individual composition - someone makes up a tune and then it is adopted by the community (and immediately begins to mutate, of course).

    Having said all that, Bayard also proposes connections that my ear simply cannot identify, as for example in this genealogical line: Leslie's March - Blue Bonnets Over the Border - Braes of Auchtertyre - Billy in the Lowground. Of those, I can hear Leslie's March to Blue Bonnets, but not the two subsequent connections. I don't know if it's musical skills or imagination that I lack, or if he is wrong.
  27. Frankdolin
    Frankdolin
    A beautiful recording Richard!!
  28. Richard Carver
    Richard Carver
    Thanks so much, Frank.
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