Aran jumpers
Jan. 16th, 2020 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2RkEZkg
So I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of music, not the way other people do, with pop songs and such. Our radio was tuned to the local classical-music affiliate of NPR, and so I casually absorbed a lot of Tchaikovsky and Bach and such without really ever knowing much about it. We owned a hi-fi system with a tape deck, and a record player, but the record player broke when I was about 6 and I forgot how to use it. We only ever owned a few LPs, including a Disney one of patriotic songs. Dad had some Irish folk music LPs but we didn’t listen to them often. Well-meaning relatives gave me tapes sometimes, like Debbie Gibson’s “Electric Youth”, but I never really understood them.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized you could move the dial on the radio, and I was finally given my own tape deck.
In high school I met my BFF, who’s the one I go to visit in Rochester pretty often. She’d grown up listening to some of the same Irish folk music LPs as me, and right away gave me a pair of mix tapes that she taped off of her dad’s Clancy Brothers LPs. CDs started to be a thing, then, and my dad bought a few of the albums he remembered on CD, and i stole them and devoured them. [Lots of the Chieftains. many re-issues of Clancy Brothers stuff. most of what he’d bought in the 60s had wound up in his brother’s possession and he hadn’t replaced them.]
Around that time I taught myself to sing folk songs; doing horse-related chores, I liked to sing, initially to keep the horses from hearing the metal can we kept the feed in (they’d crowd you at the gate if they heard it), but then I’d just keep singing, the whole time I was out there. I developed most of the vocal techniques I use still out there, and memorized a lot of the songs I still know for that purpose. (It wasn’t possible to muck out stalls with a lyric sheet in your hand.) (I took proper singing lessons from a voice coach my senior year, and the year after, but I never really shook the habits I learned in the pasture on my own.)
So BFF and I would sing Clancy Brothers songs together, up and down the hallways of school, as obnoxiously as possible. She’s not a gifted vocalist; she’s got a strong enough voice but her range is limited, and while she’s not tone-deaf, she has trouble finding the framework of where the notes really are, so she misses the mark more often than not. Fine to sing along with, but not great on her own.
Anyway, it only just occurred to me that I could probably easily enough learn any number of those songs on the banjo, and that would likely delight BFF a great deal. Part of the trouble of singing along with the cassette tape is that of course Liam Clancy is a baritone and it’s hard for a pair of teenaged girls to on-the-fly transpose that to something they can sing. If I could play them, I could also slide the key around until we could both hit the notes.
At any rate– it only just struck me that I’ve carefully taught myself a lot about the music of the last few decades through painstaking research and glomming onto people with superior cultural awareness, and streaming services and just plain old YouTube have made that so much easier this last decade or so– but I have never ever in my life attempted to put the Clancy Brothers, specifically, into any kind of context.
So I just read the Wikipedia page, and have begun to attempt to figure out which albums BFF’s dad owned on LP. (Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy, for 100% sure, which my dad did not own.) And I’m just trying to get them in some kind of context. It’s always been a sort of hokey guilty-pleasure of mine, because I mean… are they good? They’re so… dated. Is that a thing? Having a really powerful contralto voice and being able to sing their songs really well largely staves off critique in the moment, but I’ve always been faintly worried that people would think I wasn’t a real musician if they noticed that mostly what I knew was this dated, hokey shit that I learned from a tape, and not like, from sitting at the knee of some ancient sage or whatever. I still have no idea about context for any of that shit, how does someone know they’re really a musician???
Anyway. One of the things i knew was that they always wore these hokey matching sweaters, right?
Well. Mom Clancy sent her sons those sweaters (including one for their friend Tommy Makem) because she’d read that the weather in New York was very snowy that year and she was concerned for them, and they all wore the sweaters without really thinking about it because she was right, it was cold and they were glad to have such nice sweaters. And someone else was like “that’s it! that’s your Look!” and they rolled with it, but somehow I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they literally showed up to a folk show in matching sweaters their mom had sent them in a care package.
According to Wikipedia, which did cite a source there.
So I’m trying to narrow down which song to ask my teacher to help me learn, and I think it’s gotta be The Shoals of Herring, which, for your patience and indulgence in reading this, I’ll link to Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis performing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWJz_-hseJQ].
I don’t have a punchline, though.
So I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of music, not the way other people do, with pop songs and such. Our radio was tuned to the local classical-music affiliate of NPR, and so I casually absorbed a lot of Tchaikovsky and Bach and such without really ever knowing much about it. We owned a hi-fi system with a tape deck, and a record player, but the record player broke when I was about 6 and I forgot how to use it. We only ever owned a few LPs, including a Disney one of patriotic songs. Dad had some Irish folk music LPs but we didn’t listen to them often. Well-meaning relatives gave me tapes sometimes, like Debbie Gibson’s “Electric Youth”, but I never really understood them.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized you could move the dial on the radio, and I was finally given my own tape deck.
In high school I met my BFF, who’s the one I go to visit in Rochester pretty often. She’d grown up listening to some of the same Irish folk music LPs as me, and right away gave me a pair of mix tapes that she taped off of her dad’s Clancy Brothers LPs. CDs started to be a thing, then, and my dad bought a few of the albums he remembered on CD, and i stole them and devoured them. [Lots of the Chieftains. many re-issues of Clancy Brothers stuff. most of what he’d bought in the 60s had wound up in his brother’s possession and he hadn’t replaced them.]
Around that time I taught myself to sing folk songs; doing horse-related chores, I liked to sing, initially to keep the horses from hearing the metal can we kept the feed in (they’d crowd you at the gate if they heard it), but then I’d just keep singing, the whole time I was out there. I developed most of the vocal techniques I use still out there, and memorized a lot of the songs I still know for that purpose. (It wasn’t possible to muck out stalls with a lyric sheet in your hand.) (I took proper singing lessons from a voice coach my senior year, and the year after, but I never really shook the habits I learned in the pasture on my own.)
So BFF and I would sing Clancy Brothers songs together, up and down the hallways of school, as obnoxiously as possible. She’s not a gifted vocalist; she’s got a strong enough voice but her range is limited, and while she’s not tone-deaf, she has trouble finding the framework of where the notes really are, so she misses the mark more often than not. Fine to sing along with, but not great on her own.
Anyway, it only just occurred to me that I could probably easily enough learn any number of those songs on the banjo, and that would likely delight BFF a great deal. Part of the trouble of singing along with the cassette tape is that of course Liam Clancy is a baritone and it’s hard for a pair of teenaged girls to on-the-fly transpose that to something they can sing. If I could play them, I could also slide the key around until we could both hit the notes.
At any rate– it only just struck me that I’ve carefully taught myself a lot about the music of the last few decades through painstaking research and glomming onto people with superior cultural awareness, and streaming services and just plain old YouTube have made that so much easier this last decade or so– but I have never ever in my life attempted to put the Clancy Brothers, specifically, into any kind of context.
So I just read the Wikipedia page, and have begun to attempt to figure out which albums BFF’s dad owned on LP. (Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy, for 100% sure, which my dad did not own.) And I’m just trying to get them in some kind of context. It’s always been a sort of hokey guilty-pleasure of mine, because I mean… are they good? They’re so… dated. Is that a thing? Having a really powerful contralto voice and being able to sing their songs really well largely staves off critique in the moment, but I’ve always been faintly worried that people would think I wasn’t a real musician if they noticed that mostly what I knew was this dated, hokey shit that I learned from a tape, and not like, from sitting at the knee of some ancient sage or whatever. I still have no idea about context for any of that shit, how does someone know they’re really a musician???
Anyway. One of the things i knew was that they always wore these hokey matching sweaters, right?
Well. Mom Clancy sent her sons those sweaters (including one for their friend Tommy Makem) because she’d read that the weather in New York was very snowy that year and she was concerned for them, and they all wore the sweaters without really thinking about it because she was right, it was cold and they were glad to have such nice sweaters. And someone else was like “that’s it! that’s your Look!” and they rolled with it, but somehow I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they literally showed up to a folk show in matching sweaters their mom had sent them in a care package.
According to Wikipedia, which did cite a source there.
So I’m trying to narrow down which song to ask my teacher to help me learn, and I think it’s gotta be The Shoals of Herring, which, for your patience and indulgence in reading this, I’ll link to Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis performing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWJz_-hseJQ].
I don’t have a punchline, though.
