The Albion Country Band - I Was A Young Man

 #The Albion Country Band #Ashley Hutchings #Martin Carthy #John Kirkpatrick #British folk #folk rock #British folk rock #1970s #ex-Fairport Convention

The tangled vine that is the family tree of English folk-rock music has several long stems that wind through it, touching many other stems and branching wildly. One of these is Ashley Hutchings. As Ashley “Tyger” Hutchings, he was a founding member of Fairport Convention. Throughout his long career, he founded or influenced so many other bands and musicians that his status as a folk icon cannot be questioned. His insistence on exploring the pre-industrial folk music of England over more rock-based musical styles may have led to musical partings, as seen with Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, but this idealism is compelling. One of the bands Hutchings founded after leaving Fairport Convention (besides Steeleye Span) is The Albion Band.
The Albion Band grew out of a large backing band that played on Shirley Collins’s No Roses album in 1971. The Albion Band’s lineups changed regularly, to say the least, even before the first recording as “The Albion Band.” Before the recording of their first album, the band included Richard and Linda Thompson, among others. An exhaustive history of the band in all its various incarnations, not to mention its some twenty album releases, would be of book-length.
The Albion Band’s first album, Battle of the Field, recorded as The Albion Country Band, had Hutchings, Sue Harris, Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick, Simon Nicol, and Roger Swallow as the band’s lineup. Ex-Fairport drummer Dave Mattacks plays on a cut as well, and four sackbuts are used to great effect on “Gallant Poacher.” The album, recorded in 1973, was not released until 1976. The feeling of the music overall is unsurprisingly reminiscent of Fairport Convention, given the musicians involved. Shortly after recording the album, this Albion Band disbanded, and Hutchings is said to have considered leaving music behind. After a break, though, he formed the all-acoustic Etchingham Steam Band, and then in 1975, restarted a new Albion Band, calling this incarnation The Albion Dance Band. In the mid to late 1970s the band concentrated on earlier music and dance music, with John Tams, Philip Pickett, Dave Mattacks, and Ric Sanders, among others, in the lineup.
From: https://agreenmanreview.com/music-2/albion-country-bands-battle-of-the-field-and-the-albion-bands-1990-happy-accident-and-songs-from-the-shows/

The Albion Country Band - Hanged I Shall Be

 #The Albion Country Band #Ashley Hutchings #Martin Carthy #John Kirkpatrick #British folk #folk rock #British folk rock #1970s #ex-Fairport Convention

After working with the legendary English folk-rock bands Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, Ashley Hutchings put together the Albion Band (sometimes known as Albion Country Band and Albion Dance Band) in a similar style. They were first gathered as the back-up band for British folksinger Shirley Collins’ 1971 album, No Roses. The band recorded it’s own debut album in 1973, but it wasn’t released until 1976. Over the years, the ever-changing personnel in the Albion Band has included a dizzying number of English folk-rock luminaries, including Richard and Linda Thompson, Martin Carthy, Shirley and Dolly Collins, Maddy Prior, and Martin Simpson, to name just a few.  From: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/albion-country-band/3221110 

E.J. Moeran collected the grim murder ballad ‘Hanged I Shall Be’ in October 1921 from ‘Shepherd’ Taylor of Hickling, Norfolk. This is perhaps the most important of all murder ballads carried across England by the street singers. At least, a vast number of pieces of ballad journalism have taken it for a pattern during the last two and a half centuries. The original comes from a broadside from the end of the 17th Century called The Wittam Miller (Wittam is a village near Oxford). Most of the 19th Century stall-ballad publishers printed a version of this form favourite, which was probably the parent ballad to the American murder ballads The Knoxville Girl and Florella.
Hamish Henderson noted: This murder ballad, with its uneasy psychological undertones, is sometimes known as The Murder of Sweet Mary Anne. It appears to derive from a 17th century broadside in which the murdering lover is a miller. In the United States, the ballad is best known as The Lexington Murder or The Knoxville Girl, and has undoubtedly been the inspiration for several other murder ballads. In the form sung here, it is still very popular in Scotland.
American listeners, who are accustomed to the brisk measures of Pretty Polly or the start directness of The Knoxville Girl, may be surprised to encounter a slow and highly ornamented Scots variant of this familiar ballad. It is the favourite British remake of The Cruel Ship's Captain theme and might be called the classic British murder ballad, in the same sense that Omie Wise or Pretty Polly are the central ballads of the Southern American tradition. In most English variants, the murder weapon is a stick cut from a hedgerow, as in Harry Cox's version about Ekefield Town.
Steve Roud noted: Quite widely collected in Britain by Cecil Sharp and his contemporaries, and in the repertoire of several well known post-war singers such as Cecilia Costello, Jeannie Robertson, and Phoebe Smith, this song was even more well-known in North America, where dozens of versions (under such titles as The Wexford Girl or The Lexington Miller) have been noted and published. As pointed out by Laws (American Balladry from British Broadsides, 1957), in a chapter on “ballad recomposition”, the original text appeared in the mid-18th century as The Berkshire Tragedy or The Wittam Miller, and has since undergone not simply the vagaries of oral tradition, but deliberate re-composition, apparently on more than one occasion. Comparing Harry's with the Original, his is severely truncated and avoids the wordiness of 18th century texts, but it includes many of the most telling details, such as the stake from the hedge, and the dragging by the hair. Nevertheless, the omission of the original motif of pregnancy leaves the murder motiveless in Harry's version, which heightens either the song's stark horror, or the sordidness, according to the listener's own viewpoint.
Norman Buchan noted: Though Francis James Child characterised the broadside ballads as ‘veritable dungheaps’ he conceded the occasional ‘moderate jewel’. This one, ennobled by a splendid tune, is a good deal more than that. It contains little of the conventional trappings of the professional product — no last dying speech, no explanation for the murder, usually pregnancy, no ‘take warning by me’. Indeed it shows much of the bare economy of story line of our classical ballads and is obviously moulded by a community in which the great tradition was still very much alive. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that Enoch learned it from perhaps the greatest living expression of that tradition, Jeannie Robertson.

Albion Country Band's ‘Hanged I Shall Be’

Now as I was bound apprentice, I was 'prentice to the mill,
And I served my master truly for more than seven year.
Until I took up to courting with a lass with that rolling eye
And I promised that I'd marry her in the month of sweet July.
And as we went out a-walking through the fields and the meadows gay,
Oh it's there we told our tales of love and we fixed our wedding day.

And as we were walking and talking of the things that grew around
Oh I took a stick all out of the hedge and I knocked that pretty maid down
Down on her bended knees she fell and loud for mercy cry,
“Oh spare the life of an innocent girl for I'm not prepared to die.”
But I took her by her curly locks and I dragged her on the ground
And I throwed her into the riverhead that flows to Ekefield town,
That flows so far to the distance, that flows so deep and wide,
Oh it's there I threw this pretty fair maid that should have been my bride.

Now I went home to my parents' house, it being late at night.
Mother she got out of bed all for to light the light.
Oh she asked me and she questioned me, “What stains your hands and clothes?”
And the answer I gave back to her, “I've been bleeding at my nose.”
No rest, no rest all that long night, no rest there could I find
For there's sparks of fire and brimstone around my head did shine.

And it was about three days after that this pretty fair maid was found,
Floating by the riverhead that flows to Ekefield town.
That flows so far to the distance, that flows so deep and wide.
Oh it's there they found this pretty fair maid that should have been my bride.
Oh the judges and the jurymen all on me they did agree
For a-murdering of this pretty fair maid oh hanged I shall be.

From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/themillersapprentice.html