What an incredible quality in her voice. I had the blessed good fortune to hear them sing together in a small cabin , close up. It’s something one will never forget.
The Waterson/Carthy's do a splendid job with Ewan MacCall and Peggy Seeger's song and Nora intros it with the reverence for oral tradition that it deserves. It is very appropriate for right now.
just amazed by the voice... I just think it is a pitty that you should come across by such a lovely voice and great songs only by accident... You always find the music you love by accident.. :S
Written by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Ewan MacColl writes such songs as a middle class man populating his songs with working class phrases to gain credibility in an artificial and phony way. This is not the stuff of good poetry. Nevertheless it is very well sung.
Easy to say, but plenty of people of Travelling and English Romani people sing this song, and if they think it's good enough, it's good enough for me. The song carries on regardless.
Ewan MacColl was born Jimmy Miller in Salford, an industrial area called " the classic slum " by Karl Marx, to a steelworker and a cleaner. He grew up during the depression and was a member of the Young Communists as many thinking people were until Hungary. His life was more comfortable later but he wasn`t middle class and he wrote of situations and people he knew.