A Song for Every Season

Some thoughts on where Songs and Objects may go in 2024 precede a bit of seasonal music.

Statue at Bill Quay Community Farm, early January 2024.

I’m not averse to resolutions, though I’ve never found it very useful to attach them to the start of a new year. I’ve generally found that my resolve to take a new set of actions—or renew those I’ve neglected or abandoned—is more likely to harden when a combination of (usually unexpected) events and decisions show the possibility of change.

But I do find myself thinking, in these early days of January, about the year ahead and reflecting back on a recent period in which I have embarked on some new journeys. There are three in particular I’m thinking of, though I’ll only mention one of them here, which is the setting up of the Songs and Objects project on Substack. I think it’s the point that I’m at in that process—two months in, long enough to feel I am starting to establish something yet still in that period of newness and uncertainty—as much as the time of year that is prompting me to reflect.

The time of year does affect me, though. I’m always very aware of the seasons as they find me in the particular piece of North East England where I live and work. And so there will be a seasonal hue to this post and, I think, to some of my future pieces of writing here.

Briefly, then, before turning to songs that hymn the turning of the year, I’ll list some directions that Songs and Objects might take this year. Not resolutions so much as an early map of the territory I hope to cover and which I can review again as the journey progresses.

Over the last eight weeks, I have written pieces that started to establish the following:

• the aims of the bigger project about songs and objects that I’ve been involved with for some years and am trying to develop further (‘Fascinations’, ‘These Foolish Things’, parts 1 and 2)

• how songs act as technologies for exploring the role of objects in human lives and, relatedly, how songs themselves become evocative objects for humans (‘These Foolish Things Part 1: Objects in Songs’, ‘These Foolish Things Part 2: Songs as Objects’)

• how songs (as objects) take on biographies, embark on journeys of their own, have trajectories and itineraries that may rely on humans (singers, listeners, cover versions, remixes and homages) but also suggest independent careers (‘“Jolene” as Song Object’, ‘Rearrange Their Faces … Give Them All Another Name’)

• how particular artists engage with the world of objects (‘Adrift Again’, on Grandaddy; ‘A Vision Starts to Form’, on Richard Dawson)

• listing objects, events and qualities as a technique for songwriters and an opportunity for showing off for singers (‘The Musicality of Lists’, parts 1, 2 and 3)

For the coming months, I plan to continue with these themes while adding some new ones and also trying to bring in a bit more structure via occasional interwoven series:

• A Song for Every Season: reflecting on the time of year as I experience it in North East England, elsewhere when I get the chance to travel, or the elsewheres of my past (see below). A large part of this, for me, is how songs and objects respond to or evoke temporal experiences.

• Artist centred posts, in the vein of the Cat Power, Grandaddy and Richard Dawson posts I’ve already published: which artists might draw us to thinking about songs and objects in ways we might not otherwise have done?

• Object-centred posts, which are sent on their journeys by considering a single object or a range of objects rather than using an artist as a connecting thread.

• Picking up threads: to build on earlier posts with follow-ups/exapnsions on, for example, list songs, treasure troves like The Ruby Cord (my earlier post on this album was essentially a list of topics I wanted to explore furher when I got the chance) or Grandaddy (again, I saw my Grandaddy post as the first of a possible series).

• Song Itineraries. This is where I take a particular song and follow it on its journey through multiple performances, recordings, reworkings and other objects it might bring into being.

That is the map, for now. Let’s see how it goes. For the rest of this post, I’ll make a start on the seasonal strand.

Near Hebburn, early January 2024.

The January Man

I’m an inveterate maker of playlists so it’s probably no surprise to those who know me that I should have seasonal playlists such as ‘December Chestnuts’. That one was my attempt to turn defeat into victory around five years ago when I realised that if I couldn’t beat or avoid the ubiquitous Christmas playlist-makers, I might as well join them. I tried to make it a bit more broad-ranging than what I typically hear in the shops by adding songs from beyond the Anglo-American pop and choral world (and I don’t mean just ‘Feliz Navidad’, though that’s on my list) and thinking about winter more generally and the turning of the year for those of us who recognise that happening at the end of December and the start of January.

One of the songs I knew I had to add was ‘January Man’. I first heard it on Martin Carthy’s 1971 album Landfall, which I bought at some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s (I have the 1977 Topic Records reissue, shown below; the album was originally released by Philips). Even though I would have read Carthy’s liner notes and been told that ‘January Man’ was a recently written song, the idea persisted in my mind for years that it was much older. There’s a timeless quality to it that seems appropriate to its listing of the months of the year and emphasis on cyclical time. Only many years later did I hear the version of the song first released by its writer, Dave Goulder.

Front covers to the 1977 reissue of Martin Carthy's Landfall LP and the 1970 album January Man by Dave Goulder and Liz Dyer.

Goulder’s song is beautifully structured, reflecting both seasonal symmetry and the cycle of the year. There are five verses, all containing three longer lines and a final shorter line. Here’s the first verse, as recorded on the Mainly Norfolk website :

The January man, he walks the road in woollen coat and boots of leather
The February man still wipes the snow from off his hair and blows his hands
The man of March he sees the Spring and wonders what the year will bring
And hopes for better weather

In the first four verses, the three longer lines each record what the generic ‘man’ experiences in each month. The labelling of these ‘men’ fluctuates throughout, providing a dynamic variety: ‘the January Man’ and ‘the February man’, but also ‘the man of March’, ‘in June the man inside the man’, ‘the man of new October’, ‘the poor November man’. Each of these four verses in turn has a reference to a season in one of the lines.

The fifth verse follows the same melody and metrical structure as the others but focuses only on the January man as the year turns and a new cycle begins:

And the January man comes round again in woollen coat and boots of leather
To take another turn and walk along the icy road he knows so well
The January man is here for starting each and every year
Along the way for ever

There’s a slight variation in the words Carthy uses, in that he uses ‘road’ instead of ‘way’ in the final line. There are bigger differences in the phrasing and pacing of the lines and I found it strange to hear Goulder’s original recording (below) at first when I was so accustomed to Carthy’s delivery (his 1971 recording can be found here). I love them both equally and enjoy those differences in syllable emphasis, pauses, breath and accent, just as I enjoy versions by other singers (some of which I link to at the end of this post).

More of Goulder’s work can be sampled (and bought) at his website. I’m taken by his description of who might find the site appealing:

‘Steam freaks looking for songs and sounds of British Railways; dry stone walling enthusiasts wanting a step-by-step instruction video/dvd complete with accompanying handbook; singers looking for the words to that half-remembered Goulder song; poor souls who want a cd version of that worn-out vinyl disc; motor cycle maniacs to tell tall tales; long lost mates just looking for him’

From a Songs and Objects perspective, I find myself drawn to the work of a songwriter who engages in such varied ways with the physical world and human responses to the land, whether in the form of farm labourers, railway workers, railway passengers or the dry stone waller’s kinship with stone. Goulder’s songs embrace the processes of transience, permanence and renewal.

A Song for Every Season

I’ve taken the title for this post from the book written by Bob Copper and published in 1971, along with a 4LP box set of the same name that collected songs sung by the Copper family of Rottingdean, Sussex.

Copper’s book tells the stories of previous generations of his family as they worked the land of the Sussex Downs and combines his own narrative with the memories of his father Jim and the content of the song book that Jim had started compiling in the mid-1930s. Following some general introductions to the family members and the village of Rottingdean, the chapters are organised according to the months of the year, with each illustrated by a seasonal object.

Images from Bob Copper's A Song for Every Season (Paladin, 1975).

The January chapter recounts the period in 1892 when Jim’s schooldays came to an abrupt end and he started his career as a shepherd. As Bob records it, Jim ‘had grown up overnight from being an eleven-year-old schoolboy into an eleven-year-old working chap with well-dubbined boots, a “grub-basket”, a nice straight hazel cut from the hedgerow, and able from now on to make his contribution, however small, to the household economy’.

Part of this narrative is recounted in a clip created by current members of the Copper family under the name Deep Rooted. The clip mixes text from Bob’s book with images of Sussex in winter and a recording of Bob performing a song from Jim’s songbook, ‘Christmas Song’.

‘Christmas Song’ appears in a section of the book called ‘Turn o’ the Year’, which also gives its name to one of the records in the 4LP box set. Other songs from that section include ‘Brisk Young Ploughboy’, ‘The Plough Share’ and ‘Two Young Brethren’. The references to ploughs and ploughing are pertinent to this time of the year, as Steve Roud records in his book The English Year (pictured below with another outstanding Roud publication).

Roud’s entries for January include several pages on 6 January, the day I happen to be writing this post. In the Christian calendar, this is the day known as Epiphany and is also (depending which tradition of counting is being observed) Twelfth Night. Roud relates various English customs associated with Twelfth Night, involving cakes, fires, gifts and other vehicles for ‘merrymaking and indulgence’.

In the rural areas of England’s past, Roud tells us, the end of this indulgence meant the start of the farming year, and this is where the celebration of ploughs comes in. Plough Monday was traditionally the first Monday after Twelfth Night and would involve various blessings and fundraising related to ploughs and farmworkers more generally. It seems from Roud’s accounts that the party wasn’t quite over while Plough Monday events were under way and that the start of the farming year was a mixture of work and play.

The grouping of plough-related songs in the ‘Turn o’ the Year’ section of A Song for Every Season presumably relates to such January customs. Jim Copper includes a toast at the end of ‘The Ploughshare’ to the blade of the song’s title: ’may it never rust’. If it is a January song, though, ‘The Ploughshare’, like ‘The January Man’, takes us on a journey through the entire rural year as it recounts the things that will happen in and on the land as a result of the work done by the ploughers, from digging to sowing to harvesting and threshing. Similarly, ‘Two Young Brethren’—a song of praise to the ‘jolly ploughmen’—transports its singers and listeners through the preparing, planting, growing and reaping of corn over several months. The same happens with ‘Brisk Young Ploughboy’.

As the contributors to Mainly Norfolk point out, there have been many versions of ‘Two Young Brethren’ over the years. I’ve already linked to Ben and Tom Copper’s version above; here is a version from an album of songs by two sisters, Shirley and Dolly Collins.

I wanted to mention Shirley Collins here because I invariably think of her when I think of the Coppers and Sussex, where I lived and worked for four years. I hope to return to the wonderful things Collins has done with song in future posts on Songs and Objects; for now I’ll link to some earlier thoughts about her that I wrote as I was preparing to leave Sussex to journey back north to Newcastle in 2016.

Jump forward to the present and I’m walking a short distance up the road from where I live in Newcastle earlier this week. I enter a charity shop—the first shop I’ve set foot in this year—and my eye is caught by a record that I don’t recall seeing before: On Your Side by The Callies, from 1971. I check it out and find it’s an early release on the Newcastle-based Rubber Records, the only LP by the Newcastle band featuring future Pitman Poets member Billy Mitchell. That it features a version of Goulder’s ‘January Man’ seems only right, the kind of happenstantial occurrence I long ago became used to experiencing in places that sell records.

I can’t help but be intrigued. On returning home, I listen to the album and the ‘January Man’ version. It’s a pleasant version, given a different texture with the addition of guitar, and must surely rank as one of the earliest covers of the song to make it to vinyl.

My favourite versions of ‘January Man’ remain Goulder’s and Carthy’s but there are many other fine ones out there. I’ll link two more below: the first by Mike Harding which adds a psychedelic guitar sound that adds a kind of weird temporality to this song about time; the second by Rosie Calvert and Will Finn, former students in the Music department where I work, adding beautiful steelpan accompaniment to a performance of ‘The January Man’ at The Bridge Folk Club in Newcastle upon Tyne (it’s also available on the duo’s album Beneath This Place).

And so to conclude and to finish my post—to misquote my favourite Christmas song—I’ll just mention that all of these seasonal songs are examples of something I discuss quite often in Songs and Objects: the relationship between processes and objects. In the case of the songs I’ve mentioned so far, the folk tradition is the process and the songs are its objects. Songs are process too—or rather, singing is—and songs are objects that are always in process. And that is one of the main dynamics I’m interested in with the Songs and Objects project.

Before disappearing for a week or so, I’ll mention another two of my favourite songs of this season. The first, which relates more obviously to tradition, is ‘New Year Song’ by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (more familiar known these days as The Unthanks).

This is a song directly inspired by the kinds of seasonal traditions related in The English Year. The Allendale Tar Bar’l appears towards the end of Roud’s book as an entry for 31 December, but it could as easily feature near the beginning given the cyclical old-year-out/new-year-in theme that the tradition and the song celebrate.

The other song I pick seems at first less connected to tradition. It’s ‘Happy New Year’ by Let’s Eat Grandma.

While this may be a poppy departure from the kinds of songs I’ve mentioned above, I think the connection to the turning of the year is crucial in this song which explores the renewal and maintenance of friendship through the vicissitudes that life presents. Plus, it sonically invokes tradition through its inclusion of sampled firework sounds.

Even if Let’s Eat Grandma had no obvious connection to folk music, it wouldn’t matter, because seasonal songs are seasonal songs. But last year the duo provided what, to my ears, was the finest contribution to The Endless Coloured Ways, a tribute album to folk singer and songwriter Nick Drake. Providing a rendition of ‘From the Morning’ that magically retained the beautiful stillness of Drake’s version while still sounding completely like a Let’s Eat Grandma song, the duo sang these lyrics of renewal into the twenty-first century in a way that stayed true to the folk process while creating a beautiful new object.

What might ‘the endless coloured ways’ have to do with the way that goes on forever hymned in ‘The January Man’, I wonder? And what are some of the other January songs that we should be listening to as the year makes its way forward? I’d love to know your suggestions, so please leave a comment on the website.