Sara Grey
17 June 2001
Mt Hood, Oregon

What I'd like to ask you is to talk a little about why you started singing traditional music...you're from New Hampshire, right?...and go on from there. Why did you start singing traditional music?
You know no one's ever asked me that before.
Really?
That's true. Never quite like that..I am sort of at a loss for words. I don't think I could give you any one answer. Because it's always been something that's been a part of my life. It's been such an integral part of my life that I never stopped and thought one day, "I'm gonna sing traditional music." I'm...I've always been steeped in tradition, where I grew up in New Hampshire was very rural and I had a great reverence and appreciation for tradition and it was something that was part of my childhood and I just developed such an appreciation for things that were old, not just music, but stories, songs, furniture, you know I love things that are old and I always have been kind of a misfit in the21st century...and the 20th century. I've just felt that... all my interests, and aesthetically my interests take me back in time rather than forward.
And your father was singing?
My father wasn't really a singer. He wasn't a great singer at all. He was a pretty poor singer. But he was a fine fiddle player and he was a wonderful storyteller. He had a great sense of humor and the stories that he told were...they're not jokes, there's a line between the stories that have been handed down, some of them from the British Isles, some of them indigenous to New England, but he was a true native of New Hampshire and just grew up with these stories, people telling them all around him. Again, like myself, he was just steeped in all kinds of traditions, with people around him influencing him every step of the way.
They all have punch lines...
Well, they do, but they're all understated...

Falling Banjo Break...

Another thing I was going to ask you about now that we have a break here is, you were talking a lot tonite about music crossing the ocean, do you want to go into what happens to music when it comes from, say, the British Isles?
To me that's the fascinating thing, it's like a great big jigsaw puzzle, and for years I've tried to put bits of the puzzle together, and each time you research and learn a new song or a variation of a song you already know, it's like dropping another little bit of the puzzle in there. And to me the fascination of how these songs move and change, it's just never ending, it's just constant and to me you can learn so much about a culture from the way these changes occur and I just love to trace them and follow them. There've been two musicians, Jack Beck, who's from Fife in Scotland and Ann Nielson who comes from East Kilbride outside of Glasgow and the three of us have always had a passionate interest in this movement, a migration of songs, so about three or four years ago we decided to take this idea on tour and we worked out a program called strangers in this country and that's what really works so well, because you could hear the changes. They presented the Scottish version and I presented the North American...Canadian and American version. And we did this on stage in workshop form and in concert form, and we took it down the east coast, well we took it up the east coast from South Carolina all the way up the coast as far as New York State. And we did it twice at Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow and at Gervin festival (?) in Ayrshire in Scotland this spring and that's really when it's at its most sublime when you can actually hear and see the music changing from people who have that music...they are native to that particular music and then you show the crossover with someone singing another variation of the song in their own style.
Can you make any generalizations about what happens to songs when they come over? The words change..
Surely. Sometimes...there are so many different variations of things that can happen. Sometimes the words change, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the tune changes, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes both change. The likelihood that both things will alter some is very strong. You can play the game of telephone and if you have ten people, invariably...and pretend those ten people, starting from one to ten is a pan of 2 or 3 hundred years, you can imagine what can happen when it gets around. It's going to probably come out differently if you start here with a phrase or a song and you repeat it all the way around, by the time it reaches that 10th person, its going to come out differently.
I like the song about the barbecue.
Yeh, Yeh, exactly. You can think of them as distortions in the very best sense of the word. Because to me they're fascinating. And some singers like to change them, they like to pull them out because they don't make any sense. But I think it's great to leave them in. It's fine if you learn it from a particular source, I think it's great to leave that in, because it shows the change, it shows...
That's still happening.
It's still happening. Sure it is. I mean people are learning songs from me and when I hear them years later they change.
Wow.
Yeh. And so they're in the folk process as well. And I, who am I to say to them "You're not singing it correctly. There is no correct way. If that's the way they heard it, as long as there's some sense in it then it's valid.
Is there something that happens to tunes that make them American tunes.
Well, certainly the style of playing. I mean, the banjo for example is certainly not indigenous to Great Britain, so when you take a fiddle tune say from the British Isles, a reel, and you adapt it on the banjo it is defiantly going to come out differently. It's just from the very nature of the instrument. Fiddle styles all change. Singing styles change. The Scottish singers for example sing very differently from singers in England who have a more straightforward approach with very little ornamentation. The Scottish singers tend to have, especially in the northeast, with the big ballads, a very lyrical style of singing. And you cross over into Ireland, in the south of Ireland, not the north, in the Republic, you get the sean nos style of singing which is very highly decorative and ornate and you get up into the north and the Ulster tradition is totally different and it's very straightforward and its almost like you were speaking. You phrase like you're speaking as well. And that is very much akin to...that carried over very much into the Maritime Provinces and into Ontario, particularly in Ontario. I've collected songs up in the north of Ontario and you get songs where it sounds like they're almost speaking and its very direct. You get that in the Ozarks for example, a ballad like...well, there's a ballad called Johnnie Doyle which started out in Scotland and it was a fairly benign song about an arranged marriage with a minister. The mother is orchestrating all of this marriage of her daughter to this minister. And it moved across the Atlantic and moved into the Ozark Mountains and into Arkansas, and when it was sung, the Ozark people have a way of almost paring it right down. That often happened with ballads and songs in America, you get right down to the core of the song. Lots of verses are dropped. They get right down to the point, and what they do is they start speaking in just plain old vernacular. "And also,""and they did that,""hey, by the way, they did that,""They started a-huggin' and a-kissin,'" and they get down to right good old Southern colloquial speech and they drop all the formalities and along that is dropped things like swords, daggers, they have no need. So they substitute with, like in the ballad of Matty Groves, where Matty Groves is slain in the British versions with a dagger and a sword, that had no meaning for people, no relevance to their lives once they distanced themselves from that culture, and so in the Mountains, in the Appalachian Mountains, there's a version where Matty Groves is shot in the head with a .44 because that's what they can relate to.
Raggle Taggle Gypsy and Gypsy Davy is one that...
Absolutely. Same thing. Seven gypsies, seven gypsies in Britain, seven gypsies in a row. You get to the Ozark version it reduces itself down to one man, one man who goes off with one woman. And you know you often find the supernatural element in songs disappears as well. It's very prevalent in British versions but by the time it hits America, a lot of the superstitious elements disappear and if they do survive, like for example in the Ballad Of the Two Sisters, where the woman's body is made up into the components of a fiddle, her hair is made to make the strings and her finger bones make the fiddle screws. And that is all supposed to be quite a supernatural element, but, and also in the ballad, it's called The Ballad of the Lady Gay in American but in Britain it is called...it's a big Child Ballad, cant remember off hand, but there's a bit in it which talks about "There was a knight and a lady bright, 3 little babes," Can I sing a little bit of it?
Sure!
"There was a knight and a lady bright.
And three little babes had she.
She sent them away to the North Country
For to learn their grammery." Do you know what grammery was? Sorcery.
Oh!
Sorcery. She was a witch.
"It was a dark cold Christmas night
When everything was still.
She saw those three little babes come running.
Come running over the hill.

She set a table of food and wine
That they might east and drink
She laid a bed of winding sheet
That they might sleep so sweet." They're ghosts you see, winding sheet.
Mmm...
It's a shroud.
"Take it off, take it off, cried the oldest one
Take it off, take it off, cried she,
For I shan't stay here in this wide wicked world
For there's a better world for me.

Cold clods, cold clods, down by my side"--meaning underground, cold clods meaning cold clay earth.
Cold clods down at my feet.
The Tears my dear mother shed for me
Would wrap my winding sheet."
And there's a whole..."the lark spread over this wide wicked world," that was a supernatural reference. The lark was symbolic of the bubonic plague.
Oh really? Oooh!
Yes, that's how these children died. But I reckon that that bore very little relevance, that had very little meaning for Americans when they sang it. They probably did not know a lot of these meanings when they sang it. It probably had a lot more meaning on the other side of the Atlantic than it did here.
I would say so, yeh.
But I find it just a whole fascinating process and I mean usually when I travel about, most people seem to be very interested in all these changes. They want to be grounded in a song, they don't want...these songs aren't just for entertainment but they're to understand as well, you know?
Uh-huh.
They're to understand a culture and the changes that the cultures go through and the whole immigrant movement and how those songs traveled and everything. They really show and illustrate so much about a culture.
Do you ever hear anything in Appalachian music that's German? That comes from the Germans?
Well, The Germans...I've done a bit of traveling in Germany and done some singing in the north of Germany and what has happened I think, I'm pretty sure that this is so, that the second world war was responsible for a lot of German folk music not being sung anymore.. It was synonymous with Naziism, and people just stopped singing it, and if you ask a lot of Germans today...there were a lot of songs but they were sung during the Hitler regime and they're just not sung today. It's just considered politically...you hardly ever hear folk songs being sung.
Do you ever, in the Appalachians, hear any influence?
German influence? That song I sang tonite was the closest I've come.
Wow.
You know. Bingen on the Rhine.
Huh.
But no, you, a lot of these countries don't have, you hardly ever hear traditional songs being sung in the Netherlands. Britain and America and Canada are so lucky that we have these living traditions. That's why its so important to keep them alive. They died out in the Netherlands. They died out in Belgium, apart from the occasional maybe song in Flemish or something. But no huge repertoire. Same in Germany because they can't sing them. I have heard some agricultural kind of love songs being sung in the Black Forest, in the Schwartzwald but...and they were beautiful, they were sung by some people when we stayed in a pension and the couple who owned it, an elderly couple sang us a few songs and they were lovely, but generally people think it smacks too much of the war and they won't sing.
I had asked you about Gordon Jones. I was wondering...the two last albums that I have of yours, that one and In the Airly Days...is there any difference in those albums in what you did with them?
Well...
It seems like when you sing, when you record, would record pretty much straight what you're singing here and playing on the banjo.
I always try to sing and be true to what I do live with what I do on the record because so often you'll get and you listen to it and it's got all this cast of thousands on it. It's got millions of playing, you know and doing all kinds of stuff. And then you go to hear the person and it's not at all like the recording.
"Are you really going to be playing a banjo?"
Pardon?
I wondered if you were really going to be playing that banjo.
Yeh, exactly. I think that so often people just surround themselves with so much stuff. And it gets so busy. Recordings get so busy. There are so many arrangements and all that stuff. I guess that's OK for some musicians in what they're doing, but for me, I mean, the song is paramount. And if you can't hear what the song is about. I try to keep the banjo as something that enhances the song but stays well behind it so that the song comes forward, cause you're telling...you are the teller of the story. You are the purveyor of all this stuff and you don't want the instrument to be overbearing at all.
So was Gordon producing that first...
He produced two of them...
Two of them...
I think there were three! With Elie Ellis I did one. The others were on my own and then my final one, this was with Waterbug. I also did a recording with Greenwich Village, with Joe Stead and I did the last recording that Greenwich Village ever made.
And that's in England...
Uh-huh, in England. Joe Stead had a great label.
What years was that?
I made that one with Elie in...huh!...in the 80s. Sometime in the 80s. It was between that and Harbourtown. And then we made 3 recordings with Fellside.
Wow.
For Paul Adams. We did three and I did a sampler with The Golden Ring with Sandy and Caroline Paton. I was part of the Golden Ring. And my Folk Legacy record.
So you have a lot of albums out there that I have never seen!
A fair number, yeh. When I stopped recording for Fellside, Paul never...well, obviously he's not going to run off any more.
So they're out of print.
I think so. Gordon's you can still get. So from Harbourtown forward, yeh. But I don't think Paul has any more left. Sandy and Caroline, because there was still requests for the Sara Grey vinyl that I did for Folk Legacy, they had it made into a cassette a few years ago. Sandy and Caroline e-mailed me to say that it was available in cassette form. I really must get a hold of some because people still ask for them.
So is what you're doing right now different from what you were doing with say with Folk Legacy?
I would say yes. I'm...I did a lot more Scottish songs funnily enough back then, but I'm tryin...not trying! I'm not intentionally trying, I've just gravitated more toward singing the North American versions of songs, but what I have never done is to forsake the tradition. In fact if anything I get more passionate about it and I went through a period where I was doing some songs of you know, Si Kahn's,. I love them, don't get me wrong, he is a wonderful writer and a gem of a person. I love a lot of the songs that I look back on, but I feel more comfortable with songs in the tradition and that's what I love so that's what I do.
So you're doing a real show here. A lot of different things.
Well, I do try very hard to give people as much of a cross-section of the tradition as possible. To me that's the way you can see all the changes on both sides of the coin better than if I were just to present an evening of North American music or an evening of Scottish songs or an evening of Irish songs. To end, I don't want to get so clinical that I start categorizing and say "Now I'm going to play a whole set of Irish songs, now..." you know I love to move back and forth and I love to give those examples back to back of songs from...you know, with different variations to them. So you can see them, you see one, you see the other, you hear one you hear the other and they're back to back and you can see the connections.
Yep. I think that works very well.

judith@gorge.net

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