The recent boom of interest in sea shanties is nothing if unpredictable. Thanks greatly to social media, a whole new generation have embraced these sailor songs, many, hundreds of years old. In its capacity as cultural archivist, Topic Records, of course, [...]
This record is a partial musical portrait of Glasgow, the city that more than any other in these islands, arouses shame, admiration and very real fear - the Glasgow of the old tradition, half-pastoral, half-urban, and nothing at all to do with [...]
The brother and sister team of Ray and Archie Fisher first became known to a wider audience in 1961 when they appeared for a long run in the Scottish Television documentary 'Here and Now', and as regular guests on BBC 'Hootenanny' and [...]
When Chesterton wrote of the Irish "All their wars were merry and all their songs are sad" he was sacrificing accuracy for the sake of a paradox. The wars themselves were ruthless savage campaigns of destruction on the one hand and desperate [...]
From Paddy Tunney's notes in the 1965 issue of this classic Topic LP: The songs he (Dominic Behan) has selected for this record number sixteen and all tell the story of the Irish Republican Army from the Easter Rising of 1916 to [...]
'Our ballads are well known in book versions, though it must be said that the great anthologies don't always contain the best specimens. They are less well known in sung versions, though they were made to be sung, not read. In this [...]
Songs of the Jacobite Wars of 1715 and 1745 sung by Ewan MacColl with guitar and banjo accompaniments by Peggy Seeger. 'These songs recall a social order which has long since passed away under the wheels of the locomotive, the arterial road, [...]
'Together, they form a team, sometimes a little ragged, but never lacking in the fire which is essential to success. Their joint travels around Europe taught them a great deal which home life could not have done and they came back to [...]
'In 1956 skiffle was going strong in London and Jack began to sing in pubs and create something of a name for himself. In 1957 he sent for his buddy Derroll Adams, banjo-picker from Portland, Oregon and together the two sang and [...]
'Whether he is singing in Irish or English, Heaney is a remarkably discreet singer, not given to dramatic or comic effect, with an uneventful surface to his songs, but a world of secrets underneath. Outside a few settlements in his native West, [...]
The Wide Midlands: Songs, stories and tunes from the central Counties. 'Birmingham, the Midland metropolis, was an important centre for the printing of broadsides and it is inevitable that this selection should lean towards the West Midlands. As well as broadsides, a [...]
The recordings of Hugh Gillespie have a quite different 'feel' from other American-Irish fiddle music of the late 1930s period. The somewhat unusual choice of guitar rather than piano for accompaniment certainly contributes to this distinctiveness, but probably the decisive factors are [...]