Lovely weather we’ve been having the last few days. Very pleasant. And that’s about as far as it goes for most of us, urbanites that we are. But it’s been great news for arable farmers. World prices for wheat and barley may be high but a good proportion of an increasingly damp harvest had yet to be brought in here in the UK as of last weekend. I assume the combines have been burning the midnight diesel the last few days and the barns have been filling up (it’s difficult to tell for sure in Islington). Next week it should be all over bar the drying.
At The Dabbler we like to draw attention to the disregarded but worthy. So why not celebrate with our arable farmers as they reach the high point of their year? No-one else seems to, at least in this country (I’ve just come back from France where they enjoy taking this sort of thing very seriously). And yet it’s in all our interest to have a good crop what with food prices shooting up.
So first, here’s Stevie Winwood and Traffic with a superb, relatively recent performance of John Barleycorn Must Die, a song dramatising the harvest that musicians have been performing since at least 1568, when we first find it in printed form (now that’s what I call retroprogressive). Click here to see and hear the best performance I’ve come across (embedding has been disabled).
Now harvest time isn’t all about chopping down plant life to the rumble of engines and the reek of hot diesel (though nowadays it’s actually more likely to be done in a sound-proofed, air-conditioned cab whilst studying an onboard computer). We mustn’t forget that it can be a romantic time of year, and we receive a reminder from Neil Young in one of his lighter moments. So not Harvest from the eponymous 1972 album, then. Rather it’s the upbeat and charming Harvest Moon from his (again eponymous) 1992 album, which he made with some of the same Nashville musicians he’d worked with on Harvest twenty years earlier:
Neil Young Harvest Moon (Video)
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Next up is another song called Harvest from a Swedish Death Metal band. Which is not as bad as it sounds, at least when it’s Opeth. In fact, this track might be described as the softest of soft metals with more than a hint of folkiness about it (nevertheless, I’m a bit nervous about looking up the lyrics):
Now this could go two ways. But don’t worry, I’m not cueing up The Wurzels. It’s more Traffic, mostly as this is one of my very favourite tracks. But it sticks to our theme as, for me, it always evokes the time the harvest is over and done with: walking up on the downs, the arable fields ploughed, the pasture short and the westerlies buffeting. Bracingly austere and refreshingly drab.
I’m walking in the wind looking at the sky
Hanging on a breeze and wondering why, why…
My son and I have just spent a happy half hour checking out every ‘John Barleycorn’ available on YouTube – plus the Copper Family version of ‘Hard Times of Old England’ we had to try once my son had dismissed the Imagined Village version, which mentions Tesco, as ‘too modern’ … anyway, back on topic, we liked the 1972 Traffic version much better than the more recent one. The latter – like all the more recent version – is far too slow, too big on boring instrumental passages, too self-indulgent. You’d never get the harvest in with an attitude like that!
No, the best version we ever heard (not that my son remembers it) was in Lymington, early in 2009. A pair of buskers were performing in Lymington one cold and windblown afternoon. Everything – accents, scruffy New & Lingwood shirts, skin – suggested gap-year folk-amateurism of the most egregious sort. Never mind. Perhaps due to the brisk seaside breeze, there was none of that luxurious messing-about – none of those longeurs in which any Early Modern pub crowd could easily have downed a few skins, become bored, eviscerated the singer, concocted an alibi, retained legal help and kept a whole seminar of Cambridge historians busy for at least two generations – oh no. Instead, in the place of all of that, there was urgency, concision, even a little menace. And why not? It’s a menacing song. More to the point, though, the incandescent beautiful youth of these singing gap-year children reminded me that John Barleycorn is a song not just about harvest, but about time – the passing of years, seasonality, age, death not as unjust personal trauma but rather as as biological, natural and indeed perhaps even beneficial inevitability.
Anyway, you are right to remind us of the harvest – even though the Soho-dwellers here were able to enjoy the Phoenix Gardens Agricultural Show yesterday – as retroprogressive an affair as one might wish – and even though my personal explorations over recent weeks of rural locations including Fincham, Firle Beacon, Guestwick and Haltwhistle suggest that clever farmers did, in fact, take in the harvest somewhat before the heavy rains of the past fortnight.
And if this comment lacks something in terms of cohesion, please do take into account the fact that I’ve got a six-year old singing ‘John Barleycorn’ (with improvisations) even as I type …
The Imagined Village version of JBMD is pretty awful, isn’t it? Very Britpop. Great that you’ve brought the song home, so to speak. And knowing little boys like I do, I imagine the savagery recounted in the lyrics is appreciated!
One song I did want to include was The Miller’s Song as featured on the Bagpuss episode, The Mouse Mill. It’s a wonderful song; very poignant with its references to time passing (there’s a Welsh version too I heard once). But, sadly, I couldn’t find it online.
BTW, 40% of the harvest had yet to be brought in as of last week. But I think there were some regional differences in that the North was dryer than the South in August and thoses place you visited sound mostly Northern.
You’re absolutely right, of course, not only about the Miller’s Song from Bagpuss, but the harvest, too. In this context, ‘the North’ probably ought to be defined to include Norfolk (Guestwick, Fincham) which had an extremely dry summer – hence an early harvest there – but of course the highly localised nature of this whole absolutely crucial harvest business makes its own point, too easily missed sometimes in London. But anyway, a morning spent listening critically to variant versions of John Barleycorn couldn’t be anything other than a good thing, could it?
(I am not sure whether the worst thing about the Imagined Village version is the endless build-up or the guest appearance from Mr Bragg part way through – not that I don’t like some of his work (‘Between the Wars’ is a good song, no two ways about it) but that sort of look-at-me star-stuff doesn’t work with traditional folk-music, in my world anyway. Sadly, there wasn’t a nice, a capello, unfussy Copper Family version of JBMD but if there had been, I’d have tried my best to visit it upon each and every one of you.)