Am listening to festive CDs in an attempt to "get Christmassy". Currently on the turntable (?) is Comfort and joy: a Christmas Celtic sojourn, and it is this subtitle which gives me cause to saddle up the old hobby horse and take it for a bit of a canter.
Don't get me wrong - this is a great CD, and without doubt Very Christmassy. My problem is that it is billed specifically as "Celtic" and yet contains a number of (very splendid) English pieces. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, these are all Celtic countries. England however is most definitely not Celtic - England is Anglo-Saxon. This is not to say that the one is better than the other, or that there are no Celtic influences in English folk music. It's just that the mindless lumping together of our islands' folk traditions under the Celtic banner means that the subtleties and ambiguities of the different traditions are lost and, more importantly, the distinctive voices of the English rural working classes are made invisible.
(The same kind of thing happened with the film of The Lord of the Rings. More than once in the supporting documentary footage(1) Peter Jackson or one of his apparatchiks talks about wanting to capture the "Celtic feeling" of the books. Wrong! LOTR is not Celtic - Tolkien was very clear that in writing this, he was attempting to create an English mythology.)
So, if'n y'd like to hear a quintessentially English folk carol, have a listen to the snippet of Shepherds arise(2) on Amazon - a tiny taster of England's Glory. And if you live in the States, you can hear it in full here. English folk music doesn't get much better than this little beauty.
Non celtici sed angli.
Gut Yule!
(1) extended DVDs - yeah, I know, very sad!
(2) this is a very good version by Waterson-Carthy, on whom I don't normally go a bundle . There's an even better version by The Copper Family, veteran folk singers from Sussex, which I recommend you seek out and purchase this instant.
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