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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Eliza Carthy
Location: Edinburgh
Instruments: voice, fiddle
Music: English folk
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HOW I CAME TO THIS MUSICÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýWHERE I PLAYÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýA FAVOURITE SONG |
  
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 ÌýÌýListen (6'45) to an audio feature recorded at Eliza Carthy's house in Edinburgh. Presented by Max Reinhardt. (Broadcast on Radio 3: 29/1/02)
ÌýÌýListen (4'01) to 'Adieu Adieu' played by Eliza Carthy with Ben Ivitsky (guitar), Heather McCleod (harmony vocals) and Martin Green (accordion).
A favourite song:
'Adieu Adieu' is a traditional song from North Yorkshire. I learned it from my parents - the Watersons had it in their repertoire for a very long time. We've changed it slightly: Martin has written an instrumental break between verses and we play it in 5/4 - my parents used to do it in 11/13, or something really mad like that.
The story the song tells is kind of your basic hip-hop plot. It's a person in jail bragging about what they've done, the people that they've robbed and how cavalier they were about it. 'I shut the shutters and bid them goodnight '…so they basically turn up in the bedroom and say, like the archetypal highwayman, 'Give us all your money ' and' Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen', then jump out of the window to freedom.
Eventually they get caught and what you have after that is the classic verse that appears in Streets of Laredo and the House of the Rising Sun, 'when I'm dead, I want to be buried in a certain way'. In some versions of those kind of songs -- the Highwayman songs, the Felon songs, the people that have murdered people songs -- you get 'Oh I don't want a big funeral, just bury me facing towards the train tracks'.
But this particular felon wants the flashiest funeral he can find, he wants six virgins all in white and he wants them all wearing long gloves, because presumably he's some kind of glove fetishist or whatever. The premise of the song is that he is asking people to feel sorry for him: pity the fate of poor felons at the hands of this over-zealous justice system . After all, stealing just a loaf of bread at the time that the song was written would either get you executed or transported to Australia.
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