ROUD 62: Brown Robin
AKA: Brown Robyn, Brown Robyn and Mally, Love Robbie
Preface
This is a special episode in this series for me - it feels like I’ve made a couple of new friends, but sadly one of them is no longer with us. With that in mind, I’m making donations to St Luke’s Hospice and Help Musicians. I’ll also be donating 50% of all physical and digital sales from my Bandcamp, and 50% of all paid subscriptions to this newsletter, for the next two weeks. Thanks.
A very rare ballad from the Child collection. It was apparently not popular through the Victorian era, when so many ballads were repeatedly anthologised, this only appears very rarely in them, and it never appeared in broadside form. Its only mention comes from a few of the usual early Scottish sources. Unsurprisingly, that walking song repository (mentioned in several previous episodes) Anna Gordon, known commonly in the literature as Mrs Brown of Falkland, had a version.
The song is not about bird, but a young handsome man that the King’s daughter falls in love with, and has to smuggle out of the house in lady’s dress in order to elope. However, the singing bird is used as a metaphor for youthful desire at the start of the ballad, or perhaps implies the shape shifting of the beautiful bird into the handsome young man, standing outside mysteriously in the rain, while she has to serve the tedious noblemen in the house.
There is a bird in my father's orchard,
And dear, but it sings sweet!
I hope to live to see the day
This bird and I will meet.'
'O hold your tongue, my daughter Mally,
Let a' your folly be;
What bird is that in my orchard
Sae shortsome is to thee?
Music
Apart from the heroic DIY efforts of Raymond Crooke on Youtube, this has been a steadfastly unrecorded ballad. The useful Child Ballad Database of recordings gives just Raymond and one other mysterious entry:
I searched Spotify, Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Discogs, and could find no mention of Birdloom. Then I asked the compilers of the database if they knew where the entry came from, but it is managed by different people than in 2006, so any further information was lost.
I turned to Folk Twitter:
With a little help from some friends (thank you friends, ref. 1 2 3) I learned that Birdloom was the brainchild of Loop Guru keyboardist/programmer Dave Muddyman who sadly died in March 2022 and versatile singer-songwriter Sharron Kraus. Dave was clearly a boundlessly creative soul, creating internationally flavoured dance music and soundscapes, and towards the end of his life, rekindled his love for the visual arts through his painting.
I approached Sharron, and she was kind enough to send me the following account of her time working with Dave, and the process of making the Birdloom tracks.
The Story of Birdloom
by Sharron Kraus
In April 2002 electronic musician David Muddyman (aka Muud, Jamuud), whose main recording project was Loop Guru, posted the following advert to an email list I was subscribed to:
Female singer, in the vain (sic) of Sandy Denny, Celia Humphris, or even Yma Sumac, wanted to pull English traditional folk music into the 21st Century. If you think a backing of Mongolian Drones, Screaming 60s organs and Transcengenic rhythms sounds appalling, please don't reply. What I want is a singer with heart and passion and a sense of adventure. Preferably based in London or the South East. Initially this is a recording project only.I was certainly not appalled and replied expressing interest in the project. Dave and I started corresponding and quickly found common ground: a shared love of and respect for traditional music, coupled with an eclecticism and experimental approach. At that stage Dave told me that he wasn't what he considered to be a real musician, saying “My instruments are my computer, my samplers and lots of pieces of tape. Having said that I have always strived to make sounds and music that is organic. I suppose I am more of a sound sculptor really, who understands the conventions of music and uses them. I am obsessed by rhythms and drones. I love working with real singers and musicians because they give needed life and vitality, sometimes difficult to create entirely on a computer.” I was a more conventional though largely self-taught musician, and had just released my first album, Beautiful Twisted, which was a collection of songs I'd written on guitar and banjo, taking melodic cues from traditional songs and tunes.
We emailed ideas back and forth, and talked on the phone (landline). We shared our musical projects with each other, sending CDs by post in the days before Dropbox and WeTransfer. We then started thinking about songs to record. We were both big fans of Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy, so drew on their repertoires. Dave had just ordered the 20 CD Voice of the People anthology from Topic Records, so that gave us a lot to wade through and I'd been digging around in books for lesser known traditional songs to sing at my local folk session. Most of the songs we ended up working with were ones we took from Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy, one exception being the Child Ballad 'Brown Robin' with its story of love, deception and cross-dressing involving a king's daughter and her lover, which we were keen to include. We could find neither a recorded version of that song nor a tune associated with the words, so I wrote a tune for it and we recorded it.
Our recording process for each song involved Dave building up layers of sound that I would then sing and add the occasional analogue instrument to. He would send me CDs of his work in progress and was sometimes anxious that I'd be shocked at how unorthodox his experiments were, so would email to let me know what he was sending so as to forewarn me. One such email read as follows: “'Polly on the Shore' hasn't turned out how I was possibly expecting it to. It now has more in common with Tom Waits around the time of Swordfish Trombone. I have also started a third, 'Sir Patrick Spens', which is sounding like a folk band given to Jamaican Dubmaster who made a record and then played it underwater.” I looked forward to the arrival of these CDs and to being thrilled by the sounds they contained. Here's my response to one: “Some of the work in progress is great on first listening - The Bloody Gardener is definitely getting creepier - gorgeous. I love the rhythmic sounds that come in on the second verse - they sound like either plants being ripped out of marshy ground or roots sucking up nutrients, or something. It really gives the impression that it's not just the gardener that's evil but that the whole garden is!”
We fed off each other's excitement about the way the songs were developing and hoped other people would also be enthusiastic about the project, which by then had been named 'Birdloom'. Dave played some tracks to his Loop Guru bandmate Sam Dodson and reported back that “Rosemary Lane is becoming totally addictive. I played it to Sam, who not a renowned folk love. He adored it.” I shared tracks with Oxford friends John Spiers and Jon Boden, who were just starting to make a splash in the traditional folk world. They also loved what they heard and wanted to get involved, so we scheduled in recording sessions with the two of them, adding John's melodeon and Jon's fiddle to a number of tracks.
Dave also ran the project by Ian Anderson, then editor of fRoots magazine, who invited us to be interviewed on Radio 3 for a programme called 'A Place Called England' on the future of English folk music. Two Birdloom tracks were featured on this programme and that's the only time any of them have seen the light of day.
At the time of that broadcast, we described the project as follows: “The idea behind Birdloom is to mix ancient with even more ancient and tradition with modern. To take traditional English folk songs and enhance their stories with cinematic tendencies. To breathe rhythmic life into the cobwebs and create a new twenty-first century folk music.” We had high hopes and sent out demos to a number of record labels. None of them wanted to release the music, though, so it got shelved. We both became busy with other projects and life moved on. Over the years Dave and I corresponded intermittently and after a 3 year gap I received a nice email from him catching me up with his latest news and saying “I still listen to the Birdloom music. It doesn’t date. I would still like to see it released sometime. I think it is worthy of that.”
Now, after even longer, and a year after Dave's death, I'm listening to the tracks we recorded and am flooded with good memories of a dear friend, a lively collaboration, and a time and place in our lives. I don't know that Dave's right that the tracks don't date – they do sound dated to me at this point in time, post Tuung, Imagined Village, Stick in the Wheel and other folktronica and experimental folk projects. But they still have a certain something…
Sharron Kraus, February 2023
I would like to thank Sharron so much for that wonderful account. It paints a vivid picture of the beautiful collaborative nature of music. I only wish Dave was still around that he could share his thoughts.
With Sharron’s permission, here is a clip from the Birdloom track “Brown Robin”, featuring John Spiers on melodeon.
Personally I am very keen on genre-diversity in traditional song, and as an ex part-time dweller of some of the dodgier night clubs of 1990s East London, this taps into something quite elemental for me. I’d love to see it get released, but also fully understand Sharron’s hesitancy. I’d love to hear from you if you enjoyed it too.
Update - March 2023
I’m delighted to say that Sharron gave some more thought to releasing the Birdloom music, and with the blessing of Dave’s wife, she has done so. It is available here:
Please support Sharron’s release, and celebrate Dave’s life.
Some sources
There is a “Brown Robin” that turns up in another ballad of the time, namely Roud 3335 (Child 103) AKA Rose the Red and White Lily. This is believed to be a different Robin, namely Robin Hood, tales of whom make up about 40 entries in the middle of the Child collection that all concern the green-tighted wealth-redistributor of legend. The use of the adjective “brown” seems to be in many cases a signifier of low status (a notable exception being the wealthy “Brown girl” of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender), as brown clothes were the norm for the poor labouring class, who may also have been more on the grubby side than their aristocratic counterparts. This is borne out by Peter Buchan in his notes for this ballad, while also making a bold but interesting claim as to the ballad’s real life subject.
Another Brown Robin appears as a named character in a couple of versions of Jellon Grame (Roud 58). Again, this is most likely related to the Robin Hood legend, especially considering the fact that revenge is enacted via an arrow through the heart.
Frank Sidgwick in his always succinctly entertaining and informative “Popular Ballads of the Olden Time” from 1903 rightly points out the “picturesque touch” in verse eight, which paints the intimate post-coital morning-after scene of the two lovers lying in bed together as “the sun shone on their feet” - which is strikingly tender and corporeal for ballads of this era.
Finally, for completion, Child’s very brief notes, and the three versions of the ballad mentioned above can be found here.
Draft pages and audio guide
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