Ellis Peters: Black is the colour of my true love's heart

[shewhomust]

I was intrigued by sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music.

"[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.

If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (sovay recognised it even before the big reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."

How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened.

The course begins in Friday evening, when Professor Penrose invites the guest artists to provide a sample of their repertoire which they feel can most unassailably be offered as folk. This is also a convenient mechanism for introducing the suspects in the detective story (although a pair of excursions to the surrounding area soon gives most of the attenders an alibi for the significant period). But I've already put my cards on the table about where the main interest lies for me, so I might as well consider them purely as representatives of the folk scene of the time:

But first , there is Dickie Meurice, "disc-jockey, compère and television personality extraordinary,"

and wait a minute, what is he doing here? Obviously, the Professor could have compèred the session himself (I would happily have had more of the Professor). Dickie provides the reader with someone to dislike, the one unambiguously unsympathetic character in the book (and carefully designated as such from his first appearance), but what does an academic / folk music weekend offer a television personality? He's presumably being paid, but how can the college afford him? Dominic thinks his inclusion is an attempt (successful) to draw the crowds. Well, maybe.

First actual performer is Celia Whitwood, "the girl with the harp" (Shropshire borders on Wales, remember)

She sings Two Fond Hearts and By the Sea Shore, both in Welsh (which Peters is apologetic about not speaking, in an interesting interview which completely fails to ask her about music). She translates the words "for those who did not know them", which makes her the only singer reported as saying anything about her material. But she offers no explanation for deserting Wales for Dundee with the Jute-Mill song (making mill noises with her harp) This complaint about industrial life is the nearest anyone comes to singing anything political.

Visiting American Peter Crewe

had claimed that the Professor's introduction had him scared, but the Professor reassured him: "Mr. Crewe, you are probably the safest person around here." What does this mean? Is American music exempt from whatever test of authenticity may be applied? Possibly, since his initial choices are Times are Getting Hard, which seems to have reached a British audience via Lonnie Donegan (I don't have a problem with that, but then I'm not a purist) and I'm going Away (written by Walter Hawkins - I got nothing on this one). He ends, though, with The Streets of Laredo, which is surely gold standard folk ballad.

Andrew Callum

contributes a Child ballad, The Bonny Earl of Moray, and "two Tyne-side colliery ballads" which could be anything, and I bitterly resent their anonymity. Probably not drawing on The Big Hewer, but here's a collection I knew at the time, all old songs; Ed Pickford was already writing songs by 1967 so he could be included in this description, but I doubt it.

Tossa remarks that thus far they are "All playing safe." She doesn't approve, but I read her as the author's representative here in declaring these all to be securely folk music choices.

The Rossignol twins (a fine case of nominative determinism)

are, in Dominic's opinion, more provocative, for reasons which are not apparent to me (other than being French). Le roi a fait battre tambour seems mainstream; their choice of a lullaby in Auvergnat patois is apparently designed to disconcert the Professor (in which it fails) and there is no suggestion that it comes from Canteloube's classical-adjacent Chants d'Auvergne. Their last choice is a fifteenth century courtly song, L'Amour de moi (as performed by many others, before and since, including Paul Robeson in Moscow in 1949) - and "[t]hey sang it like angels..."

Lucien Galt is billed as the star attraction of the weekend, the folk singer who is successful enough that he is about to set off on a South American tour.

He sings two ballads Helen of Kirkconnell and The Croppy Boy, before dropping out of narrative mode to address Liri directly. "They all knew the air as Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms but that was not what he was singing." The words, which are given in full, begin "My Lodging is on the Cold Ground..." (which the Professor attributes to John Gay, and challenges his audience to argue that this means it cannot be folk music). I would not recognise the air, and interprete this as crediting Lucien with bringing the two together, but the internet records the association as long-established, and leaves me confused about which is tune and which is lyric (Wikipedia; My Lodging is on the Cold Ground to a tune attributed to Playford).

Liri Palmer (the Liri is one of the principal rivers of central Italy - if the name is intended to suggest something, I missed it) did not intend to sing at this gathering;

she attempts to decline, on the grounds that she has left her guitar upstairs, but is prevailed upon to borrow Lucien's guitar. There are two ways to read this: one is that for Ellis Peters, even someone who insists on the description ballad-singer rather than folk singer cannot sing unaccompanied, must borrow a guitar (and how fortunate that both musicians use the same tuning). The other is that this isn't about the music at all, it's about the characters, a way for the author to demonstrate the relationship between Liri and Lucien, a preamble to Liri's vengeful rewrite of the title song. Later it is Liri whose singing of a ballad sets in motion the final tragedy: on this occasion she accompanies herself on her own guitar, "improvising in a galloping rhapsody" which is all the more impressive because she had not until the last minute intended to perform this ballad.

"Beware," admonishes Profesor Penrose, as he lifts the needle from his precious disc of Moravian Slovak recordings, "the fanatic who finds everything phoney that isn't sung without accompaniment by an eighty-five-year old in a public bar..." It is not enough to be 'folk', it must also be 'music'. It's probably overstretching this to hear in it an echo of an earlier Folk Revival which saw itself as rescuing musical treasures from an unworthy peasantry, as Georgina Boyes characterises it in her Imagined Village. Nonetheless, those performers whose singing is described all have classically 'good' voices. The Rossignol brothers sing like angels, Lucien Galt has "a voice of great beauty, a warm flexible baritone," and this is part of what makes him "an artist of stature",; Liri's voice is "silver-pure" and "achingly sweet". At first I was disconcerted by this emphasis on pmusicality, but it is presented as serving a function: Liri's sweetness is what renders her song lethal. At the dénouement, her singing of Gil Morrice is described entirely as sorytelling, emotion conveyed by the voice. And to be fair to Lucien, the other part of his artistry is his total absorption in what he does. Peters isn't seeing her balled singers through a classical music filter, she does see the specific artistry of their chosen medium.

How deep is this dive into folk music apart from the ballads? Carol Westron quotes Ellis Peters writing about her mother that she was, "artistic, musical, interested in everything. She played the violin and sang, only in a family context, but her musical repertoire ranged from folksong through music hall and Edwardian ballads, to grand opera." But when it comes to depicting the folk scene of her own adult life, she offers nothing of that breadth or variety. Comparing the performances described above to my own unreliable memories of the 1960s, what I notice mostly is the absences:

• Top of the list, where are the contemporary songwriters? Surely a course examining what can and what can't be called folk music has to address that particular elephant in the room. You may not be able to afford Bob Dylan (though Lucien has something of his star status) but some of his songs will probably have entered the repertoire. Or something written by Ewan MacColl for the Radio Ballads of the 1950s? Where is Cyril Tawney or Sydney Carter...? When Professor Penrose wants a name to explain, in a theory now pretty much discarded, the origin of Ring a ring of roses, he reaches for "some inspired Tom Lehrer of the plague year [who] turned it into a nursery game." This holds out the hope that one contemporary songwriter may, in a faw ceturies' time, become folk music; it's a compliment, but I don't suppose Tom Lehrer would be flattered by it.


• With the exception of that one Welsh harp, the only instrument seems to be the guitar. Liri is a virtuoso accompanist of her own singing; Lucien carries a guitar, which she borrows so reluctantly, but about his playing we hear nothing; it is all about the voice. I'm assuming that the American Peter Crewe played guitar, though the text says only that he "sang" and that Andrew Callum, even more cryptically "contributed." Guitar accompaniment, in other words, is sufficiently ubiquitous not to need comment; if anyone singe without accompaniment, that isn't commented on either (in my mind, the Rossignol brothers do). No one plays fiddle, or accordion, or spoons, and there are no instrumental contributions.


• The audience are never invited to join in;


• There are no funny, or even particularly light-hearted songs (well, someone will shortly be murdered, that's not the mood we are aiming for);

It's fok music, in other words, but not as I know it.

[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]

sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).

There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...

Comments

[sovay]

[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]

Very much appreciated by me, however. I would also read your footnote about Czechoslovakia.

[shewhomust]

Thank you for both inspiring and indulging me.

Footnote: My initial thought was simply that Peters had picked a random Eastern European country, and grasped at the one Czech name she could think of, and reshaped it slightly. But (Carol Westron, again):

Peters and her brother had a great interest in Czechoslovakia and felt, as many people in Britain did, that the British Government had let Czechoslovakia down. She taught herself Czechoslovakian and translated and published many books, as well as visiting the country several times. She was awarded the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations gold medal and ribbon in 1968. Her mystery novel, The Piper on the Mountain (1966) was set partly in Czechoslovakia.

That must be the book immediately before this one, and features Dominic (and, I think, Tossa) in Slovakia.

In other words, she does know what she is doing here, even if we don't. She may have been aware of Vaclav Havel as a playwight, before his political prominence. Or the internet has several people called Vaslav Havelka, as here: though they all seem more recent, but it does seem to be a valid name.

ETA: Also. the Professor's treasured recording. It might be classical-adjacent, brought to mind by Janacek's Moravian Dances, but she spells out, this is also Slovakia. I wonder whether these are the Professor's own field recordings?