...but the melody lingers on.
Mar. 12th, 2026 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIt's more than a week since we watched a virtual Live to Your Living Room concert with Nancy Kerr and James Fagan. It was a great show, of course: LTYLR seem to have come up with a formula for hybrid events that really works (they organised an in-person concert themselves). And ten days later, it is still with me in more than one way.
In the course of the evening, Nancy talked about the Music Heritage Place project - and specifically that it was the subject of a series of talks on Radio 3. So I've been listening to those: visits to county archives round the country to see what music might have found its way into their collections, and turning up a wide variety of stuff. I haven't yet heard anything that has stayed with me, despite the best efforts of the Melrose Quartet, but I have thought many interesting thoughts about how we define folk music, and who gets to make the definitions, and what gets included and excluded as a result...
This reminded me that there is always something worth bearing in Thank Goodness It's Folk, the show James Fagan co-hosts. How can you not love a programme that sets itself to work in order through the Child ballads? They have just reached 'Geordie', and devoted much of the show to compare and contrast.
But more than either of these, the gig stayed with me because it restocked my inner jukebox - that's an archaic image, and perhaps I should learn to think of it as a playlist set to 'shuffle', but I'm archaic myself, so a jukebox it remains. Anyway. Nancy Kerr's infectious melodies are weapons-grade earworms, liable to start up at any time, let alone in the aftermath of a gig, so it was inevitable (and not on a bad way) that Queen of Waters would be following me around for the next week. More surprisingly, it was accompanied by Now is the time, which I wouldn't have claimed as a particular favourite. And just occasionally, for a change, the algorithm would offer me Robb Johnson's Spirit of Free Enterprise.
All of this makes perfect sense: what really set me thinking about earworms was the Monday morning when I found myself earwormed by The Manchester Rambler. Where had that come from? I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday... Was that it? But though it was Monday, I'm not exactly a wage slave (I was lazing in the bath at the time). Can an earworm be triggered, not by a fragment of tune but by an idea? Certainly the news headlines have had Cops of the World on pretty constant play (and I'm not the only Guardian reader to have that one).
To which you can add: One - two - three / What are we fighting for? / Don't ask me... A whole other sense in which the song has ended, but ...
In the course of the evening, Nancy talked about the Music Heritage Place project - and specifically that it was the subject of a series of talks on Radio 3. So I've been listening to those: visits to county archives round the country to see what music might have found its way into their collections, and turning up a wide variety of stuff. I haven't yet heard anything that has stayed with me, despite the best efforts of the Melrose Quartet, but I have thought many interesting thoughts about how we define folk music, and who gets to make the definitions, and what gets included and excluded as a result...
This reminded me that there is always something worth bearing in Thank Goodness It's Folk, the show James Fagan co-hosts. How can you not love a programme that sets itself to work in order through the Child ballads? They have just reached 'Geordie', and devoted much of the show to compare and contrast.
But more than either of these, the gig stayed with me because it restocked my inner jukebox - that's an archaic image, and perhaps I should learn to think of it as a playlist set to 'shuffle', but I'm archaic myself, so a jukebox it remains. Anyway. Nancy Kerr's infectious melodies are weapons-grade earworms, liable to start up at any time, let alone in the aftermath of a gig, so it was inevitable (and not on a bad way) that Queen of Waters would be following me around for the next week. More surprisingly, it was accompanied by Now is the time, which I wouldn't have claimed as a particular favourite. And just occasionally, for a change, the algorithm would offer me Robb Johnson's Spirit of Free Enterprise.
All of this makes perfect sense: what really set me thinking about earworms was the Monday morning when I found myself earwormed by The Manchester Rambler. Where had that come from? I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday... Was that it? But though it was Monday, I'm not exactly a wage slave (I was lazing in the bath at the time). Can an earworm be triggered, not by a fragment of tune but by an idea? Certainly the news headlines have had Cops of the World on pretty constant play (and I'm not the only Guardian reader to have that one).
To which you can add: One - two - three / What are we fighting for? / Don't ask me... A whole other sense in which the song has ended, but ...
