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Musician: Pete Morton Location:Leicester Instruments: voice, guitar Music:English folk / country
听听Listen (5.33) to Pete Morton discuss and perform his music including the song, 'Little Musgrave'.
'These are songs that were sung around the fireplace in the days before modern entertainment after a hard day's work.'
How I came to this music:
I've been playing traditional songs for as long as I've been writing songs. I got very much into border ballads which come from the borders of England and Scotland. Some of them are actually quite long but they've been shortened as our attention span has diminished. Even when I speed the songs up, they're still about eight or nine minutes. I've adapted some of them with new tunes to which have brought fresher influences - American, a little rock or the percussion of the acoustic guitar. I just love singing traditional songs.
When I first started going to the folk clubs I was a Bob Dylan impersonator. I was doing Dylan and Buffy Saint-Marie songs - protest songs of the folk revival. Then I came across traditional singers around the clubs. These influenced my song writing and got me interested in traditional songs. I've always had a love of history. It may be that I'm going through a song writing phase or alternatively looking through books and listening to CDs for new traditional songs. At the moment I'm writing a lot of songs but there's always a few numbers in there from the established traditional repertoire in the average performance. It's basically fifty-fifty between my own songs and traditional songs.
As time goes on there are less songs to collect. People have to come across them by accident. A lot of people who sing old songs have passed away and there are a lot of people in the folk scene who really dislike things being changed. It's virtually impossible but they like the idea of things being the same as they've found them. There's another school of thought that you adapt and make songs as presentable to the modern world as possible. I think I'm more of that school.
As time goes on there are less songs to collect. People have to come across them by accident. A lot of people who sing old songs have passed away and there are a lot of people in the folk scene who really dislike things being changed. It's virtually impossible but they like the idea of things being the same as they've found them. There's another school of thought that you adapt and make songs as presentable to the modern world as possible. I think I'm more of that school.