BACK STORIES
From Box Of Frogs (release 1 April 2013)
1. B-Wear Knickers:
A back story in itself.
2.Come see the mackerel running:
An invitation I was given by a Folky friend with a little boat. I did not accept the invitation but my imagination did!
3.Cow Bar:
The road sign at the bottom of Boulby Bank on the coast road out of Whitby to the West sparked this one.
4.Fryup:
In a Folk singaround at the Station Inn, Whitby someone did a Highwayman song and there was some banter about 'stand on your liver'. I immediately wrote this song and performed it when it was my turn. The version here is the polished version!
5.Johan Sebastian Coe:
This ran into my mind about the time of the run up to the Olympics 2012.
6.Just so Ruddy Kipling:
I bought a cap in a charity shop decorated with an elephant. I was wearing it one evening and someone sang a song about an innocent Hare.
7.No Room in the Bins:
In August 2012 I left the Station Inn Whitby at closing time. The Landlord came out at the same time and was met by a female bar person who had been trying to dispose of rubbish. Somehow the conversation seemed to resonate and this song about the homeless was written.
8.Pirate:
I have friends, a duo, who write and sing about Pirates a lot. Perhaps this was a protest song.
9.Song of Egg's Isle:
I think someone had been rather precious about an emigration song.
10.The Elephant:
A piece of journalese to protest about.
11.Where a Chip awaits for me:
Someone sang a song that was apparently a poem of John Masefield's set to music. I misheard some of it and made use of the 'Mondegreen'.
12.Worse than Rough:
I was driving to the White Hart Folk Club at Mickleby one Saturday night and the car was being buffeted by a gale off the sea. I thought to myself, "It's a rough old night". And so a song was born!
From 'THE SONGS OF TONY MORRIS 1,2,3,4
[For'TRAPPY LAD'
and 'CHANGING TRACKS'
(see bottom or page)]
JOHN HODGSON’S WHITE HORSE SONG
2007 was the 150 anniversary of the making of the White Horse at Kilburn, North Yorkshire and Tony Morris was asked by the Tyneside Poet, Dr Keith Armstrong, to write some poems and to perform them with music at the White Horse for a film he was organising. Tony wrote this song as well as some poems and performed live to camera
( click here). Since this first performance the song has become a favourite with folk club audiences.
TUPPIN’ TIME IN YORKSHIRE
One of Tony Morris’s previous occupations was a sheep farmer so, when he was going back to Whitby one day in November/December and saw a field of ewes with their tails marked by the crayon borne by the tup (ram), this song was conceived!
IRONSTONE MINERS’ MARCH
At the time of writing the songs that appear on Tony Morris’s ‘Trappy Lad’ CD, Tony did not know this story. It was told to him by Mike Benson, now Director of Bede's World but then the Director of the Ryedale Folk Museum where Tony Morris gave his launch performance for the CD.
JUBILEE
A year or two ago a small earthquake disturbed Tony Morris’s sleep. In the morning he woke up singing this song. Shortly afterwards he performed it at Ralph Butterfield Primary School at Haxby near York and by the second chorus the whole school was singing along without even being invited to join in.
RATTLING
The Ship Inn stands on the edge of the shore at Saltburn facing the wild weather of the North Sea. In the past it was run by John Andrews who appears in a folk song as a smuggler by repute, owner of a ship, The Morgan Rattler. The Mermaid and the Eagle were Royal Navy ships tasked with catching smugglers. John Andrews was also a founder and Master and Huntsman of the Saltburn and Cleveland Foxhounds. His descendants followed him in these offices for many years.
Tony Morris was returning from the Saltburn Folk Club at The Marine Hotel one foul winter night and saw a rat scurry up from the shore and go sniffing round the Ship Inn. A song was conceived that took a year to write.
RESOLUTION’S FAREWELL
The Williams Scoresby, Father and Son were two important Whitby whaling captains, sorely neglected by song writers who seemed fixated on James Cook. William Scoresby, Father invented the ‘Crows’ Nest’ which is described in this song. He was also the most successful whaling captain of his time and held the record, in the Resolution, of making the furthest sea journey to the North.
The Resolution was later captained by William Scoresby, Son who is known as ‘The Father of Artic Science’.
THE GANSEY
This song was written when Tony Morris was giving a concert at St. Stephen’s Old Church, Fylingthorpe near Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire and there happened to be an exhibition of ganseys in the Church at that time. A ‘Gansey’ is a traditional fisherman’s jumper. Each locality has its own pattern and each family knitter will make their own variation on this. It is in this way that the body of a drowned fisherman washed up on the shore can be identified.
THE WHITBY POLAR BEAR
Captain William Scoresby, Father is reputed to have brought a polar bear back to Whitby from a whaling trip to the Artic. The Song tells the story but the twist in the tale is a reference to a famous print of Lord Nelson as a midshipman on an Artic expedition fending off a polar bear with the butt end of a musket.
YOUNG WILLIAM’S TALE
William Scoresby, Son first sailed to the Artic with his Father after he stowed away, aged 10 in 1800 on the Dundee, sailing out of the Port of London but Captained by his Father. At this time England was at war with France. The French were attacking English merchant vessels. Captain Scoresby, Father was prepared for the French. This song tells the tale of the event the 10 year old William witnessed.
LIFEBOAT ANTHEM
Written because I felt I had to write it. The RNLI is a peculiarly English organisation that receives no money from Government and is entirely funded by the voluntary subscriptions of the general public. It has a long and proud tradition of being a voluntary service whose crews risk, and sometimes give, their lives to save 'those in peril on the sea'.
THE PEDLAR
I was driving through Sleights, near Whitby on my way to the funeral of an old friend that had encouraged me in my writing in the late 1970s. As I drove, the chorus of this song popped into my head. I passed the signpost to the village of Grosmont and I then knew the story that would go with the chorus, a story about a man with a phenomenally strong neck, the Grandfather of a man I knew who occasionally sang at folk nights in my local pub and whose Great Grandson is a well-known professional musician. I first sang it in my Local during Whitby Folk week and it was well received, the chorus being taken up immediately by those present.
THE BOY FROM AUSTRALIA
While researching my family’s history, I discovered that my Grandmother had a Brother of whose existence I was previously unaware. He had been born in Australia and was drowned at Egton Bridge in North Yorkshire aged 10 while bathing in the River Esk, in 1866. I went to have a look to try and work out how it might have happened. As I looked from the Bridge downstream where there was a deep pool, what appeared to be an arm rose out of the water and beckoned to me before sinking back. After a moment I realised that what I had seen was the underside of a large salmon as it rose and turned over. I then remembered a Native American tale about a drowned boy. With a little further unravelling of a Family story truth and myth became the song.
MR KNOW-BUGGER-ALL
The least said about this the better but it is a song that can be changed to include people who upset me!
COUNTRY DAYS
I really do remember these days on North Yorkshire Farms.
GROSMONT MINER
This is in effect a re-write of ‘Wagon Rule’ which appears on the ‘Trappy Lad’ CD. I did the re-write in my head on the way to Saltburn Folk Club one evening and then sang it and wrote it down afterwards.
SUGAR AND RUM
2007 was the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. This is why this song was written, as a commemorative song.
ALUM FOR THE DYER
For some 300 years Alum was mined on the North East Coast and if one looks down the Coast from the height of Boulby Cliff you can see clearly the scars that have been left. It was used as a mordant in the dying of cloth until other chemical substitutes were invented in about the 1880’s when the industry came to an end. Although ‘urine’ was used in the extraction process the chorus of the song does not use the word. The words are:
“You‘re in. You’re out.
You‘re in. You‘re out.
You‘re in. You shake it all about.
That’s Alum, Alum, Alum for the Dyer.”
JOHN CURRY’S JIG
It was the custom to fill the Office of Public Hangman by reprieving a felon due to hang on the condition that he agreed to undertake that Office. One such at York was John (or William) Curry whose nickname was ‘Mutton Curry’ as he had been convicted of sheep stealing, allegedly on two occasions. The song is set at a time when the Tyburn at Knavesmire had been abandoned in favour of York Castle where one can still see ‘The Eye of York’, a large circle of grass in front of the Castle Museum, Debtors’ Prison and Law Courts. At the time oysters were a common cheap food, rather like fish and chips before the price went up!
EAST SIDERS
Whitby Harbour faces due North, unusual on the North East coast, a fact that has misled some from other parts of the same coast writing about Whitby. The Estuary of the River Esk divides Whitby. There is a West Side where the traders, merchants, shipbuilders, jet workers and all lived and the East Side where the fisher folk lived. In fact, the West Side was technically not Whitby at all but Ruswarp Parish into the twentieth century.
NEEDHAM AND WILBERFORCE
This song is as much about William Wilberforce as Ellis Needham. Wilberforce is usually remembered for his part in the campaign for the abolition of the British slave trade at a time when it was becoming commercially unviable. He is not usually remembered for drafting the anti-trades union legislation that became the Combinations Act outlawing trades unions or for his part in the establishment of the Society for the Suppression of Vice (for ‘Vice’ read ‘Free Speech’) which led to laws against libel including making some forms of libel a criminal offence, laws which have only been reviewed in the late twentieth century. These laws actively inhibited people speaking out against the abusive working practices of the time.
From the 'Trappy Lad' Album
TRAPPY LAD
At the age of 12 a worker would start down an ironstone mine as a 'trappy lad'. The song, from which the Album takes its name, is sung in the character of such a lad and tells of his experience. Sitting alone in the dark, opening and shutting the doors that were part of the ventilation system of the mine, this lad had an important role in the health and safety of the mine. In coal mines the term used was 'trapper' and if you could prove you could read and write you could go down the mine at 8 years of age! Geordie Ridley, who wrote 'Blaydon Races', started as a 'trapper'. The song was written after a visit to the Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum at Skinnigrove where part of the tour includes a 'trappy lad experience'.
AMERICAN BEEF
On the 10 March 1877 the Middlesborough and Cleveland Advertiser carried an article about the advent of American Beef to Guisborough. Purchase of this would likely to have been beyond the means of most ironstone mining families.
THE REWARD
Looks light heartedly at another much reported type of event ( this song is loosely based on fact) for which there were frequent prosecutions, 'Shebeening'. A 'Shebeen' was an unlicensed drinking den. Apparently, the word has passed from the Celtic Countries and the North of England into common parlance in Africa.
TRAPPY LAD
At the age of 12 a worker would start down an ironstone mine as a 'trappy lad'. The song, from which the Album takes its name, is sung in the character of such a lad and tells of his experience. Sitting alone in the dark, opening and shutting the doors that were part of the ventilation system of the mine, this lad had an important role in the health and safety of the mine. In coal mines the term used was 'trapper' and if you could prove you could read and write you could go down the mine at 8 years of age! Geordie Ridley, who wrote 'Blaydon Races', started as a 'trapper'. The song was written after a visit to the Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum at Skinnigrove where part of the tour includes a 'trappy lad experience'.
AMERICAN BEEF
On the 10 March 1877 the Middlesborough and Cleveland Advertiser carried an article about the advent of American Beef to Guisborough. Purchase of this would likely to have been beyond the means of most ironstone mining families.
THE REWARD
Looks light heartedly at another much reported type of event ( this song is loosely based on fact) for which there were frequent prosecutions, 'Shebeening'. A 'Shebeen' was an unlicensed drinking den. Apparently, the word has passed from the Celtic Countries and the North of England into common parlance in Africa.
From the 2003 Album 'Changing Tracks'
HAND OF GLORY
Originally written by Tony Morris as a short story for an after-dinner reading at an event on Halloween in a Pub in a village near York, Tony later turned it into a lyre song and recorded it on the 2003 Album ‘Changing Tracks’. The first time it was performed live in Whitby he was told that the Hand in the Museum was the one involved in the incident at the Bowes Moor Inn which forms the background for the song. He did not previously know. Spooky!
For information about Hands of Glory follow this link: http://www.whitbymuseum.org.uk/collections/hogg.htm
HAND OF GLORY
Originally written by Tony Morris as a short story for an after-dinner reading at an event on Halloween in a Pub in a village near York, Tony later turned it into a lyre song and recorded it on the 2003 Album ‘Changing Tracks’. The first time it was performed live in Whitby he was told that the Hand in the Museum was the one involved in the incident at the Bowes Moor Inn which forms the background for the song. He did not previously know. Spooky!
For information about Hands of Glory follow this link: http://www.whitbymuseum.org.uk/collections/hogg.htm
