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The 1997 CD from Steve and Ros Barnes Sound samples and stories behind the songs Reviews[River
Runs Deep] [This Old Tree] [Woman
of Africa] [The Weaver and the Buffalo Boy]
[Only Yesterday] [The Insomnia
Jig] [Over the Horizon] [The
More Things Change] [Grey Stone Walls] [Reason
to Rhyme] [Present Company] [Sea
Salt] [The Red Engine] [The
Mulga Waltz]
Click song titles for lyrics and Both file types are 8 bit mono for space reasons, so they don't reflect the sound quality of the CD in any way.
A song about Australia's ambivalent relationship with water in general
and rivers in particular. The verses are about three of my favourite
places in Western Australia: Jones Creek in the eastern Goldfields,
the Margaret River area in the south west, and the Swan River estuary
near Fremantle where we live. The "blue green poison" is
the algae which is building up in rivers all over Australia, doing
incredible damage. "The Sugarloaf" is a beautiful rock formation
on the south west coast near Yalingup, home to a colony of rare Tropic
Birds. Lucky Oceans supplies the dobro, and Lee Buddle the wooden
flute. Guitar tuning is DGDGCD. As a geologist, I've spent a lot of time travelling back and forth across the Western Australian wheat belt between Perth and Kalgoorlie, a part of the world which gives up its secrets slowly. Every little town has a few specimens of a magnificent gum tree, eucalyptus wandoo. This song is about any one of these. Jenny Simpson, who sings harmony on this track, is convinced the town in the song is Mingenew, which it might be (but I've never been there). Peter Grayling is on cello. Guitar tuning is open G (DGDGBD). A few years ago I was invited to do some geological work in South Africa, in one of the old "homelands" called Transkei. The time was immediately before the crucial referendum which paved the way to majority rule, and the air was humming with politics, trepidation and hope. The inspiration for this particular song came during a long walk up a deep river valley, sparsely populated with scattered white mud huts, each with its mealy patch and gang of exuberant kids. No men in sight: they were all in the towns, working in the gold mines if they were lucky enough to have a job. As we walked back to the field vehicles at the end of a long day, we could hear from far down the valley the voices of a group of a dozen women, returning from the nearest small town with bundles of groceries on their heads. The must have been walking under the hot sun for at least eight hours, and they were still singing. I realised then that no matter how much might change politically, it would be many years before life would change for these women, and they would still be carrying the whole country on their heads for a long time to come. But I heard them singing. Guitar tuning DADGAD. The
Weaver and the Buffalo Boy The inspiration for this one came from a passage in Jung Chang's marvellous book "Wild Swans", the astonishing story of her family in China over the last century. Like many Chinese families they spent much time in separation, and at one point her father and mother were incarcerated at opposite ends of the country. The drew strength from the legend of the Weaver, daughter of a goddess, and the Buffalo Boy, a young peasant. They fell in love, but the jealous goddess caused a river to flow between them to keep them apart. One night every year a flock of birds would fly across the river, and make a bridge with their wings so that the lovers could meet. After they died, the lovers were placed in the sky as the two bright stars, Vega and Altair, on opposite sides of the Milky Way. The song is told from the perspective of the Chinese boat people who have spent upwards of two years incarcerated in the Port Hedland detention camp in the north west of Western Australia, waiting for some pack of bureaucrats to get back from lunch and decide what to do with them. Another generation of Chinese people seems fated to endure separation. Thanks to Peter Grayling for the gorgeous cello on this one. Open G tuning on the guitar. My mother would hate to think this was about her, and it isn't, but she inspired the song by something she said in a letter. We had been going over some old family photos, and she had found one of her and my late father in a cornfield in Suffolk. She commented about how it seemed like a thousand years ago, getting me thinking about time and ageing. This is dedicated to the memory of my late Great-Aunt Mary. Peter's cello again. An innocent little guitar tune in open C tuning (CGCGCE). The wobbly bit at the very end is a little trick I learned off a Duck Baker record. A bid for country music immortality, doomed from the start by the fact that it hasn't got a key change in it, but lent credibility by the fabulous pedal steel playing of Lucky Oceans. A thinking persons trucking song. The white lines never meet, of course. Open G tuning. I like unlikely subjects, and this one is about a duck pond. When I was a kid in Suffolk (in the south east of England) I used to keep ducks on a pond just up the track from our house, and I went out every morning, rain or shine, to feed them scraps. On winter days I used to break the ice for them. Going back after a long absence a couple of years ago I found that while lots of things had changed, the pond looked exactly the way it always had, and the clock on the village church was still missing a hand. This number features Peter's cello, and my little black Gibson mandolin. This is the only song on the entire album in standard guitar tuning. The old lunatic asylum in Fremantle is now enjoying a new lease of life as a museum and arts centre. This song came about after a memorable a cappella concert in the courtyard one night, an experience which the ghosts of the old inmates must have enjoyed. A song in memory of the "social undesirables" - vagrants, unmarried mothers - who found themselves inside those walls in darker days. Dropped D tuning. This started life as a tune, one of those Irish-style jigs that never ends and keeps spinning around in your head driving you nuts. The Insomnia Jig seemed like a natural title, and eventually it acquired a set of words. Ros has never forgiven me for making her sing them at this tempo. Thanks to Lucky for the surreal dobro backing, and to Peter Grayling for the loan of his gorgeous old Gibson mandola. Another C-tuning guitar tune, this one inspired by the bush around the town of Leonora in Western Australia. "The Mulga" is the low, grey-green flowering acacia scrub which covers vast tracts of the Australian interior. This began as an attempt to learn "Police Dog Blues" by Blind Blake, an attempt which got as far as the first two notes. For some reason I can't explain these two notes somehow mutated into a love song, sort of, in open D tuning. Scott Wise provides the harmonicas (two of them - spot the difference), and Dave MacDonald of the Ragabillys rattles the washboard. Open D tuning. A tune on my old Gibson mandocello, played in bouzouki tuning (GDAD) with the capable assistance of a fine uilleann piper, John Deery. For Lindsay and Kieran.
A simple little love song, from the perspective of the west end of
the west end of Australia. C-tuning again. Notes by Steve Barnes, March 1997. [River Runs Deep] [This Old Tree] [Woman of Africa] [The Weaver and the Buffalo Boy] [Only Yesterday] [The Insomnia Jig] [Over the Horizon] [The More Things Change] [Grey Stone Walls] [Reason to Rhyme] [Present Company] [Sea Salt] [The Red Engine] [The Mulga Waltz]
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