Yorkshire Almanac London-based folk-rock band Steeleye Span (lead singer Maddy Prior) play a Yorkshire-influenced support set for Jethro Tull at the LA Forum

18 July 1973: London-based folk-rock band Steeleye Span (lead singer Maddy Prior) play a Yorkshire-influenced support set for Jethro Tull at the LA Forum

Maddy Prior. 1995. The History of Steeleye Span. Spanning the Years. Ed. John Tobler and Lynda Morrison Via A Celebration of Steeleye Span Get it:

Indices for all ballads etc. mentioned here: Roud 8194 @ Vaughan Williams ML & Bodleian

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

Touring America to any English band must be a revelation. Americans are spontaneous and make great audiences. They freed us from more constraints. It has been a long road losing those English inhibitions. 5 nights at the LA Forum with Jethro Tull. 18.000 seats. We were opening our set at the time with the Lyke Wake Dirge, a grim piece of music from Yorkshire concerning pergatory and we all dressed in dramatic mummers ribbons with tall hats. The effect was stunning. 5 gaunt figures in line across the front of the stage, lit from below casting huge shadows, intoning this insistent dirge alarmed some members of the audience whose reality was already tampered with by 70s substances. It was most satisfying.

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

11 May 1985: A fire at the Bradford City stadium kills 56

1 December 1851: John (65) and Betty (73) of Wibsey are at long last united in a “funny wedding” at Bradford

30 October 1981: Joanne, Michelle and Carl go caking in their Sheffield villages

27 January 1830: William Cobbett rides from Leeds to black Sheffield

27 September 1696: Scarborough’s mock mayor collects his municipal dues by Scarborough warning in a Michaelmas parade

18 February 1889: An effigy of Jack Nelson, wife-beater, is paraded with rough music through Hedon (Holderness) by a furious crowd

2 October 1800: Part of an obituary to Harry Rowe, Punch and Judy man, trumpeter at the Battle of Culloden and the York assizes, who died today, old and ill, in the York poorhouse

15 December 1888: Leeds’s most popular wassailing song, according to Frank Kidson

15 December 1888: Frank Kidson longs for Leeds’s musical Christmasses past

27 June 1933: Norman Harding (4) of Burmantofts, Leeds, meets his baby brother, Keith, for the first time

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

Comment

Harding’s dad probably had the sheet music of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s song and may have known the early recording by the British bandleader Jay Wilbur:

Harding’s Shakespeare Street ran parallel with Beckett Street and was replaced during slum clearance by the Shakespeare flats – Shakespeare Approach, behind the flats, follows some of the same path. The modern Shakespeare Street was Harding’s Glebe Street. Here’s a map overlay and here’s a 3D visualisation from Google Maps: