The weave of a song

The field recording I chose is of a gentleman named Thomas Penniman performing an early 20th-century work song about weaving from the Gower Peninsula. It's a strange, compelling and mysterious recording, made in the winter of 1974. There's a repeated refrain, "Mrs Tanner has six sons/And they all sang like thrushes as they worked at the loom", which I loved. But then the song becomes quite angry because the sons have only been given half a herring for breakfast. It's not enough! Mr Penniman beats his fist, and it sounds like both a drum and a piece of wooden machinery thumping. The "song" in this version isn't musical as such, it's somewhere between a passionate poetry reading, an a cappella performance, and, as it goes on, almost like mouth music. Mr Penniman starts out in a determined, lucid way, but seems to lose the thread of the song as he goes on. 

I pulled at the threads of the recording's story and made discoveries. Thomas Penniman was an American anthropologist, and curator at the Pitt Rivers between 1939-63. The museum website says: "Penniman saw the Museum as aiming, 'to show the origin, development, geographical distribution and variation of the principal arts and industries of mankind from the earliest times to the age of mass production". He was responsible for the organisation of the card catalogue system, which, I suppose, is one reason why information about these field recordings, and the recordings themselves, are easily available to us online today. I liked the sense of a history of technology for this artefact. 

The song references the Tanner family of weavers, the most famous of which was the Welsh traditional singer Phil Tanner (1862-1950), known as the Gower Nightingale. He performed and remembered - and in doing so transmitted into the future - a body of folk songs in English, using the Gower dialect. They survive through him. His life story conjures up a lost world of Welsh weaving, of family "factories" and mills, and of singing and dancing (I sing, badly, a line from the shearing song "Rosebuds in June"). The Welsh wool industry peaked around the time the song was born, and declined after the early 20th century. The song suggests this industry was no idyll; hard, repetitive labour and poverty is suggested through its refrains and rhythms. 

The Tanner family has six sons, but they also had a daughter, yet she is not included in the song. Why not, and why was she unsung?

I was intrigued by Thomas Penniman and Phil Tanner, and how their personal and other histories were entwined by song and work, and in this specific song as it has come to me. What was I responding to, and how, and why? I liked the way the song carries a memory of the lost world of that industry and time, and I was compelled by how Mr Penniman, who must have heard the song directly from Phil Tanner, starts out so confidently, determined to conjure the song, but loses his way - he was an elderly man by the time of the recording - and ends in a kind of confusion, unable to remember how to finish it. There seemed something moving in all this about how singers and songs are woven on the loom of time, and how the means of that remembering, or passing forward, of the song has evolved through the technologies of the century to our time of the lossless WAV format - which is how we're hearing our pieces. But there are also loose threads, tangles, confusions, snags, knots, widows and losses. 

I'm a poet, not a musician, so my piece is a poem. It's lo-fi in terms of how I was able to edit together the original field recording and my own text. You can probably hear how hand-made it is, despite the tech. But I like that.

There's a tiny moment at the end of the recording when Mr Penniman asks for help to stop the recording, which I found haunting - the strange moment after the song has ended, and we just hear the scratchy particles of lost time. So, I have kept it in.

Weaving song from the Gower Peninsula reimagined by Nick Drake.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds