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| n Navigation: n Obituaries n Menu of pages on this CD-ROM n Sound Samples: n Netscape Users click here for opening sound montage n Peter Bellamy: Collecting in Norfolk n Martin Carthy tribute n Heather Wood remembers n Steve Ashley: Over There in Paradise n Grace Notes: Down Falls the Day n Peter Bellamy: When I Die Credits: Steve Ashley's Over There in Paradise, from Test of Time CD, © Copyright 1998 Market Square Music, used by permission. Grace Notes' Down Falls the Day, from Down Falls the Day CD, © Copyright 1993 Grace Notes Records, used by permission. Heather Wood's recollections from a tribute programme on radio station WBAI, New York, October 6, 1991, used by permission of Ed Haber. When I Die from the Doc Watson family of Deep Gap, North Carolina, sung by PB, Royston Wood, Heather Wood & the Watersons, on Both Sides Then © Copyright 1979 Topic Records, used by permission. |
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| Though Peter Bellamy died on September 24, 1991, after a quarter of a century of achievement, this website, and the three audio CDs, are not an act of mourning. We've done our grieving. Now is the time to celebrate our good fortune in sharing the planet with the man who was, as the Independent put it, " the most individual and prolific voice of the second generation of folk revivalists who followed in the pioneer footsteps of Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd".
The Bellamy story breaks down into four main areas:
This website concentrates on the latter three areas, though there are inevitable references to the short and tumultuous life of the YT, also. Here is a menu of the pages on this site:
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Obituaries |
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| Michael Grosvenor Myer in The Guardian
Peter Bellamy's sudden death agred 46 has come as a profound shock to his friends in the folk world. The son of a farm bailiff, he was brought up near Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, whose traditional music was to be embellished by his researches and his own creative work. I met Pete first in the sixties when he led the Young Tradition trio, with harmonies from Heather Wood and the late Royston Wood. His astonishing near-falsetto voice gave the group its characteristic sound, and his flamboyant appearance - a blond ponytail topped by the Amish hat he had bought in Pennsylvania - provided its atmosphere. His colourful brocade-and-velvet clothes were of his own making. Before becoming a singer he studied at art school and designed the covers of all his 20plus records and cassettes, often with witty Old-Master pastiches. His home was always a joy to visit, decorated with his own paintings (which he often exhibited), a royalty statement from a record company for 4½p, and the framed and mounted cocked hat of his ancestor, Surgeon-Commander Bellamy, who had served with Nelson. Folk Review magazine ran his cartoons and many stylish and cogent reviews and features. But it was as a musician that Pete shone most brightly. He had a marvellous way with a traditional song, usually unaccompanied but sometimes with Ango-German concertina, and could shout a fine blues with bottleneck guitar, always in open-G tuning. He was, moreover, one of he few who could create new songs convincingly of the tradition. Farewell to the Land - based on his own country childhood and set to a Copper Family tune - I rate as the best original song to emerge from the folk revival, revealing him as a considerable poet:
He could write his own tunes too, notably in his settings of Kipling's poems. After some initial copyright difficulty, he so far impressed the establishment as to be elected an honorary vice-president of the Kipling Society. His creative work reached its apotheosis in his ballad-opera, The Transports, a celebration of the First Fleet to Australia. Despite a sense of humour tending to the sardonic, Peter Bellamy had a wide circle of affectionate friends, not only in Britain but in the US and Australia. He toured both those continents, even gigging in the Sydney Opera House. Yet, for all his manifold talents and the regard with which the folk world held him, he never quite achieved that breakthrough that his many talents cried out for: a disappointment that must have contributed to the depression that took him from us and above all from his wife, Jenny. |
Karl Dallas, in The Independent: PETER BELLAMY was the most individual and prolific voice of the second generation of folk revivalists who followed in the pioneer footsteps of Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd. Though he trained as an artist under such pop art mentors as Peter Blake, he moved into the burgeoning London folk scene of the mid-Sixties and formed the seminal Young Tradition group along with Heather Wood and Royston Wood singing a capella versions of English traditional tunes and American gospel and "Sacred Harp" hymns in a style that owed something to the Copper Family, of Rottingdearn, Sussex, and a lot to blues and rock in the sheer fire of their vocal attack. They became a sort of freefloating "think tank" on traditional and contemporary music, a commune of ideas that included and influenced such differing talents as Donovan Leitch, Bert Jansch, and Anne Briggs, and through them such better-known names as Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and American groups like Buffalo Springfield. In their turn, the YT (as they were known to their fans) became an influence upon later generations of singing groups throughout the world, and though they broke up in 1969 and Royston Wood died in April 1990, Bellamy's solo career was blighted to an extent by memories of their halcyon days - days in which, he later recalled sardonically, they had to cut their fee from £30 to £25 a night to get work. "We only were a legend after the event, you know," he said to me last year, "We weren't very highly valued at the time." Typically, the Young Tradition achieved more recognition in the United States than in their homeland, and they were invited to the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 to share the bill with Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, and other luminaries of the American revival. Similarly, when his solo work been to reveal what a superb stylist he was, whether unaccompanied or while playing his Anglo-German concertina, he was more of a draw in the US and even as far afield as Australia, while the British folk clubs found him hard to fit into their preconceivcd ideas of what a solo folksinger should sound like. The alienation was not entirely one-sided. He felt remote from the left-wing concerns of many folk audiences, and his remarkable settings of the Barrackroom Ballads and other lyrics by Rudyard Kipling did nothing to dispel the widely held (and erroneous) view that he was an unreconstructed right-winger. In fact, he was rather apolitical, but his individualism would not permit him to kow-tow to any orthodoxy, of whatever political complexion. The very determination to be his own man that took him out of the art world made it difficult for him to submit to any sort of cant about music - or indeed, anything else - and his eclectic tastes were reflected in a home decorated with Elvis Presley memorabilia, indicating a sympathetic approach to "commercial" music which his more traditionalist followers found hard to accept. Under his brash, abrasive exterior, he was a warmhearted man, increasingly puzzled by the difficulties of making a living in a folk scene that was supposedly outside the ephemeral fads of commercial pop, but actually as subject to fashion as any Tin Pan Alley craze. Though best-known as a vocalist of great stature, he became a songwriter of increasing capability. He composed a major work, The Transports, about a true episode concerning convicts from his native Norfolk on their way to Australia, which was first a best selling double album for the now defunct Free Reed label, then a successful stage show, which was put on by amateur groups all over the country. At the time of this death he was working on a project to record the major British unaccompanied singing talents for the Fellside label typical concern with the future of music to which he had dedicated most of his life. Though his roots were obvious to anyone with half an ear, he added much of himself to what he inherited, and was a giant in a world where the pygmy is the standard by which all must be measured. It was unable to contain him, but now he is dead he will no doubt be. consigned to the pantheon where the more threatening icons of our time can be tucked away safely, as relics of a past golden age. Peter Bellamy knew that the golden age is now, and he made it more glorious with his presence. His vast recorded output will be all inspiration to all who follow after. |
Steve Winick in Dirty Linen
When issue #36 of Dirty Linen went to print, there was, snuggled away in its pages, a review of Peter Bellamy's latest recorded effort, Songs an' Rummy Conjurin' Tricks [Fellside Recordings]. Little did anyone know at the time that the artist would not live to read it. In September, Peter Bellamy took his own life, and lovers of folk music are still mourning his loss. As part of the Young Tradition, as a solo performer of traditional song, as the premier interpreter of both the repertoire of the Copper Family of Rottingdean and the poetical works of Rudyard Kipling, and as the conceptual genius behind the ballad opera The Transports, as well as other concept albums and stage shows, Bellamy proved himself to be one of the most creative and intelligent people involved in folk singing. It's been 26 years since Bellamy dropped out of Art College to begin singing professionally. In the early days of 1965, he moved to London, and was literally a starving artist, unable to eke out the meagrest living as a singer. As the year progressed, he met up with Royston Wood and Heather Wood, and the three got a regular gig at a club whose name they would eventually adopt - The Young Tradition. Singing traditional songs in unaccompanied threepart harmonies, the Young Tradition quickly rose to a position of prominence on the folk scene. In flamboyant costumes, with witty presentation, and with the startling power of Bellamy's voice backed by his companions, they entertained a lot of audiences. They recorded a pair of albums, gained a reputation for excellence and were still unable to make a living as performers. So, in 1969, they broke up. As Bellamy would later point out, they became important and influential, even legendary, after they had ceased to exist. In 1970, the idea first struck Bellamy to set the poems of Kipling to music, either traditional tunes or his own. This fascination with Kipling continued until Bellamy's death, resulting in no less than five albums of Kipling songs. In addition, it earned Bellamy a lot of flak from people that he termed "dyed-in-the-wool Lefties" who would not look at Kipling in the context of his times, that is, as a relative populist among relative elitists, but only as an imperialist. To these people, Bellamy had one answer that eventually became an album title: "Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs." Also in the seventies, Bellamy composed The Transports, a ballad opera in the mold of Ewan MacColl's work, and recruited such people as Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, A.L. Lloyd, and Cyril Tawney to record it. It was released as an album in 1977 and also had several stage runs in England. Some consider The Transports his greatest achievement of all, but throughout the seventies and eighties, Bellamy was known for masterful concerts of straight traditional singing, and also for multimedia concept shows like "Keep on Kipling" and "We Have Fed Our Sea for a Thousand Years." The former was a history of England in Kipling's words, the latter a history of English seafaring, both of which used songs, monologue, and visual media. During this period, Bellamy was trying to find an audience wider than the traditional folk crowd, and so he cut back on the traditional songs in his shows. But traditional singing was in Bellamy's blood, and the beginning of the nineties found him back to performing mostly a traditional repertoire once again, with the exuberant enthusiasm he has always been known for. His latest album captures him live, chatting energetically between numbers, sounding as happy as can be. Just what led to his tragic suicide is unknown; almost certainly, though, Bellamy felt there was a lack of appreciation for the music to which he had devoted his life. More than once he has commented on how countless performers have ditched traditional music for other forms of "folk" music. Some, he felt, did it for money, something he no doubt understood but regretted. More often, though, he expressed regret that interest in traditional song was simply on the wane, not only with audiences, but with performers as well. He, however, remained steadfast and uncompromising in his devotion to the tradition. He always acknowledged that the unwillingness or perhaps the inability to compromise had led to the demise of The Young Tradition. Perhaps, some 22 years later, it helped lead to his own. To his friends, Bellamy will always be more than a performer. They remember a sharp mind and a quick wit, a glibness of tongue and a fondness for verbal dueling. They remember his opinions, his beliefs, his convictions. His fans will certainly remember his voice, the magnificent bleat that commanded attention and emotion, perhaps the most interesting voice in the world. In 1975, Bellamy recorded an album of new songs. Though he was not much known as a songwriter, the words to one of them will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who knew him. They ran:
That hand, that mind, that voice will live forever. Adieu, Peter Bellamy. |
