During my student days, Folk Rock music was very popular, and we listened a lot to bands like Fairport Convention; fronted of course by the late and great Sandy Denny. Their album "Liege and Lief" was pivotal in the movement; and I was very taken with their arrangement of "Mattie Groves", in which the young lad is enticed by the great lady, but meets with his fate at the hands of her enraged husband. The only trouble was that I felt it needed a bit of an update. The lord of the land became a chartered accountant, and the "two long beaten swords that cost him deep in the purse" became tight-furled umbrellas. Otherwise, the song remains fairly true to the original, as they say.
There is, naturally, an element of the faintly ridiculous about my version. The geography is a bit questionable, and chartered accountants have been a target for humour at least since the days of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I must also acknowledge the influence of Benny Hill, and his classic chart hit "Ernie".
The song should be performed unaccompanied, with a finger (or three) stuck firmly in the ear, and the tongue stuck equally firmly in the cheek. |
