The Making of Gone to Earth 2

A second behind-the-scenes video from the film shot by Powell and Pressburger in the Shropshire hills and released in 1950.

Local extras are paid in cash. David Farrar rides his horse. Jennifer Jones relaxes. Esmond Knight, playing her father, ropes her in to carry a coffin. Michael Powell helps manhandle a wind machine up a hill.

At the end, Cyril Cusack prepares to baptise Jones at Lords Hill Chapel above Snailbeach on the Stiperstones.

The music's nice, but they really should have used this.

All My Life's Buried Here: The Story of George Butterworth

From the website seeking funding to make the film All My Life's Buried Here:

For the first time in a film, the story of George Butterworth: composer, folk song collector, folk dancer and prime mover in a radical era for British music before World War One. 

This is your opportunity to support a comprehensive and lovingly crafted journey through George Butterworth's life and music.  By supporting our campaign you can help put this powerful documentary on cinema screens in the UK and bring George's story to the widest possible audience.

Fred Jordan: We Shepherds are the Best of Men

A Shropshire farm labourer who lived in a cottage without running water sounds like the sort of singer who should have been collected by Cecil Sharp or George Butterworth before the First World War.

Yet Fred Jordan lived to sing at folk festivals in the 21st century.

He was born at Ludlow in 1922 and left school at the age of 14. He was recorded by the BBC in the early 1950s and subsequently left Shropshire for the first time to sing at the Royal Festival Hall and at folk clubs around the country.

He lived for most of his life in the village of Aston Munslow and died at a care home in Ditton Priors in 2002.

Fred Jordan sang We Shepherds Are the Best of Men on his 1966 album Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker.

Later. The video I originally posted has disappeared from YouTube, so here is another one of him.

George Butterworth: The lads in their hundreds

A.E. Housman published his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad in 1896 at his own expense after it was turned down by several publishers.

As Wikipedia says:

At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman's nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men's early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a best-seller.

Reading them today, you get an eerie feeling that Housman foresaw the First World War.

And the modern reader, you suspect, is more likely to detect the homoerotic undertones than were Housman's contemporaries.

The poems were set by many 20th-century British composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, but those by George Butterworth are my favourites.

George Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad

A bit of culture this week, as I am writng this in Church Stretton and the only Shropshire band I can think of is T'Pau. And you wouldn't want that.

Shropshire means Housman. And (with apologies to Ralph Vaughan Williams) Housman means George Butterworth.

So this week's video brings you Butterworth's setting of the poem "Loveliest of Trees" and then moves rather abruptly into his glorious orchestral rhapsody on the theme. It ought to be the Shropshire national anthem. Certainly before "China in Your Hand".

As a page devoted to George Butterworth says:

Although just about every English composer of the time attempted some settings of the poems of A. E. Housman (1859-1936), none caught the essence of the poetry like Butterworth – and no other composer is quite so associated with these poems, especially A Shropshire Lad (published in 1896).
As well as having a recurrent death wish theme, many of Housman's poems return to the senselessness of war and the arbitrariness of who would return and who would not. Although it was the Boer war that was the main subject of such poems, WWI brought new force to the agony of these lines.
It is with almost fatalistic irony (only too common in the world of the arts – for example Pushkin foretelling his own death in Eugene Onegin) that we note that Housman would long outlive these young men, particularly his greatest musical interpreter: Butterworth.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Somme robbed us of the most promising composer of his generation.

More on Friese-Greene

I saw the first part of The Lost World of Friese-Greene last night, and it was every bit as good as I had hoped. They even used George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad as backing music. If you have broadband you can download the programmes from the BBC website.

There are a couple of points to add to what I wrote about the Friese-Greene family earlier this week.

First, the Goon Show joke about "deep Friese-Greene" which Tim Worstall remembered comes from "Tales of Old Dartmoor". That episode begins like this:

Greenslade: This is the BBC light programme. And here is a photograph of me saying it.
Seagoon: Thank you, Friese-Greene. Or as he came out of an icebox, deep-freeze Greene.
Greenslade: I don't wish to know that.
Seagoon: Stop those carefully rehearsed and written ad-libs and proceed with your task of announcing radio's answer to TV.
Sellers: (older voice) Namely the original lantern-slide type wireless Goon Show.

Second, there is a rock musician and producer called Tim Friese-Green. He used to play with Talk Talk. I don't know if he is related to William and Claude. Maybe he thought the final e was just not rock 'n' roll enough.

David Dimbleby: All is forgiven

Well, not all, but last week's edition of A Picture of Britain did include an early film of the composer George Butterworth dancing a jig. It was worryingly reminiscent of Monty Python's fish slapping dance, but still a little piece of history I had not seen before.

Not that Old Iron Bladder got everything right. He misquoted A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which is a heinous sin as far as this blog is concerned.