Five voices

It’s Wednesday and time for Rambler5319 to entertain us again…

Remember LLM’s piece on “Songs that remind me of stuff”. I have those as well but I also have artists that stand out in my musical memories. They stand out because they have endured, not necessarily in terms of long life as 2 died in their early thirties, but because I still love and listen to them today.
In 1999 Yes produced an album called The Ladder and track 11 was called “Nine Voices”. I’ve decided to do five of my favourite female voices. I won’t do the biographies, there’s enough on the internet if you want to look them up but a few facts will be included. They are voices, each unique in its own way, which remind me of particular things. Any musical choice will inevitably be personal and bound to divide opinion so I don’t say these are the best five voices in the world EVER. I simply say that these voices had a great effect on me. They have touched and continue to touch my heart today. They are not in order like a top of the charts list; they are more chronological in that this is the order in which they came into my life. Ok so here we go:

1. LESLEY DUNCAN

Probably an artist few of you will know but one who was a big part of my growing up musical history. I heard a track on the radio and bought the first album. Then I got each new one as it came out. She sang backing vocals for a number of more well-known artists (Donovan, Ringo Starr, Dusty Springfield who also sang on Lesley’s singles, Walker Brothers). If you check out the track listing for Jesus Christ Superstar on Amazon you will see her as one of a number of singers on many of the tracks. She is credited on Pink Floyd’s (1973) Dark Side Of The Moon and here is a pic of the inside of the album cover with her name in the “Backing Vocals” section (with Lesley incorrectly spelt with an ‘ie’ ending rather than the ‘ey’ which she herself used):

She appears on Elton John’s 3rd album (1970) Tumbleweed Connection. She plays acoustic guitar in a duet with him on her self-penned song, Love Song (Side 2, Track 2). It’s the only non Bernie Taupin/Elton song on the album. She appeared with him in 1974 at The Royal Festival Hall to perform it. According to the Guardian newspaper, it was covered by more than 150 artists (including Olivia Newton-John, David Bowie and Barry White)! It’s worth checking out the lyrics to Love Song. (Also on YouTube.) Elton played piano on Lesley’s first album Sing Children Sing in 1971. Unfortunately she made only the 5 albums you can see in the picture but her voice was very special for me. She died fairly recently, on the Isle of Mull, (her home since 1996), in March 2010 aged 66. The Guardian, in its obituary, said this:
“Her songs had an astonishing emotional depth and her voice a rare combination of warmth and clarity, bringing an intimacy to the experience of listening to her records. For those who discovered her music in the early 1970s, she stood out from all the other pop and rock of the era.” (March 23, 2010).

2. KAREN CARPENTER

Interesting the group was called “Carpenters”: there is no “The” in the official name. Karen was initially a drummer in the duo with her brother Richard on piano. She was quite happy to play the drums and sing whilst doing it. She didn’t want to be “out front” but folks wanted more of her – her voice: a contralto voice that spanned 3 octaves. She was forced to reconsider. Eventually she played the drums less and less. I’ve got just the one album of Greatest Hits but what a voice. She was noted for her low range and Richard would adapt songs (& covers) to fit it. Just listen to the way she can hold the notes she sings. Out of the 5 here hers has to be the purest voice and who can fail to be moved by some of those famous songs: Yesterday Once More, Hurting Each Other, Close to You and the ubiquitous We’ve Only Just Begun played at so many weddings around the world. Died a month short of her 33rd birthday from anorexia. Very sad.

3. JONI MITCHELL
I suppose she is remembered, by most people, for her single Big Yellow Taxi (1970) and the rather silly laugh at the end of the song. However, over the last 44 years, she has produced many albums. My collection, of just some of them, is in the pic below:

Hers is a voice that has sung in many different styles with a uniqueness that no-one has come close to imitating. Some of Kate Bush’s songs do give a feel of her style. Joni has ploughed her own furrow not allowing people to be able to pigeon-hole her and constantly changing. Once again a voice I heard and bought one album and then began to add to as the years went by. A very unusual voice and variety of singing styles and unusual cadences make her one of my top five voices.

4. SANDY DENNY
Lead singer of Fairport Convention for a short time and produced solo work as well. She formed the group Fotheringay (1970) and released one album (Fotheringay). Fotheringay Castle was where Richard III was born (1452) & where Mary Queen of Scots was tried and executed (1587). Sandy was given the accolade “Britain’s finest female singer/songwriter” by three publications at the time. She was voted “Britain’s No.1 Singer” for two consecutive years in the music paper Melody Maker’s readers’ poll.

Amongst others, wrote the song Who Knows Where The Time Goes? (Have a listen on YouTube). And I suppose we all echo that as we look back. Time does pass incredibly quickly. Sadly for Sandy and her fans she died aged just 31 in 1978. One newspaper obituary referred to her as having been: “Equipped with an incredible voice and an immense songwriting talent….” For me, a great voice which stirs up the emotions.

5. MADDY PRIOR (INCL. STEELEYE SPAN & THE CARNIVAL BAND)

A founding member (in 1969) and and lead singer of Steeleye Span. Who can forget those words: “All around my hat I will wear the green willow……..And if anyone should ask me the reason why I’m wearing it, It’s all for my true love who’s far, far away…”. It’s about a young man whose fiancée has been sentenced to 7 years transportation to Australia. He mourns his loss by wearing a green willow sprig in his hat. Excellent voice range, and a number of projects jointly with the Carnival Band have produced albums of folk versions of many of the old hymns, demonstrate how good it is. Still going strong today.
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There are of course many more (Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, Kate Bush, Eva Cassidy, Dido, for example) I could have included but the list would never finish. You will have your own favourites and maybe mine might seem a bit old or not of interest but they’re mine and I love them! All I’d say is have a listen before you discard them. If JM & MP have survived for 40 years or more in a very fickle business they must have something special about them; likewise those whose lives were cut short but are still remembered & played today. Go on, give them a listen.

NaCl

Ok, a quick note from me before handing over the guest blogger. Does everyone remember the post about invisible art? Well, as I wandered around London yesterday enjoying my day off, I happened upon the exhibition itself! Just so you know it really does exist. It’s at the Southbank Centre in London, should you wish to pop along!

Remember that chemistry lesson? When you were wondering what use it would ever be I think you’re about to see why you should have paid attention.
Salt has a number of uses. First off, it can preserve: Egyptians used it when mummifying bodies and many cultures use it to preserve food.
There’s a fascinating book on the subject:

You may be surprised to learn that salt also appears, a number of times, in the Bible. In the Old Testament book called Numbers (the 4th book in the index of the Bible): “It is a covenant of salt forever, before the Lord with you and your descendants with you” (Num Ch18 v19). It also appears in the Book of 2 Chronicles (the 14th book in the index of the Bible): “….the Lord God of Israel gave the dominion over Israel to David forever, to him and his sons, by a covenant of salt” (2 Chr ch13 v5). Covenants are binding agreements between two parties so salt was clearly very important in these cases. In the New Testament there are a number of refs to salt. Remember the expression that we use when we say a person is “the salt of the earth” – it’s a direct quote of Jesus’s words recorded in Matthew’s Gospel Ch5 v13.
By the start of the 7th cent AD the city of Venice was using landfill to extend the mainland out to the islands and to produce salt it had begun using a system of “ponds” or pools which had seawater in. (NaCl – that is, sodium chloride – is what gives seawater its salinity). The system works like this beginning, quite naturally, with Pond 1. As the sun evaporates the water its salinity increases. Then it is moved (or pumped) into Pond 2 where more evaporation takes place and Pond 1 is re-filled with a fresh supply of seawater to start the process off again. Once Pond 2 has increased salinity due to the evaporation by the sun acting on it then it’s moved into Pond 3. Ponds 2 and then 1 move their water up and Pond 1 is re-filled. And so the process goes on until the salt begins to solidify and drops to the bottom of the last pond where it can be scraped out. This process saved the problem of just having single ponds which you had to wait for to go through the whole evaporation cycle over and over which could take up to a year from start to finish.
Did you know that Roman soldiers were at times paid in salt? This is where we get the English expression that someone is “worth their salt”. Our word “salary” is derived from the Latin salarium (not solarium!) which, it is believed, referred to money given to soldiers to buy salt. The Romans often located their settlements in areas with easy access to salt because it could be used, as they saw it, to further the development of civilisation and, of course, primarily their empire.
World production of salt is around 300 million tons per year. My little salt cellar holds approx 50gms.

Now, go on admit it, you’re wondering – how many times could I fill my little salt cellar from the world’s production for just one year. Ok, well here goes – 1 kg would supply me with 20 refills (20 x 50g); so 1 tonne would give me 20,000 refills; 1 million tonnes would give me 20,000,000,000 (20 thousand million =20 billion as per the OED); so finally 300 million tonnes would give me 300 x 20 billion = 6,000 billion refills or 6 Trillion refills! And just one 50gm amount lasts me ages & ages. (For comparison purposes think of it this way – there are 31.6 million seconds in a year so if I consumed what would definitely be a fatal – 50 gms/sec – it would take erm…..200,000 years to use up just one year’s production!! Numbers are just too big – blowing a gasket here! Moving on……..
In the county of Cheshire in the UK there is a small town called Northwich (pop. 20,000 as of 2001). Dated pottery fragments found there suggest the town has been associated with salt since at least 600BC and it became more important, as a source of salt, during Roman times. The town’s coat of arms has the Latin motto Sal Est Vita which means salt is life.
There is also an association with salt found in the etymology of the town’s name Northwich. The “-wich” part of the town name itself is believed to derive from the Norse “wic” (or wych) meaning bay and is associated with the traditional way of obtaining salt by evaporating sea water (Wikipedia). The “wich” (or wych) suffix occurs in other towns in the county – Middlewich, Nantwich and Leftwich. In fact anywhere in the UK with a “-wich” ending in its name means that usually there will have been a connection to salt at some point in its history. Therefore a place for making salt became a wych-house; and Northwich was so named because, you’ve guessed it, it’s the most northerly of the “-wich” towns in Cheshire.
To get salt out of the ground it has to be mined. Once the traditional (c.16th cent) method of sending men into a hole in the ground, to manually dig it out became unviable in terms of cost, producers moved to what is called “solution mining” (c.17th cent) where fresh water is pumped down a well to dissolve the salt. The salted water (brine) is then pumped back to the surface where the salt can then be extracted. The difficulty with this method is that as more salt is dissolved & drawn out, it leaves holes underground where the solid salt used to be; then land above can easily subside and this is what happened in the Cheshire area. The ignorance or deliberate avoidance of the consequences of their actions back in the 19th cent led to the salt extractors causing many areas to subside and holes to form at ground level. These holes then would fill with rain water adding to the whole problem. Indeed, in Northwich itself, there are horrendous examples of buildings leaning and damage to shops, private houses etc.
The social and practical impact of salt extraction in this area is highlighted by displays & storyboards in the SALT Museum located in the refurbished workhouse (built c.1838) in Northwich. I hope to visit it some time before the autumn and will report back.
In more modern times (1972) the group Steeleye Span released an album called Below The Salt. You, like me, may have wondered where they got the title from. In the Middle Ages, when families & their servants ate together, the salt would be placed in the middle of the table separating the two. The servants were then referred to as sitting “below the salt”. Incidentally the album contains an acapella track sung entirely in Latin which got to No.14 in the UK charts – Gaudete. I’m sure you remember that famous opening chorus: “Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus ex Maria virgine, Gaudete” (Translation: Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born of the Virgin Mary, Rejoice).
You must have heard people talk of someone “rubbing salt into the wound” as a way of saying a bad situation has been made worse by whatever that person did. However did you know that the origin of it goes back to days of sail and punishment by flogging on board ship. Once the skin was broken and bleeding, salt was rubbed in to prevent infection (and therefore ultimately the loss of a crewman) but it was a very painful experience for the person concerned.
There are a number of “sal” expressions and derivations in the English language. Let’s look at a few:
1. You’ve probably heard of the compound sal volatile (pronounced sal volatilly) which is the Latin name for what we refer to as smelling salts. You know the scene in a play or film when someone faints and the salts are used to “bring them round”. Workplaces used to have some in their first aid boxes for emergencies and I’ve seen them used a couple of times. They act by releasing a small amount of ammonia gas which produces a reflex in the nose causes the person to inhale.
2. Do you know the expression people use when they don’t believe something is true – they say you have to take what another person says with a “pinch” or “grain” of salt. (The latin is cum grano salis.) The expression dates back to Roman times (with Pliny the Elder) and refers to one of the ingredients of an “antidote to poison”. Threats of poison in food were therefore said to be taken “with a grain of salt”: the inference being that the effects would be less serious if the salt was taken. The lessening effect, in modern times, has been transferred but inverted to mean a lessening of the truthfulness of a particular statement.
3. The word “salad” means salted dish and “salami” is a sausage which contains a lot of salt.
4. Remember those films again with safecrackers blowing up the safe to get the money. They were called Petremen (pronounced Peter-men) referring to the substance they used which was actually called “saltpetre” or potassium nitrate – a component of gunpowder. Originally saltpetre meant salt of rock – the “petre” bit coming from one of the Latin cases of petra meaning rock. However did you know that it can also be used as a preservative. I’m not joking, if you check Amazon you will find it on sale (4oz for £2.25 from one supplier) for curing beef.
5. A sailor can be referred to as an “old salt” – the reason coming from the preservative qualities of salt for their meat & fish which were soaked in brine.
If you get a chance have a read of Mark Kurlansky’s book (in the pic at the beginning). I really enjoyed it and it’s got to be THE authority on the subject and kept me interested from start to finish. (It’s 452 pages with a 12 page Bibliography!). Thanks to him for some of the historical stuff used in this article.
So you see salt can be a very interesting substance and far more important than you thought. Hope this has not been too much of an assault on your brain and senses (haha).