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I’d like to start some discussion about how to approach learning Jakes songs. I’m building a bit of a repertoire. There’s a lot to consider, its not all over when you’ve worked out an intro the chords and a suitable ending.
There’s plenty of words to memorise too and I would be keen to hear debate about how to approach the challenges.
My advice to others is to remember that Jakes somgs tend to be stories, so learn and tell the story . . . but it aint easy.
All the best,
Alistair
:blink:
Hi Alistair
Good topic. I find that there are two distinct aspects of this: one is memorising the words for which I resort to tried and tested multiple repetitions until they are firmly lodged and even then they slip; the second is the accompaniment.
Sticking with the words, a lot comes down to confidence. At Torrington I started of the guitar intro to Side by Side and completely blanked the words. Luckily I was compering the first half so I could cut my losses and exit the stage smartly by introducing the next act. At Knutsford last week, where I did Side by Side again, I had a cheat sheet with key lyrics stuck on the top of the guitar but in the event I didn’t need it.
The accompaniment poses an interesting question though: do you try and copy Jake or go with your own style. People on this board have different approaches. Sometimes this is forced upon you – a couple of the songs I do, Side by Side and Thomas Haverley, are in B on Jake’s recordings of them but the limitations on my vocal range meant that I shifted them to C and this obviously necessitates a change. On the other hand I play Family Tree pretty much straight off the record. At Wallasey David Harris and I had a crack at the Policeman’s Jig for guitar and bodhran and finished off the song by segueing into a couple of jigs, one Irish and one Scottish.
Other performers can speak for themselves but there are a wide variety of approaches taken by people here. I’m not sure if you’ve been along to one of the Jakefests or other events that we run but if you do you’ll meet no end of people happy to talk about this at length! If you fance doing a song at the Jakefest in Edinburgh in September, drop me a private eMail and I’ll add you to the list!
Cheers
Ian
Tricky question when you think about it, and I’m sure you’d get a different answer from every performer here.
As for me, I learned to play the guitar in order to be able to accompany the Jake songs I (thought I) knew, and loved. Now, EVERYONE here will agree that’s not as easy as it seems!My approach usually evolves thus: pick a song I love and make sure it fits my vocal range (by singing along approx 15, 000 times in the car, typically). Then find out what the words really are from this or a similar site, then repeat stages 1 and 2.
Download the chords and any tips (also from this site), try a slow strum with appropriate timing along with the words you now have.
Give up, as the two usually seem incompatible.
Listen to the song again, realise it’s in a totally different key and then try to work out what rhythm works. In order of difficulty you can make this work for strumming patterns, ‘grabbing’ the bass note and a 3 finger chord, alternating bass with the thumb, with or without increasingly complicated finger arpeggio-type patterns or, if it’s a song where you can really hear Jake’s guitar part try to copy that.
Giving up is a repeated stage inserted at any point in the paragraph above.
Once you’re happy, just practice! (a lot)
PS the last stage should not be done in front of wives or partners, unless contemplating trial or actual separation. (Top tip!)
I hope some of the others can add technical detail but the above worked after a fashion for me!
Look forward to hearing you sometime…
Phil Neal
Don’t quite know why I was a ‘visitor’ there, but never mind.
I meant to add that the WORDS are a minefield, ESPECIALLY when you think you know them.
My personal tip is for the tricky repetetive bits is to have some way of remembering what letter the phrase starts with and link the sentences together
Eg: (Country bus)Rusty and you’re dusty
and then Though you may stumble…
See, R, S, TWell, that’s the general idea, obviously doesn’t always work, and I’ve probably got that example wrong anyway but see what you think…
Hi ! Phil is spot on with the Initial Letters thing. Jake often does refrains, choruses or interludes with very small lyrical changes from verse to verse and they can be very off-putting – you try and remember them so hard that after you’ve got the next one out you’ve forgotten how to start the following verse !
Here are my similar tips for “The ballad of Billy Kershaw” :
…Spectacular but dodgy, so they say… matches …only the Silvery laughter that it caused
…which, in fact, had often harboured Billy’s Chin… matches …only the Common Comfort…
…the Potter’s wheel, which was steadily continuing to spin… matches …only the Passing happiness…
…Could be anywhere at all, or so they say… matches …only the Consolation…
…he worked as a Country ploughman, so they say… matches …only the Common Comfort…
You find this kind of matching initials occurs so often in Jake’s work that you’d suspect that he remembers his own lyrics that way…
Secondly, the fact that many of Jake’s songs are stories or jokes set to music, is often a hindrance rather than a help… because you have to get the verses in the right order for the thing to make any sense. Other songwriters are easier to cover, as any one verse of (say) “The Lady In Red” is interchangeable with another, or even repeatable by accident without ruining the overall point of the song : whereas, with the “Jolly Captain”, say, you can’t sing the “deathbed” verse before she’s fallen down her staircase, if you want to tell the joke properly. It would make no sense for the Blacksmith to pretend to be Jehovah before the Toffee-maker lady has actually gone to the church. And then there are Mary, Helen and Julie, the three daughters in “The Lodger”, whose names are so linked to the rest of their choruses that you start to sing the choruses and verses out of sequence if you get their names mixed up, and while you’re still trying to work out where you are, you find you’ve got to the point where you have to sing “she was chaotic, idiotic, quite exotic and ecstatic, acrobatic and emphatically fine”…
So with Jake’s lyrics, you more or less have to practice a lot. And when you’ve got the thing committed to memory, concentrate while you’re singing it. I’ve been singing “Jumble Sale” for nearly 20 years and it still gets away from you when you take your eye off the ball. Sometimes the songs are just too funny and you put yourself off. No-one ever said it was easy…
Lastly, even strumming through the simplest of Jake’s songs, you are sadly not going to be able to get away with just knowing C, G and the Other One – very few of Jake’s songs have less than three chords and even fewer of the rest will have chords that can fit into non-barred positions. Jake was a classical guitarist, a folkie and first and foremost a jazz-influenced guitarist, so his repertoire of chords was pretty comprehensive : and despite choosing a kind of guitar which is more unforgiving than most to play, he had longer fingers than most players too. Jake as a player is a tough act to live up to… and then you’ve got to get the words out too ! Maybe a career as a singer of Oasis songs would be easier… š
Sorry to interrupt – I know nothing about all this sort of thing.
Except that Jake got the words wrong himself sometimes – e.g. The Lodger on the Live Performance LP
Carry on!
Just goes to show, doesn’t it??
Annoyingly though he could occasionally rescue those situations by shuffling the words of the other verses around, but as Malcy says, a recipe for disaster..
… something like Fred Wedlock’s autobiographical lines (sung to the tune of Simon/Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’) about getting stuck one night trying to rememberthe middle bit of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’…
"… I clean forgot the 42nd verse
so I sang the first 3 backwards,
twice as loud and in reverse
and no-one noticed…"Not advocating that way out but usually, if you bring the audience in on any fluffs by not trying to cover them up they’ll usually go with you…
and, yes… just carry on!
Hi DGemini, welcome along. Good call on the Wedlock lyric. Out of interest, do you play Jake’s songs?
Ian
Hi to the last posters – sounds a bit militaristic that – – – well I used to do a couple of Jake songs a while back, predictably, Sister Josephine and Leopold Alcox but it’s been a long while as full-time work kind of got in my way. Recently got a Jake T complilation album though and I thought I’d rekindle the interest… although it *was* helped along by the recent Radio 4 series on Folk Song wit – on a Sunday Evening at 8.30. I remember Jake’s (seemingly) regular TV slots from my youth and loved the wordsmith in him as well as the humour and understated guitar – also something of the Music Hall too. I think I’ve also known most of his characters in one way or another over the years – that’s why I joined…
I’ll try to keep up…!
Ive only just discovered Jake (BBC4 docu) and Im just getting to grips with Billys Ballad – Picked up the chords in about 15 mins. I’ve made a real effort to day and I think Ive got the lyrics sussed – I had a lot of walking to do! Its the first time in ages I’ve tried remembering lyrics – but I found it got easier as I went along – my imagination created the cues & clues easier the more I did it. Isnt it funny how you never have trouble remembering the bits you laugh at? Jakes words are pretty complicated on this song – miss out a word here or there and the whole rythm cocks up.
J
Jake’s story songs are both a blessing and a curse to commit to memory, I found. Yes, there is a storyline or the setting up of a joke’s punchline, so you have a thread to keep you on track : but there is a certain extra pressure on you to get the whole thing right so that the story or joke isn’t spoiled.
A song like "Jolly Captain" is a good example – it’s a joke set to music but you can’t do the Fred Wedlock trick and shuffle the verses around as the story will make no sense. The Captain’s wife clearly has to fall down the staircase before she is on her deathbed, and has to die before he can remarry etc, so you can’t give yourself the luxury of shuffling them around in case of brain emergency. :o) "The Blacksmith…" would be another one where there is no real punchline but if you get the story wrong you spoil the point.
However, there are several songs Jake does with small changes to the choruses (Never did it for the profit of it /it was not for the profit of it/never ever for the profit of it from Billy Kershaw) which you can shuffle about or even repeat without spoiling the song, whose story lies in the verses.
Ah well, no-one ever said learning Jake’s stuff was easy. :o)
Malcy wrote:
A song like "Jolly Captain" is a good example – it’s a joke set to music but you can’t do the Fred Wedlock trick and shuffle the verses around as the story will make no sense.
Part of the challenge is in the fine detail: ‘Close your poor eyes,’ says the Captain to his wife, but when she is dead this becomes ‘he closed her wild eyes’. This is fine writing, full of humanity and insight into the human condition: using the right adjective in the right verse is absolutely vital if the song is to make sense. Elsewhere it has to be ‘hacking her way back again’ because of the rhyme, no word but ‘hacking’ will do. There is rarely any room for manouevre in Jake’s songs: change one word and something is lost. When singing one of Jake’s songs you change a word at your (and the song’s) peril.
Post edited by: Paul, at: 2006/10/17 19:11
Ah – the fine detail. That’s a different kettle of fish altogether from disaster recovery !
For me, and I believe for Paul too, the challenge is to get not only the story of the song out unspoilt, but to make all those micro changes in verses and chorus segments correctly.
The "never did it for the profit of it" bits in between the Billy Kershaw verses are all different in some ways and I had to learn tricks from the previous line to remind me which ones came up next. The choruses of "I Stayed Off Work Today" are quite similar but some laugh aloud, some chuckle, some giggle. The end of the verse just before the choruses of "Grandad" are reflected in the changes in the choruses themselves, so you get "Pearly Gates he’ll climb" followed by "keep a guard", and offering to molest the Ladies’ Union followed by "don’t expect that much respect".
My favourite in this respect is "The Statues", where the lyrics change from
"does the silky moonlight warm your heart to me"
through
"is it the milky moonlight warms my heart to you"
to
"was it the creamy dreamy moonlight warmed your heart"and, of course, the bit no-one ever spots consciously, the fact that Jake and his drunken grandad are telling this tale to progressively more important lawmen as the song goes on : "Constable..", "Inspector", "Your Worship"…
Breathtaking. :o)
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