VA - Song Of a Young Country (The New Zeland Story in Song) - 1971 (RE 2010)
FROM www.audioculture.co.nz
In 1971 singer, composer and folksong collector Neil Colquhoun released a concept album of songs by – or re-creating the experience of – the Pakeha pioneers of the 19th century. Among the writers were Colquhoun, Phil Garland, Rudy Sunde and many by unknown early settlers, collected in the 1960s. The multi-artist double LP on Kiwi Pacific Records received renewed attention in 2009 when it was included by Nick Bollinger in his 2009 book 100 Essential New Zealand Albums (Awa).
The 1971 album was followed a year later by an accompanying songbook, Song of a Young Country (Reed); this was re-released in 2010, in a lavish production by Steele Roberts.
Whether sung, played, read or listened to, the songs in this influential New Zealand folksong compilation and songbook provide insight and human colour to the bare facts of our collective past.
Music and vocalising have been in fluid evolution ever since the first humans slapped a leathery foot on a hollow rock, knocked a tree with a stick and it made a pleasing sound, or mimicked the cadences of birdsong and the rutting noises of animals to attract them on a hunt.
Millennia on from then, there are multiple music styles and labels. Folk music is one of many. This has been blending, hybridising or diverging since Woody Guthrie sang about the Depression and since the folk revival of the sixties when Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan sang out in protest; when civil rights marchers chorused aching spirituals about injustice, and since Odetta or Buffy Sainte-Marie told it like it was.
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| The 2010 reissue of the Song of a Young Country anthology |
In New Zealand, folk clubs around the country host the works, from bluegrass, American urban blues, old-time country and Celtic stylists to Euro gypsy jazz, jug bands, a cappella harmony groups and soloists playing covers and originals.
The clubs also have a solid core of traditionalists who enjoy what they consider the “real” Kiwi folk music; that is, the songs, sea shanties, old ballads and work chants sung or recited by the people at the birth of these islands as a Treaty-formalised Crown-Māori nation. They were the sailors, sealers, wives and whalers, adventurers, bushmen and the like, who sang out their joy, humour, or misery during their hard-slog work and after hours; about bully bosses and fair blokes, madams and murderers, hardships underground and weird happenings above; about social milestones, triumphs, shipwrecks and other disasters.
01. John Smith A.B
02. On Whalemen
03. Soon May The Wellerman Come
04. Blood Red Roses
05. From England
06. Little Tommy Pinkerton
07. Altered Days
08. Black Velvet Band
09. Rise Out Your Bed
10. Banks Of The Waikato
11. A Drover
12. Dug-Out In The True
13. The Mill
14. Gum Digger Letter
15. Song Of The Digger
16. Black Swans
17. As The Black Billy Boils
18. Gold Rush
19. Tuapeka Gold
20. Wakamarina
21. Murderers Rock
22. McKenzie And His Dog
23. Paheha Land-Takeover
24. Te Kooti E Ha
25. Livestock
26. Rerenga's Wool
27. On The Swag
28. My Man's Gone
29. Talking Swag
30. The Sweater Prelude
31. The Sweater
32. Run For Your Life
33. Day The Pub Burned Down
34. Union Worker
35. Cargo Workers
36. Railway Bill
37. Down In The Brunner Mine
38. Hundred & Fifty-One Days
39. Gutboard Blues
