Milestones

Steeleye Span

Name: Steeleye Span – Below The Salt
Item: Below The Salt
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Below The Salt

1972 (Chrysalis)

British folk rock, Celtic folk

by Federico Romagnoli

Even before the release of “Liege & Lief”, a milestone for Fairport Convention, bassist Ashley Hutchings had left the band, feeling that the rest of the lineup no longer shared the same enthusiasm for traditional songs that had driven him to dig through the archives of Cecil Sharp House in search of forgotten material. Hutchings's instinct proved right: already on the following “Full House”, Fairport would make room for several original compositions, and by the time of the still-superb “‘Babbacombe’ Lee”, relatively little of that traditional spirit remained.

Determined to explore the musical archaeology of the British Isles, Hutchings went on to found Steeleye Span, backed by the folk duo of singer Maddy Prior and guitarist Tim Hart, whom he had met at a festival. The band's name comes from the protagonist of “Horkstow Grange”, a nineteenth-century ballad from Lincolnshire.

The lineup was, unfortunately, unstable, as was the case for many bands on the British folk scene, Fairport chief among them, prone to swapping members back and forth. It was an endemic condition brought on by a combination of factors: the insularity of the scene, the lack of particularly dominant figures (the work was collective, and few had any ambition to establish themselves as songwriters), the fickle nature of success (one could go from the national top 10 to selling a few hundred copies within a matter of months), and a punishing schedule of live shows, sometimes made even trickier by the fact that some members kept performing solo in small venues, determined to stay close to their roots.

For one reason or another, Hutchings also left Steeleye Span right after their third album, "Ten Man Mop…" (1971). The band naturally has no trouble replacing him, and it's precisely at this point that the lineup forms which would go on to make what's probably their finest record.

For Steeleye Span, it's like a second beginning. They sign with a new manager, Jo Lustig, who a few years earlier had launched the Pentangle, and land a deal with Chrysalis, which would lead to them performing alongside the Jethro Tull. By the time they entered the studio in May 1972, the ranks included co-founders Prior and Hart, multi-instrumentalist Peter Knight, and two brand-new additions, Bob Johnson (guitar) and Rick Kemp (bass).

All nine tracks on the "Below The Salt" tracklist are traditional, selected by Prior and Hart, except for "Gaudete" and "King Henry", suggested by Johnson. Production is handled by the band themselves, who a few months earlier had dropped Sandy Roberton, perhaps due to disappointing commercial results.

The album opens with "Spotted Cow", a song from Norfolk first transcribed in 1820, but popularized among folklorists by farmer Harry Cox around the 1950s. Prior and Hart's voices trade off in duet over a lyric that's sexually charged and somewhat farcical, while the arrangement features mandolin, a grumbling bass, an angular electric guitar (treading ground similar to Richard Thompson), rattles, and sporadic distortion achieved through the fuzz, which would go on to define some of the band's most celebrated moments (above all, "Alison Gross", from the following year's "Parcel Of Rogues", 1973). Despite being almost entirely electric, the track retains an ancestral, authentic atmosphere, perhaps also thanks to the absence of drums (the band wouldn't bring them back until a year later). Critic George Starostin wryly suggests that if they'd had electric amplification available in 1820, this is exactly how they would have played it.

"Rosebud In June" is sung a cappella by the whole band in unison, with gorgeous, pagan-tinged harmonies and Prior's crystalline voice rising above the rest. It's a Sussex carol dating back at least to 1715, the earliest year for which there's a record of it, and it tells the story of a harvest celebration.

"Sheep-Crook And Black Dog", another eighteenth-century ballad, tells the story of a woman who betrays the man she'd promised herself to, a shepherd of humble origins. The structure is curious, with the opening and closing sections seemingly disconnected from the middle part, blending into it through clever use of dynamics. The rest is carried by Prior's voice, Knight's amplified fiddle, and guitar distortion (kept low in the mix, but enough to add color).

Side one of the vinyl closes with the traditional Scottish tune "The Royal Forester", whose earliest known form dates all the way back to the thirteenth century. The lyric is a striking example of how sex could shape social mobility in olden times, with a peasant woman seducing a nobleman and then convincing him to marry her. The reinterpretation here is inspired, with a pulsing bass to the fore, over a bed of distorted electric guitars and electrified dulcimer. The vocal melody is essentially an adaptation of a jig (a fast-paced dance), heightened by the vocal interplay between Prior, out front, and the rest of the band in the background. The mood is less playful than it appears, as shown by the warped, effects-laden fiddle ostinato, so heavily processed it sounds almost like an electronic instrument.

"King Henry", dating back to the late eighteenth century, is the band's first track drawn from the catalogue of scholar Francis James Child. It runs seven minutes and boasts a multi-part structure, with a cappella moments, dance sections, jam instrumental passages and sudden changes of tempo. The variety of the sound is impressive: it wanders between gypsy violins straight out of "Danse macabre", guitar harmonics repeated relentlessly like a drone, galloping bass lines, and guitar solos that take off from the raga Indian and hard rock touches. Sung as a duet by Prior and Johnson, it's a gem of folk rock with Celtic musicality and a gothic atmosphere, full of intricate harmonic interplay. The story tells of a king who is accosted by a hideous, woman-shaped spectre. Frightened, he grants her request for food and sleeps by her side. In the morning, he finds an angelic-looking girl beside him instead.

The best-known track on the album, “Gaudete”, is a Latin Christmas carol published in 1582 by the Finnish friar Jacobus Finno. Sung a cappella by the whole band, with Prior once again in the position of honour, it found success as a single a year after the album's release, spending a month in the UK top 20. Sadly, that wasn't enough to turn around the fortunes of “Below The Salt”, which had performed poorly, but the album has nevertheless remained the band's most celebrated over time, matched only by “Hark! The Village Wait”. The band would go on to enjoy several commercial triumphs as the mid-Seventies approached, peaking in 1975 with “All Around My Hat”.

In closing, a philological reflection is in order. One is compelled to ask just how much of Steeleye Span's music can truly be said to belong to the realm of Celtic folk. In writings about the band, the term rarely appears; instead, one almost always reads of “English folk”, “Scottish folk” and so on, in reference to the origins of their songs, or of “British folk rock”, in reference to their sound.

And yet Steeleye Span often and willingly fall within the Celtic tradition: their arrangements have no real parallel, but despite all their innovations, they remain determined to stay within that furrow. If this element is often marginalised in critical analysis, it is perhaps because of a reluctance to place Steeleye Span, and all the bands around them, within the philosophy of pan-Celticism — the idea that there exists a cultural and identity-based bond among the various lands with Celtic traditions (Great Britain, Ireland, Brittany, Galicia). It's an idea not necessarily embraced by everyone who plays that kind of material.

It remains true, however, that traditional English folk is Celtic right down to its structure, starting with the construction of its melodies, with those wide intervallic leaps and predominantly modal scales, often pentatonic-based (which, not coincidentally, would go on to form the backbone of the blues, born on the soil of British immigrants).

Secondly, there may be a tendency to instinctively label as “Celtic” music that draws on the legacy of dances, which is predominantly instrumental, while instead emphasising geographic origin — a vaguer marker of identity — when it comes to vocal music (ballads, songs, and so forth). All this despite the fact that these pieces belong to the same broader landscape and are, harmonically speaking, essentially interchangeable.

For all these reasons, “Below The Salt” stands as a masterpiece not only of British folk rock, but of Celtic folk too, one that helped modernise the genre while deeply respecting its origins and the centuries of cultural baggage that have piled up around it. Starting with the title itself, drawn from a medieval expression used as a social marker: a salt cellar (a symbol of wealth) would be placed at the centre of the table, separating the nobles (“above the salt””) from the lower classes (“below the salt””).

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24/03/2019

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition