Power of Two

William Dart takes a brief jaunt through a number of tracks with duetting singers before settling on the 2018 album, Anchor, from the partnership of mother and daughter Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy.

A number of recent releases reminds me of the special pleasure, for listeners and perpetrators, of two voices mingling in what’s hopefully sweet harmony. And you don’t get much sweeter than this: a Mendelssohn duet, ready-made to bring out the hankies in a Victorian drawing room.

I’m going to bypass the sloppier specimens of the genre — so Barbra Streisand won’t be chiding Neil Diamond for not bringing her flowers.

Here's the sort of mother-and-son singalong that maybe Oedipus and Jocasta could well have diverted their energies into. Mary Martin and her son, Larry Hagman, later to become the patriarchal J.R. of Dallas, were obviously having a ball. Such a ball, in fact, that Martin would revisit the song five years later with Noel Coward, with much theatrical campery, for a television special.

Tunes that rather deviously duet with themselves, such as that one, were a bit of a thing in the 50s and 60s. The most famous being “You’re Just in Love” from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam and Georgia Gibbs’ "Seven Lonely Days". In fact, I remember, as a young child, that last song being a bit of a party hit around the piano. Maybe my parent’s set knew the local TANZA recording, with Dorothy Brannigan and Buster Keene as tune-swappers.

But back then we were also writing our own. Johnny Cooper the Maori Cowboy came up with this number, variously known as “Lonely Blues” and "Look what you’ve done”. While Johnny Devlin at the time simply took the first part of the song as an uncomplicated rock 'n' roll outing, Cooper joined up with Margaret Francis to do a rather nifty musical swap and share.

But as the grand old songwriters realized, there’s nothing like a duet to fuel a good, old-fashioned slanging match. And Irving Berlin wrote one of the best in his 1946 musical Annie get your gun.

Originally it was a bit of stand-up braggadocio between Ethel Merman’s Annie Oakley and Ray Middleton’s Frank Butler. In 1951, though, on NBC radio, it was given something of a Sapphic twist with two new sparring partners — Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead.

One of Cole Porter’s particular expertises was setting bitchery to music. Who could forget Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby’s one-upmanship over cocktails in the 1956 movie High Society?

And then there's Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry's take on this particular duo. Here's the clip that Alex Cox directed for the 1990 Red Hot and Blue project. Neither exactly does Cole Porter Cool, and updated lyrics here and there push towards the punk, with the song itself launched on a pounding dominant seventh roar.

We had Frank Sinatra above, in his prime. By 1993 The Voice was not the best, and you can hear it in the first of two Duets albums. Sinatra and his fellow singers never met; everything was done over the wire.

There had been happier, and sillier times for Sinatra. One was working with daughter Nancy in 1966 and recording this weird little single. Its wide-eyed send-up of the drug-soaked hippie scene comes a little uncomfortably from a man well-known for drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels a day until he was 80. Father and daughter would have a real hit a few months later with the song "Something Stupid" and maybe this one, titled "Life’s a Trippy Thing", could have been titled "Something Silly".

From the Sinatras we move to mother and daughter Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy, who have just released a new and much more serious album, titled Anchor – a significant name for a release that is indeed anchored in the Waterson-Carthy lineage that’s one of the core creative families of contemporary British folk music.

Although the two women have their names on the billboard, so to speak, this is not a collection of eleven duets. Ironically, when you hear more than one voice joining in, it can be a family collective, bringing in husband and father Martin Carthy. A folk baritone who’s also part of the band, plucking away in this traditional folksong, through massive chords that could have strayed in from Stravinskyville.

The eleven songs of Waterson and Carthy’s Anchor are nothing if not eclectic. But then that’s something we’ve come to expect from these two women.

The big moment for me on the album looks to the Great American Songbook.

It’s the title song from Kurt Weill’s musical,  Lost in the Stars with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson and based on Alan Paton’s novel, Cry the Beloved Country. In other hands, this song can be grand and rhetorical. It can stir every political fibre in your body.

But here Norma Waterson puts it into her own vernacular, right down to moments where she pulls back to everyday speech. That may not work for some, but I defy anyone to resist the searing passion when Eliza Carthy makes her entry. And what better to set up the expectation of shivers and goosebumps than the eerie chromatic descent of Phil Alexander’s piano.

 

Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy's Anchor follows this celestial Kurt Weill song with Eric Idle's "The Galaxy Song" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. And the theme remains for the final song of the album, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".

Listen to these and several more songs by clicking on the link above for the complete programme.

One of the other songs that William features is an old recording of the Watersons singing the traditional Cornish folk song "Hal-an-Tow". Here is a wonderful video of them performing it live.

 

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'Song of Autumn (Herbstlied)' (Mendelssohn) – Purcell Consort Of Voices
Music All Powerful: Music to entertain Queen Victoria
(Decca)

'Get Out Those Old Records' (Lombardo, Loeb) – Mary Martin, Larry Hagman
The Great Comedy Songs
(KCP)

'Look What You’ve done to my Heart' (Cooper) – Johnny Cooper, Margaret Francis
Rock and Sing with Johnny Cooper
(HMV)

'Anything You Can Do' (Berlin) – Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich
Give My Regards to Broadway
(AEI)

'Well Did You Evah?' (Porter) – Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby
High Society, Original Film Soundtrack
(Hallmark)

'Well Did You Evah? B%Red Hot +lue
(Porter) – Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry) – ) – Red Hot)

'I’ve Got You Under my skin' (Porter) – Frank Sinatra, Bono
Frank Sinatra Duets
(Capitol)

'Life’s a Trippy Thing' (Laurie, Greenfield) – Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra
Nancy in London
(Sundazed)

'The Elfin Knight' (Trad) – Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy
Anchor
(Topic)

'The Beast' (Marra) – Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy
Anchor
(Topic)

'Hal-An-Tow' (Trad) – The Watersons
Three Score and Ten
(Topic)

'Over the Rainbow' (Arlen, Yarburg) – Norma Waterson
The Very Thought of You
(Hannibal)

'Lost in the Stars' (Weill) – Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy
Anchor
(Topic)

'The Galaxy Song' (Idle, Du Prez) – Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy
Anchor
(Topic)

'Variations on “Ah, Vous dirai-je, maman' (Mozart) – Christoph Eschenbach
Great Pianists of the 20^th Century: Christoph Eschenbach
(Philips)

'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' (Trad) – Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy
Anchor
(Topic)