| Location: | Bodmin |
| Story Number: | Story-020 |
| Themes: | Cornwall, culture, heritage |
| Listen: | |
| Transcript: | Transcript by Jayde Stevenson Since I was about 19, I guess, I was playing Cornish music, um, on my clarinet and also singing. Umm… and then I met Sal- how many years ago? Oh, twenty something… yeah 20 years ago (both laugh). We’ve both got this passion for Cornish culture, Cornish history, Cornish language although I’m not a speaker I know the odd word, umm… And uh… I started to have… a sort of little singing group in my house from our village, and we sang all the… the… what we knew as the Cornish pub songs. Umm… when I talk about the songs they were sort of like Little Eyes, Lamorna, Cambourne Hill, White Rose- songs that were totally… ‘Oh yeah I know what they are’ was the reaction you’d get in Cornwall… you go across the Tamar and people go ‘what you talking about?’ (laughs) you know- ‘don’t know what you’re talking about!’ (laughs). Um it was… it’s remarkable how um, this tradition survived in Cornwall really- the pub singing. When you’ve got like a living tradition like that, what you don’t want to do is pin it down and go ‘this is the definitive version’. When you… having come from East Cornwall I knew that people sang the songs slightly different in East Cornwall than they do down Cambourne or Penzance or whatever, so you know it is about people respectful of people’s traditions so what we wanted to do is preserve that so rather than us just write the book, we’re going to go and visit people and say this is how they sang Lamorna on this particular date- this is what happened then. You know and… you know, no one could argue with that either could, you know what I mean? We weren’t saying this was the… this was the definitive version, so that meant that we then went on a bit of a pub crawl around Cornwall (both laugh). We went to 20 odd pubs? Yes And so part of our drive in all of this is to celebrate where we live and to say ‘what we’ve got is good’. Not ‘better than what you’ve got’- but this is amazing, this is really important, lets celebrate this before we lose it and also feel better about yourselves… you know! (laughs). Both singing: I had a dream that other night And she said ‘Little Eyes I love you honey |