Andrew Cronshaw - Lucy Wan / Black Dog & Sheep Crook (Zither, koncovka)

Following on from the video I posted last month of "Searching for Lambs" on marovantele, here's another from the same session in late November 2022, on zither, music box and koncovka (video'd by John Kye).
The incest and beheading ballad "Lucy Wan" has a melody in the Lydian mode, which is vanishingly unusual in the music of the British Isles and, though he never admitted it, was probably made, or perhaps modified to Lydian, by A.L.('Bert') Lloyd. I've long been interested in it, and indeed have recorded versions twice - on "Ochre" and then, on "Zithers", variations inspired by it. The first person I heard sing it, and caused it to lodge in my mind, was Kate Betney.
It sits well on the koncovka (no-hole harmonic whistle traditionally made by watchers of flocks across Europe), which plays a natural harmonic scale, and indeed I realised it's that Lydian mode that's so characteristic and attractive in the folk songs of northern Slovakia and the goralska (highlander) vocal and fiddle music just across the Tatras in Poland. Lydian mode can be thought of as a major scale with an augmented fourth, making a tritone (three whole tones next to one another), and in "Lucy Wan" a flat seventh seems to be what fits best too, making four in a row so I guess might be called a quadtone.
The other tune in the video is of the English folk-song "Black Dog and Sheep Crook", which also has some interesting features and changes and which I first heard sung by Philip Taylor in Edinburgh.

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