Sunday Feb 01, 2026
Episode 17 - Dam Filk
A Filk and Music special!
In which we discuss Filk music, dangerous dams and old songs!
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Music in the episode: "Flying Kerfuffle" and "Space Jazz" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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3 months ago
Barry and Lee Gold are on Facebook. Filthy Pierre used to wander around at conventions with a melodica. I remember at (I think) the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, when we were sitting in a hall waiting for a slightly delayed event, he started playing the Imperial March.
3 months ago
Sumer is icumen in: Well done for rendering the first line as ”Summer has arrived” rather than ”Summer is a-coming in”. The six-part polyphony is a four-part round plus a two-part burden (. bass) IIRC I was surprised to hear you say ”bucke erteth”, as I know it as ”bucke verteth”. Looking at the Wikipedia entry I see ”bucke uerteth” - ”u” and ”v” were regarded as variants of the same letter even as late as Johnson’s dictionary (even though by his day they were not interchangeable). Few English (as opposed to Norman French) words began with /v/ in (prestigious London) Middle English, but in the Southern and Kentish dialects, initial unvoiced fricatives were voiced (as in Mummerset today) and the words ”vat”, ”(weather-)vane” and ”vixen” all appear to be dialect variants of OE ”fat”, ”fana” and ”fixen”. So the word is ”verteth”, and can readily be seen as a Southern version of ”ferteth”. (The OED lists is as such, but notes that it has also been interpreted as an early instance of the Latin borrowing ”vert” (”turn up, root, the ground”), not otherwise known until 1578. I know which I find more plausible.) [Information from Danny Bate’s recent book ”Why Q Needs U”] I don’t think the assumption that this is a children’s song is justified. Rutting is not usually in Spring, but Autumn, as far as I know.