Minor Key Monday 89: Pentangle – Cruel Sister

Folk music comes in many forms and while most of them are a basically just that dude playing acoustic guitar in Animal House, it’s still one of my favorite styles when I’m not listening to beats of a heavy kind. My favorite folk uses simple acoustic guitar arrangements that sound nice and sparse, vocals with rough edges upping the authenticity, and, of course, heavy minor key tonality. Today’s song “Cruel Sister” by English folk/rock band Pentangle is exactly the kind of folk I like (the guitar phrasing is pushing the simplicity envelope, and it’s probably a stretch to call Jacqui McShee’s ethereal vocals “rough,” but still)–mournful, and evocative of a different time:

Pentangle had a reasonably large early body of work, most of which I enjoy (despite often dipping their toes in non-mournful waters). Cruel Sister, the album from which this song (the title track) comes, was actually one of Pentangle’s least successful albums, and a bit of a departure as they abandoned the more glossy production of their big hit Basket of Light for stripped-down FOLK austerity, and featuring only traditional songs. Small wonder it is one of my favorite albums from them (despite the 17 minute B-side song being a bit much).

Of course with lyrics like this, it was bound to be a hit for me:

There lived a lady by the North Sea shore
Two daughters were the babes she bore
As one grew bright as is the sun,
So coal black grew the elder one.
A knight came riding to the lady’s door,
He’d traveled far to be their wooer.
He courted one with gloves and rings,
But he loved the other above all things.
Oh sister will you go with me
To watch the ships sail on the sea?
She took her sister by the hand
And led her down to the North Sea strand.
And as they stood on the windy shore
The dark girl threw her sister o’er.

If you can get past the eugenics, that’s archetypal stuff right there.