the hex collective
Bob Berry at Devizes Folk Club told Jim about the Alfred Williams archive, a collection of folk songs collected by Alfred Williams in the early part of the twentieth century. Alfred Williams was a fine poet, and he was meticulous in noting down the words to the songs that he heard in his travels by bicycle around the counties of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Wiltshire; but he was no musician and so was unable to write down any of the tunes. The tunes to some of the songs Williams collected are known from elsewhere, but for the bulk of the nearly 1,200 songs in the archive, no-one has any idea what tunes they were sung to.
Jim sat down to write tunes to some of the lyrics towards the end of 2014. He soon found that he needed to impose some kind of structure onto the attempt, both in order to help the process of sifting lyrics from the archive, but also in order to stop all the songs from sounding the same.
In order to help with sifting sets of words, he decided to look for lyrics under six themes - love, death, nature, work, soldiers and sailors, and drinking. He also adopted two musical constraints, which you can read more about here. None of this would mean very much if the results sounded forced - you can be the judge of whether that has happened or not. Strangely perhaps, all these structural shenanigans actually made the writing process easier.
You can see a list of all the songs that were written at the time here. This list is now out of date, since not only are some of the tunes on the list not ones the Hex Collective play, there are also tunes not on the list with words from the Alfred Williams archive that we do play. More seriously for the architecture of the original project, perhaps, some songs on the list that we do play have changed key (but not mode) - we play the Bold Recruit, for example, in B flat and not G. The structure was extremely useful for writing purposes; we quickly learnt to be more flexible in the context of performance.
WHY SIX?
The number six first entered into the project when Jim found himself unable to write in the Locrian mode (if you play the white notes from B to B on a piano you have just played the Locrian mode and it sounds pretty strange). But having once entered in, it seemed to impose itself in all sorts of ways, including giving the project its name.
Six is of course the devil's number. But the devil is just the name given by the Christian church to the repressed, pagan past. You might thus think of the number six as a symbol for the life that lies beneath any repressive system, whether that be religious, political, or psychological. That earthy life, that delights in sex and looks death straight in the eye, that sees suffering as a tragedy rather than a symbol or a salvation, that refuses to see injustice as part of a greater glory, is precisely what you find in the songs that Williams collected.
WHAT ABOUT THOSE SCARECROWS?
Jim found them at the bottom of my garden when we rented a house in Tisbury, Wiltshire. He subsequently found out that they had been made by the man who lived in the house before he did and that they had been in the garden, in a more prominent position and easily visible from the road, as far back as the early seventies. Jim met several Tisbury residents of his vintage who remember seeing them in the garden when they were kids and being scared of them. They went by the name of Mr and Mrs Tisbury. Jim moved out of the house in December 2012, and the garden was dug up to form a junction to the new Wyndham Place development. He didn't think Mr and Mrs Tisbury would take kindly to leaving, even if it meant that they likely ended up in a skip somewhere, so he didn't take them with him. They are no longer anywhere to be seen.