Isla Cameron, Ewan MacColl‎ - Still I Love Him - Traditional Love Songs (Topic, 1958)

"Still I love him" was a 10" LP by Isla Cameron and Ewan MacColl, released in 1958 on Topic in the UK. Isla Cameron was accompanied by Ralph Rinzler (banjo and guitar), Ewan MacColl was accompanied by Peggy Seeger (banjo and guitar). The songs later were reissued with additions on the Riverside album "English and Scottish Love Songs".

From the sleeve notes:

"How few love songs, how little love music at all, the great composers of the Anglo-Saxon world have produced! Oh, hundreds of pieces dealing with polite affection between lover and lass, with gentle heart-to-heart responses, with tears, idle tears. But the real bite of passion, the genuine evocation of erotic experience embraced without reserve and remembered with pride and joy, seems to be missing. Is it due to Puritanism, the climate, the food?

The answer would seem to lie in none of these things. For if we transfer our attention from the world of written music to the world of unwritten music, from the world of gentility to that of commoner folk, the picture changes. Certainly in the amatory folk songs of England and Scotland there is no lack of sensuous freedom and delight. So much so, that the scholar collectors have felt bound to modify the lexis of many of the amatory songs before committing them to print, presumably in order to protect polite people from being contaminated by the songs of rougher men and women. (In this album, such songs arc restored to their original form, as the collectors first found them.) Not that any of these are dirty songs. Experienced collectors have found that the truly bawdy ballad, the ballad with an excess of graphic sexual detail, is found among students and uprooted men-without-women such as soldiers, sailors and prisoners. But among the "classical" folk singers, such songs are rare. The British amatory folk songs generally show a more permissive attitude to sex than their White American counterparts. They look the facts of life in the eye and tell of what they see. proudly, delicately, perhaps with a grin, but never a snigger. They are songs with a clean joy or sadness over the large realities of virginity and desire, passion and pregnancy.

They are rich in delicate metaphors. The morning dew, the chiefest grain, the bird in the bush, the cuckoo's nest, the flower garden and the herb called thyme, have a constant erotic meaning to country singers. They are the love utterances of a people living a life in tune with the cycle of the seasons and the round of mating and increase."

Tracks:

Side One

Whistle, Daughter, Whistle

Once I Had A True Love
The American Stranger
My Bonny Miner Lad
Let No Man Steal Your Thyme
Buy Broom Besoms

Side Two

Geordie

The Maid On Thee Shore
Are Ye Seeping Maggie
Still I Love Him
The Waters Of Tyne
The Bleacher Lassie O' Kelvinhaugh
Bobby Shaftoe

Isla Cameron & Ewan MacColl - Still I Love Him
(320 kbps, front & back cover included)