Unbuttoned by Katie Howson & Jeannie Harris

On this album Jeannie and Katie play traditional dance tunes on two single-row melodeons, in a style that has been greatly influenced by their many years in East Anglia. From this area too, come Jeannie’s unaccompanied songs. Katie and Jeannie have been playing together for 40 years in different line-ups, and this album was made in 1998, in a period where they were gigging as a duo at folk clubs and festivals. They still play together in the ceilidh band PolkaWorks - look up their 2014 album ‘Borrowed Shoes’ here on Bandcamp.

TUNES

These tunes have had long and varied lives and many travelled thousands of miles to be on this album!
Paddy Godden’s Lancers has travelled the furthest to us: a Tasmanian friend sent us some albums and we learned this one from the playing of Dave de Hugard. It sits perfectly with many tunes; her we put it with Captain White’s Jig which came to us via sessions from Jim Small, mouthorgan player from Somerset: look out for the duelling melodeons in this one! The Sloe is another tune well-known on the English music session scene, and comes from Gloucestershire fiddler John Mason. Both The Lichfield Tattoo and Jack’s Rambles were found in nineteenth century manuscripts: the first from Staffordshire and the second from Sussex and Lincolnshire.
In the 1990s we got to know Jeanie McLerie and Ken Keppeler of the American band Bayou Seco very well, and shared our music on many an occasion. They introduced us to the traditional music of the southern states, from where come the Cababi and Squash Fields medleys.
Several other tunes have come to us from North America: Charlie Lynch’s Waltz was taught to me by concertina player Mel Dean when were both in the Old Hat Dance Band. Valse de mon Pere comes from Quebecois mouthorgan player Gabriel L’Abbé, as does the tune we now call Greengrocer’s March, but which should more properly be called Marche des Marchands des Fruits ... too much of a tongue twister! Peril Waltz comes from the same area, from melodeon player Alfred Monmarquette.
Suffolk is where we met and played with many traditional musicians, and we couldn’t get away without playing a couple of tunes from our local hero Oscar Woods: the jig he called Tiger’s Jig, and Seamo’s Polka, both named after the musicians he learned them from.
Katie Howson

SONGS

These four songs come from the repertoire of three of the best singers to have been recorded in Suffolk.
Green Bushes was a favourite of Geoff Ling of Blaxhall, and a classic of the ‘walking out in May’ boy meets girl genre. The Ship in Blaxhall is still a centre for traditional music and song, and at the time of making this album we often had sessions there, and Geoff Ling would still turn out on high days and holidays!
Captain Thunderbolt comes from the magnificent singer Phoebe Smith. I felt it lacked some key elements of the story so I put together a fuller version using the broadside On the Shannon Side.
Molly Vaughan, again from Phoebe, is a wonderful version of this classic ballad, both for its tune and its near complete text.
One Fine Morning Early in Spring is a lovely version of this well-known song, which has turned up in many collections of folksongs. Fred Whiting, from whom I learnt this song, was a regular at the marvellous Brundish Crown in the early 1980s.
Jeannie Harris

Katie Howson plays melodeon and harmonica and her distinctive style blends her early East Anglian influences and her lifelong love of music from southwest Ireland, always rooted in putting the music under the dancer’s feet and planting the tune in the listener’s ear.

katiehowson.co.uk