Cities And Memory

The field recording I chose is of a gentleman named Thomas Penniman performing an early 20th-century work song about weaving from the Gower Peninsula. It's a strange, compelling and mysterious recording, made in the winter of 1974. There's a repeated refrain, "Mrs Tanner has six sons/And they all sang like thrushes as they worked at the loom", which I loved. But then the song becomes quite angry because the sons have only been given half a herring for breakfast. It's not enough! Mr Penniman beats his fist, and it sounds like both a drum and a piece of wooden machinery thumping. The "song" in this version isn't musical as such, it's somewhere between a passionate poetry reading, an a cappella performance, and, as it goes on, almost like mouth music. Mr Penniman starts out in a determined, lucid way, but seems to lose the thread of the song as he goes on. I pulled at the threads of the recording's story and made discoveries. Thomas Penniman was an American anthropologist, and curator at the Pitt Rivers between