Millennial Musings: Celebrated guitarist Richard Thompson brings his 1,000-year 'best-of' list to The Bijou

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

If the editors at Playboy magazine had been serious about their offer, an almost-forgotten song discovered in Cades Cove might have ended up on the millennium best-of list submitted by celebrated guitarist Richard Thompson.

The song — “King Henry V’s Conquest of France” — instead appeared on Thompson’s 2003 album “1,000 Years of Popular Music,” which was a descendant of the original project commissioned by Playboy.

To understand the whole scenario, go back to 1999, when millennium fever was sweeping the media. In an act of hubris, Playboy asked several icons of popular culture — including Thompson, who’s been ranked as one of the Top 20 Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone — to submit a list of “the best songs of the millennium.”

Little did they know that Thompson would take them at their word.

“I was kind of (annoyed) at Playboy for their pretentiousness at using the term ‘millennium,’” Thompson told The Daily Times this week. “That was in 1999, and ‘millennium’ was the buzzword, and to me, that actually does mean 1,000 years; it doesn’t mean the best songs of the past 30 years. On the other lists, there probably was nothing older than 50 years old, so I decided I was going to call their bluff and do a true songs-of-the-millennium, starting in 1000 A.D.”

Among the selections Thompson chose was “King Henry V’s Conquest of France,” also known as “Tennis Balls,” “Fency King and the English King” and “Henry’s Tribute.” The song’s origins date back to 1415, when the French Dauphin provoked the ire of England’s King Henry V by sending him a barrel of tennis balls as tribute. That led to the historical Battle of Agincourt during which, as the song says, the English “killed ten thousand of the French/the rest of them, they all ran away.”

The song was celebrated in England for several hundred years, eventually dying out. However, a version was discovered in 1928 in Cades Cove, of all places. Sociologists discovered it had lived on in the folk tradition of the cove’s residents, who apparently brought it with them in settling the region.

“A lot of ballads that seemed to disappear from Britain surfaced again in obscure parts of America, particularly the Appalachians,” Thompson said. “I read a piece about the song in a book of balladry, a very old book from the 1950s, and it just goes to show how these songs are preserved by being handed down from generation to generation. These little communities in the Appalachians still observe a lot of the traditions that date back to the 1600s in Britain — the same ways of getting married, the same table manners and so on. It’s extraordinary that this song survived.”

Other selections on Thompson’s list included the folk revivalist song “Blackleg Miner,” a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” a song by Stephen Foster and, in a head-scratching moment of peculiarity, Britney Spears’ “Oops! I Did It Again.”

“Most critics probably think ‘Oops’ is too trashy of a song to be covered by artists of such good tastes as ourselves, but the fact is, it actually is a good song,” Thompson said, chuckling. “It’s a well-structured pop song with a good sardonic lyric, and it’s well put together. The guys who write Britney’s songs and produce her records are quite clever; they’re Swedish, I think, and they write in the great Swedish pop tradition. It’s a good enough song to withstand our kind of treatment, which is slightly ironic anyway.”

After submitting his list to Playboy, Thompson got no response whatsoever. He didn’t expect to — “I took it philosophically,” he said — and, for a time, he shelved the idea and had the last laugh.

A few years later, however, he was asked to do a show at a Los Angeles museum, and he was commissioned to come up with a different format than his usual repertoire of popular music. It was to be part of a series, and given the historical nature of the venue, Thompson dusted off the 1,000 Years idea.

“I did it that year, and it was so successful that I did it again the next year,” he said. “I got asked to do it in different places and for different educational establishments, so we did it for other shows here and there and eventually took it on the road as an occasional tour. And here we are, still doing it eight years later.”

Thompson doesn’t hesitate to point out the difficulty in reproducing some of the material in the “1,000 Years” set — after all, playing songs from the 13th and 14th centuries doesn’t come with a book of sheet music or an instructional “how-to” DVD.

“It’s tough, and I suppose the great difficulty is that every song presents a new style of music,” he said. “We have to change hats so many times in that show, and I suppose one of the greatest difficulties is trying to render the larger arrangements into more casual stuff, to have them reduced to an acoustic guitar. That leaves out 95 percent of the available material, but the songs that survive in the set are the ones where we can physically come up with an arrangement.

“I want to stress that we’re not experts — but then, who is? Obviously, there are specialists in early music who can play it better than we do, but I suppose what we’re trying to point out is that the songs are the stars of the show, and hopefully people will hear things that will encourage them to look wider musically for their own pleasure.”

If anyone is qualified to bring such musically historic documents to the masses, it’s Thompson. His own background as a musician is the stuff of history — as a teenager, he was one of the founding members of the pioneering folk group Fairport Convention; in the 1970s, he was acclaimed for his work with his then-wife, Linda Thompson. He’s recorded more than 40 albums of music and been recorded by everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Elvis Costello to David Byrne, and in addition to the Rolling Stone accolade, he’s the recipient of both an Ivor Novello Award for Songwriting and the 2006 BBC Lifetime Achievement Award.

On this tour, he’s accompanied by singer-songwriter Judith Owen and percussionist Debra Dobkin. Their abilities as musicians and singers adds depth to the show, Thompson said.

“Having three voices is great for doing a lot of things historically, going back to the church music of the 1200s,” he said. “We can do madrigals from the Elizabethan period, and we can do things by The Inkspots and Gilbert and Sullivan. It gives us a lot of choices, and even though the music is extremely complex, we’re a very versatile group.”

Thompson brought the tour to The Bijou Theatre, to which he’ll return on Monday night, last year, and given the dry-witted Brit’s sense of humor, the between-song banter was likely as entertaining as the music itself.

“I don’t really remember, but I think we had a good time,” he said. “I don’t remember being hit by any missiles, so we’re optimistic we didn’t do too bad a job last time. And if we did, hopefully the audience has forgiven us and we can crawl humbly back to the stage.”