A Garland for Joey: The War Horse Songbook

In the 1980s John Tams brought folk music to Britain's National Theatre in famous productions of The Mysteries and Lark Rise to Candleford. So when work began there on War Horse he was called on again. Tams describes himself as a ‘songmaker,’ not a songwriter, and sometimes as a ‘songmender,’ because rather than creating new songs he introduces existing songs appropriate to the story and fettles them to fit.

More than eight million people have seen War Horse and to mark its tenth anniversary, John Tams and Bob Fox have made A Garland for Joey, comprising all the songs from the show, with a postscript of pieces reflecting on World War I. In this re-telling Fox, a very fine singer, forsakes the melodeon – which, when he took the part of the ‘Songman’ onstage, he had to learn – returning to the guitar, on which he is far more accomplished. He is joined too by the Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band.

As well as exploring the folk canon, in songs such as ‘Snowfalls’, Tams and Fox turn to the chapel, with ‘Only Remembered’ sung heartily to the rousing tune by Sankey, the great tunesmith of Methodism, and the music hall in ‘Scarlet and the Blue/Dolly Grey’. It ends on a very sombre note with ‘Scarecrow’. Here Tams draws on the bitter couplet ‘If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied’ that Rudyard Kipling wrote after his myopic son, whom he had encouraged to join up, was killed aged 18.