Tabor's earliest public performances were at the Heart of England Folk Club (at the Fox and Vivian pub) in Leamington Spa in the mid 1960s. In the late 1960s an appearance at the Sidmouth Folk Festival led to folk club bookings and she contributed to various records. One of her earliest recordings was in 1972 on an anthology called Stagfolk Live. She also featured on Rosie Hardman's Firebird (1972) and The First Folk Review Record (1974). At the time she was singing purely traditional unaccompanied material but in 1976 she collaborated with Maddy Prior on the Silly Sisters album and tour, with a full band that included Nic Jones. It provided the launching pad that same year (1976) for her first album in her own right, Airs and Graces. She later joined again with Prior, this time using the name Silly Sisters for their duo. Starting in 1977 Martin Simpson joined her in the recording studio for three albums before he moved to America in 1987. (Simpson has returned from America to be a guest guitarist on albums in the 2000s.) After his departure, she started working closely with pianist Huw Warren.
In 1990, Tabor recorded an album with the folk-rock band OysterBand entitled Freedom and Rain. She went on tour with OysterBand, and the Rykodisc label published a limited-run promotional live album the following year. Many of her current fans first discovered her through this tour and album with the OysterBand. In 1992 Elvis Costello wrote "All This Useless Beauty" specifically for Tabor, and she recorded it on Angel Tiger.
Since then her solo albums have included:
A Quiet Eye (1999)
Rosa Mundi (2001)
An Echo of Hooves (2003)
At the Wood's Heart (2005)
Apples (2007)
Ashore (2011)
Ragged Kingdom is a 2011 album by June Tabor & Oysterband.
Since 2006, Tabor has also been working with Huw Warren and Iain Ballamy as Quercus.
Website: www.junetabor.co.uk
No Man's Land
June Tabor Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while ′neath the warm summer sun
I've been working all day and I′m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Did they sound the dead-march as they lowered you down.
Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,
Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' the Forest′.
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.
The song No Man's Land by June Tabor is a powerful anti-war ballad which portrays the futility of war, the loss of life, and the consequent human suffering. The song speaks directly to a young soldier who died in World War I, Willie McBride. The singer, presumably a fellow soldier or someone who knows his history, visits Willie's grave and questions the circumstances of his death. The song's opening lines of ‘Well how do you do, young Willie McBride, Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside, And rest for a while ′neath the warm summer sun’ create a sense of intimacy and vulnerability, immediately setting the tone for the emotional journey to come.
The chorus of ‘Did they beat the drum slowly… Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' the Forest′.’ is melancholic, somber, and highly emotive, poignantly referencing the traditional Scottish funeral tune. The lyrics are asking a series of devastating questions, seeking to know more about the circumstances in which Willie died. The final verse of ‘Or are you a stranger without even a name, Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame, In an old photograph, torn and battered and stained, And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame’ suggests that the horrors of war can quickly reduce people to mere distant memories, leaving little more than old photographs as a reminder of who they once were.
Overall, No Man's Land is a heart-wrenching song that praises and remembers the lost generation of soldiers who fought and died in wars. The lyrics evoke powerful emotions of sadness, grief, and a disturbing sense of loss. The song has a powerful message about both the futility of war and the loss of human lives, making it relevant today just as it was during World War I.
Line by Line Meaning
Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Greetings, Willie McBride, may I join you in your resting place?
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
May I take a seat beside your grave?
And rest for a while ′neath the warm summer sun
And take some time to relax in the warm summer sun.
I've been working all day and I′m nearly done.
I've been working hard all day and I'm almost finished.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
From your gravestone, it appears you were only nineteen years old.
When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.
When you died in the year of 1916, among other war heroes.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
I hope your death was peaceful and dignified, without pain or suffering.
Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.
Or, on the other hand, was your death slow and painful, and too terrible to speak of?
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Were you honored with a slow drumbeat and somber fife music?
Did they sound the dead-march as they lowered you down.
Did they play the customary funeral march as they lowered your body into the ground?
Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,
Were you honored with the traditional Last Post bugle call and accompanying music?
Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' the Forest′.
Were you remembered with the Scottish lament, 'Flooers o' the Forest'?
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
Did you leave behind a beloved wife or girlfriend?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Has your memory been preserved in the heart of a devoted loved one?
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
Even though you passed away in 1916,
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Are you forever young and nineteen in the heart of your loved one?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Or have you been forgotten, known only as a stranger with no name?
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
Forgotten, forever trapped behind a glass photo frame.
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
Captured in an old, damaged and stained photo.
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.
Faded to a dull yellow, forever frozen in a brown leather frame.
Writer(s): Bogle Eric
Contributed by Eliana A. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
@HugoDBPHuguenot
***** I have to laugh when YOU instruct ME to "look up the facts about the VA system" and the insane lie "you will find it is one of the best sections in the health provision of the country." I will not have my fellow Britons deceived by you. The American VA System would be awful in England as it is in America.
The FACT, sir, is that for the few who must put up with VA medical care it is the option of last resort, and has been so for many years. Sir, your comment is the most deceptively polemic prat I have read here in a long time. Do you think this stuff up all on your own, or is it spoon fed to you on brochures from Washington? Your comment is utter crap -- do you submit these little shit-bombs for awards from (a) the Obama Administration, (b) a corrupt but well entrenched VA system, or (c) do you lie just for fun?
The next time you lie so outrageously in public, I advise knowing whom you are addressing. Right now you are looking rather foolish.
I am a dual British/American national married to a British national. I met my wife at Oxford - she at Oriel, me at Balliol. Both wanting to read medicine, we were very fortunate to attend Yale together. She went on to become a paediatric oncologist, and I became a Trauma Surgeon when, post Vietnam, that was the new thing.
I have vivid memories of VA hospitals affiliated with medical schools and used for teaching. Yale was affiliated with the VA Connecticut hospital and clinics. That facility was not too bad, but still a pit by the standards of the day.
My general surgical training and board certification at Tulane, affiliated with the VA New Orleans. OH God what a cesspool. It was like a very large, very bad nursing home. We surgical residents quickly learned that if we needed to order something, we had better be prepared to do it ourselves. Getting the staff to do anything would otherwise require a visit to some "I-could-care-less" nurse manager or worse, an administrator who not only did not care but never seemed to be around. This was not for authorisation, but for ordinary hospital orders with very fragile, sick patients.
After electing to to do a Chief Residency at Tulane, I did a three year fellowship at Univ of Maryland's R Adams Crowley Shock Trauma program, thankfully free of the VA Hospitals.
With the desire to "top up" my surgical skills in cardiothoracic and vascular surgery, I won a grant to work at Stanford University for three years (DPhil). They are affiliated with a large VA hospital -- not quite a pit, but something on the order of a poorly rated community hospital. Stanford manages to encourage a slightly higher standard, but to a person - as every other VA in my experience - patients considered VA hospitals to be health care of last resort.
There are huge exceptions, like anything. I have a very good friend who is an outstanding clinician working with a VA facility near a huge military base -- the later being the reason that facility is well rated.
Wanting badly to return home to England, we faced licensure issues and a bit of fear about Britain's NHS (making money at this stage was not our issue, but we wanted to know we could have our medically necessary orders followed). Any concern about the NHS quickly faded. It seems that England has been at it long enough to have made it work well, at least in our fields.
Obama's massive power grab which some call the "affordable care act" will bring a VA-like system to all Americans. It's a very Obama thing to do... bring everything down to the lowest common denominator and skim the cream. THEN YOU and all who think like you will really have America by the throat. Your most massive lie is to suggest that private or private/public funding for health care in America is somehow only available to the rich. This is prat of the first order.
From my experience as a university based inner-city trauma surgeon, reimbursement, even for long term after care, was never a problem. I never knew or cared about reimbursement. My wife's experience in hospital based paediatric oncology has been the same, though parents sometimes confuse access to great care with access to any and all research studies around the country; heartbreaking, but not a payment issue.
The next time you address me, either have a physician do the writing, someone I can telephone, or get access to some published, peer reviewed hospital metrics on the VA system, including correct citations. Otherwise, go practise your lies somewhere else. I would not wish the American VA system on any other nation, especially Britain!!
"Hugo" DBPHuguenot, MD FACS Dphil FRCS-Candidate
Associate Director,Trauma Service and Professor of Medicine
A London University and Hospital
@HugoDBPHuguenot
***** Wow. You just keep those colour brochures coming. I would be happy to bet that all of the material was prepared at VA expense. After all, self preservation is the first commandment for a bureaucrat.
The crap you cite could not be used in a first year undergraduate paper. Gee, I thought you had FACTS.
I challenged you to provide cited, peer reviewed material. For years I have had to collect and publish surgical performance metrics. The data is easy to reach in any hospital library or something like Medline.
What you "cite" is still more glossy brochure material. And RAND? They are a consulting firm long employed by the American government -- I had some exposure to them long ago. First meeting their huge team basically wanted to know what the University wanted published... not studied, published.
Medical performance metrics are very different than "patient satisfaction surveys." First, it is very easy to dope the numbers when there is no peer review.
Importantly, it is universally understood that "patient satisfaction" often includes things like food, wall paint, and the way staff look -- NOT what really matters.
Example: In my training, I discovered that VA ICU nurses repeatedly failed to alert me to very critical changes. They also failed to execute orders in anything like a timely way -- if at all. Just try getting THAT changed in an atmosphere of "I-don't-care". I was so upset at the VA's disinterest in my patients that I went to the State's Nursing Board, causing widespread hate by the remaining ICU staff, but far better patient care for a least the year.
A patient just would never know to put something like that significant nursing problem in a satisfaction survey, even if he survived the massive nursing errors.
Speaking of metrics and nurses, here's a good one even you may understand -- at The New Orleans VA Hospital, right now, how many "CCRN" qualified nurses work in the ICUs. The CCRN in America (and maybe Britain) is a demanding set of exams taken by the most committed and best educated critical care or ICU nurses. I will find that tid-bit by mid week -- why don't you give it a try.
So please do, sir, provide PROPER FACTS using published, peer reviewed materials, and stop quoting irrelevant glossy garbage. Otherwise, I believe we can end this debate. Again, I would never wish the American VA system on any nation, especially Britain.
"Hugo" DBPHuguenot MD FACS DPhil FRCS-Candidate
Associate Director, Trauma Service and Professor of Medicine
A London University and Hospital
@career.vanshika
Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
I've been working all day and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Did they sound the dead-march as they lowered you down.
Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,
Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' the Forest'.
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.
@wornpick1
June has one of the purist voices recorded in modern folk. The most natural voice imaginable. Only challenged by our beloved Maddie Pryor, and our forever missed Sandy Denny.
@devsedit
With you with all that.
@steveselby6201
You obviously have the same taste as me
@marvinallen6468
You are so right on that.Such a beautiful tone she has .Those 3 ladies along with Jaquie Mc shee ,i just cant believe the legacy they have all left for us to wonder over.They were all artists of great substance and style.
@annmccosker
This is the most beautiful rendition of this song I have ever heard.
@fredjackamikoons
I can't stop listening to this song. It makes me remember my friends, who died in Vietnam, when we got ambushed in Sept 1968. They never got buried except by the leaves that fell on them over the years and turned into dirt.
@Bazra1
I visited Vietnam recently, tried to imagine what it was like to fight in that jungle, barely 40M of visibilty. I am in awe of the soldiers that did it.
@phillipcozens3321
My dear American friend, I too grieve for the loss of your buddies, though I never knew any of you.
@tribegoddess
I once hear June sing this on an unlabled cassette tape, so I didn't know who it was. Well, this evening I know. If it is okay with everyone, can I please dedicate this to my unburied friends in the jungle of Vietnam with whom I barely escaped in September 1968. Sp5 F Miles, US ARMY 1st SFGA
@nealbaker7991
A salute to you.