Thursday, November 29, 2012

"Over the hills and far away"


I'm sure many readers are familiar with Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' novels, and the TV series made from them.

For the TV series, musician John Tams played the role of Daniel Hagman, one of Sharpe's 'Chosen Men'.  He also adapted an old English folk tune into a Peninsular War-era soldier song, which was used as the theme song for the entire series.  I'm well schooled in English folk music, and I thought he did an excellent job.  Here he is singing it.





(For details of the images used in the video, see its page on YouTube.)

Peter

5 comments:

Old NFO said...

Interesting one, I've never seen an episode of it!

Peter said...

They're all on YouTube if you want to watch them. The first one is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaJXMHWN4bI

Anonymous said...

'Here's to the king, sir. You ken wha' I mean, sir'
Sorry, couldn't resist. For all its faults and all its sins, the British Empire was a glorious creation.

Kevin said...

It's also on Netflix. Highly recommended. I listened to this recording on the way into work this morning, as a matter of fact. I copied it off YouTube and burned it to CD a while back. It's the best version I've found, though there was one that seems to be gone now that included all of the stanzas that Tams wrote for each of the episodes. That one's quite long.

Jenny said...

Oh that's a beautiful rendition - thank you. :)