Robin Hood is one of those figures who drifts somewhere between history, folktale and myth in the English imagination. Did he exist at all? The truth is lost to history. But bards have sung ballads about a Robin Hood as far back as the 13th century, and men like him certainly roamed the land: rebels who made themselves a thorn in the side of the ruling class. In modern tellings, Robin Hood is often painted in heroic terms: the charismatic outlaw, possibly wearing tights, who robs from the rich to give to the poor. But there are also darker takes on this story, and it is these that director Michael Sarnoski channels in his film The Death Of Robin Hood. Here, Hugh Jackman’s Robin is a brutal brigand nearing the end of his life, stricken with guilt for his past actions. When deciding how his film would sound, Sarnoski knew he needed someone who understood something of these heavy themes. A stroke of luck for him that he happened upon the music of Jim Ghed
Ghedi is a folk musician from Sheffield, not far from Loxley, the village reputed to be the birthplace of Robin Hood. His take on folk tradition taps a similar vein to that of Sarnoski’s film: a raw, unvarnished study of the human spirit in the face of strife and suffering. Ghedi and Sarnoski quickly discovered an artistic affinity. In their inaugural Zoom call, Ghedi recalls Sarnoski bringing up “Twa Corbies”, an old folk ballad popularised by Steeleye Span that Ghedi, by coincidence, had learned to play on guitar just the week before. It’s a particularly bleak example of the folk music tradition, sung from the perspective of two carrion crows picking at the body of a slain knight. Ghedi’s rendition, pairing his keening vocal with chilling strings and a climactic death-march of drums, captures the spirit of the song perfectly: a cold vignette of bravery and valour laid low in the face of nature, implacable and remorseless.
Recent history has well documented the tales of musicians who signed up to score a film and subsequently had to force their artistry into a Hollywood-shaped box. But the music here is unmistakably Ghedi’s – more atmospheric and filmic in places, certainly, designed to capture the ebb and flow of a story’s beats, but assembled from the same raw materials. Sarnoski paired Ghedi – a confessed newbie to the art of composing for film – with veteran music editor and composer Tony Lewis, and together they crafted a sound that kept Ghedi’s artistic vision intact.
The newly recorded material here sees Ghedi’s guitar, fiddle and harmonium augmented with a selection of traditional instruments – the hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa and Uilleann pipes – that accentuate this music’s ancient feel. The mood is often fearsome and fearful: “Farm Attack” and “Elderfather Fight” are turbulent dronescapes punctuated by strings that moan and howl like the wounded in the aftermath of battle. But there are also more nuanced moments that indicate scenes of passage or the chance of redemption: see particularly “Walking Again”, a beautiful, airy violin piece that feels like the sun’s rays forcing their way through clouds as a storm passes.
Scattered throughout, meanwhile, are highlights of Ghedi’s earlier catalogue. From 2021’s In The Furrows Of Common Place comes “The Lamentations Of Round-Oak Waters”. A piece for voice and harmonium, it finds Ghedi adapting a poem by John Clare, a farm labourer turned “peasant poet” whose bleak, tormented verse addressed the destruction of the countryside as the Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed, fens drained and the commons enclosed by landowners. Centuries separate Clare and the time of Robin Hood, but in their loathing of the ruling class, the pair are kin. Also present here is Ghedi’s magisterial reading of “What Will Become Of England”, a song first set to tape in partial form by Alan Lomax and the Norfolk farm labourer Harry Cox back in the 1950s. A lament to the working man in an age of austerity, it’s placed in the film at a key moment, as Robin, critically wounded, is transported to a priory for healing.
The tale of Robin Hood has resonated through the ages not because it tells us about how things were back then, but because its themes speak to us in the here and now. Jim Ghedi’s music, too, has this quality. It reaches back into history for its sounds, tales and vernacular. But you feel the tightening of its sinews, the passion in its chest, the blood that rushes through its veins. When you listen to these songs, history feels not so far away.