musical conundrums

For some reason Amazon has decided that I want to buy an electric guitar.  For several weeks now they have been sending me emails about guitars I might like.  Normally Amazon's algorithms are pretty good, or at least I can work out how their recommendations relate to my previous purchases and browsing history.  Cake tins, gardening sundries, sewing notions, reprints of classic detective fiction, new releases in military history, all these I can understand.  But an electric guitar?  I cannot think of a single thing I have clicked on, on Amazon's site or anywhere else, that would give anybody the idea that I wanted to buy one.  People who bought a Hozelock four way distributor also bought a Fender Starcaster Strat?  I was so disconcerted I even checked my purchasing history to make sure that nobody had hacked into my account and bought a guitar to be sent to a new address (though I think I'd have noticed when my credit card bill came through).  It remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, listening to a version of the US folk song Shady Grove on the radio, I had a sudden moment of recognition.  The tune is essentially a version of Matty Groves, as in the version performed by Fairport Convention on Liege and Lief, which is musical first cousin to Little Musgrave as rendered by Planxty for a spellbinding eleven minutes and twenty-six seconds on The Woman I Loved So Well.  Martin Simpson does it too on Prodigal Son, but strips it down to just under the six minute mark.  I adore Little Musgrave, and am always happy to encounter good new versions.

I've been familiar with Shady Grove since childhood, though I never learned all the words to sing it. I think Doc Watson recorded it, and probably Hedy West.  And I first heard Liege and Lief at university, but in all the years since I never made the connection between the two tunes.  And now I've thought about the words, was Shady Grove a corruption of Matty Groves anyway?  Somebody picking up a fragment of the original big ballad but losing the long and complicated story of the doomed affair of little Matty Groves and Lord Barnard's wife might not realise that Groves was a man's name.  Once you thought it meant a group of trees, shady would make perfect sense.

Over on Radio 3 the composer of the week is a nineteenth century French woman, Louise Farrenc, who as the Radio 3 website puts it 'may not be a household name in the twenty-first century'  Too right.  She is really good, so why haven't people heard of her?  Or at least, I can understand why I haven't heard of her, because I haven't heard of all sorts of things in classical music, being a rank amateur, but when I enthused about her to the chairman of my music society she hadn't heard of her either, and she knows about classical music.  Rhetorical question, Louise Farrenc was a woman, composing chamber music at a time when all France wanted to know about was the opera.  Why did she compose chamber music?  She liked it.  Why didn't she compose opera?  The men who ran French opera wouldn't let her.