The Voice of the People-Folk Song Collectors

ABOUT THE SERIES EDITOR
Dr Reg Hall is a visiting fellow in the Graduate Research Centre in Culture & Communication at the University of Sussex. Engaged now in preparing A History of Irish Music & Dance in London, his academic work is enhanced by four decades of close contact with many traditional musicians, singers and dancers in the Irish immigrant community. An active musician throughout that time with Bampton Morris and Padstow Blue Ribbon 'Obby 'Oss, he has associated with country musicians in the south of England and he has known a good number of the performers featured in this series. His production credits include a number of significant record releases of traditional music. Lateral thinking, a working class family background and professional experience in social work have contributed to his challenge to received wisdom. His radical views on the whole field of traditonal music and dancing, part of a growing movement of re-assessment, are in the best traditions of Topic Records.
TONY ENGLE
Managing Director. Topic Records
Production by Tony Engle & Reg Hall. Compilation, research & notes by Reg Hall. Edited digital transfers from original sources
by Tony Engle, Paul Marsh, Charlie Crump (using CEDAR), & Reg Hall.
Mastering by Tony Dixon.
Sleeve design by John Haxby, art surgery. Edinburgh.
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The producers wish to thank the following for their assistance in preparing this volume: Vic Gammon, Claire Gilliam (National Sound Archive), Heather Horner, Maggie Hunt. Bill Leader, Helen Leader, Paul Marsh, Des Miller, Robin Morton, Steve Roud, Rod Stradling, Keith Summers. Malcolm Taylor (Vaughan Williams Memorial Library) Mike Va
The Topic Records catalogue of long-playing records, deleted some time ago with the phasing-out of vinyl, included about 120 albums of English, Irish and Scottish traditional music. The creativity of the original producers-making the recordings, programming the albums and writing the notes-set the standards for their time and their work remains an important stepping stone in our understanding and appreciation of traditional music. In making much of this material available again two or three decades later, Topic Records has adopted an approach for a different medium and a new audience. This formidable project is presented as a series of thematic anthologies, but, more importantly, the selection of material and the annotation reflects a revised view of traditional music.

Some aspects of traditional music have interested outside observers for a couple of centuries, and it is the values, interests and activities of those outsiders- the founders and activists of the folk-song and folk-dance movements that have set definitions of what the outside world should find interesting in traditional music. Part of the motivation behind the preparation of this series has been to shift the emphasis away from the values of the folk-song collectors and to present traditional music in its own right, reflecting its history, social contexts and the values of its practitioners. The paradox is that, although the focus here is on traditional music, the series owes its existence to the folk-song movement. Some consideration, therefore, of the main phases of that movement is needed to put the series in context.

The early folk-song and folk-dance collectors-middle-class, educated and operating within the mentality of their time-were motivated by varying shades of nationalism, and it was held, very commonly within nationalist thinking, that society in general had lost its innocence and that a nation could regain its soul by purifying its culture. Thus, in the 1880s, the notion of a lost golden age informed the Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals. Ballad studies, long-established within the field of literature, showed that balladry had once been in the mouths of the common people, while some academic musicians, with an interest in ancient music, pointed to national airs as the potential raw material for new schools of art music to oust what was held to be the offending influence of European romanticism. Getting back to the innocence of a golden age required a search for its survivors; those people thought to have the longest cultural memories, untainted by the artiness of elite society and the vulgarity of the brutalised, industrial poor.

 The finger pointed to 'the peasantry', and a few dedicated and inspired collectors, most notably at the turn of the century, sought out members of the rural working population and recorded on paper thousands of song airs, song texts and dance tunes. There was no intention of documenting the music-making of those rural workers and their families; the aim was to gather raw material for a minor revolution in art and popular music. Mediating their finds through the conventions of their own culture of art-music and literature, the collectors defined their new genres as 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' (in Ireland Irish song' and 'Irish dance), which they promoted. often heavily edited and reconstructed, through music publishers, live concert performance and state education systems.

The post-war revival of the folk-song movement-the so-called Folk Revival - was inspired initially by models in the American labour movement, and moved politically to the left, where it occupied ground further down the social scale in the urban working and lower middle classes. The Folk Revival was also rooted in a form of cultural moralism, reacting against the commercial music of show business and aiming for the creation of a proletarian entertainment and art form. Whereas the Victorians and Edwardians defined 'folk-song' narrowly, the new wave of the movement was eclectic. Almost anything could be "folk-song-industrial workers' songs, material derived from the music-hall, songs of protest and contemporary writing on social issues. Within the proliferation of British folk-clubs and Irish ballad-lounges, there developed performance styles unique to the folk-song movement, and these styles, owing little to traditional music-making, entered the mainstreams of English, Scottish and Irish popular culture.

In parallel with this post-war movement, there was a new phase of field-collecting. made possible by the availability of the relatively cheap means of making sound recordings. Folk-song collecting could now capture the subtleties of intonation, accent, inflection, pitch, rhythm, timing and language of authentic performance. Although some folk song collectors at the beginning of the century had made use of the cylinder recording machine and the British Broadcasting Corporation had made some studio and location recordings in the 1930s and early 1940s, Brian George was the real modern pioneer. Assisted in January 1947 by Seamus Ennis, who had just left the Irish Folklore Commission, he recorded on location in Ireland with a disc- cutting machine for the BBC. Shortly afterwards, working with portable tape- recorders and with little prior knowledge of the extent of traditional music-making in these islands, Alan Lomax (Columbia Records, NYC), Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis (BBC, London), Hamish Henderson (School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh) and Ciarán MacMathuna (Radio Éireann, Dublin) embarked upon endeavours of great discovery and excitement.

 The initial period, however, was relatively short-lived, particularly as the BBC, the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the major record companies showed no lasting interest. However, national institutions in Scotland and Ireland have continued to collect in the field, and Radio Eireann (now RTC) has for several decades responded to public demand for Irish traditional-music programmes as popular entertainment. The exposure of traditional singers and musicians on radio (albeit very limited in Britain) and commercial records, in folk- clubs and on concerts from the early 1950s has made some impact on the Folk Revival, and within a section of that movement there has developed a taste for authentic performance. The tape-recorder, of course, has been available to amateur enthusiasts, and many-self-financed and working in isolation-have made valuable field-recordings, and a number of independent record producers have made interesting material available.


Those at the forefront of contemporary thinking about traditional music and dance have in recent years applied the academic and professional disciplines of ethnomusicology, community studies, social history, biography, multi-media recording and archiving to document and examine them in their social and historical contexts. There has been a shift from the elitist, patronising notion that folk-song" is the corporate and primitive creation of an anonymous, amorphous population of folk, who in the jargon of the 1950s are 'bearers of tradition. It can now be recognised that traditional music and dance are created and developed by real identifiable people within real identifiable communities. While they are at the lower end of the social scale, the vitality and richness of their art and entertainment are as deserving of serious attention as the popular culture and high art of other sections of the community.
Any attempt to describe, let alone define, traditional music and dance is inevitably.

 loaded with paradoxes and contradictions. To start with it there is no popular or even academic consensus about what they include and exclude. Having long co- existed and cross-bred with popular culture, the boundaries between the tradition and popular culture are blurred, and it can be argued there is value in keeping them blurred. Traditional music and dance have belonged primarily to rural working communities, though not exclusively to them and not to all members of every such community. For example, in southern Co. Sligo at the beginning of the century, traditional music-making was for some an almost obsessional daily occurrence, yet for others it was treated with indifference or even open hostility. Evidence suggests that as a general rule the piece-meal migration of rural workers to towns puts an end to their traditional music-making and dancing, yet rural practices and repertories have sometimes been modified to suit the needs of urban communities. It is widely believed that traditional music-making has flourished and survived longest in isolated and remote areas, yet in rural Northumberland, Scotland and Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s it was the bus services, bringing people together, and the gramophone and the radio, circulating repertory and style, that gave the popularity of music-making a significant boost. No community in these islands, including the most isolated and remote, has been free from generations of population shift, as labour has. pursued employment opportunities in the army, at sea, in farm work and heavy construction and in service for the gentry, and as migrant workers have returned home. It is these movements and mixing of populations that have contributed to the dissemination of repertory and modes of practice beyond parish borders.

The tradition is essentially an aural one with each performer learning his or her material by ear from another, yet some learned song texts and dance tunes from print and manuscript. Some performed their material exactly as they learned it. while others honed it to their own liking and imbued it with their own meaning and significance. Some struggled as children, unaided and even in the face of family opposition, to make a musical instrument and devise a playing technique, while others had expert tuition from older musicians on factory-made instruments. Some sang primarily at home for family entertainment, others sang to ease the monotony of repetitive labour, while some sang alone for their own satisfaction. In rural England a primary location for traditional music-making was the pub, the preserve of men, incidentally excluding women and children, whereas in rural Ireland it was the domestic kitchen, where gatherings of family and neighbours embraced both sexes and several generations. Most traditional music making has been amateur, yet it was not so long ago that dance musicians were invariably paid for their services and there were livings for dance teachers and street singers and musicians.

The broad repertory of traditional songs comes from a number of sources. Some songs originate from composition within the tradition itself, while others have been adapted from material from outside the tradition, most notably from seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century ballad sheets and the nineteenth-century music hall. Some are archaic survivals, but some others are either contemporary or are set in the recent past. The texts are invariably constructed in conventional poetic language and the story lines and scenarios are based on equally conventional themes.

Those at the forefront of contemporary thinking about traditional have in recent years applied the academic and professional ethnomusicology, community studies, social history, biograpl recording and archiving to document and examine them in their soc contexts. There has been a shift from the elitist, patronising notion
while the tunes, not necessarily though sometimes wedded to particular texts, call on a stock of well-used melodic phrases. The creative potential and vagaries of aural transmission have tended towards mutations and hybrids of both words and tunes, which have resulted in countless variations. The same is true of dance tunes. for, while there is clearly some archaic survival, most dance-tune types were adapted from the dance music of the nobility and gentry (and later middle class) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tempered by a massive creative force within the tradition itself.

The recordings in this series represent cultures that have passed or are passing rapidly, as the social and economic conditions and the habitats that supported them have gone or are going for ever. These performances have timeless appeal and resonances, but what of the meaning and significance these songs and tunes had for the singers and musicians themselves and their audiences? Succeeding generations will have ever-increasing difficulty in grasping the nature and quality of the lives these performers lived. How will they understand the family structures and community ties, the gender roles and the inhibitions between the sexes, the rigid class structures, the livelihoods, the poverty and hardship, and the high level of violence in the communities that practiced traditional music-making? The brief biographies of the performers should offer some insight into the social contexts and set minds thinking. The dialects and accents in which these songs are sung are being rapidly eliminated, and the subtleties of meaning implied in the inflections, vocabulary and syntax might easily be lost on future listeners. The song-texts, given as the singers sing them and transcribed with a considered balance between standard and dialectal English and Scots, are offered primarily as an aid to understanding. When transcribed in print, the words of some songs seem fragmented or confused. yet in live performance the general drift of meaning is invariably clear enough.

This series makes available a large body of recorded songs, instrumental music and calendar customs from the tradition, drawn from the archive at Topic Records and
a number of private collections. It includes recordings made on location often in the homes of the performers, some in live public performance and some from commercial 78rpm records now in the public domain. In the case of the English and the Welsh 78rpm records, they were originally issued for a very limited 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' public, but in the case of the Scottish and Irish records they were put out as ethnic popular music. Some recordings presented here were made by amateur enthusiasts, as early as the mid-1950s, with portable and sometimes domestic equipment and, though the sound has been cleaned up in the studio, they still have something of the quality of a faded holiday snap. The final selection has been governed by a subjective view of good performance and good material, an equally subjective belief in the aesthetic merit and historical value of each track and an eye to fairness of representation. A major constraint has been the nature and the quantity of the material available, which inevitably reflects the self-directing activities and priorities of those who made the recordings. This has resulted in distortions of representation relating to geographical regions, performance genres, and the age, gender and social background of performers: other CDs in the Topic catalogue, however, will fill some of the gaps.

My ship shall sail the ocean
SONGS OF TEMPEST & SEA BATTLES, SAILOR LADS & FISHERMEN
In a sense there is no such thing as a sea song: rather there are songs on nautical themes. This volume brings together a varied selection of such material and a further selection appears on We've Received Orders To Sail: Jackie Tar At Sea & On Shore (Topic TSCD 662).
The classic period of sail from the end of the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, associated with trade in the East and West Indies, wars with the Netherlands, Spain and France, and the acquisition and maintenance of Empire, provided the backdrop for many a good yarn appealing to rural singers and listeners alike. Of course, a good proportion of those who went to sea were from the country. and heroic stories about the seaman's life glamourised a pretty appalling existence. The cut and thrust of battles, cliff-hanging danger, gallant crews and victorious captains were celebrated in such songs as A Broadside, A Ship To Old England Came and Young Henry Martin. However, life for a seaman on board a merchantman or a man o' war was harsh, with a regime of exhausting work, strict discipline and brutal punishment, poor food, primitive living conditions and mortal danger from the elements. The Banks Of Newfoundland deals with the tough life aboard ship in the early days of steam, while the central theme of In Scarborough Town is death during a raging storm at sea.

It was probably the theatre of eighteenth-century elite society that first romanticised the sea in British national life with a succession of plays, ballets and songs on romantic, patriotic and heroic nautical themes. The theatre business went hand-in- glove with the publishing and bookselling trades, and not surprisingly the same stereotype characters and situations were portrayed on the stage, in broadsheet ballads and in engraved prints. The sailor is sometimes cast as a constant lover, as in The Dark-Eyed Sailor & In London So Fair, while his sweetheart remains loyal and true, as in The Pretty Ploughboy, in Scarborough Town & A Sailor And His True Love, and maybe even follows him to sea disguised as a man, as in In London So Fair. The dangers of being taken by the press-gang are dealt with in The Lowlands Of Holland and The Pretty Ploughboy, while in the latter song the hero is rescued by his lover. In The Streams Of Lovely Naney and A Sailor And His True Love, the sailor is depicted as less trustworthy, promising marriage only if he should come back again. This characterisation points to a more extreme image of the saucy sailor, Jacky Tar, a feckless rogue when in port, splashing his money about on loose women and booze, as portrayed in Sandy's A Sailor. The Cak And The Ash & Jack Tar Ashore, though rising to the occasion when duty calls. In Riding Down To Portsmouth 6 The Royal Albion he gets his desert, a dose of pox, for his loose living. Among those who within living memory have sung The Royal Albion (better known as The Sailor Cut Down In His Prime), there was and perhaps still is a belief that the song was forbidden in dockyard towns and anyone who sang it publicly was likely to be arrested. Curious, as its warning against immorality was more likely to uphold naval discipline than subvert it!

The most enduring survival of the jolly Jack Tar stereotype in popular culture is the balletic character dance. The Sailor's Hornpipe. Almost certainly the creation of the professional stage, its first known performance was at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London in 1730. The Sailor On The Rope (pulling on a rope being one of the mime actions in the stage dance) and The Bonny Bunch Of Roses belong to a genre of eighteenth-century dance tunes that includes The College Hornpipe & Jacky Tar, associated even now with The Sailor's Hornpipe in dance academies.
There is a quite different resonance in the songs made up by fishermen and merchant seamen which they sang among themselves. There are no romantic characters or heroic scenarios, but reference to every-day work routines laced with mild in- jokes about their job, their ship, their skipper, their mates and themselves. All these elements can be found in Round Rye Bay For More, Cod Banging. On Board The Leicester Castle and The Fish And Chip Ship. In sharp contrast to their self- deprecating humour, many sea-goers are deeply superstitious and philosophical about their chances of survival at sea. Many, no doubt, have found comfort in the Methodist hymn, Jesus At Thy Command, which suggests an eternal deliverance from the dangers of tempest.
Those wishing to pursue these songs further are recommended to consult Steve Roud's computer data-base, Folk-Song Index, held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, which is a comprehensive reference work to printed, manuscript and recorded sources. The only song references given here are to those appearing in the seminal early collection, Francis James Child, The English & Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98, reprinted New York, Dover, 1965) & the classification system, G.

Malcolm Laws, American Balladry From British Broadsides (Philadelphia, American Folklore Society, 1957).
The Performers
WILLIAM BRIGHTWELL, one of eleven children in a railway plate-layer's family, was born in 1900 in the small village of Little Glenham in Suffolk. He inherited the nickname "Jumbo' as a child on the death of an elderly friend. Jumbo Poacher. His first job at thirteen was as a bird-scarer. The family moved to the small town of Leiston in 1916, and after two years in the army, he returned to Leiston in 1919 and worked briefly as a fisherman, and then as a bricklayer's labourer, a gas-stoker and a docker. Around the end of the Second World War, he became a railway shunter, staying with the job until he retired at 65. He picked up many songs in childhood from his father and other adults and started singing at about eleven years old. "Us kids used to get outside The Lion there when the sheep-clipping was in season, and every Saturday night those old boys would hold their meetings there. After the meeting they'd have dinner and then a song. We'd all hang on the pub windows and listen... And we'd hold their horses for them- you know, they all come by horse and cart -- and they'd give us a bottle of ginger beer." As a young man he cycled a couple of miles across fields most Saturday evenings with his father and his elder brother Bob for the singing and stepdancing at The Eel's Foct Inn at Eastbridge. As he described it. "It was a real old-fashioned little pub. It weren't no bigger than my living room. If you had twenty people there you couldn't undo your jacket! And Mrs. Moreland used to go down the steps to the cellar every time you wanted a pint." Philip Lumpton, keeping order by thumping the table with a gavel or cribbage board, called on each person in turn 'to sing, say or play and those who didn't entertain dropped sixpence in the beer kitty for those who did. Jumbo Brightwell was a member of a steel quoits team, travelling to such pubs as Middleton Bell, Snape Quay, Friston Chequers, Marleford Bell and Blaxhall Ship, where after the matches he took part in the singing and learned new songs. As he said many years
later, "I wouldn't have to hear a song more than twice before I had it." The character of The Cel's Foot changed around 1965, and Jumbo Brightwell gave up singing in public then.
Ackt: Keith Summers in Traditional Music, 

VICTOR ALBERT SPENCER BROWN, nicknamed Turp, was born in 1887 at Ashen Wood, West Tisted four miles from Cheriton in Hampshire, the last in the line of thirteen children born to a thatcher and his wife. With little book-learning, he started working in the fields at the age of eight. He lost his mother while still young and, from an orphanage in London, he was placed with various farmers, for one of whom, he recalled, he worked from "half past four in the morning until nine at night for hardly any money and only a little porridge and soup to eat." He was in the Royal Hampshire Regiment from 1904 until 1920, after which he married and settled at Bramdean Common two miles from Cheriton, working as a woodsman and thatcher. Referring to his father, William Brown (from whom George Gardiner collected songs in 1905), he said to Bob Copper, "When I was a little nipper, my dad used to bring me down and squat me up on a bench in the corner, and there I would stay until 'twas time to go home. There was some good old singers round here then, and my old man knew as many songs as any of 'em- more than most." He went on to say, "I learnt all these old ones off my old dad and he always used to finish up a song with a dance..." Turp Brown did the broom dance, and at the age of seventy could still stepdance with energy and style, usually ending with a flourish on top of a pub bench.
Ackt: Bob Copper, Songs & Southern Breezes (Heinneman, 1973).
& BBC Sound Archive Index, XII.]

MARY ANN CAROLAN was born in 1902 in the townland of Tenure, near the town of Drogheda, Co. Louth, and at the time of this recording she and her husband Nicholas 
were working their farm at Hill o' Rath, near Drogheda. Her father, Pat Usher, had a large repertory of songs which he sang constantly in the house and while working on the farm. He was considered in his community to be a fine exponent on the concertina and he played with energy and dash right up to his death in 1965 at the age of 94. He passed on much of his music, both dance tunes and songs, to his children and nephews. Mary Ann Carolan played the concertina after her father's model and she had a repertory of about sixty songs. After not having played or sung for several years, she began making music again in the mid-1960s. Ackt: Sean Corcoran, 

HARRY FRED COX was born in 1885, the seventh of thirteen children, at Pennygate, Barton Turf, close to Barton Broad in north-east Norfolk. His father Bob, having worked initially as a labourer, went to sea as a young man on the herring fleet out of Great Yarmouth. He later worked on the wherries, the cargo sail-boats that plied the Broads, before returning to farm work. Harry had a hard childhood and left school at thirteen. He went into farm work, developing additional skills particular to the Broads, such as reed-cutting, thatching and basket-making, as a supplementary source of income. During the Great War, he served in the Royal Navy on a mine- layer. He married at the age of forty and settled near home at Catfield Common. His paternal grandfather and his father were noted singers in the community his father also played the fiddle and his mother sang as well. His father was reputed to have been able to sing two songs each watch on trips at sea that sometimes. lasted three months.

 Before he married, Harry spent a lot of his time not only working along side his father but playing and singing with him in pubs, and the majority of his songs came from his father. He was very quick to pick up a new song and he retained a phenomenal memory. Whether he learned songs from song-sheets is not known for certain, but he sang many that were included in the collection (which still exists) of broadsides his mother had bought on trips to the market in Norwich as a young woman. Harry sang in pubs, probably until he was middle-aged, and was known for the outstanding quality of his performance and his endless repertory of old songs. He stepdanced and played dance tunes and song airs on the fiddle, the tin-whistle and melodeon. When in old age, he sang and played at home for his own amusement. He was 'discovered just after the Great War by E. J. Moeran, a young composer collecting folk-songs, and some of his material was published in the Folk Song Journal in 1922. From the late 1940s until shortly before he died, he was visited and recorded by numerous song collectors including E. J. Moeran, Francis Collinson, Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax, and he made occasional appearances on the radio and television.
Ackt: Paul Marsh.I