Shoals Of Herring Lyrics And Chords
The first piece of sheet music can be used on the flute or accordion.Ewan McColl wrote this folk song. It was recorded by Ewan McColl , The Corries , Llewyn-Davis, and The Dubliners. The sheet music and tin whistle notes are included. Ewan has wrote a raft of great songs , many are included here. I have given a couple of versions of the guitar chords in chordpro including the version as played by Luke Kelly. The song featured in the film Inside Llewyn Davis with Oscar Isaac. It was also recorded by The Clancy Brothers and. Louis Killen. The ukulele chords are now included plus the piano sheet music and chords in a pdf..
Shoales Of Herring Song Words With Chords In C Major
With[C] our nets and [Am]gear we're[G] far[C]ing
On[C] the wild and waste[F]ful[C] oc[G]ean.
Its there[C] that we[F] hunt and we[C] earn[G] our[Am] bread
As we[C] hunted[F] for the shoals of[G] herr[C]ing
O[C] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[G] faring
As a[C] cabinboy on a sailing[Am] lugger
For to go and[C] hunt the[F] shoals of[G] herr[C]ing
O the work was hard and the hours long
And the treatment, sure it took some bearing
There was little kindness and the kicks were many
As we hunted for the shoals of herring
O we fished the Swarth and the Broken Bank
I was cook and I'd a quarter sharing
And I used to sleep standing on my feet
And I'd dream about the shoals of herring
O we left the homegrounds in the month of June
And to Canny Shiels we soon were bearing
With a hundred cran of silver darlings
That we'd taken from the shoals of herring
Now you're up on deck, you're a fisherman
You can swear and show a manly bearing
Take your turn on watch with the other fellows
While you're searching for the shoals of herring
In the stormy seas and the living gales
Just to earn your daily bread you're daring
From the Dover Straits to the Faroe Islands
As you're following the shoals of herring
O I earned my keep and I paid my way
And I earned the gear that I was wearing
Sailed a million miles, caught ten million fishes
We were sailing after shoals of herring
With[C] our nets and [Am]gear we're[G] far[C]ing
On[C] the wild and waste[F]ful[C] oc[G]ean.
Its there[C] that we[F] hunt and we[C] earn[G] our[Am] bread
As we[C] hunted[F] for the shoals of[G] herr[C]ing
O[C] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[G] faring
As a[C] cabinboy on a sailing[Am] lugger
For to go and[C] hunt the[F] shoals of[G] herr[C]ing
O the work was hard and the hours long
And the treatment, sure it took some bearing
There was little kindness and the kicks were many
As we hunted for the shoals of herring
O we fished the Swarth and the Broken Bank
I was cook and I'd a quarter sharing
And I used to sleep standing on my feet
And I'd dream about the shoals of herring
O we left the homegrounds in the month of June
And to Canny Shiels we soon were bearing
With a hundred cran of silver darlings
That we'd taken from the shoals of herring
Now you're up on deck, you're a fisherman
You can swear and show a manly bearing
Take your turn on watch with the other fellows
While you're searching for the shoals of herring
In the stormy seas and the living gales
Just to earn your daily bread you're daring
From the Dover Straits to the Faroe Islands
As you're following the shoals of herring
O I earned my keep and I paid my way
And I earned the gear that I was wearing
Sailed a million miles, caught ten million fishes
We were sailing after shoals of herring
Here's the chords as played by Luck Kelly on his banjo.
With[C] our nets and gear we're[G] far[C]ing
On[C] the wild and waste[F]ful[C] ocean.
It's out there on the [F]deep
[C]We harvest and [F]reap [C]our bread
As we hunt the bonny [F]shoals [C]of [G]herr[C]ing
O[C] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[G] faring
As a[C] cabinboy on a sailing lugger
We were following the [G]shoals of Herr[C]ing
With[C] our nets and gear we're[G] far[C]ing
On[C] the wild and waste[F]ful[C] ocean.
It's out there on the [F]deep
[C]We harvest and [F]reap [C]our bread
As we hunt the bonny [F]shoals [C]of [G]herr[C]ing
O[C] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[G] faring
As a[C] cabinboy on a sailing lugger
We were following the [G]shoals of Herr[C]ing
Below is the sheet music with tin whistle notes. The version just below the whistle version is in a slightly lower key.
Here's the guitar chords for the key of G.
With[G] our nets and [Em]gear we're[D] far[G]ing
On[G] the wild and waste[C]ful[G] oc[D]ean.
Its there[G] that we[C] hunt and we[G] earn[D] our[Em] bread
As we[G] hunted[C] for the shoals of[D] herr[G]ing
O[G] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[D] faring
As a[G] cabinboy on a sailing[Em] lugger
For to go and[G] hunt the[C] shoals of[D] herr[G]ing
With[G] our nets and [Em]gear we're[D] far[G]ing
On[G] the wild and waste[C]ful[G] oc[D]ean.
Its there[G] that we[C] hunt and we[G] earn[D] our[Em] bread
As we[G] hunted[C] for the shoals of[D] herr[G]ing
O[G] it was a fine and a pleasant day
Out of Yarmouth harbor I was[D] faring
As a[G] cabinboy on a sailing[Em] lugger
For to go and[G] hunt the[C] shoals of[D] herr[G]ing
The pdf file below has the piano sheet music and chords.
| shoals-of-herring-piano-sheet-music.pdf |
Below is an alternative version of the sheet music in a lower key
Shoals of Herring is a folk song written by Ewan McColl in 1960, and has since become an iconic and influential song in the genre. The song has been covered by numerous artists, and its powerful lyrics and haunting melody have resonated with listeners for decades. McColl's song captures the essence of the fishing industry in Scotland and the struggles and sacrifices of the men who worked in it. Through his vivid imagery and emotional storytelling, McColl paints a picture of a way of life that has long since disappeared, but remains an important part of the cultural heritage of Scotland.
In this thesis, we will delve deeper into the origins and meaning of Shoals of Herring, exploring the historical and cultural context in which it was written, as well as its impact on the folk music scene and society as a whole. We will also examine the song's enduring relevance, and how it continues to be a powerful symbol of the working class and their struggles.
Ewan McColl was a prolific songwriter and folk singer who was deeply passionate about preserving traditional folk music and using it as a medium to tell stories of the common people. Born in 1915 in Salford, England, McColl grew up in a working-class family and was exposed to folk music from a young age. He was a self-taught musician and became a prominent figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. McColl's songs often reflected his strong political and social views, and he used his music to shed light on important issues such as poverty, inequality, and the struggles of the working class.
Shoals of Herring was written by McColl in 1960 for a BBC radio program called 'Singing the Fishing.' The program aimed to document the traditional songs of the fishing communities in Scotland and was part of a larger project to preserve the cultural heritage of these communities before it disappeared. The song was based on McColl's own experiences as a young man, working as a fisherman in the North Sea. He had witnessed firsthand the harsh and dangerous conditions that the fishermen endured, and the toll it took on their physical and mental well-being.
The lyrics of Shoals of Herring are a poignant and powerful portrayal of the life of a fisherman. McColl's use of vivid imagery and descriptive language paints a vivid picture of the rough seas, the long and grueling hours, and the camaraderie among the men. The chorus, 'Oh, the summer time is coming, and the trees are sweetly blooming, and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather,' is a stark contrast to the reality of the fishermen's lives, highlighting the sacrifices they make to provide for their families. The song also touches on the cyclical nature of the fishing industry, with the line 'With our nets and gear we're faring, on the wild and wasteful ocean.'
One of the reasons Shoals of Herring has endured in popularity is its universal themes and relatable lyrics. The struggles of the working class, the harsh realities of labor, and the sacrifices made for the sake of providing for loved ones are issues that are still relevant today. The song also serves as a reminder of the disappearing way of life in the fishing communities of Scotland. As technology and industrialization have taken over, the traditional methods of fishing have been replaced, and the tight-knit communities that once thrived have been scattered.
The song's impact on the folk music scene and society as a whole cannot be overstated. It has been covered by numerous artists, including Johnny Cash, The Dubliners, and The Corries, among others. It has also been used in films, documentaries, and theater productions, further cementing its place in popular culture. Shoals of Herring has become an anthem for the working class, and its powerful message has resonated with listeners from all walks of life.
In conclusion, Shoals of Herring is a timeless folk song that has stood the test of time and remains as relevant today as it was when it was first written. Through his powerful storytelling and emotional lyrics, Ewan McColl has captured the essence of a way of life that has all but disappeared, but remains an important part of Scotland's cultural heritage. The song serves as a reminder of the struggles and sacrifices of the working class, and its enduring popularity is a testament to its universal themes and the enduring impact of traditional folk music. Shoals of Herring will continue to be a beloved and influential song for generations to come, keeping alive the memory of a way of life that once was.
In this thesis, we will delve deeper into the origins and meaning of Shoals of Herring, exploring the historical and cultural context in which it was written, as well as its impact on the folk music scene and society as a whole. We will also examine the song's enduring relevance, and how it continues to be a powerful symbol of the working class and their struggles.
Ewan McColl was a prolific songwriter and folk singer who was deeply passionate about preserving traditional folk music and using it as a medium to tell stories of the common people. Born in 1915 in Salford, England, McColl grew up in a working-class family and was exposed to folk music from a young age. He was a self-taught musician and became a prominent figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. McColl's songs often reflected his strong political and social views, and he used his music to shed light on important issues such as poverty, inequality, and the struggles of the working class.
Shoals of Herring was written by McColl in 1960 for a BBC radio program called 'Singing the Fishing.' The program aimed to document the traditional songs of the fishing communities in Scotland and was part of a larger project to preserve the cultural heritage of these communities before it disappeared. The song was based on McColl's own experiences as a young man, working as a fisherman in the North Sea. He had witnessed firsthand the harsh and dangerous conditions that the fishermen endured, and the toll it took on their physical and mental well-being.
The lyrics of Shoals of Herring are a poignant and powerful portrayal of the life of a fisherman. McColl's use of vivid imagery and descriptive language paints a vivid picture of the rough seas, the long and grueling hours, and the camaraderie among the men. The chorus, 'Oh, the summer time is coming, and the trees are sweetly blooming, and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather,' is a stark contrast to the reality of the fishermen's lives, highlighting the sacrifices they make to provide for their families. The song also touches on the cyclical nature of the fishing industry, with the line 'With our nets and gear we're faring, on the wild and wasteful ocean.'
One of the reasons Shoals of Herring has endured in popularity is its universal themes and relatable lyrics. The struggles of the working class, the harsh realities of labor, and the sacrifices made for the sake of providing for loved ones are issues that are still relevant today. The song also serves as a reminder of the disappearing way of life in the fishing communities of Scotland. As technology and industrialization have taken over, the traditional methods of fishing have been replaced, and the tight-knit communities that once thrived have been scattered.
The song's impact on the folk music scene and society as a whole cannot be overstated. It has been covered by numerous artists, including Johnny Cash, The Dubliners, and The Corries, among others. It has also been used in films, documentaries, and theater productions, further cementing its place in popular culture. Shoals of Herring has become an anthem for the working class, and its powerful message has resonated with listeners from all walks of life.
In conclusion, Shoals of Herring is a timeless folk song that has stood the test of time and remains as relevant today as it was when it was first written. Through his powerful storytelling and emotional lyrics, Ewan McColl has captured the essence of a way of life that has all but disappeared, but remains an important part of Scotland's cultural heritage. The song serves as a reminder of the struggles and sacrifices of the working class, and its enduring popularity is a testament to its universal themes and the enduring impact of traditional folk music. Shoals of Herring will continue to be a beloved and influential song for generations to come, keeping alive the memory of a way of life that once was.
Llewyn Davis singing Shoals Of Herring
Below is the ebook list of Irish Folk Songs with guitar chords
in 3 keys. Price €8.90 and I'll email the ebook after purchase .
The chords are suited to ukulele, banjo or mandolin also.
Martin
in 3 keys. Price €8.90 and I'll email the ebook after purchase .
The chords are suited to ukulele, banjo or mandolin also.
Martin
Below is taken from filims made about Ewan McColl
can i say on this evening it's a pleasure and a privilege to be present at this birthday celebration and present this special miner's lamp to someone like you McCall who has made an outstanding contribution not only to folk music but the working-class movement Ewan Mccall writer composer actor playwright folk singer educator romantic and Stalinist celebrated his 70th birthday this year folk fans refugees from the singing 60s striking miners reformed hippies and retired revolutionaries gathered to pay tribute to the daddy of the folk revival come on your gallon drivers wherever you may be whether you drive or you play door to 54 rp and take it nice and steady boys up the wrong way here in the singers club London which he runs with his wife Peggy Sieger and their family in a fundraising concert for striking shipyard workers in
Liverpool and in a birthday gala performance in the royal festival hall Ewan Mccall looks back in words and music on 70 years of struggle against bosses black legs policemen and the unmusical now we're going nice and steady boys do well both my parents were were Scots my father came from Sterlingshire my mother from Perthshire from akhtarando they were working people but both of them sang both of them had good repertories of traditional songs and a lot of other songs too you know music hall and and street songs and so on um my father was the son of a an ad molder he himself was an iron molder his grandfather had been an iron holder and of course he grew up in that part of Scotland where which is the classic soil of the of the iron industry and around about that time he fell under the influence of john Mclean who was the great Scottish revolutionary leader a friend of Lenin's
a protege of Lenin's in actual fact he would come home from work on a Saturday and he would sit there and after he had his meal he would sit there in his in his moleskins his small skin trousers with his galaxies his braces looped down with his feet up on the on the hump and he'd usually had a few drinks and he would sing a whistle my old man was a good old man skilled at the moulding train in the stinking heat of the iron foundry my old man was made down on his knees in the mold in sand he wore his trade like a company brand one of the cyclops smoky band yes that was my old man my old man wasn't really old it was just that i was young and anybody over 12 years old was halfway to the tomb he was loyal to his workmates all his life gave his pay packet to his wife had a few jars on a saturday night yes that was my old man
my old man was a union man who'd had all his he days the system and was wise to the boss's ways he said if you want what yours by right you'll have to struggle with all your might they'll rub your blind if you don't find some bath with my own fan my old man was a proud old man at home on the foundry floor until the day they paid him off and showed him to the door they gave him his card said things are slack and we've got a machine can learn the knack of doing your job so don't come back the end of my old man my old man he was 51. what was he to do a craftsman molder on the doll in 1932 he felt he'd given what he could give so he did what thousands of others did
abandoned hope and the will to live they killed him my old man my old man he is dead and gone now i am your old man and my advise to you my son is to fight back while you can watch out for the man with a silly come chip hold on to your job with a good firm grip because if you don't kill of that your chips the same as my old man blacklisted in Scotland Mccall's father moved the family to Salford Lancashire where Ewan went to school and his father found a different means of self-education he used to go along to a place in Salford that we used to go to called hindman hall later called the workers arts club and this workers arts club had a snooker table on the first floor and a bar on the second floor it had a little dancehall and on the third floor he had a boxing ring the workers arts club and uh he um would go there and he'd stand at the bar and he's saying he's singing eating a song like the Derry dance of yarrow 14 or 15 verses and the snow cover players would stop playing and they'd be
no longer the click of balls when he sang you know and this is a this is a ballad dealing with a 17th century incident in a in a place that had no more than a dozen inhabitants you know can you remember any of it oh yeah we went there was a lady in the north heinen could find her she was coated by nine gentlemen and a flu boy lad freya and so on long slow ballad and he'd capture them completely my father wasn't only interested in singing however uh in the trade union move but he was interested in in in politics in in a really profound way and he wasn't the only one of his particular group they represent a kind of a kind of of small perhaps very narrow community that has ceased to exist they're the they were the last remnants i suppose of that uh of the kind of working men who were produced in the final days of the
first industrial revolution and of that great political revolution which followed on the industrial revolution which started in 1848 and went on building up and building up which produced the chartist movement in Britain and later produced the great series of working-class movements and I've already said that he was he was brought into politics so to speak by John Mcclane but he went on reading he went on exploring the exploring ideas right until the the last days of his life and when i was a young fellow when i was say 14 or 15. i used to go along to the workers arts club and even earlier too and there would be a circle of men that would include my father old men i thought of them at that time there were men in their 40s and 50s and jock smiley and jack Williams and jimmy tillbrook and uh bill savage and a whole lot of others and they'd sit there with their pint
mugs in their hand and two-thirds of them unemployed and they'd sit and they'd argue they'd argue philosophical points somebody had would bring a volume of deep skin or a fireback and somebody had red angles antifa Bach and they would argue by the hour about these things you know and it was perhaps no accident that when my father brought me books from the second-hand bookstores that there were books like heckles hickles riddle of the universe and Darwin's descent of man and so on and they also numbered among among their their ranks people who could quote passages from Robert Ingersoll's books Ingersoll of course was the great kind of rational American rationalist like a writer they knew they argued about tom Paine as though Tom Paine was a kind of contemporary of theirs one of them was constantly bringing up passages from volney's ruins of empires volney was the historian to the napoleon the first these were kind of these were a brand of working-class intellectual that was interested in all kinds of things
so that that too was part of my background so on the one hand i was being i was fortunate in growing up in a family where there was a there's where there still existed even in this in the heart of this gigantic slum where there still existed a real living folk culture on the one hand and also a realization that politics was important to us politics was absolutely central to our lives this is what my father always taught you know people who were not interested in politics my father i was he dismissed as just one of evolution's failures you would say just one of evolution's failures he applied this to policemen scabs and people uninterested in politics and by politics he meant communism he meant his politics yes he meant yes i suppose he meant communism now my mother she came south from her part of Scotland to she worked at various jobs for a time she was a maid in a in a minister's house in Glasgow during periods when my father was unemployed my old lady would would take in washing and the house was always filled with the
with the smell of hot linen and of wash tubs so that I would come home from school i must have been five or six or seven about this period i remember coming home in the autumn or the winter period and going in and she'd obviously been ironing a long time she was standing there in our kitchen at the table ironing and the light had gone and she hadn't bothered to to to light the gas but there was enough light from the fire and she's standing in the fire line she's the iron is going monotonously backward and forward and her voice is there matching it you know singing songs like the like the the brewer the brewer's daughter for example or one i remember particularly she always used to sing when she was i knew sir heather grows a metal us we had lambs and use the lambs came frescoin out of the nose and the moon was shining clearly and it was a very hypnotic tune and it captured my my imagination and although
i never uh was conscious of learning it i did i found i knew the song when later on in life when somebody called the title to mind i thought i know that song sure enough i knew it right through and the same with the brewer's daughter that one that i sang the other night that how's it go oh I've forgotten as through a story as you shall hear up to London she has gone to look for service and she's found one yeah if i just sing that stanza i can recall the smell of hot leather uh it's a very it's a very uh singular smell what's that other one that we were doing there my mother had a remarkably true voice that is she could keep pitch uh over long long periods of time uh even when she got old she managed to be able to always to sing and pitch
around about 1971 uh when we were visiting his home in beacon in New York made a home movie of us singing and again she never loses pitch her voice is gone is a bit quavery it's weak but it's still absolutely pure still true and then the Disney light gets scorched my relationship with Salford ever since I left has been a love-hate one i can't bear the place the idea of going back there and at the same time everything I do everything I've ever written uh is to some extent informed by by my experience in Salford '' Dirty Old Town Song'' we were poor because we grew up in a landscape where everything offended the eye the houses were unending lines when i lived in them a blackened brick two up and two downs facing each other across 28 feet of cobbles one street was exactly like the one next to it and the one next to that and so on two streets away from us was the erwell where if you fell in the oh well you
didn't drown you were poisoned this was the local kind of folklore uh on the bottom of our street or the street which was the continuation continuation of our street was the canal the canal was a kind of a quiet oleogenous kind of sump for the town with a scum of of colored oil and grease dead dogs floating upside down occasionally the police would come and the kids would climb the wall to the canal if they could get there without being seen in line watch the police drag their grappling hands and fetch a suicide out you know it was that kind of a place on the other side you could walk along the canal bank and on the other side it was lined with factories which had been built around about the 1780s 1790s a glassworks a small mill a finishing mill a bleaching place and all giving off their own individual smells this is the thing i remember most about Salford every area had its smell for instance that regent road area where the cattle market was situated you close your eyes you you didn't need to be told you were there you could smell the pigs
and you could smell the cattle you know and I learned I walked Salford from the time i was 14 to the time i was 18 i would guess and a lot of the time i did this with a with a mate of mine a fella called bob goodman who who lived in briggs street in Salford bob and i used to walk around the town and we'd say that's the place where Engels mentions in that letter to marx that he wrote on October the 13th 1874 or whatever you know say no we have an argument about this are we walking through artwork you say oh that's the mill that's mentioned in the conditional working class in late 1834. that's the one that he says about so and so so in a way uh not only was Salford and Manchester ours in the sense that we knew its history and we we knew its working class history in particular but also engels was ours he was a buddy he was a mate we loved old Friedrich you know because he walked the same streets that we'd walked he'd looked on the same factories in the same mills that we were looking at you know knew the same kind of people and when we discovered
we became very very ardent ramblers hikers and rock climbers bob and i and when we learned that Engels had used to take his girlfriend kitty O'Shea to stay at a little place just outside marple you can't believe how how excited we were you know at this here was one of the great philosophers of the of the 19th century and he was our mate and did the kind of things that we did you know so that uh as i say that in spite of the poverty of the surroundings in spite of the bleakness of Salford itself there was a kind of life in us that that made us impervious to these things in a way i used to walk down when i was about 15 and 16 and kind of with the special kind of loneliness that a male adolescent has for women for girls you know when all your thoughts are of girls when you walk around all the time in a kind of daze imagining the things that could happen to you and that never happened to i'd walk through salford at night on a moonlight night and see the moon reflected on the gray slates they looked
like pewter like polish pewter and the moon kind of riding rising above the city down silk street with his past the boots's factory my factory and then past the on the other side of the miller uh road a derelict mill kind of half vandalized and so on right now and then through rows and rows of the kind of houses i lived in and you could literally feel the sleep in those houses you could feel it was palpable and i used to think all these places filled with people like me dreaming dreaming you know why do we put up with it why do they put it and i used to think that all these books I'm reading i used to go to the library and i used to think I'm going to write Balzac and Dostoyevsky into my name you know and Salford was my Paris it was and the the unemployed blokes honey this one was resting yeah and that one was lucian durapombre all the characters out of the human comedy i saw as my as the people i were meeting i was meeting every day on the streets of Sulphur
i met my girl on the gas works crawl dreamed a dream by the old canal kissed my girl by the factory wall dirty on town old town dirty old town dirty old town clouds are drifting across the springs a girl in the street at night dirty old town um I'm going to make a down like an old dead tree dirty old town dirty old town
after the general strike my father was in and out of work pretty much all the time and consequently my mother had to go out working for a period and for a period we took in lodges and i can remember a long succession of lodges but one of them a fellow called Charlie Harrison uh who came to live with us made a very deep impression on me he was a a very ascetic bloke and every day i used to go have to go out and buy four ounces of of Cheshire cheese and a small hovis loaf and that was he that he lived on that that was his diet and he wouldn't take any of the things my mother offered him god knows we were poor we were really on the edge all the time but no he wouldn't he'd set himself a regimen of this but he was there around about the time i was coming up to leave school i left school on the day i was 14 no the week i was 14. i was 14 on the Tuesday and i left on the Friday but anyway Charlie's uh he was mad on on on opera and he had an
old wind-up gramophone and the only luxury allowed himself was a Saturday morning when he would play the whole of the paliachi right through on these old Columbia 78 discs you know and i learned the whole of that opera and i used to do i used to i used to do conversions of it to all my mates you know this evening at seven o'clock i invite you to see our performance i know it will delight you we'll show you the troubles up for punching hello and the vengeance he freaked on a treacherous fellow antonio the clown with his big corporation that strange combination of love and of hate so come then and honor us we'll all be delighted a seven-year-old invited but seven we're invited well I'll be delighted say when you drink with me i measure they sell goodly cut out the time and yonder and so on I'd sing all the parts you see and Charlie heard me doing this now and he may have been a little incensed i don't know but he says you know you're a good mimic you ought to be in a you ought to be doing theater work the red megaphones was the first of a varied clutch of street theater groups in which the young Mccall played out the coming revolution the idea was that we would we would
write our own sketches or we would take sketches from anybody who had suitable material and we would perform wherever there was a flat space on which to stand and this meant we were available for performing in the streets uh if we were allowed to perform in the streets or in public parks or wherever you know and then we did one on meerut which we didn't ride which we we got from the we affiliated that's right to the workers theater movement and they sent a script on mira which was about the strike of the Germany kamgar railway union in India in 1931 I think it was and the leaders of that strike were imprisoned and given ferocious sentences life sentences in some place and this sketch that we had was absolutely perfectly suited to street theater it could be performed by four or six people and we all by this time were wearing the same kind of uniform that is brown khaki shirts and bib and brace overalls we were based on the German blue blouse groups and these were many of them and they were very powerful they were very skillful and all the rest of it we were not skillful and there weren't many of us but we were a blue blouse group and
all you needed for me were four poles broom handles would do and uh no not four yes four four poles and you would go to the place where you were going to perform and two of you would kneel down and you would put the poles vertically in front of you holding them like that the other two would have them at the horizontal so that they'd form prison bars and you started the thing it was a mass declaration India everybody would say in every state in British India the police and troops are out to crush the rising tide of revolt against the vile conditions voice India the brightest the brightest jewel in Britain's crown and so it went on you know finishing with hands across the sea and everybody would put their hands through the bars it was a plea for international solidarity hiking was the was the great sport of the of young workers in in in the north of England in that period and young unemployed in particular who had to sign on maybe twice a week could go out for three and four days at a time and live really cheaply off the land on of what they
could lift you know in the way of potatoes grouse that they could take from the moors in the in the season and so on and um unfortunately the great areas of derby show that were the best for walking that is the high peak of the the kinder area and bleaklow moors were and are privately owned although these days of course there's roots across them but at that time if you dared to go onto the moors you were liable to to for imprisonment and so on so but we did go on we went every week great masses of people went on every weekend and spent their time dodging keepers and all the rest okay so they'd be assaulted and beaten up occasionally they'd go to court and have to pay heavy fines well we wanted the thing clarified we wanted access to those moors so we organized a mass trespass i remember on that particular that particular campaign i was the publicity uh organizer and i remember writing a long hand laborious letters we're having a mess trespass you're welcome to come you know take pictures and um
the day arrived and to our absolute astonishment about 3 000 hikers turned up and it was a wonderful sight at hayfield uh to see all these young kids you know of whom i was one people from between the ages of 15 and maybe 25. uh all in their hiking gear with rucksacks other burgers on their backs and climbing heavy boots on you know shorts making their way in a great column up to up to kinder and then up over over a ship head well there was a a line of keepers about every five yards along the first ridge with sticks and we got there and we formed a small kind of arrowhead and just went right through them and they closed in but there were more of us coming up behind we closed on them and then there was a running fight went on but we actually got across the upshot of it was that for the rest of the day whenever we as soon as we got down onto the roads the police were there in huge numbers they brought them from castle from from south Derbyshire from from places like darby they brought from the nottingham show from leicester
and north Yorkshire all over the place and they they had some of them with big African borehounds i remember that were there to terrify us you know and indeed they did and they rested half a dozen and they were sentenced to uh to sentences ranging from i think from 18 months to five months I'm not absolutely sure about that but it was a tremendous struggle and indeed as a result of that struggle the access to mountains was brought forward years i think that mass trespass did more to bring access to mountains than the hundred years of speech-making had done let's try the chorus first have slept up on crowden have camped by the rainstorms as well I've sunbathed on kinda been burned to a cinder and many more things i can tell
my rucksack is off in my pillow the heather has up in my bed
and soon haven't bought from the mountains
can i say on this evening it's a pleasure and a privilege to be present at this birthday celebration and present this special miner's lamp to someone like you McCall who has made an outstanding contribution not only to folk music but the working-class movement Ewan Mccall writer composer actor playwright folk singer educator romantic and Stalinist celebrated his 70th birthday this year folk fans refugees from the singing 60s striking miners reformed hippies and retired revolutionaries gathered to pay tribute to the daddy of the folk revival come on your gallon drivers wherever you may be whether you drive or you play door to 54 rp and take it nice and steady boys up the wrong way here in the singers club London which he runs with his wife Peggy Sieger and their family in a fundraising concert for striking shipyard workers in
Liverpool and in a birthday gala performance in the royal festival hall Ewan Mccall looks back in words and music on 70 years of struggle against bosses black legs policemen and the unmusical now we're going nice and steady boys do well both my parents were were Scots my father came from Sterlingshire my mother from Perthshire from akhtarando they were working people but both of them sang both of them had good repertories of traditional songs and a lot of other songs too you know music hall and and street songs and so on um my father was the son of a an ad molder he himself was an iron molder his grandfather had been an iron holder and of course he grew up in that part of Scotland where which is the classic soil of the of the iron industry and around about that time he fell under the influence of john Mclean who was the great Scottish revolutionary leader a friend of Lenin's
a protege of Lenin's in actual fact he would come home from work on a Saturday and he would sit there and after he had his meal he would sit there in his in his moleskins his small skin trousers with his galaxies his braces looped down with his feet up on the on the hump and he'd usually had a few drinks and he would sing a whistle my old man was a good old man skilled at the moulding train in the stinking heat of the iron foundry my old man was made down on his knees in the mold in sand he wore his trade like a company brand one of the cyclops smoky band yes that was my old man my old man wasn't really old it was just that i was young and anybody over 12 years old was halfway to the tomb he was loyal to his workmates all his life gave his pay packet to his wife had a few jars on a saturday night yes that was my old man
my old man was a union man who'd had all his he days the system and was wise to the boss's ways he said if you want what yours by right you'll have to struggle with all your might they'll rub your blind if you don't find some bath with my own fan my old man was a proud old man at home on the foundry floor until the day they paid him off and showed him to the door they gave him his card said things are slack and we've got a machine can learn the knack of doing your job so don't come back the end of my old man my old man he was 51. what was he to do a craftsman molder on the doll in 1932 he felt he'd given what he could give so he did what thousands of others did
abandoned hope and the will to live they killed him my old man my old man he is dead and gone now i am your old man and my advise to you my son is to fight back while you can watch out for the man with a silly come chip hold on to your job with a good firm grip because if you don't kill of that your chips the same as my old man blacklisted in Scotland Mccall's father moved the family to Salford Lancashire where Ewan went to school and his father found a different means of self-education he used to go along to a place in Salford that we used to go to called hindman hall later called the workers arts club and this workers arts club had a snooker table on the first floor and a bar on the second floor it had a little dancehall and on the third floor he had a boxing ring the workers arts club and uh he um would go there and he'd stand at the bar and he's saying he's singing eating a song like the Derry dance of yarrow 14 or 15 verses and the snow cover players would stop playing and they'd be
no longer the click of balls when he sang you know and this is a this is a ballad dealing with a 17th century incident in a in a place that had no more than a dozen inhabitants you know can you remember any of it oh yeah we went there was a lady in the north heinen could find her she was coated by nine gentlemen and a flu boy lad freya and so on long slow ballad and he'd capture them completely my father wasn't only interested in singing however uh in the trade union move but he was interested in in in politics in in a really profound way and he wasn't the only one of his particular group they represent a kind of a kind of of small perhaps very narrow community that has ceased to exist they're the they were the last remnants i suppose of that uh of the kind of working men who were produced in the final days of the
first industrial revolution and of that great political revolution which followed on the industrial revolution which started in 1848 and went on building up and building up which produced the chartist movement in Britain and later produced the great series of working-class movements and I've already said that he was he was brought into politics so to speak by John Mcclane but he went on reading he went on exploring the exploring ideas right until the the last days of his life and when i was a young fellow when i was say 14 or 15. i used to go along to the workers arts club and even earlier too and there would be a circle of men that would include my father old men i thought of them at that time there were men in their 40s and 50s and jock smiley and jack Williams and jimmy tillbrook and uh bill savage and a whole lot of others and they'd sit there with their pint
mugs in their hand and two-thirds of them unemployed and they'd sit and they'd argue they'd argue philosophical points somebody had would bring a volume of deep skin or a fireback and somebody had red angles antifa Bach and they would argue by the hour about these things you know and it was perhaps no accident that when my father brought me books from the second-hand bookstores that there were books like heckles hickles riddle of the universe and Darwin's descent of man and so on and they also numbered among among their their ranks people who could quote passages from Robert Ingersoll's books Ingersoll of course was the great kind of rational American rationalist like a writer they knew they argued about tom Paine as though Tom Paine was a kind of contemporary of theirs one of them was constantly bringing up passages from volney's ruins of empires volney was the historian to the napoleon the first these were kind of these were a brand of working-class intellectual that was interested in all kinds of things
so that that too was part of my background so on the one hand i was being i was fortunate in growing up in a family where there was a there's where there still existed even in this in the heart of this gigantic slum where there still existed a real living folk culture on the one hand and also a realization that politics was important to us politics was absolutely central to our lives this is what my father always taught you know people who were not interested in politics my father i was he dismissed as just one of evolution's failures you would say just one of evolution's failures he applied this to policemen scabs and people uninterested in politics and by politics he meant communism he meant his politics yes he meant yes i suppose he meant communism now my mother she came south from her part of Scotland to she worked at various jobs for a time she was a maid in a in a minister's house in Glasgow during periods when my father was unemployed my old lady would would take in washing and the house was always filled with the
with the smell of hot linen and of wash tubs so that I would come home from school i must have been five or six or seven about this period i remember coming home in the autumn or the winter period and going in and she'd obviously been ironing a long time she was standing there in our kitchen at the table ironing and the light had gone and she hadn't bothered to to to light the gas but there was enough light from the fire and she's standing in the fire line she's the iron is going monotonously backward and forward and her voice is there matching it you know singing songs like the like the the brewer the brewer's daughter for example or one i remember particularly she always used to sing when she was i knew sir heather grows a metal us we had lambs and use the lambs came frescoin out of the nose and the moon was shining clearly and it was a very hypnotic tune and it captured my my imagination and although
i never uh was conscious of learning it i did i found i knew the song when later on in life when somebody called the title to mind i thought i know that song sure enough i knew it right through and the same with the brewer's daughter that one that i sang the other night that how's it go oh I've forgotten as through a story as you shall hear up to London she has gone to look for service and she's found one yeah if i just sing that stanza i can recall the smell of hot leather uh it's a very it's a very uh singular smell what's that other one that we were doing there my mother had a remarkably true voice that is she could keep pitch uh over long long periods of time uh even when she got old she managed to be able to always to sing and pitch
around about 1971 uh when we were visiting his home in beacon in New York made a home movie of us singing and again she never loses pitch her voice is gone is a bit quavery it's weak but it's still absolutely pure still true and then the Disney light gets scorched my relationship with Salford ever since I left has been a love-hate one i can't bear the place the idea of going back there and at the same time everything I do everything I've ever written uh is to some extent informed by by my experience in Salford '' Dirty Old Town Song'' we were poor because we grew up in a landscape where everything offended the eye the houses were unending lines when i lived in them a blackened brick two up and two downs facing each other across 28 feet of cobbles one street was exactly like the one next to it and the one next to that and so on two streets away from us was the erwell where if you fell in the oh well you
didn't drown you were poisoned this was the local kind of folklore uh on the bottom of our street or the street which was the continuation continuation of our street was the canal the canal was a kind of a quiet oleogenous kind of sump for the town with a scum of of colored oil and grease dead dogs floating upside down occasionally the police would come and the kids would climb the wall to the canal if they could get there without being seen in line watch the police drag their grappling hands and fetch a suicide out you know it was that kind of a place on the other side you could walk along the canal bank and on the other side it was lined with factories which had been built around about the 1780s 1790s a glassworks a small mill a finishing mill a bleaching place and all giving off their own individual smells this is the thing i remember most about Salford every area had its smell for instance that regent road area where the cattle market was situated you close your eyes you you didn't need to be told you were there you could smell the pigs
and you could smell the cattle you know and I learned I walked Salford from the time i was 14 to the time i was 18 i would guess and a lot of the time i did this with a with a mate of mine a fella called bob goodman who who lived in briggs street in Salford bob and i used to walk around the town and we'd say that's the place where Engels mentions in that letter to marx that he wrote on October the 13th 1874 or whatever you know say no we have an argument about this are we walking through artwork you say oh that's the mill that's mentioned in the conditional working class in late 1834. that's the one that he says about so and so so in a way uh not only was Salford and Manchester ours in the sense that we knew its history and we we knew its working class history in particular but also engels was ours he was a buddy he was a mate we loved old Friedrich you know because he walked the same streets that we'd walked he'd looked on the same factories in the same mills that we were looking at you know knew the same kind of people and when we discovered
we became very very ardent ramblers hikers and rock climbers bob and i and when we learned that Engels had used to take his girlfriend kitty O'Shea to stay at a little place just outside marple you can't believe how how excited we were you know at this here was one of the great philosophers of the of the 19th century and he was our mate and did the kind of things that we did you know so that uh as i say that in spite of the poverty of the surroundings in spite of the bleakness of Salford itself there was a kind of life in us that that made us impervious to these things in a way i used to walk down when i was about 15 and 16 and kind of with the special kind of loneliness that a male adolescent has for women for girls you know when all your thoughts are of girls when you walk around all the time in a kind of daze imagining the things that could happen to you and that never happened to i'd walk through salford at night on a moonlight night and see the moon reflected on the gray slates they looked
like pewter like polish pewter and the moon kind of riding rising above the city down silk street with his past the boots's factory my factory and then past the on the other side of the miller uh road a derelict mill kind of half vandalized and so on right now and then through rows and rows of the kind of houses i lived in and you could literally feel the sleep in those houses you could feel it was palpable and i used to think all these places filled with people like me dreaming dreaming you know why do we put up with it why do they put it and i used to think that all these books I'm reading i used to go to the library and i used to think I'm going to write Balzac and Dostoyevsky into my name you know and Salford was my Paris it was and the the unemployed blokes honey this one was resting yeah and that one was lucian durapombre all the characters out of the human comedy i saw as my as the people i were meeting i was meeting every day on the streets of Sulphur
i met my girl on the gas works crawl dreamed a dream by the old canal kissed my girl by the factory wall dirty on town old town dirty old town dirty old town clouds are drifting across the springs a girl in the street at night dirty old town um I'm going to make a down like an old dead tree dirty old town dirty old town
after the general strike my father was in and out of work pretty much all the time and consequently my mother had to go out working for a period and for a period we took in lodges and i can remember a long succession of lodges but one of them a fellow called Charlie Harrison uh who came to live with us made a very deep impression on me he was a a very ascetic bloke and every day i used to go have to go out and buy four ounces of of Cheshire cheese and a small hovis loaf and that was he that he lived on that that was his diet and he wouldn't take any of the things my mother offered him god knows we were poor we were really on the edge all the time but no he wouldn't he'd set himself a regimen of this but he was there around about the time i was coming up to leave school i left school on the day i was 14 no the week i was 14. i was 14 on the Tuesday and i left on the Friday but anyway Charlie's uh he was mad on on on opera and he had an
old wind-up gramophone and the only luxury allowed himself was a Saturday morning when he would play the whole of the paliachi right through on these old Columbia 78 discs you know and i learned the whole of that opera and i used to do i used to i used to do conversions of it to all my mates you know this evening at seven o'clock i invite you to see our performance i know it will delight you we'll show you the troubles up for punching hello and the vengeance he freaked on a treacherous fellow antonio the clown with his big corporation that strange combination of love and of hate so come then and honor us we'll all be delighted a seven-year-old invited but seven we're invited well I'll be delighted say when you drink with me i measure they sell goodly cut out the time and yonder and so on I'd sing all the parts you see and Charlie heard me doing this now and he may have been a little incensed i don't know but he says you know you're a good mimic you ought to be in a you ought to be doing theater work the red megaphones was the first of a varied clutch of street theater groups in which the young Mccall played out the coming revolution the idea was that we would we would
write our own sketches or we would take sketches from anybody who had suitable material and we would perform wherever there was a flat space on which to stand and this meant we were available for performing in the streets uh if we were allowed to perform in the streets or in public parks or wherever you know and then we did one on meerut which we didn't ride which we we got from the we affiliated that's right to the workers theater movement and they sent a script on mira which was about the strike of the Germany kamgar railway union in India in 1931 I think it was and the leaders of that strike were imprisoned and given ferocious sentences life sentences in some place and this sketch that we had was absolutely perfectly suited to street theater it could be performed by four or six people and we all by this time were wearing the same kind of uniform that is brown khaki shirts and bib and brace overalls we were based on the German blue blouse groups and these were many of them and they were very powerful they were very skillful and all the rest of it we were not skillful and there weren't many of us but we were a blue blouse group and
all you needed for me were four poles broom handles would do and uh no not four yes four four poles and you would go to the place where you were going to perform and two of you would kneel down and you would put the poles vertically in front of you holding them like that the other two would have them at the horizontal so that they'd form prison bars and you started the thing it was a mass declaration India everybody would say in every state in British India the police and troops are out to crush the rising tide of revolt against the vile conditions voice India the brightest the brightest jewel in Britain's crown and so it went on you know finishing with hands across the sea and everybody would put their hands through the bars it was a plea for international solidarity hiking was the was the great sport of the of young workers in in in the north of England in that period and young unemployed in particular who had to sign on maybe twice a week could go out for three and four days at a time and live really cheaply off the land on of what they
could lift you know in the way of potatoes grouse that they could take from the moors in the in the season and so on and um unfortunately the great areas of derby show that were the best for walking that is the high peak of the the kinder area and bleaklow moors were and are privately owned although these days of course there's roots across them but at that time if you dared to go onto the moors you were liable to to for imprisonment and so on so but we did go on we went every week great masses of people went on every weekend and spent their time dodging keepers and all the rest okay so they'd be assaulted and beaten up occasionally they'd go to court and have to pay heavy fines well we wanted the thing clarified we wanted access to those moors so we organized a mass trespass i remember on that particular that particular campaign i was the publicity uh organizer and i remember writing a long hand laborious letters we're having a mess trespass you're welcome to come you know take pictures and um
the day arrived and to our absolute astonishment about 3 000 hikers turned up and it was a wonderful sight at hayfield uh to see all these young kids you know of whom i was one people from between the ages of 15 and maybe 25. uh all in their hiking gear with rucksacks other burgers on their backs and climbing heavy boots on you know shorts making their way in a great column up to up to kinder and then up over over a ship head well there was a a line of keepers about every five yards along the first ridge with sticks and we got there and we formed a small kind of arrowhead and just went right through them and they closed in but there were more of us coming up behind we closed on them and then there was a running fight went on but we actually got across the upshot of it was that for the rest of the day whenever we as soon as we got down onto the roads the police were there in huge numbers they brought them from castle from from south Derbyshire from from places like darby they brought from the nottingham show from leicester
and north Yorkshire all over the place and they they had some of them with big African borehounds i remember that were there to terrify us you know and indeed they did and they rested half a dozen and they were sentenced to uh to sentences ranging from i think from 18 months to five months I'm not absolutely sure about that but it was a tremendous struggle and indeed as a result of that struggle the access to mountains was brought forward years i think that mass trespass did more to bring access to mountains than the hundred years of speech-making had done let's try the chorus first have slept up on crowden have camped by the rainstorms as well I've sunbathed on kinda been burned to a cinder and many more things i can tell
my rucksack is off in my pillow the heather has up in my bed
and soon haven't bought from the mountains
