Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)

Subject: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: wdyat12
Date: 15 Mar 01 - 02:07 AM

"John Meredith, best known for his pioneering collection of folk song, died on 16 February 2001." Did I miss that thread? I just found out that John died from the Australian Folk Songs site:

http://crixa.com/muse/songnet/merro.html

Sorry to hear the news a month late.

wdyat12

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: katlaughing
Date: 15 Mar 01 - 02:13 AM

A quick check and it looks as though we all missed, as I didn't find any threads about it. Sure seems like we are losing a lot of the treasures this year. It's too bad.

Thanks,

kat

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: aussiebloke
Date: 15 Mar 01 - 11:26 PM

Anyone that plays (played) a lagerphone is OK with me, and John Meredith did it first.

Vale John Meredith...

Photo and info here.

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: wdyat12
Date: 16 Mar 01 - 04:06 AM

aussiebloke,

Thank you for sharing more of John's life with Mudcat. That is a great site you just linked. Are you related to John?

wdyat12

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: aussiebloke
Date: 16 Mar 01 - 10:12 AM

Hi wdyat12

Nope, not related in the usuakl sense of the word - never met the man.

Unless, you believe in musos being 'related' via 'the universal brotherhood & sisterhood of musicians'...

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Helen
Date: 16 Mar 01 - 06:22 PM

It was John Meredith's book Folk Songs of Australia, co-atuhored with Hugh Anderson in 1967, which got me started in a lifelong interest in folk music.

I first found it at the local public library when I was in my second year of high school. Lucky for me that library takes 20 years or so to throw out its books so I borrowed it repeatedly over the next decade. Now I have my own copy which I salvaged from a library sale at another public library, and when I worked in yet another public library system I discovered that volume 2 was available so I bought that as well.

I don't know what to say to fully express my gratitude for the work done by John Meredith in collecting and preserving Oz folk and traditional music, and especially my gratitude for turning me on to folk music. There were other people who helped to get me interested but I seriously suspect that without John Meredith's work there would have been a lot less folkies in Oz.

Helen

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Roo
Date: 18 Mar 01 - 06:57 AM

There was a long obituary notice in last Monday's Sydney Morning Herald written by Keith McKenry, You can read it on the paper's online archives at: John Meredith If you can't access it there is a potted version on the Folk Australia site . There are also some lovely images of John taken by Mudcat's Bob Bolton on the Folk Australia. Bob's photos of John were taken back in 1972 of him giving a lecture reading from his "Frank the Poet" manuscript at the PACT Folk Club.

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 18 Mar 01 - 07:23 AM

G'day wdyat12, Kat, Helen, Roo &c,

I have just got back in from the Illawarra Folk Festival, so I hadn't seen this thread until now (although JennieG told me about it, down at Jamberoo). As Roo says, there are some old pix of John reading from the manuscript of Frank the Poet.

I must say that my piece on John is not really a "potted version" of Dr Keith McKenry's obituary. My text is based on an updated version of the citation I wrote in 1985 for John's Order of Australia Medal. I have been listing and scanning a number of obituaries for the Club's Archives and I may have reflected some of Keith's words - but I feel that he has done the same with mine.

I knew John for just on 40 years, first meeting him in the days when he was still active in running the Bush Music Club, despite his recent heart attack. A few years after this he dropped out of the Club's routine matterds and concentrated on books. I always kept in contact and valued John's expertise and opinion. I will probably get a full booklist of John's books onto the BMC web site during the week. He covered a wide range, well beyond folk song and a booklist will give some idea of his breadth of interest.

As it is, 40 years later, the third volume of his Folk Songs of Australia and the men & women that sang them is unpublished (although text is being published in the Australian Folklore Society journal, there is no music, because the ational Library has not been able to do the transcribing. John's death has galvanised some positive reaction and it now looks like a number of different people and groups will cooperate to get this done.

Regards,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 18 Mar 01 - 09:53 PM

G'day again,

Helen: We stil have a number of John's books in the Bush Music Club sale stock. We have both Vol. 1 and vol. 2 of Folk Songs of Australia and the men & women that sang them in the University of New South Wales soft cover versions. We also have his Frank the Poet (about convict poet Francis MacNamara), Wild Colonial Boy (John Donahoe - the real bushranger behind the hundreds of version of WCB), Talk the Old Jack Lang (an Australian dictionary of rhyming slang), Duke of the Outback, (a biography of 'Duke' Tritton, a very important old singer) and several more.

I will be trying to get together a booklist to be posted on the Bush Music Club web site in the near future.

Aussiebloke: Strictly speaking, John didn't play the "first" lagerphone. The one that you may have read about is his older brother Claude's copy of what he saw played in a talent quest (in a Holbrook pub?). Brian Loughlin of the original Bushwhackers (1952 - 1957) ... the archetypal bush band on whom all subsequent bush bands are, to some degree, modelled, made a copy of that and launched it upon the Australian folk revival. Merro sensibly stuck to playing his button accordion and singing. (Apart from a brief flirtation with a primitive amplified fiddle. He dropped that pretty quick when it scared all the horses in town!)

If you look at my book Australian Traditional Bush instruments, you will see that Alan Scott had references to lagerphone type instruments as far back as 1912 - only 7 years after crown seals (bottletops) became available in Australia.

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Mar 01 - 12:18 AM

G'day Bob - thanks for the info, and sorry that you've lost a mate...

regards

aussiebloke

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Roo
Date: 19 Mar 01 - 03:34 AM

Bob! There has been a misunderstanding....I wasn't actually referring to your article as a "potted version" of Keith McKenry's... I was actually referring to the NEWS item on the Folk Australia site which is indeed a potted version of Keith's obituary that appeared in the papers. I had not realised that I had uploaded your excellent piece on John M. to the BMC site. For those wishing to read Bob's BMC page, go here and click on the link.

Subject: RE: Help: John Meredith (1920-2001)
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 19 Mar 01 - 07:46 AM

G'day Roo:

Sorry I even commented. We are all writing about the same bloke and we all appreciate what he did for our Australian folklore - at a time when the government was trying to tell us to be good little English persons and not to have illusions of being something else. If we say some of the same things, it is because they are (reasonably) true.

Regards,

Bob Bolton