Subject: RE: Ewan MacColl - any first-hand anecdotes?
From:
Vic Smith
Date: 06 Feb 11 - 08:54 AM
Serendipity being what it is, I was looking through my huge collection of old folk music magazines this morning for something else when I came across this editorial article in a long extinct magazine called FOLK MUSIC BALLADS & SONG. This issue (No.2) is not dated but it appears to come from 1966. Neither is the author of the editorial named but we read that the managing editor is KARL DALLAS. The writer admits that he was not at the (mainly) Davenport / MacColl discussion which is referred to above in this thread, but to me he seems to sum up the known positions of the two main protagonists quite well and calls for a sensible middle group between what he sees as two extreme positions. The article has the title:-
"TIME FOR A TRUCE"
THE SINGERS' Club of London recently organised a confrontation between Ewan MacColl, Alex Campbell, A.L. Lloyd and Bob Davenport on the subject of the future of the folksong revival. We have heard various reports of the occasion, from the fans, followers or disciples of the various protagonists, which show the others up in various shades of black. -But, frankly, we did not go. There have been similar discussions before. The old London Folk Music Centre had MacColl and Davenport at it, along with Leon Rosselson, Stephen Sedley and John Marshall. Nothing very constructive emerged from that particular meeting and there was nothing to indicate that the Singers' Club meeting would be any better. From what we hear, it was worse.
What did emerge from both these meetings was that the basic divergence of opinion is not between the Dylanites and the traddies, nor between the purists and the commercialists, nor yet again between the serious students and the entertainers.
The only argument of any significance is between the intellectual dissection wing of the revival, headed by MacColl and anti-analytical primitivism, represented by Davenport. To an outsider, there would not seem to be much quarrel between the two. Both profess, sincerely, to be passionately concerned with the tradition. Both, in their quite different ways, are performers of tremendous stature. One can quarrel that MacColl's analyses of the sound of tradition are over-intellectual on the one hand, or based on insufficient evidence on the other.
One can complain that Davenport does not appear to make any real distinction between popular music and the folk tradition, and that anything "of the folk" can be considered as traditional.
One can point outh that MacColl sounds like no traditional singer in the archives of recorded song, and yet still be chilled to the marrow by his rendering of one of the great old ballads he has brought back into the common repertoire. One can become impatient at Davenport's obscurantism, his woolly use of terms like "middle class" and "working class" which are used to mean simply "bad" and "good", or "them" and "us". Yet when he sings The Lambton Wairm followed by Hanging on the old Barbed Wire, it is still possible to learn something from him about living traditions.
The real point about MacColl and Davenport is that they are not contradictory, they are complementary. Folksingers have never been the brainless noble savages Davenport would have us believe. If literacy dealt the first great blow at the tradition, then what of the broadsheet ballads, which used literacy to spread folk songs throughout the land in the greatest explosion in folk culture before the present day?
Davenport refuses to let his songs be printed, and yet many of the music hall songs he professes to love were born in print, and were sold to the semi-literate classes that created the popular culture of the music hall. What of the Catcheside-Warrington songbooks that can still be found in colliers' front parlours throughout the north-east? Like many great artists, folk musicians of any calibre find it difficult to talk about their art in any other way than the music itself, so it s hardly surprising, especially with a tradition that has been bashed about like ours, that not many folk musicians or singers are articulate about their work. But you do have the occasional stylist like Joe Heaney, who can analyse his own technique of decoration. And Jack Elliot of Birtley was no mindless child of nature, unaware of what he was doing!
MacColl's antagonism to the depredations of the mass media have blinded him, perhaps, to the valuable and creative effects of enjoyment in the appreciation of folk music. Cerebral analysis is not the only way to approach culture. Bertholt Brecht, the most incisive analyst of modern times, found room for the belly laugh while still cutting away with his intellect at the ills and follies of modern life. Great theatrical craftsman that he is, MacColl has the technique to become one of the great popular performers of our time, who could use the mass media on his own terms, without sacrificing his integrity, which is unquestioned. He could also be criticised for his love of the exotic, which colours his comparisons of nativeborn traditions with those of Central Europe and Asia. Complexity for its own sake is no criterion of cultural vigour; many a great society vanished up its own anus in a great flourish of arabesques. If debaters in this still infant revival of ours were willing to define their terms, confine their discussions to what is rather than what might be, listen to what the other fellow was saying and consider it on its merits, avoid falling back on personal abuse when the argument started going against them, consider their own positions as critically as their opponents', there would be room for polemic. Indeed, "Folk Music" magazine was started with the aim of promoting discussion.
But the time has come for calling a truce. What unites us is more important than what divides us. What we can learn from you, whoever you are, is probably greater than what you can learn from us. The real enemy is the mass media, which will try to kill folk and popular culture, and if they cannot kill it they will emasculate it, and if they cannot emasculate it, they will pervert it, and if they cannot pervert it they will feed on it.
MacColl and Davenport, and anyone else who is in the revival for more than just personal glory or profit, have a common interest in building up something that can resist that sort of onslaught.
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