"Fancy an argument anybody?"
Yeah - why not!!!
Just before I left school I was reprimanded by a teacher for being late for his maths class - I had stayed to talk to an English teacher about work I was doing in a school play (Tom Sawyer Whitewashing the Fence). The maths teacher told me in no uncertain terms that once we left school people like me would no longer have any use for subjects such as drama, music, literature or painting, and that the only skill I would need in the big, wide world was to be able to tot up my wage packet at the end of the week. He made it clear that, as a class, we had no part in 'the arts' and that our future lay in keeping the streets clean and the buses running on time. That message has been repeated time and again ad nauseum throughout my working life.
A few years after leaving school, soon after I had discovered folk music, I was hearing people like MacColl, Lloyd, Lomax and others arguing that far from what my teacher had told me being true, the opposite was the case – that this big, beautiful body of songs I was discovering and developing a lifelong love-affair with was made, remade, adapted, sung, perpetuated and passed on by people just like me – miners, mill workers, land labourers, merchant seamen, servicemen..... not exactly apprentice electricians serving their time on the Liverpool docks but near enough to give me an incredible pride in them and the people who made them, as well as providing a lifes worth of entertainment.
Later on, when I discovered the ballads, despite a queue of academics telling me that these were composed by skilled bards and minstrels for the entertainment of 'our betters', I came to believe that these also were the beautiful creations of 'ordinary', 'common' people like me. This belief was more than substantiated when I took up collecting and realised that if I wanted to find examples of these rare and virtually extinct pieces I had to seek out an elderly carpenter from farming stock in North Norfolk, or retired East Anglian deep-sea fishermen, or Munster small farmers and their families, or landless labourers and road-workers - or a retired waitress who worked much of her life in an hotel in Windsor, but who had returned home to spend the remainder of her days in the family cottage (minus sanitation and running water) a few miles from the Atlantic coast.
I discovered that if I wanted to see these ballads still in full, living use I had to visit a tent-dwelling traveller in North East Scotland or some of the thousands of non-literate Irish tinkers camping behind corrugated iron fences and gathering scrap metal for a living in London, Birmingham and Manchester – way down near the bottom of our social heap.
On a more personal level, both sides of my family originated in rural Ireland, left for Britain in the mid-nineteenth century to escape the effects of a lethally mismanaged famine, and spent the next century or so travelling backwards and forwards across the Irish Sea trying, and largely failing to re-settle in their home country. Their experiences were mirrored perfectly in the huge repertoire of immigration songs that came from that mass exodus. My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were merchant seamen, under sail and at the changeover period from sail to steam- once again, their lives were echoed by our wonderfully rich body of sea songs.
My personal situation is repeated throughout these islands - by descendents of miners and millworkers who experienced and fought wage-cuts and deplorable conditions, of those who were transported away from home for the crime of trying to feed their families, or pressed to sea or into the army to go and fight wars so the rich might stay rich........
As far as I am concerned these songs are a part of our social history; they are our birthright . The don't belong to any single individual or group; they are held in common by us all. For me one of the acid tests of whether a song merits the term 'folk' is to roll it on its belly and see if it has a small 'c' for 'copyright' stamped on its backside – if it has, at almost certainly isn't – the genuine article belongs (or belonged) to 'the folk' (if you want to know who they are – go and buy a book).
When I hear people marginalising these songs, or taking the piss out of them, or debasing them by suggesting that you don't have to put in any effort in order to sing them, or whingeing that they are 'too long' or 'boring', or are no different to pop songs of any age, or self-penned, undefined and undefinable pieces that pass for 'folk' nowadays, I occasionally get more than a little pissed off and feel the need to express my pissed-offness. Folk songs are from a totally different stable than all of these and, in my opinion vastly superior in quality and importance to any of them.
So why do we sometimes get passionate and het up about folk songs – as that nice lady says on the telly – because they're worth it.
Jim Carroll