Rod Stradling writes a brief obituary on his Musical Traditions website. He writes -

Fred McCormick 1946-2015 [Fred McCormick]
If you've read the News Page recently, you'll perhaps not be surprised, but I'm very sorry to tell you that my friend - and one time deputy editor of this magazine - Fred McCormick, died in hospital on 15th November at 21:10. His writings have been absent from these pages for some years as he became involved in numerous other projects that took up much of his time but, looking back, I can find over 60 reviews and six articles he wrote for us. You can find them via the Search facility on the Home Page.

It would be unreasonable for me to suggest the 'best' examples of his always informed and often passionate writing, but I found a phrase in his review of a couple of Irish sean nós CDs which was so typical of the man - 'Don't be put off by the language barrier. Music is its own form of empathy and it transcends all the difficulties of human communication.' I would also recommend Fred's contribution to the "Ten Records that Changed My Life" article, which tells you a lot about the man, and the whole of his Introduction section to the Joe Heaney Interview is a fine example of his academic writings.

To me, he was a constant paradigm for how to write well about traditional music. I will miss him enormously.

Peta Webb is writing a proper obituary for Fred, which will appear here in due course.

I took Rod's advice and re-read his Ten Records that Changed My Life written eight years ago. A surprise was to find that Fred's choices were placed next to me own - I had forgotten that - but it is easy to agree with Road about the quality of Fred's writing in that article:-

Ten Records that Changed my Life
Choices (with reasons) from MT contributors
Fred McCormick

1]    The Best of Muddy Waters - Pye International
2]    Radio Ballads: The Travelling People - Argo
3]    The Manchester Angel - Topic
4]    The Folksongs of Britain: Songs of Courtship - Topic
5]    Ulster's Flowery Vale- BBC Radio Enterprises
6]    Grand Airs of Connemara- Topic
7]    The Living Tradition: Romania - Argo
8]    Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's Volume 2 - Folkways
9]    Radio Ballads: Singing the Fishing - Argo
10]   Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 5, The Emperor

That was a pretty neat idea of Mike Yates'. Not only does he get to know how old everybody is, and what they were doing, and where and when, but he also finds out who has the greatest number of ideologically unsound skeletons in the closet. Well, the sooner the subpoena is answered, the better. Here's my confession, closeted skeletons not excluded.

For the record (every pun intended), I was fifteen in 1961, between the trial of Lady Chatterley and the Beatles first LP, as Philip Larkin almost said. That is important for it meant that I grew up in post war Britain during a time of moderate affluence, and economic security, but also at a time when the embers of empire continued to smoulder, when people still believed in the immutability of the social order, and when their cultural horizons were firmly fixed by their position on the ladder of social class.

My family, and practically everyone I knew were on the bottom rung. What's more, the powers that were had decreed that we were there because we were too thick to be anywhere else. To the administrators and employers and educators of post war Britain, the 'working man' (and woman) was incapable of independent thought and action. We could not create. We could not lead. We could not question. We could only follow.

The result was that millions of people just like me grew up not knowing who the hell we were. The working class communities, which at one time had given meaning and stability and identity to people's lives, had largely dissipated. What's more, I knew nothing of the history of my ancestors or where I had come from, because the only history I had been taught was that of grasping monarchs and colonial wars. Equally, although we had the music lesson and the art lesson, and the English lesson, all these things taught me about artistic culture was that it had been made by a few individuals of such towering genius, that it could only be appreciated and understood by the people who were clever enough to rule us. Thus the education, which was actually supposed to improve the minds of the masses was in reality a neat and tautological form of social control.

Like practically everyone else in this wasteland, I sought refuge in pop music. In fact, by the time I reached fifteen, I had amassed a tidy collection of 45 rpm records of luminaries such as Cliff Richard, The Shadows, John Leyton and Helen Shapiro.

Then Pye Records secured the British rights to the Chicago based Chess catalogue and The Best of Muddy Waters dropped like a bombshell.1. My apologies for not quoting catalogue numbers but many of these gems have gone to the graveyard, to be replaced in my collection by CD transfers.1 Well, it wasn't quite that simple. I'd had a sudden and jarring revolt against the inanities of pop music some months earlier, and set off in search of something a little more meaningful. For a while I tried to interest myself in modern jazz. That didn't work, but the experience brought me into contact with the blues, and the blues was the first music I'd ever heard which seemed to speak directly to me. The Best of Muddy Waters was the first of many incursions I made into the Pye International R 'n' B catalogue, and it was quintessential. It was music which had been brought up from the Mississippi delta by migrating post World War II Negroes and hardened and toughened and electrified and amplified to suit the dance halls and mean streets of Chicago, and it thrilled me to the very depths of my soul. To a dissolute white kid from the mean streets of a concrete housing estate, this music seemed tailored to echo the way that I felt.

I bought many more blues LPs over the next few years. They weren't all from the Chess stable by any means. But while CBS brought me Robert Johnson and Son House and Big Joe Williams, and Storyville brought me John Henry Barbee and Juke Boy Bonner, the orange and gold label of Pye International's R 'n' B series ran through my record collection like Blackpool ran through rock.

I'd be less than honest if I didn't tell you the next big influence in my life was Joan Baez. I'd discovered the American singer-songwriter movement of Dylan, Paxton, Simon etc., via the blues, and that naturally led me to those early Vanguard LPs of Ms B's. Joan Baez didn't sing much in the way of contemporary protest of course. She sang nearly all traditional American and British songs and I was absolutely gobsmacked by the purity of her singing. Such gobsmacking can be attributed to youthful inexperience and the fact that I hadn't yet heard Harry Cox. When I did, I ditched those Vanguards. Even so, Joan Baez inculcated in me a lifelong passion for the beauty and simplicity of folksong.

June 1966 found England on its way to winning the World Cup, and it found me in the Domestic Mission, Mill Street, Liverpool; the only 'dry' folk club I ever admit to attending. I was there to hear Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Although I'd been drawn into the folk revival by this time, I was having a lot of trouble making sense of it. What was folksong ? Why did it have to be hundreds of years of old ? And if it did, how did all these modern protest songs fit into the equation ?

Then MacColl started talking. He described how he and Peggy had been recording Gypsies and Travellers for the radio ballad, The Travelling People, and how they had recorded Caroline Hughes, a Dorset gypsy. She had given them no less than 75 ballads and songs, including the splendid We Poor Labouring Men.

O, some do say the farmer's best, but I do need say no;
If it weren't for we poor labouring men, what would the farmers do?
They would beat up all their old odd stuff until some new come in
There's never a trade in old England like we poor labouring men.

"Immediately afterwards", MacColl continued, "we recorded some people from a housing estate who were protesting about all these tinkers and down and outs who were camped in their neighbourhood. We asked the protesters why they didn't like Travellers and they said they'd got no culture. We'd just recorded 75 ballads and songs from one single individual. Yet these people probably all went home and watched Coronation Street, while they complained about Travellers having no culture".

The import of what MacColl had said didn't sink in at once. That took several years of reading Thompson, Engels and Orwell on the English working class, Marx on alienation, Michels on oligarchy, Steinbeck on Oklahoma migrants, Lloyd on English folksong, and every tract on working class life I could lay my hands on. The picture which emerged from all this showed that the working class had a history and a culture and an identity just like everybody else; that we had become estranged from these things by industrial capitalism; and that the consequence of that estrangement was that the working class had been denied the means of artistic expression.2. For a detailed discussion of MacColl's theoretical stance, see http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm#intro2

But if full blown enlightenment lay in the future, Ewan MacColl's The Manchester Angel had been released a few months earlier, and contained many of the songs he sang that night. I was enraptured by it, and by its stories of pseudo-blind beggars and shepherds and sheep stealers and forest outlaws, and of night visitors and abandoned lovers. Ewan MacColl never did realise his vision of a socialist world, with a free unfettered working class once more united with its musical heritage. And I nowadays find myself rejecting many aspects of his thinking. But by all let this be heard. Ewan MacColl, more than anyone else removed the blinkers which had been placed on me by a state education system, and got me thinking and got me reading, and gave me the wherewithal to discover who I am. Thanks Ewan.

There was something more. The notes to The Manchester Angel contained names; the names of the people who had sung these songs to collectors anything up to six decades previously. Who were they and what did they sound like?

At first finding out wasn't easy. The few records of traditional singers, which had been released in Britain, were expensive and hard to come by, and for all I knew, contained uncertain glories. Surely an amateur singer, with nowhere more auspicious to perform than his village pub, couldn't hope to equal the best that the revival had on offer.

They could and they did. In the USA, Caedmon Records had released a ten LP set of field recordings in 1961. They were erroneously titled - for they contained more Irish material than anything - The Folksongs of Britain. In 1968, Topic Records of London began releasing them to considerable acclaim, and at a more affordable price than the Caedmon imports. I bought the first volume, Songs of Courtship, and it literally stood my world on end. It was everything those Joan Baez LPs should have been and weren't. It was pure and pastoral and its gently flowing musical eddies spoke vividly of mountain streams and moorcocks and false brides and faithful lovers. There was the cranky outpouring of the farm worker who was considered too socially inferior to marry the girl he'd got pregnant; there was the story of the ardent young man ploughing through frost and snow to be with the girl he loved; and there was the song of another girl, abandoned by her soldier paramour, who was ready to sell everything she had to buy her love a sword of steel; one which just might see him safely through the wars. Is go dtéidh tú mo mhúirnín slán.

Most compelling of all was the fact that the people on these records weren't millionaire superstars. They were farm workers, housewives, tinsmiths and travellers. They were ordinary people. My people. Nothing I have heard before or since has had anything like as profound an effect on me.

Record No 5 is a strange one. In those days department stores used to carry record sections, and the one in Debenhams, Birkenhead, had some pretty tasty items. One day I found a record on the BBC's Radio Enterprises label, called Ulster's Flowery Vale. It was the digest of a pair of programmes on traditional music and song from Northern Ireland. In spite of its tacky cover painting and tacky sleeve notes, I recognised enough names among the participants to give it a spin in the store's listening booth.

It wasn't the greatest record in the world, and the presence of one or two showy big names was off putting to me even that far back. Yet there were some terrific ensemble tracks from Cathall McConnell, Tommy Gunn and Sean McAloon, and several marvellous vocals from Sarah Makem and Geordie Hanna.

Ulster's Flowery Vale was pivotal for three reasons. Firstly, I was captivated by the songs on it. They were more lyrical and ornate than many of the ones I was growing used to, and some of them were set to indescribably beautiful melodies. They were wide and weighty and long and flowing and often had startling turns in them. Indeed, the eight vocal tracks on that LP were the earliest inklings of what would become a lifelong fascination with the songs and singers of Northern Ireland. Secondly, I hadn't up to then heard, or indeed enjoyed, much Irish music. So that was the start of another life long love affair. Finally, with this record I found I was identifying more closely with the music and songs of Ireland than with either of its neighbours. Perhaps that was just a function of my Irish ancestry and the Irish sentiments of my family, but I had just got to see the place.

I wound up in Carna, Conamara, not knowing anything about Conamara, and unaware even that Irish was still the first spoken language there. I got the tent up and repaired to a nearby pub for a lunch time drink. There was a row of fishermen standing at the bar and talking in a language that this stranger certainly didn't know, when one of them burst into song. The singing was unlike anything I'd come across before. Even the Cork and Hebridean singers I'd heard on The Folksongs of Britain couldn't have prepared me for the exotic, floral delivery, the massive ornamentation, the continually shifting rhythms, and the harsh, nasal impassioned timbre which are so typical of this part of Conamara. During the course of that afternoon, perhaps half a dozen singers unleashed their burdens of song while I sat there like a startled rabbit. This was living tradition. This was a night's boat journey and a day's hard drive from my home on Merseyside. Yet it was so unfamiliar it could have come from another planet.

Like The Manchester Angel, Grand Airs of Connemara marked a pivotal point in my life, rather than being the point itself. Nevertheless, I bought that latter disc immediately I got back to England and wallowed in the singing of Seán 'ac Donncha, Pádraic a Catháin and Tomás a Neachtain, to say nothing of the clear crystal tones of Festy Conlan's whistle. And when Topic eventually got around to sending out the booklets of that LP, I was able to wallow in the resplendent translations. Grand airs indeed, and grand singing, and grand texts as well.

By this time I was reaching something of a crisis in my attitude to folk music. I had never wholly subscribed to the 'it's gotta be British' brand of chauvinism which marked that phase of the folk revival. Even so, the cosy world of the revival had up to now circumscribed my musical interests, and I was beginning to feel that circumscription was turning into constraint. Not only had I become far more interested in the tradition than the revival, I had begun charting Gaelic waters, and I had started to wonder what lay outside the navigable areas. There was a whole world of folk music outside of these islands. Why not explore some of it ?

That was easier said than done. There was no world music movement in those days and, even if I could have afforded a foreign holiday, I didn't fancy sitting in some European cafe while a bunch of paid professionals performed ersatz versions of the real thing. Then I discovered a bookshop in Liverpool which had a sale of classical LPs on various esoteric labels. Among the works of Schoenberg and Stockhausen, I found half a dozen different volumes from a series on Argo called The Living Tradition. I picked the one which covered Romania, possibly because its cover photograph showed a caravan full of the wildest looking Gypsies I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, not all the contents were as wild as those Gypsies. Some of it was the self same urban cafe music which I'd been anxious to avoid.

The rest of it wasn't. There were frenetic wedding dances, staggering two part polyphonies, and a verbunkos (army recruitment melody), played slowly and hair raisingly while the village dogs barked in accompaniment. I'd hit a gold mine.

Over the next few months, and starting with the rest of the LPs in that sale, I bought every record of ethnic music I could lay my hands on. I thrilled to the sound of Peruvian harps, wallowed in the tortured strains of flamenco, marvelled at the intricacies of Bulgarian bagpiping, and sat in open mouthed astonishment at a vocal orchestra in the form of a group of Italian dockers. And I remember being infuriated at the stuffy attitudes of my folk singing confreres. No. It wasn't British and they weren't going to listen to it. Not for the first time, I began to feel that the folk revival wasn't the place for me.

Yet if I rejected revivalist sentiments towards the non-English speaking world, I did concur with expressions of anti-Americanism. That was understandable, for the efforts of MacColl and Bert Lloyd to nativise the revival were directed much more at pseudo-Americans than at pseudo-Bulgarians.3. Which is not to say that huge swathes of the revival didn't miss the point. MacColl and Lloyd were in no way opposed to American folksongs. They were merely opposed to their performance by people who were culturally too far removed from the scene of the action to interpret those songs adequately.3 Moreover, the USA, with its involvement in Vietnam, its record on civil rights, and its stifling of left wing opinion, was seen as a political pariah. On top of that there was the problem of American cultural imperialism. I wasn't the only one who felt we were being buried by the stuff.

Then, the week after I discovered those Living Tradition LPs, I walked into the Liverpool Communist Party bookshop and found that they were also having a sale. This one yielded up a solitary Folkways LP. Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's Volume 2, it was called, and the line up included Doc Watson, Clint Howard, Fred Price and of course Clarence Ashley. I'd heard a lot about Watson and Ashley and figured it was worth risking thirty bob on.

Wasn't it just! Old time fiddle tunes! Banjo songs! Fugueing hyms!. Absolutely devastating, the whole damned disc. To this day I am uneasy about the political attitudes which permeate old time country music. But the stuff just blew me away. And it opened a door which led me into the incredible labyrinth which is the traditional music of the USA.

Record number nine represents a return to these shores, or rather to these waters, in the form of the third of the radio ballads; Singing The Fishing. A friend of mine, Paddy Doody, now alas deceased, used to keep open house on a Sunday. I'd go round there and we'd sit and drink coffee and Paddy would talk with great animation about Blind Gary Davis and Séamus Ennis and The New Lost City Ramblers and the Yorkshire village carols we'd recently discovered. Argo Records had started issuing the radio ballads on LP, and one day Paddy asked me if I'd heard any of them. I said I hadn't and he pulled Singing The Fishing from one of the stacks of records he'd got stashed all over the floor. I sat there stoned, while the vivid interplay of song and speech and chorus and instruments unravelled across the carpet. There was young Sam Larner reliving the excitement - and the dread - of his first days at sea. There was Ronnie Balls relating the pride and satisfaction of coming into harbour with a big catch of herring. There were the seamen and the fishwives and the fishermen's wives, and the tales of cruel usage and economic slump. And there was old Sam Larner describing, a storm at sea with all the pungent graphic living detail you'd expect in an Émile Zola novel.

"There was great seas a'comin'. Now and then they'd peel you know and break. And once they break, look out. So I stood in the wheelhouse along the skipper. I was there the whole blessed night, me and the skipper. The chaps down below are cryin'. They were these young chaps, you know. Well, once she shipped the sea. I said "Ted, look out. Here's one a'gonna get us". Eh, that come roaring along. I bet you our boat stood on our hend like that ! I bet you she stood up like that !"

I bet you my hair stood on its end like that.4. For more on the radio ballads, visit http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/rad_bal.htm4

Well, there they are, or nine of them at least. I didn't include Gael Linn's wonderful double CD, Michael Coleman 1891 - 1945, or The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin or the Alan Lomax anthologies, Sounds of the South and Southern Journey, or Music in the World of Islam or Scottish Tradition, or Voice of the People, or the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music or The Woody Guthrie Library of Congress Recordings. Neither did I mention Murderers' Home or the Harry Cox EFDSS LP, English Folk Singer or Topic's Folk Music of Albania or the Doc Watson Vanguards or that incredible trio of Tangent LPs of Ethiopian field recordings. Fabulous records all of them, and absolutely seminal. But they weren't the ones which changed my life.

Anyway, before I get thrown out of here, I want to introduce you to record number ten. Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 5, The Emperor; Stephen Bishop Kovacevich with the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis conducting. Yes I know this is supposed to be about traditional music, but that was the first compact disc I ever bought and the first one I ever played and the first one I ever heard. It turned my life around because I realised the potential of digital recording for the very first time. Here was a means of preserving not just the great historical recordings of Beethoven and other composers, but of preserving in non-corruptible form, all the traditional music which is being extinguished all over the planet.

Around twenty years have passed since that first meeting, but I can still remember the almost physical shock of hearing the orchestral sound in far greater detail and clarity than I would ever have thought possible. Digitisation of the analogue master had revealed whole chunks of the score which even the best hi-fi vinyl audio players couldn't get at. The whole thing was so vivid that I felt as though I could reach out and shake hands with every single one of the musicians. And that is what my life as a record collector has been about. Sure I've met the odd opinionated schmuck along the way, and the odd dollop of self-indulgent rubbish done up to look like a serious release. But what is that compared with the fact that Woody Guthrie still drops in on me almost forty years after he died? So do Joe Heaney, Phil Tanner, Belle Stewart, Dillard Chandler and many others. I even had Joseph Taylor call round the other evening, and he serenaded me with some of the songs which he recorded for Percy Grainger all of ninety nine years ago. You know what? These guys will be singing these songs for ever more. They'll be here till doomsday in the afternoon.

"And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song." Robert Frost
Notes:

    1.   My apologies for not quoting catalogue numbers but many of these gems have gone to the graveyard, to be replaced in my collection by CD transfers.

    2.   For a detailed discussion of MacColl's theoretical stance, see http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm#intro

    3.   Which is not to say that huge swathes of the revival didn't miss the point. MacColl and Lloyd were in no way opposed to American folksongs. They were merely opposed to their performance by people who were culturally too far removed from the scene of the action to interpret those songs adequately.

    4.   For more on the radio ballads, visit http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/rad_bal.htm

Fred McCormick - 3.1.07