Bertsongs? (songs of A. L. 'Bert' Lloyd)

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 05 May 08 - 04:56 AM

YEEESSSSS!!!!!

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: pavane
Date: 05 May 08 - 05:02 AM

Why is 200 lucky? I can understand 100, 1000, but 200?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 05 May 08 - 05:18 AM

I dunno, but then again I'm still fairly new to the protocol here. Still, in an age when the media can insist that we celebrate 20th and 40th anniversaries of events, pretty much anything with a '0' or even a '5' on the end of it can be the excuse for a Special Commemorative Issue and a documentary on Channel 4.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 May 08 - 05:24 AM

A further parallel that has occurred to me is this.

They say funerals are not really for the dead, they for those of us who are left. And I think its this way with folksongs.

I have never been in battle, but my Dad was - he served in the Irish Guards, Armoured tank division in the WW2 - through the low countries and Germany. He would never say much about the killing grounds, he said it was incommunicable.

In a way all these songs about Waterloo, the Irish rising of of 1798. and more recently Eric Bogles stuff about WW1. Most of that was written well after the event. It doesn't have much of the smell of fear and homicide.

All these songs are really about people who came later trying to make sense out of nonsense. They're not in a meaningful sense someone sitting down and telling you his story - like say a Chuck Berry song does. Its not first hand - that's surely why we get all this 'seven long years' stuff. What is it? a rhetorical device that the songwriter vaguely remembers from the bible about the seven lean years perhaps.

But that isn't to say that they are valueless as songs. It really does mean though that when Brian gets in front of that class of kids - he surely has carte blanche to tell these people's story the best and most compelling way he can.

The only way we can dishonour the dead is by making them irrelevant and forgettable.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 05 May 08 - 06:18 AM

seven years,was often the period of time of transportation.
some of the broken token songs,are connected with transportation to Australia.
[But that isn't to say that they are valueless as songs. It really does mean though that when Brian gets in front of that class of kids - he surely has carte blanche to tell these people's story the best and most compelling way he can.

The only way we can dishonour the dead is by making them irrelevant and forgettable].
Isnt this what Bert was doing?.,by improving the songs,he is telling the story in the most compelling way,he is honouring all the previous song carriers and the dead,by making it interesting.
I find all this tut tutting about his scholarship,over sanctimonious.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 05 May 08 - 06:25 AM

by improving the songs,he is telling the story in the most compelling way,he is honouring all the previous song carriers and the dead

TThere are no shining teeth in any of the pre-Lloyd versions of "Reynardine"; there's no collier in the original version of "The recruited collier" (quote: If owre the stibble fields I gang/I think I see him ploughin,/And ev'ry bit o' bread I eat,/It seems o' Jemmy's sowing). These changes sometimes make for a better song - I don't think anyone's ever denied that - but they certainly don't honour the sources.

Les has been asking a very straightforward question: "was this song written by people in its time or made up or seriously changed recently - because that's not the same." You may think the difference doesn't matter - that's up to you (and hopefully there's plenty of room here for all of us). The point is that it is a difference.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,doc.tom
Date: 05 May 08 - 10:16 AM

Oh come on Dick - I never thought I'd see you say that a desire for accuracy is the same as being over sanctimonious!

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 05 May 08 - 10:44 AM

ok Tom.
Accuracy is important.,but probably imo not as important as his other contributions
I think we should make a few allowances for Bert,in the same way people should for Sharp,Baring Gould etc,that he should be viewed in the context of his times.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 May 08 - 11:04 AM

Tell us about accuracy. Seriously. You obviously have some ideal in mind.

Try and explain your point. Not all of us understand where you are heading with this.

Folksong isn't really journalism. Its nearer an attempt to mythologise. So presumably we're not talking about adherence to the historical facts, but adherence to the intentions of the original writer of the folksong.

Or perhaps I misunderstand you.....?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Nerd
Date: 05 May 08 - 11:44 AM

I think we all do make allowances for Bert. This is why I find Dick's comments puzzling. In my paper, and in my posts, I'm very careful to say that Bert should be viewed not only in the context of his times, but in the context of the scholarly tradition, and that what he did is actually quite in line with what a lot of other popularizing scholars have done--again, the Brothers Grimm being a good example. The achievements of the Grimms, and of Lloyd, should not be minimized. At the same time, when engaging in scholarship, we need to be careful not to take their claims, or their versions of texts, at face value as a representation of the tradition, because they are are compromised in various ways.

I always do say that Lloyd was and remains enormously important, enormously engaging as a writer, enormously entertaining as a singer. For us scholars, it can actually be fun to try to figure out what Lloyd did and why. Still, I say, we can wish he had been less secretive and downright misleading about his editorial interventions.

So this is what I and many of us other scholars say, taking care to heap praise upon Lloyd before saying anything critical. Our criticisms rarely amount to anything like a scathing attack. Yet no matter how much praise we heap, and no matter how gentle our criticisms, any whiff of critique leads to demands that we "make allowances" for him.

I guess our only recourse is to agree that he is above all criticism, then.

Somehow, I don't think he would have wanted that...

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 05 May 08 - 12:29 PM

>> So presumably we're not talking about adherence to the historical facts, but adherence to the intentions of the original writer of the folksong. <<

I don't think your post was directed towards me, WLD, but let me explain a bit more, using the previous example of the schoolkids and the mill songs.

I could sing them a song I'd written, after proper historical research, that gave them an accurate and quite possibly harrowing account of - say - child labour in cotton mills.

Or, I could sing an old song, telling them: "This is what people at the time were singing about the cotton mills."

Since singing old songs is what I do most of the time, the latter would be the more likely scenario (and would fit with the ideas I grew up with about the stories old songs can tell us). In which case, in order to be able to look myself in the eye, I would have to be confident that the 'old song' was exactly what I said it was, and not a product of the folk revival post 1950. If it were the latter, no matter how historically accurate the picture it painted, I wouldn't be making an honest presentation.

I'm not suggesting here that Bert Lloyd systematically faked songs about conditions in the mills, just giving you an example of why this kind of thing matters to me.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 05 May 08 - 12:53 PM

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters - PM
Date: 05 May 08 - 12:29 PM

>> So presumably we're not talking about adherence to the historical facts, but adherence to the intentions of the original writer of the folksong. <<

I don't think your post was directed towards me, WLD, but let me explain a bit more, using the previous example of the schoolkids and the mill songs.

I could sing them a song I'd written, after proper historical research, that gave them an accurate and quite possibly harrowing account of - say - child labour in cotton mills.

Or, I could sing an old song, telling them: "This is what people at the time were singing about the cotton mills."

[Since singing old songs is what I do most of the time, the latter would be the more likely scenario (and would fit with the ideas I grew up with about the stories old songs can tell us). In which case, in order to be able to look myself in the eye, I would have to be confident that the 'old song' was exactly what I said it was, and not a product of the folk revival post 1950. If it were the latter, no matter how historically accurate the picture it painted, I wouldn't be making an honest presentation.

I'm not suggesting here that Bert Lloyd systematically faked songs about conditions in the mills, just giving you an example of why this kind of thing matters to me.]
we clearly sing old songs for partly different reasons.
I sing them because they have beautiful melodies and interesting stories,and becuase they give us an idea of the life of people in former times,I do not sing them because they are faithful reproductions of that which happened historically.
Why? because history is bunk.
let us take a song about the battle of Trafalgar,who won this war? the French believe they won it, The English believe they were the winners.,
all songs to make them interesting[Or to ease the singing] include poetic licence,they are not necessarily factually accurate,the poetry of the song is more important than factual accuracy[Three Score and Ten,Who cares whether it was February or October]it is the sentiment of the song,that is important.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 05 May 08 - 01:02 PM

"I sing them because they have beautiful melodies...."

Yes, absolutely.

".... and interesting stories...."

Indeed.

"....and becuase they give us an idea of the life of people in former times."

Exactly my point in the last post, Dick.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: greg stephens
Date: 05 May 08 - 01:13 PM

Capatain Birdseye: you explain your motives for singing old songs very eloquenttly, and Like Brian Peters I totally share your attitide. But we are not talking about old songs here. We are discussing the fact that it would seem that Bert Lloyd wrote some completely new songs, and passed them off as old songs. So the picture they give may be be beautiful, but it is a false.He was putting words into the mouths of people long dead and gone.
   I expect, Cap'n, you have in your family certain heirlooms. Pictures, letters,other possessions from those of previous generations? Things like that help to make a portrait of our forebears. Now, wouldn't it annoy you slightly if a letter you were led to believe was written by your great-grandfather in fact turned out to be a 1963 forgery?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,Ballyholme
Date: 05 May 08 - 01:51 PM

I'd be interested in hearing Burl's opinion on this topic. I know that he knew Bert quite well.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Nerd
Date: 05 May 08 - 02:34 PM

To clarify, Bert rarely wrote ENTIRELY new songs and passed them off as old. What he did most of the time was to take an old song or an old poem, or several old songs and poems, and cobble lines together. Then he would write a stanza here or there, a line here or there, to fill in the gaps. So Lloyd's "Reynardine" has lines and words from Herbert Hughes, Joseph Campbell, A.E. Housman, and Lloyd himself, in addition to the broadside ballad. In "The Recruited Collier," he started with a poem by Robert Anderson and made his own, fairly drastic, changes.

In both of these cases, Lloyd claimed to have collected the song from someone else: "Reynardine," he said, was sung to him by Tom Cook of Eastbridge, Suffolk, while "The Recruited Collier" was sent to him in manuscript by a Mr. Huxtable of Workington. Neither source was ever located in any records outside Lloyd's own claims, and the purported Huxtable manuscript of "The Recruited Collier" has never surfaced either.

Where ideology came into it was that it seems Lloyd would take songs that were essentially rural (like "Jenny's Complaint" or "The Weaver in Love") and specifically turn them into "industrial folksongs," by changing the protagonists from rural occupations (a ploughboy and a serving-maid) to industrial ones (a collier and a "factory maid.")

He was, at the same time, attempting to argue through his scholarship that "industrial folksong" was a crucial and neglected area for research. It is for this reason that his falsifying such songs was wrong--he was essentially presenting bogus "industrial folksongs" to bolster his argument that there were a lot of industrial folksongs out there waiting to be collected. Whatever one's take on Lloyd as a person or as a singer, I think it's pretty clear this wasn't helpful to future scholars. Since the goal of scholarship is to clarify, not confuse, Lloyd must be seen as a failure AS A SCHOLAR.

As a singer, teacher, friend, revivalist, and loving family man, we can all agree he was a great success.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 05 May 08 - 03:30 PM

So presumably we're not talking about adherence to the historical facts

No, we're not. Take "Spencer the Rover" - presumably it's not a factual account (there aren't any mountains near Rotherham), but that doesn't justify changing the song. If anything, Bert Lloyd could argue that the historical facts were on his side - I'm sure there were colliers recruited to the Napoleonic Wars, and why should the ploughboys get all the songs? For me, at least, it's not about saying "this is how it was" so much as "this is how the song was" - and getting that right (or at least doing my best not to get it wrong) is actually more important than getting the history right.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 May 08 - 04:00 PM

Thank you all for your thorough and interesting replies.

I could have gone to see a discussion Bert was chairing in the 1970's at Birmingham about Whither the Folk Revival?, but by that time I was so royally pissed off with being excluded from the Grey Cock singers list (because I had the wrong influences), I didn't go and make his acqaintance.

I knew all about Lloyd's reputation and achievements, so there was no real excuse for me - just the imapatience of youth. Or maybe the premature onset of middle aged narrowmindedness.

To clarify further though - were these claims made as a precis-ed introduction from the stage? Or were they made in scholarly publications?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 05 May 08 - 04:10 PM

WLD: both and neither; I came across Bert Lloyd's claims about "The recruited collier" in Anne Briggs's sleevenotes, for instance. As Steve Winick (aka Nerd) says, in some cases a particular claim (or even a particular song) appears in one of Lloyd's more 'popular' books but not in Folk Song in England.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 May 08 - 06:31 PM

I thought it might be something like that.

I tell you something that occurred to me. That practice of playing fast and loose with lyrics and beeefing them up to make a powerful connection with an audience is far more prevalent in American folk music. And goes unremarked.

If you think about someone like Derek Brimstone, he had been Rev Gary Davis's roadie and he had bettr insight into the guitar playing than a lot of people who played cleaner versions. His instrumentation was nearer the original - (big Gibson for much of his career) and national steel fingerpicks.

And yet Derek would tell a joke whilst finding the tuning - some completely crazy tale about the song's origins, and the words of say a classic like Candyman would be the cobbled up from the Reverends, Sleepy John's, Donovan's and he'd probably feel free to write a verse of his own. I've seen him do the same with Frank Proffits and Clarence Ashley's banjo songs as well.

And I think Derek probably took this approach from American artists he had seen. people like rambling jack eliot. I seem to recollect seeing quite serious American artists adding a tall tale to spice up presentation.

perhaps AL Lloyd wanted you to look at the artists that he credited with the creation of these songs. Perhaps he saw it as part of his brief and he thought if he pesented it strongly - it had a better chance of surviving than as a fragment.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 05 May 08 - 06:53 PM

You'd have a hard time looking at the work of Tom Cook or J.T. Huxtable; they don't seem to have existed outside Bert Lloyd's notes. But yes, I'm sure there was something like that going on; I don't picture Bert Lloyd stroking a white cat and plotting to make life harder for future generations of folk historians!

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Nerd
Date: 05 May 08 - 11:12 PM

As Phil points out, Lloyd wasn't trying to get you to listen to his sources, because he never told you truthfully who his sources were. In many cases, the sources he cited were salt-of-the-earth laboring men, who didn't exist outside his imagination. The real sources were professional poets like Anderson, Campbell, Houseman and Hughes--but he never cited them. Lloyd was taking middle-class poetry, assigning it working-class origins, giving the names of nonexistent source singers as his authority that it came from tradition, and using it all to make arguments about the proletarian origins of traditional song.

As for wld's point about American folksingers, scholars generally don't care much what people do on stage in front of audiences--except for scholars of performance, who look at a whole different set of practices. Folksong scholars don't take American folksingers to task for telling tall tales because we don't care what they do in performance. For the same reason, we don't criticize Martin Carthy if he rewrites a song without telling anyone (though he usually tells). And we wouldn't care if Lloyd did it either.

But Lloyd wrote books purporting to be serious histories or studies of vernacular song, like The Singing Englishman and Come All Ye Bold Miners. Because of this, scholars DO care, and we eventually began to check out his sources--once things began to seem fishy. This is only right. Books purporting to be non-fiction ought to contain the facts, and if they contain speculation and invention, it ought to be marked as such.

Finally, Lloyd wasn't, in my opinion, just trying to make a powerful connection with an audience; at least not in some cases. If that was all he was doing, a ploughboy would have worked as well as a collier, and a serving-maid as well as a factory-maid. He changed those details to lend credence to the concept of "industrial folksong," which was still a fairly new idea. It was an attempt to lend credence to a historical theory--and once you begin lying to support your theory, you invite people to believe the theory wasn't viable in the first place (if it had been, you wouldn't have had to lie). This is why it's a scholarly sin to falsify evidence in this manner--it may temporarily bolster your position, but it almost inevitably falls apart and makes you and your theory look foolish in the process.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 06 May 08 - 02:14 AM

A mischievous spirit then......

Maybe the world of middle class scholasticism was perceived as another front on which to fight the class war. In many ways it was a battle he won.

I would say that his ideas have been immensely influential. He has in fact inspired a generation of songwriters to speak from that'educated working class' promontory through the medium of folksong form. I say 'folksong form' to prevent the usual descent into bickering over what is a folksong!

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 06 May 08 - 02:31 AM

NERD,If thre were a lot of industrial folksongs that havent been collected,we can partly blame Sharp and his generation,and his next generation, Kennedy etc.
If there werent,it would be an interesting thesis for someone:why werent there?
WLD, I agree,both he and Maccoll have been extremely influential.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: pavane
Date: 06 May 08 - 02:42 AM

So what does 'middle class scholasticism' mean? Is there more than one kind?

Surely scholarship can only logically be a search for the TRUTH.

Genuine scholars can make mistakes, but deliberately faking evidence is clearly not a search for the truth, and therefore the forger cannot claim to be a scholar, whether working class, middle class or any other.

Does that make sense?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Rowan
Date: 06 May 08 - 03:03 AM

If there were a lot of industrial folksongs that haven't been collected, we can partly blame Sharp and his generation, and his next generation, Kennedy etc.
If there weren't, it would be an interesting thesis for someone: why werent there?

A interesting question. And one that, at this spatial and temporal distance from the dark satanic mills, I can't really attempt to answer. I have heard it argued that mill owners established the original glee clubs in England's industrial areas during the mid 1800s, partly to keep the workers' minds off thoughts of activism but I don't know whether there is even any (let alone how much) truth to such a proposition.

But it is also a question I have pondered in an Australian context, where most of the rural songs collected by Meredith et al. (and I know Dick has a copy of Manifold's collection as published by Penguin) give the impression that sheep and cattle were the main rural industries in pre1950s Oz. My first question, on reading such collections was posed only to myself at the time and was "Where are all the dairy farmers' songs?" Apart from the Cockies of Bungaree, songs by or about dairy farmers have been a bit thin on the ground until Peter Pentland wrote "My Beaut Little Fergie Tractor" and a few others in the 1970s.

The nature of the question was prompted by my patrilineal line being mostly dairy farmers in South Gippsland; they certainly knew how to enjoy themselves and several from my extended family toured that area (and adjoining areas) of Victoria as The Holmes Family Orchestra, playing a (more or less) chamber music ensemble for concerts and dances. For a while I thought that dairy farmers didn't have much spare time for songmaking but then I discovered the family history about the orchestra. Perhaps dairy farmers were isolated from the (largely class-based) arguments between squatters and other pastoralists or the similarly based arguments between bosses and shearers. I haven't yet pinned any satisfactory hypothesis. Perhaps, if Bert's sojourn in Oz had included a lot of time among dairy farmers, we might now have some.

Sorry for the thread drift, South Gippsland used to have anthracite collieries at Kongwak and Wonthaggi but, apparently, no songs from them until John Warner started writing some recently.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 06 May 08 - 04:13 AM

Dear Nerd, (Steve Winick),

Thank you so much for your learned comments earlier. I have had to wade through so much po-faced commentary in this thread that I damned near gave it up in despair.

Thanks also to Brian Peters and Greg Stephens for equally learned and measured analysis, not forgetting Richard Bridge, and the acerbic but valuable WLD's remarks.

Bryn Pugh - with regards and respects.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 06 May 08 - 04:34 AM

Yes indeed, there is more than one kind of scholasticism. as an ex Open University student of the excellent Arthur Marwick, I can confirm that a working class intellectual is a distinct possibility of the evolutionary process.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,Phil at work
Date: 06 May 08 - 06:55 AM

Tangentially, it strikes me that the turn back to source singing is a very recent development. Back in the second (Fairport) and third (Steeleye/Horslips) generations of the revival, the early revivalists were seen as, if anything, too reverential towards their sources. Writing about Skewball, Maddy Prior effectively claimed Bert Lloyd as one of the good guys because he'd changed the source material:

Martin (Carthy) assures me that this version comes from the influential repertoire of Bert Lloyd. Bert had a wonderful lyrical sense of the traditional and was not hampered by false loyalty to any rigid idea of how it "should" be. He consequently greatly enriched the music for us all.

I guess it's a generational thing: we're far enough from Bert Lloyd's heyday to see the Revival as an event in the history of traditional music, rather than as a process that we're still contributing to. Hence the recent revival of interest in singers like the Copper family (how many years did the BBC have to make a documentary like "Coppersongs"?)

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 06 May 08 - 07:13 AM

Bryn Pugh,trolling?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 06 May 08 - 07:50 AM

Yes many many thanks to Brian, Steve, Greg, Phil and so many others


So, what should we do now that we understand some of what Bert was up to?

Cheers

Les

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: pavane
Date: 06 May 08 - 09:10 AM

"I can confirm that a working class intellectual is a distinct possibility ."

An intellectual is not necessarily a scholar (in the sense I used).
And scholarship does not depend at all on social status or class, though this may affect the direction in which you look.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 06 May 08 - 09:13 AM

If the cap fits . . .

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 06 May 08 - 01:59 PM

My own wild guess: there were scarcely any "protest folksongs" in the 19th C. partly because potential singer-songwriters (unlike those of the 1960s) didn't think of singing as a way to protest.

And who would they mostly be singing to? Friends and neighbors. In other words, the converted.

As to why there wereso few industrial songs in general, industry wasn't a popularly recognized song genre. Songs about sailors, soldiers, milkmaids, lords & ladies, etc., had 200 or more years to develop into recognized genres. They dealt with characters whose lives were sterotypically supposed to be more "interesting" than most
(as for the milkmaids, ye ken very weel what I mean).

Perhaps tradsong/broadside/ballad tradition became moribund before working underground, for example, could be molded into something romantically "fascinating."

And if it had been, maybe the resulting songs wouldn't contain much protest anyway. The protest element in songs that were widespread in tradition, while present, is generally pretty muted. Had it been more overt, I wonder how many people would have passed the songs on. Few traditional folk audiences, I believe, were much interested in listening to "protests" as a way of entertaining themselves (that is, forgetting their troubles).

Now I'll duck....

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 06 May 08 - 02:18 PM

somewhere in the depths of my attic I used to have a songbook called victoria's inferno - full of pissed off Victorian songwriters. (Was it Jon Raven pu that one together?)

then there were the Irish, they had a few choice things to say about us English in song.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Goose Gander
Date: 06 May 08 - 03:17 PM

On the other side of the Atlantic, Archie Green wrote extensively in Only A Miner about a certain class of American industrial folk songs. Unlike Lloyd, however, Green did not invent his sources. I don't doubt that 'industrial songs' were written in nineteenth-century Britain. If Lloyd wanted to write about them, he should have dug some up. There are any number of reasons why such songs might have been less likely to have gone into tradition than songs of love and loss, murder ballads, etc., but inventing sources shouldn't be necessary if the raw material is really out there waiting to be found.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 06 May 08 - 03:26 PM

Jock Purdom wrote a fair few,as did TommyArmstrong.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Nerd
Date: 06 May 08 - 03:44 PM

Actually, Phil (to get back to heaping praise on Lloyd), I do agree with Maddy to an extent. Lloyd greatly enriched the music and songs for musicians and singers (of which I am also one).

If he had had the confidence to simply note what he had done to each song and why, he wouldn't have mucked it up for scholars. Instead, he not only hid his editorial changes, but in some cases lied about it by inventing sources. This was partly due to his trying to live in both worlds--music scene and scholarly community. It was partly, I think, the insecurity of not having any academic credentials coupled with the paradoxical self-certainty that championing the cause of the industrial worker was right, even if he had to tell some white lies.

It was also partly due to his being a pioneer--there weren't too many other scholars who were really looking at songs as historical evidence yet, so there was no methodology in place. Finally, it had to do with him being untrained--as most of us know, he wasn't a trained historian, and kind of made up his methods as he went along. For all these reasons, we can be amazed that he accomplished all he did.

But, we can STILL wish he hadn't done some of the things he did...

Captain B., you're right, of course, about Sharp et al. But just as we must make allowances for Lloyd, we also have to for Sharp. One of the reasons that Sharp et al didn't look for industrial folksongs is that they didn't think they existed. Indeed, they did NOT exist for those collectors, in the sense that they wouldn't have called singing about coal-mining, by colliers, "folk song." It seems absurd to us now, but in Sharp's day "folk-song" meant rural and pre-industrial songs, or songs preserved among rural folks, by definition. So it was simply outside his scope. While we tend to think of the "definition" of folksong as a bit of hairsplitting that only affects a rarified few, it really did affect what got collected and entered in as historical evidence!

Michael, Lloyd did, in fact, dig up some industrial songs through the "Come All Ye Bold Miners" project in the early 1950s. But the book of materials collected in that project includes songs that he himself had secretly "industrialized," most notably "The Recruited Collier." So one of the things we do owe to Lloyd is that he raised the profile of industrial song beyond the north-east (in much of the rest of England, it was much less well known). But then, in the process he made up some of the evidence.

It's a remarkably complex legacy!

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 06 May 08 - 04:03 PM

>> My own wild guess: there were scarcely any "protest folksongs" in the 19th C. <<

There were plenty of protest broadsides. No-one is suggesting that Bert Lloyd or anyone else made up 'The Cotton Lords of Preston', or 'Handloom v Powerloom', or 'The Miners Lockout' (all from Harry Boardman's repertoire, of my fond memory). See also 'A Touch on the Times' and 'Victoria's Inferno'.

The interesting question for me now - having been really turned on by all that stuff in my teens - is whether those industrial broadsides had any currency in oral tradition. For the reasons Nerd cites, we may never know whether 'The Cotton Lords' was ever a folksong in the sense that, say 'Barbara Allen' was, although by giving his chapter in Folksong in England on The Industrial Songs equal billing with the chapters on Ritual Songs, Ballads and Lyrical Songs, Bert Lloyd was implying that.

Which is why Beckett Whitehead and the other source singers for 'Industrial Folksongs' are so important. If Whitehead did indeed sing 'The Four Loom Weaver' to MacColl, that would be evidence that the old broadside piece had indeed exerted a hold on the popular imagination that survived well into the twentieth century. As a song.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Rowan
Date: 06 May 08 - 06:25 PM

As to why there were so few industrial songs in general, industry wasn't a popularly recognized song genre. Songs about sailors, soldiers, milkmaids, lords & ladies, etc., had 200 or more years to develop into recognized genres.

and
One of the reasons that Sharp et al didn't look for industrial folksongs is that they didn't think they existed. Indeed, they did NOT exist for those collectors, in the sense that they wouldn't have called singing about coal-mining, by colliers, "folk song." It seems absurd to us now, but in Sharp's day "folk-song" meant rural and pre-industrial songs, or songs preserved among rural folks, by definition.

These comments, by Lighter and Steve (Nerd) respectively make me wonder whether we are using the term "industrial" correctly. The genres listed by Lighter are "occupational" and we'd instinctively place them as pre "Industrial Revolution" in folksong context. But soldiering, seafaring, milling and farming are all regarded as "industries", just as coal-mining and cotton-spinning or weaving are, to economists and anthropologists.

It seems to me that, in much of the above discussion the term "industrial" (in its application to collieries and mills) could be replaced by the term "urban" without changing one iota of meaning; the sense of posters' arguments would largely be unaffected. So, was Bert using his political awareness to rebalance notions of the sorts of industry that should be represented in folksong (redressing the effects of Sharp's filters) or did he have wider targets, such as the more class-affected and urban parts of the folksong landscape?

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Nerd
Date: 07 May 08 - 12:03 AM

Rowan, we on the Mudcat didn't create the category of "industrial folksong," and we can't easily change what is meant by it. But it's not as screwy as you make it out to be. "Industrial" has several meanings, and you're applying the very broadest one. By most meanings of the word "industrial," soldiering, seafaring and farming are not industrial activities, and milling, under some meanings of the word, is considered proto-industrial. Let me explain:

Broadly and loosely, it is as Rowan says: one can use "industry" to refer to all sectors of the economy, as in "the farming industry" or "the shipping industry." But this isn't the most common meaning of the word, or the meaning that is used in folksong scholarship.

"Industry" more narrowly means the secondary sector of the economy: refining and manufacturing.

Also, "industrial" refers to a type of economy, one dominated by the secondary sector, an economy in which refining and manufacturing account for more economic activity than farming or extraction. The "Industrial Revolution" changed the countries involved from a mercantile economy to an industrial one. Secondary-sector activities in a pre-industrial economy are sometimes called "proto-industrial," and this would include most songs about milling, waulking songs, etc.

The term "industrial songs" is generally used for the mining, building, and manufacturing trades. I think it gets this from two overlapping usages of "industrial": one, these are songs about the secondary sector of the economy, and two, they are songs of the modern economy, dominated by the secondary sector (the so-called "industrial economy"). So they're about factories, big textile mills, etc.

Mining, of course, became hundreds of times more important in the industrial economy when machines needed power; so even though mining existed before the industrial age, and even though strictly speaking, mining itself is extraction rather than industry, mining songs end up in this category.

This is why "occupational" songs and "industrial" songs aren't considered to be the same. Field hollers and sea shanties are both occupational, but not industrial. A field holler is, economically speaking, agricultural, and a sea shanty is, economically speaking, mercantile--neither of which is the same thing as the narrower sense of industrial.

Nor are "Urban" songs and "Industrial songs" the same. The Butcher's Boy" is an urban folksong ("In Jersey City where I live now..."), but it's not industrial. "In fair Worcester city" or "Molly Malone" likewise: they occur in the city, but don't have to do with industry.

Hope this helps clarify...it's a mouthful, but I THINK this is why the term is used as it is in folksong circles.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Rowan
Date: 07 May 08 - 01:08 AM

And an eloquent mouthful it is, too. Would I be too far off the mark if I wondered whether Bert was engaging in deliberate extension of the two overlapping usages of "industrial", for political (in the wider sense) purposes?

Most of the collectors mentioned so far have had some connection with socialism (whether they were British or Australian); Bert's socialism seems more active than Sharps so, while he could be just extending Sharp's approach to your "secondary sector" (in which case he could be regarded as merely modernising folksong) you seem to have created a good argument for seeing Bert as using song-modification for a much pointier political agenda. Have I understood this correctly?

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: pavane
Date: 07 May 08 - 02:03 AM

"It was also partly due to his being a pioneer--there weren't too many other scholars who were really looking at songs as historical evidence yet, so there was no methodology in place. Finally, it had to do with him being untrained--as most of us know, he wasn't a trained historian, and kind of made up his methods as he went along"

I think you are being too generous. And there is a contradiction here too. If he was untrained, he presumably wouldn't have known of an existing "methodology". I see no reason why this is fundamentally different to history, which has been studied for centuries. And even an untrained person must surely know that forging 'evidence' is wrong.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 07 May 08 - 04:01 AM

Good point Pavane. Lots of us have used the term "scholarly" because it covers most kinds of academic study.

The treatment of evidence and hypothesis building is generally the same for science as it is for history, economics or philosophy. The exceptions are probably creative arts and religion.

Bert knew about evidence that's why he was so good at making it up to support the hypotheses his Marxist background had helped him to generate. He had decided that the industrial working class were part of an oral tradition akin to that of the rural working class and so he doctored songs and in some cases made up sources to support that hypothesis.

Their are lots if "Industrial"songs but I suspect most cold be tracked back to their authors. Many were recorded in only one variant and so had not been molded by an oral process as were many rural songs. This in no way detracts from their value either as songs or as social records but it does make them different.

Cheers

Les

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 07 May 08 - 08:43 AM

I agree with all that, but it doesn't explain Lloyd's root-and-branch rewrite of Skewball (which he didn't own up to), or his brilliant reworking of Reynardine (which he lied about), or even his completely pointless addition of a nudge-nudge verse in the middle of Long a-Growing. Perhaps all of these (plus the 'industrial' songs we've been talking about) are vastly outnumbered by the songs Lloyd put down faithfully; I don't know, I haven't studied the subject.

It comes back to the first question Les asked (which you should be able to see if you scroll up a mile or two): "how long is the Bertsong list?"

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 07 May 08 - 04:00 PM

Yes, the deceased equine of "2. and does it matter?" has been thoroughly beaten from all sides! (I realized quite late that I couldn't be annoyed at some contributors given the question actually had been posed...) (and I won't say which! ;-)

I agree with Phil, how about a bit of energy on question 1?

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 07 May 08 - 04:31 PM

I think maybe theres a bit of 20/20 hindsight going on here.

Remember that in the 1950's people like Ewan MacColl and Bert had created a folk club movement in England - taking from all kinds of things - maybe from cod ethnic singers like Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White who were gigging American nightclubs in the 1940's -, people who had made a success of raising folk music's profile in a tough industrialised society.

Ewan and Bert had to think - what will carry, what will survive , what is the most armour plated toughened version of folk music that will make it out of the library doors and into the human throng. That's something that English folksingers since haven't had to worry about, because Ewan and Bert succeeded.

Perhaps Shakespeare could have written Richard III as a decent chap who had his good points - but would we have remembered his plays if all Shakespeare had done was chronicle and tabulate.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 07 May 08 - 04:42 PM

"how long is the Bertsong list?"

Thanks, Phil, for re-posting this question. It's been avoided studiously since it was originally posted. buried in giving 'albis' to Lloyd and to MacColl.

How long that list is we may truly never know......

'but it doesn't explain Lloyd's root-and-branch rewrite of Skewball (which he didn't own up to), or his brilliant reworking of Reynardine (which he lied about)

Charlotte R

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 07 May 08 - 07:20 PM

WLD - I appreciate what you're saying, but whether we think Bert Lloyd was a fiend in human form or a hero of the Revival doesn't really make any difference to the question I want to look at, which is what he actually did. I mean, the "Spencer the Rover" John Kelly sings is essentially the same song that Bob Copper collected, which in turn is essentially the same song that you can find in the Bodleian's broadside collection. There are some songs collected by Bert Lloyd that you could make similar claims about, and others that you definitely couldn't. How long is list 2, that's the question - and it's a question we could quite possibly answer, with a little help from the people who really know this stuff. Whether or not Lloyd was justified in what he did is a different question, on which we'll probably never agree.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 07 May 08 - 07:46 PM

on which we'll probably never agree.

Phil, I don't actually have an opinion. But it pisses me off somewhat, when I see that people can't somehow see that we are all a bit like flies frozen in the amber of time.

Why didn't bert Lloyd and Ewan macColl take themselves as seriously as wot we do. Well actually they did. the only bloody reason you're here is cos of what they did. They did the best they could in the circumstances and with the insight the and expertise THEY had. Which may I suppose not have been up to the scholastic standards of some round here.

Why didn't they see it like I see it. the same reason Inspector Morse doesn't use a mobile phone in the early episodes.

A future generation will ask why you lot didn't storm the BBC and get things done, and left it to them to sort out.