Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From:
Nerd
Date: 08 May 08 - 07:24 PM
Oops! I'll try again:
I think WLD greatly overstates the case when he makes Lloyd and MacColl into strategically-minded folksong warriors with statements like this:
"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."
I see no evidence they thought like this at all. MacColl's strategy was to throw everything at the wall and see what stuck. He recorded between one and two hundred LPs worth of material, of everything from "Songs of the Jacobite Rebellions" to "Songs of Robert Burns" to modern topical songs, to two LPs of "Broadside ballads of plays by Elizabethan dramatists" (I am not making this up). He wasn't carefully selecting the songs he thought were tough and resilient, he was just presenting thousands of songs, and a few of them have turned out to be tough and resilient. I'm not suggesting he was indiscriminate--he recorded material he liked, or that was intellectually interesting to him. I just don't think he wasted a lot of time thinking about a song's resiliency, or strategizing about how the song would lead to a stronger folk tradition. If he liked it, he recorded it, and it was by being out there and doing it (and, not incidentally, by trying to infuse folk music with some of what he knew as an actor and dramaturge) that he hoped to revitalize the music.
Lloyd was different. He didn't really record that much himself--say, about a tenth of what MacColl did. His greatest influence was behind the scenes. He selected singers who he thought would be influential, and passed his songs on to them: Anne Briggs, Frankie Armstrong, Bert Jansch, Maddy Prior, Sandy Denny, Mike Waterson, Louis Killen, Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, etc. (He also acted as "artistic director" of Topic Records, although you'll need someone with more insider knowledge than I have to tell you what he actually did in that role.) So he did have a strategy, but it wasn't what WLD describes. He edited songs to make what he thought were compelling versions, and then passed them on to singers who he thought would do them justice and make them popular. Once again, and forgive me for talking loud here, but NO ONE IS CRITICIZING HIM FOR THIS.
Partly because this was his strategy, it's hard to get a handle on how many songs Lloyd edited. The singers didn't always credit him, because he just told them these were good versions of folksongs. much of the material recorded by them, at least in the early and formative years of their careers, is likely to have been touched by Lloyd.
Another thing to point out is that Bert didn't really "collect" very much at all, in the sense that Sharp or Baring-Gould did. I can think of four "collecting" instances from Lloyd's life, for only one of which can we verify what he collected and from whom: he collected seven songs and one tune in Eastbridge, Suffolk, for the BBC in 1939.
Other collecting:
He spent several years in Australia as a young man. When he was there, he later claimed, he wrote down the words of songs from the station hands he worked with, in composition books. Some say those books were destroyed in a fire before he ever went back to England. One person claims he once saw one of them, years later. But whatever happened to them, they don't seem to have survived. All the Australian songs Bert knew were relatively common pieces that were in the standard books and publications on Aussie songs. Because of this, some Australian folksong researchers believe that Lloyd never collected anything substantial, that he went back to England, learned Australian songs from books, and used the fact that he'd lived in Oz to set himself up as an "expert" on Australian songs.
Similarly, he did spend a season on a whaler, and another as a merchant mariner, and later said he'd learned some songs from the men he knew aboard ship. But, as we've seen earlier in the thread, there are reasons to think he either didn't really learn them from shipmates, or that he edited them after the fact.
In neither case did Lloyd publish a volume of songs--there is no "Australian Songs" or "Sea Songs" book by Lloyd. He did record albums on both these themes, but as some have said on this thread, the only writing there was in sleeve notes, and it's often vague.
In the early 1950s, Lloyd was a principal force behind the project that created "Come All Ye Bold Miners." Here, he created a contest for the best mining songs, which he publicized through the Coal Board, in a Newsreel film, and in regional magazines. The material was mailed to him in written or printed form. He then published it later. Whether this counts as "collecting" will depend on your perspective, and also on what actually came to him (if most of the songs were copied out of books by people who didn't sing them, most folklorists wouldn't consider it "collecting," but if a singer wrote out the words to his or her songs, most folklorists would.) How much he edited these materials, again, is unknown. How many of them were actually sent to him is also unknown, though some of the original correspondence may survive; I don't know. This is when the purported Mr. Huxtable purportedly sent Lloyd the text of "The Recruited Collier."
Apart from that, I'm not aware of any "collecting" of English traditional songs that Lloyd did. Others may know more than I on that topic. He worked for the BBC on and off as a writer, and it wouldn't surprise me if he had collected for them a few more times.
Lloyd's principal contributions were not as a collector, but as a singer, as a mentor to other singers, and as an analytical writer about folksong in several books, many articles, and (of course) sleeve notes. His writings were, as we've seen, flawed by the fact that he had an axe to grind, and didn't mind altering songs or making up singers in order to grind it sharper. But he also made a lot of interesting points and wrote very well--so the books are a mixed bag.
By the way, as to Bert writing the line "Blusterous wind and the great dark water," this is a great example of Lloyd's method. "Blusterous wind" is in fact a folksong phrase from the real tradition, which Lloyd knew: Phil Tanner's version of "The Banks of the Sweet Primroses," as arresting a performance as exists in English-language folk tradition, ends on those words. Lloyd seems to have borrowed and expanded the phrase.
As for songs Lloyd edited, we can start a list if we want:
Tam Lin
Jack Orion (Bert's reworking of "Glasgerion")
Skewball
Reynardine
Weaver and Factory Maid
Recruited Collier
Heave away my Johnny
The Ship in Distress
Surely Malcolm knows more about his interventions in the materials in the Penguin Book...
|
sj
