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

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 09 May 08 - 04:19 PM

Thanks,I am off to play some concertina.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 09 May 08 - 03:01 PM

Thanks, Brian. I suppose my question should really have been preceded by "do we know enough to answer this question: ". As I've said, I don't know a lot about Lloyd, and one of the problems with not knowing a lot is that you don't know what it is that you don't know but other people do.

Which is a slightly roundabout way of saying I wasn't asking anyone to do loads of work to answer that question - just asking whether anyone already knew the answer. It looks as if it's a much bigger question than I realised. (The EFDSS doesn't award research grants, by any chance?)

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 09 May 08 - 02:48 PM

Phil wrote:
"if I were to name (say) three songs Lloyd extensively rewrote and another two he more or less wrote from scratch, what kind of proportion of the songs he collected would those five represent?"

What you are asking for would take an awful lot of research (and NB Steve Winick's comments about Lloyd as collector). Steve's conclusions about Reynardine and The Recruited Collier represent a good deal more than an afternoon's work. Malcolm Douglas tells us on the 'Blackleg Miner' thread that he spent a year "attempting to deconstruct the songs in Lloyd's Penguin Book of English Folk Songs". So, someone would have to identify all the songs in Lloyd's publications and discography, then cross-refer them against all the published collections and broadside indexes.   But, as Steve has pointed out, his most significant influence was in passing songs on to important singers in the revival, so you'd have to talk to those people as well, and do the same kind of detective work on the songs they had from Bert.

I would love to have the time and funds to undertake that research myself (I thought about it seriously as a project at one time), but I'm a musician, and it's not gonna happen. Just out of idle curiosity, though, I spent a couple of hours yesterday with one of Lloyd's LPs – the excellent 'First Person' – and cross-referred some titles with the Roud Index available at VWML online [http://library.efdss.org]. I left out the Australian songs – others know more about those – and I should stress that I've only used a list of titles and sources, not the original manuscripts or books, so I can't compare the actual lyrics or tunes.

'Four Drunken Maidens': Lloyd tells us little about the provenance of this song other than that it "spread like wildfire" during the 18th century, and that "the tune we use is the standard one in the Southern counties".
Roud lists two versions, one in Baring-Gould's 'Songs of the West', and one in 'A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs' (Edinburgh, 1869). I couldn't find a match in the Bodleian Library's Broadside index.
This song has long been a folk club standard, which I guess is due to Lloyd's popularizing it - I'm not convinced it was as widespread as he suggests.

'Saint James' Hospital': As to his source, Lloyd reports only that the tune "was sung in Cork about 1790". I don't have the resources handy to check that, but Roud tells us that Hamish Henderson collected the song in Scotland in 1952, and Mudcatter Jim Carroll recorded a version from Tom Lenihan in Co. Clare in 1978. Harry Cox sang the song as well.

'I Wish my Love'. Attributed to the manuscripts of John Bell of Newcastle, where Lloyd tells us it is titled 'A Pitmans Love Song' - and that he fitted a tune himself. There are over three hundred items from John Bell's collection at the FARNE site [http://www.asaplive.com/FARNE/Home.cfm] but I haven't been able to find the broadside under this title – but then, I'm not sure whether the FARNE resource represents the whole of Bell's collection.

'Jack Orion'. Based on Child 67 'Glasgerion'. "I took it out and dusted it off a bit, and set a tune to it."
A pretty radical rewrite, actually, though none the worse for that.

'The Lover's Ghost' "The great Irish Collector Patrick W. Joyce learned this as a boy in Co. Limerick."
The title is listed in Roud under Joyce's 'Old Irish Folk Music & Songs' (1909), but I don't have a copy to cross-check. Looks sound, though.

'Short Jacket and White Trousers' "I can't find [this] in any of the English printed collections, but Firth of Pocklington (Yorks.) published a broadside of it…. A bit longer but perhaps not as good as our version here".
Roud has only one entry, 'Short Jacket and Blue Trousers', from Newfoundland, but if it's the same song this at least places it in oral tradition. I couldn't find the broadside version on the web.

'Sovay the Female Highwayman' "Every collector of prominence has found versions of it" – there are indeed a number of versions in Roud, several collected by Sharp and others from Kidson, Hammond and Gardiner. "The Dorian tune here is …. substantially the same as H. E. D. Hammond's tune from Long Burton, Dorset… I've added a pinch of spice to the rhythm." Hammond did indeed collect a version about 'Shilo' from a Mrs. Young of Long Burton, and Lloyd does indeed seem to have spiced up the rhythm.

'Farewell Nancy' "Substantially the one that Sharp noted from a 74-year-old Somerset woman with lovely tunes but an uncertain voice." There are several versions in Roud, but Sharp only collected one from a woman, this being Susan Williams of Haselbury Plucknett. Strange, then, to find that Sharp wrote that her voice was "sweet and pure as the note of the woodland thrush." Perhaps Lloyd confused her with another of Sharp's singers.

'Fanny Blair' "Sharp noted this extraordinarily handsome and elusive tune in Somerset", says Lloyd, who goes on to explain that the source singer jumbled the words and that Sharp himself collated a text. Lloyd also mentions that a version from a whaling ship's log specified Fanny's age as eleven, which ties in with Roud's entry for the song's inclusion in Huntington's 'Songs the Whalemen Sang'. Roud also lists a number of broadsides and several traditional versions from Southern England.

And that's it. It looks to me (again stressing that I haven't checked the named sources against the actual MSS) that most of these have sound traditional antecedents, even though some are clearly rarer in tradition than others. Only 'I Wish my Love' defied my attempts to locate a source, but that may mean no more than that FARNE didn't have access to the entire John Bell collection.

Of the rest, 'Jack Orion' is the kind of major Child Ballad reworking that a number of singers (myself included) have indulged in from time to time. 'I Wish My Love' uses an original tune, 'Sovay' a 'spiced up' tune, and some of the others may well have been collated. 'Short Jacket and White Trousers' is a rarity. At a guess, though, I don't think he wrote any of the songs "from scratch". His notes on the sources (he wrote a lot more than I've included here, in characteristically colourful style) are actually very full. So there – for what it's worth – you have it. If anyone has the time to check the sources more fully, please do.

'The Weary Whaling Grounds', however, thanks to the contributions of Curmudgeon and Lighter, we might now add to the list of 'Bertsongs'. And what a great job he made of it!

Finally, in answer to WLD's comment: "I think he was writing for young people who went to folk clubs rather than scholars. you see most people were young in those days."

I first read 'Folk Song in England' when I was seventeen. I was fascinated not just by the songs and the background information, but by Bert Lloyd's way with words. The fact that I now sing these songs for a living is due in part to his book.... and so too is the fact that I want to know where they came from.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 08 May 08 - 09:33 PM

"Wings of a Goney" is indeed in Huntington, who unearthed it from the log of the Ocean Rover, 1859. "Wings of a Gull" - revised and Briticized - isn't. Nor do I believe that it was ever "collected" by anyone but Lloyd.

In fact, there's no particular reason to assume that "Wings of a Goney" was anything more than one whaler's poem. It appears in Huntington without a melody.

An example of the alterations:

Huntington :

For a man must be foolish to venture so far
On the broad blue expanse catching whales
When he knows that his life is in danger at times
Or his head being smashed by their tails

Lloyd:

For a man must be mad or want money bad
To venture chasing whales;
For he may be drowned when the fish turns around
Or his head smashed in by its tail.

Note the added internal rhymes. The 1859 "Dutch grocery shop" becomes, in Lloyd's song, "a Deptford pub." The unpoetic "crackers and cheese" of the original disappear. And so forth. The spirit of the poem is unchanged. But it's hard for me to ignore the fact that verses not known to have been sung by anybody have been consciously improved, set to a tune, the cultural references (like "one red cent") altered for no obvious reason from American to English, and turned into a song by a professional 20th C. writer.

Not only that, but the new creation is asserted to be "traditional," by implication known and sung by many British whalers, perhaps for generations.

There's seems to be no evidence at all that it was.

Is the tune identifiable ?

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

I can't actually see where we differ.

They knew folkmusic's profile could be raised in a modern society - because they had seen it done in America. They knew it was possible. they must been debating with each other, and seizing mainchances in the way that all unregarded artists do.

MacColl's success as a playwright behind the Iron Curtain - must have awakened in him the idea of the using a Brechtian model of doing folksong - and thus the radio ballads. Folksong was beng used in other plays in the 1950's like John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and Weskers's Chips with Everything. MacColl with his theatre background must have felt part of all that.

The English being the English rose to the stimulus those two presented in their own peculiar way. And bloody frustrating it must have been, as Lonnie Donnegan and Donovan and Dylan in turns went stellar.

As you say Lloyd had a strategy, and presenting songs rather than fragments with a punchy and compelling and not too diffuse provenance must surely have been part of his effort.

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...

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

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: curmudgeon
Date: 08 May 08 - 05:39 PM

"...and know who wrote weary whaling grounds..."

It's in Huntington as "Wings of a Goney" -- Tom Hall

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 08 May 08 - 12:02 PM

*Sigh*

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 08 May 08 - 11:56 AM

I think therein probably lies your answer. to understand all is to forgive all.

Perhaps, but it would help a lot on the "understand all" front if we had some idea what the all actually was.

This is not an anti-Bert Lloyd thread. I think we're all agreed that he did some rewriting. All I'd like to know is which songs are heavily rewritten, and what proportion of his work as a collector they represent.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 May 08 - 11:31 AM

I think he was writing for young people who went to folk clubs rather than scholars. you see most people were young in those days. It must have hurt him considerably to see this great wave of youth and enthusiasm slowed down to a trickle by the 1970's.

showbiz versus the crusties - must have broken his heart.

And I think therein probably lies your answer. to understand all is to forgive all.

Theres this beautiful little story in Denis Healey's autobiography where he describes the idealism of socialists after ww2:-

Denis is the prospective MP for somewhere or other, straight out of uniform and not one practical idea in his head.

This poor bloke stands up in the Labour Party meeting. he's got a shoe factory and financially its in the shit because of shortages and with rationing - no one can buy any shoes anyway. What am I going to do? the guy asks.

Denis gets up to speak, and says very grandiosely - as long as there is one barefoot child in this country - your factory will not be idle - your workers will not be unemployed under Labour.

Uproarious applause, but of course it wasn't answering the poor sod's question, as Denis realised when he came to write his biography fifty years later.

We say the things we say and we do the things we do - and it will seem strange and wrong to those who come after us. I really can't see as cribe any evil intent in this case we are discussing though.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Pete_Standing
Date: 08 May 08 - 10:39 AM

From a practical point of view, we could use the resources of an internet forum (such as this) to make a list (thread) of songs known to be doctored or thought to be doctored, citing reasons, but keeping debate about the validity of the practice out of it, which is best kept here. I'm not a scholar, I am a singer, but I would still like to know about the sources of the songs I sing.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Snuffy
Date: 08 May 08 - 10:12 AM

I sometimes wonder if it wouldnt be better to be ignorant of who wrote traditional songs,and just enjoy them on their merit as songs.Dick Miles

Perhaps Bert Lloyd also believed that and did his best to keep us "ignorant of who wrote traditional songs" so that we could "just enjoy them on their merit as songs"

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 08 May 08 - 09:47 AM

sorry to interrupt,when I hear trad music being used to promote fish fingers,or some other consumer desirable,the music becomes spoiled for me.
yet on the other hand we should be pleased the music is being promoted.
Like wise,to seek after historical truth,and know who wrote weary whaling grounds,is undoubtedly commendable,but as we strip away the layers,in search of pigeonholing everything.,we are in danger of reducing the magic.
the late Elizabethan[computer] age will be known as the age of the person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
when I first heard folk music it was all wonderful,as one becomes more knowledgeable,one becomes more critical,but in doing so we lose our innocence.
I sometimes wonder if it wouldnt be better to be ignorant of who wrote traditional songs,and just enjoy them on their merit as songs.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: GUEST,Phil at work
Date: 08 May 08 - 09:09 AM

Brian:

Did he really need to invent sources, in order to sell the music? (always remembering that the number of instances where this has actually been demonstrated remains small).

I can't help feeling we're having this discussion back to front. Surely we need to know more about what Lloyd actually did before we talk about why he did it, never mind arguing about whether he was justified in doing it.

I'll confess to almost total ignorance of Lloyd's contribution to the Revival canon. Here's a question: if I were to name (say) three songs Lloyd extensively rewrote and another two he more or less wrote from scratch, what kind of proportion of the songs he collected would those five represent - 10%? 5%? 1%? Another question: how many of the other 90% (or 95%, or 99%) are solidly attested, and how many are still being taken on trust?

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 May 08 - 06:27 AM

Call it faking if you want - but we're talking about LP covers and books liely to read by people who went to folk clubs. people who get bored like myself, people with low attention spans, probably only there in the vain hope of meeing somone who looked a bit Marianne Faithful or Judy Collins.

More of a creative precis.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 08 May 08 - 05:37 AM

>> I suppose this is why such a lot of the traddies on mudcat go apopleptic when you a suggest maybe some of these old songs aren't actually worth preserving - they really aren't all that good as songs. <<

'Traddie on Mudcat' - that's me.

Some old songs are aesthetically beautiful but don't tell us an awful lot. Some are fascinating historically but lousy to sing. Some score on all counts, others have no redeeming features at all. I've never met a singer, traddy or otherwise, who doesn't filter their material, nor one whose motive is primarily one of 'preservation'.

Song collectors post-Sharp have increasingly tended towards the view that you should record everything in a singer's repertoire in order to avoid interposing your own value-judgements, but that's a separate issue.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 08 May 08 - 05:24 AM

>> So Bert invented a few folksingers. If that's what it took to get people listening, good luck to him. <<

I know his singing only through several (much-loved) recordings, but even at that distance it's clear that his skill was such that he could have got people listening to the phone book. Did he really need to invent sources, in order to sell the music? (always remembering that the number of instances where this has actually been demonstrated remains small).

I take the point that he was operating in very different circumstances from those we know now. I also realise that without the 'Industrial Songs' concept, there would most likely have been no 'Deep Lancashire', no Harry Boardman, and my life would have been poorer. I still want to know where the songs came from, though.

Talking of which (and this is a genuine question), does anyone know the origin of 'The Weary Whaling Grounds'?

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

WLD: I am with you all the way that Bert was a good bloke and was fantastic for the folk revival. But I can't follow you on the logical leap to "therefore faking historical documents is a good thing". It's not a good thing: faking historical documents is a bad thing.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: The Sandman
Date: 08 May 08 - 04:35 AM

well said WLD.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 May 08 - 03:59 AM

Okay, I admit, all said in annoyance last night. But i really don't think some people here aren't making allowances for the the time and place. Or the lives these people led.

How many millions did Ewan and Bert get out of teaching all the school kids in the land High Germany and countless other folksongs, and the radio ballads. And god knows how many other projects that gave the folk revival its momentum.

I remember going to a Ewan and Peggy gig one night in Leicestershire - it was the night the record comany had old them they intended destroying all the stocks of the radio ballad lps, because they didn't fit the label image. Peggy and Ewan had asked if they could buy them to sell at gigs - as it would have been impossible to finance producing them to that standard- and the company had said.

What I'm trying to say is that these weren't pampered people. they weren't photogenic enough for BBC2 to be queing to make in concert programmes about them! I'm quite convinced they wouldn't have done anything that wasn't with the primary intention of getting the folk music ship afloat.

personally i wans't buying quite a few of the ideas in Folksong in england, but it was one hell of an influential book. Even people who hadn't read it absorbed its ideas through the folk clubs and contact with those who had read it.

I suppose this is why such a lot of the traddies on mudcat go apopleptic when you a suggest maybe some of these old songs aren't actually worth preserving - they really aren't all that good as songs. but they are defended hook, line and sinker by people who have absorbed a view of history that doesn't hold water if you examine the minutiae, or even just weigh up the probablities of how it was.

So Bert invented a few folksingers. If that's what it took to get people listening, good luck to him. I wish I were that creative.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 08 May 08 - 03:33 AM

I'll just repeat myself - 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 (specifically) he actually did.

Subject: RE: Bertsongs?
From: Goose Gander
Date: 08 May 08 - 12:41 AM

"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."

Well, this does not make a great deal of sense. My grandfather told me about the Wobblies and my uncle told me about Woody Guthrie. Both sang fragments of song. It made me want to sing, but I had to find 'the tradition' on my own because it wasn't lying around anywhere convenient. It wasn't anywhere around me, actually, but there were recordings and books that helped. It makes a hell of a difference whether something in a supposedly scholarly work was actually sung by a real person, or whether it was the product of the author. Re-creations are fine, but I want to know about it. And I really cannot understand why some folks here cannot understand that lying about one's sources is wrong.

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.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: The Sandman
Date: 06 May 08 - 03:26 PM

Jock Purdom wrote a fair few,as did TommyArmstrong.

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: 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: 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: Bryn Pugh
Date: 06 May 08 - 09:13 AM

If the cap fits . . .

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: 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: The Sandman
Date: 06 May 08 - 07:13 AM

Bryn Pugh,trolling?

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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