AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 08:11 AM

Really enjoyed Phil's very articulate critique of Fakesong in this thread. I felt exactly the same way (and I'm also a Marxist).

I felt much the same way about The Imagined Village, which I gave up on about 50 pages in. Whoever supervised that particular PhD thesis wasn't doing their job properly, I thought: I got fed up having to look up every footnote expecting to read some kind of support for what was being asserted as fact, only to find the title and publisher of whatever the work was.

And that work was generally by an ethnomusicologist from a completely different country talking about that completely different country's tradition. Purportedly a critique of the English folk revival, it will use any other source talking about any other country's folk music, if it can be used to build up a case.

As it happens, it's unable to make any especially damning inditements of the major collectors (as far as I read, anyway), so its grand claims seem like hyperbole in the main.

As you say Phil, any stick...

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 08:27 AM

...but to tie that back to Bert though, if you compare those books to Bert's 'Folk Song In England', what's clear is that Bert could really write. 'Folk song in England' has a sharp and literate prose style and is a truly inspiring tome: you come away from it buzzing with ideas (which I can't say about Fakesong and Imagined Village). Writing was his bread-and-butter and it shows.

I also think that some of the things Bert is bashed with are overstated: if you read 'Folk song in England' scrupulously, his 'pagan' stuff is a lot more speculative than he's given credit for. When I read it, I thought it was just funny that a rather stuffy ageing bookish man should should be lustily speculating about pagan fertility origins: it never occurred to me that he could possibly be saying all that stuff was Historical Fact.

There's a middle ground: a recognition that we're talking about songs here, not historical documents. Songs are art, they're not people. I did an English Lit Degree and I read a lot of poetry, so I accordingly tend to think of folk songs much the same way I do poems. To me, a song like 'Herrings Heads' quite simply IS a magic spell. To me, that's completely indisputable when you read the words: herrings heads become universally plastic, cosmic fleshy Lego. It's irrelevant what that song was historically. Bert was definitely on the side of the poets, simple as that.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: The Sandman
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 09:35 AM

Bert was a Curates Egg,

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 09:36 AM

I suppose that the point that I was groping towards, in my contribution about Artisan Naturalists, is that the Industrial Revolution marked a point at which ordinary people's relationship to their culture changed: they went (in a collective sense) from being active creators to passive consumers. This was most marked in urban areas but lingered on, in faded forms, in the remoter, more rural parts of these islands, to the end of the 20th century. Trouble is, the Industrial Revolution is too far away in time to be really sure about exactly what changes took place.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 10:40 AM

"I felt much the same way about The Imagined Village,"
I found one of the golden rules of the building trade to be that it was always easier to demolish something somebody else had built than it was to build something yourself.
Seems to apply to this particular field of folk-song scholarship.
"Bert was a Curates Egg,"
Does that make Alex Campbell a Scotch Egg, I wonder?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 11:40 AM

Well Jim we put up with all sorts of b*llocks aon here but we draw the line on humour - as you well know!


Trousers

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 11:44 AM

I like The Imagined Village too. It accounts for the condition of the revival as a bourgeois construct, which is exactly what it is: a highly selective paternalistic imperialist fantasy of working-class cultural 'traditions' meticulously pieced together from the shards and fragments of particular idioms of popular song, dance and custom which the working class themselves had largely given up on in the light of new developments (dare I say improvements?) in technology and lifestyle giving rise to the reactionary mawkishness that has typified folk since Cecil Sharp's Epiphany of August 22nd 1903.   

That's what folk is - it is born and perpetuated by cultural & class dichotomy. What The Imagined Village and Fakesong do is attempt to account for that with a twist of cultural criticism to contextualise the thing with moderate affection. All very straightforward one might have thought, and though by no means perfect I suspect the inherent fundamentalism of The Revival informs a lot of the opposition here - the belief that Folk is anything else other than a specialist idiom of popular music, or that the 1954 Definition tells us anything that isn't true of ALL music, whatever the genre.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: The Sandman
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 12:28 PM

no Jim, Alex Campbell, had something you will never have, a wonderful sense of humour, an abilty to entertain, an abilty to tell stories and keep an audience riveted, you in comparison are an earnest fellow who has done a lot of collecting.
But given a choice of Alex Campbell or you as a guest performer/entertainer, you are not in his league.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 12:40 PM

they went (in a collective sense) from being active creators to passive consumers.

Can I cite that as Exhibit A in my case for the reactionary mawkishness that has typified folk since Cecil Sharp's Epiphany of August 22nd 1903?

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 12:41 PM

"but we draw the line on humour - as you well know!"
I see somebody does - ah well, you can't please all of the people all of the time
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 12:44 PM

I guess you can cite what you like, Sean. As we all know [so must you], you are engaging in an interminable dialogue with yourself in this particular, to which the rest of us have long since ceased to pay the remotest attention ~~~

Or had you really not noticed?!

≈M≈

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: GUEST,Nick Dow
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 01:24 PM

Just to let,know that I'm still here but with my mouth firmly shut. The level of scholarship here is way above my league. I can't say that I understand everything that's been posted, but I'm doing my best. Dick comes out of the same background as me but to be fair he's doing a much better job of keeping up than I could ever do.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 01:29 PM

"The level of scholarship here is way above my league"
Oh, come on Nick; you know more about Travellers than most people here - modesty, surely?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 03:18 PM

Coventry eh, Michael? Well, that's what you get for trying to play reasonably with the big boys.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: GUEST,Nick Dow
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 03:18 PM

Yes I've lived the life. Its not modesty just a feeling of 'That is not for the likes of me' That's how it was when I was a kid, and it sort of stays with you. 'Get your nose out of that book and earn a bloody living!!' That's how it was.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim McLean
Date: 04 Aug 14 - 05:23 PM

As we seem to have reached the usual conclusion in this type of thread , slagging matches, may I add that my appreciation of Bert Lloyd was that I couldn't stand his voice. I heard him many times at the Pinder of Wakefiled in the 1960s and shuddered every time although I liked the songs. I am also not a fan of Alfred Deller.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 11:13 AM

I do hope the little spat hasn't driven this interesting topic into the ground.
Both Ewan and Bert, for all their shortcomings, were instrumental in giving us the music that has given me at least, a lifetime of pleasure and interest - it was refreshing to be able to take part in a discussion that didn't include the usual grave-dancing and backbiting.
Both left us a body of work that has hardly been examined (I certainly know this to be the case with Ewan)
I never participated, but I became somewhat depressed reading the recent discussions on folk-clubs, (where nearly all of us cut our musical teeth), and the ease with which some people seem happy to write than off as a thing of the past and let them go.
For me they were a door into a subject that has occupied a large part of my like and hopefully, will continue to do so.
If nobody has anything else to add, I just wanted so thank Nick for opening another door.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: The Sandman
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 12:08 PM

The most important thing is to sing the songs, everything else is of less importance including criticising Berts scholarship. I am indebted to everyone who has added to the repertoire, I am indebted to everyone who has organised a folk club, I am indebted to MacColl as a songwriter.
I forgive Jim Carroll.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 12:59 PM

"I forgive Jim Carroll."
Hallelujah - salvation at last!
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 01:36 PM

Say 6 Hail Maries and count your beads!

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: zozimus
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 02:48 PM

Having followed this thread,I would like to ask, if Bert was economical with the truth, can we accept all the copious sleeve notes he wrote for the Topic L/Ps as being accurate on songs other than "Bertsongs" ?
I've just been reading his notes on "All Bells in Paradise" by The Valley Folk and it would take ages to double-check all his references.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 04:02 PM

Sorry, zozimus,
but there must be other sources you can go to by now.

I suggest you type in any sleeve notes you are interested in as a new thread using the song title and we'll do our best with them. If references are to versions in published books there's a good chance they were accurate, but we can always check, if the books aren't too obscure.

If this song is also known as 'Down in yon forest' I'm pretty certain there is plenty of info on this in the EFDSS journals which is probably where Bert got the info from.

The most likely thing that would need double checking is references to religious meaning. A lot of these old carols contain allegories and there are various interpretations.

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 05 Aug 14 - 04:30 PM

A L Lloyd and Alfred Deller - two of my all time favourite singers of folk songs...

Subject: RE: AL Lloyd, is he the one that got away
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 06 Aug 14 - 03:27 AM

"All Bells in Paradise"
Hi Zoz
The song appears on the final album of The Riverside series 'English and Scottish Ballads by MacColl and Lloyd - all the songs included have copious notes which might be of some use.
I'm pretty sure you have the set - if not, contact me
Jim Carroll