Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revolution

Subject: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 02:54 PM

Can anyone help with lyrics or titles that we help finds songs that deal with the impact of the industrial revoloution on working people.
Hope you can help.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST,ET, Guest
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 03:30 PM

I highly recommend Peggy Seegar - "Gonna Be an Engineer" - and look up a lot of Ewan MaColl and Peggy Seegar - Cotton MIll Girls, etc.

These two are just the first to pop into my head but I'm sure you'll get a lot of others!> Luck. ET

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 04:05 PM

I don't think any song is more evocative about the impact of the industrial revolution on ordinary people herded from the countryside to work in mills and factories than Poverty Knock (it's in the Digitrad).

Can't really agree with Guest ET's nomination of Peggy Seeger's Gonna Be An Engineer. This was written only 30 years ago and deals with the prejudice women faced (and still do to an extent ) in pursuing careers hitherto considered a traditional male preserve, alongside the pressures of conventional marriage.

I would however consider many of the songs from the MacColl/Seeger Radio Ballads (especially The Travelling People) which depict the enforced changes which industrialisation and 'progress' have wrought on people's lives.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 04:07 PM

The Fourloom Weaver,

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: SINSULL
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 05:05 PM

Babies In The Mill by Dorsey Dixon
In The Weaving Room recorded by Sandy Paton on one of the Golden Ring CDs.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 05:12 PM

Ten and Nine (The Jute Mill Song)
Poverty Knock
Doffing Mistress
Springhill Disaster
Black Waters
The L&N Don't Sop Here Anymore
Peg and Awl
Aragon Mill
Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill
Pollution
The Factory Lad
Garbage

Bev and Jerry

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 05:15 PM

Poverty Knock, probably written by Tom Daniel, the Cropper Lads (in Karl Dallas's Songs of Toil anthology) and, more recently, Alan Franks' Fairfax and Fordingley.

Kitty

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 05:15 PM

Countess Richard:

"This was written only 30 years ago and deals with the prejudice women faced (and still do to an extent ) in pursuing careers hitherto considered a traditional male preserve, alongside the pressures of conventional marriage."

This dilemma could not have occurred before the industrial revolution as men and women worked together on farms before that.

Bev and Jerry

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 06:47 PM

er...that was my point, Bev & Jerry. 'Gonna Be An Engineer' is a post-industrial revolution song about gender inequality, not class struggle.

Though I really don't think you can argue that in an agrarian society women had a noticeably better deal.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Gareth
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 06:59 PM

Click 'Ere Tho this may be classified as post industrialisation.

McColl sumed it up from "John Axon" to "Singing the Fishing"

Gareth

" And I know that ****** Coal mine,
Has seen the last of ME"

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Susanne (skw)
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 07:32 PM

'The Testimony of Patience Kershaw', about a girl working in a mine.
'The Dalesman's Litany' ("From Hull and Halifax and Hell, good Lord deliver me ...")

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 02 Feb 04 - 09:02 PM

Most of the songs named so far are about the consequences of the industrial revolution, but written long after it happened. Others are simply about work. Are you looking for material made at the time, or retrospective takes on it, or both?

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 03:40 AM

If you're interested, I can look up some German songs.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: pavane
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 03:50 AM

See Album 'Songs of a changing world', if you can find it.
Jon Raven, Tony Rose, Nic Jones

Subject: Lyr Add: GENERAL LUDD'S TRIUMPH
From: Teribus
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 04:43 AM

General Ludd's Triumph

Tune "Poor Jack"

Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood,
His feats I but little admire
I will sing the Atchievements of General Ludd
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire

Brave Ludd was to measures of violence unused
Till his sufferings became so severe
That at last to defend his own Interest he rous'd
And for the great work did prepare

Now by force unsubdued, and by threats undismay'd
Death itself can't his ardour repress
The presence of Armies can't make him afraid
Nor impede his career of success

Whilst the news of his conquests is spread far and near
How his Enemies take the alarm
His courage, his fortitude, strikes them with fear
For they dread his Omnipotent Arm!

The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims
At the honest man's life or Estate
His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames
And to those that old prices abate

These Engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the Trade
And Ludd who can all opposition defy
Was the grand Executioner made

And when in the work of destruction employed
He himself to no method confines
By fire and by water he gets them destroyed
For the Elements aid his designs

Whether guarded by Soldiers along the Highway
Or closely secured in the room
He shivers them up both by night and by day
And nothing can soften their doom

He may censure great Ludd's disrespect for the Laws
Who ne'er for a moment reflects
That foul Imposition alone was the cause
Which produced these unhappy effects

Let the haughty no longer the humble oppress
Then shall Ludd sheath his conquering Sword
His grievances instantly meet with redress
Then peace will be quickly restored

Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice
Nor e'er their assistance withdraw
Till full fashioned work at the old fashioned price
Is established by Custom and Law

Then the Trade when this ardorous contest is o'er
Shall raise in full splendor it's head
And colting and cutting and squaring no more
Shall deprive honest workmen of bread.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: muppett
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 04:55 AM

How about four loom weaver,the Spinners did a version of it.

Chumbawamba's album English Rebel Songs 1381 - 1984, has a number of songs of this period as well, such as the Colliers March, The triumph of General Ludd, Chartist Anthem, Song on the times, the world turned upside down & Poverty knock.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 07:18 AM

Actually I would love to have soem things that were written at the time> I am familiar with many of the songs about weaving and mills but I am not sure about farming, mining and so on. I am very grateful for the suggestions so far, thanks a lot. I am teaching the industrial rev. through music so I need lots of help.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 07:28 AM

I see that Springhill Mine disaster is listed..It is a fairly recent event, is it not ? Also, I have a great version of I wanna be an engineer by Frankie Armstrong, but I don't think it quite qualifies as industrial revoloution.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 08:03 AM

"In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Late in the year of '58..."

And , to clarify, you want songs written contemporaneously, not retrospectively...and do you want British only?

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 08:33 AM

I would like to have songs written at the time although I know there are good things written in retrospect..They need not be exclusively British although I believe the majority of contemporary music might be British.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Nemesis
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 09:09 AM

Wiliam Blake's Jerusalem .. written attacking industrialisation which contemporaneous with the period

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST,Henryp
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 09:26 AM

Check the Folk in Education website

EARLY 19th CENTURY INDUSTRIAL SONGS
Gill Burns, Peter and Moira Gutteridge
Six factory songs for classroom use. Songs on side A with accompaniment and accompaniment only on side B.
Booklet of the song text included.
Music Cassette and Booklet:    £6.50

HORSES HOUSEMAIDS AND HARD OLD TIMES
The Tollhouse Company
Made for schools, this pack illustrates (mostly agricultural) Victorian life through song.
Songbook contains teachers notes and support material for songs.
CD and book:    £18.75

IRON MUSE
Various
A compilation of songs from the Industrial Folk Tradition of the mining and textile industries.
Singers include: Anne Briggs, Ray Fisher, Dick Gaughan, High Level Ranters, Louis Killen, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger...
... and many more.
CD:    £12.50

The Painful Plough, A Portrait of the Agricultural Labourer in the Nineteenth Century, from Songs and Ballads and Contemporary Accounts. Editor. (CUP, 1972)

Also look through the collection of songs in the Digital Tradition on the Mudcat site.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: pavane
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 10:23 AM

The Thrashing Machine is agricultural and authentic, as it was written soon after this machine was invented (C1850?) but is rather 'impolite'! See broadsides at the Bodley Ballad collection.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 10:29 AM

Thank you all so much, this has been very useful.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: GUEST,Big Jim from Jackson
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 10:31 AM

Gary and Vera Aspey have a number of songs having to do with coal mining in England, along with some other stuff that is related to the topic. And they are great fun to listen to!!!

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Susanne (skw)
Date: 03 Feb 04 - 08:15 PM

Tommy Armstrong, the 'pit bard', was contemporary, I think.

Subject: Lyr Add: CROPPER LADS - BLACKLEG MINER - etc.
From: GUEST,Len Wallace
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 12:16 PM

Well, there was a book published out of England a number of years back. I believe the title was "Victoria's Inferno" that dealt with songs from the time period of the 19th century on that subject. I'm tryig to find my copy of it in my library under a mountain of songbooks.

A number of songs i'd suggest:

The Cropper Lads (about the Luddite movement around 1815, smashing of the new machines) i actually recorded it on my album "Winds of Change". The first verse is:

Come Cropper Lads of high reknown
who love to drink good ale that's brown
And strike each haughty tyrant down with hatchet, pike and gun.

Chorus:
The Cropper Lad's for me, the gallant lad's for me
who with lusty stroke the shear frames broke
The Cropper Lad's for me.

"Blackleg Miner", one of my favourites that came from 1844 (the Black Year of '44 it was called) and a bitter coal mining strike by Chartists. Steeleye Span recorded it. I did too on my first album. the words are:

It's in the evening after dark
that the blackleg miner creeps to work
in his moleskin pants (or cap) and dirty (dorty) shirt
There goes the blackleg miner.

He takes his pick and down he goes
to hew the coal that lies below
There's not a woman in this town row
Will speak to the blackleg miner.

Oh, Delaro is a terrible place
They rub black clay in the blackleg's face
And 'round the pithead (pitheid, or pitheaps)
They run a footrace to catch the blackleg miner

Oh, don't go near the Seghill mine
Across the road they stretch a line
To catch the neck and reak the spine
of the dirty blackleg miner.

They take his pick and tools as well
And throw (hoy) theym down the pit o hell.
down ye go, faretheewell you dirty blackleg miner.

So, join the union while you may
Don't wait till your dyin' day
That may not be far away you dirty blackleg miner.

Then there's:
"Drill Ye Terriers, Drill" from 1888;
"Song of the Lower classes" by Ernest Jones one of the Chartist leaders with the verse that starts:

"We plough and sow, we're so very, very low
that we delve in the dirty clay
till we bless the plain with the golden grain
and the vale of the fragrant hay.
our place we know we're so very, very low
'tis down at the landlor's feet
we're not too low the grain to sow
but too low the bread to eat.

"The Internationale" or "L-internationale" written 1871
"The Durham Lockout" 1892;
"The Strike" by Joe Wilson, 1871;
"Fourpence a Day" (about child labour);
"The Banks of the Dee" (minerworkers song of unemployment);
Jute Mill Song (but written around 1920):

Oh dear me, the mill's running fast
And we poor shifter canna get no reat.
Shiftin, piecing, spinning,
warp weft and twine
To feed and clothe my babies off of ten and nine.

Poverty Knock (about the mills). I remember the words as:

Up in the morning at five, it's a wonder that we stay alive
I'm allus (always) yawning all on a cold morning
It's back to the old dreary drive.

Oh dear, we're going to be late, Gaffer is standing at gate
There's a note in his pocket says wages he'll dockit,
we'll have to buy grub on the slate

Chorus: And it's poverty, poverty knock
Me loom is saying all day.
Poverty, poverty knock
Gaffer's too skinny to pay.
Poverty, poverty knock
Allus one eye on the clock
and i know i can guttle when I hear me shuttle go
poverty, poverty knock.

Tooner should tackle his loom,
but he just sits there on his bum.
He's all a-busy a-courtin' our (oor) Lizzie
And I just can't get him to come.

And Lizzy's so easily led
I reckon he takes her to bed.
She used to be skinny, now look a her pinny
It's just about time they got wed.

We've got to wet our own yearn
And dip it into yonder tarn.
It's wet and it's soggy and makes us all groggy,
There's rats in that dirty old barn.

Oh dear my poor head it sings,
I should have woven three strings
Strings keep on breakin and my heart is aching
Oh dear, i wish i had wings.


Also:
The Work of the Weavers (Scottish song, but possible late 19th early 20th century);
The yiddish song - Der Hammer (or Un du Akerst) based on a Georg Herwegh poem from the 1840s)

There was an extensive book and collection of songs "American Labor Congs of the nineteenth Century" which may be valuable.

Hope this helps. I'll try and find the cope of "Victoria's Inferno". it's a little treasure I found in a music store in London, England a few years back.

All the best.

For music that never dies,
Len Wallace
[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 12:44 PM

Mike Raven. I'd question that dating of The Blackleg Miner, though.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 01:28 PM

As a child in what was then rural County Durham near Washington but which is now part of the city of Sunderland, we knew The Blackleg Miner like any other street tune or nursery rhyme.

It was a surprise to learn, many years later, that A L Lloyd had collected the song just once in Bishop Auckland, a good 20 miles away to the south, when I was 4 years old. What is more astonishing is that the song is set specifically in the Northumberland coalfield way to the North across the Tyne which was, and is, a considerable physical and social frontier.

I don't know how much (if any) field song collecting occurred in and around Delaval but it would be interesting to know if there is any corroborative evidence to substantiate the persistent claim that this song dates as far back as the 1844 strike.

I do know of several families from my own area whose forebears, tenants of Durham mineowner Lord Londonderryr, were brought from Ireland to work in the mines.

Whatever, the song is not one of the industrial revolution but a graphic representation of class struggle, of the divide and rule tactics of capitalist coalowners whose manipulation of the workforce for their own profit has left rifts in communities - even between families - that still persist to this day.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 01:45 PM

Karl Dallas (100 Songs of Toil, 1974, 227-8) refers to the coal strike of 1844, during which blacklegs were brought to Tyneside from Wales, Ireland and Cornwall and violence ensued; but that is not a dating of the song (though it seems that many people have assumed that it was) so much as an illustration, I think. It may perhaps be from that time, but we don't have evidence; and strike-breaking was common enough.

It's interesting to hear that the song was generally known. Was that mainly among children, or more general? Bert Lloyd seems to have been inclined to take credit for its circulation in the years following the first edition of Come All Ye Bold Miners. I daresay he was unaware of currency in "street" culture, though.

Subject: Lyr Add: JUTE MILL SONG
From: GUEST,henryp
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 01:49 PM

I didn't recognise "we poor shifters" in the words to the Jute Mill Song given above! Digitrad - the writer was Mary Brooksbank. Here's another version from Henry's Songbook at http://mysongbook.de/msb/songs/j/jutemill.html

Oh dear me, the mill's gannin' fast
The puir wee shifters canna get a rest
Shiftin' bobbins coorse and fine
They fairly mak' ye work for your ten and nine

Oh dear me, I wish the day was done
Rinnin' up and doon the Pass it is nae fun
Shiftin', piecin', spinnin' warp weft and twine
Tae feed and clad my bairnie affen ten and nine

Oh dear me, the warld is ill divided
Them that works the hardest are the least provided
I maun bide contented, dark days or fine
For there's nae much pleasure livin' affen ten and nine

Repeat 1 (as sung by Cilla Fisher & Artie Trezise)

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 02:02 PM

Malcolm,

My impression is that it was just among children. After school some of us went to stepdancing classes run by the Ellwood family (I had no idea of their celebrity until I went to work at the EFDSS in the late 60s!) where we were also taught stagecraft and singing. This consisted, I regret to say, of 1950s show tunes rather than traditional music. There again, the Ellwoods were more than likely under close scrutiny not to include anything controversial in the classes which were held at the miners' institute under a very reactionary regime.

I did mention it to Bert Lloyd who, up to the time of his death in 1982, used to send me lengthy 'notes', typed in single spacing on flimsy paper. Needless to say I plagiarised these shamelessly in future articles but I'm not aware that he ever made use of anything I told him!

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revoloution
From: Willa
Date: 04 Feb 04 - 07:03 PM

Collier Lass and Fourpence a Day are both in the DT and about child labour in the mines.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revolution
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Jun 11 - 04:11 AM

refresh

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Songs of the industrial Revolution
From: JennyD
Date: 07 Jun 11 - 11:17 AM

What about The Coal Owner and the Pitman's Wife? That dates back to 1844. http://www.metrolyrics.com/coal-owner-and-pitmans-wife-lyrics-lloyd.html