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A Broadside Concert

26/2/2017

To the Exeter Phoenix again last night, this time to see Sam Lee, Lisa Knapp and Nathaniel Mann perform a selection of Broadside Ballads. Their selection though, of about a dozen or so, was narrowly proscribed. The performance was as much a show as a concert. The songs chosen were almost entirely dark in tone, and performed in a contemporary way, sometimes as if they were merely a jumping off point for the music, which was filled with strange percussive noises and odd distortions, as distorted as the pictures that flickered above the stage. The music took place in a stygian gloom of dry ice and uncertain shadows. It became like some ghostly music heard from the next room of an old house, where if you enter it is to find only an absence. Music performed by revenants.
And of course, this atmosphere was no doubt the intention, achieved cleverly by the performers(plus a subtle bassist and percussionist) notable for their singing but accompanying themselves on a variety of traditional and odd instruments (bowed banjo and meat-cleaver anyone?) which served to emphasise the uncanniness of the proceedings. You were taken in and gripped for a while by a hokum conjuring of the past.
But to cavil, It was the Broadside with the raunch and merriment taken out for the sake of an agenda. Then when the lights went up at the conclusion and the audience were encouraged to join in Pleasant and Delightful (yes, really!) we crashed back into another world.

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Stan Hugill

25/2/2017

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Here's luck! I have recently been given a first edition of Stan Hugill's Shanties of the Seven Seas. The lady who kindly gave it to me was the widow of the man named in a flyleaf dedication handwritten by Hugill himself - they worked together at the Outward Bound Centre in Aberdyfi. Jill Davies heard me singing in the street at the Ashburton Festival, and generously thought I would give it a good home.
Stan Hugill is often called the last of the shantymen, having had that role on board square-riggers in the 1920's and 30's. He was born in 1906, and we are fortunate that he was singing till a ripe old age - there are several records, and are now we have videos on You-Tube dating from about 1990, shortly before his death at the age of eight-five. He was still in pretty good voice even then. With his beard, ear-ring and pigtail, he looked the epitome of the old salt, no doubt self-consciously so. But he was the Real Deal.
The book (and he was a proficient marine artist too) is a tribute to Hugill's enthusiasm for the subject, and his comprehensive knowledge both of the shanty and its maritime background. It would be difficult to find any shanty in English that it does not contain - and many in Norwegian, German and other languages too. That may be because it became the final record of an oral art which as a living form became extinct with Hugill's passing. But you name it, and the song is almost certainly here, with all its variations and with provenance and usage attached. Indeed the book is so comprehensive that the central text is more a work of reference than a straightforward read. If there is a criticism, it is that it has to leave aside most general history of the ships and the trade that necessitated them. You must largely look elsewhere for that, although the introductory chapter is a fine summary of how the shanty was born and grew. I learned a lot, and lost a few fond misconceptions at the same time.
The book was published in 1961. Fifty-six years later, you must be prepared for a quaint air. It is self-censored to suit pre-Chatterley sensibilities (tho not quite as irritating as a Baring-Gould re-write) yet is full of the salty slang for other races that we would now see as perjorative. Hugill clearly admired, for example, his source the Barbadian Barbarian, but we can only speculate how comfortable the West Indian shantyman himself was with being unwittingly patronised in that way. But that was then. Now we can only be grateful that Stan Hugill survived so long to speak to us from the past.

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The Tebbit Test

16/2/2017

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Last Saturday I sat down once again to watch Wales v. England in the Six Nations. It was close and exciting rugby, tho the wrong side won. When it is a matter of sport, there can be no doubt where my loyalties lie: I would fail the Tebbit test. The test, you may remember, was proposed in 1990 by Thatcher's attack-dog, as a test of true assimilation for those of an immigrant background. At the cricket, which nation do you cheer for? Thus, are you harking back to where you came from or cheering from where you are? (it is at least rather better than his latest proposal - who did your grandfather fight for in the war? - which a second's reflection would tell you is bonkers however you approach it).
The Cricket test is interesting tho, for what it says about the the importance of roots for all of us, and their almost ineluctable quality. There are of course people who can start a new life for themselves with never a look back: they are rare. For the majority our roots cling to us even down to the second or third generation; and how much harder is it to escape their embrace when your skin colour is for others a patent and immediate signifier of your presumed difference.
An attachment to our past, where we come from, is more than mere sentiment. It is an awareness of what makes each of us who and what we are. But recognising what conditions us does not commit us to a future. We remain capable, for the most part, of rational choices. When I lend my support to the Welsh rugby team, it is a recognition of my heritage and is a sentiment that produces a warmth of feeling. With the crowd at the Principality stadium, I feel proud of where I come from and identify with them. But that does not prevent me recognising that through circumstances I have made my home elsewhere, and I have other loyalties that demand my affection too; wife, family and friends and a different landscape that has given me a living and nourished me for a long time. I am entitled to feel sentimental about those too - and in appropriate circumstances manifest that feeling. Very few of us ever have to choose, and if we were compelled, could not. Tebbit forgot that. We can take delight in both.
As to pride in country and identity - that's for another post!

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Honouring the Past

9/2/2017

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Last night by a quirk of programming, BBC4's new version of Alex Haley's Roots was followed by Bettany Hughes on Confucius, so that one could only be struck by the significance in two different cultures of family, home and ancestral connections. Growing up in the west that sense of connection has become badly eroded, and we have lost a lot. The removal of the extended family and the breakdown of communities that began even as early as the Industrial Revolution has contributed hugely to the sense of alienation and fragmentation that is abroad. It has a manifestation in anti-immigration rhetoric, which is a sign of a society that is not at ease with itself, that is insecure. When we welcomed e.g. the Hugenots and the Jews we were not so uncomfortable with ourselves.
In the west , we now only gradually learn the importance of our personal past. It is not inculcated from birth in the manner those two programmes described. So many of us reach middle-age before finding that there is something missing, a rootedness which might tell us who we are, and which might help us to feel psychically integrated. Not everyone feels this, but it accounts for the turn to ancestral research that seems to be a pursuit of advancing years. But for some of us, the past has always been important, from family stories at mother's knee to the excitement of a wider history beginning even with the Ladybird books. It has a special reality of its own, and one which is easily entered by the gate of folk music in particular. Those songs are the past tugging at your sleeve, quite in addition to any intrinsic value of their music or poetry. And if those songs originate in your own culture, then it is your past that is calling.
I do not believe of course, as a Chinese might, that the ancestors are literally looking over our shoulders. But in honouring and respecting those who have preceded us, I believe we acknowledge a fundamental part of our own being. We are the more complete for that.
The stories on this website then are a modest attempt to excavate the past of Britain, to use the songs as a means of entering and revivifying that past, in the hope it can live a while again for the reader (the writer too) and be honoured accordingly.

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A Blog about Roots

1/2/2017

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I have been following Folk Music for all my adult life - which is a frighteningly long time now - not with obsessive attention, but it has always been in the background, and especially the traditional music of England. I am Welsh, but of the deculturated English speakers of South Wales. The great Phil Tanner of the Gower is the exemplar in the Folk tradition; that snapper-up of other people's trifles, which he then made his own (as indeed did the Copper family down in Sussex). Folk Music has always been open to alien influence, taking things foreign and remaking them till they form an indistinguishable part of its own stream. That is one of its strengths.
But I live in England now, have been here more or less forty years. I like to think myself Devonian - at least, they stopped stoning me in the street a while ago. But I heard you can't call yourself a Devon man till you've a granfer in the churchyard. So like 40% of the population here, I am in it and not of it, and must reconcile to that. So I feel when in North Pembrokeshire also, for all that my ancestors started out from there in the 1850's to become workers amongst the melting pot of industrial South Wales.
Folk music is often called Roots music. That I guess recognises its earthy and primordial qualities. But when as a teenager with an enthusiasm for history I first heard Ewan McColl's recordings of Border Ballads, the past was suddenly alive in that primitive lonely voice. The people of the songs were speaking to us across four hundred years. The songs were about death and loss and love, and their protagonists lived again in them. So that while the music continued, you moved in their world, and connected with them.
This Blog is going to be mostly about our reconnection with the past, what we have inherited. Roots then, I suppose.

Peter Bellamy
Thurs, 2.02.17
To The Transports in Exeter on Tuesday, the new production with Nancy Kerr, the Young 'Uns, Paul Sartin etc. Wonderful songs of course, the product of Peter Bellamy's long immersion in the old Broadsides, very well sung and now knitted together with an excellent new narrative. It's an apt place to begin this blog.
Some of us remember the original production c.1982, with PB, Nic Jones, Shirley Collins and the splendid Vic Legge. I was sitting outside Wadebridge Town Hall wearing a Transports T-shirt, when PB himself came by. He pointed at me and said That's the Man For Me! Ha!
Poor Peter. I miss him still, that atavistic voice with those songs that took you through a portal into the past, so the hairs stood up on your neck. Somehow I was not surprised by his sad death, often feeling he may have recognised that he was clinging to a tradition that then seemed fading, and which did not give him the credit he deserved. Shame he could not have seen the standing ovation granted the production two nights ago.
When writing my story about Yarmouth, famously his home town, I could not refrain from memorialising him in the name of Jack's ship, The Great Peter (tho that also was intended to reflect the Baltic trade).

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A Broadside Concert

Stan Hugill

The Tebbit Test

Honouring the Past

A Blog about Roots

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A Broadside Concert

Stan Hugill

﻿The Tebbit Test

Honouring the Past

A Blog about Roots

Author

Archives

Categories

The Tebbit Test