Why Re-visit this Interview?

When I dragged out the transcript of my 44-year old interview with A L 'Bert' Lloyd from its long hibernation, I experienced a strong feeling of returning to a lost era.  As I re-read it, I realised that so much of the period of my life in which it took place had been pushed to the back of my mind and buried beneath ever-increasing layers of subsequent experiences and events.  And yet, so much did seem startling familiar, if I could manage to drag it back into my immediate consciousness!

Then I thought: if I am unfamiliar with the events that I actually lived through, how much more so will be the readers who were not around at the time?  Would the controversies of the nineteen-fifties, sixties and seventies have any resonance with today's enthusiasts?  And how familiar would they be to the people who were around at the time?  So, I decided to write this introduction, sketching the way that the interview came about and to try to give some idea of the 'folk scene' in England at that time.  And, if readers will forgive me for a little self-indulgence, I'm going to give my opinion, on reflection, of some of the issues that seemed so important at the time but may (or may not?) have faded now into complete obscurity!

Why the interview?  By 1974, my friend Jim Carroll and I had been involved with folk music for around fifteen years and closely connected with the Singers' Club since the late 'sixties.  We were both members of Singers' Workshop, the 'beginner's group' that was closely allied to the Critics Group, of which Jim was also a member.  We thought that it would be a good idea to have a magazine that would run parallel with the Singers' Club, featuring articles on the residents, as well as the guests, plus any other topics that we thought germane.  After some thought, we decided that our choice for the main article in the first edition would be an interview with Bert Lloyd.

Forty-four years on, I can't remember exactly why we thought then that an interview with Lloyd would be most appropriate for our first edition but, of course, with Ewan MacColl, Peggy Singer, Alan Lomax and others, he had been a founder of 'The Ballad and Blues Club', in the mid-fifties, which was run in the late '50s by Malcolm Nixon and Pete Turner.  Ewan and Peggy left the Ballads and Blues Club and started The Singers Club in 1961, though the former continued operations until May 1965.  However, unlike MacColl, Lloyd had tended to avoid controversy and, certainly by the nineteen-seventies, rarely entered public debate over the rights and wrongs of the direction of the revival and of folk clubs, and certainly did not comment publicly on the performance standards of singers.  I think that we saw the interview as an opportunity to try to ascertain his views on these subjects - and anything else that he cared to speak about.  I don't recall whether, at that stage, we had any firm views on the rest of the magazine's contents and/or follow-up interviews.

Although Lloyd had been involved with the Singers' Club from the start, by the time that we had become involved, my memory is that he sang there fairly infrequently.  So, by 1974, Lloyd had become a rather peripheral figure for us, but I believe that we still admired his work.  Earlier, we had been proud possessors of his collaborative work with Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs1 and had learned a number of songs from it - it was a slim volume of only 128 pages, and very handy to slip into the jacket pocket when heading off to a folk club!  My own copy, the 1961 reprint, sits on the desk in front of me, much battered and worn; it still contains my listed repertoire from the 1970s!  We had, of course, heard and admired him on numerous occasions in folk clubs and we possessed his book Folk Song in England.2 which was part of our introduction to the study of folk song and, therefore, highly influential on our thoughts.

I can't remember in how much detail Jim and I had discussed the topics for the interview prior to the event.  I have no documentation that suggests that we had previously agreed an agenda but I can hardly believe that we did not discuss at least the major areas that we would try to cover.  Nor can I recall why it was me that carried out the interview; certainly, at that time, I had little experience of interviewing or recording anyone, so it was a totally new venture.

My visit to Bert, at his home in Greenwich, took place on the Saturday afternoon of the 2nd February, 1974.  He was remarkably hospitable, which helped put a rather nervous interviewer more at ease.  I did not realise until Rod Stradling pointed out recently that Mark Gregory had previously conducted an interview with Bert in 1970, also at his home.  You can find this in Musical Traditions, article MT223.  It makes an interesting comparison with my interview!

So, what were the matters that I (or we, because this was a joint venture) thought important to discuss with Bert Lloyd in 1974?  We didn't know much - really, hardly anything - about Lloyd's background, so that seemed a good place to start.  Quite early in the interview, he talked about his work in Eastern Europe and then went on to industrial songs: an area that interested us.  The records of Lloyd and Ewan MacColl had been our road into this rich seam of the tradition and, while we were pretty conversant with MacColl's background in working class Salford, we knew nothing of Lloyd's.  Given that he was a Londoner, how did his interest and familiarity with the songs of the industrial heartlands of the north of England come about?

Knowing that Lloyd had been an active singer in folk clubs for two decades, their current state was worth discussing.  This discussion led into the field of song writing and his opinion of the songs being sung in folk clubs at that time.  Further, I think that we were interested in the potential for writing contemporary songs based on traditional forms.

Lloyd had never been particularly vocal on the way that folk songs should be performed and it seemed important to discover his own approach to singing or to choosing material.

I thought, correctly, that Lloyd would have a view on the EFDSS, having been intimately connected with the organisation for many years.  I was anxious to explore the organisation's present role and to ascertain ways in which their material resources - particularly, the book and record library - might be more extensively utilised in the future.  This led on to questions about the possibility of a national archive and the role of the BBC, again, both in the past and possibly in the future.  In the interview, we discussed programmes that the BBC had broadcast, both on radio and television and, here, I demonstrated my ignorance of Lloyd's broadcast output, which had been considerable.  When discussing the BBC, we touched on the questions of their attitude to folk song and the level of their broadcast output.

Both Jim and I had been heavily influenced by the work of Ewan MacColl almost from the start of our interest in traditional music, so, we were keen to ascertain Lloyd's views on his work, particularly on the radio programmes, The Song Carriers, which had had a relatively limited distribution via the BBC's Midland service and the 'radio ballads', which had received international acclaim, and on some of which, Lloyd had featured. 

A hot topic at the time was 'folk-rock' or 'electric-folk' (about which I knew nearly nothing!) and I was really surprised at Lloyd's approval of this treatment of traditional music but I had not realised just how involved Lloyd had been with Fairport Convention.

Knowing something of Lloyd's political convictions, I asked him what he thought of contemporary political song (which was, essentially, not a lot!) and about whether he had ever considered writing songs.  Although the answer was in the negative, an exploration of the way that he handled traditional texts - particularly those that were incomplete - was more fruitful.  Of great interest was his attitude to selecting songs for his own performance.

A book that was stirring up a lot of interest at the time was David Buchan's The Ballad and the Folk,3 which drew heavily on Milman Parry and Albert Lord's work on Serbo-Croatian epic ballads.4  Given Lloyd's familiarity with the song traditions of Eastern Europe, it seemed to promise fertile ground for discussion.  And so it did, with Lloyd expanding on topics such as the difference between the Balkan epic ballad and the North West European lyrical ballad and the whole question of textual and musical improvisation.  He strongly emphasised the advantages of studying flourishing traditions in Eastern Europe for the light that they threw on the 'debris' of British folk culture.  Perhaps not surprisingly, our final discussion focussed on the lack of academic standards in folk song study in the UK.  This discussion may have helped whet my appetite for a forthcoming project that I was considering.

Reading the interview after a gap of forty-four years, I wish that it had been more focussed and that I had pursued some of the subjects in more detail.  But, I put of this down to my own inexperience as an interviewer and my relative lack of knowledge of the various topics.  Certainly, Lloyd did not hesitate to answer any of my questions and was generally willing to state his views on the various topics.  It was a fascinating afternoon and I hope that you will find the interview of interest; further, that some of my hazy recollections will shine some much needed light on Bert's ideas and provide a further insight into his work.

Some More Background

From the early days of the revival almost up to the time of the interview, the lives and ideas of Lloyd and MacColl seemed to the observer so interwoven that it was, and still is at times, hard to separate them.  It is, then, perhaps not surprising that Dave Arthur, in his biography, Bert - The Life and Times of A L Lloyd5, devotes probably more references to MacColl than to any other single person - with the exception of Lloyd himself, of course.  However, in reality, their close working relationship spanned considerably less than two decades - after the mid-sixties (hard to pin down the date precisely), they met only occasionally.

There is no doubt that Lloyd was one of the key figures in English folk song in the second half of twentieth century and, therefore, more than worthy of being interviewed by us - or anyone else interested in folk music.  As he says in the interview, along with MacColl, he could claim to be one of the 'architects' of what is often referred to as the 'second' English folk song revival.

Lloyd's persona had a certain air of mystery and, to be honest, probably like many others in the 'folk world', I had only the sketchiest idea of his background.  Of course, we had no handy 'Wikipedia' or 'Google' to consult and our relative youth meant that much of his life was unknown to us, with only vague legends percolating down; had he really spent his youth shearing sheep in Australia and, later, taken part in an Antarctic whaling expedition?

Our knowledge of Lloyd stemmed from four areas of his professional life: his recordings, his club work, his broadcasts and his writing - most notably, of course, from FSE.  Of course, in a single interview, it was only possible to get a brief snapshot of his life.  Fortunately, in the years since, many of the gaps have been filled in, most notably by Dave Arthur, and, for those who haven't read Arthur's book, what follows is the briefest summary of Lloyd's life in folk music.6

Although it might be said that Lloyd seem to have spent the early years of his life anticipating that he would become involved in folk song, his direct involvement might by dated to 1944, when he was asked to write a short introductory book on the subject.  In that sense, Lloyd was the real pioneer of the 'second' English folk song revival that blossomed in the nineteen-fifties.  The Singing Englishman7 (available here as MT Article 134) was published in 1944 but nearly a decade was to pass before the revival really started to take off.  Lloyd explained that:

'It [The Singing Englishman] was put together mainly in barrack-rooms, away from reference-works, in between tank gunnery courses.  It wasn't a good book, but people were kind to it perhaps because it was the only one of its sort: like the okapi, not much to look at but cherished as unique.'8

By 1951, in association with the National Coal Board (NCB), he had started his groundbreaking collection of miner's songs.  Come All Ye Bold Miners, the printed collection that resulted from the project, was published in 1952.  The early fifties was a busy time, which included recording around a dozen songs on 78 rpm records, though, in comparison with MacColl who, by 1956, had recorded over thirty individual sides, Lloyd was a relatively slow starter in the recording business.  He was also making and writing radio programmes for the BBC.

In 1954, Lloyd recorded two Australian Bush Ballads: Bold Jack Donahue and The Banks of the Condamine for Topic (TRC84).10  Then, in 1956, he made his LP bow for the company, featuring with MacColl and Theatre Workshop actor Harry H Corbett on The Singing Sailor.11  During that year, he also recorded a number of LPs for the American Riverside label.

During his much faceted life, Lloyd featured on many recordings: in the earlier years, he was often in the company of MacColl but, gradually, the number of solo recordings, or those with singers other than MacColl, began to increase.  His last recording with MacColl was made in 1964, at about the time when their close collaboration began to decline.  Many of his LPs reflected his own particular interests, such as Australian songs, English lyrical songs and ballads and, of course, industrial songs.  Although MacColl had recorded several selections of industrial songs for Topic, this was back in the nineteen-fifties and, mostly, before the time of the emerging young folkies.  As a result, The Iron Muse - a panorama of industrial folk song was an 'ear opener' for many who had absolutely no idea of what was going on all around them - I've still got my well-worn copy, bought new on its release in 1963!  This record also gave an airing to a number of the younger singers in the revival, such as Bob Davenport, Anne Briggs, Matt McGinn, Louis Killen and Ray Fisher.12

However, not all the young singers of the early 'sixties were interested in the industrial song genre and, for many, the recording that really opened up the English repertoire in the early 1960s was the eponymous LP: A Selection from the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.13

Given Lloyd's penchant for academic study and his experience as a writer, it is surprising that he should have waited until 1967 before publishing another book on English folk song.  He didn't see FSE as a revision of The Singing Englishman:

[In the nineteen-sixties] ... people still asked for it, but I did not want to see it reprinted, nor did I feel that mere revision could make it adequate for current needs.  So it was proposed [Ed.  note: He doesn't say by whom but, presumably, by its associate publishers, the Workers' Music Association] that I should write a new book 'based on the old one'; and here it is'.14

Although I had enjoyed listening to and reading Lloyd, it had been MacColl who had really stimulated my interest in folk music.  I first heard of MacColl through my friendship in Manchester with singer Terry Whelan.  Terry was an avid enthusiast for and singer of both Scottish and English ballads and had been an early follower of MacColl.  He was possibly influential in arranging for MacColl and Peggy Seeger's visits to the Wayfarer's Folk Club, which he ran with Harry Boardman.  I believe that he also attended at least one 'conference' that MacColl had called to discuss the future of folk clubs and singing in general.

Jim Carroll and I had met around 1960 and, after a slightly uncertain beginning, we soon realised that we had a common interest in folk song.  Through Terry Whelan, I had engaged in at least one discussion with MacColl and Seeger.  Such lengthy conversations often reached late into the night, and were held on cold pavements outside pubs long after closing time.  I found out later that this was normal MacColl/Seeger practice - a way of engaging with sympathetic followers and an attempt to gauge the state of the nation's attitude to folk song.  Typical of these was one following probably the first time that I heard MacColl and Seeger at the Wayfarer's Club, which was held at the time in the Clarendon Hotel on Oxford Road.  It must have been in the early 1960s, as the pub was demolished to make way for new university buildings in 1964.  As an aside, MacColl always loved Citroen cars and I seem to remember that, at the time, he owned a 1950s 'Traction Avant' (or it may have been a 'DS'?), which was parked outside the pub.  To be honest, as a car-mad teenager, I think that I was as fascinated with the Citroen as with the conversation!

During one such meeting, Jim and I were invited down to Beckenham to use their extensive library and to copy tapes.  We also visited the Singers' Club on several occasions in the sixties.  It was not surprising then that, first, Jim, in early 1969, and then myself in August of that year, made the move to London.  Jim was invited to join the Critics Group and, if memory serves me right, we were both founder members of Singers' Workshop, which was held in the first floor 'concert room' of the Union Tavern, Lloyd Baker Street, King's Cross - then home of the Singers' Club.  We were joined by a number of other aspiring young singers, I think mainly recruited from the regular audience at the Singers' Club, along with some of the less experienced (in singing terms) members of the Critics Group.

With all this in mind, looking back, I have to think that one of our ideas for the interview was to float with Lloyd some of the concepts that we had picked up from MacColl over the years.  Certainly that seems to be, at least in part, the tenor of the interview when I read it again, all these years later.

Bert and Ewan - a great divide?

At times, the discussion got heated, with much of the fire turned on MacColl who, unlike Lloyd, appeared to take every opportunity to advance his often seemingly controversial opinions.  One of the points always raised by those who opposed MacColl was the notion that he and Seeger were trying to impose their views on both the repertoire of club singers and the way that they should sing them.  It was viewed as an attempt to straight jacket singers into singing songs that they weren't especially interested in and, thus, stifled creativity: it was referred to at the time as the 'policy' and clubs that followed the edict were known as 'policy clubs' (in my experience of the time, there were actually very few that followed the 'policy' and even less that had any notion of what it meant).

In her biography of Peggy Seeger, Jean R Freedman infers, initially, that the 'policy' came about with the founding of the Singers' Club in June 1961 stating:

'The Singers' Club embraced the musical diversity that had been part of the Ballad and Blues Club but also introduced a radical new policy 'that singers do not sing anything but the songs of their own native tradition'.16

Seeger writes:

'I'd heard Ledbelly's pulsing, steam-engine voice singing 'Rock Island Line' ...  since the year dot.  Now here it is with charming cockney vowels - smart, clipped ...  and in high tenor.  My gut reaction was to laugh.  It was rude, outrageous - but I couldn't stop.  I had to be taken out of the room ...  After the show, the other resident singers insisted that we talk about it.  Members of the audience were invited.  The singer, downcast ...  maybe he hadn't sung the song well enough?  I apologised and accounted for my behaviour: "East London vowels don't really fit with Ledbelly and you sang it so fast ...  " - at which point, one of the French audience members said he didn't like my singing of French songs.  Stung, I passed the aggro on to Ewan: "Well, I don't really like it when you sing Sam Bass with an exaggerated American accent".  Then Isla Cameron objected to Bert singing songs from Scotland.  A trail of dominoes - we all lost but in the process found a policy for our club and our club only.  Repeat: The policy was for our club only - Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, because the "Policy" has been blown up out of all proportion.  Repeat: It was only meant for on stage singing.'18

'As the months went by, we found that we tired of singing songs in a language we didn't speak fluently or, sometimes, didn't understand at all; or, if the songs were from an alien culture or lifestyle, they began to lose their conviction.  We felt no real sense of identity with them.  Other performers from other clubs were exhibiting the same malaise … So, the resident singers of 'Ballad and Blues' decided on a policy: that from now on, residents, guest singers and those who sang from the floor should limit themselves to songs which were in a language the singer spoke or understood.  We became what began to be known as a 'policy' club.  It was an unpopular decision and, for weeks after it was made, our audience reduced to a handful of devotees ...  This was the first real point of dissent in the folk revival and one still occasionally hears faint echoes of it some thirty years later.'19

'Well, particularly Ewan and I felt that it was rather a shame that this simple exotic American [Ed.  After reading a proof of the interview, Bert amended this to 'foreign grown'] material was hugging the scene and that it would be nice if we could introduce onto the musical scene more and more traditional stuff from our own islands.

...  America has a stratum of folk music that is a complex as, say, English folksong, but this kind of repertory [that] the kids were going for was one that was already simplified in the States.  It was folksong with its face turned very firmly towards conventional music, folksong that had been worked over by country professional players, who simplified it, when they came to play it to strange audiences rather than their community own audiences.  They couldn't afford to be tricky with it, so they simplified it, so it was already a form of folk music, which had been processed, as it were, easier to handle than the British material, which hadn't undergone that processing.

So, at first, what we did - I was going to say, were obliged to do - but we partly did it because we liked doing it that way - performers like Ewan and myself and Isla [Cameron] and others.  We'd appear at skiffle clubs with a mixed repertory that was part American and part British and, gradually, shed more and more of the American material and concentrated more and more on the British ...

And I suppose that it was really something of a landmark in the early days of the revival and did a great deal to encourage the formation of an audience.  And so that, ultimately, the spread of clubs all over the place, devoted many of them, sometimes in a very sectarian fashion - many of them devoted to performance of traditional music to the virtual exclusion of popular commercial musics.'

It has to be remembered that the roots of the 1950's folk revival in the United Kingdom lay in the upsurge of interest in 'folk-type' music and protest song from the USA, prompted in part by the worldwide popularity of the group, The Weavers, who featured Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Peggy Seeger's brother Pete.  This was followed by a growth of interest in blues and, finally, by the 'skiffle explosion', which was launched by the 'traditional jazz' bands of Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and others.  This meant that, when clubs such as the Ballad and Blues launched themselves, many if not most, of their singers were singing songs in an accent that owed more to the Mississippi Delta than the Mersey Estuary!

I can confirm this from my own experience.  At the time of my first foray into a folk club, in the late nineteen-fifties, most of the residents and guests at the previously mentioned 'Wayfarer's' Club were singing songs from the USA.  Club organiser Harry Boardman had not yet entered his 'Lancashire Mon' period and was playing US-mountain music on his banjo.  There was country and western singer Frank 'Yonko' Marriott (who appeared with Harry Boardman in other locations along with his band 'The Texas Drifters'), table steel guitarist Rod King, and a young Dutch student, Francis Kuypers, who specialised in the songs of Rambling Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk and the Reverend Gary Davis.  The only people singing British material were Terry Whelan and his friend Dave Macadam. 

Pinpointing which club had first decided on the 'policy' is only really a historical nicety; more to the point was the disquiet felt by some enthusiasts at the time that it was a decree supposedly issued from on high by MacColl and Seeger.  To make matter worse, many said that originators of the decree were flouting their own injunction!  Examples of this feeling can be found in Dave Arthur's biography of Lloyd:

'Under their rules, the fact that Afro-American singer Elizabeth Cotton worked for the Seeger family should have no way validated white, upper-middle-class Peggy's singing of her songs.  It was a case of do as we say and not as we do.'20

'There is little difference between MacColl's theatrical impressions of a range of accents and dialects and the efforts of certain other British singers to adopt some sort of American accent when singing American songs ...21

'In 1948, I wandered off in Landsburgh's department store in Washington and a tall, calm, very black woman found me and stayed with me until till Dio (Dio is Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peggy's mother) came - Elizabeth Cotton.  Penny (Peggy's youngest sibling) nicknamed her 'Libba'...  She and Dio struck up a relationship immediately.  I loved Libba.  For five years, she came to us on Saturdays ...  The family guitar was hung on a wall in the kitchen.  I came in after school one day and found Libba playing it left-handed ...  We heard "Freight Train" for the first time.  Mike and I learned to play it left-handed.'22

'Released from prison through the influence of the Lomax's, he travelled with them.  Mike and I put Goodnight Irene and Midnight Special into our daily song-box.'23

As for MacColl, of course, we know that he was born Jimmy Miller, in a terraced house in Lower Broughton, Salford (my best-man lived in the next street!) but cognisance must be taken of his family background.  In her introduction to Journeyman, Seeger writes that he 'was brought up among an émigré community of Scots and he felt that he was more Scots than English.'24 There is no need to chronicle the 'Scottishness' of MacColl/Miller's upbringing; it is related at length in his autobiography; in addition, long before he started singing in folk clubs, MacColl had been an actor and a mastery of different patterns of speech was his stock in trade.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the residents of the Wayfarer's Club had any significant relationship with the originators of their chosen repertoire.

As a matter of fact, MacColl and Seeger were aware that there was, perhaps, a degree of contradiction between the 'policy' and their repertoire and on the liner notes to their LP, Two-Way Trip, MacColl was at some pains to justify their decision to record an album that seemed in direct contravention of the 'policy':

'And now, I am not only singing American songs with Peggy but encouraging her to sing both Scots and English songs with me!  However, for the most part, we confine ourselves to joining in the chorus of each other's songs.'

And:

'There is a further point.  When you work with someone over a period of several years, you begin to assimilate elements of their style and vocal habits.  This need not mean that your approach to your own repertoire is affected but it does mean that you can stand on the edge of another musical tradition without feeling too conspicuous'.25

And the 'policy' was effective, as Martin Carthy later recalled:

'When he (MacColl) stood up and said "if you're English, you should sing an English song", that irritated the hell out of me at the time.  But, then, on the other hand, what it made people like me do, even though I didn't follow him, was go and look for it.'26

Growing up in Manchester, I knew many Irish people who, like Darach Ó Catháin, had been brought up with the sound of traditional songs ringing in their ears.  Often, their children, born in Britain, and enjoying the same environment as myself, chose to sing the songs of their parents.  But, for most of us who were brought up in post-war urban Britain, our everyday experience was the never-ending drab procession of commercial popular music, blasted out from radio, television, juke boxes, on fair grounds and every other conceivable source.  In fact, for many of us, the dreariness of this 'music' was the main factor in attracting us to traditional music in the first place!  But where should we locate our repertoire and how best to choose it?  As Martin Carthy said, the 'policy' encouraged us to go out and find it.  Not surprisingly, my 1970s repertoire was probably not too different from that of most of my contemporaries, containing items from every part of Britain and Ireland; none of these songs is truly more a part of my 'indigenous tradition' (which is mainly Manchester - but part Wales, part the Black Country and, maybe, even part Scottish!) than The Rock Island Line would have been for that young Londoner!

Although, in retrospect, the reasoning seems a little lame, we have to place MacColl's 'Liner Notes' in some sort of context.  As we have heard from MacColl, Seeger and Lloyd, the 'policy' had been formulated as a response to their experiences in nineteen-fifty's skiffle clubs and early folk clubs, where most of the singers chose to sing American songs - because that was all they knew.  As Lloyd said to me, '...  it was rather a shame that this foreign grown American material was hugging the scene and that the introduction of more and more traditional stuff from our own islands ...  did a great deal to encourage the formation of an audience ...  and ...  ultimately, the spread of clubs all over the place'.

It is interesting that, in my interview, Lloyd elaborates on the 'policy' question far more intensively than he idid in FSE, in which he introduces the topic only in an explanation for the contemporary popularity (i.e.  in 1967) of industrial songs:

'The phenomenon arises from a peculiar circumstance of our musical life, from what is called the urban folk song revival.'28

'Chain-gang songs were everywhere, the Mississippi mumble further blurred by the inflections of Wigan and Walthamstow.  The exploited peach-pickers of Bethnal Green and Batley consoled themselves with the Worried Man Blues.  The skiffle movement ran through the country like wildfire.  From this exotic beginning, the British folk song revival began.'29

However, the 'policy' decision was not the only feature of the Singers' Club that proved contentious and that helped to raise opposition to MacColl: Eric Winter, one of the founders of the magazine 'Sing' in 1954, a Ballads and Blues regular and the first organiser of the Singers' Club, took exception to MacColl's claim that the Singers' Club was 'the only genuine folk club in London' - especially as MacColl, Winter claimed, rarely went to any other club.

In Sing (December 1961), he declared:

'The arrogance that lies behind this has isolated MacColl from the mainstream of the clubs' life - especially in London ...  Moreover, it is difficult to see how one so cut off from the club scene can set himself up as a judge of the clubs.'30

Although Lloyd had been friendly with Eric Winter and his wife Audrey since the early 1950s, it did not prevent him from replying:

'Some sharp little teeth were shown in Sing ... over the question of: Isn't the Singers' Club too exclusive?  The longest wind was spent in complaining that one of the Club's Singers' (E.  MacColl) performs only at the Singers' Club and not at other clubs.  Now Sing is a small magazine and its space (one would think) is too valuable for lengthy exercises in fan-mag-ish triviality.  Surely it's the singers own business where he performs and how frequently ...  Let the critics do half as much for the revival as Mr MacColl and the situation will be happier, and standards of performance and repertory will improve; likewise perhaps the standards of folk song journalism.'32

At first sight, it is hard to understand why the 'English folk song family' divided into 'pro-MacColl and pro-Lloyd' factions but delving deeper into the development of the 'folk movement' and its folk club singers reveals a chain of events that, perhaps, helped to foment differences.

We will read later that, although Lloyd was always more than happy to help young singers with their repertoire by providing texts and background information, he was reluctant to give advice on how to sing - and this marked a significant different between himself and MacColl and was one of the real dividing lines between the two.

We can trace the onset of this developing process to the late 'fifties: as the folk club movement gained momentum, MacColl and Seeger became increasingly frustrated by what they saw as a lack of standards for singing.  In an undated letter to Seeger, probably written in 1959 when Seeger was living in Paris, MacColl complained of the poor standard of singing in skiffle clubs:

'What is the answer?  Training?  Good models?  To some extent but it is not the whole answer.  You and I are the models that most young singers in this country are using.  One of the most important factors in the whole business is this semi-professionalism.  It's having the most awful effect on young singers.  They learn half a dozen songs which they sing without style, feeling or understanding ...  Whenever they sing a slow tempo song, their voices crawl with self-pity, if they sing in tempo, they automatically surrender the text and adopt a spurious American accent.'33

But the poor standard of singing, particularly of British songs, should really have come as no surprise, as there so few British models on which the young performers could rely and no incentive for aspiring singers to develop their technical abilities, even in the limited way that aspiring instrumentalists would seek out recordings of eminent guitar players on which to model their style.  Most of the corpus of British folk song recorded in the field (and, even the little that had been recorded was hardly available to most people) had been gathered from elderly men and women, who were mainly past their vocal prime, and it provided little obvious indication of how the songs may have been sung at an earlier date and the way that they could be approached decades later.

But, in this letter, we can see, perhaps, the embryo of the idea that MacColl and Seeger were to put into practice later with the establishment of the Critics Group: the formation of a 'training group', with MacColl at its head (and, to some extent, as its model).  However, MacColl's description of the way that the Group came about does not suggest a planned programme - in fact, it seems to have about it more than a breath of serendipity:

'In 1964, an established Tyneside singer, resident in London, said in the course of an interview that Lloyd and MacColl should share the benefits of their enormous experience with all those newcomers on the scene who were anxious to improve themselves.  After reading the article, I phoned Bert and suggested that it might be a good idea to start a discussion group.  He was distinctly cool and refused to be involved.  Peggy and I mentioned it to two or three friends and, almost before we had realised what was happening, we found ourselves taking part in a discussion on the problems of the revival with several dozen young singers.'34

Nevertheless, whether or not the Critics Group may have started in a rather casual fashion, it quickly developed into a highly-organised activity, taking up much of MacColl and Seeger's time.  And soon, it was to become apparent that this, apparently, simple act of setting up a group to improve singing would be the cause of much acrimony.

Ben Harker comments:

'From the outset, public relations weren't the Group's strongest suit.  There was confusion about how one joined and some who expect to be included felt put out when they weren't asked.'36

The original membership of the group had been fairly self-selecting: they were mainly in their early to mid-twenties and mostly regulars at the Singers' Club who wanted to further develop their current, often rather casual, interest in folk song.  'Outsiders' were not shunned, as Frankie Armstrong, who had met but did not know MacColl and Seeger particularly well, found after being encouraged by Tynesider Louis Killen to ask to join the Group:

'I can't actually recall the moment of dialling the famous Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger to ask if there was any chance of joining the group but it must have been scary.  However, they were kind and encouraging and invited me to tea on a Saturday afternoon.  I must have impressed them at least with my seriousness, as I was invited to join the group after the summer break.'37

'A matter of months after I joined, Charles Parker was asked about the group and its work in a radio interview.  At that point, we had no name and the interviewer pressed Charles to suggest one.  The name he came up with was "The Critics Group", arising out of just one aspect of our work together.  The name stuck and for years it was a millstone ...  Ewan already had a reputation for arrogance among people who disagreed with his ideas or simply found it hard to relate to him in person.  Now the group could be construed by others in the folk revival as implying that we were setting ourselves up as critics and custodians of the'correct' criteria.'38

In addition to any judgement of a possible member's singing ability, MacColl's political views could influence his decision as to membership.  Jim Carroll, a relatively late recruit in 1969, recalled:

'I had a love of the music but he took into consideration that I was a left-wing worker [Ed.  note: Jim was an electrician and was active in left-wing politics].  My father had been in Spain [James Carroll, senior, had been a member of the International Brigade during the Spanish civil war].  He jumped at that'.39

Dave Arthur claims that Lloyd had no great respect for the Critics Group and 'MacColl's training methods' and goes on to give a quote in Bert that has something of the apocryphal about it, coming from a tape from an unknown source:

'[There are some] ... who look for the most rigid kind of traditional folk music to provide some kind of model for modern creations.  Those people are few, but they exist and sometimes give themselves rather spiky titles like Critics Group but those exclusive blokes are very few really'.40

'Bert Lloyd preferred to keep away and to take under his wing those who felt that studying folk singing as an art was an oxymoron.  To each, his own.  Everyone liked Bert.  Ewan wanted to teach and didn't much care if he was liked or not.  The purpose was to create a space where you worked and discussed the role of folk song in contemporary life.  It felt like a political duty.  Like Bert's, our home was opened and, like Bert's, our library and teaching were offered gratis - but two different camps arose.  A shame, for Bert and Ewan had been such friends and they'd worked and sung so well together.'41

One final word about the Critics Group: in addition to regular critiques of a member's singing, members were expected to practice certain exercises in order to improve various aspects of voice production.  In discussing the purpose of the voice exercises carried out by the Group, MacColl stated:

'... the object of the exercise [was] to make the voice supple, able to do what you wanted it to do.  The object was not to end up singing like McDonagh, Heaney or Cronin [BT: he might well have added 'or MacColl and Seeger' because that's what many claimed].  It was to develop the muscle of the voice and then move on to your own style ...  Violinists who want to become fiddlers have to do the same thing.  The bowing is different, the way of holding the fiddle, the impulse given, and so on.'42

In the world of Irish traditional dance music, since the early nineteen-seventies, tens of thousands of would-be traditional musicians have flocked to informal schools with an ambition to learn from those who have 'inherited the tradition' from earlier players.  Anyone who attempts to learn to play traditional music quickly becomes aware that it is necessary to practice for many hours to improve technique.  So why should singing be any different?  And why should the formation of a group with this ambition be subject to so much acrimony?

With regard to MacColl and the Critics Group, at least a part of the answer seems to have been the perception that they were 'setting themselves' above the rest - a claim about MacColl, we might remember, that was floated by Eric Winter in 1961.  This perception was, perhaps, reinforced in 1965 by a radio programme that MacColl wrote and introduced on the BBC.  The Song Carriers consisted of an initial series of ten programmes, in which he looked at various aspects of traditional singing in Britain and Ireland, using examples from other traditions to illustrate certain points.

So far, perhaps, so good.  However, after programme ten was broadcast on 8th April 1965, the BBC announcer stated 'This was the last programme in the present series, but a further four programmes dealing with young singers of the British folk revival will be broadcast from Friday, 14th May at 6.40 p.m.'

Against this background, I was extremely interested to know what Lloyd thought about The Song Carriers, partly as I thought that this might help to understand his relationship with MacColl:

'I admire them very much.  The ones that dealt with the revival, I didn't like so very much.  Perhaps the revival didn't stand up to such an extensive treatment as it got.  The series was much more valuable for the traditional performers who got an airing, than on the whole, the revival performers.  It seemed to me that the revival would have been excellent for one programme but not so good for something like three or maybe even four - I'm not sure.'

One of the singers criticised was Bob Davenport, of whom Arthur remarks:

'Davenport saw them [BT: Lloyd and, especially, MacColl] as intellectual mediators and arbiters of the communist gospel.  An inveterate iconoclast, he believed the music should speak for itself.  It should be imbibed, if not with the mothers' breast milk, at least in a relaxed, convivial setting, with no lecturing or pontificating to create an artificial barrier between performer and imbiber.'43

Of his singing of The Collier Lad, MacColl had this to say:

'An engaging little song, sung with considerable charm, though Boardman's tendency to lean a little toward crooning is rather disturbing.  Like many regional singers, who have a strong feeling for dialect, his musical judgement tends to be rather less developed than his sense of local pride, with the result that his repertoire is overloaded with items chosen because of their dialect rather than because of their musical value.  The fact is that a poor song doesn't become a good one, merely because it has an accent.'

It is up to you, reader, if you can find a copy of the programmes, to come to your own conclusions as to the validity of MacColl's criticism.  Reflecting fifty-something years later - and with my own experience working with MacColl's methods - my view is that the criticism of Harry Boardman and others, taken in isolation, without the listener being able to consider other examples of the singer's work, is not entirely appropriate.  At the time, MacColl would have quite familiar with the singing of all those featured in the final four programmes and so was in a different position to many, if not most, of his listeners.  Listening to the programmes all these years later, it strikes me that a different approach might have been more useful and instructive, particularly when we consider MacColl's reasoning for this part of the series, summarised in his final comments on the role of the revival singer - as he saw it:

'... because the traditional style of singing those songs is much decayed, they are attempting to recreate it.  Each of them brings to this important task varying degrees of skill, understanding, enthusiasm and devotion.  They are the song carriers of their generation and on them will depend whether or not the people of these islands will still have a traditional music, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years from now.  Our tradition is in their hands.'44

If we were to reflect on the methods used by the Critics Group (many of the weekly meetings are available to listen to in Birmingham City Library), we would observe that criticism of a singer's performance was not a quick, one-off activity.  The singer was given time to prepare and, generally, a context in which the performance would be set.  Peggy Seeger sets a typical scenario:

'Brian, next week you'll be singing in the folk club at Winchester.  Prepare a programme.  Brian would be expected to keep the Winchesterarians interested for half an hour.  The choice of songs had to be tailored to the audience: a convocation of students at a local technical college, a social night out for members of a union, a gaggle of secretaries ...'45

In Seeger's example, the technique was expanded to provide 'Brian' with an imaginary - but realistic - situation in which to set his performance.  The singer in question would be expected, in the following week, to prepare a programme of songs and introductions appropriate to the given context and to deliver that programme to the Group.  Individual Group members would be expected to give a critical response, always promoting the positive and with suggestions for changes, improvements, etc., if thought necessary.  Bear in mind that all members of the Group would have received training, mainly from MacColl, in voice production, relaxation, textual analysis, and a myriad of other things thought essential to good performance.  The critical process was not intended to be a set of 'snap' judgements but a carefully thought out response to a singer's performance, with ideas for improvements that might be made.  Generally, the singer would work through some of the suggestions with the Group and would be expected to take part in a review at a later date.

Under the tutelage of, first, Sandra Kerr and, later, Terry Yarnell, Singers' Workshop emulated many of the critical processes used by the Critics.  Like the other members, I went through performance criticism many times and I can say that being the 'victim' takes some getting used to.  But, being the critic also requires preparation and training.  I had the experience (and privilege) of my singing being criticised at a Singers' Workshop in 1977, at which MacColl was present - this was, of course, many years after the break-up of the Critics Group.  Many of those present had been members of Singers' Workshop for many years (and some had been members of the Critics Group as well) and they provided much useful comment.  However, MacColl's remarks lifted the experience to a different, significantly higher, level.  It was quite an uplifting, though, contradictorily, somewhat humbling experience!

In 1965, the majority of club singers were simply unaccustomed to being subject to criticism of their singing and, therefore, exposure to the process, even to the small extent featured in the Song Carriers, was something new and, probably for some, quite alarming.  In retrospect, a place where we are all wise, perhaps if MacColl had explained the process thoroughly, chosen fewer singers, provided a structured context and given more breadth to their performances, then the final four programmes would have been more effective.  Whether their reception would have been less acrimonious is, perhaps, more doubtful.

The difference in approach with regard to vocal performance between Lloyd and MacColl seems quite curious, considering their long connection and their many shared views and values.  If nothing else links them - and thus divided them from the majority in the world of folk song academia - it was their belief that folk song was the possession and birthright of the 'common people'.  Likewise, both were convinced that song performance and the place of song in the culture of working people was the most critical factor in shaping its development.  These thoughts permeated their published output, both written and broadcast.

There is no doubt about the mutual respect that Ewan and Bert had for each other.  However, their close relationship seems to have gradually faded through the nineteen-sixties, Lloyd had appeared on the first four radio ballads, with The Big Hewer, broadcast on August 18, 1961, marking his last performance in the series.  Apart from appearances at the Singers' Club, perhaps, their last joint activity was the 'Centre 42' project (a nationwide arts event which took its name from a resolution passed at the 1960 TUC Congress).  They had appeared on several recordings made in the 1960s, the last of which was Topic's English and Scottish Folk Ballads (12T103; 1964); whether such recordings actually involved studio time together is unknown.

By the nineteen-sixties, Lloyd had fully established himself as a radio broadcaster, with a series of excellent programmes for the BBC.  He was constantly in demand for workshops and lectures, and, between 1965 and 1968, was a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.46  Dave Arthur quotes a conversation with Peggy Seeger in which she says that there was no actual falling out between Lloyd and MacColl:

'She feels it was more of a drifting apart as their ideas and musical careers developed in different directions.'47

MacColl was an extroverted proselytiser, someone who would go out of his way to gather disciples to his cause.  He took every opportunity to advance his ideas about folk song and, particularly, about folk singing, to almost anyone who cared to listen.  His background was in the theatre, as both a performer and writer, and I think that it was these experiences that gave him such an interest in the performance of folk song.  As a member of Singers' Workshop, I became familiar also with the theatrical techniques that he introduced to the Critics Group (and anyone else who cared to listen) in order to improve their performances.  I doubt whether even my best friend would have marked me out for a successful theatrical career but I found these techniques both challenging and illuminating and exceedingly useful in helping to envisage the situation of the people of the songs and ballads.

In Journeyman, MacColl devotes several pages in praise of Lloyd but states that he found it hard to come to terms with Lloyd's, perhaps, less overt approach to advancing the cause of folk music.  He also found it hard to understand why Lloyd had not become a song-writer, stating 'He could write about songs, about poems, about novels, but he lacked the special talent which is needed to actually write them'.48  Is it the lack of a special talent or something more?  This is a topic that I explored with Bert and one that you can read in my interview.

Compared to MacColl, Lloyd certainly seemed to cut a more reflective figure, pursuing, perhaps, a more scholarly approach and demonstrating his knowledge of traditional music by his singing in folk clubs and his writing and work in the media.  But, as Dave Arthur makes clear in Bert, he shared much of MacColl's zeal for discussing folk song and passing his knowledge on to others- he just went about it in a different way.

Both MacColl and Lloyd were largely self-educated and both were extremely well-read on a wide variety of topics.  Both Lloyd's house on Croom Hill and the MacColl/Seeger maisonette in Beckenham were stacked with books of on a wide variety of topics but, of course, with an emphasis on traditional music.  Although Lloyd might not be immediately thought of as a proselytiser or known for public pronouncements on singing style, he did take an active interest in the direction of the folk revival and this interview shows that he had very definite ideas about it.

As an occasional eavesdropper on the 'Mudcat' folk music Internet forum, I am aware that, thirty-five years after Lloyd's death and twenty-eight years after MacColl's, the debate concerning their contribution to folk song in Britain still goes on.

Lloyd and Singing Standards

'... [R]esponding to my appreciation for all he'd given myself and others, he rejected the idea that he was in any way responsible for 'teaching' us to sing or to 'interpret' the songs.  'That was Ewan's affair', he said but he went on to say, 'If I did anything to instil a bit more understanding and respect for the more serious parts of the repertoire, the idea would please me'.'49

'If you wanted information, he'd supply it.  He was very encouraging; he never laid down laws like you've got to sing like this.  As he said in a letter to me just before he died, 'That was Ewan's job, what to sing, how to sing'.'50

'[They have] a power of miniature invention ...  Moreover, what they have in their minds is not a note for note accuracy of a written tune; but rather an ideal melody or melodic idea, which is responsive to the momentary dictates of feeling or verbal necessity'.51

However, little is really said to direct contemporary singers, who, presumably, would have made up a big slice of his intended readership other than the following somewhat demeaning comment:

'Modern folk singers [BT: presumably modern 'British' folk singers] on the road to stylisation and decadence reduce their alterations to a minimum, tending to sing each successive verse of a song in the same way, even the ornaments cropping up at the identical spot, strophe after strophe, regular as clockwork or the 8.30 train.'52

'Moreover, in traditions in full flower, training counts for much and the admired singers will practice over and again the perfect their art'.53

'... they incline to treat their traditional music in a variety of non-traditional ways, with voice-production, instrumentation, rhythmical treatment, etc., borrowed from the world of commercial light music.  Whether the material is thereby enriched or impoverished is arguable; it is less arguable that, through new treatment, many fine folk tunes and texts are made valid for thousands of performers and listeners whose musical interests would otherwise be limited to the banalities of Denmark Street [Ed.  'Tin Pan Alley', London; former home of the commercial music industry].54

'During the performance, the eyes are closed, the head upraised and a rigid expression of countenance maintained until the song is finished.'56

'The quality of the voice of the average folk singer is, of course, thin and poor, but that is because he is an old man.  You cannot expect a man of eighty years of age, or upwards, to sing with the resonant voice of youth; the wonder is that he can sing at all.'57

'The folk singer is, however, no mean vocalist.  He is a past master in the art of welding together words and tune, i.e.  in enunciating his syllables with great clearness, while maintaining an unbroken stream of melody.  He sings, too as a rule, with a very pure intonation, except when the compass of a song is so wide that he is driven on to the extremes of his voice.'58

We are fortunate that sound recording, in the form of the phonograph, coincided with the 'first revival' and that a number of contemporary song collectors, including Sharp, captured the voices of their informants for posterity.  One of the early users of the phonograph was the composer, Percy Grainger.  When we listen to some of Grainger's recordings, particularly those of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, Lincolnshire, Sharp's description of a typical English folk singer come to mind.  Although Taylor was 75 years of age when Grainger recorded him in 1908, his light tenor voice rings out loud and clear, as of a man half his age.

Although FSE is not replete with ideas about the way that folk songs might be sung, Lloyd was more informative in his earlier work, The Singing Englishman:

'In England, the singer's fancy usually brought more ornament into the tune than variation with the words.  Any singers who usually sing unaccompanied, as the English did, are likely to be inventive in style; and, as a rule, they will not sing two successive verses of a song the same and the performance will alter in detail from day to day.  Which is one of the things which makes the singing of a folk song 'as written' in say a Cecil Sharp arrangement such a false and unrepresentative thing.  Commonly, the folksinger would put his flourishes and trills and turns into the melody wherever he fancied; often, he would go quite a long way from the basic tune; and always he allowed himself great rhythmical freedom so that, at times, a song would be much more like plainsong than the rigid metrical foursquare and obvious thing you get in the printed arrangements.

...  Cecil Sharp has remarked: 'Folksingers like to sing in as high a pitch as possible and will often apologise for not being able on account of age to sing their songs high enough'.

If ever you have the good fortune to hear a singer with a traditional style - and it is not too late for you to have the chance - even if you do not like that style, even if the ornamentation and the long drawn notes at the end of the phrases seem far-fetched and fantastic to you, you will at least get an idea how terrible far off the mark is the folk song as written in the arrangements and as sung on the concert platform'.59

• No sustaining of pure unaltered notes as taught by the music academies;
• If notes are held for any length, they are 'warbled'; and
• Most singers seem to prefer to put a harsh cutting-edge on their voice and pitch the song as high as possible.

Kennedy also comments that:

'In some parts of England, and still more often in Ireland, one occasionally comes across signs of a highly elaborate form of musical decoration.  In a previous number of this review [magazine], A L Lloyd has referred to 'an ancient general European decorated style!' And my own belief is that what now persists in England only in isolated examples is a survival of this once-widespread singing style.

Another thing that may seem strange is that nearly all our singers use no form of instrumental accompaniment ...  [Folk singers] were never concerned with harmonic implications but with the melodic variation of one note in relation to the next.'60

'I would like also to enter for the Folk Music Festival Competition on March 10 in Class 1 (solo singers).'61

'He'd obviously decided that he was ready to start performing in public and had been giving a lot of thought to English performance style, his own in particular.  He'd read Percy Grainger's analysis of traditional singing in the Folk Song Society Journal and Cecil Sharp's English Folk Song: Some Conclusions and, over the years, he had heard a fair bit of folk music.  In his A L Lloyd: A Personal Memoir (1984), the historian A L (Leslie) Morton, a good friend of Lloyd's from the nineteen-thirties on, remembered Bert in the 1930s as: '... developing his own distinctive singing style in these years, taut and unfussy.  On the whole, he preferred the traditional English style of unaccompanied song but he was never pedantic about that or anything else and was prepared to accept an instrumental accompaniment, if it seemed to add anything of value'.62

Whatever Lloyd's preparation, he won his class in the singing competition.

In my interview with Lloyd, perhaps the following was the closest that I got to a direct consideration of vocal performance:

'I don't think my attitude has changed towards the songs - in a way, perhaps it's become a bit more conscious - I'm sure of that.  Songs that I like to sing are, however obliquely, have something to do towards the formation of people's opinions.  That may be very oblique - it may be, for example, a song in which a girl is subjected to male superiority but manages to extricate herself, with aplomb or even with triumph.  Or it may be a song that, to some extent, undermines the mystifications - conventional mystifications - of Christianity or not necessarily Christianity of bourgeois illusion, generally.

Songs that tend towards a collective or communal feeling, away from an entirely personal, navel gazing one - that kind of thing; songs expressing an attitude, either of social responsibility or of irony towards the more illusionary kinds of institution that our masters try to fob us off with; I suppose that roughly is likely to be in my mind, when I'm finding a song that I fancy.  That's from a textual point, of course, I have my melody preferences, naturally, very strongly.  I detest singing songs that have a humdrum [melody], just as I detest singing songs with a humdrum text.  A humdrum - that means, however unexceptionable the sentiments may be, there's plenty of songs that, from a logical point of view, are entirely praiseworthy but they're presented in such a dull and doggerel fashion that they don't strike any depth in a very philosophical [way to] an audience - don't give them anything really to carry away.  I like to feel my audiences are not quite the same after I've finished with them than when I began, which may sound a bit high-flown but, well, I like to feel it.'

I went on to ask him: 'What would you consider the standards that we now have, as regards the folk revival singers?  Do you think that the standards have been raised in recent years - the technical standards?'

'Technical standards ... let's put it this way: there are many, many more competent performers going round the clubs now than was the case ten years ago, many more [Ed.  note: this was 1974].  Competent performers, that doesn't necessarily mean accurate imitators of old time country singers - not at all.  And, perhaps, no harm in that!  People find their own forms of competent expression, without having to imitate 'old Bob' or 'young Sam'.  Indeed, often the imitators produce a kind of museum atmosphere, which is distasteful.  But, competent [singers], up to the level of good performers, are much more abundant now than they formerly were.'

Well, from the letter to Louis Killen, we know that Lloyd did not think that it was his place to advise any singer on how s/he might approach a song with a view to improvement because that was 'Ewan's job, what to sing, how to sing'.

Forty-odd years on, this still puzzles me: why, with all of Lloyd's vast experience in the field of 'folk song' did he not think that he had a role, perhaps even a responsibility, to pass on this aspect of his knowledge to young aspirants?  Later in his life, Lloyd was to lecture extensively, both in Britain and overseas.  I wonder whether he ever discussed singing performance during his lectures or whether this remained an area that he thought was down to individual choice.

At the end of the interview, I asked Lloyd whether he wished to comment further on the state of the revival at that point in its development.  Perhaps his answer gave a clue that might answer this puzzle:

'... as far as I can see, in its extremely mixed and heterogeneous form, what we call the folksong revival is very vigorous.  It means an enormous lot of different sorts of musics and, particularly, a great multiplicity of forms of performance, of performance styles and so on - so much the better.  Some improve the material, some diminish it, but, as to the future, well, I haven't the faintest idea.'

Accompaniment and Instrumentation

'We would like to give a few suggestions for singing the songs in this book.  The ideal way to sing an English folk song, of course, is unaccompanied.  Our melodies were made to be sung that way, and much of their tonal beauty and delightful suppleness comes from the fact that they have been traditionally free from harmonic or rhythmic accompaniment.  They are best suited to stand on their own, and we rather agree with the Dorset countryman who commented on a professional singer of folk songs: "Of course, it's nice for him to have the piano when he's singing, but it does make it very awkward for the listener."

However, for those to whom the unaccompanied voice seems naked, there is no harm in adding a few supporting chords on the pianoforte, guitar, or other instrument, provided the chords are in keeping with the style of the tune.  Special care needs to be taken when accompanying modal tunes, where the chords should be strictly in the mode.  As to which instrument should or should not be used for folk song accompaniment, this is entirely a matter of choice.  The fashionable guitar has no more traditional sanction than the less fashionable pianoforte.  The concertina, mouth-organ, fiddle, banjo, zither, spoons, bones, even the harmonium have all been used as accompaniment to country singers without necessarily resulting in a performance that sounds more 'right' than that given by the voice unadorned.  On pages 11 and 12, we print a few examples of the way in which, in our opinion, the songs might be harmonised.  But we hope that our readers will sing the songs unaccompanied as much as possible.'65

In its way, its message is typical Lloyd - it gives all the reasons why you should do - or not do - something and then says, 'Well, ignore this if you want, it's up to you and I'm not going to interfere!'

Given Sharp's views, Morton's comments about Lloyd's attitude towards singing, Kennedy's observations and, more pertinently, Lloyd's own writing, it seems odd that he should have sung so often, both on recordings and in live performance with accompaniment - most notably with Alf Edwards, a virtuoso player of the English concertina.

In Dave Arthur's view, the probable reasons for Lloyd's seemingly contradictory attitude to accompaniment was that:

'Bert, ever the pragmatist, realised that, following the burgeoning of instrumental accompaniment (mainly on the American guitar and banjo) of songs in the skiffle era, and the expectations of young pop-fed urban audiences for a fuller sound than the unadorned voice, he should invest in some sort of accompaniment.  He eventually settled for Alf Edwards' English concertina ...'66

'I chose to be accompanied by Alf Edwards' fine concertina-playing not because the concertina is more traditional than the fashionable guitar (strictly speaking in England, no portable instrument is more traditional than any other as accompaniment to folk song) but because I think it suits my kind of songs better and interferes less with the rhythm; also I like working with Alf.'67

'I have a programme, an hour long, which would be, I suppose, coming up in something like a month or six weeks time; it's already recorded.  But it's dealing with the dilemma of contemporary composers and the tendency to try to extract from the deeper forms of folk music a sort of mythology that's valid for them.  No longer the old use of just taking of folk melody and harmonising it and away, you know, that nonsensical way of using folk music.  That's trying to use folk music and primitive musics for their ritual content as much as their artistic content and to infuse something of that mythology into their composition.

But, the best of modern composers seem to be trying it now.  Whether it's Messian [BT: Olivier, 1908 - 1992], on the one hand, trying it mystically ...  or Nono [BT: Luigi, 1924 - 1990] on the other hand, trying to annexe a proletarian mythology for a new audience of alienated factory workers, I don't think either has very much chance.  But this programme of mine is concerned with the kind of folk musics, which both would-be mythologisers deploy and try to annexe into their compositions.  It's called 'The Savage in the Concert Hall'.'

As he elaborated in my interview:

'... to take ritual musics from primitive or peasant community, where their whole collective is deeply involved in that particular kind of mythology that the ritual represents, and to re-score that kind of thing for a concert use, present it to an audience - to a modern western city audience - with the kind of alienations that they have - the lack of any of collective mythology, which they have - seems to me in vain.'

However, I do know the song Lovely Joan, which is a major element in the piece; so, when I hear the Fantasia, I immediately think of the song, which is about a girl outwitting a well-heeled would-be seducer.68  In essence, it's a perfect example of the type of song that Lloyd mentioned earlier: 'a song in which a girl is subjected to male superiority but manages to extricate herself, with aplomb or even with triumph'.  But (as far as I'm concerned, at least), the gentle soothing of the Fantasia, with its lush orchestral tones, beautiful as they may be, seems to be at complete odds to the rough and tumble of Lovely Joan.  So, was Vaughan Williams attempting to infuse something of the story and its moral attitude into his composition or did he simply think that the tune provided a good basis for the embellishments that might be provided by a clever composer?  But, of course, the vast majority of those who enjoy the Fantasia would have absolutely no knowledge of Lovely Joan, as evidenced by the comments of the many who have listened to it - a likely cross-section can be read by accessing YouTube, where its performance is accompanied by photo's of notably scenic sites in England!

Which leaves me now wondering what he was attempting in any of his other compositions that were based on the music collected from the mouths of his informants?  And, more to the point of this essay, why didn't Lloyd use such more familiar examples in 'The Savage'?  I wonder now whether Lloyd thought that RVW's music was 'in vain' and whether that this argument might apply equally to the music of Percy Grainger and the other composers who used the folk music collected in the early part of the twentieth century as an inspiration for their compositions.  I wished that I'd had the gumption to ask him.

Lloyd's attitude to the instrumentation of English folk song bounded a good few steps further later in the interview when I plunged straight in with the blunt question: 'What do you think of this fairly recent development: the electronic folk-rock phenomenon?'

Readers may or may not find this hard to believe, but, at the time (and even now), I knew very little about electric folk or folk-rock.  I didn't really even know what to call it and didn't know the names of the bands involved or their personnel.  I certainly did not know that Lloyd had been fairly intimately connected with Fairport Convention, one of the founding ensembles of the genre (or, maybe, the founding ensemble?).  So, believing that Lloyd to be a pillar of traditionalism, I was not at all prepared for Lloyd's fulsome answer and his equally fulsome enthusiasm for the genre!

'I certainly don't feel any horror at the thought of electronic treatment of folk music melodies.  On the contrary, I find such treatments usually interesting, not always successful, goodness knows.  But, quite a lot that 'Fairport' did in the past, that 'Steeleye' have been doing recently, that the 'Albion Country Band' have produced, have seemed to me are certainly not impoverishments of the material ... properly handled electronic sound can be enormously expressive ... four musicians can envelope an audience of, say, two thousand or more in a web of sound, that, if properly handled, can give them a very acute artistic experience.  And this I've noticed, working sometimes, with the use of traditional music, in quite interesting ways.'

'... they incline to treat their traditional music in a variety of non-traditional ways, with voice-production, instrumentation, rhythmical treatment, etc., borrowed from the world of commercial light music.  Whether the material is thereby enriched or impoverished is arguable; it is less arguable that, through new treatment, many fine folk tunes and texts are made valid for thousands of performers and listeners whose musical interests would otherwise be limited to the banalities of Denmark Street.'

Lloyd's view was that Fairport Convention, in particular, had done more than justice to the genre; unlike the composers who had failed to communicate the essential qualities of folk music in their compositions.  It leaves me to wonder why he had not used an example of, say, Fairport Convention, in 'The Savage' - just to illustrate a positive way that traditional music might have been used.

However, he was critical of some aspects of the Band's and Sandy Denny's earlier performances of Tam Lin (a ballad that he had 'resuscitated'): he did not like the 'truncated text' and wasn't particularly fond of the tune but he did like:

' ... the end, [where] the group would have an enormous long purely instrumental coda, that would be an extension of the magical atmosphere of the ballad but done in a way that really raised that atmosphere to a considerable pitch of - at once, a mixture of terror and triumph, which the ballad itself has.  It's a ballad full of anxieties, that ends in triumph and well handled electronic sound can give an impression of elation or of tragedy in a way that takes enormous resources to achieve acoustically.'

There seems to be a direct contradiction between his view that '... well handled electronic sound can give an impression of elation or of tragedy in a way that takes enormous resources to achieve acoustically' with a typical performance by Lloyd, in which, often unaided by accompaniment, he created exactly that impression of elation and tragedy for which Fairport strived and in my view (admittedly based only on filmed performances and recordings) failed to achieve with their coterie of musicians and electronic equipment.

I first heard Tam Lin at a folk club (I can't remember which one now) sung by Lloyd, probably not so long after he had re-constructed his version of the ballad.  It was mesmeric.  Although Lloyd had quite a small, thin, high pitched voice - probably created in the way that he thought English 'traditional' singers sang - in the confines of a folk club, it held your attention to the words from beginning to end - even given the uncomfortable hard chairs and the cigarette smoke!  We were not of the community that created the ballad (whoever they may have been) but we sat entranced as we followed Janet's struggle with, and eventual victory over, the Queen of Fairyland.  When Lloyd finished singing, I for one felt like the victim of a master hypnotist coming out of a trance, such was the spell woven by his performance!

Can I say the same about Fairport Convention's performance, well, for me, the answer is firmly no.  That mesmeric quality captured by Lloyd (and also to some extent on a fine recording by Anne Briggs) is totally dissipated by the instrumental breaks.  Of course, Lloyd might have found it difficult to reproduce the 'magic' of his performance in the confines of a small room if transferred to an auditorium with an audience of two thousand but that only begs the question of whether a ballad such as Tam Lin was ever meant for such a purpose.

It is hard to know how to assess folk-rock: is it folk music or is it rock - or neither or both or something else completely?  Ashley Hutchins, one of Fairport's originators and sometime bass player had no such doubts:

'... we just leapt in and did this in a rock'n'roll kind of way.  We weren't concerned with being historically accurate, it was rock'n'roll.  And it blew a lot of cobwebs away.  We were on a kind of crusade.'71

'The performances of traditional texts - sometimes in full, it depends on the length of the song, sometimes truncated.  But, you know, if it's a traditional song that's being used, the text is being sung traditionally but it's the melody that's having the treatment.  The text is not very heavily processed as a rule.

BT: The text often does seem to get lost …

Acoustically, that may happen - that's simply a matter of balance, isn't it?  That can happen - it doesn't always.  Again, Sandy was lucky, you could usually hear pretty well all Sandy's words, although it always meant a lot of manipulation of the controls.  Some singers can sing clearly, some can't - it's the same in the world of concert singers.  The majority of concert singers - virtuoso singers - are not very easily decodable, you know.  It's very hard to hear what they're singing, often.  It's one of the reasons why so many pop songs, particularly in the repertory of groups like the Stones, for example, consist of simple repeated phrases, over again.  Because the message is not really a verbal message - the message is conveyed in the atmosphere and texture of the music, in a sense, what I've just being saying now about this coda is the same thing.'

I've listened to quite a few of Fairport's recordings now and my overwhelming feeling is that it's a great pity that we cannot just hear Sandy Denny singing without the instrumental backing, which, in my opinion, does little to enhance the quality of her voice.  The heavy percussion, bass and amplified guitar are just too much for the light and melodic quality of her voice (I am sure that her multitude of Fairport fans will disagree!).  However, the more important question is: does it help to convey the message contained in the lyrics?

When we listen to Bert Lloyd singing Tam Lin, we are transported into the magical world of the ballad; in this type of music, the singer is really subservient to the song and the verbal message conveyed in the song.  I assume that is one of the reasons that MacColl called his programmes The Song Carriers; the singer 'carries' the song from one person (often from one generation) to the next.  S/he is a carrier rather than a 'performer'.

Peggy Seeger, who has probably sung more 'folk songs' to more people than most, commented:

'The word perform bothers me, as does the fact that I've used it so much.  It doesn't feel right when you're talking about folk music ...  Performance has an air of artificiality about it, suggesting the delivery of a prepared piece in which you, yourself, are part of the scenery.  Once you hire a hall and admit a miscellaneous group, each of whom is parting with an entrance fee, it becomes a one-off entertainment.  The element of pay and the fact that you are singing to strangers are crucial.  Take field singers or folk singers away from their community into the outer musical world ...  we do too much, we try too hard.  We jazz the music up, put glitter on it, play it too fast, smile or laugh nervously, employ histrionics, borrow features from other musics in order to - we hope - make it acceptable .  In a word, we lose our trust: in the material, in ourselves, in those who listen.'72

Lloyd wrote in FSE:

'Everywhere the old oral traditions are jeopardised by the struggle for literacy, the ceremonial repertory shrinks as the magic is no longer believed in, the flavour of feudal and other past orders is no longer palatable in the singers' mouths and the flood of Western popular music - so easy to assimilate - is carried by radio and record to drown the local musics that once were so closely interwoven in the fabric of daily life ...

The easily identified, water-pure, guaranteed authentic folk song beloved of scholars is dying everywhere ...  But in sophisticated urban surroundings, it is rising again and entering on a second existence, either informally under the influence of commercial popular music as in the U.S.A.  or Britain, for example, or formally under the influence of concert music, as along the road from Prague to Peking [Beijing].  Whether this second existence is ephemeral or not, it is artificial, with the repertory at once protected as a conscious portion of 'heritage', and exposed to the winds by being shifted on to the plane of mass entertainment, divorced from its natural setting and the function it fulfilled in its former folklore milieu ...'73

'... the old use of just taking of folk melody and harmonising it and away, you know, that nonsensical way of using folk music ... '

One last thought: in the interview, Lloyd compared electronic folk-rock with the radio ballads, saying that both were '… an exploitation of the traditional repertory'.  However, I believe that the two genres are not comparable.  What MacColl, Seeger and Parker did was to take the contemporary speech of people in specific circumstances (for example, working down a mine, living in an oxygen tent or a caravan) and to try to tell their story by weaving the speech into a dramatic framework, with music linking and enhancing the emotional impact.  In her autobiography, Peggy Seeger describes the way that Ewan MacColl 'constructed' the songs for the radio ballads, listening to the speech of the miners, boxers, travellers, teenagers, et al and blending their patterns of speech with the traditional melodies that swirled around his head.  Was he successful?  Well, one of his greatest informants, Sam Larner (Singing in the Fishing), claimed to have known Shoals of Herring all of his life.  In Ireland, at least, that song, and many others of MacColl, have passed into the national repertory and can be heard sung over the length and breadth of the land.  Some are even claiming them to be 'traditional' songs.  Well, maybe they are, but that's for another discussion.

Are the radio ballads, as Lloyd claimed, 'an exploitation of the traditional repertory'?  Yes, in a sense they are.  But, can they be compared in that sense with folk-rock?  Well, yes, MacColl certainly drew on his encyclopaedic knowledge of traditional music, which was reinforced by Seeger's musical learning, instrumental expertise and experience of folk music, particularly that of North America.  But, in my view, the radio ballads are a wonderful artistic achievement - yes, it could be said that are a new type of musical creation and not folk song.  Yes, again, it could be said that they are uneven in type and quality but, considering the pioneering nature of their creation, and the sometime reluctance of the BBC to fully back their production, they show a pioneering and unmatched level of creativity in the use of song, speech and music.

Folk Song in England - the original!

'Mr Lloyd approaches the subject from the sociological angle.  His main theme is that 'the best way to understand the songs is to relate them to the times and circumstances (that) they were made up in.' A study on these lines undoubtedly throws many interesting side-lights on the songs but one cannot agree that it is the best method of approach.'74

'... our folk arts seem to be reaching out to other fields of knowledge - anthropology, sociology and musicology.  If the Journal and its reviews are here reflecting a tendency for kindred studies to join forces we have a satisfactory prospect before us of profitable work yet to be done'.75

'A thing of beauty is a joy forever is not a mere sophism but a truth which has a special significance when applied to folk song; for the perpetuation of folk song has in the nature of things depended upon its intrinsic merits.  Time and circumstances have undoubtedly affected the songs, but the songs as we know them are the cumulative expression of many ages and it is therefore misleading to regard them as the product of any particular age, or to identify any particular song with any particular circumstance.'

Ms Karpeles later congratulates Lloyd's 'note of conviction' in the statement:

'... only a dry boned old professor could think of the folk song as archives ...  Much better to look at the folk song first of all as music and poetry, the peak of cultural achievement of the English lower classes.'77

Throughout the review, Ms Karpeles characterises Lloyd's view as being that English folk songs have a purely utilitarian character and role, which is simply to express the maker's (or singer's) dissatisfaction with her or his social position.  However, in The Singing Englishman, and throughout his writings and broadcasts, Lloyd takes great pains to display and praise their aesthetic qualities and the abilities of their makers and singers - while accepting the inevitability that not all will attain the highest creative standards, which seems a reasonable viewpoint.  There is no shortage of examples in The Singing Englishman but the following will suffice:

'Some folksongs are good and some are bad.  Many which have come down to us from quite early times seem hardly worth the trouble … But many have something fine and tragic, with great emotion in the words and exotic beauty in the tune; and this no exaggeration, the best of them are probably the highest points reached by the imagination of the ordinary Englishman'.78

If Bert Lloyd had done nothing other than write Folk Song in England, I believe that he would have made an outstanding contribution to the development of a generation's understanding of traditional music.  I can say that its arrival was welcomed by many of us who were searching for such a study (it was a Christmas present to me from my parents in 1968, the year after publication).  Lloyd says that it is a book for the general reader and not for the specialist - actually, there were very few 'specialists' in England at that time.  Even fewer who could provide anything like Lloyd's erudite commentary on folk songs and the people who sang them.  As it happens, some of these early readers have gone on to serious, academic studies of the subject, perhaps stimulated to fill in the lacuna that occurs throughout FSE.

One of Lloyd's reasons for writing FSE was his dissatisfaction with many of the ballad studies published during the decades before FSE, of which he commented:

'Generally speaking, our folk song has not been much illuminated by learned comment.  Some studious starlight falls on the carol, but most kinds of English traditional poetry and music remain in the darkness of a night pierced here and there by the hand-torch of the Folk Song Journal.  But, if the greater part of the field is pallidly lit, the sun of scholarship has turned the full force of its one-eyed glare on the ballad.  Neglecting other folk songs, generations of students commented on the ballads devoutly but inequitably for, in their absorption with the texts, they had left the tunes out in the cold.'79

Over the years, probably the strongest criticism of FSE has come from the ranks of those who disagree with his political opinions, particularly as they occur in the work.  Such critics, it should be added, have come from both the right and left of the political spectrum, as well as from those who, I suppose, would not have considered themselves politically committed in any direction.

It was apparent from the outset that his views would not meet with universal acceptance, as an early review by Francis Collinson confirmed.  Written for the 1968 edition of the EFDSS's Folk Song Journal, on whose editorial board Mr Collinson served, the review is reminiscent of some of Maud Karpeles' comments in her review of The Singing Englishman:

'It comes as a shock to one who, like this reviewer, has done his stint in the field of English folk song ... to find this same field used for the exploitation, or exposition at least, of class distinction and class prejudice ...'83

Moving on, it is hardly surprising, given Lloyd's support for the British Communist Party and their endorsement of the policies of the U.S.S.R.  and the other 'socialist' regimes of Eastern Europe, that he should express interest in the song traditions of those countries and, further, as he explained to me, to find them useful to enhance his understanding of English folk song.

Unfortunately for Lloyd and the work, his analogies between the English song tradition and those of Eastern Europe were and are some of the most contested sections of FSE.

He explained to me that he found it useful to study a living tradition, such as might be found in Romania, Albania or Bulgaria, to try to understand the morbid English tradition.  This is a path that Lloyd had followed for many years.  Long before I, or anyone else in the revival, asked him about his involvement in eastern Europe, or before Francis Collinson had been startled by the contents of FSE, Lloyd had explained such views in an article entitled 'Folk Song for our Time', published in January 1954, in the first edition of Marxist Quarterly; published by Lawrence and Wishart, it was the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  It would have made an interesting addition to the Journal of the EFDSS, though, given the content of the article, it is doubtful whether the EFDSS and the editorial board of the Journal would have welcomed such an article, even though Lloyd was a member of the board and might possibly have persuaded them!  In fact, outside a publication of the left-wing press, it is hard to think where an article looking at the future of folk song in Britain, and couched in Marxist terms, would have been welcome.84

Discussing the value of comparing folk song in England and Eastern Europe, Lloyd wrote:

'The folklorists of the U.S.S.R.  and the new democracies have an enormous advantage in that not only are they dealing with a folk tradition in full flower, but their philosophical approach provides them with a method of grasping the material however subject it may be to fluctuation and change, and gives them a theoretical groundwork for interpreting the social character of folk music.  'Society influences music and, at the same time, music influences society' is their thesis and the process is seen in its clearest and most exciting forms in folk music, precisely because it isn't the solitary talented individual who speaks through folk song but the humble anonymous collective crowd with the power to move mountains and bring down the stars.'85

The same reference to the folk traditions of Eastern Europe occurred in my interview, where Lloyd explained the way that a comparative study would work:

'Well, as I said earlier on, traditions in full flower can often throw light on traditions that are in a state of dilapidation.  And so it happens often that things in their come-down state that would be mysterious become clarified in the light of what happens elsewhere in a flourishing form.  We understand, for example, much more about the nature of mummer's plays and the meaning of mummery through comparison with continental models than we would if we hadn't those continental models.  For instance, this comparative thing, as a clarification, applies particularly to the under stratum of our folklore, that is ceremonial, ritual musics and so on.'

Whether the traditions were in 'full flower' or had begun to wither is a difficult question.  Later and more complete evidence than that provided by Lloyd suggests that there is some truth for his claims that the customs, songs, stories and dances of the 'folk' had in the nineteen-fifties and into the nineteen-nineties, been better preserved in 'the U.S.S.R.  and the new democracies' than they had in most of western Europe.

As Lloyd himself pointed out in the article on the Caluş, under the regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu's predecessor, the equally authoritarian Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, things were changing rapidly in the countryside:

'Thus, the young Caluşari dancer who leaps and prances at the Bucharest Festival no longer believes that his dance has power to make the crops grow and the cattle breed ...  Nevertheless, neither he nor his spectators are insensitive to the magical encouragement of the dance, even if they associate it with phosphates and tractors rather than with semen and water-buffaloes.'88

'...  also it applies to such considerations as how folksongs are made up and how they are spread and so on.  Because, I'm talking of classic folklore, because, say in Bulgarian villages, where new songs are appearing every week and immediately going into the general repertory, one has then the opportunity really to study the mechanics of the creation of the stuff and of its diffusion also, right under your nose instead of speculating on the basis of bits of information from the relatively remote past, which happen to come your way.'

'... the two fundamental characteristics which distinguish it from other kinds of music ... [are] its manner of performance and its function in society.  By performance, I imply such features as oral transmission, the perpetual variation of the material, the varying aspects of vocal or instrumental technique ...  By function, I mean the reason why the a song gets sung, what it means to the singer, what the singer hopes to achieve by its performance (the propitiation of evil powers, solace for a baby's death, strengthening men's determination during a strike).89

While I would applaud Lloyd for his attempt to inject some much needed analytical thinking into the study of folk song in England, the evidence suggests a lack of rigour in his work.  A comparative study can be extremely useful in allowing comparisons to be made across a range of cultures.  However, to be of value, we have to be reasonably sure of what we are comparing and to be sure that grounds exist to make such a comparison valid.  Can we reasonably compare the culture of the rural peasantry of Romania and Bulgaria in the nineteen-fifties, for example, with the post-industrial society of the English countryside and the small town communities that were mined for songs by Sharp and his colleagues?  Given the totally different social and economic development of each, to my mind, this seems highly unlikely.  And, if we know so little about the lives of so many folk song informants in England, how little real information do we have - or is provided in FSE by Lloyd - on his Eastern European examples?

I find his references to Romania particularly interesting, having worked in that country extensively in the period between 1991, just after the fall of Ceausescu, and 1995.  Even during the period of my visits to the country, Romanian television was screening highly choreographed shows that purported to show the traditional music, dance and customs of its rural inhabitants but looked more like the Hollywood musicals of the nineteen-fifties.  Thus, it is difficult to know exactly what Lloyd's exemplars represent: are they truly examples of traditions handed down over centuries or are they highly selective and, thus, unrepresentative of a real tradition?

Much of my work in Romania took me inside its institutions, including government ministries, universities and hospitals; but, although I had very good personal relations with many high officials and even parliamentarians, it wasn't always easy to get almost any information from people who had been brought up in the shadow of the old regime, where your best friend or work colleague could turn out to be a member of the 'Securitate' - the dreaded secret police.  With this in mind, I have long wondered precisely how Lloyd managed to infiltrate this apparently impenetrable country in the 1950s, when it was under the control of Gheorghiu-Dej.  Just exactly how much free and unfettered collecting he was able to manage in what was probably the most strictly controlled regime in eastern Europe is open to some question.

Dave Arthur, who probably knew him as well as anyone outside his family, sheds some light on Bert's activities in Eastern Europe but remained sceptical about his precise involvement as a collector, particularly in Romania:

'We can't be certain how aware Bert was of the political machinations of the Culture Bosses.  How much he actually saw from the cocooned environment of his 'privileged' guest status, with its free transport, comfortable hotels, compliant translators, folklorists, archivists and choreographed and handpicked performers.  Or, maybe he was just being pragmatic and gratefully accepted what was offered to him.'90

'A most remarkable example of self-imposed limitation is afforded by those folklorists - the majority of Western folklorists, in fact - who regard the rural manifestations as the only ones worthy of their attention, who would deny the term 'folk-song' to any product of the cities, whether orally transmitted or not, and who would prefer to disregard any historical evidence of any song traffic between the urban and rural lower classes.'91

'It cannot be overlooked that at least part of the newly revived interest in folk music has a strong political bias.  There are many who believe that music may be a force to assist the progress of the human race; and since folk music is created directly out of the common experience and aspirations of working people, it follows that folk song is likely to be a powerful aid not only in mirroring man's condition but also in encouraging him on his forward march.  Also, folk song is the most truly and deeply national aspect of our musical culture, and at a time when that culture is in grave of losing its independence, it is well that we avail ourselves of what we can in the way of fortification.'92

'One hears a great many of these lyrical pieces of urban folklore, largely of 19th century origin, in Central Albania, where the narrow ravines of the North are replaced by broader valleys, and where life is not so tight and spare nor its blossom so withheld.  On the collective farm at Laknas, a few miles north of Tirana, a little snub-nosed Muslim girl of eighteen, wearing the Turkish-style trousers that even Christian women favour hereabouts, sat in a farm-shed singing a song that was probably made in the capital but has circulated in the countryside for a century or so.  When the recording session was over, to the collector's mild surprise, she gave him a friendly kiss as a bonus.'93

In FSE, in a somewhat typical Lloydian manner, we are introduced to a bewildering array of often eastern European names: Hungarian music historian Bence Szabolsci, Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brailiou, the great Hungarian composers, collectors Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, and many others are freely scattered through its pages.  Doubtless, these are all great authorities in their field but this is, according to Lloyd himself, a book for beginners and, with little or no opportunity to verify the theories of these authorities, one can't help feeling that they are really there more to demonstrate Lloyd's connections and scholarship than to enlighten the reader.

In Bert, an interesting point about Lloyd's knowledge of Romanian gypsies is raised.  Dave Arthur discusses a series of lectures that Lloyd gave at London's Goldsmith College in the 1970s, which Paul Nixon attended whilst a mature postgraduate student.  Referring to a lecture given by Lloyd at the Royal Music Association.94  Nixon commented:

'Bert's 1964 RMA piece on Romanian Gypsies merits belated correction.  Persuasive in tone, deftly put together (as ever) and doubtless appealing to many who would never know the living realities, its suppressions are less than honourable.  His empirical experience in E Europe was extremely limited.95

In briefly discussing the article in Marxist Quarterly, Arthur is quite dismissive.96  However, I think that it is important in that it helps to show Lloyd's journey from his generalised belief in the essential class nature of English folk song - and folk song in general - to a more fully formed view of its possible role in the politics of the nineteen-fifties.  It is certainly more overtly political than FSE but, of course, it was filling a different role, being aimed at the small circulation of the Marxist Quarterly, primarily among members of the Communist Party.  It paves the way for Lloyd's general philosophical approach in FSE, which was inspired by the eastern Europeans folklorists and ethnomusicologists with whom he had had contact.

FSE was written in the immediate aftermath of the cold-war, during which members of the Communist Party of Great Britain spent much of their time defending the Soviet Union and the other 'socialist' countries of Eastern Europe.  That they had been cruelly deceived only became apparent in the years following the publication of FSE.  From my limited experience gained during brief holidays in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria (and later confirmed by my time spent working in Poland, Romania and Armenia), it wasn't difficult to see that things were not quite as depicted by the various regimes.  I wonder now how it would have looked to an intelligent observer making multiple visits and, presumably, given more access than the casual holiday maker.

Of course, by now, many of the old traditions that may still have been practised in Romania in the nineteen-fifties will have died out or changed beyond recognition under the dual influence of the Ceausescu regime and its free market successor.  Unfortunately, many of the references to the folk-music of Eastern Europe quoted in FSE are vague and were dated even by 1967.  This will make them extremely difficult to trace today, although, perhaps, it might be easier than in the late nineteen-sixties, when visiting Eastern Europe was so much harder and folk lore archives so much more inaccessible to the general public.

It is hardly reasonable that the reader should have to simply take Lloyd at his word and is and was left to wonder about the veracity and applicability of the examples quoted.  A rigorous examination of the examples quoted in Lloyd's various works would certainly make for an interesting research project today but still a mammoth task.  Any offers?

Of course, all this talk about 'the U.S.S.R.  and the new democracies' was meat and drink to the camp of detractors who saw Lloyd's work as part and parcel of a Soviet-led deception, led in Britain by the Communist Party and its affiliates.  One such, Dave Harker, had been a persistent critic.  In One for the Money (Chapter 9), he analyses the revival of interest in English folk song, starting with the work of Cecil Sharp.  The chapter is entitled 'Fakesong' and the title immediately reveals its direction of travel, as Harker commences by dismissing the work of Sharp, and his 'coadjutors', as seeking to:

'...  impose on to the living culture of English working people (few of whom were agricultural labourers), in some parts of some predominately rural counties in the south-west, notions of history and of culture which owe more to romance than to reality'.97

Like all retrospective judgements, the context of time must be considered, I do not know of any evidence that suggests Sharp's singer's were harmed or damaged in any way by the process.  Nor is there any substantial evidence that Sharp and company's activities changed their attitude to or performance of their songs.  At worst, his attitude to his informants may be described as condescending and, at best, paternal.  For example, some years after recording Louie Hooper, he bought her a concertina; in addition and he often sent gifts of tobacco to his male informants.  Against Harker's charge of fraud, we have a large collection of material recorded more than a hundred years ago that we are able to sift and analyse according to any philosophy that we may wish to apply.

The brief and contemptuous dismissal of Sharp's work and ideas was, in effect, a summary of his earlier article, Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions.98  This article (and, its abbreviated form in Fakesong) has been picked over by many folk song enthusiasts in the years since publication but I think was really adequately answered in a short reply in the correspondence section of the Journal by Leslie Shepard in the following year, in which he stated:

'Mr Harker's satirical tone ... and his breathless presentation of highly selective data and out-of-context quotation only obscures the real Sharp and expresses the writer's own prejudices.'99

'From the first, this revival had distinct political overtones; and its success owed much to the Labourist ideology of post-war Britain ...'100

Although Lloyd had been interested in folk music before the Second World War, a more widespread, if marginal, stirring of interest arrived somewhat later.  The publication by the WMA of The Singing Englishman in 1944 - it was number four in their 'Keynote Series of Music Books', which included 'Twenty Soviet Composers' 'Background to the Blues' and 'Music and Society' - precisely the proselytising works that would be expected from the organisation.  But it was by no means a sign that a serious revival of interest in English folk music was on the horizon.  In fact, such common agreement as there exists on the subject, suggests that the 'second revival' did not really get underway until the early nineteen-fifties.  And, even then, it could hardly be labelled 'a success' - such popular success that folk song has enjoyed came much later.

Dave Harker states:

'For example, it has to be said that the milieu which gave rise to the revival was decidedly unproletarian ... and dominated by intellectuals who were of a radical frame of mind.'101

When it comes to the second folksong revival, in Harker's view:

'... the intervention of the Communist Party and its fraternal organisations was absolutely crucial ...'103

Although the editorial board of Marxist Quarterly chose to include Lloyd's article on folk music in its first edition, in reality, the Communist Party of Great Britain paid little attention to the growing interest in English (or British) folk song: rather, as part of the fight against the Cold War, its members were encouraged to support events by organisations from the 'socialist democracies' of Eastern Europe, such as the Moscow State Circus and the Red Army Choir.  I grew up in a Communist Party household in this period and the only evidence of folk song in our house was a 78-rpm record of Peter Peer's rendition of Benjamin Britten's arrangement of The Foggy Dew, which my mother loved (without understanding for one moment what is was about) and I, showing great judgement as a ten-year old, hated - although I still possess my late mother's copy of the record!  Of course, I was familiar with folk-type songs from an early age as a member of the Woodcraft Folk and similar organisations, which Dave Harker would, doubtless, class as 'fraternal'!

More factually, folk song enthusiasts who were members of the Communist Party generally bashed their heads against a brick wall of apathy from 'the Party' towards folk song.  As for its youth wing, The Young Communist League, even during the heady days of the skiffle movement and later folk club 'boom', far from seeing interest in folk song as an opportunity to spread its influence among young people, it was more concerned with tempting them to pop dances - and certainly not folk dances!  In fact, at the height of the Beatles craze in the early nineteen-sixties, the YCL published an edition of its monthly publication, Challenge, with a full front page picture of the 'Fab Four'!

In reality, the lift-off point for interest in folk song was not some Marxist-inspired revival was, of course, the advent of skiffle, which swept thousands of young people towards into skiffle clubs and some into the arms of the folk song enthusiasts.

As Georgina Boyes puts it:

'Whether new recruits to the movement knew - or cared - who was the President of English Folk Dance and Song Society is a moot point [Ed: it was H.R.H.  Princess Margaret at the time].  How many had even heard of the Society is probably a more relevant question.  But whether the WMA or the Cultural Committee of the CPGB was now proving more effective in overseeing the 'preservation, study and performance of folk music in England' is equally doubtful.  The movement was growing rapidly - small and hidebound, the WMA as an organisation or a source of ideology meant little to the erstwhile fans of Lonnie Donegan now crowding into folk clubs.'104

Another aspect of FSE that has been criticised Lloyd writing style but it is typical Bert - if you ever heard him introduce a song in folk club, his writing style will be immediately recognisable.  It is whimsical and sometimes meandering, a little teasing at times, but always fascinating - if not necessarily entirely factual or to the point.  But, in general, he was a great talker and an experienced, proficient and entertaining writer - which is more than can be said for many of the earnest authors of ballad studies - although I believe that a good editor could have improved the book.  Yes, it can be annoying for the more serious student because many of his statements are not adequately referenced, particularly the many off-hand referrals to Eastern European 'experts' and events.

Lloyd claimed in the first sentence of FSE: 'This is a book for beginners, not specialists'.  However, I think that is a fairly lame reason for many of vague statements, particularly those concerning the origin of some of his Eastern European analogies.  Surely, beginners deserve the same of level of veracity as specialists?

In my view, if it has an over-riding fault, it is that Lloyd, in his attempt to provide the ultimate guide to English folk song, strove too hard to provide a solution to the thorny question of its origins.  This is particularly evident in the first chapter, in which he floats some ingenious theories and possible scenarios for its origins, many - if not most - of which are highly speculative and rather unconvincing.  But, in 1967, ethnomusicology was hardly evident in Britain (though it already had been practiced for some years in the U.S.A.) and Lloyd tended to rely, as he says in my interview, on the experiences of Eastern European field workers.

It seems to me that the origin of the mass of individual folk songs and ballads in Britain is as much shrouded in mystery today as it was when the ballad scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries started to delve into its past.  We have had many suggestions as to the likely beginnings of folk songs - from communal composition to the apparently current notion that folk song began with the broadside ballad.  When it comes to ballads, theories concerning their origins range widely - at opposite ends of the spectrum, studies by David C Fowler and David Buchan might be cited - the first proposing a literary origin for the ballads and the second suggesting a history of oral composition, akin to that of Parry and Lord's epic balladeers of Serbia.105  Both the works of Fowler and Buchan appear to be credibly researched and are convincing in their execution but, in reality, get us no nearer to the truth than the work of previous academics.106

As I have tried to suggest, teasing out Lloyd's views on various aspects of folk song can be tricky - it's a bit like the old saw of trying to find Francis James Child's definition of what is a ballad; there is a lot of talk around and about the subject but a lack of commitment to anything too specific.  In FSE, the conclusion seems to precede the argument, with, probably, the most important discussion appearing in the first chapter (The Foundations of Folk Song - particularly pages 53 - 55, in which Lloyd starts with the simple question 'How is a folk song made up?' and proceeds with a quite masterly but short analysis of the various theories).  After the four hundred pages of detailed discussion about English folk song in FSE, you might expect to find a summary of his views, well, there is one, sort of, smuggled in at the end of the chapter on industrial songs (pages 407 - 411, in my edition).

When I came to write an account of traditional dance music in west Clare,107 I made a rapid decision to stay clear of any lengthy discussion on the origins of the material.  I was fortunate in two ways: firstly, I was well aware of some largely unsuccessful attempts to provide a guide to the origins of Irish traditional dance music and was, thus, determined to keep well away.108  Secondly, for nearly forty years, I had been near the epicentre of a tradition, which had only very recently reached the end of its active life, and was able to personally interview many who had been participants.  Thus, I decided to concentrate on the relationship to the activity of participants (whether players, dancers or listeners), the methods of transmission of style and repertoire and, most importantly, to look at the place of the music within its cultural environment.

The Aftermath

Sadly, this is where the project stopped.  Early in 1974, I had applied to study at Leeds University and much of my time in the first half of 1974 was taken up with preparations for interviews, preparatory trips to Leeds, searches for accommodation, and the like.  Eventually, my application was accepted and I headed off in the September of that year.  Partly as a result, I suppose, the proposed magazine didn't get off the ground, though Jim was involved in (and edited in 1979 - 80) a magazine for the Singers' Club, called The Lark, which was rather short-lived.

Personally, this activity marked almost the end of a phase of my life in traditional music, which, from the late nineteen-fifties until then, had largely been concerned with English and Scottish song.  For a year or so after moving to Leeds, I carried on with many of the activities that had been part and parcel of the activities of Singers' Workshop, particularly working on song performance and criticism.  With my friend and neighbour Jim Doody, along with Ned Ogier and Mary Humphreys, a kind of Leeds' version of Singers' Workshop was established.

However, fatally for my song ambitions, Jim Doody also introduced me to the flourishing Leeds Irish dance music scene, nourishing an appetite that had started with visits to sessions in London pubs in the early 1970s, and from 1975, my interest became increasingly focussed on studying and attempting to play Irish music.

This led to many articles and presentations on Irish dance music and to two books.109  I believe that I was the first person to conduct an in-depth study of the Irish céilí band and the first person to publish a detailed study of the way that style and repertoire were passed from the 'master' to the 'pupil' in the Irish dance music tradition.  This entailed a study of the relationship between Junior Crehan and Michael Downes, which was originally the subject of my University dissertation.  An abbreviated version of which was included in the magazine Dal gCais.110  An article on Junior Crehan appears in Musical Traditions.

So, the interview with Bert has never seen the light of day, although I did pass a copy of the interview to Dave Arthur, who included several quotations from it in Bert.  The possibility of its publication has been since filed in the 'things still to do' section of my life (with many other projects that have yet to come to fruition!).  However, I think that it's about time it surfaced, although 44 years late, as it sheds an interesting light on Bert Lloyd's views and the state of folk song in Britain at that time.  I have now read through both the original transcript and my edited version, and feel that the original is of much more interest, particularly as the original clarified many of the matters raised by Bert in his letter and corrected transcript.

Many of the items discussed in this short essay seemed of critical importance at the time but may now be just part of the flotsam and jetsam of English folk song history and, perhaps, best forgotten.  Of that, I leave you to judge.

Reading the interview again, after so many years, I realise that, like others before, I had largely failed to break through the calm, urbane front that Lloyd usually adopted when discussing traditional culture and had failed to get more than a glimpse of the belief that inspired him to become - against all odds - a fulltime folklorist.  Put this down to the lack of experience and knowledge of the interviewer.  To find, perhaps, the real Bert Lloyd, I will end with a passage from FSE, which demonstrates why he chose to invest his singing with such layers of intrigue, mystery, affection, enthusiasm and downright passion, and reveals, maybe, the real Bert Lloyd, the one that was so hard to find:

'At this point, I rest on my typewriter and think how abstract the matter of folk song definition is and how boring for all but those dogged scholars who dart into arguments with voices sharpened, glasses glinting, using their conference-papers as batons in a Tweedledum-Tweedeldee fight, with never a notion that their science more than most should be all of a piece with life, or that the materials of their study come directly from the dreams, hopes, glories and despairs, guffaws and night-whispers of such people as the old potato-lifter who cried to the pitiless sun: "Oh, were you never on hire yourself?", or that other woman in another field who broke off her song to seize the folklorist by the coat-lapels, exclaiming in rapture: "Isn't it beautiful?"111

Barry Taylor - August 2019

* Letter from Bert Lloyd re: corrections to transcript.

16 Crooms Hill
London SE 10
9th May 1974


Dear Barry

Thank you very much for sending the transcript.  I've made a few modifications, mostly in the interest of coherence.

A small point: nowadays 'folk song' is usually written as two words, not hyphenated.  'Folklore', 'folkloric', etc is one word.

The little discussion we had about the EFDSS library seems to have got rather truncated, and the result appears a bit dismissive.  I have great admiration for the book library, and make considerable use of it.  I don't have occasion to use the sound library because it's more convenient for me to use the BBC's archive and gramophone library.  But I wouldn't like it to appear to dismiss either EFDSS book library or sound library without comment.

Perhaps you can insert a short sentence that summarises what was said and that leads less abruptly (and mysteriously) to the legal matter of copyright infringement.

Thanks again.  I enjoyed your visit.

Sincerely

A. L. Lloyd

Footnotes:

1.  Vaughan Williams, R & Lloyd, A L; The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs; Harmondsworth; 1959
2.  FSE in the remainder of this essay; published by Lawrence and Wishart, London; 1967
3.  Buchan, David; The Ballad and the Folk; Routledge and Kegan Paul, London; 1972
4.  See Lord, Albert B.; the Singer of Tales; Harvard University Press; first edition 1965
5.  Arthur, Dave; Bert - Life and Times of A L Lloyd; Pluto Press, London; 2012
6.  I am indebted to Dave Arthur's 'Bert' for much of this biographical information.
7.  Published by the Worker's Music Association; 1944
8.  FSE; 5 - 6
9.  Arthur; 202
10.  See the Topic discography on the 'Musical Traditions' website. MacColl also featured on Topic's first LP (TRL1 1956?)
11.  Topic TRL3
12.  Topic Records, London, 12T86, London, 1963 - for further details of Lloyd's writings and recordings, see Arthur; 399; Note: a CD of the original LP with additional tracks has recently been released by Topic
13.  LP published by Collector Records; JGB 5001; 1960
14.  FSE; 6; Preface
15.  We should note the two song collections compiled by James Reeves, which contain much useful information: The Idiom of the People; 1958; and The Everlasting Circle; 1960; both William Heinemann Ltd.; London
16.  Freedman, Jean R., Peggy Seeger - A Life Of Music, Love And Politics; University of Illinois Press; 2017; 144. MacColl; 305
17.  For original recording of Kelly Pace by John Lomax, 1934: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NTa7ps6sNU; for Ledbelly recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_Ri76gwY4; for Donegan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_Ri76gwY4
18.  Seeger, Peggy; First Time Ever; Faber and Faber, London; 2017; 188 - 189; in her biography of Seeger, Freedman locates the incident in the Ballad and Blues Club, as per a personal interview with Seeger, June 13, 2009
19.  MacColl, Ewan; Journeyman; Sidgwick & Jackson, London; 1990; 288; [BT: Nowadays, the 'faint echoes' are fairly distinct, particularly in online forums]
20.  Arthur; 271
21.  Arthur; 271
22.  Seeger; Journeyman; 44
23.  Seeger; Journeyman; 24
24.  MacColl; 2
25.  MacColl; Preface to liner notes; Two-way Trip
26.  Freedman; 150; quoting from Folk Britannia, part 1: Ballads and Blues; broadcast February 3 2006, BBC4
27.  Unrecorded conversation; Leeds; c.1974
28.  FSE; 393
29.  FSE; 396
30.  See Arthur; 271-2
31.  MacColl; 293
32.  Arthur; 272
33.  Freedman, Jean R., Peggy Seeger - A Life Of Music, Love And Politics; University of Illinois Press; 2017; 144
34.  MacColl; 305
35.  Seeger; 258
36.  Harker, Ben; Class Act - the cultural and political life of Ewan MacColl; Pluto Press, London; 2007; 184 - 5
37.  Armstrong, Frankie (with Pearson, Jenny); As Far as the Eye Can Sing; Women's Press Ltd.; 1992; 33
38.  Armstrong; 34
39.  Harker; 185
40.  Arthur; 337
41.  Seeger; 258
42.  MacColl; 306
43.  Arthur; 274
44.  Song Carriers; Programme 14
45.  Seeger, Peggy; 260
46.  Arthur; 349; [BT: more detailed information on Lloyd's activities can be found in 'Bert']
47.  Arthur; 337 [BT: noted as a 'conversation', thus presumably unrecorded]
48.  Journeyman; 291
49.  Arthur; 275
50.  Arthur; 381
51.  No source details given
52.  FSE; 67
53.  FSE; 67
54.  FSE; 396
55.  First published 1907; edition referred to: EP Publishing Ltd., Wakefield; 1972
56.  Sharp; 134
57.  Sharp; 135
58.  Sharp; 135
59.  Lloyd; Englishman; 19- 20
60.  Arthur; 181
61.  Arthur; 178
62.  Arthur; 178 - 9
63.  Arthur; 179
64.  There is an interesting short article by Lloyd on harmony singing in the English song tradition in The Journal of the English Folk Dance Society, Vol.7, No.3, 1954; The Singing Style of the Copper Family; 145
65.  Vaughan Williams, R & Lloyd, A L.; The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs; Harmondsworth; 1959
66.  Arthur; 282
67.  Arthur; 282; quoting Lloyd's sleeve notes on the LP 'The Best of A L Lloyd'; PrestigePL-13066 (SA); 1966
68.  A shorter version was collected by Vaughan Williams from a C Jay, in Acle, Norfolk, in 1908 The version in 'The Penguin Book, 64, was filled out from a version collected by Cecil Sharp - see note, 188.
69.  Arthur; 342
70.  Arthur; 341
71.  http://www.uncut.co.uk/features/inside-fairport-conventions-liege-lief-crusade-77150/4#vSiiqWhHysGW43LE.99
72.  Seeger; 262
73.  Lloyd; FSE; 408
74.  Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Vol.4, No.5, 1944; ed Frank Howes; EFDSS, London; 207
75.  Ibid iv
76.  See notes to the song; Penguin Book; 115
77.  Karpeles; 207
78.  Singing Englishman; 10
79.  FSE; 136
80.  Princeton University Press; by 1967, only three volumes had been published and these were included in the bibliography of FSE
81.  FSE; 66
82.  University of California Press; 1969
83.  Folk Music Journal (FMJ) Vol.1, No.4; EFDSS, London; edited by Dr Russell Wortley; London 1968, 270
84.  It is hard to pin down the precise origins of much of Lloyd's information on Eastern European folk song and more so to construct some sort of chronology for them Although Arthur states that Lloyd was a regular attendee of the World Youth Festivals held in the capitols of eastern Europe - see Arthur 252 - he is, unsurprisingly, given Lloyd's vagueness about these matters, not too precise about the date of Lloyd's first 'collecting' trip to eastern Europe but it could have been that made to Hungary in January-February 1954 - see Arthur, page 247 Thus, the publication date of the first edition of Marxist Quarterly appears likely to predate Lloyd's first collecting trip
85.  Lloyd, A L.; The Marxist Quarterly; Lawrence and Wishart, London; January, 1954; 48
86.  316 - 323; Folk Music Journal, Vol 3, No.4; EFDSS, London; 1978
87.  See Arthur, 183, for more information.
88.  Marxist Quarterly; 49
89.  Marxist Quarterly; 47
90.  Arthur; 184
91.  Marxist Quarterly; 54
92.  Marxist Quarterly; 54
93.  FMJ; Vol 1, No.4, ed Dr Russell Wortley,1968; 216
94.  352; Arthur; The Music of Rumanian Gypsies; December 1964
95.  352; Arthur; from correspondence with Nixon
96.  Arthur; 239 - 241
97.  Harker, Dave; One for the Money' Hutchinson, 1980; 147
98.  FMJ Vol 2, No.3; ed Michael Yates; 1972; 220 - 240
99.  FMJ Vol 2, No.4; ed Michael Yates;, 1973; 318 - 319
100.  Harker; 149
101.  Harker; 149
102.  Harker; 151
103.  Harker; 151
104.  Boyes, Georgina; The Imagined Village; No Master Co-operative Ltd., 2010; 235
105.  Fowler, David C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad; Duke University Press; 1968; and, Buchan, David; The Ballad and the Folk; Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1972 (you can read Lloyd's views of Buchan's work in the interview transcript)
106.  For a survey of ballad studies up to 1958, see Wilgus, D K.; Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898; Rutgers University Press; 1959; the latest to dip a toe into the muddied waters is Steve Roud with his confusingly titled 'Folk Song in England' - a 'doorstopper' of a book at 764 pages, which I look forward to reading (Faber and Faber; 2017)
107.  Taylor, Barry; 'Music in a Breeze of Wind - traditional dance music in west Clare 1870 - 1970'; Danganella; 2013
108.  For example, Seán Ó Riada's series of radio programmes, 'Our Musical Heritage', broadcast on Radio Éireann, 7th July to 13th October 1962; 'Irish Folk Music and Song', Donal O'Sullivan, Dublin, 1961; 'Folkmusic and dances of Ireland', Breandán Breathnach, Dublin, 1971; 'Traditional Music in Ireland', Tomás Ó Canainn, London, 1978
109.  'A Touchstone for the Tradition - the Willie Clancy Summer School' (with Tony Kearns), Brandon, 2003 (now out of print); and Music in a Breeze of Wind (see above)
110.  Miltown Malbay, Co Clare, edition 4, 1997
111.  FSE; 17

The Interview

February 2nd, 1974 at Greenwich, London
BT: Barry Taylor
AL: A L; Lloyd
Additions in [square brackets] are from Lloyd's proofreading of the interview text.

AL: Well, I suppose it began as these things do more or less imperceptibly.  When I was a young fella in my teens or earlier, I went to work in Australia on a sheep station, sheep-cattle station.  And the - my fellow station hands and shearers come into the station and drovers too, because most of the stations I worked on were a long way from the railway.  They had songs - certain number of songs - that interested me - amused me - and, just as a youngster, I fancied taking them into my head, as it were.  So I used to try to memorise the tunes and write down the words in exercise books.  It makes, in fact, a sizeable collection taken directly from oral sources of Australian song.  But of course, I wasn't doing this as a collecting exercise at all, I didn't know that there were such queer animals as folksong collectors.  I didn't think of these materials as folksong material, they were just songs that were there to sing and to listen to.

Then, when I came back to Europe in the 1930s, the tail end of the slump was still on and it was difficult to get work and I used to spend quite a bit of my time keeping warm in the British Museum reading room.  And, as I got interested in the songs and being in the reading room, I thought I'd better read something.  I began, as it were, a study in a very amateurish sense of folksong on the resources that the BM had to offer and then later, a year or two later, I worked at sea and, later still, in journalism on jobs that took me abroad.  So that both as a seaman and as a journalist, I was able to acquaint myself, to some extent, with a certain number of other musics than British, other musics and European also.  Then during the 1950s, I resigned in a huff from journalism because I felt it was no business for me.1

Then, I was going to say to my family's distress - it wasn't to their distress, but they nearly starved in the process - I began to devote myself more and more to studying folkmusic scientifically.  Being short of money that rather took me out of this country because collecting folklore from strictly folklore sources is a slow business in England.  That means it is a relatively expense business whereas in Eastern Europe, for example, where the traditions are in full flower, it is very easy to descend on a group of villages and in a very short time to have recorded several hours of artistically valuable, sociologically valuable, music.2

So it happened, as it were, for economic reasons more than anything else that much of my study of folklore has been done outside this country and particularly in south-east Europe, where the stuff is so much more abundant.  And, where incidentally, of course, one can work scientifically on more - what's the word - on more reliable, on firmer foundations because the folklore material is less altered, less affected by conventional music, by town music and such.  And so one can have a clearer notion of the character of folklore, a clearer notion even of the character of traditional folklore in one's own country, often because here one's dealing to such a great extent with the debris of a tradition.  And, sometimes, you are faced with mysteries because the material is crumbled as it were that you are faced with mysteries that experience with folklore that's more vital can help to help to elucidate.

BT: To a degree actually, you've jumped on to another area, which I wanted to raise later anyway.  So, this is the stage to which you have now reached, does this bring us up to now?

AL: In a sense, yes, however, one particular field of British folksong that I have concerned myself with almost accidentally originally, is worth touching on - since it's a field that has remained to this day only superficially explored and indeed when I began exploring it, it was virtually unknown, when I began exploring it, a bit more than 20 years ago, 23 years ago to be precise - it was little known, that's the field of industrial folksong.  Which I have concerned myself with very considerably in this country and other countries over the last nearly quarter of a century.  It's the most - as far as musical folklore is concerned in Britain - it's the most vital, the most creative aspect of our folklore that we have left because the country folklore is no longer - in the rural scene - is no longer in a creative condition.  The repertory is still used by a few traditional singers up and down the country - I'm talking of England now, not of Scotland or Ireland.  The repertory dwindles on but new material is not added, whereas new material is likely to be added at any time to these funds of industrial folksongs.

BT: Just really a question out of place but in relation to that, I saw your programme, Rap 'er to Bank, on television and I actually listened to a recording of it a few weeks ago.  On that, you dealt quite extensively with the North-East [of England], Glasgow, Birmingham and I think you even went into Manchester …

AL: Lancashire anyway …

BT: Lancashire anyway, but you didn't deal with London at all, or the south of England.  Was there a reason for that?

AL: Yes, the reason for it is a very simple one that the southern industries don't produce anything like the songs that the Midlands, North and the southern part of Scotland produce.  Light industry, for example, never seems to produce the same kind of songs that heavy industry produces, partly perhaps because the circumstances aren't so dramatic but there are other reasons too, I think.  Coal mining is certainly the most productive industry as far as song creation is concerned and the reasons, I suppose, are that it's a dramatic occupation, at once dangerous, full of tensions, industrial tensions of various kinds, as we see very clearly at the moment,3 the community sense is very strong, which means that an awful lot of things, social things, happen collectively - mining communities are not communities of isolated individuals, as happens in some parts of industrial England.  Also, the traditions of song making at a folklore level have been continuous, so there's no rupture in the mining areas.  In the old days, pre-industrial revolution for most of England, although one has to remember that the industrial revolution happened as far as colliers are concerned, the industrial revolution happened long before it happened to anybody else.

In the old days of the early eighteenth century and before, colliers had already a considerable repertory of songs closely connected with their trades and with their daily cares and comedies - a repertory that in character was very similar to the classic folksong repertory of the agricultural villages.  And, as the pits gradually got deeper and the work got more intense, at the same time, the character of mining communities and the character of the work didn't alter, the quality of it, as it were, altered because it was getting more, becoming more and more, in the nature of a heavy industry.  But, at the same time, it was a continuous process.

Whereas, for many industries, it was violent rupture - the former agricultural communities, with an agricultural repertory of songs suddenly found themselves pitchforked out of the fields and into the factories, where their old songs hardly matched and indeed, often, they were so confused by their new kinds of life, so demoralised also in many instances, that their old songs faltered on their lips and their new songs very slow or scanty to come - new songs that matched their new conditions.  Some things rather similar happened in the textile industries of the North-West [of England], although there the continuity wasn't quite so strong as with miners and, accordingly the repertory isn't quite so vigorous as the miners folk song repertory, but still it's pretty considerable.

Whereas, in the South, with such of profusion of light industry, and with such mobile communities, they hardly had the opportunity to form that kind of collective intensely sociable, intensely solidarity inclined, things that one found in pit villages or in smaller textile towns, since they hardly hard an opportunity to form in the south.  Some production of what one might call a folkloric kind was very much scantier.  One got in the factories of the south, for instance, at strike times, a fair profusion of songs relating to the strike, nearly always based on parody of commercial songs, commercial hit songs of the time, and with words of local ephemeral application, that didn't last simply because they were made for the moment.  They were seldom of any particularly interesting quality, musically or poetically.

So, the situation, generally speaking, for southern industry, doesn't resemble the situation in Midlands, the north, or the south of Scotland.  Of course, in the far West, among the lead miners or the tin miners, and such, one has a certain number of songs too.  They're not easy to come by now because the industry has long shrunk almost out of sight.  So, it's just [that] most of the tin miners songs survive in the memories of a very few, very old colliers, but it's not a vital part of tradition - it's a pity that so much of it has been lost.

BT: Can I go back to the point, I don't know what the exact date was, say 20 years ago, would that be reasonable for the start of what we have of the revival today ...

AL: Yes, a bit before, actually, that would be 23 years ago, about 1951, nearly would be as far as I remember, '51 or '52, that the revival really began to take shape in the early skiffle cellars - the very earliest of them.

BT: Were you involved in the revival at that sort of …

AL: Oh yes, I suppose [that] it's not too much to say that Ewan and myself, in a sense, were the architects of it.

BT: Yes.  I don't know whether this an ambitious question - would it be possible to give a short summary of how the revival, 20 years past - a brief outline of you think it developed, particularly in relationship to the folk clubs?

AL: When, it began, I said that Ewan and I, in a sense, were the architects of it - let's say, the principal architects, there were a number of other people concerned with it, some of whom dropped out quite early on, like John Hasted, who ran a worker's choir, which was interested in performing a near folk music repertory and had some influence in London - but Ewan and myself and Isla Cameron used to sing quite a lot of folksongs in skiffle clubs.

And people coming down from Scotland, like Nancy Whisky and others, with Scottish songs in their heads, since the revival in Scotland was a different thing in Scotland than it was in England.  Since most Scots, working class Scots, particularly, had in their heads a lot of songs, which had persisted at least as near folk songs, for, in some instances, centuries.  The repertory of the near folk song in Scotland is enormous and great social use has been made of it, you know, sort of at parties or informal music dynastic musical occasions.  So, a number of Scots came down and allied themselves with a handful of English folk singers, most of whom had learned their material rather from print than having survived domestic circumstance.  And, although, as far as I remember, the Irish were a bit slow off the mark, ultimately, a number of Irish singers, very valuable ones and instrumentalists came and added their weight to the scene [took part in the revival in England].

I say added their weight because the prevailing climate at that time in the beginning of the 1950s was for American songs and especially for a particular kind of American song - the skiffle clubs and such were not interested in commercial songs, pop songs, but they were intensely interested in a particular repertory of American songs, that had only really come to the attention of American audiences in the period shortly before the war in the later 1930s in more or less political auspices.  That is, the kind of protest songs, prison songs, songs of distressed American farmers and such, the repertory of Woody Guthrie and Josh White and Burl Ives and such, of Leadbelly too.  And Leadbelly was a sort of link between those skifflers proper and the blues boys who were their close allies, except that the blues boys were usually a bit more musical and could do more with their guitars than the skifflers could.

But, anyway, there it was - between skiffle and blues - there was a rash of clubs starting up, run mainly by youngsters, who found to their astonishment that they were able to make music for themselves, however, rudimentary.  And that the guitar in its elementary stages was a rather easy instrument to handle and that the kind of songs that were interesting them, the chain gang, come American country repertory was very easy to harmonise.  You could manage with a very simple set of chords - at the most three - and three chords was what most of the skiffle players could manage.  So, these kids found that they had songs that were easily memorable, with words that were often rather picturesque, sometimes dramatic, that they could accompany on guitars and over and over, the enthusiasm was enormous.  So, they began running these clubs and getting big audiences, say audiences, at least of the size of solid folk song club audiences now - a few audiences, 50 to 100, 150 to 200.  And the audiences were not at all passive, the audiences were turning up to learn these rather simple songs, and simple chord progressions, and so on.

Well, particularly Ewan and I felt that it was rather a shame that this simple exotic [amended to 'foreign grown'] American material was hugging the scene and that it would be nice if we could introduce onto the musical scene more and more traditional stuff from our own islands.  A few showed up who worked really because British material is much more difficult to handle adequately than that simplified American material.  America has a stratum of folkmusic that is a complex as, say, English folksong but this kind of repertory [that] the kids were going for was one that was already simplified in the States.

It was folksong with its face turned very firmly towards conventional music, folksong that had been worked over by country professional players, who simplified it, when they came to play it to strange audiences rather than their community own audiences.  They couldn't afford to be tricky with it, so they simplified it, so it was already a form of folk music, which had been processed, as it were, easier to handle than the British material, which hadn't undergone that processing.

So, at first, what we did - I was going to say, were obliged to do - but we partly did it because we liked doing it that way - performers like Ewan and myself, and Isla and others.  We'd appear at skiffle clubs with a mixed repertory that was part American and part British and, gradually, shed more and more of the American material and concentrated more and more on the British.  And then, I suppose around 1954, we got the chance, after a lot of nagging, to do series of programmes with Humphrey Lyttlteton's Band, which was the most respected jazz band proper in the country, and a very good band it was too.  And we did a series of six programmes with them called, Ballads and Blues, where, by and large, we British sang British things and Humprey's Band played American things and bluesy things and so on.

But, also we performed, [that is] both sides, both the ballads lot and the blues lot - performed a certain amount of material, which came rather close together.  You know, things like, for example, an English version of St James' Hospital and Humprey's Band would do a jazzed up version of Streets of Laredo [added: or St James' Infirmary], that kind of thing.  And this had a considerable impact because the Lyttleton Band had prestige, and it had a big audience.  And the audience - the jazz audience and skiffle audience throughout the country - became aware of the fact that, even English folk song, that awful thing that they had been bashed over the head with in school in the most nimmeny-pimmeny fashion had a validity that was at least equal to prestigious popular musics like jazz and blues.

And I suppose that it was really something of a landmark in the early days of the revival and did a great deal to encourage the formation of an audience.  And so that, ultimately, the spread of clubs all over the place, devoted many of them, sometimes in a very sectarian fashion - many of them devoted to performance of traditional music to the virtual exclusion of popular commercial musics.

As far as developments now are concerned, well, I don't sing in all that many clubs.  The situation seems to me not at all unhealthy in that there are a lot of clubs on the go, some die and others take their place, some are long-lasting clubs, performing a very wide spectrum of music.  Some clubs are still doggedly 'trad', other clubs seems predominately what Tin Pan Alley calls folksong - that rather introspective kind of personalised, semi-cabaret song, you know, the sort of - from Dylan to Ralph McTell repertory, which is a perfectly respectable repertory.  It hasn't much to do with folksong in the folklorist's sense - it has a great deal to do with folksong in the Tin Pan Alley sense and Tin Pan Alley has rather annexed the term.  Perhaps the folklorists in retreat ought to find a new term for what they occupy themselves with, because so much bashing goes on about what is folkmusic and what isn't.

The term was never a satisfactory one because 'folk' seems to imply a whole nation, or at least of a large chunk of a nation - I don't know what the word means.  The individual items of the folksong repertory often were in the heads of very, very few people, frequently only having a most tiny circulation.  You've got your Barbara Allens that crop in hundreds of variants but, on the other hand, you have your Brigg Fairs that were only in the head of one singer and he couldn't remember all the song.

BT: Perhaps just to take a few, couple of individual, individual aspects of the revival, say people that have been involved or organisations.  One of the things that has struck me, since first coming into the revival, and particularly outside London, was the role of the EFDSS.  On the one hand, you seem to have the folksong revival - with the clubs, etc., developing - on the other side, you seems to have the EFDSS, which had been there for a considerable length of time but which seems - totally - to have no connection with the revival.  What do think of that?

AL: Well, over the years, the EFDSS had come to concentrate more and more on social dance, partly because the classic repertory of folk singers was dwindling and the collectors were finding it more and more difficult to come across material that was in any sense new - or even valuable variants of what had been collected before.  And so, as study of surviving country folklore in the mouths of country singers, that was becoming a very restricted activity.  And the EFDSS found that they were perfectly willing to leave the performance of the songs that had already been collected and piano arranged to concert artists who wanted to perform the songs.

But they felt that their value as an organisation lay in an extensive programme of social dance.  So, the branches of the EFDSS all over the country came to concentrate on dance and, once established, it went on and on, mostly with the same dancers, who were getting more and more middle-aged and, indeed, the organisation was, to some extent, beginning to suffer from hardening arteries, I think.

The quantity of dance - the number of organisations, or branches and so on, who were arranging dances was enormous but the number of the people actually and actively concerned in it were relatively - were not very numerous.  The folksong revival began, as I've described, partly, first of all in the skiffle cellars and such and the more and more it developed as an opportunity for the performance of the traditional repertory - folksong repertory - the more and more politically radical it seemed.  And this, the vulgarity cum 'reds under the beds' aspect of it, in the eyes of many of the respectable members of the EFDSS, rather made them extremely wary of the folksong revival for many years.  Gradually, of course, the revival established itself very strongly and gradually too, the EFDSS itself, organisationally, began to alter.  And people became aware that folksong clubs were flourishing and the EFDSS were doing nothing about it but they really ought to but they came rather late on to that wagon.  They jumped on it eventually with aplomb but a certain amount of damage had been done - damage in respect of their own standing among the people who were participating in the revival because so many youngsters had the idea that the EFDSS was irrevocably a fuddy-duddy organisation - an organisation of middle-class people sold on establishment principles.

And, indeed, many still feel that.  It's not entirely just now and the EFDSS itself run - has - now a number of very valuable clubs operating under its auspices.  But, they were slow because, first of all, they were geared to dance and, secondly, they were very suspicious of the revival when it began because they felt it was too indiscriminate - that didn't discriminate between [added: what they conceived as its] commercial products and traditional products - and also because, politically, it seemed a dubious venture.

BT: Do you think that their participation in things will increase, do you think that they have a real role to play in the future?

AL: Yes, I don't see why not!  Yes, for example, they have the most valuable library for people who are interested in participating in the revival to replenish their repertory from, for a start, and it's very much used now.  Much, much more used than in the old days when the Society had this middle-class and painfully bourgeois character.  It's much more adult now.

BT: Are you referring to the library in respect of the books and the recordings?

AL: Yes, I am.

BT: Just on that subject, do you not think that the somewhat restrictive set of policies, the library, particularly the sound library, or the way it operates, in the sense that it's impossible to record materials from it for the ordinary person - do you think that's a restrictive thing?

AL: It's a legal matter really.  Strictly speaking, it is illegal to duplicate material deposited in archives and such, except under special circumstances.  Although it's irritating, it is proper.  Actually, they are a bit more generous than the law permits them to be.  But, the duplication of copyright work is a complex matter.  As far as traditional folkmusic material is concerned, the copyright situation is extremely unclear but many people, collectors and others, are anxious for a bit of protection.  So, although it's irritating, I don't think it's improper.  As far as the book library is concerned, my view is that, far from being restrictive, they are reckless.  And, in consequence, have lost such an enormous quantity of irreplaceable material, especially manuscript material - it's criminal what has happened to the manuscripts deposited in the library.

BT: Yes, I was more concerned with the sound aspects of it.  I understand that there was - I mean with the recent events of this week - I believe there was a committee looking into the question of copyright?

AL: Yes, it's just been established.  It's so far only had one meeting but it's due for another very shortly.  It's a small committee, on which a lawyer sits and three other people.

BT: Who are the people on the committee?

AL: Stephen Sedley as the lawyer, Bob Thompson, myself and a chap, whose name for the moment I've forgotten, as secretary.

BT: And this has been set up by a government department to look into this question?

AL: No, not by any government department at all.  What happened was that some three years ago, partly as a result of Topic Records wanting some legal clarification about responsibility for rights on traditional material because so many people were claiming copyright fees on traditional material.  Partly as a result of that, Stephen Sedley and myself began to look into the matter and to see if we could sort out some sort of code, as it were, on which the thing might operate.  And we thought it might be a good idea if, indeed, musical folklore, words and melodies, were subject to copyright control but that the fees accruing from that control - or at least the greater proportion of the fees - should go into a common fund - into a national fund if you like - for research and such.

And, at an annual general meeting of the EFDSS, Stephen and I both put this to the meeting quite formally.  A number of people spoke against it, especially Maud Karpeles, as Sharp's executor - Sharp's principal executor, because she felt that it was too dangerous to go out of the hands of executors and such.  And she felt that the law as it stood, vague as it was, did give protection to the people who had already devoted time and money to folkmusic collecting.  She spoke against it - the thing ended in stalemate then, but has constantly nagged at some people on the executive of the EFDSS.

And so, the executive asked for this matter to be revived and for a committee to be formed who can make recommendations, which can then be presented to parliament to see whether it can't become statutory.  And that is what we are working towards.  And we intend ultimately to draw up a document, which can go to parliament.

BT: Would you think it would be possible or even advisable to set up a national archive of recorded music?  And, if so, who would be the best person to do that, if not EFDSS, or do you think that the EFDSS should be the …?

AL: A national archive would require, I imagine, to be found within the structure of an institution of some sort.  An enormous archive of recorded musical folklore exists in the BBC, of course, as part of their recorded programmes library.  And the BBC have been relatively generous in allowing the EFDSS to have copies of a small proportion of that archive, particularly of British Isles material, but British Isles material, of course, is only a tiny part of it.  There's something of an archive, but much more difficult to use because the cataloguing is not clear, in the British Institute of Recorded Sound and the EFDSS have a little archive, based mainly on BBC recordings, of its own.  The institution of a national archive that would be more ambitious than the BBC one would be vastly costly, of course, [and] would necessitate, too, a permanent staff - a fairly sizeable one because the cataloguing alone of such material is tremendous.  And the difficulties of cataloguing, too, because cataloguing needs to be done under the guidance of expert people, would rule it out unless you've got plenty of money at your disposal.

I'm never sure to what extent the BBC archive is available to students.  Outsiders in certain circumstances may use it very freely, although, there again, the copying of material is another matter.  You have to have very elaborate licences to copy any of that stuff for the good reason that the BBC have only ever bought broadcasting rights on it and the BBC feels that it has the responsibility to informants alone that the stuff isn't just for widespread use, for widespread free use.

They have in most instances paid the informants for the broadcasting rights, but that's all.  This consideration, of course, is what applies to the EFDSS, as far as the copying of material is concerned.  You can't really allow indiscriminate copying of material, which has been contributed by others on another understanding.

So, I don't know - I would be delighted if it would be possible to form anything like a national archive but I simply don't see it as a likely thing to have an archive proper, small collections are another matter.  In this connection, however, there is something that's worth remarking on.  As far as I know, within the framework of the Department of Education, some enterprising schoolteachers are circularising other teachers, up and down the country, to record children's game songs and such, all to be deposited in a central archive.  This kind of activity can be very valuable and very fruitful.  You send the circulars out to people who are already interested and you may send out ten thousand circulars and it only hits a hundred people with tape recorders who are interested in the possibility of recording the kids.  But, already a hundred field workers is more than the - is far beyond the dreams of ordinary institutions.  It's fairly easy to establish a central archive of that kind of material, which, incidentally, is material very much neglected by conventional folklorists.  Most conventional folklorists have very little notion of what happens as far as children's song is concerned.  Except, of course, there are all these books of texts of children's songs but that's like something in the 19th century, when they were all texts.

So, that's an aspect of national archiving, which is of some interest.  But an archive of British folksong, let alone foreign folksong, I don't quite see it happening outside of institutions like the BBC.

BT: Just the last thing on that.  I have heard that some of the BBC's material, which were originally recorded on acetate or on the old style tapes, is not in too good condition.

AL: Oh no, it's quite true that much of it is on 78 disk and 78 disk is not the most durable - it gets scratchy and so on.  Some of it was not well recorded to start with.  It was unfortunate that, early on, the decision was taken to tape record but then press a number of disks for each item, I think something like five disks for each item, and wipe the tapes.  Of course, originally the BBC material had been cut directly on to disk, so the very earliest folkmusic recordings in the BBC are direct disk cuts.  But, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the early 1950s was the time when the BBC showed most energy in hiring fulltime collectors to do nothing else but record folksong.

They were coming back with perfectly good tape recordings of the material and, as I say, each item that was passable was put on to disk in something like quintriplicate and the disks stowed away on shelves and the tape wiped and used again.  And so it wasn't until some years later that the BBC began using LP disk of much higher fidelity and much more durable quality that the danger of the material - the earlier material - deteriorating became clear.  It would have been better if they had hung onto the tapes and reprocessed them onto disks, perhaps periodically.  It is a fact that a great many of the disks are in pretty poor shape.

BT: While we're on the BBC, what do think of the BBC, as probably the most influential part of the media, of their influence on folksong, on the folksong revival?

AL: Well, the BBC is the only institution that presents, first of all, serious musical folklore to the nation - it does it very, very rarely really, generally on Radio Three.  Sometimes quite generously as far as time is concerned - they will allow an hour for serious programmes of folkmusic accompanied by commentary.  And, in that respect, of course, a vast number of people have become acquainted with folkmusics that they would never have heard otherwise, both within these islands and from other continents.  Our tolerance of - and to go beyond tolerance - our appreciation of the musics from other continents, for example, and of the deeper forms of folkmusic in our islands is enormous now compared with what is was ten or fifteen years ago and the BBC has played a considerable role in that.  At the level of popular entertainment - as I say, however, such programmes are relatively few, compared with the enormous output of programmes dealing with fine art musics, particularly.

But, at the level of popular entertainment, that's another matter.  I think [that] they persistently underestimate the size and enthusiasm of an audience for revival folkmusic.  It is, of course, a minority audience but it's a sizeable minority - it's not a secret society of 'quacks', as the BBC seems to think.  So, more often than not, if the BBC does present a programme of folkmusic as popular entertainment, it's done by the light music department, with all the prejudices of the light music department.  Which means that, generally speaking, the kind of performers and the sort of repertory that is preferred is precisely the kind is closest to conventional pop music anyway, because that's felt to be safer than something which is a bit less conventional.  And so, the implication is likely to make for baffled listening.

As I say, I think it's a serious underestimation of the possibilities of audiences.  But, for that matter, their policy towards pop is not much better - serious pop music doesn't get much an airing.  You get the Jimmy Young thing or these beastly loutish outfits like Slade or so, but serious pop doesn't get much of an airing - serious jazz is usually relegated to some very late night listening.  Folkmusic suffers from the timidity of programme planners without doubt but folkmusic is the not only kind of entertainment music that misses out - not only kind of entertainment music so to suffer.

BT: Over the last ten years, the two major efforts that the radio has put on are the Song Carriers and your own Songs of the People.  I think these two are the two major series that the BBC has staged, apart from the present one the BBC is doing now.

AL: Well, no - I've done two or three such series, nationally, the Song Carriers was on the Midlands, so had a very restricted audience.  But, I have done rather a lot of programmes, but all the serious programmes that I've done, as far as I can remember, have been of international character rather than national.  I did a series of thirteen programmes called Music of the Celtic World, which dealt with the Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic music and to a small extent, as a sort of little parallel, Breton music.  That was done for Radio Three but I've done several series of a dozen or thirteen.

BT: When were the Celtic ones?

AL: I suppose - about three years ago?  Long after the Song Carriers, yes, I think it'd be about three years ago - about 1971.

BT: Are you familiar with the Song Carriers?  What do you think of them as a series?

AL: They were very interesting indeed.  They were patchy, in a way.  I didn't so much like the introductory ones and I didn't so much like the final ones - but the middle ones, which were dealing with strictly traditional singers, gave a very good panorama of our traditional music.

I admire them very much.  The ones that dealt with the revival, I didn't like so very much.  Perhaps the revival didn't stand up to such an extensive treatment as it got.  The series seemed to me much more valuable for the traditional performers who got an airing, than on the whole, than the revival performers.  It seemed to me that revival would have been excellent for one programme but not so good for something like three or maybe even four - I'm not sure.

BT: I think it was four, yes.  Do you think the revival would stand up to that sort of scrutiny now?

AL: Better, better.  For one thing, of course, we have many more instrumentalists - good instrumentalists on the go, than we had.  And there are many more outfits, duos, trios, quartets, groups of the style of, say, Boys of the Lough, to show, who are very brilliant, you know.  They are not ra-ra-ra Irish clowns, like the Dubliners or so.  They perform serious music but they perform it in a way that is immensely appealing to non-specialist audiences, as well as specialists.

Yes, I think that, now, the revival is much better off than it was when the Song Carriers was done.  I can't remember how long ago the Song Carriers is but it seems an awful long time now?

BT: I think it was 1964.

AL: Ten years - yes, we've gone a long way in those ten years.

BT: I think maybe the other major contribution in that sense on the radio could be the Radio Ballads.

AL: That's another matter!  That's quite a different thing.  The strict folklore content of the Radio Ballads was relatively restricted.  They were ingenious exploitations of a folkmusic repertory and a jazz repertory and so, and so on.  And every now and then, especially in the early ones, they had very brilliant traditional singers alongside singers singing what you might call an altered kind of music.  You know, especially the fishing programme was very strong on traditional singers - you not only have old Sam, but it had very good girls from Scotland and so on.  And gradually that content came to be less and less and they were, as it were, exploitations of a traditional repertory.  When I say 'exploitations, I don't mean at all in any derogatory sense.  They were very brilliant uses of a traditional repertory but, of course, very much altered.  And Ewan, you know, one always knew that he was a very good composer of folksong pastiche and songs like Shoals of Herring, for example, do bear comparison with good traditional melodies and poems.

But, it's particularly, a very handsome melody.  But, that's a different matter - I don't consider the Radio Ballads to fall into any firmly folkloric category at all.  Not at all.  Which is nothing - I never use the word 'folk song' as necessary of the quality of the thing, because I'm too interested in different kinds of music, as well, to do that.  I can't think that a song has any special virtue because it's a folk song - in fact, many folk songs are bloody boring!

BT: Would you think that it was a valid use of folk song or folk song technique?

AL: Valid, perfectly valid, because what it took from musical folklore, it didn't impoverish.  Valid, of course!

BT: Mainly, we talked about the radio but what the television?

AL: Television has been very poor for folkmusic, hasn't it?  Very, very poor, indeed.  Very little hard folkmusic has had any airing at all on television.  A few revival performers of quality have appeared on 'telly' but, generally, in circumstances that belittles them rather, you know.  Watersons, for example, their appearance on telly was a shame because they never had much of a chance.  Bob Davenport again, you know, he was made to dress up in cloth cap and things like that - didn't suit him.  Telly has given considerable airing to the lighter kind of folkmusic performing groups, such as the Spinners, they are very much used and they make an amiable social occasion, not an artistic occasion, not a musical or a poetic occasion but a sort of mild, friendly thing.  And there's no risk in presenting the Spinners ever on telly because they're dead easy.  On the other hand, with harder performers, then the telly people incline to be nervous because a television programme presenting folksong has either to be the business of [the] light music department or [the] light entertainment department, or of [the] music department.  And both light entertainment department and music department have a conventional prejudice, I think it's safe to say, against folkmusic in general.  But entertainment people - light entertainment people - feel that it's not commercial enough, and the music department feel that it's not artistic enough and, in consequence, [it's] difficult to sell Tele programmes to them, unless they're a bit special.

I've done three programmes of just on an hour each presenting folkmusic - one of industrial songs and one which was a panorama of calendar custom, involving music, and a third one which was on the musical life of a chain of Romanian villages in north-west Romania.  I think that the Tele would be prepared to take more programmes from me because they're in the nature of feature films or essays, as it were, television essays.  But straight entertainment programmes presenting folkmusic, there is a lot of prejudice to be got over before they would be accepted.  Unless, as I say, it's harmless, amiable things like the Spinners.

BT: Do you know anything of the BBC's plans for the future on radio or television?

AL: I have a programme, an hour long, which would be, I suppose, coming up in something like a month or six weeks time, it's already recorded.  But it's dealing with the dilemma of contemporary composers and the tendency to try to extract from the deeper forms of folkmusic a sort of mythology that's valid for them.  No longer the old use of just taking of folk melody and harmonising it and away, you know, that nonsensical way of using folk music.  That's trying to use folkmusic and primitive musics for their ritual content as much as their artistic content and to infuse something of that mythology into their composition.  To my mind, it's a vain endeavour.  Because, to take ritual musics from primitive or peasant community, where their whole collective is deeply involved in that particular kind of mythology that the ritual represents, and to re-score that kind of thing for a concert use, present it to an audience - to a modern western city audience - with the kind of alienations that they have - the lack of any of collective mythology, which they have - seems to me in vain.  But the best of modern composers seem to be trying it now.  Whether it's Messian [BT: Olivier, 1908 - 1992], on the one hand, trying it mystically, which would probably fascinate Parker; or Nono [BT: Luigi, 1924 - 1990] on the other hand, trying to annexe a proletarian mythology for a new audience of alienated factory workers, I don't think either has very much chance.  But this programme of mine is concerned with the kind of folkmusics, which both would-be mythologisers deploy and try to annexe into their compositions.  It's called 'The Savage in the Concert Hall'.

BT: Anything else that you …

AL: I don't know their plans.  They have, as you know, been running a series for a long time, it seems to be an endless series, of programmes in which people concerned with folkmusic or people concerned with music even, simply go through the archive of British material - the BBC's archive of British material - and present their views of aspects of tradition.  Martin Carthy did one last Saturday - I've done one, I did the first one.  Mellors, the Prof. in York, did, I think, the second one, I think Ewan and Peggy have done one, I'm sure, or they will do one.  That's a rather interesting series because quite a number of the people concerned with it or are only marginally concerned with folkmusic but, nevertheless, have things to say, which come a bit fresh because they're outside the business.  There's too many people inside the business have been saying the same things over and over - it gets a bit wearisome.

Just at present, not BBC, but - all right, I'll deal with that later.  What I was going to say was, apropos the spread of interest in this kind of thing, I don't know whether you know, it's now possible to take a degree, a masters degree in the music department of London University, in folkmusic and musical ethnography.  And there was some trepidation among the faculty of the music department because none of them was a specialist in folkmusics or in what's called 'ethnomusicology', which is a hideous term.  So it meant going outside for people to set papers and also to examine.  Also, of course, to tutor.  You had to take your B.Mus. in fine art music but then you could take your M.Mus. in musical ethnography or musical folklore and this seems to be spreading now.

I'm just doing a course for them at the moment on aspects of folkmusic, it's a rather heavy course but, of course, [they are] degree students, so they can take advanced stuff.  And it looks as if that may well grow, which is valuable.  First of all, because it means at last, at last, at long last, there is a prospect - a possibility - of putting folkmusic studies on to a scientific basis instead of that thrashing around in the thickets that's being going on among amateurs.  And also it means that we may even have seen the beginning of a formation of a group of proper collectors and commentators on the material.

BT: That is certainly interesting.  I was going to talk about a couple of other things in relation to the revival; I think we've really dealt with folk clubs, because you mentioned them originally.  Don't know if there's anything particularly, other feelings you got about folk clubs as they stand at the present?

AL: Don't think so - I would have said that the situation is rather healthy - there are an awful lot of folk clubs that run rather mechanically and present a rather mechanical repertory, week after week, but they're not necessarily characteristic.  I don't sing around all that much, but the clubs that I do seem to visit, I have a nice time in.

And I must say [that] the audiences, the attentiveness of audiences, I rather - I feel to be rather better than it was, say, five years ago.  I think that people know much more about the thing than they used to.

BT: What do you think of this fairly recent development: the electronic folk-rock phenomenon?

AL: Well, it was an exploitation of the traditional repertory, just as the treatments in the Radio Ballads were.  Any such exploitation can bring down a good melody or it can enrich it.  I certainly wouldn't - don't - feel any horror at the thought of electronic treatment of folk music melodies.  On the contrary, I find such treatments usually interesting, not always successful, goodness knows.  But, quite a lot that 'Fairport' did in the past, that 'Steeleye' have been doing recently, that the 'Albion Country Band' have produced, have seemed to me are certainly not impoverishments of the material.  And there is something too - you know, properly handled electronic sound can be enormously expressive, but enormously - four musicians can envelope an audience of, say, two thousand or more in a web of sound, that, if properly handled, can give them a very acute artistic experience.  And this I've noticed, working sometimes, with the use of traditional music, in quite interesting ways.  For example, in the old days when Sandy Denny was with 'Fairport', they used to do a performance of Tam Lin.  And I didn't so much like the truncated text that Sandy used and I didn't so much like that rather off-centre kind of ballad in which they fitted the words.  But, on the other hand, the story was told sketchily.  And, then, at the end, the group would have an enormous long purely instrumental coda, that would be an extension of the magical atmosphere of the ballad but done in a way that really raised that atmosphere to a considerable pitch of - at once, a mixture of terror and triumph, which the ballad itself has.  It's a ballad full of anxieties, that ends in triumph and well handled electronic sound can give an impression of elation or of tragedy in a way that takes enormous resources to achieve acoustically.

And that kind of coda thing can apply to a folkmusic repertory - can give that repertory, not a new aspect but a very heightened aspect.  It's seldom done effectively because, quite often, the taste of pop music performers is not of the firmest and the musical ability is not always all that great, although 'Fairport' had very competent musicians and so, for that matter, on a slightly more modest scale, did 'Steeleye'.  But electronic treatments can cheapen a thing beyond recall but they also have the possibility of raising it to a pitch that it's not really used to - to an artistic pitch, even.

BT: You particularly mentioned the melody and you've mainly dealt with the melody …

AL: The performances of traditional texts - sometimes in full, it depends on the length of the song, sometimes truncated.  But, you know, if it's a traditional song that's being used, the text is being sung traditionally but it's the melody that's having the treatment.  The text is not very heavily processed as a rule.

BT: No, only it would seem that the text often does seem to get lost among the …

AL: Acoustically, that may happen - that's simply a matter of balance, isn't it?  That can happen - it doesn't always.  Again, Sandy was lucky, you could usually hear pretty well all Sandy's words, although it always meant a lot of manipulation of the controls.  Some singers can sing clearly, some can't - it's the same in the world of concert singers.  The majority of concert singers - virtuoso singers - are not very easily decodable, you know.  It's very hard to hear what they're singing often.  It's one of the reasons why so many pop songs, particularly in the repertory of groups like the Stones, for example, consist of simple repeated phrases, over again.  Because the message is not really a verbal message - the message is conveyed in the atmosphere and texture of the music, in a sense, what I've just being saying now about this coda is the same thing.

BT: It seems to me that in the late fifties, early sixties, in the very thriving days of the CND movement, the peace movement, that the folkmusic revival, and this particular aspect of our political life seem to go very much hand in hand and one seemed to be influencing the other.  One, do you think that this is true and do you see any sort of relationship between political developments, as they stand now and the revival, how do think the revival is apropos the political position now?

AL: In many ways, the CND movement didn't produce a large number of directly political songs of a relatively folkloric character, a very restricted lot.  More in Scotland, particularly over things like Polaris and so, because [there] most songs were made by workers, whereas the CND songs were mostly made rather by middleclass people, by the intelligentsia.  The revival began as I suggested earlier, under a fairly strong political influence, in this respect that people like Ewan, myself, so on, wanted common man's culture to have a bit of an innings instead of, on the one hand, the bourgeois culture for the bourgeoisie of fine arts music and, on the other hand, the anti-culture of the entertainment corporations.  So, we were interested in folkmusic as a product from below, not imposed from above.  And also we were interested in British folksong as a counter to the American cultural take-over, which, in the period shortly after the world war, was operating very vigorously to the virtual exclusion of native products, of homemade products.  Gradually, over the years, those considerations have ceased to be, in a way, important, because the product from below now has much more prestige than it used to have and one doesn't need to brandish a banner on its behalf.  The circumstances may arise when once again banner brandishing and slogan shouting is required but, at present, they're not.  And American cultural prestige doesn't stand nearly as high as it did twenty years ago or so, so one doesn't need to be so sectarian about that either as to order out of the room English boys who happen to mumble a Walthamstow version of a chain-gang song.

Now, as to the provision of directly political songs, that's, in a way, marginal to the folkmusic revival, in the same way as the Sidney Carter's Christian songs are marginal to the folksong revival are generally.  They're likely to be adaptations of folksongs and folk poems, or to employ some of the melodic terms and poetic terms of traditional poetry and tunes.  But, of course, they are not - it's marginal to folklore, strictly speaking.  It's a valuable exercise and I'm sorry that there isn't more of it - but really, in England, particularly, we've not been very strong in the provision of political songs that really circulate vigorously among the kind of people that we'd like them to circulate amongst.  CND songs, on the whole, only touch middleclass liberals often rather than anybody else but working class, especially working class radicals didn't sing them.  They did the Polaris songs in Glasgow but not the CND songs in England, very much.

BT: Moving away from that again - you've partially dwelled with the question of contemporary songs and their relationships - I think I've only on one occasion heard you sing a song that you've written yourself …

AL: I am not songwriter …

BT: Do you ever consider writing songs?

AL: No, not seriously, no.

BT: What do you think of the songs that are being written?  In your passage around the folk clubs, you must hear songs?

AL: I find them very humdrum in words, they're often rather good in melody but the words are often too literal, never really quite take off.  They're like bits of journalism rather than the sort of thing that shakes the heart.  They're frequently too full of message, I think, and the message is a directly expressed one, which one automatically agrees with, and nods one's head in agreement, but not, perhaps, is not deeply taken by - not so deeply taken as by many a traditional song or traditional ballad may take one.

It's a complicated matter this writing song words because it's very hard to establish what it is about a song that really impresses.  You have songs that have vitalised nations and it's bloody hard to see why.  How does it happen that the Internationale means so much to so many - dreadful set of words, tragi-melody and, yet, to many people, to Spanish workers, for example, it's a Clarion.  The Marseilles, to take a song that appeals to a rather broader but less intense audience; again, it's hard to see what it is about the Marseilles.  Certainly, it's not the direct message, which is so badly expressed.

So, I find there were contemporary songs - there's an awful lot contemporary songs sung in clubs - which are just - oh - mumbled bits of personal misery, you know, hang ups, that's boring, of course.  And I think you see people listening to them, they're listening to the guitar chords or something like that, while that's going on.

Agitational songs are relatively few and, as I've said, they could with an infusion of a bit more poetry, as a rule, than they get, although, there again, the melodies are often better.  I felt, with the Radio Ballads, that the melodies were often very, very superior to the words.  Some smashing melodies, but the words often too directly factual, not enough lift to them.  A personal view, but I'm often puzzled by what makes a song a song.

BT: Do you think that within the scope of study of traditional music, there is the scope for utilising for writing contemporary material, based on a study of traditional forms?

AL: Some of the contemporary songs seem to me, generally, to have more the character of cabaret songs than folksongs.  I don't - it's relatively rare that one hears a contemporary song that makes really fertile use of either musical folklore, or folk poetry, particularly folk poetry.  Perhaps, it's easier to imitate the folk melody than it is the folk poem - often a very delicate matter.  I must confess [that] I seldom encounter what are called contemporary songs that really excite me - very seldom.  And its relation to folklore is very vague.  As vague, for example, as much rock 'n roll music is.  It had a connection but it's pretty remote.  With rock pieces, the more they remind one of folkmusic, often the better they seem to be - the solider based they seem to be and perhaps with contemporary songs, the same applies.  If they do remind you of folklore, well, you know, it's like meeting at least a relative of an old friend, but a pretty distant relative more often than not.

By and large, as I say, it's not a field that I find as interesting as I would like it to be.

BT: There's a sort of associated topic, just moving slightly away from that.  You've one or two or a number, I don't really know an exact amount, I can think of an example like Jack Orion - there's one or two songs that that, shall we say, you've rescued almost from oblivion, in the sense that scraps of songs which you've rewritten, put together, utilised.  What do you see the value of this type of ...?

AL: First of all, I sing very few songs as I receive them - very few.  I like to alter them around a bit, according to my fancy.  Old Vaughan Williams once said to me, the practice of altering folksong is an obnoxious one and I trust nobody to do it, except myself [laughs].  I feel like that.  But I do like to alter and remake songs.  And, as for songs, which have remained in oblivion, partly because sometimes there doesn't exist, among all the variants, there doesn't exist a single complete one, it seems to me.  If a songs going to be nicer if you splice three or four variants of it together and make the story more or less complete, so much the better.  It's better than having it hang around as a ruin - a set of ruins.  So, that's it, I don't feel that, in popular performance, the existing traditional model is sacrosanct.  For study purposes, that's quite another matter, of course.  If one's dealing with a thing on any plane of scholarship, then it's necessary to be as precise as one can.  In the past, I've certainly not been precise enough.  I'm in the process of trying to make more precise some of my earlier publications, like Come All Ye bold Miners, but for scholarly purposes, for study purposes, one must be precise.  But, for the purposes of popular entertainment, then one makes the thing as entertaining as it can be, without trying all the time, not to belittle it, not bring it down, not to make it clownish, where it wasn't clownish before, and so on - nor to infuse false pathos into it.

But, I would be bored on the whole to reproduce songs exactly as I received them, I think, unless I felt that I was receiving them in a totally satisfactory way and there was no way in which it could be made better for me.

BT: Can I ask you how you are fixed timewise?

AL: It doesn't matter.

BT: Glad you are not too restricted, because there are quite a number of things that I'd to ask you but I wouldn't like to get too involved and cut them too short, associated with a point you were saying before about your attitude the way you come across songs - how do you say, your personal approach to the songs, what motivates you to sing particular songs.  What your motivations are now, now you've sung for how many years, has your attitude changed, what is your approach to it?

AL: No, I don't think my attitude has changed towards the songs - in a way, perhaps it's become a bit more conscious - I'm not sure of that.  Songs that I like to sing are songs that, however obliquely, have something to do towards the formation of people's opinions.  That may be very oblique - it may be, for example, a song in which a girl is subjected to male superiority but manages to extricate herself, with aplomb or even with triumph.  Or it may be a song that, to some extent, undermines the mystifications - conventional mystifications - of Christianity or not necessarily Christianity, of bourgeois illusion, generally.

Songs that tend towards a collective or communal feeling, away from an entirely personal, navel gazing one - that kind of thing.  Songs expressing an attitude, either of social responsibility or of irony towards the more illusionistic kinds of institution that our masters try to fob us off with.  I suppose that roughly is likely to be in my mind, when I'm finding a song that I fancy.  That's from a textual point, of course, I have my melody preferences, naturally, very strongly.  I detest singing songs with a humdrum melody, just as I detest singing songs with a humdrum text.  A humdrum text - that means, however unexceptionable the sentiments may be, there's plenty of songs that, from a logical point of view, are entirely praiseworthy but they're presented in such a dull and doggerel fashion that they don't strike any depth in a very philosophical an audience but don't give them anything really to carry away.  I like to feel my audience isn't quite the same after I've finished with them than when I began, which may sound a bit high-flown but well I like to feel it.

BT: What would you consider the standards that we now have, as regards the folk revival singers?  Do you think that the standards have been raised in recent years - the technical standards?

AL: Technical standards - oh, I will … let's put it this way: there are many, many more competent performers going round the clubs now, than was the case ten years ago, many more.  'Competent performers' that doesn't necessarily mean accurate imitators of old time country singers - not at all.  And perhaps, no harm in that.  People find their own forms of competent expression, without having to imitate 'old Bob' or 'young Sam'.  Indeed, often the imitators produce a kind of museum atmosphere, which is distasteful.  But, competence, up to the level of good performers are much more abundant now than they formerly were.  You know, a singer like Martin Wyndham-Reid or Roy Harris - neither of them sing like old time country singers but they can express a song in a very gripping and powerful way - if that is what you had in mind.

BT: Yes, basically - you talked about Martin Wyndham-Reid and Roy Harris - who else of the present revival singers do you also consider to be ...?

AL: Oh, I don't know - those were two names that floated into my head and I'm not much of a one for naming names, because the thing becomes a sort of personality thing, you know.  But, there are many more performers whom I find pleasure in listening to now, than was the case, say, ten years ago, many more.  But the personality thing I don't much like to involve myself in to - that was the downfall of the Melody Maker folk review and this and that.

BT: One of the things, I think, going back to a statement you made before, and also mentioned at the recent thing you did at Cecil Sharp House on the kid's songs.  You earlier said of the difficulties of collecting within England, personally, because of the now state of the tradition.  Have you done any collecting in England or are you doing any collecting in England?

AL: I'm just about starting off on a fairly extensive lot of field work but not on songs, on industrial tales, anecdotes, oral history, proverbs and such, particularly miners.  But, I'm not contemplating song collecting.

BT: Have you done any in the past - have you been involved in field research in England?

AL: Yes, a great deal, after all, a high proportion of the industrial stuff that's on the go - a high proportion of it - became public as a result of my collecting and publicising.  So, it certainly is the case that, compared with the fieldwork that I've done outside England, the fieldwork that I've done inside England has been restricted.

BT: I've been reading Folksong in England recently and, particularly, in the early part of the book, where you talk about the foundations of folk music, you draw great analogies with the tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly.  How far do you think one can go utilising these analogies?

AL: Well, as I said earlier on, traditions in full flower can often throw light on traditions that are in a state of dilapidation.  And so it happens often that things in their come-down state that would be mysterious become clarified in the light of what happens elsewhere in a flourishing form.  We understand, for example, much more about the nature of mummer's plays and the meaning of mummery through comparison with continental models than we would if we hadn't those continental models.  For instance, this comparative thing, as a clarification, applies particularly to the under stratum of our folklore, that is ceremonial, ritual musics and so on.  But, also it applies to such considerations as how folksongs are made up and how they are spread and so on.  Because, I'm talking of classic folklore, because, say in Bulgarian villages, where new songs are appearing every week and immediately going into the general repertory, one has then the opportunity really to study the mechanics of the creation of the stuff and of its diffusion also, right under your nose instead of speculating on the basis of bits of information from the relatively remote past, which happen to come your way.

BT: It seems to me very relative this type of thing to the book by David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, where, I think he tries to draw the parallels between the work done by people like Lord and Parry on the north-eastern areas of the tradition.  He relies very much for his information in relation to the north eastern tradition on what you might say scraps of information.  Do you think that is a valid process that he's utilising there?

AL: Yes, although another field of investigation would have suited him better.  There is such a gulf between that big old recitative epic - hero epic - stuff that is still practised - still performed - in south-east Europe and the lyrical ballads, which we know.  There's an enormous gap between those and it would have suited Buchan better if he had studied or attempted to study lyrical balladry rather than hero epic and native lyrical balladry in traditions that are flourishing.  Because the hero epic, that is something else.  It's like trying to establish a connection between Sir Patrick Spens and Beowulf, you know.  Whereas, in the same territories that the hero epic is performed, the lyrical ballad is also performed to song-like melodies like ours, ballads, and divided up into neat strophes, four line strophes, verses and so on.

So, if it'd been me, I would not have devoted so much attention to that kind of epic balladry, which in Western Europe relates to the song - on the whole - of the Middle Ages, rather than anything later.  After all, our lyrical ballads are relatively modern in so far as the oldest of them has barely four or five hundred years of life - probably four hundred.  Most of them have, not much more than two, two hundred and fifty years of life.  So, we're dealing with a different phenomenon really, formally different, I mean different in form too as well as different in function.

On the other hand, yes, the formation of a lyrical ballad in countries where folklore is rich, that provides one with very good ground for study.  Because one sees, for example, communities in south-east Europe, who in the nineteen-thirties were more or less isolated, were cut off, had very little contact with neighbouring villages, let alone with the music and poetry of the towns, and lived off a tiny restricted repertory themselves.  In the ensuing years, since the nineteen-thirties to now, have, of course, established much broader contact and communication with other sources of music and poetry.  The peasant who brings his own - the collective farm lorry driver bringing produce into a provincial town and going to, say, a club or a theatre even and hearing town musics, becoming acquainted with town poetry, goes back to his village - is likely to go back to his village - with an amplified notion of melody and an extended notion too of poetic expression.  So that, for example, kids whose parents notion of melody have been restricted to the lower five notes of a minor scale, with a phrygian cadence, want to sing melodies that range over an octave and have a variety of cadences, not only phrygian.

And so, their village repertory becomes expanded and becomes probably more lyrical than it was, more exuberant than it was.  Many villages in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-thirties only had a tiny repertory of really very depressed and tragic songs and now have vast repertories of songs with a great deal of flourish and power to them.  Such processes happening under one's nose, give one often a very clear notion of how the lyrical ballads developed in the West, with the collapse of feudalism, and the beginnings of small holding, of private small holdings, of the marketing of produce that one's grown oneself.  In towns, contact with the arts of towns and, not only with the arts of the towns, but also with the horizon, as it were, the general human and social horizon of town and neighbouring villages, so that the whole perspective expands and one no longer has to deal with such restricted lyrical expressions, as one had before.  That kind of process was certainly very important in the formation of lyrical balladry at the end of feudalism and the beginning of the capitalist era and our ballads developed only slowly from their beginning until now.  Well, now the process has long been since in high decline and has been replaced with other forms of musical expression.  But that sort of parallel is more valuable, I think, than the parallel with hero epic, which is a reflection of a different - of a former, an anterior - form of society, really, than that of the peasant with an expanded lyrical horizon.

BT: The important in making that kind of comparative study is to get the parallel correct - to investigate the nature of the thing first.

AL: Yes, of course, the insights that one gets from dealing with flourishing traditions - the insights that one gets that enable you to unravel certain mysteries of one's own tradition come quite accidentally.  I don't study Eastern European musics in order to be able to understand my own but it's a nice plus, a nice bonus that, here and there, one is able to do so.

BT: One of the things [that] I was going to say is this relationship - the question of the improvisation factor - one can see, for example, to take the statement: the creators (or whatever) of the music that he's talking about in Northeast Scotland were able to improvise at the same sort of ability of the epic ballad singers to improvise on texts.  Whereas you say that your feeling is the texts are more solidified in fact than the tunes, in terms of improvisation, because is it the question of retentive memory affected them more?

AL: Well, there again, the person singing a lyrical ballad is faced with totally different problems from a person singing a hero epic because, in the hero epic, the material is likely to be far too vast to be memorised, to be memorised at all.  The good epic singer is likely to recreate the thing - to see it differently every time, but really differently, to follow a slightly different story every time.  If he's feeling good and the audience is really with him and he's settling down to sing a ballad that may be going to take him ten hours to get through and he'll do it in instalments, night after night.  He, of course, his skill consists in being able to tell a story in metrical form but to tell the story and, just as a good narrator telling a fairly elaborate story doesn't tell it in the same words every time.  But, as I say, if he's feeling good and the audience is with him, in the course of telling a story [he] will explore all sorts of avenues that he never ventured into before.  So too would the epic singer, he does that, and he doesn't remember what he's done at the end because the process of narration has been too complex for him.  You know, he can't remember exactly how the hell he ever got onto to the business of the hero chasing a wolf across an icy river but it occurred to him in the course of his ballad, so he splices those bits in.

The singer of a North-west European lyrical ballad is dealing with material, which is much more manageable - it probably hasn't more than - at the outside - thirty verses or so and its very easy to memorise and to have it off pat in your head.  You will, of course, be likely again not to sing it as you first heard it because phrases occur to you which you think improve the ballad - both melody phrases and text phrases - so you quite consciously vary.  But, the level of extemporisation is quite different; the quality of extemporisation is quite different, from what happens with an epic singer - totally different.

The epic singer, for example, is not in the least concerned with a musical performance, he's concerned with a story telling performance and often his music is bloody dreary but the story is fascinating and always new.

BT: So, it would be more accurate to compare an epic singer with a storyteller?

AL: A storyteller, absolutely, yes, not with a ballad singer - not with a lyrical ballad singer.

BT: You mention that [a lyrical ballad singer] may be able to memorise more accurately a thing of a manageable length of thirty verses.  Would this be equally a valid point for someone who was literate as well as someone who learned it in purely an oral manner?

AL: Literate people come to rely a bit on note taking of one kind or another - you know, 'give me your address' means 'I'll write it down' not 'I'll take it into my head'.  People in societies that don't use writing much, of course, have more highly developed memories simply because they have to have.  They're not using a crutch - we use writing as a crutch to memory, as an aid to memory.  Even so, from a written text, some people learn very fast, they only need to read it through three times, four times, unless it's very long and they have it.  However, people who at all [are] used to using writing as an aid to memory very seldom have anything like the instantaneous, snapshot memory of oral societies.

You know, we've been walking with an aid all the time, then find it find it difficult to walk any distance without that aid.

BT: Last summer, I came across a gypsy by name of Johnny Connors, who I don't know whether you've heard of, who was featured in the Jeremy Sandford book - quite a remarkable chap.  He talked about, in fact, that his grandfather or his uncle, I can't remember which, was able to sing for an hour - he mentioned an hour but a considerable length of time - purely and simply improvising all the time.

AL: Well, it's possible.  It depends on the artistic quality of the improvisation would depend on his artistic skill, wouldn't it?  But it's always possible to improvise endlessly unless you set yourself an artistic level to achieve, in which case your improvisation would probably be for a shorter time and probably more halting.

On the other hand, performers of epic balladry do frequently show a fabulous fluency in improvisation.  After all, Romanian epic singers improvise in rhyme as well as in metre and in very short lines, six syllable or eight syllable lines.  Whereas Yugoslav, such as Lord was studying, have a much longer line, usually a ten metre line - four plus six - and no rhyme and so it's a little bit easier.  Improvisation in metre isn't hard - actors who learn in Shakespeare plays, sometimes experience a blank.  They know the sense of what they should say; they don't always find it very difficult to lapse into a Shakespearean metre, to improvise a passage.  But, by and large, of course, our folksingers don't rely on improvisation for the good reason that the material they handle is usually short and easily memorable.

That is text improvisation - melody improvisation is another matter, of course.  If you have a melodic gift at all, its always on tap, you can improvise melodies endlessly but anybody can do that.  While you're waiting for a bus, you can pick up tunes.

BT: It seems that with melodic improvisation - I haven't really studied it to any depth, but it seems among Irish traditional musicians, who you can watch with relative ease, it seems very much to be a question of knowing certain codes, almost certain phrases, certain particular methods of playing a line and then being able to put those together, maybe in a slightly different form, but always around the structure - this basic structure, which they have - with improvisation around.  Would you think this is a thing you could compare textually - do you think you could have a textual equivalent to this?

AL: No, I think it's a different matter because, for example, with Irish musicians, especially during the nineteenth century, melodies, which formerly were very complex, became very simplified and had their contour very much eroded and they became very formulaic.  You know, the running of the melodies became so much a matter of formula that the creation of new melodies was dead easy - the profusion of, the thousands of Irish jig and reel tunes that sound very much like each other, were not variants of each other, they're simply tunes made along the same formula.  They're very easy to join in with and they're very easy to extemporise on, with any little bounds to vary, just slightly within restricted bounds.  But text is another matter because there you're dealing - as a rule - with a logical message, which you want to convey, and you have to find a form for your messages - not always easy to find a fluent lyrical form for a message.  If you're in the position of a storyteller, like an epic performer, you have a certain advantage there.  For one thing, you're not, for example, improvising in strophes, in stanzas, the story is coming out in a solid block.  Our songs demand a certain amount of architecture in the poetry, which involves some reflection, as a rule.

So, text improvisation proper is a difficult matter in our tradition - text variation is optional, whether a small variation or large, but that's a different thing.

For example, just today, I've been speculating on whether I should reproduce certain songs in Come all Ye Bold Miners in the form that they are in the book.  Or, whether for this new edition, whether I shouldn't make new versions taken directly from tape recordings, such those in those boxes, of miners singing songs that they have learned from Come all Ye Bold Miners but, in the course of the years, have just slightly altered them - sometimes, consciously, sometimes entirely unconsciously.  And the differences are small differences but they occur in practically every line of the song.  So, that sort of improvisation is not only easy but inevitable.  I, myself, for example, every now and then, I come across the copy of a song that I've perhaps been singing for twenty years or more - the original copy of a song and I'm astonished to find to what extent it's altered, quite involuntarily in the course of repeated performance, where, obviously, I've either forgotten bits or I've fancied bits, turns of phrase or so on.

BT: Really, in essence, that is more or less all the things that I had.  Just as a final thing on that - I was going to ask you what you thought of the present state of academic studies in England, or in Britain on folk song?

AL: Well, for song, academic study is nearly null and void isn't it?  That is, one or two universities have departments dealing with folklife, which material folklore, which means thatch patterns or the shape of tools, or such, and dragged in by the scruff of the neck out of the cold just occasionally comes some consideration of songs.  But we have no institution that's scientifically concerned with the study of folklore, with musical folklore, at all.  Scotland has the School of Scottish Studies and Ireland has the Irish Folklore Commission but we have nothing at all.  And, by and large, although we were very early in the field of serious folklore collecting, we are practically unique in the Western world, by which I mean Europe and the Americas.  We're practically unique in that our folklore studies, our musical folklore studies, are practically entirely in the hands of amateurs, who just do it as a hobby but not as a study.

No, academically, we have no standards.  We don't even know, as a rule, what the scientific scholars of musical folklore are up to and, in fact, especially now, that the study of musical folklore is expanding so - racing ahead - especially in Eastern Europe, where a lot of money is at the disposal of scholars, we find it almost impossible to understand the terms that they are using even because they are breaking ground that we never thought to tread on and using analytical methods that we've never dreamed of.

Of course, it's a reflection of what has been happening in anthropology - by and large, English anthropology too has been a long way behind modern European anthropology.  Modern European anthropology may be a bit trendy now and then.  With the intoxication of structuralism and the acceptance of Levi-Strauss as a god, and so on, well, that's just intellectual fireworks more or less, but it does affect folklorists in America.  The American folklorists are in a curious condition as a result of what's happening in Europe but English folklore doesn't even exist - people who are interested in folklore in England, [no one] has never heard of them.  The thing is [that] actually folklore studies are in a tremendous state of effervescence and uproar at present but it doesn't disturb us.  We're just plodding along in our old amateurish nineteenth century way.

BT: Well, that's about it save to say, I don't know whether you have any feelings that you haven't expressed during this on the future of the revival - as it is at the present time, how it's likely to develop, how you think it may develop, or any things, apart from the things that you have mentioned, that are likely to be a good development?

AL: No, I don't really - the term 'folk song revival' seems to imply a revival of interesting repertories, doesn't it, otherwise it's not revival and the additions to that repertory, in the form of contemporary song, generally don't have a very valid passport as far as entry into the world of folklore is concerned.  They're really at home in another world than the world of folklore as far as the folklore establishment is concerned.  It's possible that the folklore establishment has too restrictive a view of what its field of study should be.  On the other hand, it's got to restrict its field of studies somewhere, otherwise, it gets out of proportion, you know, there's no containing it.

But, as far as I can see, in its extremely mixed and heterogeneous form, what we call the folksong revival is very vigorous.  It means an enormous lot of different sorts of musics and particularly a great multiplicity of forms of performance, of performance styles and so on, so much the better.  Some improve the material, some diminish it, but, as to the future, well, I haven't the faintest idea.  I don't know what function a traditional repertory is likely to serve in the future.  It may be, for example, maybe, as politically and economically, things get more critical, then large sections of people of, for example, the working class, become involved emotionally in movements that demand the provision of songs.  And, it may well be, because the conventions is already well established, that industries may well throw up quite a lot of newly created political material of a much more firm traditional basis than the sort of pastiche of folksong that is likely to be produced by intellectuals writing on behalf of the working class in a 'folksongish' fashion.  It's always a possibility, but I wouldn't necessarily say that's a prophecy.

What small amount of creation on more or less traditional lines, on more or less folkloric lines, that has gone on over the last hundred years has been in the realm of industrial song, without a doubt.  And the creation of new industrial songs on quite an identifiably folkloric level took quite a lively new lease of life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties partly by contagion from the folksong revival because people who weren't necessarily part of the revival came to feel that the sort of things they had in mind as valuable songs had a certain prestige and so they created songs of that sort.  I was looking at a letter - I think it's in my file now - that I had from George Purdom who wrote Farewell to Cotia, for example.  It was a letter he wrote to me and […] and he happened to mention that he had never had anything to do with the folksong revival - he worked with Jack Elliot, and he knew what Jack was up to, and he knew Jack's sort of songs.  And he knew several songs from his family - from his father, grandfather, so on, of that sort.  But, with young colliers taking to that sort of song as well as to the pop repertory, he had been interested to make one or two songs of that sort and he sent me actually one or two other of his songs, which he'd done to traditional tunes, which are very good - every bit as good as Farewell to Cotia.

Well, as I say, that's a sort of a rather curious re-emergence of a creative spring - a spring that was able to emerge partly because the ground had already been prepared by the folksong revival.  He probably - if it'd been in the thirties, he'd probably never would have produced his songs because they had no sort of a prestige - you know, the precedent for them had disappeared.

BT: Ok,

AL: Thanks.

BT: I think we'll call it a day on that.

AL: OK.

Footnotes:

1.  Bert resigned from the 'Picture Post' in sympathy with the treatment of a colleague (see DA: 150-152).

2.  Interestingly, Dave Arthur quotes Bert using more or less the same words regarding his activities in eastern Europe (see DA: 153).

3.  From 1 January until 7 March 1974, Britain was on a government imposed three-day week.  From 5 February until 21st February, miners were on a strike, called by the National Union of Miners.  The interview took place on 2nd February, 1974.

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