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when there were many strikes – and associat- ed ballads – arising from poor conditions and insecurity of tenure rather than over pay.
In the earlier ballads, we hear many appeals to the better nature of the paternal- istic employers, which give way over the years to complaints about the pettifogging meth- ods of docking wages. Again, there is a uni- versality of religious belief early on which, by the 1840s, gives way to: “So chus what else I’m short on, I’ve sarmons enoo”.
The Imagined Village
Georgina Boyes No Master’s Co-operative Ltd ISBN 978-0-9566227-0-9
Georgina Boyes’ The Imagined Village – Cul- ture, Ideology And The English Folk Revival is the story of how folk music and dance as a construct entered the nation’s cultural blood- stream. She explains how and why collectors went out with their figurative folk butterfly nets and what happened afterwards to their catches; the evolution of the English Folk Dance and Song Society; the rise of paid folksingers and folk gurus and the emergence of the folk club, a scene and institution as typ- ically English as the pub. The book’s re-emer- gence, now with added photographs, after such a long absence from anything but the secondhand book market is a cause for cele- bration. It first appeared in 1993 as a Manch- ester University Press imprint and it now emerges for another generation’s delectation.
In Iolo A Williams’ English Folk-Song And
Dance (1935), anticipating many generations’ feelings, Sir John Squire – a name too good to google – was quoted speaking about “that hyper-athletic thing” meaning folk dancing and calling it “a thing I have been content to watch and admire at a respectful distance”. The book’s cover has a photograph of the Spirella Company Folk Dancers – a dance troupe based at the Spirella corset factory in Letchworth Garden City – and corsetry makes a lateral connection with the Belles of Lon- don City and from that to David Owen’s image of Morrissey having a right old dance. That is what this book promises and delivers.
It is a tale that takes in feuding dance regimes, race and class issues and the German- ist Rolf Gardiner. “Every nation to-day,” Gar- diner wrote in 1932, quoted by Boyes, “requires a form of Fascism to rescue it from the pitfalls of its own self-sufficiency.” (His sub- sequent German-language pronouncements, not included here, developed such themes.)
The Imagined Village was pertinent and polemic in 1993. It still does that job. You don’t have to agree with everything here. But do read this book and think.
www.nomasters.co.uk Ken Hunt Working Songs
Roy Palmer Herron Publishing ISBN 9 780954 068257
Involved with the folk scene since the 1960s, Roy has been producing books of songs with commentary, and folklore since the early 1970s. This volume of British industrial bal- lads in the 200 years up to the 1980s could well be his most impressive offering to date.
Social historians often bemoan the lack of written evidence from working people in the days before universal education. Here Roy gives a massive insight mainly through broadsheets but as time goes on he uses the words of known songwriters, many associat- ed with the folk scene.
The broad extent of his research means that he is able to pinpoint times when agita- tion was intensified, for example the 1830s
Gradually we see the rise of trade union- ism and a mass of songs, most of which only enjoyed a short functionality, devoted to spe- cific strikes. The songs that really remain in the mind after reading so many of them are the ones that can involve the listener and generate a fellow feeling for the emotions involved in the song’s situation; the over- whelming sadness of the pit disasters, the anger at blacklegs and the division that they cause in a community, the distress in the break-up of companionship when industries are closed down.
Roy Palmer logs all of this here; there may be little doubt on where his sympathies lie, but this very impressive book is enhanced by the even-handed nature of his observa- tions on the songs that he reproduces.
www.herronpublishing.co,uk Vic Smith
The Great Folk Disco graphy – Pioneers & Early Legends
Martin C Strong Polygon ISBN 978-1-84697- 143-9
This wonderful sprawl of a book has the ability to delight and inform as much as it puzzles and infuriates. The first volume of a planned trilogy, it deals with “Pioneers & Early Legends” (“up until the dawn of the ’80s”). The cover’s images of Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Baez, Mitchell, Leadbelly, early Fairport Convention and late Incredible String Band give a flavour of what is broken down inside as “The North American pio- neers and legends”; “The British and Beyond contingent”; and “The Cult, Col- lectable and Continental”. The next vol- umes are set to cover “folk acts from the ‘Next Generation’” and “Celtic Folk”.
Divining who is included and where their entry might be is a major problem with this vol- ume. The entries are alphabetically arranged but without an index it requires the reader to first look for the name. That may turn up the entry or it may point to another entry or point to a later volume. The discographical entries generally do pass muster (though life’s too short to check catalogue numbers).
The inconsistencies can be very irritating.
Two-and-a-half examples will suffice. Surely, The High Level Ranters should be the main entry, rather than being ‘subservient’ to Johnny Handle (whose entry omits the impor- tant song anthology A Cold Wind Blows, as do the entries for Matt McGinn, Alasdair Clayre and Cyril Tawney). If the order is based on Handle and Louis Killen’s EP – in what might be called the Along The Coaly Tyne tril- ogy – appearing first, the premise is based on a quirk of history. The Home Service presum- ably will appear in volume 2 but there is no signpost under H; to get that go to Muckram Wakes, presuming you have enough folk his- tory in your head. Since Strong presupposes knowledge and precedence, on that basis one should argue the inclusion of Oysterband under Fiddler’s Dram in this volume.
On the playground seesaw of what it delivers, it is up about 65 per cent of the time and down the other 35 per cent. Folk includes Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane and Love (“folk part”) but excludes the only Cali- fornian band that consistently from 1965- 1995 included folk, blues and beyond material in their repertoire: the Grateful Dead. If Robin Hall and Jimmy Macgregor warrant an entry – and they do – the exclusion of the genuinely trail-blazing Rory and Alex McEwen is a disas- ter, especially when set beside ones that did make it. Such as, no offence to either, Noel Harrison and Nancy Priddy.
There is a lot of rewriting – as opposed to reappraisal – of history going on here. Much like Rob Young’s Electric Eden extols names that were, frankly, nonentities as far as the folk scene was concerned – try Vashti Bunyan, Comus and Faraway Folk – Strong is hooked on Record Collector rarities. The whole flimsy “Cult, Collectable and Continen- tal” section (that’s “Emmet Spiceland to Ougenweide”) should have been ditched. And please no more ‘sadly’s when somebody has died or Emtidi made their last album.
www.polygonbooks.co.uk Ken Hunt Imaginary Villagers: The Spirella Company Folk Dancers, Letchworth, May 1911
Photo: Pat Pickles collection
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