51 f The Songsharer
From Bagpuss to Academia, Sandra Kerr has been making her mark on folk music in the UK for over fifty years. Derek Schofield tells the tale.
Sidmouth choir workshop I
f points were awarded for the num- ber of folk music gigs and record- ings, then Sandra Kerr would not achieve a very high score. Yet her influence over 50 years has been considerable – as a singer, instrumentalist, teacher, broadcaster and writer. For San- dra, her greatest achievement has been her daughter – the singer and songwriter Nancy Kerr, and it’s in Nancy and husband James Fagan’s home in Sheffield that I’m sitting, chatting to Sandra on a visit to see her grandchildren.
It’s not that Sandra is a stranger to records and touring. In the 1960s, with her then husband John Faulkner, Sandra was a prolific performer. Active in the feminist movement, Sandra (alongside Peta Webb, Janet Russell and Rosie Davis) is a member of Sisters Unlimited, who continue to per- form. Sandra has also recorded and per- formed with Nancy and James (as Scalene), and with her women’s choir, Werca’s Folk. But it’s probably for her work as a lecturer on the Newcastle University Folk and Tradi- tional Music degree course and, earlier, as a regular tutor with Folkworks that Sandra is best known today.
Coffee in hand, our conversation starts at the very beginning. Sandra was brought up in London’s East End, living close to the docks where her father worked. With little money, there was nevertheless a rich family life with literature, outings, parties and music. Although she didn’t know it then, her father’s grandfather and her mother’s mother both played the concertina, San- dra’s first instrument since her twenties. At grammar school, Sandra was involved in drama and music and started a girls’ skiffle group, relishing the rich, earthy and rhyth- mic music. At eighteen, while training as a nurse, she was taken to London’s Singers’ Club, the nationally-known folk club hosted by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Bert Lloyd. She was bowled over. Nursing gave way to teaching, but at 21, Sandra accepted MacColl and Seeger’s invitation to live with them as nanny to their two sons.
By this time, Sandra was singing at the East End folk club she had started with John Faulkner and Brian Clarke. Her new employ- ers saw her potential and part of the deal was that she would have one-to-one classes. “With Ewan it was folklore, balladry, litera- ture and vocal techniques, and with Peggy
it was musicological tuition and notation,” Sandra explains. “Peggy was a brilliant teacher and Ewan was absolutely inspiring.”
Soon after these lessons started, Mac- Coll instigated a wider programme of tuition for a select number of singers associ- ated with his club. When the singers needed a name, the BBC producer of the Radio Bal- lads, Charles Parker, suggested The Critics Group. It was a name that came to haunt them. It was meant to reflect the process of self-criticism that was a key feature of the weekly meetings, but others saw them as being critical of other singers and elitist.
Ewan’s first love was the theatre, and many of the techniques he’d used with The- atre Workshop and Joan Littlewood from the 1930s to the ’50s he later introduced to The Critics Group. “He was looking at the ballads as musical expression of theatre,” Sandra explains. “These songs had real char- acters, real conflict, real stories, and the Stanislavski techniques, for example, were remarkably close to what traditional singers said about their identification with charac- ters in the songs. Ewan used this on us and it was a revelation. He also used Rudolph Laban’s theory of efforts, which suggested
Photo: Jak Kilby
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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