47 f
Mid-1960s Watersons – Lal, John, Mike and Norma M
eanwhile, in Hull, Norma Waterson was growing up with her younger siblings Lal and Mike, in a family of strong Irish stock, a mix
of Huguenot and Catholic, with some sort of gypsy in their souls, too, courtesy of a grandmother who’d come to Hull, mar- ried someone in the textiles industry and hauled a cart around the streets selling clothes. She was good at it too – she ended up with four second-hand clothes shops, which were in big demand in a time of austerity.
Tragedy struck with the early death of both parents within eighteen months of one another when Norma was eight. A week after her mother died, her father had a stroke and was bed-ridden from that point. The parental duties were largely assumed by her maternal grandmother Eliza Ward, with help from an assortment of aunts, uncles and friends. Music was a natural ingredient of this upbringing… all sorts of music. Norma recalls the great Ital- ian tenor Gigli as a constant sound in the house, while her grandmother would sing songs from the Great War. Music hall songs were popular, trad jazz was all around and the odd folk song would even get an air- ing at family get-togethers. The music was naturally in them all.
“We were very lucky to have had that musical background behind us,” says Norma. “Everyone in the family did some- thing. My dad played guitar and banjo, my mum played piano, my aunties played piano, my uncle Ronnie, who was brought up in a Barnardo’s home, he was lead cor- net player in the pit band and played for the silent cinema. And as children we sang in the way we always sang: all sorts of songs, creating our own harmonies. My grandmother sang and she had a very low, loud voice… and we had to sing loud to be heard over the sound of the bloody cornet.
“There wasn’t a day went by when we
didn’t sing something. My grandmother sang to us every day. She had a little reper- toire of songs. She loved Delia Murphy – that Spinning Wheel song. As a young woman she’d go to the music hall two or three times a week – Little Dolly Daydream and all that. She loved it and would sing us all that stuff. My uncle loved opera and would play these big red vinyl label records on a wind-up gramophone, so we learned about opera too. There was no telly and very little radio in those days, you had to make your own entertainment.”
So music came naturally to all three siblings but there was no thought of any of them doing it for a living, even as skiffle swept the nation and they did what any self-respecting kid of a certain age did at the time and formed a skiffle group – in their case, the Mariners. As they evolved into the Folksons, and the skiffle groups turned to folk music, they opened their own club, Folk Union One, mainly because they couldn’t find anywhere else to sing the songs they liked.
As with the Topic label, searching for its own road around the same time, there were no signposts or obvious horizons. Smitten by jazz, Norma married a jazz drummer, Eddie Anderson, who played on the riverboat shuffle cruises ferrying party- goers on the Humber between Hull and North Lincolnshire. She worked by day as a nurse. But apart from his jazz, Anderson’s adventurous record collection – including Alan Lomax records – played its part in Norma’s awareness and interest in the folk song tradition.
Topic, meanwhile, had slowly grown out of its original role as a record club and was now releasing records commercially, albeit with a strong political agenda. Ini- tially after the war it relied mainly on releases sourced from Eastern bloc state labels, with Russian choirs and the like. But
in 1949 an event occurred in Peekskill, New York, which served to harden minds to the importance of music in the civil rights struggle. The great singer, trade unionist and activist Paul Robeson announced a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress, with Pete Seeger and The Weavers also on the bill.
Robeson, who’d already been sum- moned to appear before the House Un- American Activities Committee, had put plenty of noses out of joint with com- ments about the Ku Klux Klan and Ameri- ca getting rich and fat on the backs of working people, and on arrival at the con- cert he found a welcoming committee armed with baseball bats and stones. It quickly turned ugly. Effigies of Robeson were burnt, the concert was cancelled and thirteen people were seriously injured in the riots that followed.
The following year Robeson sang at Haringey Arena in London in a concert marking the 20th anniversary of the Com- munist newspaper, the Daily Worker, an event that concentrated many minds on the importance of music in the socialists’ struggle. Robeson and Seeger both subse- quently featured on Topic’s 1950 release Our Song Will Go On, which featured Howard Fast recounting the story of the Peekskill riots.
Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd were emerging with an agenda to shape the embryonic folk song revival as a political weapon, shifting the focus from tradition- al songs reflecting a rural idyll to an urban, working-class movement. Lloyd had already attacked the middle-class allusions he felt were being pursued by the English Folk Dance & Song Society in his 1944 book The Singing Englishman, published by the Workers’ Music Association; and the more firebrand figure of MacColl had been working towards similar ends through his work in radical theatre.
Photo: Brian Shuel
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