Folk song as solidarity with the dead: Shovel Dance Collective, Broadside Hacks, Ewan MacColl and Walter Benjamin

Not sure how many folk music revivals we have had now, of course it's never really gone away but I am enjoying the latest queer friendly iteration with the likes of Shovel Dance Collective and Goblin Band. Have seen the former's Jacken Elswyth and Mataio Austin Dean performing solo at the Goose is Out folk night in Nunhead, likewise Sonny Brazil of the latter. And Broadside Hacks used to do a session at pub in my road in SE14.

The Broadside Hack (Live from Real World) 2022 is the soundtrack to a short film that includes some interesting reflections on the politics of folk song. In a 'collective authoring of history' interview, members of Shovel Dance describe how 'Folk music's kind of  like an act of solidarity across time I think… a real kind of genuine act of sharing across hundreds of years and millions of people...  A different kind of history than what you get from mainstream history, from capitalist history if you will, it's a kind of intergenerational, intertemporal collective authoring of history'. Simlarly Thryis discuss how 'We place ourselves within this greater chain of history by playing these songs, we're figuring ourselves within  this collective narrative...There's this sort of collaboration across space and time, you are engaging with other musicians from other times that you’ve never met and yet you feel like perhaps you have something of an intimate relationship with them, I like that sort of distanced intimacy'. Naima Bock says 'it’s a kind of history of people that have no voice so it’s a beautiful and poetic way of hearing people from the past who you wouldn’t otherwise have heard'.

Echoes here of Ewan MacColl who used to tell the Critics Group of folk singers meeting at he and Peggy Seeger's Beckenham home in the 1960s: 'I find it necessary to close my eyes and shut the audience out, and to identify, either with some character in the song, or with the kind of person I think may have originally sung the song, or even may have created the song. This means that you have to equip yourself with a fair amount of the data about the period in which the song was created ... say this song was perhaps written in 1736, written by a ploughman in Dorset. What was it like? I wonder what it felt for a bloke like that to create a song like this, and all the other people who contributed to the song later. All the other men and women who polished it over generations.. suddenly you find yourself filled with an extraordinary sense of compassion and respect for all those people who went before. And suddenly you find yourself in the tradition - you're with them. And at that moment you also disappear in a strange way, and the song really takes over ... the audience comes with you' (quoted in Ben Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl, 2007).

Folk singing here is a historical method, a form of 'history from below' of the kind pioneered by E.P. Thompson as famously stated in the preface to 'The Making of the English Working Class' (1963): 'I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Thompson's approach was characterised by his fellow radical historian Raphael Samuel as a form of 'resurrectionism', an attempt 'to give a voice to the voiceless and speak to the fallen dead' (Theatres of Memory, 1994).

For Walter Benjamin, remembrance was not an act of passive contemplation but a motor of radical change. For him the 'enslaved class' has to be 'the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden' (On the concept of history, 1940), giving a redemptive voice to those who came before. As Michael Löwy summarises it in his 'Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History' (2005), ' It is clear the remembrance of victims is not, for him, either a melancholic jeremiad or a mystical meditation. It has meaning only if it becomes a source of moral and spiritual energy for those in struggle today... During a conversation with Brecht on the crimes of the Nazis in 1938, Benjamin notes: ‘While he was speaking like this I felt a power being exercised over me which was equal in strength to the power of fascism, a power that sprang from depths of history no less deep than the power of the fascists.’ Or again from Löwy: 'the last enslaved class, the proletariat, should perceive itself as heir to several centuries or millennia of struggle, to the lost battles of the slaves, serfs, peasants and artisans. The accumulated force of these endeavours becomes the explosive material with which the present emancipatory class will be able to interrupt the continuity of oppression'.

The radical theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926-2024) was influenced by Benjamin and the Frankfurt School.  He wrote of 'The community with the dead... We suffer almost dumbly under the unreconciled hurts of the past. But we hardly perceive any more the sufferings of the dead which cannot be made good. A wall of silence, hard to break through, has been built up between us and the dead. Who feels the silent protest of the dead against the indifference of the living? Who is still conscious that the dead cannot rest as long as they have not received justice?... Are the murderers to triumph irrevocably over their victims?  Can their death be their end? 'Theology', said Max Horkheimer at  that time, 'is the hope ... that injustice will not be the last word. [It is] the expression of a longing, a longing that the murderer may not triumph over the innocent victim. ' It is profoundly inhumane to push away the question about the life of the dead. The person who forgets the rights of the dead will be  indifferent towards the life of his or her children too' (The Coming of God, 1996). 

It is not necessary to believe in a literal afterlife to recognise that the dead have a presence, not least in our language and our music (though of course in many spiritual traditions engagement with the ancestors is central). Isn't the singer of old songs of the downtrodden and apparently defeated resisting this indifference of the living to the dead and drawing on the power of the ancestors? I like to think so.

Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger interview (1978)

An interview with folk singers Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger from 1978, published in the socialist  newspaper Militant (28/7/1978) after the couple had played at a Militant Folk Night at Wallasey Labour Club.  The interview includes  McColl's reflections on the mass trespass movement of the 1930s:

'The earliest songs I wrote were for factory newspapers, from 1928 onwards. At one time I was writing satirical political songs for five different newspapers. Only some were folk songs, but by the time I wrote "The Manchester Rambler' in 1933 it naturally slipped into that style. I wrote four songs for the Mass Trespass that we organised over Kinder Scout [in 1932]. One was for the Ramblers rights Movement, which was affiliated to the British Workers Sports Federation- but that's history now. the only one that survived was the "The Manchester Rambler' Another one started:(sings)

"We are young workers in search of healthy sport, We leave Manchester each weekend for a hike, Oh 'the best moorlands in Derbyshire are closed, to us, we ramble anywhere we like. For the mass trespass is the onlv way there is to gain access to mountains once again".

It's a very crude song as you can hear- but expressed our feelings. Nearly all the open areas were closed off. There were more than 3 million unemployed, and nearly half a million were young workers or had come straight from school at 14 on to the dole... A big hiking movement developed out of the young unemployed and from this all the best of the young militants came'

 

Song of the Living Corpses - Japanese Textile Workers' Ballads

As Japan industrialised in the late 19th and early 20th century large numbers of young women were employed in textile mills, often living in tightly regulated dormitories under the control of their employers. Like people in many places they sang songs of despair and defiance.

Here's some extracts from a few textile workers' ballads, from an article by  E Patricia Tsurumi (Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan, History Workshop Journal, 18, Autumn 1984).

Song of the Living Corpses

My family was poor,

At the tender age of twelve,

I was sold to a factory.

Yet though I work for cheap wages,

My soul is not soiled.

Like the lotus flower in the midst of mud,

My heart too,

Will one day blossom forth.

Carried away by sweet-sounding words,

My money was stolen and thrown away.

Unaware of the hardships of the future,

I was duckweed in the wind.

Excited, I arrived at the age,

Where I bowed to the doorman,

I was taken immediately to the dormitory,

Where I bowed to the room supervisor.

I was taken immediately to the infirmary,

Where I risked my life having a medical examination.

I was taken immediately to the cafeteria,

Where I asked what was for dinner.

I was told it was low grade rice mixed with sand.

When I asked what the side dish was,

I was told there weren't even two slices of pickle to eat.

Then I was taken immediately to the factory,

Where I donned a blue skirt and blue shirt,

And put on hemp-straw sandals and blue socks.

When I asked where I was to work

I was told to fasten threads on the winder.

Because my parents were good-for-nothings,

Or, because my parents weren't good-for-nothings

But I was a good-for-nothing myself,

I was deceived by a fox without a tail.

Now I'm awakened at 4:30 in the morning;

First I fix my face, then go to the cafeteria;

Then it's off to the factory

Where the chief engineer scowls at me.

When I return to my room,

The supervisor finds all manner of fault with me,

And I-feel like I'll never get on in this world.

When next I'm paid

I'll trick the doorkeeper and slip off to the station,

Board the first train

For my dear parents' home.

Both will cry when I tell them

How fate made me learn warping,

Leaving nothing but skin and bone on my soul.

We friends are wretched,

Separated from our homes in a strange place,

Put in a miserable dormitory

Woken up at 4:30 in the morning,

Eating when 5 o'clock sounds,

Dressing at the third bell,

Glared at by the manager and section head,

Used by the inspector.

How wretched we are!

Though I am a factory maid,

My heart is a peony, a cherry in double blossom,

Though male workers make eyes at me,

I'm not the kind to respond.

Rather than remain in this factory,

I'll pluck up my courage,

And board the first train for Ogawa,

Maybe I'll even go to the far corners of Manchuria.

Prison Lament

Factory work is prison work,

All it lacks are metal chains.

More than a caged bird, more than a prison,

Dormitory life is hateful.

The factory is hell, the manager a demon,

The restless floorwalker a wheel of fire.

Like the money in my employment contract,

I remain sealed away.

If a male worker makes eyes at you,

You end up losing your shirt.

How I wish the dormitory would be washed away, 

the factory burn down,

And the gatekeeper die of cholera!

I want wings to escape from here,

To fly as far as those distant shores.

My Factory

At other companies there are Buddhas and Gods.

At mine only demons and serpents.

When I hear the manager talking,

His words say only 'money, money, and time

'They sang lovingly and longingly of their parents and siblings at home; they sang angrily and resentfully of the factories and sheds in which they toiled and of the owners and managers who supervised that toil' (Tsurumi)

Pete Seeger: Keep singing, keep making things better

When Pete Seeger (1919-2014) was born the First World had only just finished. I don't feel so much sad that he has died this week almost a century later as amazed that his life, singing and activism has spanned such a long period of historical hopes, tragedies, victories and defeats.

'this machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender'
image of Seeger from 'Carry it on"'

Pete Seeger's biggest direct influence on me was via a book rather than through his singing. 'Carry it On! A history in song and picture of the working men and women of America' was written by Seeger with Bob Reiser and first published in 1985. The book grew out of a 1982 call from Seeger, in the folk magazine 'Sing out' to 'commemorate the Haymarket Affair and celebrate working people and the growth of the unions'. 

The book provides a potted history of U.S. struggles from the late 18th century onwards, with some amazing illustrations and photographs. But what it mostly consists of is songs, with lyrics, chords and music. Work songs, wobbly songs, Woody Guthrie dustbowl ballads, civil rights songs, a couple of Seeger songs of course, and even a Dolly Parton number- '9 to 5' rightly being given it's dues as a great working class anthem. Along the way it makes an argument about the importance of song and music, not just as a soundtrack to social struggles, but as a source of inspiration at their heart.

The introduction by Seeger and Reiser, says it all:

'Beware! This is a book of history. With songs and pictures, we try to tell how the working people of this country - women and men; old and young; people of various skin shades, various religions, languages, and national backgrounds - have tried to better their own lives and work toward a world of peace, freedom, jobs and justice for all...

people have gone on marching in the streets, talking out, striking, singing and working together for a better life. Sometimes it seems that we have to keep fighting the same battles over and over. But every now and then the mist does rise and we can see how far we have come...

Each step forward came as a result of enormous work and courage, some bloodshed, and music like this which kept people's spirits alive... Keep singing. Keep making things better'.

Seeger and Reiser - image from back cover of  'Carry it on!'

When I first came to London in the late 1980s, I learnt guitar at a Lambeth evening class in a school in Stockwell, starting out on Lead Belly songs. But it was through Seeger and Reiser's book that I was initiated into the canon of US radical songs, teaching myself 'Deportee', 'Joe Hill', 'This Land is your Land' and many others.There's still plenty of us to keep on singing.

One of my favourite pictures from the book, or any book - an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)  memorial event on May 1 1917 in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle for victims of the Everett Massacre

Chris Wood - Hollow Point (a song for Jean Charles de Menezes)

A while ago, I did a post on songs about people being killed by the police (Blair Peach, Liddle Towers etc.) At tonight's Radio 2 Folk Awards, the best song award was given to another: Chris Wood's 'Hollow Point' is about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by police at Stockwell underground station in 2005.

Lowlands: music at the Turner Prize

The Turner Prize 2010 exhibition is now open at Tate Britain, with at least three of the four short-listed artists having strong musical connections.

Painter Dexter Dalwood was once the bassist in first wave Bristol punk band The Cortinas. I have a copy of their 1977 single Fascist Dictator/Television Families which I will have to get out if he wins.

The Otolith Group is a partnership between Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The latter is well known for his music writing, notably the seminal afro-futurist thoughtist classic, More Brilliant than the Sun. The former sings on some of their film soundtracks.

I don't know whether Angela de la Cruz has a secret past as a member of an anarcho-punk band or zine editor, so can't comment on any musical connections with her work.

But the final room in the exhibition is a musical work by Susan Philipsz. She was shortlisted on the basis of her piece Lowlands which involved recordings of her singing a Scottish folk song being played under three bridges across the River Clyde in Glasgow. Transposing this into the much smaller scale of a single room in a gallery is quite a challenge, but actually adds something to it.

As with many old folk songs, there are several versions of Lowland's Away in circulation. Philipsz has recorded three different versions of the song which play simultaneously from a triangle of speakers in the gallery. The effect is slightly disorienting as the three voices are singing in chorus but not always the same lyrics. Presumably in the original piece it was not possible to hear the three voices together in the same way, or to mix between them by shifting your attention or location in relation to the speakers.

The acoustics of the gallery are of course different from outdoors with the sound waves from the three speakers creating a sonic space that does feel almost tangible, as when for instance a long sustained note carves the air.

It's undeniably lovely, but I guess there will be the predictable 'is it art?' response. It is true that in some ways it is not so different from the unaccompanied warblings of an accomplished folk singer - her style is similar to the recording of the song by Anne Briggs. But there is no doubt that she has created a specific experience quite distinct from what is commonly heard and felt in a folk club or a concert setting.

The song itself is a mournful lament for a lost lover, drowned and returned as a ghost. When I am in the Tate galleries I often think of its own ghosts, of the prisoners who suffered there when the Millbank Penitentiary stood on the site and the patients in the hospital next door replaced by the later Tate extension. Hearing this song there put me in mind of an inmate in exile from the Scotland of lowlands, highlands and islands, wistfully singing to themselves in their cell 'My love is drowned in the misty lowlands...'

Here's another three versions of the song, you could even create your own version of the Turner piece by playing them all at the same time!:

Anne Briggs:



Kate McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright:



The Corries:

General Ludd vs. John Henry

A while ago I went to a talk by the great radical historian Peter Linebaugh on 'The Invisibility of the Commons' . In the course of it he compared the two 19th century songs, John Henry and General Ludd's Triumph, as reflecting two approaches to work - suggesting that maybe one had historically been more typical of the US working class and the other of the working class in England.

In the former American song, the railway bosses' introduction of a steam-powered hammer to replace human labour is viewed as a challenge by Henry the 'steel drivin' man', who works hard to demonstrate his superior power even at the cost of his own life - he beats the hammer only to die as a result. An assertion of the dignity of labour at one level, but also a willingness to compete with mechanisation by voluntarily intensifying work:

John Henry told his captain
Lord a man ain't nothing but a man
But before I'd let your steam drill beat me down
I'd die with a hammer in my hand

Here's Mississippi Fred McDowell's version:



In the latter English song about the Luddite movement, the introduction of machinery in the cotton industry is responded to not by workers working themselves to death, but by them sentencing the machines to death through sabotage:

Those engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the trade,
And Ludd who can all opposition defy
Was the grand executioner made.

And when in the work he destruction employs,
Himself to no method confines;
By fire and by water he gets them destroyed,
For the elements aid his designs.

Here's a version by The Fucking Buckaroos (personally I prefer the version by Chumbawamba, but it's not on youtube):



Admittedly, on the basis of these versions, John Henry is a better song, even if it's not a better strategy...

Folk Against Fascism

The majority of folk musicians I have met have tended to be some kind of lefty/liberal/anarcho/counter-cultural type, and indeed the same goes for many of the people involved in Morris dancing and other folklore-related events. But the British National Party is trying to shift this, advising its activists to get involved in these kind of scenes to stoke up some spurious nationalist culture. Lancaster Unity quotes from the BNP's Activists and Organisers' Handbook which states:

"Ideally our units will lead their communities in organising, or at least supporting, cultural events such as St George's Day celebrations (April 23rd). Most regions of the country have cultural events which are unique to that area, or county. For example, Padstow Hobby Horse (sic) in Cornwall, Arbor Tree Day in Shropshire, Garland King Day and the Well Dressing in Derbyshire, the Marshfield Mummers in Wiltshire, the Haxey Hood in Humberside, and countless others.Some such celebrations, now very popular, have only been revived in recent years - the Hastings Jack in the Green and Whittlesea Straw Bear festivals show just how big such things can get. Why not do some research to see if there's a lost local tradition you can inspire a team of enthusiasts to revive?"

Meanwhile, folk musicians are getting increasingly pissed off about the BNP playing their music and selling their CDs to raise fund- both of which are pretty much out of their control. At the recent Sidmouth Folk Festival, Folk Against Fascism was launched to counter this. They say:

'The UK folk scene is a welcoming and inclusive one; folk music and dance have always been about collaboration, participation, communication and respect. Folk Against Fascism has been created to take a stand against the BNP’s targeting of folk music, a stand against the appropriation of our culture. Folk Against Fascism isn’t a political party or a bureaucratic, top-heavy organisation. It is any and all of us who want to make ourselves aware of the BNP’s bigoted view of our history and culture, and who want to do something about it. The BNP want to take our music, want to twist it into something it isn’t; something exclusive, not inclusive. We must not let them. Folk Against Fascism is a way to demonstrate our anger at the way the BNP wants to remodel folk music in its own narrow-minded image'.

There's a Facebook group and much more to come.

Miners Strike: (2) Kent; (3) Dick Gaughan

Following my earlier post about the 25th anniversary of the Miners Strike, here's some recollections of being a strike supporter in Kent - plus next in a series on miners strike songs, Dick Gaughan's The Ballad of '84.

When the Miners Strike started in 1984 I was living in Whitstable in Kent, very close to the small Kent coalfield. The Kent mining villages in the 1980s were radically distinct from the surrounding area. In the middle of the 'garden of England' the three pits of Snowdown, Tilmanstone and Betteshanger were more or less the only major industry, employing two thousand miners, many of them living in the villages of Aylesham, Elvington and Mill Hill on the edge of Deal. A fourth Kent pit, Chislett, had been closed in 1968.

Betteshanger in particular had a long history of militancy. During the Second World War, three union officials were imprisoned and over 1000 men were prosecuted after going on strike. In 1961 miners occupied the pit for 6 days in a stay-down strike in a successful protest against redundancies - 'an old record player was sent down the pit, and each of the teams organised a show of songs and comedy acts' (Pitt). In the 1972 strike, Kent miners had travelled around the country as 'flying pickets' .

Map of the Kent coalfield (from Pitt)

My first introduction to the mines was during my pre-strike time in the Socialist Workers Party when the worst task for a drinking and smoking student was a paper sale at the pit gates early in the morning as the miners were changing shifts. We never seemed to sell more than 1 or 2 - there were a few vaguely sympathetic miners, but nobody wanted to talk politics a couple of hours the wrong side of dawn. Most just walked by no doubt wondering quite rightly why anyone would want to get out of bed that early unless they had to. Soon I too was crying off the early shift, and indeed the whole trotskyist project, but that's another story.

When the strike started, me and some friends at our college (University of Kent at Canterbury) took the initiative to set up a Miners Support Group. The aim was practical solidarity - we collected money, organised transport to demonstrations and pickets and generally encouraged support for the strike. There was plenty of support to be tapped into, even though for most people this never went beyond putting some money in a bucket and wearing a 'coal not dole' sticker. As the radical historian Raphael Samuel perceptively argued at the end of the strike: 'In retrospective it can be seen that support for the strike, though fervently expressed, was also precarious; that it was predicated on the miners' weakness rather than their strength; and that it owed more to a humanitarian spirit of Good Works, than, in any classical trade union sense, solidarity, and it is perhaps indicative of this that the local organisation of aid took the form of Miners Support Groups rather than, as in 1926 - an analogy fruitlessly invoked - Councils of Action. The support was heartfelt and generous, but with the important exception of the seamen, the railwaymen and the Fleet Street printers, it did not involve stoppages of work'.

Coal Not Dole - slogan in Whitstable, Kent (by the Labour Club)

The strike polarised society with passionate support on the one hand and equally virulent opposition on the other. We encountered some of the latter in Kent too, from the college official who tried to stop us collecting to our landlord in Whitstable who tried to get us to take down posters from our window.

Kent NUM leaflet from May 1984 [click on pictures to enlarge] - 'Our fight is a fight for everyone' - the language of this leaflet is very much in line with the Communist Party of Great Britain politics of Kent NUM leaders Jack Collins and Malcolm Pitt, combining calls for solidarity with appeals to nationalist sentiment (e.g. 'The Coal Mining Industry of Britain belongs the whole nation')

When the strike started, the Kent miners unanimously joined in. In Nottinghamshire many miners continued to work, and strikers from Kent travelled up to the Midlands to join their comrades from Yorkshire in picketing the working mines. The police mounted a massive operation to prevent the Kent miners from moving around the country. 'On Sunday March 18th, police officers from the Kent constabulary attempted to stop anyone who appeared to be a miner or who was going north to aid the miners strike from crossing the Thames through the Dartford Tunnel'. Strikers were threatened with arrest for trying to leave Kent, even though the police had no legal powers to stop them (State of Siege).

Malcolm Pitt , President of Kent National Union of Mineworkers, was jailed for 18 days for defying bail conditions which prohibited from going anywhere near a picket line. I took part in pickets of Canterbury Prison, where he was being held in May 1984.

Later in the strike, some Kent miners did begin to go back to work and the strikers mounted pickets of the Kent pits. The Miners Support Group joined the pickets, and the canteen in the miners welfare club had to get used to the vegetarian demands of student radicals!

The Kent miners were the last return to work in March 1985, staying out longer than the rest of the country in an attempt to win the reinstatement of miners sacked during the strike. Within five years all three of the remaining Kent mines had been closed for good, with the loss of 2000 jobs (Betteshanger was the last to go in 1989)

References: Malcolm Pitt, The World on Our Back: the Kent Miners and the 1972 Strike (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979); ; Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas (eds.), The Enemy Within:Pit villages and the Miners Strike of 1984-5 (London: Routledge, 1986); Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker, State of Siege: Miners Strike 1984- Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields (London: Canary Press, 1984). There's some interesting material on the strike in Kent here

Dick Gaughan

The folksinger Dick Gaughan was a tireless supporter of the Miners Strike, performing at benefit gigs all over the UK. Immediately after the strike he wrote a song about it entitled The Ballad of 84, first performed at a benefit for sacked miners at Woodburn Miners Welfare Club in Dalkeith, Midlothian in '85.

Gaughan's song recalls the strikers who died, as well mentioning Malcolm Pitt and others who were imprisoned:

Let's pause here to remember the men who gave their lives / Joe Green and David Jones were killed in fighting for their rights / But their courage and their sacrifice we never will forget / And we won't forget the reason, too, they met an early death / For the strikebreakers in uniforms were many thousand strong / And any picket who was in the way was battered to the ground / With police vans driving into them and truncheons on the head/ It's just a bloody miracle that hundreds more aren't dead... And Malcolm Pitt and Davy Hamilton and the rest of them as well / Who were torn from home and family and locked in prison cells'.

You can listen to the song here.

I will be doing some more posts about the miners strike, if you can recommend any songs (or better still point me in the direction of MP3s) let me know. Particularly keen to get hold of Chumbawamba's Common Ground and Fitzwilliam - my tapes long lost - and The Enemy Within track (done by Adrian Sherwood).

We dead lie unburied

War in Gaza, and (less publicised) war in Sri Lanka, war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq. It's too soon to say whether and how these tragedies will be commemorated in song, but some of the earliest known ballads deal with the misery and suffering of war, offering a kind of counter-narrative to the patriotic sagas of kings and generals.

These examples are from the Han Dynasty period (202 BCE - 220 CE). Remarkably, the government of the time established a Bureau of Music (the Yueh-fu) which collected popular ballads and song. As a result lyrics from this time have survived for over 2000 years.

We fought South of the City Wall

We fought south of the city wall.
We died north of the ramparts.
In the wilderness we dead lie unburied, fodder for crows.
Tell the crows for us:
'We've always been brave men!
In the wilderness we dead clearly lie unburied,
So how can our rotting flesh flee from you?'
Waters deep, rushing, rushing,
Reeds and rushes, darkening, darkening.
Heroic horsemen fought and died fighting,
Flagging horses whinnied in panic.
Raftered houses we built,
And south, alas! and north;
If grain and millet aren't reaped, what will you eat, Lord?
We longed to be loyal vassals, but how can that be?
I remember you, good vassals,
Good vassals I truly remember:
In the dawn you went out to glory, At nightfall you did not return.

At Fifteen I Joined the Army

At fifteen I joined the army,
At eighty I first came home.
On the road I met a villager,
'At my home what kin are there?'
'Look over there- that's your home!'
Pine, cypress, burial mounds piled, piled high,
Hares going in through dog-holes,
Pheasants flying in through rafter tops;
The inner garden grown wild with corn,
Over the well wild mallow growing.
I pound grain to serve for a meal,
I pick mallow to serve for broth.
Once broth and meal are cooked
I'm at a loss to know whom to feed,
I leave by the gates, look east.
Tears fall and soak my clothes.

Source: Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China, Anne Birrell (University of Hawaii Press, 1988)

Westering Home

Away this week from my usual London habitat, I have instead been (re)visiting the ‘ancestral homeland’ of the Isle of Islay in the Hebrides. To my resting urban ears, listening to the waves and the seabirds has been music enough, but still as always I am curious about what’s happening musically.

Well, yes there are bagpipes in the form of the the Islay Pipe Band, an earlier incarnation of which my father played in before he left the island. He bequeathed to me his chanter, but I have never yet learnt to play the highland bagpipes – still time, still time. By the way, does anyone remember Acid Folk by Perplexer, mid-1990s slice of bagpipe sampling techno? I remember dancing to it at a party at Taco Joe’s in Brixton. But I digress.

We went to a music session at the Lochside Hotel in Bowmore, the main village on Islay. In a bar overlooking Loch Indaal, people turned up with a banjo, accordion, guitar, fiddle and mandolin. There was a really good singer, Norma Munro, with a set including The Gypsy Rover, Yellow’s on the Broom, and inevitably on Islay, Westering Home. This oft-recorded song about returning to the island is probably the best known Islay song, not excepting Donovan’s Isle of Islay, the latter a nice enough song but committing the crime of mispronouncing the island’s name to make it rhyme with ‘play’ – it’s actually pronounced ‘Isla’.

I am always interested in a pub session, it’s a different kind of musicking from the gig format – open in the sense that the line up is fluid depending on who turns up, and the set list is usually not determined in advance. It is performative, but not necessarily dependent on an audience. Every session has its own unwritten rules, and no two sessions are therefore ever the same.

Anyway if you’re ever visit Islay – and I recommend you do – you can check out a session yourself every Wednesday night at the Lochside Hotel.

(Just to be clear though, it's not all folkiness up here - at the fairground it was strictly Euro-bounce-core, while in the swimming pool the lifeguards in control of the sounds put on the rockist breakbeats of Granite by Pendulum).

Japanese Silk Workers Songs

In late 19th century and early 20th century Japan, thousands of young women workers were recruited from villlages to work in the cotton and silk mills. The work was hard with long hours and dangerous conditions, and even outside of work the companies controlled their workers' lives, keeping them in dormitories and controlling their movements.

'Many did not get out of their dorms until the end of the year when they were allowed to visit their homes for New Year's. In order to keep the girls confined, factories built tall fences around the compounds - much like those of a prison camp. In fact, factory girls used to sing:

Working in a factory is like working in a prison
The only difference is the absence of iron chains'

In 1927, silk workers went on strike in Okaya. They 'marched through the town of Okaya singing labor songs, one of which went:

Harsher than prison life is life in the dormitory
The factory is like hell
The foreman is the devil,
and the spinning wheel is a wheel on fire

I wish I had wings to fly away to the other shore,
I want to go home, over the mountain pass,
to my sisters and parents.'

Source: Mikiso Hane, Peasant, Rebels and Outcastes: the Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1982, p.185-196.