Folk News is a blog about all things to do with folk, whether traditional or contemporary. It is run by Karl Dallas, who has been involved in the revival for over 50 years, for many of which he wrote for Melody Maker. He has also contributed to media throughout the world, including Rolling Stone, The Times of London, The Independent, the Morning Star, as well as his own magazines, notably Folk Music. Karl also runs the Jazz blog.
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Fairport Convention follow their sell-out electric tour with two new CDs this month and next,and a 28-gig acoustic tour.
Fame and Glory, (Matty Grooves Records, Cat number: MGCD049) due out on Monday, April 20, is a 15-track collection of songs and tunes by Breton composer Alan Simon from the gold disc song cycle Excalibur.
Tracks include: Castle Rock, Pilgrims, Celtic Dream (live), The Gest of Gauvain, Morgane (live), Dragon Breath, Lugh, Behind the Darkness (live), La Guerre Folle, Fame And Glory (live), Sacrifice, Danza del Crepusculo, Marie la Cordeliere, Duchess Anne, and The Soldier.
The music is performed by Fairport Convention with guest appearances by Jacqui McShee, Martin Barre, Dave Mattacks, Dan Ar Braz, John Helliwell, James Wood, and Flook among others.
Live at Cropredy '08 (Matty Grooves Records, Cat number: MGCD048) was recorded on Saturday August 9, and features the following tracks:
Ye Mariners All, Reynard The Fox, The Eynsham Poacher, 3 selections from Babbacombe Lee (Breakfast in Mayfair, Cell Song, Hanging Song), Doctor of Physick,Reynardine, Mock Morris, Suite of 5 songs honouring the memory of Sandy Denny (Fotheringay, It'll Take a Long Time, John The Gun, Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, The Battle of Evermore), John Gaudie/The Bowman's Retreat, and Best Wishes.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Sandy Denny , Fairport commemorated her life and work at Cropredy with a suite of five songs, all but one of which (The Battle of Evermore, by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page) were written by Sandy.
The guest artists who sang them at Cropredy 2008 were:
Vikki Clayton (Fotheringay), Chris While (It'll Take a Long Time), Kellie While (John The Gun), Chris While and Kellie While (Who Knows Where The Time Goes?), and Robert Plant and Kristina Donahue (The Battle of Evermore).
Reviews of these two CDs will follow in due course.
Fairport 'Acoustic' Convention UK Tour 2009
May 1
Dartford
Mick Jagger Centre
01322 291100
May 2
Margate
West Coast Bar
07967 028844
May 3
Hailsham
Hailsham Pavilion
01323 841414
May 5
South Petherton
David's Hall Arts Ctre
01460 240340
May 6
Dartington
Ariel Centre
01803 847070
May 7
Southampton
Talking Heads
02380 678446
May 8
Lichfield
Arts Centre
01543 262223
May 9
Colchester
Arts Centre
01206 500900
May 10
Cromer
Folk on the Pier
01263 512495
May 11
Portsmouth
New Theatre Royal
02392 649000
May 14
Dublin
Whelan's
00353 1 4780 766
May 15
Chesterfield
Alexanders
01244 340005
May 16
Alnwick
The Playhouse
01665 510785
May 17
Boston
Blackfriars Theatre
01205 363108
May 18
Nettlebed
The Folk Club
01628 636620
May 19
Swindon
Arts Centre
01793 614837
May 20
Abergavenney
Borough Theatre
01873 850805
May 21
Bury
The Met
0161 761 2216
May 22
Hertford
The Corn Exchange
May 23
Leamington Spa
The Assembly
01926 523001
May 24
Haddenham
ArkenstallVillage Ctre
01353 740999
May 25
Shrewsbury
West Mids Showground Music Events
0845 050 8252
May 26
Leek
The Swan
01538 385260
May 27
Stirling
Stirling Folk Club
01259 218521
May 28
Bromsgrove
The Folk Club
0121 476 5938
May 29
York
The Duchess
08700 600 100
May 30
Papplewick
Village Hall
01623 794700
May 31
Didcot, Oxon
Cornerstones Arts Ctre
01235 515144
Among the guests so far booked for Fairport's Cropredy Convention (August 13-15) are Steve Winwood, the Buzzcocks, Ken Nicol & Phil Cool, 4 Square, Harlequinn, Richard Thompson, Seth Lakeman, The Dodge Brothers, John Jorgensen Band, Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, BBC Young Folk Award Winners Megan and Joe Henwood, ColvinQuarmby, Ralph McTell, Dreadzone, Feast of Fiddles, Churchfitters, and Richard Digance.
At the conclusion of today's concert for president-elect Barack Obama 89-year-old Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen for a sing-along with perhaps half a million people of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, which I dare say practically everyone in the country knows from childhood.
But sly old Pete, who actually hoboed with Woody during the Depression and Dust Bowl, had the crowd sing the song as it was actually written, as not only a celebration of this great land, but as a demand for workers' and people's rights. That is, he restored the verses that have been censored from the song over the years to make it less political:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; That side was made for you and me. (Actually, this verse is quite well-known. Lee Hays sang it when the Weavers were still going.-ED)
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
The "relief office," of course, refers to the ad hoc soup bowls and such set up during the Depression before the New Deal began to get the social security net we have all depended upon since the 1930s in place.
Seeger, like Guthrie, has been a controversial figure at times during his life, questioned by the witch hunting committees of Congress in the 1950s, black listed, and even banded from television as late as the late 1960s.
But while he hasn't got much of a voice left anymore and did not attempt to play his banjo today (not true, as you can see from the video.-ED), it was wonderful to see the gleam in his subversive eye as he did his call and response with the throngs in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Somewhere Woody - and Leadbelly, and Sonny and Cisco and the rest of the great balladeers of that bygone era - are smiling tonight.
This Land Is Your Land Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
Chorus: This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me
As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway I saw below me a golden valley This land was made for you and me
Chorus
I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts And all around me a voice was sounding This land was made for you and me
Chorus
The sun comes shining as I was strolling The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling The fog was lifting a voice come chanting This land was made for you and me
Chorus
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!
Chorus
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me.
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The 6/8 tempo of Charlie Mingus's exuberant piece was used by Davey, in conjunction with bassist Tony Reeves and drummer Barry Morgan, for a series of improvisations which had a remarkable effect upon the further development of folk instrumental playing.
John Renbourn’s Waltz, on his album, Another Monday, also reworked when he and Jansch formed Pentangle, was based on this (Renbourn also credited Davey with introducing him to Kenny Dorham’s Buffalo, which he recorded on his second album), as was Bert Jansch’s Veronica. It even cropped up on Fairport Convention’s Nottamun Town, a tune which Davey had recorded with Shirley Collins.
The recording he made with Alexis Korner for Bill Leader and released on a ground-breaking Topic EP, 3/4 AD, was based on Miles Davis’s All Blues, on Kind of Blue, and mutated into Pentangle's I've Got a Feeling. As Bert Jansch once said, introducing the tune on TV: "I've got a feeling we stole this".
Davey was always more assiduous in crediting his sources and influences than most of his followers and imitators, but he never seemed angry at his lack of credit from his peers. “I am fortunate in being famous rather than well-known,” he told me once, I suppose meaning that he could shop in his local Sainsbury’s in Camden Town without being mobbed, as could well have happened with admirers such as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.
Probably Davey’s greatest innovation was to point up the links between Irish and Scottish folk scales, and what came to be known as world music. He was not the first to notice this.
I remember when I was working with Paul Robeson in London, helping him promote his autobiography, the great man was fascinated by the analogues he was finding between various musics, and when I recommended he get a chance when in Scotland to hear the McLeod sisters, he made a careful note of their names. In her biography of Robeson, Marie Seton describes a similar outburst of Robesonian enthusiasm, in more distinguished company in Moscow: “. . . Paul Robeson sat down on Sergei Eisenstein's small three-legged stool and told him how he had traced out American Negro syncopation in the rhythm of West Indian Negro speech and how – his voice quickened with excitement – he had found the same rhythm in Chinese music. He had brought his gramophone and as many albums of music as he could carry. First he put on a record made in Africa, then a Chinese one, then a Thai one and, finally, his own Negro Spirituals. They discussed the rhythms, playing the records over and over again.”
A decade or so later, Davey Graham discovered that the melody of Padraic Colum’s song She Moves Through the Fair, with its flattened seventh (G-to-G on the white notes on the piano), was similar to the Indian khammaj rag scale (sag a ma pa dha ni sa – sa ni-flat dha pa ma ga re sa, ascending and descending).
He used a non-classical tuning for his guitar on this melody – DADGAD – though he denied having invented it. “It occurred over in the States as well at about the same time,” he said. He also used a dropped second string tuning (EADGAE) and open-G.
David Michael Gordon Graham was born in Leicester on November 26,1940. His father, Hamish, was a Gaelic teacher from the Isle of Skye and also an amateur singer. His mother Winifred was from British Guiana (now Guyana).
Though he began to take an interest in the guitar at the age of 12, he did not actually own an instrument until he was 16. An early mentor was the guitarist (and taxi driver) Steve Benbow. Two years later, he was off on his travels, which broadened his musical horizons, as he played on the streets of Paris, in Greece, and North Africa.
He also appeared that year (1959) in Ken Russell’s Monitor documentary for BBC TV, Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze, playing a typically off-the-wall version of Cry Me a River (a clip of which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWeejHJxGjs). He also made an uncredited appearance in Joseph Losey’s The Servant in 1963, and performed Rock Me in Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain's Film, in 1969. Nearly half a century after the Ken Russell film, he was the subject of a 2005 BBC Radio documentary, Whatever Happened to Davy Graham?
They might well ask. It was symptomatic of Davey’s significance on the music scene that he had become a legend, rarely seen and seldom heard. Yet his nearly half a century-old composition Anji (variously spelled Angi or Angie) recorded by Bill Leader, was used as the theme music for the BBC 4 TV survey, Folk Britannia.
According to Davey, he was working on the Am-G-F-E7 chord sequence of Jack Elliott's Cocaine Bill when he hit the wrong strings and Anji came out.
Though much of Davey’s playing was finger-busting stuff that had his contemporaries scratching their heads in bemused astonishment, Anji was comparatively easy to play, and has been covered literally dozens of times, notably by Paul Simon on his Sound of Silence album. Bert Jansch actually released his version on his eponymous first album before Davey, having learned it from a tape lent to him by the composer’s half-sister, Jill. It was also recorded by Chicken Shack.
Over the years, constant drug abuse and ill-health began to take its toll. He suffered from chronic arthritis in his fingers, and years of smoking were playing hell with his breathing.
A very private man, when he was admitted to hospital, he instructed his long-time lady friend, Carol Ballard (who'd been working on my Acoustic Music magazine when she first met him nearly 30 years ago) not to tell anyone how ill he was.
He was a weird, astonishing, amazing man, in his life just as much as his music. He said to me once: “When I heard the Beatles’ When I’m 64, I went to the swimming bath and swam 64 lengths to see what it felt like.” When I used the term “wanker” to him, he gave me a lecture on the virtues of masturbation, and might well have demonstrated it to me had I not changed the subject.
He and his then wife, Holly Gwinn, were living with me at the time, and my children were fascinated by their emerging from the bathroom totally nude.
His friend and neighbour, the artist Jeff Sawtell, recalled to me: “Despite his ability to annoy, irritate and alienate people in equal measure, [he] could be as kind and considerate, [I] especially remember him singing lullabies for my daughter at the foot of our stairs and turning up to sing in front of my last big installation.”
He continued to perform intermittently, though at one recent gig he had to give up after a few tunes, and Wizz Jones came up from the audience and filled in for the sick man. His most recent recordings were Playing in Traffic, released in 1993, and Broken Biscuits, with singer-songwriter Mark Pavey, released last year.
Though many of his past associates are queueing up to acknowledge how great he was, he has not always been treated with the respect he deserved.
For instance, when Shirley Collins used the title of their joint pioneering album, Folk Roots – New Routes, for her concert series at the South Bank earlier this year, he was conspicuously not invited to participate (nor was her former husband, Austin John Marshall, who produced and named the album).
Davey of all people should have been given some kind of a Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s not too late for Mike Harding and the BBC to remedy the omission, but it would have been better if they could have done it while he was still alive. -KARL DALLAS
The picture at the head of this message was taken by JEFF SAWTELL of Davey Graham playing at his 2006 installation at the Arlington Gallery in Parkway, Camden Town.
By arrangement with Amazon.Com, readers can buy and download the following Richard Thompson songs for an average of 89cents each. Click below to hear samples.
Folk News gets a small commission on every tune you download.
The ludicrousness of the division between traditional singing and contemporary singing and song-writing that has bedevilled the English folksong revival over its past 50 years was never better demonstrated than in the career of Lal Waterson, who died from cancer on Friday September 5, 1998 at the age of 55.
As Martin Carthy, her brother-in-law, puts it: “It was impossible to separate her singing from her song-writing. She used all the techniques of traditional song-making in her own lyrics and she never sounded like a revival singer. All the rest of us did.
“She was tremendously inventive, and as different from her brother Mike and her sister Norma as it was possible to be. She and they were and are the very, very best to be heard today.”
Coming from the acknowledged doyen of the English folk music revival, that’s high praise indeed, and while his marriage to Lal’s sister might be thought to colour his judgement, there are few of his peers who would dispute it.
I first met Lal, Mike, Norma and their second-cousin, John Harrison, when I was compering some sort of a benefit concert in St Albans in the early Sixties. They had not yet shaken off their roots in the skiffle movement, and accompanied their songs with a guitar, yet there was an integrity and an authenticity that distinguished them from many of their better-known colleagues in the second wave of the revival (the first wave, of course, being that led by Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd) with record contracts on budget labels.
Folk producer Bill Leader had picked up what he billed as “The Waterson Family” for a “New Voices” sampler he was putting together for Topic Records, and in the liner notes for that album Lloyd himself wrote: “They have a wide repertory but their abiding interest is in the songs and customs of their native East Yorkshire. They make their own harmonies to the songs and in all the world of the folk song revival there's nothing quite like the ' Waterson sound'.”
Actually, Lloyd was only the first of many to make the mistake of describing the interweaving melodies of their a capella singing as “harmonies”: their style was strictly polyphonic, and the lines they sang had the same relationship to the root chords of the tunes as the three-part voicing of a New Orleans jazz front-line. And like many jazz virtuosi, their ensembles were the combination of four very individual solo voices, but it was not for some time that this was to be adequately recognised.
Elaine "Lal" Waterson, was born into a Hull family partly of Irish gypsy descent, on February 15, 1943. The three children were orphaned early in life and brought up by an aunt, a second-hand dealer. They started singing around Hull as the Mariners, and were known later as the Folksons until they reverted to their family name and started up what became one of Britain’s leading folk clubs, Folk Union One, at the largest venue they could find in the city, at the old Bluebell pub.
The four of them were never keen on the touring that soon became necessary, Lal less so than the rest. As Carthy recalls: “She was a very private person. She didn’t enjoy singing on stage, or in any public event, for that matter.”
When Norma went abroad to work in a tropical radio station in the unlikely role as a late-night DJ, and John Harrison went to live in London in 1966, they stopped performing for a while. Six years later they returned to public platforms, for a short time with Bernie Vickers, and ultimately with Martin Carthy.
The group last toured in 1993, but had been performing without Lal for some years. She had been plagued with ill health for many years, and had to withdraw from a US tour in 1991, after which she was replaced by Jill Pidd, who was joined on their final US tour two years later by her niece, Eliza, Norma and Martin’s daughter, today a Brit Award-nominated star in her own right.
However, in the previous two decades she and her brother had begun writing songs, at first not aware of what the other was doing, but then coming together triumphantly in May 1972 for what is probably the seminal British folk rock album of all time, when these two singers – known till then, predominantly, for their unaccompanied singing of traditional lyrics and ballads – blazed forth to the accompaniment of electric alumni like the great Fairport Convention electric guitar virtuoso, Richard Thompson. Lal contributed six songs to the album, “Bright Phoebus”, for Bill Leader's Trailer label, ranging from the drunken reminiscence of Red WineAnd Promises to the devastating picture of industrial poverty in Never The Same.
Perhaps her most remarkable song on the album was The Scarecrow, a joint composition with Mike (later recorded by June Tabor on her “Abyssinians” album), with its chorus:
Ah, but you'd lay me down and love me, Ah, but you'd lay me down and love me, if you could. For you're only a bag of rags in an overall That the wind sways so the crows fly away And the corn can grow tall.
Mike’s song, I’m the Leader of the Rubber Band, was licensed to RCA as a single, and there was even talk of a Top of the Pops appearance, but the group refused to go on the show.
The Phoebus album has been long out of print since Dave Bulmer bought the Leader catalogue, but two tracks (one, The Magical Man, another joint composition of Lal’s with Mike) reappeared recently on Castle Communications' reworking of the “Electric Muse” folk-into-rock compilation). In addition to her appearances on Waterson albums, she recorded with her sister and her daughter, Maria, on the Topic album, “A True-Hearted Girl”, in 1977, which included her solo performance of The Welcome Sailor.
She joined the Rotherham-based No Master’s Voice song-writing collective (forced by HMV to drop the last word in their name), for whom she joined with her son Oliver Knight, in recording “Once in a Blue Moon”, an album in many ways as significant as “Bright Phoebus”, and very different from it. Ultimately this appeared on Topic. She was also involved in a TV project, “Hard Cash” for the BBC, who took fright at its downright condemnation of mid-1980s Thatcherism, and refused to show it. Her song from the soundtrack, Hilda’s Cabinet Band, was the most outwardly political of her material, though her very existence, and the disregarded tradition upon which she based her life’s work, was a political statement of great power.
In the last year of her life she was also working with Oliver, who had turned out to be a highly talented electric guitarist and recording engineer, not only for his mother but also for his cousin Eliza. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Elaine “Lal” Waterson, born Hull, February 15, 1943, died Robin Hood’s Bay, September 5, 1998.
BBC Electric Prom, October 25, 2007 Did you miss this? Yes, so did I. I managed to capture a web showing (which ended on November 4, so you've missed it unless you're reading this today) and captured it to a DVD which is now one of my most precious possessions.
(If you're interested to know how I did this, I'll be posting a techie thingie on my SoftwareDaily blog http://software-daily.blogspot.com/ if you're interested. But not today, which is supposed to be my day off.)
The video quality isn't up to much. Blowing up a tiny web window to full TV screen pixelates like mad, and since I did the capture on a Saturday, which has got to be the web's busiest time, the transmission juddered a few times and lost sound and/or vision once or twice. But most of the time, it was OK, and the sound was superb. I'll be editing it down to an audio CD I can play in my car as soon as I have the time.
And no, before you ask, I can't let you have copies! But (crossed fingers) here's a slideshow of shots from the show:
The set list was * Some Old Salty * Flight Of The Pelican * Foolish One * The Altisidora * So Strange Is Man * Migrating Bird * Pheobe * Cornfield * Memories * Fine Horse Man * Winifer Odd * Never The Same * At First She Starts * Midnight Feast * Her White Gown * Evona Darling * The Bird * Wilsons Arms * One Of Those Days * Scarecrow * Red Wine Promises * Song For Thersa * Once In A Blue Moon * Stumbling On
BBC's Clare Hudson and Daniela Armstrong recorded this minute-by-minute record of how it all happened:
1. 19.31 - We are waiting for the 'Once In a Blue Moon' music event to start. 2. 19.36 - Radio 2's Mike Harding takes the stage to introduce the event with a story of when he first met Mike and Lal Waterson. 3. 19.38 - There are twelve people on the stage. It's hard to describe how powerful the sound is. 4. 19.39 - Eliza is centre stage in a fabulous red dress. 5. 19.42 - She's introducing the house band. She's warned up she might blub. She won't be alone if she does! 6. 19.44 - Flight of the pelican starts with a guitar solo followed by the haunting lyrics sung by Eliza about 7. 19.47 - Marry Gilhooley, Lal's daughter, joins Eliza for 'Foolish One'. 8. 19.49 - Their vocals are supported by a string quartet. 9. 19.53 - Eliza introduces special guest actor Tim van Eyken to ring the next song The Altistadora. 10. 19.57 - Another special guest - James Yorkston and guitar join Tim for 'So Strange Is Man'. 11. 20.00 - Liverpool artist Kathryn Williams takes centre stage for the 'Haunting Bird' supported by the string quartet. 12. 20.03 - The audience are delighted as Kathryn sings 'Phoebe' and 'Cornfield' which she explains are part of the same story. 13. 20.05 - An instrumental resounds around the walls of Cecil Sharp House. 14. 20.10 - Marry and Eliza are back for 'Memories'. It's a family affair with Lal's son Oliver Knight on guitar. 15. 20.13 - Eliza affectionately introduces her old Dad Martin Carthy to the stage to accompany Marry in Fine Horse Man. 16. 20.18 - Martin's singing this one solo. 'Winifer Odd'. It's a curious song of a woman in strange circumstances! 17. 20.23 - One more from Martin. 'Never The Same' harks back to the old days. 18. 20.49 - The second half starts the man from Fife, James Yorkston singing the melancholic 'At First She Starts'. 19. 20.56 - 'Midnight Feast' and James is joined by Norma and Mike, Lal's sister and brother. 20. 21.01 - He jokes about the rehearsals at Norma's house. Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall there! 21. 21.03 - Another special guest Liza Knapp brings what looks like an electric zither to the stage to give her rendition of 'Her White Gown'. 22. 21.05 - She's immersed in the song. 23. 21.07 - Talented Lisa takes to the auto harp for this next care free track 'Evona Darling'. 24. 21.17 - Alasdair Roberts is the next special guest, he solos on 'The Bird'. 25. 21.20 - Mike Waterson has arrived on stage, introduced by his niece Eliza as the family trouble maker. He's joined by Liza and Dougie. 26. 21.23 - Mike stays on stage joined by brother-in-law Martin and nephew Oliver. 27. 21.26 - Mike jokes with the crew and the audience - "We're only here to have fun", he laughs. 28. 21.33 - After a moving song Mike invites "the plague of his life" Norma to join him in Red Wine Promises! 29. 21.37 - Norma introduces 'Song for Thersa', the lady who looked after her, Lal and Mike when they were kids. Did Norma just wipe away a tear? 30. 21.38 - The family unite again for 'Once In a Blue Moon' what an incredible line up. 31. 21.42 - Eliza grabs a violin in this track. 32. 21.45 - Everyone's back on stage. Eliza runs through the thank yous and the applause for the assembled throng. 33. 21.49 - The crowd are demanding more. Will they get it? 34. 21.50 - They're back, but Norma says they've not rehearsed any more. Ah they've found one! 35. 21.51 - Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight!
Lal died nine years ago last September, which is why I've preceded this post with a reprint of my obituary published in The Independent.
The petition to nominate Pete Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize has grown rapidly; there are over 7600 signatures and you are one of them. The comments on the petition web page attest to how deeply Pete has touched our lives, from our parents to our children and grandchildren, and helped shape our sense of human responsibility.
In response to this initial outpouring of support, we have launched a new website, specifically to support this campaign. While it is still under development, we are asking you to take a look, and to publicize its existence to others who might want to support this campaign. The site can be reached at:
We are actively seeking additional help in building this campaign. Of particular interest would be organization endorsements of the campaign that we can publicize. If you are involved in such an organization, please ask them to endorse this effort, and have them send email to that effect to:
Another goal of ours is to collect additional materials to support this campaign. Because Pete is such a private person there is little besides what's on his record jackets that fills in his life story. Everybody has a little tale to tell about when they first met Pete or when he sang at their camp or school. Others may have photographs of Pete or of activities he has been involved with. It would be nice to collect those memories. He is essential to so many people.
Below are some of my thoughts on this campaign that you might be able to use in convincing others to join in!
The fact that Al Gore won the Peace Prize award this year encourages our effort for Pete Seeger for 2008! I hope this recognition helps the environmental movement and increases ways to protect the planet that is our home. I hope it makes more of us aware of the chasm we endure between rich and poor, between obscenely rich and obscenely poor. I am also encouraged that it was through an art form, a film, that Al Gore got his message around the world so quickly and won such acceptance. How tired I am of having the arts referred to as “artsy/fartsy”, how insulting to have the Universities cut back programs in the “humanities”, and music and arts enhancement in grade schools be the first to go for budget cuts.
The folk music revival movement that spread around the world encouraged young people to learn to play an instrument, give poetic voice to political opinions, and find appreciation for the carriers of the folk tradition who had kept those jewels of music alive in their families and communities. One of Pete’s most important contributions to our consciousness was that he always paid homage to the lineage of folk traditions and was one of the first to see that folk music, was not cute and quaint, but was a form of protest against oppression.
Pete Seeger is an ambassador for Peace and Social Justice and has been over the course of his 88-year lifetime. His work shows up wherever you look in the history of labor solidarity, growth of mass effort to end the Vietnam war, ban of nuclear weapons, work for international diplomacy, support of the Civil Rights Movement, for cleaning up the Hudson River and for environmental responsibility in general. Pete knit the world together with songs from China, the Soviet Union, Israel, Cuba, South Africa and Republican Spain. We learned that Crispus Attucks, born a slave, was the first man to die at the opening of the Revolutionary War, that the Farmer-Labor party in the mid-west had a socialist philosophy that lasted well into the 20th century, we learned that anti-slavery movements were often inspired by songs that indicated a map of escape, such as “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd,” he popularized many of the IWW songs that helped in CIO organizing, and spread the Civil Rights Movement through promoting the SNCC Freedom Singers and making songs such as “We Shall Overcome,” known all over the world.
When subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pete defended himself on the basis of the First Amendment, the right of an American citizen to free association, not the Fifth Amendment, protection against self incrimination. When he was boycotted from earning a living and practicing his craft on a national scale Pete appeared at union meetings, summer camps, Jr. High and High Schools, and Colleges. His pay at times was as little as $5, but his value was priceless!
Pete also had his mentors: among them Paul Robeson, who said: “The Artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery...” It is time that a cultural worker receives the acknowledgment that, as Bertolt Brecht points out, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” The cultural workers who know the power of the arts for social and political change, also know how difficult it is to gain recognition for cultural creation without either trivializing the art or somehow qualifying for designation of “high art” selected by an elite.
Pete Seeger always held to the principles that people’s music is not only “good art” but is representational art through music. Thus “folk music” was a living, vibrant form of culture.
Culture, in essence, means to honor our forbears. In the words of the Eastern European writer Milan Kundera: “ the struggle for people’s power is the struggle for memory and against forgetting”. Pete’s talent, sense of decency, and inalterable belief in, as Anne Franke said, that, “at heart, people are basically good”, were uniquely his, but he has never been alone in his work; the support of his wife Toshi and his family gave him the opportunity to be all he could be. We all stand on Pete Seeger's shoulders in a manner of speaking. We share Pete Seeger as a "father" of cultural, social, and political movements, as much as we share our parental DNA.
It is time that cultural work receives the recognition that the arts have great influence and global reach, that it is not only a medium of entertainment but of education, compassion and action. It is the desire of the committee that Pete Seeger be recognized as a beacon of integrity and principle in a time, and in a country, more defined by the absence of those qualities than by their honor.
Adulation, denigration: They're two sides of the very same coin. Both a con to keep you under, Both a trick to do you down.
History's made by human people, praise the good and love the small. One man can accomplish nothing, many make the tyrants fall.
I wrote those words back in 1990, towards the end of my song, Djugashvili, in which, like your recent song, The Big Joe Blues, I sought to come to terms with the undoubted crimes committed in the USSR during the Stalin era. Reading about your song in the New Statesman (and subsequently in another article in the online New York Times) has caused me to revisit my own song. I am now planning to perform it next month, in the Raise Your Banners political song festival here in Bradford, probably along with my version of Woody’s Jesus Christ song. (I’ve appended the text of Djugashvili at the end of this letter; the tune is adapted from Dock Boggs’ Coocoo Bird). Here is a comment I appended to the New Statesman online article about your song:
“I am saddened by Seeger's song. Not because the horrors it documents are not true, but because by personalising them in the shape of Stalin, he actually absolves from guilt the apparatchiki who sent people to the gulags. It should be remembered that Khrushchev, whose speech to the 20th CPSU Congress began the process of the demonisation of Stalin (a denunciation, we should always remember, which was circulated by the United States Information Service who rightly saw it as a valuable weapon in the Cold War), that same Khrushchev presided over the famine in the Ukraine. When Stalin died, Khrushchev crowed: The mice have got rid of the cat. What do we think he meant by that? “The way in which Stalin attempted to protect artists like Bulgakov, Mandelstam and Pasternak from the Politburo bureaucrats is well documented. “After the fall of Nazism, attempts to blame the Holocaust solely upon Hitler were rightly recognised as attempts to evade responsibility for their part in it; those who try to suggest the gulags were the sole responsibility of Stalin are playing the same role. “When Stalin's death was announced, many of his ‘victims’ in the gulags wept. They did not blame him for their incarceration. Do we, and my old friend Pete, presume to be wiser than they?”
Of course, I have only seen some of the words of your song. We both know that, when divorced from their melody, many songs don’t read well on the page. I have searched on the Internet but cannot find it. Has it been recorded? I might even sing it alongside my own song, rather in the spirit of Brecht’s two contradictory plays, Der Jasager and Der Neinsager, in which he left it to the audience to decide which had the more preferable outcome. As Bob Dylan famously said: “I can’t think for you; you’ve got to decide.”. The words as published in the New Statesman go as follows:
I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams Of so many in every land. He had a chance to make A brand new start for the human race. Instead he set it back Right in the same nasty place. I got the Big Joe Blues. (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.) I got the Big Joe Blues. (Do this job, no questions asked.) I got the Big Joe Blues.
I’m not sure how that stacks up against Woody’s criteria:
“I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good! I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too thin or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard travelling. “I am out to fight those kind of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.”
I have no problem, of course, with tendentious or politically slanted songs. I have written many myself. Some have been political ephemera, composed on this march or during that campaign, and deservedly forgotten. In the end, as performers, our sole criterion must surely be: Is it an effective song? Does it address concerns that are uttermost in people’s minds right now? If it is about struggle (or, more relevantly, in this context, defeat) does it strengthen us or weaken us in our resolve? Assuming that we can blame one man for crimes committed across a sixth of the world’s surface, can it be true that he put an end to all our dreams? Yes, I know many ran screaming out of the room when Khrushchev denounced his old boss, more when the same Mr K also sent the tanks into Budapest. But you didn’t. And I didn’t. So I find myself asking: Why now? Has your dream died within you? I cannot believe that. I will not believe that. Like Joe Hill in the song (and Jesus in the prayers of millions across the world) those dreams never died. In the words of the other Dylan, “death shall have no dominion”. When I was a young tyro agitator in the Young Communist League, I was often criticised by older comrades for refusing to believe Stalin was a god. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the same people (the very same!) criticised me for refusing to believe he could have been a devil. Many of those people, like the “Communist” leaders of Britain’s Electrical Trades Union (who had tried to stop me singing at their trade union college because of my political “unreliability”) went on to become red-baiting anti-leftists, operating blacklists in the union they continued to control in the same, anti-democratic manner as before. I appreciate that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana; Marx quoted Hegel in similar terms, adding “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”). Re-evaluating historical figures can play an important contemporary role; similarly, criticising hagiography can equip us to avoid similar “cults of the personality” in future. But this does not mean we should refrain from honouring those (Joe Hill, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Paul Robeson, yes and also Stalin and Mao, and even yourself) who have made considerable contributions to human progress. Stigmatising them, or seeing them as wholly good or wholly bad runs against everything we know about human nature. As Brecht says of Galileo, his great anti-hero, we cannot expect to only praise or only condemn them. The most considered evaluation of Stalin came from Mao, who described him as “30 per cent wrong and 70 per cent correct” (at the same time, he described the level of understanding in the Chinese Communist Party as “30 per cent know-how, and 70 per cent ignorance”, that “in the area of literature and art, the advantage lies outside the Communist Party”; would that the great principle of such self-criticism had not perished inside the left). In his song, The Ballad of Stalin, Ewan MacColl tried (unsuccessfully, to my mind) to equate Stalin with ballad heroes like John Henry and Ewan’s own “Big Hewer” in his radio ballad of the same name:
“There was a range of mountains that was standing in the way So Stalin put his hand out and he smoothed them all away; For Joe he was determined to make the land all green And that’s the biggest project that the world has ever seen.”
(A rather self-conscious echo there, in the last line of every verse, of Woody’s Great Historical Bum.) It is not perhaps irrelevant that this particular verse refers to what turned out to be an ecological disaster. But then the same could be said, perhaps, of Woody’s encomia to projects like the Grand Coulee Dam. And is not your own “He ruled with an iron hand” reminiscent of Ewan’s “Stalin put his hand out”? I think Alex Comfort’s lyric is appropriate here:
One man's hands can't break a prison down, Two men's hands can't break a prison down, But if two and two and fifty make a million, We'll see that day come round, We'll see that day come round.
I believe that it takes more than one man's hands, also, to organise the sort of tyranny associated now with Stalin's name. One problem with Ewan’s Stalin ballad is that it is out of touch with the healthy scepticism of our native traditions. It’s true, that during the demob strikes of British troops at the end of World War II, one of their slogans was “Joe for king and Pollitt” (Harry, general secretary of the CP) “for Pope”. And armourers chalked “This one’s for Joe” on the bombs they were loading into the bomb-bays of British bombers going to attack Berlin. But a more typical British reaction against hero worship came when volunteers on youth brigades in Yugoslavia encountered the following Serbian lyric about Tito: “Druje Tito, oy, Druji Tito/Lyublicici byela" (“Comrade Tito, oy, comrade Tito,/Our little white violet”), to which the Trecu Engleska Brigada responded: “Harry Pollitt, oi, Harry Pollitt,/Our little red geranium” or (less politically correct), “Mary Gibson, oi, Mary Gibson,/Burnt the stew last Tuesday”. You are quoted as wondering what Woody would have said about Stalin. Well, we do know, from his memorial to FDR:
“He (Roosevelt) said he didn’t like De Gaulle, nor no Chiang Kai Check (sic): Shook hands with Joseph Stalin, says: ‘There’s a man I like’.” (Dear Mrs Roosevelt)
This song, incidentally, presents a rather sanitised version of Roosevelt’s life. He was, after all, the president whose administration set up the machinery used by the FBI and the CIA to persecute the left and assassinate the Rosenbergs. Rather more realistic is Woody’s song from the phoney war period, Why do you stand there in the rain?, urging FDR not to send military aid to Finland, a country which later became a base for the Nazi attack on the USSR, which his record company refused to put out and which isn’t in the Essex Music collection of Woody Guthrie Folk Songs in my archive. (It’s not in the online archive of Woody lyrics either.) I return to my early question: why this song, and why now? Are we more guilty of what Khrushchev called “the cult of personality” (while building up a similar cult around himself) today than we were then? The only living leader we are tempted these days to eulogise is Fidel. (Frankly, I have no problem with that. It is preferable to the way the faceless leaders on the Chinese CP are leading their country down the capitalist road Mao warned against.) But, as I have written elsewhere (and as the lyric I quote at the outset of this letter indicates) demonisation is the same process working in reverse, as “a con to keep you under, . . . a trick to do you down”. In Britain, the excoriation of Margaret Thatcher as “the iron lady” helped to perpetuate her power, compared with the reality of her indecision and petulance in the face of any opposition - demonstrated by her acquiescence in the American invasion of the British territory of Grenada. Today, representation of George W. Bush as a bumbling idiot serves a similar function, concealing the true face of an astute politician whom we under-estimate at our peril. We need to remember Lenin’s words, in his article, "The Political Significance of Abuse": "Abuse in politics often covers up the utter lack of ideological content, the helplessness and the impotence, the annoying impotence of the abuser." A song today about Stalin (or, indeed any other hero, all of whom inevitably stand upon feet of clay) would serve a useful purpose if, in the words of The Who rock group, it declared: “We won’t get fooled again.” (Of course, we will, but if we follow Dylan’s advice, “Don’t follow leaders/Watch for parking meters”, we might be better able to resist the temptation.)
