Come write me down: the creative process in the writing of contemporary English folk songs

A study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Librarianship

at

The University of Sheffield

by

Eleanor Thornton

September 2007

Abstract

This research was inspired by the lyrics of two anti-war songs written by folk artists during the Vietnam War. They were set in the age of privateering and in the First World War rather than being written from the point of view of soldiers serving in Vietnam. This led to the question of how the idea to set their songs in another era occurred to them and whether they were then concerned with the historical accuracy of the content.

The investigation focuses on aspects of the creative process in the writing of English folk song. Paper based research is used to discuss folk song writers from the revival of the 1960s, with particular focus on the work of Ewan MacColl and the Radio Ballads. This provides a frame of reference for the work of the modern song writers, discussed using the field research results, and a comparison of the subject matter that is covered by the respective artists.

It examines where the initial ideas for songs come from and what inspires the writer to continue with that idea and complete the song. It looks at what the important aspects of the song are in terms of how they are formed and how the lyrics and tune work together to make the whole. The question of authenticity is also discussed, although the notions of authenticity that emerged from the study were different to those originally envisaged.

The subject matter and content of modern folk songs was found to have changed in the modern era and that the inspiration for songs was likely to be found in everyday occurrences, from the very traditional material and from the local history of an area. The lyrics are the most important aspect of a song and they take precedence over the creation of a tune. Authenticity in a song is important to folk artists but the authenticity of a song can mean historical accuracy or the truthfulness of emotion.

Potential areas for further study are recommended in several different aspects of this research including how libraries could assist songwriters at various times during the writing process and whether the oral tradition and folklore is enough for authenticity and accuracy or whether research on a subject is needed.

i Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Andrew Cox, for believing in this topic and encouraging me to go for it. I would also like to thank all those who agreed to be interviewed and those who helped (may we meet again at Towersey 2008), all my friends who have supported me with kind words and not minded when I’ve been too busy to keep in touch properly, Sheffield Ceilidh Society for providing great music to work by. But most of all I would like to thank my parents and also my wonderful boyfriend Jez without whom it would not have been possible for me to do this course or this dissertation.

Word count: 15,205 (excluding title page, abstract, acknowledgements, contents, bibliography and appendices)

ii Contents

1: INTRODUCTION...... 1 1.1 The ‘initial spark’ ...... 1 1.2 The research context...... 4 1.3 Aims and objectives ...... 6

2: LITERATURE REVIEW: ENGLISH FOLKSONG AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS ...... 7 2.1 English folksong...... 7 2.2 The early revivalists and song collecting ...... 9 2.3 Creativity and song-writing ...... 10

3: RESEARCH METHODS AND METHODOLOGY ...... 13 3.1 Methodology ...... 13 3.2 Data Collection...... 13 3.3 Ethical considerations...... 14

4: THE ‘60S REVIVALISTS...... 15 4.1 Ewan MacColl ...... 15 4.2 The Radio Ballads ...... 17 4.3 Jez Lowe...... 19 4.4 John Kirkpatrick ...... 20 4.5 Songs and motivations ...... 21

5: MODERN FOLK-SONG WRITERS...... 24 5.1 Ideas and the first spark...... 25 5.2 Lyrics and tune...... 29 5.3 Research and the question of authenticity ...... 32

6: CONCLUSIONS ...... 36 6.1 Research limitations and difficulties ...... 37 6.2 Areas for further research...... 39

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 40

APPENDIX 1 ...... 45

APPENDIX 2 ...... 47

APPENDIX 3 ...... 50

1: Introduction

“I think that pressure of having a deadline makes you creative.” – Laurel Swift

1.1 The ‘initial spark’

The idea for this dissertation essentially came from three sources:

• Hearing a song called Barrett’s Privateers by Stan Rogers being sung by an actor in a television programme. • Hearing And the Band played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle sung by a friend at folk camp. • From a band called Touchstone who write and perform songs about historical events and disasters that took place in their home county of Sussex.

Barrett’s Privateers appears to be a traditional song about the dangers of privateering in the eighteenth century. However, it was actually written by Canadian singer/songwriter Stan Rogers in the 1960s as a protest song against the war in Vietnam. It raised questions, not least of which was the question of accuracy. How much research had he done about the conditions for privateers, how historically accurate was the song, was he bothered about historical accuracy or was he more interested in the message he was trying to express.

The answers to these questions were relatively easy to find:

“There was no Elcid Barrett. There was no Antelope sloop and there wasn’t even a town of Sherbrooke in the year of 1778. Stan Rogers basically made up an imaginary privateer to carry a 60s anti-war theme in a traditional folk setting. Having said all that, many of the details, ranging from the type of cannons mentioned to the letter of marquee reference, are very authentic. Stan Rogers did a fair bit of reading about privateering and appears to have been influenced by the historian Archibald MacMechan, who wrote several books on Canadian privateers.” (Conlin, 2001: 1)1

1 See appendix 1 for lyrics to ‘Barrett’s Privateers’ by Stan Rogers

1 There was also another song that raised similar questions. It was another song about war, this time about the First World War and a young man having to leave his life of roaming behind and go to fight at Gallipoli. It is also about the futility of war, the impact it has, and the damage it causes to the people caught in the middle. Eric Bogle, a man who had no first hand experience of fighting or of war, wrote the song And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda2 in 1972.

Eric Bogle was born and brought up in Scotland, however, as a child he had become interested in First World War history and he learnt all he could about that period of history. He knew about the Anzac deployment to Turkey and the disaster at Gallipoli before he emigrated to Australia in 1969. He wanted to write a song about the futility of war but he also wanted to pay tribute to the servicemen who had served in the conflicts.

“In writing an anti-war song, he wanted to avoid denigrating the servicemen who'd suffered, and to indict those responsible for the ridiculous loss of life and limb in war, especially in unnecessary wars (like Vietnam) and unnecessary actions (like Gallipoli).” (Casimir, 2002).

Bogle feels that ‘Matilda’ is not the best song he has written and that he has written better anti-war songs. “lyrically and melodically, I have surpassed Matilda may times… Of the war songs I’ve written, The Gift Of Years is far superior to No Man’s Land, which is superior to Matilda.” (Bogle in Casimir, 2002). He feels the song is overlong and that the lyrics do not quite convey exactly what he intended, his main example is the line ‘The young people ask what are they marching for and I ask myself the same question.’ He explains that he knew what he was trying to say but that it was not expressed particularly well:

“The old soldier knew why they were marching, but he was heartbroken that they had to. But what comes across is that he’s saying Anzac day is a waste of fucking time.” (Bogle in Casimir, 2002)

There are other aspects of the song with which he is unhappy and the historical inaccuracies are part of that. Despite having done a large amount of reading about the First World War and knowing about the allied troops involvement in battles and

2 See appendix 2 for lyrics to ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ by Eric Bogle

2 engagements in line three of the second verse he implies that the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) landed at Suvla Bay when in reality they made landfall at an unnamed cove that would later become known as ‘Anzac Cove’. He felt that Suvla Bay made the rhyme easier and so he used it in the song, however, he “now curses his own laziness”. (Casimir, 2002). The other historical inaccuracy that he says was a “careless error” (Bogle in Casimir, 2002) was the mention in verse one that the year was 1915 and the protagonist was issued with a tin hat when being deployed to Turkey when in reality the tin hat was not issued to soldiers until 1916 and then to those stationed in France.

He got the idea, and what became the lyrical hook, for the song from watching the Anzac day parade and hearing the band play Waltzing Matilda. It took him two weeks to write the song but “the song didn't come easily, and he had to work hard on rhyme, rhythm, and making it make sense.” (Casimir, 2002) and at eight verses he felt that it was “twice as long as it needed to be.” (Bogle in Casimir, 2002) he tried to reduce the number of verses to four but only succeeded in cutting it to five, he did not want to be making the same points repeatedly and he felt as though he was not giving his audience credit for understanding what he was saying, he felt he was “shoving it down people’s throats, as if they were too stupid to get it in the first place.” (Bogle in Casimir, 2002).

Eric Bogle, from the evidence of ‘Matilda’ and the way he talks about it, is more interested in the veracity of his songs and the emotions and events he is trying to portray than Stan Rogers. Both the songs mentioned here have their origins in protests against the Vietnam War but neither, on the surface, are about that conflict. Stan Rogers chose to base his song in the age of privateering, the promise of glory and gold and easy victory coming through as the themes and parallels with the Vietnam War while Eric Bogle focuses on the futility of war and the tragic loss of life (and in the case of his central character limbs) that shattered people and families. He believed the song would sink into obscurity following the end of the Vietnam War but it has endured and he attributes this to the experience of war being common to all people across the world, and he also believes that it has resonance once more due to the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

3 These two songs were both inspired by an international conflict that affected a whole generation and there was a wealth of material to help them write those songs. So the questions then became:

• What inspires modern folk songwriters? • What kind of stories are they trying to tell? • How do they tell them and is authenticity important to them?

1.2 The research context

Folk music in Britain has a large following as the successes of festivals such as Sidmouth Folk Week and Towersey Village Festival indicate. The interest is not just confined to English folk music or the Celtic traditions but also includes world folk music and traditions.

“The folk music festival has become an extremely important feature of folk music activity in this country. It has matured into possibly the best medium for presenting the eclectic and idiosyncratic in folk music.” (Brocken, 2003:125).

In England it is often the English folk tradition that gets ignored. When folk music is mentioned it is usually Irish or Scottish music that first occurs to people. However, there is a strong history and tradition in England, revived in the early 1900s by the collectors, most famously Cecil Sharp, and kept alive through their work and the work of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. There are issues surrounding the work of the early collectors with doubts about the motives and the racism and nationalism that some believe Sharp was promoting.

However, the early folk revivalists were not interested in the development and expansion of the cannon of songs that had been collected, they were the traditional songs of England and therefore new and original songs could not be termed as folk Even if a song was written in the style of the traditional songs they could not be real folk songs because they were not the result of an oral tradition or they had not been created by the workers, the ‘folk’ whom Sharp had sought to find.

In the 1950s and 1960s a new revival occurred. In the Celtic traditions interest had maintained at a steady level in the folk traditions as songs and dances were

4 performed at gatherings and the oral tradition was being continued. In England, the oral tradition had never been as strong as those of Scotland and Ireland despite, or perhaps because of, Sharp’s attempts to have the traditional songs he had collected taught in schools.

Ewan MacColl was one of the leading protagonists in the revival of the mid-twentieth century. He had long had an interest in making the arts accessible and relevant to the working classes. He worked within the theatre, bringing plays about politics and subjects important to his intended audiences to the industrial areas of Britain. After he left the Theatre Workshop, which he had established with his first wife Joan Littlewood, he turned his attention to music and radio. He felt that folk music was the people’s music and that it could be used to express the feelings, difficulties and struggles of the working classes. The Radio Ballads are some of his most famous works, working with Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker.

He defied the folk traditionalists who felt that new songs could not be folk songs and many of the songs that were written in that revival period are now considered classics by fans of the genre and are performed regularly on stage and in local folk clubs. Many of the revival songs were influenced by political events and the problems facing the working classes. The motivations behind the writing of folk songs have changed over the intervening years and it is the modern folk songwriter with whom this research is concerned.

There is less political motivation for modern songwriters and there is significantly less obvious deprivation on the same kind of scale experienced just before and after the Second World War. Folk music has moved on and there is much more acceptance of new, original composition. How the songs are written and how different songwriters approach the same genre is not a topic that has been researched before. Folk music is extremely diverse and the ideas and ways in which people create songs for similar audiences is an interesting area for study. In terms of library and information science it is really a very preliminary examination of what kinds of resources songwriters use and how they acquire information and subsequently use that for the creation of their songs. It may be that there is scope for libraries and information services to assist songwriters with research, particularly if they use local historical events for inspiration or need information about a particular local dialect. Also there could be the possibility of providing song writing workshops as many libraries already do with creative writing

5 for storytelling as folk music is often being about telling a story, albeit in a different format.

1.3 Aims and objectives

The aim of this research is to discover if there is a creative process that songwriters utilise in order to write their songs. It also aims to look at whether there is a single moment when an idea occurs to them or whether the idea emerges slowly, “Blake and Coleridge are prominent examples of poets who published accounts of poems written in altered inspired states.” (Rothenberg, 1970: 173). A more recent example is that of J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter story occurring to her while she was on a train from Manchester to London:

“Where the idea for Harry Potter actually came from I really couldn't tell you. I was travelling on a train between Manchester and London and it just popped into my head. I spent four hours thinking about what Hogwarts would be like - the most interesting train journey I've ever taken. By the time I got off at King's Cross many of the characters in the books had already been invented.” (Stories from the Web, 2002).

The rest of the process is also important, how the songwriters expand on the initial idea and how it becomes the finished product, what sources or assistance they may use in the process and which aspects are key to their song writing. The key aspects under investigation were:

• How did these songwriters find their subject? Is there a single moment of inspiration? • How did they go about writing the song on a particular subject? • Were they bothered about authenticity and using correct factual information? • What tends to come first? Is it the lyrics or the tune?

6 2: Literature review: English folksong and the creative process

“any music which, being composed in the peculiar taste of the nation to which it appertains, appeals more powerfully than other music to the feelings of that nation, and is consequently pre-eminently cultivated in a certain country... The peculiar characteristics of the music of the nation and therefore more strongly exhibited on the popular songs and dance-tunes traditionally preserved by the country-people and the lower classes of society, which form the great majority of the nation.” (Engel cited in Harker, 1985: 142)

2.1 English folksong

English folksong was chosen as the focus because there have been three significant periods of revival in the tradition in England with distinct lulls between, the early 1900s and the song collecting of Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood and Vaughan Williams, the 1960s with Ewan MacColl, Norma Waterson and Richard Thompson, amongst others, and the upturn in interest that has taken place over the last twenty years from the folk rock of the 1980s, particularly the resurgent Fairport Convention and latterly, in the 1990s, the big band style made popular by the duo John Spiers and Jon Boden and their band Bellowhead. In contrast to this the Celtic traditions have appeared to hold a steady level of interest and performance of the music is sustained at a more or less constant level. “Engel was obliged to note that, though Scottish music had been fairly thoroughly published (however disfigured with harmonies), and Irish music was available in print.” (Harker, 1985:143-144) The Celtic traditions are stronger and have had more interest and focus in the literature.

“The problem of what was really ‘English’ music and song remained unresolved.” (Harker, 1985: 142)

“Folk-music is a term of curiously, but perhaps inevitably, loose signification.” Walker (1907:311). Authors on the subject of English folk music seem to have difficulty providing a clear definition of exactly what constitutes English folk music. Kidson & Neal open their ‘definition’ section with “the word “folk-song” is so elastic in definition that it has been feely used to indicate types of song and melody that greatly differ from each other.” (1915:9). Karpeles states “I believe it in the nature of the subject

7 that we cannot draw up a precise scientific definition of folk song which will serve to differentiate it entirely from all other forms of music.” (Kapeles, 1968:9)

In his preface Lloyd (1967) mentions the “topical imitations” that were created during the hard times of the depression and the War years but questions whether they are folk, terming them “newly-made ‘people’s songs’” and he suggests that “in the field of song for instance any piece that has passed widely into public circulation is identified as ‘folk’, especially if one can pretend it somehow expresses part of the essential character of the nation.” Lloyd (1967:12). Greenway’s defining characteristic for folk song was whether or not the people had “complete possession of a song” (1960:3) but found this to be too restrictive and having such a closed idea of what constituted a folk song meant that there was a vast range of material that was ignored which he believed did great harm. Elbourne draws out the “two main approaches to the definition of folk music” (1975:9) as being those concerned with the cultural background and those interested in the internal characteristics. Kidson & Neal (1915) identify thirteen different classes of folk song, making distinctions between types such as the narrative ballad, drinking and humorous songs, hunting and sporting songs, pressgang songs, sea songs and traditional carols. These distinctions could provide some explanation as to why there is so much disagreement about what folk song is and what the origins are.

Karpeles (1968) discusses the distinction between folk and popular music, or Lloyd’s “topical imitations.” (1967:preface). She holds that it is not how popular a song is that makes it a folk song and appears to subscribe to Elbourne’s second approach to the definition of folk music and she states that “it is its inherent qualities which distinguish it from other types of song.” (1968:9). This is why she believes that contemporary songs composed on the model of a folk song can not be regarded as folk song; the modern composers are not sufficiently imbued with the “folk song tradition” (1968:10) (she does not specifically define what she means by ‘folk song tradition’). She continues to list other factors that she believes exclude modern compositions from being true folk songs: while they use clichés from folk songs they will not be a natural follow on from the genuine folk song, they have not been formed through a community sharing a common experience and they are “intended to be represented to all and sundry as a form of entertainment” (1968:10) but “above all, they have not been submitted to the moulding process of oral transmission.” (Karpeles, 1968:10). According to Barker & Taylor a definition was given in the 1930s by Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Ewan MacColl and Pete Seeger. They utilised Communist theory

8 and instead of using the song or music as the defining feature they used the performance method. Folk was sung or performed without expectation of payment or remuneration: “while working, around a campfire, on a ship, among children.” (2007:2)

Karpeles also believes that the popular songs of the present day cannot become the folk songs of the future. She also continues to say that the “creation of folk songs in an industrialized country is hardly possible.” (1968:10). This is echoed by Barker & Taylor who assert that the “songs people sing while working or among friends were once performed by paid entertainers.” (2007:3)

2.2 The early revivalists and song collecting

Cecil J. Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams are the figureheads of the “decidedly middle-class” (Brocken, 2003:3) folk revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brocken includes the story that is itself a folk story about the moment many think the folk revival was inspired “Many have cited the day in autumn 1903 when Sharp first heard John England, the gardener of the Somerset vicarage where he was staying, sing ‘The Seeds of Love’ as the beginning of the folk revival.” (Brocken, 2003:4). It had started prior to that with Sharp travelling the country searching for “unadulterated traditional material” (Barker & Taylor, 2007:online) sung and performed by rural workers including morris dance which he had witnessed in 1899 at Headington Quarry, Oxford (Brocken, 2003). It is said that he was looking for “the ‘merrie England’ of myth” (Barker & Taylor, 2007: online) and that in “his search for the voice of “common people”… there is a true voice of the working class or proletariat which Sharp had misrepresented.” (Barker & Taylor, 2007:online). The driving force behind his collecting was either an interest in “isolating white Britishness” (Barker & Taylor, 2007:online) or a hope that “by the adoption of an older, more authentic form of music… society could experience a musical, cultural and spiritual reawakening.” (Brocken, 2003:5). “Even if ethnicity might have been expressed musically, quite ordinary popular songs and tunes will have been invested with deep symbolic meaning in ways that would have been impossible for Sharp and his cohorts to spot.” (Brocken, 2003:7)

9 2.3 Creativity and song-writing

“There is no consensus as to whether creativity is located in a person, a product or a process.” (Petrowski, 2000:305).

In his attempt to provide a definition that can be used universally to provide a single basis for use of the term in research Götz examines what has been used before and why these definitions are not sufficient for the purpose. He looks at two other definitions of creativity. A definition by Torrance does not have sufficient distinction between creativity and research procedures, discovery/insight and communication (Götz, 1981). Götz (1981) also criticises a definition by Pfeiffer on because it fails to distinguish adequately between creativity and different kind of newness, an ability or talent and originality. Balkin echoes this and identifies the fact that “Creativity is often mistakenly used as a synonym for originality.” (1990:30). Götz offers the definition “Creativity, then, is the process of making.” (1981:299) Balkin’s is remarkably similar: “Creative people do things. They make. They assemble. They put together.” (1990:30). Both Balkin and Götz locate the creativity within the person, not the thing that is created.

Balkin (1990) argues that there are other components central to the creative process. He believes that the creative person has to be aware of the creative process. He enumerates four basic phases in the creative process that are those generally accepted by researchers: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. These are also identified in the article by Götz (1981) who then adds two more of his own: the product and the process of evaluation. Balkin also augments the four stages, following on from these he adds his own fifth phase which he terms “the ‘re’ factor.” (1990:31). He believe this to be the heart of the process and it involves the continual process of rethinking, revising, reconsidering, reaffirming, rewriting and replacing (“add your own ‘re’ words to the list.” (1990:31)). Götz summarises the stages by defining creativity as “the process or activity of deliberately concretizing insight.” (1981:300).

Sasso states “The creative process results in a product or idea which embodies something genuinely novel.” (1980:125) However, he continues to say that just as people learn a language so too they learn their artistic styles from others and necessarily so because from the imitation the artist’s own individual style will emerge:

10 “The earliest stage of an artist’s work is essentially imitative – not directly of life, but of the artistic work of other artists… it is from this phase that every creator eventually wrests his individual personality and style.” (1980:119). Jaumotte argues that something novel may be something that is only new and of significance to the person individual concerned. (1976:315).

Sasso (1980) does, however, distinguish between strong and weak novelty. Strong novelty is when something created is entirely new and previously unheard and unthought of, whereas weak novelty something that is different and fresh but not groundbreaking. He believes that creativity is developed through the imitative phase and that as the creator develops and learns they will become increasingly capable of truly creative acts: “the habits, skills and learning which have been cultivated during the imitative phase all come into play and prepare the way for genuine creativity.” (1980:123).

The thought from creativity theorists is that there are four stages of creativity: (1) preparations, (2) incubation, (3) illumination, (4) revision or verification. According to Sasso “Illumination is the critical and decisive stage of creativity.” (1980:125). Jaumotte is in agreement with this theory and statement believing that the accumulation of knowledge will lead to the moment of inspiration: “A basic role is played by concentration of effort to accumulate information on a chosen problem and to allow ‘illumination’, the moment of inspired surprise, to occur that leads to the problem’s solution.” (Jaumotte, 1976: 318). The idea that background knowledge is important to the creative process is also supported by Sternberg & Lubart who agree that “In order to make a creative contribution to a field of knowledge, one must, of course, have knowledge of that field.” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1993: 229).

“What is a musical vision? Hindemath likens it to witnessing a flash of lightning in the night.” (McElvain, 1968: 129) The flash of inspiration moment, being hit by a bolt out of the blue with a fully formed idea is one conception of the creative ‘moment’ This is also mentioned by Rothenberg but he rejects the idea of the “brooding and silent figure whose face suddenly becomes transfigured and illuminated by a thought or idea.” (1970:172) He also believes that creativity stems from having knowledge of a subject and that it is the events of everyday life are more likely to be of inspiration: “One need not search his mind for unusual or exciting events; the most suitable material is all around him in his common everyday surroundings… Indeed, it is often the familiar, comfortable topic with which a student is most creative, for he is writing

11 about something which is real and stimulating to him.” (Rothenberg, 1970:132). Rothenberg (1970) proposes a change in the way inspiration is emphasised within the theoretical context of the creative process with a greater differentiation between inspiration and insights. True inspiration is very rare and so creativity in the arts is more likely to stem from a psychological insight rather than a flash of divine inspiration.

In contrast to Sasso and Jaumotte Rothenberg suggests “Inspiration is neither the invariant starting point of the poetic creative process nor is it necessarily the most critical aspect of poetic creation.” (Rothenberg, 1970: 173). He is of the opinion that “the term inspiration refers to an intrinsically dramatic experience. It indicates more than the simple achievement of a good idea.” (1970:173)

Creativity, like folk music, seems to have many disputed elements. Even the basic definitions cannot be agreed upon. What constitutes ‘true’ creativity in some theories would preclude the majority of folk musicians from being termed creative. The connection between creation of something new and the knowledge of a subject or a genre is likely to be critical to a folk song writer’s creative process as they will be working within a creative process as they will be working within a musical area that has many dedicated followers who also have knowledge of the forms and will therefore have expectations of the music being created.

12 3: Research Methods and Methodology

3.1 Methodology

It was deemed that a qualitative approach to the research would be the most appropriate due to the relatively abstract nature of the subject under investigation. People’s personal opinions and experiences were being sought and a quantitative approach would not be suitable for extracting results from the interviews that would be conducted. The results could not be predicted and therefore an approach to the data analysis that allowed for a theory to be formed subsequent to the investigation rather than attempting to find answers to fit a preconceived idea was important.

The responses were examined using several of the aspects of the grounded theory technique which allows a theory to be formulated from the evidence that is gathered rather than attempting to find verification for a preconceived idea: “Generating a theory from data means that most hypotheses and concepts not only come from the data, but are systematically worked out in relation to the data.” (Glaser & Strauss, 2006: 6) Through analysing the interviews and extracting commonalities a clearer idea of how the creative and song-writing process develops and progresses could be established.

3.2 Data Collection

The creative process of writing English folk songs is not a subject about which there is much current information. Several methods of data collection were utilised to gather information about the subject. The initial approach was to review the existing literature to see what had been written about the creative process and about the writing of songs, preferably those of the folk genre. The literature search is where this research differs from the standard grounded theory approach. In grounded theory it is recommended that the literature review be conducted after the primary research element has been completed to ensure that the theory comes from the field research findings: “the defining components of grounded theory practice include… conducting the literature review after developing an independent analysis.” (Glaser * Strauss in Charmaz, 2006: 6).

13 The library of the National Centre for English Folk Tradition based at the University of Sheffield proved to have a range of books about the English folk scene and also works by people involved in the revival which took place in the 1960s. Books and journal articles were also utilised for comparison between songwriters directly influenced by the 1960s revival and those writing contemporary songs. The Sheffield Central Library proved to have a good collection of folk music including most of the original Radio Ballads, although there was slightly less coverage of modern folk musicians and bands. They also held Journeyman the Ewan MacColl autobiography that provided a wealth of information not only about Ewan MacColl but also about other people involved with the Radio Ballads and the folk revival.

The website of BBC Radio 2, the broadcasters of the 2006 Radio Ballads, has all the modern Radio Ballads available to listen to, as well as extracts from the original Ballads. It has information about the seven members of the song writing team involved with the 2006 project and a short piece about the process of writing them.

The original research element consisted of semi-structured interviews which were used to ask writers of modern English folk songs about the processes they used when writing their songs, what inspired their ideas and how they continued on from the initial idea to the completed songs and whether, during the writing, they considered the question of the authenticity of what they were writing.

3.3 Ethical considerations

This research project was classified as ‘low risk’ because there were human participants involved. Sensitive data was not being collected and the interview subjects were informed that the information they gave during the interviews would not be anonymised unless they specifically requested it. They were also told that they were entitled to withdraw at any time should they decide they did not want to continue or be involved further. All those involved were content with these arrangements and agreed to be part of the research.

14 4: The ‘60s Revivalists

“The folk revival had a lot of things in it at its inception, and one was to make songs of struggle in an idiom that would be immensely acceptable to a lot of young people.” (MacColl, 1990: 272)

4.1 Ewan MacColl

Ewan MacColl was born in Salford in 1915 to Betsy and William Miller. Originally called Jimmie he later changed his name to Ewan MacColl in commemoration and celebration of a Scottish artist of that name. He was born to Scottish parents and lived in a community that included many Scots that had emigrated to the North West of England looking for work. In his autobiography Journeyman he claims to have felt more Scottish than English. He was brought up in a Scottish household and followed many of their traditions, growing up with the songs and poetry of Robbie Burns and he did later change his name. However, later in life he settled in Bromley, Kent and many of the songs he wrote and sang were about English subjects and locations. For the purposes of this dissertation, due to the content and style of his songs, he will be treated as an English folk singer/songwriter (although it is quite likely that he would have taken issue with that label).

The library and books played a huge role in his teenage years. When he left school at fourteen there was massive unemployment in Salford and the surrounding areas due to new technologies and ‘streamlined working practices’. The unemployed men would congregate in the library after visiting the Labour Exchange to read the newspapers and look at the ‘help wanted’ sections. Ewan MacColl, already a prolific reader, began to work his way through the library’s collection in alphabetical order and adopted a programme of learning ten new words each day in order to improve his vocabulary. This would later be important in his political oration and the writing of both his plays and songs.

He had always been able to conjure up songs, starting when he was very young and he was learning the traditional songs from his family. This ability to write songs ‘off the cuff’ helped in his theatre work. One of Ewan MacColl’s most famous songs, Dirty

15 Old Town was originally written simply to cover a set change in his play Landscape of Chimneys:

“It didn’t bother me at all that my songs were expendable, ephemeral pieces that could be dropped without trace from a production. Only ‘Dirty Old Town’, which had been written to cover a set-change in Landscape with Chimneys, could be regarded as a song in its own right.” (MacColl, 1990: 276). Song writing was not something that MacColl really thought about, sometimes not even bothering to write them down:

“Some of them weren’t written at all, but were conceived and sung straight from the head, without recourse to the intermediate stage of writing. I didn’t regard this facility as anything particularly noteworthy or important. It was something I did as naturally as talking.” (MacColl, 1990: 276)

Authenticity was very important to MacColl, he gave up singing songs in foreign languages because he felt he could not impart the correct inflection without knowing the exact meaning of the lyrics. He did not like mimicry and so would not imitate another singer’s version of a song. During the researching and writing of the Radio Ballads he would sing his songs to the people he had interviewed and take back early versions of the songs for their comments and corrections:

“We then made rough tapes of the songs and played them to Sam and Ronnie and anyone else who was prepared to listen. Occasionally they would criticise a word or a line or a phrase or they would question a piece of information, whereupon I would rewrite the offending word or phrase and go on rewriting it until it met with their approval.” (MacColl, 1990: 323)

Ewan was a keen student of the acting techniques espoused by Stanislavski. He applied the techniques and theories of acting to his singing and song writing. A song had to ‘feel’ correct in order for it to be sung properly and with the correct feeling and inflection: “The application of the idea of if to a role.” (Stanislavski in MacColl, 1990: 306) He felt that the text, the tune and the history of a song should all contribute to an holistic understanding of the song which would allow the singer to present their own interpretation of all the components and inject their own meaning into the song and therefore into the performance of that song.

16 The folk revival in the 1960s was seen more as a British folk revival by MacColl, the Celtic traditions flourished possibly through the strength of the traditions and the singing of songs at family and religious events such as Hogmanay. It could be that the English folk revival was somewhat stifled by the legacy of the original collectors and the perception of what constituted ‘real’ folk music. They questioned the authenticity of newly written songs and claimed they were not folk music. This approach meant that creativity was not encouraged and new music was not feeding into the tradition meaning that it was not able to grow. The current success of folk artists and the growth of creativity and the delivery of new songs “written in the folk idiom.” (MacColl, 1990: 286) shows the myopic approach of these bastions of English folk. Ewan MacColl discovered a great amount of inventiveness and creativeness in singers that he encountered when touring the folk clubs, had this been encouraged and allowed to flourish by the folk establishment then it is possible that English folk music would have been in better health.

4.2 The Radio Ballads

One of the main driving forces behind much of Ewan MacColl’s performance work was the idea of bringing expression and art to the working classes. He felt that folk music belonged to the working classes; it was their music because it had been their struggle. He felt that it should be reintroduced to them and that they should take ownership of the music which had been appropriated by the collectors who like the idea of folk music but not the folk themselves.

The initial radio ballad was the story of a railwayman called John Axon. He had been awarded the George Cross posthumously for an act of heroism. The locomotive he was driving suffered a brake failure; rather than jump clear while the train was moving slowly uphill he held on and leant out of the cab in order to shout warnings to signal-men along the route. He died as a result of these actions but he did save the lives of an entire train of schoolchildren.

The radio ballads are classics of story-telling through song. Each programme tells the story of the work and lives of the people through song and through the use of ‘actualities’, recorded text from interviews conducted in the field with the people at the very heart of the subject. The songs themselves are then stories about particular aspects of the work or the experiences of one of the people interviewed, where this is

17 the case the experience tends to be one that is more generic and can therefore be applied to more people of that that profession or those within the communities. It was an important element of the radio ballads that they should be representative of the profession or employment being undertaken:

“A fisherman might, conceivably, accept a third-rate song about farm life as a true expression of the country man’s attitude but he would never make the same mistake about a song which dealt falsely with the subject on which he’s an authority: fishing and fishermen.” (MacColl, 1990: 328)

He used a very similar technique to that employed in the Radio Ballads in a cassette that he released in 1985 entitled Daddy, What Did You Do In The Strike? which was written and produced to document the 1984-85 miners’ strike; While not strictly a radio ballad it is constructed in a very similar style with the use of recorded interviews and the placing of these actualities between songs on subjects relating to the miners’ welfare and the struggles and hardships they, and their communities, faced during the strike including the negative portrayals of the strikers in the media and the violence they faced on the picket lines.

The original radio ballads were all written by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger using field research and interviews that had been conducted. They possessed a thorough understanding of their subject through the close contact with the people that they were singing about. In contrast the 2006, or ‘modern’, radio ballads utilised the same structure employed by MacColl, Seeger and Parker but there is not the same feeling of subject knowledge present in the recordings. The artists performing the songs did not necessarily write them and nor did they conduct the research. What resulted is a series of programmes that MacColl would almost certainly have refused to have anything to do with. The idea of authenticity in folk music was very important to him: “A song about fishermen must please fishermen, a song about miners must be convincing to miners, or there is something wrong with it.” (MacColl, 1990: 323) and in Journeyman he relates the story of one occasion when he returned to visit one of the contributors to the herring fishing radio ballad, Singing the Fishing, to sing one of the songs he had created from the material they had gathered whereupon he was told that he (the interviewee) had been singing that song for years: “When I finished writing Shoals of Herring, we sang it to Sam Larner on our next trip up. He was delighted that I knew it for, as he declared, ‘I known that song all my life.’” (MacColl, 1990: 323)

18 4.3 Jez Lowe

Similarly to Ewan MacColl Jez Lowe was composing songs from an early age: “I’d come up with little songs while I was still at school.” (Lowe in Jones: 2001). He became interested in folk music and began singing and performing, however, when he sang his own songs he met some initial resistance because “At that time on the folk scene there weren’t many songwriters, indeed it was frowned upon to be a singer/songwriter.” (Lowe in Jones: 2001) this was because of the prejudice against new songs that could not be termed ‘folk’ because they were not one of the traditional songs collected in the early revival.

His songs are mainly about the industrial areas in and around Durham where he was born and brought up. “The north-east is rich in subject matter and that’s where the inspiration for the songs came from initially.” His songs do have political content and refer to the industrial past of the north-east and the financial and social ramifications of the decline in the heavy industries based in the north. He writes about this area because he “identified more with local things.” This identification lends authenticity and truthfulness to his songs and allows the audiences to identify with the stories he is telling through the songs.

His song ‘The Bergen’ was inspired by a visit to a graveyard in a town on the north coast of England where the local residents had buried the bodies of the crew of a Norwegian vessel that had sunk in a storm just offshore. They did not know the names of the sailors and so marked the gravestones simply with the name of the ship.

As with both MacColl and Kirkpatrick he has been commissioned to write songs and has found that as easy to do as writing songs from moments of his own inspiration: “I’ve done a lot of commissions and it just seems to work, it is hard work but enjoyable.” He was one of the team of songwriters put together for the writing of the new Radio Ballads where the subjects had already been determined, following closely the kind of subjects that were covered in the MacColl and Seeger Ballads.

He finds that there is no set way of writing songs and that sometimes a tune will come first followed by the lyrics, and vice versa: “Is it harder to write the words or the

19 music? ‘It depends really, sometimes I have a melody in my head and no lyrics and other times lots of words and no melody.”

4.4 John Kirkpatrick

John Kirkpatrick was born in 1947 and, in contrast to Ewan MacColl and Jez Lowe, brought up in the south of England. His family lived in Chiswick, West London and they were very musical. He sang and played instruments from an early age, when he joined the Hammersmith Morris Men, aged 12, he learnt to play the ‘squeezeboxes’3 which are the most commonly used instruments for accompanying morris dancing in the Cotswold tradition. He became involved with a London folk club based centrally on Tottenham Court Road and it was there that he met Ashley Hutchings, a singer/songwriter who was already established on the folk scene.

Similarly to Ewan MacColl he was brought up in a musical family who valued the traditional folk songs. The songs he writes are heavily influenced by these traditional English folk songs that he learnt when he was young:

“Most of them are firmly rooted in the conventions of the English folk scene, in which I have been a keen and active participant since my early teens. Any departures from the norm in terms of style or subject are usually caused by some outside impetus driving the song in a particular direction.” (Kirkpatrick: 2000)

He has written songs for the theatre and has had to write songs on request but he can write songs equally well whether they are commissioned or whether they are ideas that have occurred to him through some other process: “from time to time I get the urge to chase an idea, and, for no reason that I can explain, I find I can write and compose to order.” (Kirkpatrick: 2000)

One of the best examples of a John Kirkpatrick song that had a very definite ‘trigger’ and that has become a folk staple is the song Dust to Dust which was written after the death of Kirkpatrick’s father:

3 Melodeon, accordion (button or piano) and concertina (Anglo or English). In John Kirkpatrick’s case they were: melodeon, button accordion and Anglo concertina.

20 “The song ‘Dust to Dust’ was inspired partly by a gravedigger friend and mainly by my grandfather’s very sudden death in 1969… The song has passed through the repertoire of Ray Fisher and June Tabor, and actually been recorded by Roy Bailey, Martin Carthy, and storyteller Hugh Lupton, who thought it was traditional.” (Kirkpatrick: 2000).

4.5 Songs and motivations

Ewan MacColl was deeply political, from his dad’s union activities to his own membership of the Young Communists when he left school he was immersed in socialist and communist theory and ideology from a very young age. These politics continued throughout his life and were a defining point of his work and informed a great deal of his creative output. The plays that he wrote were intended for working class audiences and similarly the songs he sang and wrote were for those same people. Perhaps the most famous examples of these are the songs ‘Dirty Old Town’, originally written simply to cover a set change in the play Landscape with Chimneys, which was about the conditions in the industrial areas of Northern England, particularly Salford where MacColl was born and brought up; and ‘The Manchester Rambler’ which was written slightly after the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout in order to commemorate and celebrate the action that the working class ramblers took to get the land opened up to all people who wished to enjoy it. Aside from these two songs he is probably best known for the Radio Ballads which were broadcast between 1958 and 1964.

His collaborators also tended to share his political beliefs, Theatre Workshop which he founded with his first wife Joan Littlewood was established through a desire to bring theatre to the workers. In his music he worked with Bert Lloyd who was also “an inveterate Marxist” (Brocken, 2003: 25)

The Radio Ballads were written and sung by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and they focused on different areas of industry and on the workers in particular occupations in Britain. Singing the Fishing is about the Herring fishing industry and how it was declining. The Big Hewer is about the coal miners in England and Wales. Less well know amongst his works is a tape entitled Daddy, what did you do in the strike? It follows a very similar format to the Radio Ballads by using actualities from interviews recorded with the striking miners and also other members of the mining

21 communities. It did not focus just on the main coal producing areas of Tyneside and South Wales but also used interviews given by those affected in Kent and the south of the country.

Jez Lowe is from County Durham and his songs deal with the coal mining industry and the social impact the decline has had on the communities in the north east and, in contrast with MacColl and Lowe, John Kirkpatrick is from the south of England and he does not have the same political and protest elements to his songs. He would not have faced the same kind of social and economic difficulties in his formative years as the singer/songwriters from the industrial areas of northern England.

”Throughout both eras of revivalism, musical ‘ruins’ were erected – their function to cater for an affect, to create a ‘real illusion’ which, through the aesthetic emotions it triggered, ceased to be an illusion. This was a contrivance, for somewhere within it lay both a block on reality and a claim to an alternative system of cognition – a post facto false picture of the past combined with an idealised, distorted version of reality.” (Brocken, 2003: 23)

The types of folk song written by those songwriters directly influenced by the revival in the 1960s tend to be more political, about ‘true life’ for the workers or the contemporary ‘folk’. This is particularly true of those songwriters brought up in areas of deprivation and economic hardship. Their songs tend to be either descriptive, designed to make a socio-political statement about the hardships that people endure on a daily basis such as Jez Lowe’s songs about coal production in and around his home town of Durham or they are political rallying calls, attempts to create songs that will inspire people to believe that they can change their circumstances and improve their lives through action, Ewan MacColl’s Manchester Rambler is one example of this style of song, it is a call to all those who believe they should be able to walk where they want to walk and have as much right to enjoy the countryside as those with money and privilege.

Modern folk song writers do not appear to have the same political reference for their work. There is less political content in the work of the younger generation of folk songwriters. This could be attributed to the changes in the political climate following the 1970s and the general depoliticisation of society. The change in focus and the estrangement from the political process that is more prevalent in society, as evidenced by the ever decreasing turnout for election voting, has had an impact on

22 the subjects about which songs are written: there is not seen to be such a need for rallying calls but rather the songs can be entertainment and can be informed less by contemporary hardships and more by the very traditional song types and subjects.

Love songs and ballads, songs informed by historical and true events as well as those based on legends and myths are all popular but while Eric Bogle and Stan Rogers wrote about the Vietnam War there are no songs being written and sung, by the younger generation of English folk singer/songwriters, about the conflict in Iraq. This could be because of a difference in the way the war is reported and the lack of immediacy and engagement felt with the troops in the Middle East but it is interesting to note that it is not a subject that has inspired young songwriters as much as Vietnam did in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, there are fewer songs in the Ewan MacColl and Jez Lowe style, the difficulties and hardships of daily life are not so apparent. Jez Lowe is still singing and writing songs of the North East and the communities there but because there is now perceived to be economic growth and regeneration in areas of deprivation there is not the same impetus to sing about and broadcast the problems they face. There is a move away from the songs of social realism that emerged from the folk revival of the 1960s and there seems to be a return to songs about historical events and, perhaps, the rose tinted ‘Merrie England’ styles that were favoured by collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood and Vaughan Williams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “We don’t inherit or discover history, we create it, and, in this creation, nostalgia is often fundamental to what we feel is a ‘realistic’ creation of history.” (Brocken, 2003:1)

23 5: Modern folk-song writers

“What we nowadays call English folksong is something that came out of social upheaval. That is no random remark, but a statement of what happened in history. It grew with a class just establishing itself in society with sticks if necessary, and rusty swords and bows discoloured with smoke and age. While the class flourished, the folksong flourished too, through all the changing circumstances that the lowborn lived in from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. And when that class declined the folksong withered away and died.” (Lloyd cited in Brocken, 2003: 25)

This is a very pessimistic view of what has happened to English folksong. There has been a degree of change and adaptation within the genre and it is a very different situation for the modern folk songwriters than for those that were involved in the revival of the 1960s. When Jez Lowe started writing and performing his own songs he was discouraged and stalwarts of the folk scene frowned upon the practice. In the modern folk era it is accepted, supported and recognised as an important part of the evolution of the tradition. The annual BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards have a category for ‘best original song’ and the winner of the ‘best album’ and ‘folksinger of the year’ awards in the 2007 was a singer songwriter who performs his own original material and is a commercial success beyond the traditional folk demographic.

Due to the growth of the internet and sites like MySpace which allow people to place their music on them for people to listen to without the need to purchase an album on speculation and the development of digital radio catering to a wider variety of tastes there is an increased availability of, and access to, new styles of music and musical influences available to folk songwriters now than there were in the past and this is allowing for a growth in the music and the song styles that are produced and performed. There is an acknowledgement and appreciation of these influences as well as come incorporation by modern folk artists but there is also a feeling that even with these changes there is still something that essentially makes their music ‘folk’ and the folk audience is the one that will appreciate their music and the songs they write.

24

When analysing the interview responses, using the grounded theory technique of extracting themes, three distinct aspects of the song writing and creative process emerged. These were:

• The initial idea. • The importance of the lyrics. • The necessity of authenticity in the song.

These aspects break down still further with the interviewees talking about what triggers their ideas or, in some cases, re-triggers them; the story the lyrics tell and how they are used to convey the story or emotion of the song; the veracity of the content and the truthfulness of the ‘voice’ of the song.

The song writing, performance and singing styles of those interviewed vary greatly. However, these factors emerged as being important to all of them in the creation of their songs and it is these aspects which assist them in their creativity; knowing what they want the song to say and how they want it to sound tends to be the next stage in the creative process following the emergence of their initial ideas. The tune seems to play an almost supporting role in the song but while it is not the first consideration it has to be right for the song and certain chords and sounds will lend themselves to certain moods, themes and lyrics that then allows the completion of the song.

5.1 Ideas and the first spark

The question of how an idea first occurs is perhaps one for psychologists but what happens with the spark and how some people can turn that from an idea into a song is the question with which this research is concerned.

Mark Orchin’s first ‘Sussex song’ was inspired by a visit to the Anne of Cleeves Museum in Lewes where he saw a painting depicting an avalanche that occurred in Lewes in 1836, which killed eight people. “I found this really big, old oil painting by an unknown artist I think and it depicted the avalanche, the snow avalanche, in eighteen-whatever it was… It showed the devastation of all this snow falling off what

25 they call the Cliffe in Lewes and crushing seven houses and I just looked at it and I thought ‘what a fantastic subject for a song’.”

Following the success of The Night The Snow Came Down Mark began looking for inspiration in the local history books: “by then we’d started to collect, and still have, a number of Sussex history books and I’m always buying them and looking for stories.” Other people also began to send stories to him which means that he now has “a bit of an archive of ships blowing up in the sea and rail disasters and one thing and another.” The next Sussex song to be written was inspired by a book that was lent to him by the parents of the band’s drummer at the time “and it depicted the story of the Wivelsfield train crash” which gave them the song Calamity at Wivelsfield.

Books of local history are an important resource for Orchin and he was already familiar with the works of Bob Copper but returning to those after the success of the Sussex songs provided more inspiration for his song writing: “I’ve read all Bob Copper’s books… he talked about a farm worker ho worked the same routine year in year out… this chap had a diary and he used to write in the diary and he signed up to go in the First World War in the trenches and he was killed on the first day he was there and it said in the book ‘put the cows away, done this, tomorrow I’m going to the war’… I read this story and thought ‘blimey, you’ve got all these people who were probably signing up to go into the war because of the glamour of it, didn’t realise the horrors that’s be in the trenches.”

Books and articles are not the only sources of inspiration for him and one of Touchstone’s most popular songs came from a visit to the South of England Show: “I was at the South of England Show and just sort of wandering round with a beer… and there was a chap doing Saxon readings… and he was doing poems. And one of the poems he was doing was One the Rum – the complete ‘one the rum, two the rum, caw the rum, coo the rum, sin the rum, san the rum, winebarrel, jigtarrel, tarrydiddle, den’ and he was explaining what it meant… and I thought ‘what a brilliant title for a song’.”

Similar to Mark Orchin’s approach is that of Ruth Notman. Although she does not write about historical events of her local area: “there’s not that much because it’s all mining and I find that a bit tedious.” She does gain inspiration from written sources and draws inspiration from the traditional folk songs and the themes they contain ”like in a lot of traditional songs the general storyline, the theme doesn’t really

26 change that much… I definitely take a lot of influence from others and the songs they do, especially the themes.” She does not feel that she is a natural songwriter and she has to “work hard at it.” However, when she is writing more contemporary songs without the perceived pressures of the traditional forms she finds that “it’s easy because it’s just about a good first line and then you carry on into a little chorus.”

The research and discovery approach to finding subjects for songs in one that is shared by other folk artists, particularly those writing about specific events or areas. In contrast to this song writing technique is the more intuitive, waiting for inspiration style that is employed by Gren Bartley and, to a slightly lesser extent, Laurel Swift. These writers tend to depend more on events and occurrences in their lives to inspire them and ideas to come to them rather than necessarily seeking the inspiration or idea for a song.

The inspiration for Laurel Swift’s Midsummer Carol came mostly from the enjoyment she gained from attending festivals and she wanted to create a song that reflected that. However, she also knew that she wanted the song to be a carol to be sung in four parts because Christmas carols are “pretty fun” but she felt that “there must be other times of year when you get carols as well. There are some May carols and there were Easter carols but they became unused. Like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen was originally a May carol but somebody wrote winter words.”

The other source of inspiration that Swift has used is her garden. She uses it as “a kind of quiet retreat and a place of calmness from London.” However, she does not use it as a place to go and write songs or tunes as it is her “calm place’. It does inspire her and one line that occurred to her came from standing in her garden at night and wondering why the sky was orange: “so it kind of came in ‘all the birds are singing boldly as amber drowns the sky/and I wonder if in your lifetime the stars will shine brighter than in mine’, and I was just standing here in my garden going ‘why can I see orange?’ and all the birds tweeting ‘cos they think it’s dawn.” She also believes that “It’s about getting obsessed with one line… I think always one line of observations or comments and then you can build something up out of that.”

It is also the case with Gren Bartley that he often has a line occur to him which he then writes down and expands upon. “I think a line comes into my head and a feeling of that kind of little area that I’m going into, that my head’s going into and I start writing a song but after one or two lines I just get into writing a poem and just getting

27 all the ideas down and often I’ll have two or three lines and then some other things’ll start popping into my head so I have to write them down off to the side and remember that for a later verse then maybe come back to it in a day, a week, a month and think ‘okay, yeah, I’ll put that bit in at the end now… when you have that first line you either knock out the rest of the song and you’ll have all these ideas just kind of popping out everywhere and you write them all down and hopefully get some kind of order and some kind of sense out of it, or you get nothing.” He also says that in order to get started he just needs “a trigger, one great line, one nice little melody, even if it changes, it just gets you started. I think getting started on a song is probably the hardest bit.” He is unable to force himself to write songs but without the inspiration they do not happen: “I try to force myself to do it sometimes and it’s just impossible.”

Bartley always carries a songbook with him to ensure that if an idea occurs to him he can ensure that it gets written down. He then returns to his songbooks and re-reads them which can inspire a new song because he finds he can revisit the emotions that inspired the notation he made originally in the book: “I read through my songbooks a lot and find old things and think ‘ah, maybe I could do something with that now, I remember where I was right then so maybe I can go back there’.” His songs are nearly all inspired by events that have happened in his life, either to him or to those close to him. He finds that he is not immediately inspired by an event but rather that it will be something that happened a lot earlier: “the songs I write about – they aren’t something that happened yesterday or last week – they tend to be something that happened six moths ago or years ago, which is just coming out now. I think a lot of the time songs take that time to work themselves out in your head.” One example of this process is the writing of the song Favourite Red Coat which he considers to be one of his best songs. The idea came to him because his friend was going through a similar life experience that he was also experiencing something similar but it and that allowed him to write it from the point of view of his friend: “I had a friend who lived in my hall at university… who was going through a similar thing at the same time so I totally wrote it from his point of view and the song is going on about ‘Peter this, and Peter that’ and this is my friend from a couple of floors down.”

Laurel Swift and Gren Bartley both mentioned that certain notes or chords make them think of certain words or help them to fill in the blanks they have in a song. Gren says that “certain notes on the guitar just seem to lend themselves to certain words, just the way they, the way it bounces around the strings just sounds like a

28 word almost… words just seem to fall into place over these notes.” For Laurel it tends to be when she is not really thinking about writing a song but she will sit down at the piano and then find a chord which will almost lead to a first line for a song.

The songwriters interviewed all have different subjects that they cover in their songs but they do all have similar ways in which the ideas occur to them. They tend to write about subjects that are familiar to them with the inspiration for the songs coming from everyday occurrences or certain things that have happened to them. Gren Bartley’s songs are inspired by events throughout his life and they come through in his poetry, his prose and in the first lines he thinks of for his songs. Laurel Swift writes about things that she enjoys and things that mean a lot to her in her personal life such as the folk festival season or her garden. By contrast Mark Orchin and Ruth Notman write about stories and their ideas come from the source material they consult including previous songs, local history books and other people’s writings.

5.2 Lyrics and tune

“Folk songs are easy to write because they are typically telling the story or part of the story… so now it’s a question of finding a story that inspires you to write a song.” – Mark Orchin

The songwriters that were interviewed for this research all tended to write the lyrics before the tune (although this is not a hard and fast rule) and they also deemed that, in song writing, the lyrics were more important than the tune, as Gren Bartley says “I guess it sounds pretty obvious that what you’re writing about is obviously going to come out more in the lyrics than in the tune because a tune’s a tune… a tune is just a tune to carry the words.” Laurel Swift said something similar and while she recognised that a song could perform the role of an instrumental if it does not really say anything but she does feel that “in song writing the words are what you’re trying to say… you want the words first and then your tune should emphasise the bits that are important.”

The lyrics come first because they are the access point to the song for the audience; they provide the interest and the engagement for the listener. Bartley believes that the songwriter has to have a “nice little margin of vagueness… you’re an act on stage and you’re trying to put a message across and you want people to identify with

29 what you’re singing and if you’re too literal about what happened to you I think it becomes a little bit more difficult for people to relate to it… people can go ‘oh yeah, that happened to me’ and they think you’re talking about a past love when in fact you’re talking about a pet.” For Bartley the song is about the story and communicating and entertaining people, dragging them into “your little story, your little world.”

Ruth Notman also believes that the song is about the story and the songs she writes reflect this even more so than Gren Bartley’s. Notman does not write about personal experiences but invents characters for her songs and then gives them stories. “I think of maybe a story, a popular story, then give it characters… then I’ll think of events that are going to happen through it and then it’ll be, I’ll go on to the actual lyrics.”

In contrast to Swift, Notman and Bartley Mark Orchin tends to write the tune or the guitar part before the lyrics are written or completed. When writing The Night the Snow Came Down he “came up with a tune… and then the words to the song took me about twenty minutes to write from beginning to end.” With Calamity at Wivelsfield the lyrics were essentially in place as the song was based on a poem written by an eyewitness but he “came up with a set of chords” and Bonnie (Flitney, also of Touchstone) “sang the words of the poem about the train crash straight from the chords. After the tune was in place he “wrote the chorus and it was done in an evening.”

Notman, after she has written the lyrics, then she will “probably make the tune to go with it, then the melody.” She tends to work on the arrangement throughout the process whereas others will wait until they have the component parts in place before arranging their songs. If she is working with someone else then she finds the process changes slightly: “If I’m with another musician then that changes the arrangement. For example, when I was writing with Briony Bainbridge we’d sit down and I’d probably come to her with an idea or she’d say ‘I’ve got some lyrics here’ and she’d say ‘you play the piano on that and we’ll play the chords together and I’ll play you what automatically comes to me in my style’ and then she’d put on top what her style would be and fuse it like that.”

Swift operates a similar technique for creating the music for her lyrics. She will sit down with an instrument or just to sing and then put her minidisc player to record and let it flow. After she has recorded her ideas she then revisits them and transcribes

30 them, as she says, “you’ll have to sit down with it and move things around.” This also applies to how she approaches her lyric writing. Like Gren Bartley she lets the ideas flow and writes them all down and then concerns herself with reorganising them and putting them into the order she wants for her song. “I had all these pieces of paper literally all over my desk and I started changing the order and sticking them together.” When Bartley first began writing songs he used to start with a tune because he feels himself to be a guitarist first as he only really started writing songs in 2005. He would “come up with interesting melodies and round that… just start throwing words at it.” Since he has developed the song writing aspect of his music he has found that certain lyrics or prose that he has written tend to fit into certain rhythm patterns. He has also found that he has other tunes in his head when he starts to write a song: “Often I write songs with another tune in my head so you kind of have that melody anyway and then you kind of mess around with it afterwards. But it means that you always have that kind of rhythm there already even if you don’t have the music as such you already have that rhythm so then you can concentrate more on the words.”

When it comes to the tunes for the songs Bartley and Swift have very different feelings about the music they write to accompany their lyrics. When asked about a particular song entitled Teacher Talks Bartley does not want to discuss it. Clover Abbott, Gren Bartley’s girlfriend, provided more detail about the song: “One of his first songs. He wrote very strong, nasty lyrics. Awesome tune but because he doesn’t like the lyrics anymore he doesn’t play it and I’ve said ‘why don’t you rewrite it? Write some new lyrics but keep the tune?’” The answer from Bartley was that he feels that every tune has its lyrics: “that tune’s done now. It had its lyrics and they weren’t great. I would quite happily do a similar tune but I wouldn’t be able to do the same tune again because that’s the Teacher Talks tune and I wouldn’t use that again… that tune has to stay with those lyrics, it’s a loyalty thing.”

With almost a diametrically opposed viewpoint is Laurel Swift. Within her own song writing Swift feels that the tunes can be more fluid, she is “not protective of a bit of tune” she is “happy to change it to make it fit the words better.” Both Swift and Notman are happy to take parts of other songs and tunes and fuse them together to create something new. Swift talked about a composition she had recently created and the process she used for that: “I was going to do was nick lines from lots of folk songs and get any lines that referred to garden or referred to solitude or referred to calm and steal them and then recombine them and write new tunes and make them into new songs.” Ruth Notman finds that, when working within the traditional genre,

31 the fusing of songs happens almost by accident: “sometimes it’s like, even though you don’t mean to do it, but sometimes you’re fusing songs together and even though to anyone else it doesn’t sound like it but because you’re fusing songs together it is just like rearranging them but you change the words and stuff.”

It emerged through the interviews that the songwriters felt that the lyrics were the most important aspect of the song writing process. The majority of them wrote the words first and then created the tune around the lyrics. However, they all had different processes for writing the lyrics and then putting the tune to the words. Some found that certain chords or notes suggested particular words to them and some found that the easiest way for them to create the whole song was simply to sit down and sing and play and allow the tune to build around the lyrics they had written. So while the initial ideas all seem to come from similar places for the writers the next stage is much more diverse and individual to each songwriter depending very much on the type of song and the subject matter.

5.3 Research and the question of authenticity

Ewan MacColl was extremely serious about the authenticity of the songs he wrote. Many of his early songs utilised his own experiences and they resonated with people because they recognised the people and the places he was singing about. Later, with the Radio Ballads he was writing songs about subjects in which he had no expertise, although the majority of the Ballads were written about the working classes and their daily struggles, which was not a huge departure for the politically vociferous MacColl, he wanted the songs to have the ring of truth for those engaged in the occupations about which he was writing. He achieved this by conducting extensive interviews with people, not just with those working in a specific trade but also the families and communities whose fates were tied up in that same profession and industry.

Mark Orchin of Touchstone also recognises that historical accuracy and the ‘truth’ of a song is important. The band is based in Sussex and many of the songs that Mark writes are about the county and they often relate historical events. There is a wealth of information about the history of Sussex and he utilises those sources in order to tell the story with as much detail and authenticity as possible.

32 The first song about he wrote about Sussex was The Night the Snow Came Down and after the initial spark of the idea caused by the painting in the Anne of Cleeves museum he copied down the story of the avalanche that was displayed beside the painting and then he “found a couple of local history books to reinforce the story to make sure it was all accurate.” He then continued to follow this pattern when writing songs. The majority of the songs he writes for the band Touchstone are based on events in Sussex and he uses source such as Bob Copper’s books A Song for Every Season and Songs and Southern Breezes to provide detail and information about the subjects he is writing about. The song Away to France was inspired by a story in one of Copper’s books about a farm worker who kept a diary about his everyday life and the final entry is “tomorrow I’m going to the war.” He also used Copper’s writings as a reference for the song One the Rum, the sheep counting song, because Copper discusses various festivals that the farmers celebrated including the end of shearing time: “they used to have these huge big celebrations with real ale and food when the shearing had finished and one of the lines is ‘I don’t want to hear the sound of bells again until this time next year’.” One the Rum has also received comments from audiences about the dialect in which the song is written: “it was very well received at folk clubs we played at and one or two people came up to us and said ‘I see you’re using the South-Ease dialect, there is another dialect from Rottingdean and another one from Stanmer’… but a lot of the people, a lot of the folkies, a lot of the local historians knew of this.” His song Man to Man, about smugglers on the south coast, is also an example of how accurate Orchin wants his songs to be. After being inspired to write a song about smugglers following a visit to the smuggler’s caves in Hastings and reading various books he then decided that his song would be specifically about the smugglers on the Romney Marshes: “There are other people that have written songs about smugglers but this is specifically about the Romney Marsh smugglers.

Ruth Notman, by contrast, does not write about the history of her local area and her songs take broader, more generic ‘folk’ themes as their central focus. The question of authenticity for her is that of the voice of the song and ensuring that it is believable to her audience and true to the context in which she is writing. She has recently written a song in the dialect of her local area and to make sure that the song was accurate she listened to a lot of Derbyshire sources: “I have studied, in one song, the local dialect… and I did it about the Derbyshire Dales so I had to listen to a lot of… Derbyshire sources… the wording and stuff like that and I listened to that quite a lot.”

33 The authenticity of the song also concerns Gren Bartley but he feels that the style is less important than the ‘voice’. “I think if there’s no honesty there, even if it’s a song like Three Years Gone, about something else, somebody else, it’s got be… I’ve got to believe it… the singer has to believe what they’re singing.” He has to write from personal experiences, attempts to write made up stories have not worked and he admits “when it comes to writing in the traditional folk style, you know these old folk ballads – they’re tough to do because I’m just not that literal when it comes to writing.”

When asked where he felt that his songs fit into the folk genre in the absence of the ability to write in the ‘traditional folk style’ he answered that “there seem to be a lot of… young songwriters on the folk scene at the moment… And they’re not writing these literal folk songs anymore, they’re writing very much about emotions and I think that’s where I fit in. I’m not sure if I’ll always fit there but right now that’s what I’m aiming for, aiming towards. There are a lot of other influences – because music is so accessible these days via the internet, radio and cds… you can just find random cds from some guy who’s writing about subjects you’ve never even thought to write about… Whereas in the past you’d be stuck to a very small circle of friends… and the old field recordings. It’s so much more varied now.”

This view of how folk music has changed and developed also echoes the thirteen classifications of folk song that Kidson and Neal made in 1915. There is a wide variation in the types of singers and songs in folk music and increasingly there are influences from outside the traditional folk circles and songs. Bartley also emphasises the necessity of this development and change in keeping the genre fresh and interesting for audiences. “It is important that the folk music is always evolving because that’s pretty much what it is. There’s so many different genres of folk music from various periods in the past. To keep it new now it is important for people to write about what they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing but it still needs to be accessible.”

All of the songwriters that were interviewed for this research were concerned with the question of authenticity. Those that write in the more ‘traditional’ style want the audience to believe that what they are hearing is a real traditional song; those that write in the more modern and contemporary style are more concerned with the audience appreciating the honesty of the song and becoming involved in the emotion and message contained within the lyrics. It is not that they are unable to create if they

34 feel that the song is not honest and authentic but they do find it harder. When the songs are written from life experiences it is easier to make sure the emotions are honest; when writing songs in the traditional style the song must be true to the form being used and thus the writer must make efforts that their creation meets the requirements of that particular style. There has to be an aspect of comfort with what the songwriter is saying in order for the song to be written.

35 6: Conclusions

A deep knowledge and understanding of the subject matter helps to make a song more believable and creates a resonance with those hearing it. Songs like Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town and The Manchester Rambler and Mark Orchin’s Away to France have a strong element of truth to them and through that they make people feel the emotions and really engage with the subject matter contained within the song.

However, the idea of authenticity does not necessarily have to relate to the contents of the song. The style of the song is also important within the folk genre. Despite songs such as Wonderwall by Oasis and Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Greenday being performed by people at folk related gatherings, possibly due to the ease with which they can be played by soloists with guitars, they are still not regarded as folk songs. These songs were popular chart hits before they were performed at folk gatherings and therefore their authenticity is in doubt; the perception is that artists who are not ‘folk’ have written these songs for financial gain.

While it is impossible to generalise about the actual, specific process each folk songwriter uses to write their songs there are certain aspects of the songs and the methods used which are the same or similar. All of the songwriters interviewed were concerned about certain aspects of the authenticity of their songs. However, these aspects were different for each of them. Honesty of voice, accuracy of historical information and the story being told were all important to them.

The concept of a ‘first spark’ was one that the songwriters recognised. They all had songs which had been inspired by an event, a picture, a story, a place, another song and other everyday occurrences. However, whether those ideas get converted into a song is another matter.

The lyrics were deemed to be the most important aspect of the song. They tend to be written before the tune, although certain sounds or chords can be suggestive of words. The lyrics are there to tell the story and they are what allow the audience to share in the emotions being conveyed by the song.

36 Authenticity was important to all those interviewed. However, it was not the historical accuracy aspect of authenticity that was thought to be the most important. The desire for authenticity ranged from wanting the story to be accurate using source material to ensure that the song was essentially correct to wanting the ‘voice’ of the song to be authentic and wanting the audience to relate to the content of the song.

The songs that the participants write are all folk songs and yet they all have very different styles within the genre, there are similarities in the songs and music that they create. What is also interesting is the contrast between the interviews they gave and the styles of their songs. Gren Bartley gave the longest interview and spoke extensively about many aspects of his songs and writing but his songs are the ones that use language most sparingly and convey emotions and events with the concise and precise selection of words. Ruth Notman, who writes her songs in the style of the old story ballads, gave the shortest interview and that reflects her song writing process which utilises the norms and recurrent themes and language of the genre, for her it is very structured and easy to follow and that emerged through how she talked about her song writing and through the length of her interview. Laurel Swift is extremely energetic and enthusiastic when talking but her songs are much more considered and they display a more relaxed side and quiet and solitude emerged as important parts of her life as she spoke about the inspirations for her songs and the need to be tranquil in order to create her music. Mark Orchin probably has the closest relationship between his interview style and the way in which his songs are written. He is a storyteller and he keeps the story flowing with little deviation, much like the songs he writes, the research he does for his songs shows in his interview and it is demonstrated in the songs; they tell the story but they all have the human element which draws in the audience and gives them somebody with whom they can identify.

6.1 Research limitations and difficulties

This subject is not one that has been specifically examined before. There are several limitations with this research that stem from the lack of previous research. This is very much a first attempt at combining the ideas of creativity and examining the processes that different people use in order to write their songs. The focus of the research was necessarily narrow and focuses on those writing within the English folk genre. This study provides a very small examination of how songs are written within

37 the parameters of English folk. A more extensive study could have included many more interviews and possibly focus groups in order to gain a fuller and broader understanding of the creative process. Focus groups could have been used and these could have meant that the songwriters would have had a sounding board for their ideas and found similarities and differences in the way they thought about and actualised their songs. The number of interviews conducted was dependent on time and availability of subjects. Unfortunately for this research it had to be undertaken in the summer when many folk singer/songwriters are engaged in their busiest season and spend a lot of time away from home travelling to venues and festivals. This could also apply to other genres and if further research were to be undertaken it would be advisable to avoid evidence gathering during the summer period.

The interviews focused on those songwriters currently working and writing. There is also an examination of three prominent songwriters who began their song writing careers earlier than those that were interviewed. This was a paper-based investigation and ideally the study would have included more interviews with a wider range of age groups.

The use of face to face interviews as the primary research tool was effective, however, it also posed some difficulties as the research timeframe covered the summer period which is the busiest time of year for the subjects as it is the season when they are most likely to be away working at festivals. Ideally the research would have been conducted during the off-season in order to ensure wider availability of participants.

38 6.2 Areas for further research

This specific subject is not one that has been investigated previously and so any subsequent research in this area could take many routes.

The idea behind this study was to find out the process songwriters working within a specific genre used in order to create their songs. Future research could examine:

• Songwriters in other genres and how they work; are there any significant differences? • A comparison between the folk traditions; do Scottish, Irish and Welsh folk songwriters employ similar processes? • Political struggle and the folksong medium; protest songs and their inclusion in folksong heritage (e.g. The World Turned Upside Down, The Digger Song and The Blackleg Miner). • Political change and the change in the subject matter of original folksong compositions. • Oral tradition versus researched subject matter; does research on a subject enhance the song or is the ‘folklore’ enough? • What role can local libraries play in assisting songwriters? Is there scope for providing song writing workshops alongside those provided for other forms of creative writing? • What role can local studies libraries play in assisting songwriters?

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44 Appendix 1

Barrett’s Privateers by Stan Rogers – Lyrics

Oh the year was 1778 (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) A letter of marquee came from the King To the scummiest vessel I’d ever seen

CHORUS: God damn them all! I was told we’d cruise the seas for American gold We’d fire no guns! Shed no tears! Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier The last of Barrett’s Privateers

O, Elcid Barrett cried the town (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) For twenty brave men, all fishermen, who Would make for him the Antelope’s crew

CHORUS

The Antelope sloop was a sickening sight (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) She’d a list to the port and her sails in rags And the cook in the scuppers with the staggers and jags

CHORUS

On the King’s birthday we put to sea (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) We were ninety-one days to Montego Bay Pumping like madmen all the way

CHORUS

45 On the ninety-sixth day we sailed again (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) When a bloody great Yankee hove in sight With a cracked four pounder we made to fight

CHORUS

The Yankee lay low down with gold (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) She was broad and fat and loose in stays But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days

CHORUS

Then at length we stood two cables away (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) Our cracked four pounders made an awful din But with one fat ball the Yankee stove us in

CHORUS

The Antelope shook and pitched on her side (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs And the main truck carried off both me legs

CHORUS

So here I am in my twenty third year (How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!) It’s been six years since we sailed away And I just made Halifax yesterday

CHORUS

46 Appendix 2

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle – Lyrics

Now when I was a young man I carried me pack And I lived the free life of the rover. From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback, Well, I waltzed my Matilda all over. Then in 1915, my country said, "Son, It's time you stop ramblin', there's work to be done." So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun, And they marched me away to the war.

And the band played "Waltzing Matilda," As the ship pulled away from the quay, And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears, We sailed off for Gallipoli.

And how well I remember that terrible day, How our blood stained the sand and the water; And of how in that hell that they call Suvla Bay We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter. Johnny Turk, he was waitin', he primed himself well; He showered us with bullets, and he rained us with shell -- And in five minutes flat, he'd blown us all to hell, Nearly blew us right back to Australia.

But the band played "Waltzing Matilda," When we stopped to bury our slain, Well, we buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs, Then we started all over again.

And those that were left, well, we tried to survive In that mad world of blood, death and fire. And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive Though around me the corpses piled higher.

47 Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head, And when I woke up in me hospital bed And saw what it had done, well, I wished I was dead -- Never knew there was worse things than dying.

For I'll go no more "Waltzing Matilda," All around the green bush far and free -- To hump tents and pegs, a man needs both legs, No more "Waltzing Matilda" for me.

So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed, And they shipped us back home to Australia. The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane, Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla. And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay, I looked at the place where me legs used to be, And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me, To grieve, to mourn and to pity.

But the band played "Waltzing Matilda," As they carried us down the gangway, But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared, Then they turned all their faces away.

And so now every April, I sit on my porch And I watch the parade pass before me. And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march, Reviving old dreams of past glory, And the old men march slowly, all bones stiff and sore, They're tired old heroes from a forgotten war And the young people ask "What are they marching for?" And I ask meself the same question.

But the band plays "Waltzing Matilda," And the old men still answer the call, But as year follows year, more old men disappear Someday, no one will march there at all.

48

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda. Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? And their ghosts may be heard as they march by the billabong, Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda with me?

49 Appendix 3

Interview transcriptions

Mark Orchin ET I’m looking at where the ideas for songs come from and how those songs then get written, so I’m thinking of the ‘Sussex Songs’: Night the Snow Came Down, things like that, so it’s really where the initial idea comes from Night the Snow Came Down MO Well, the history of that song, if that’s of interest, [E: yes] Yep, ok, erm, I’d decided I wanted to sort of form a folk rock band anyway, so our very first incarnation of Touchstone was a bit like a Fairport Convention copy/cover band, y’know, so which is predictable. Anyway, I thought if we’re going to do this band properly the best thing to do would be to actually write some original songs. Now, if you’re in a folk rock band it’s too tempting to write pop songs because that’s how they tend to come out. I was in the Anne of Cleeves museum in Lewes and, er, I found this really big, old oil painting by an unknown artist I think and it depicted the avalanche, the snow avalanche, in 18-whatever it was, the actual details are on the album sleeve. It showed the devastation of all this snow falling off what they call the ‘Cliffe’ in Lewes and crushing 7 houses and I just looked at that and I thought ‘what a fantastic subject for a song’. So I sort of came up with a tune and sort of like a lead guitar intro bit which is kind of folky but we obviously play it very heavy. And then the words to the song took me about 20 minutes to write from beginning to end. I just got the story; I wrote the story down longhand. By the side of the picture there was this story, I also found a couple of local history books to reinforce the story to make sure it was all accurate. I then had to get permission from the Sussex Archaeological Society to use the photo, to actually get the photograph of the picture which then became the front cover of the first record and we’ve used it lots and lots of times. And we had to licence that as well, for use on the cassette sleeve. And that was the very first one and it just worked so well, um, y’know, the idea of having a modern folk song about a story, and that was really the first one, then we got the bug, and the next one that I wrote probably of any note would be ‘Away to France’. Away to France MO And my long association with the Copper Family going back to when I was about 15, so about 35 years ago, whoops just given my age away! I remember reading all, er, I’ve read all of Bob Copper’s books and many of them several times: I think it was ‘A Song for Every Season’ he talks about, or the other, the second book which is ‘Songs and Southern Breezes’ I think it was. He talked about a farm worker who, erm, worked the same routine year in year out, so the same routine every day on the farm where the whole agricultural process hadn’t really changed much in a thousand years and, apart from the industrial revolution but, this chap had a diary and he used to write in the diary and he signed up to go in the First World War in the trenches and I think he was killed on the first day he was there and it said in the book, y’know, ‘put the cows away, done this, tomorrow I’m going to the war’. And I read this story about this thing here and it just, I thought ‘blimey, you’ve got all these people who were probably signing up to go into the war

50 because of the glamour of it, didn’t realise the horrors that it’d be in the trenches and I came up with this sort of haunting guitar intro which is in the drop D tuning and whatever and the very original concert that we did here with it we actually had some really big sound effects, had canons going off and feet, we created a marching army in the studio feet going up and down like this and then you double record it and overdub it and overdub it and all the sounds of the battle which are actually on the original track. And so that was inspired by that, and the futility of mens’ lives and whatever going to a totally pointless war. So by then we kind of got the bug a bit more. Bonnie then wrote Onion Pie. Onion Pie MO Which by then we’d started to collect and still have a number of Sussex history books and I’m always buying them and looking for stories. So Onion Pie Bonnie wrote entirely herself I out the chords to her tune and she found the story of the girl who was murdered by her brother’s husband, erm, can’t remember the woman’s name, Sarah French, that was right. She murdered her husband so that she could live with her husband’s brother who she fancied and the story goes that the body was buried and everything went as normal and then words started to, whispers started to occur in and around Chiddingly, but you know anyway, that all was not right so a Home Office pathologist was called down, the body was exhumed and put in the belfry of the church where they examined the body and found that he had been poisoned with arsenic which is very difficult to discover. This is in Victorian times and she was the last woman hanged in Lewes prison in Sussex in 18- whatever it was, it was 1856 or something. Anyway, Bonnie saw that story and absolutely thought ‘it’s got to be a song, it’s never been done’ so that was that process. ET Was Chiddingly folk camp part of it having to written as well, or was that..? MO We’d done it anyway. It just coincided with folk camp at Chiddingly and it, you remember that period ‘cos you were quite a lot younger then and it’s dunno 15 years ago or so [laughs]. How old were you then? 5? ET I was 7 I think MO 7? ET The first one, yeah. MO But it was all of that period. The band was popular, the songs were popular, people liked the songs and the song that we wrote about Chiddingly was about the very place we were staying at. And it, we’ve always had a joke when we’ve played at the Six Bells that ‘don’t eat the food’ there because it could have arsenic in it. The landlord’s always going mad, Paul, saying ‘no, don’t keep saying that to them, they might believe it!’ But last year at Crawley Folk Festival we had a friend of ours playing, his son playing rhythm guitar with Touchstone, and his name is Tom Onions and he was doing some backing vocals so when we got to the bit where [sings] ‘she poisoned the onions’ all his parents and brothers and sisters were sitting in the front row and I just completely cracked up! So by then people started to give us stories to look at and Chris Jewel’s parents gave us a number, they kept giving me articles that they photocopied out of books or cut out of newspapers and we’ve still got a bit of an archive of ships blowing up in the sea and rail disasters and one thing and another, and then our drummer at the time, Darren, his parents leant me a book which was last in print in 1935 and it depicted the story of the Wivelsfield train crash which we’ve got a song called ‘Calamity at Wivelsfield’. Calamity at Wivelsfield MO And what happened there was the driver of the train, sorry the guard of the train that crashed into the other train was quite an articulate fellow and wrote

51 a poem in rhyming lines, is it iambic pentameter? When every other line rhymes or whatever, can’t remember how it is. Anyway, poems that rhyme like that with the same syllables are very easy to put to music because, y’know, the phrasing of the words is perfect. All we did was we used, because it was out of copyright we didn’t have to get permission to use it, we did have a futile attempt to trace the ancestors of the chap but didn’t succeed, this is before the internet was very big so perhaps we could now. And I came up with a set of chords, we just, Bonnie sang the words of the poem about the train crash straight with the chords and I wrote the chorus and it was done in an evening. And we were really excited about that because it er, it’s a good stage number. I always play it too fast and I’m always getting told off by the others for starting it too quick. And it’s got a fantastic fiddle solo in it and it depicts the story of the Wivelsfield train crash. Which, erm, the actual location that the crash took place in was called World’s End and as a result of this fatal train crash they renamed it Wivelsfield. Because no drivers would, the train drivers refused to stop there, and it was, I think it was Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve 1899 so right on the millennium as it were and they refused to stop there because of the bad superstitions about World’s End. So that was quite an easy one and then I suppose one of the best ones is One the Rum. One the Rum MO Many years before I started Touchstone I was at the South of England show and just sort of walking round with a beer and walking in and out of the various different tents and looking at all the stuff and er, it’s, you’ve been to the South of England show haven’t you? It’s at Ardingly showground and it’s a huge country show you can buy anything there. And anyway, I was in one of these craft tents and I came outside and there was a chap doing Saxon readings and he had a Saxon hut that was built out of logs and twigs and he was dressed like a Saxon and he had an axe and a shield and he was doing poems. And one of the poems that he was doing was One the Rum, the complete one the rum, two the rum, caw the rum, coo the rum, sin the rum, san the rum, winebarrel, jigtarrel, tarrydiddle-den. And he was explaining what that meant. And I stood there with my beer transfixed by this and I thought ‘what a brilliant title for a song’. So I wrote it all down on a bit of paper and I’ve got a file at home that’s got songs in progress written on it and it’s full of rubbish as you’d expect – only the good ones get out – anyway I wrote this down and forgot about it and then I found another book and in it was the story of the Sussex sheep counting because it’s a rhyme and it all adds up to 20 cos the shepherds couldn’t count, they didn’t go to school, they didn’t do y’know sort of school as we do now obviously in the Victorian times the schools were far and few between in rural areas. And this was a very very ancient, right back to Saxon times, rhyme, they used to count using rhymes and it was very accurate cos that’s the one the rum all the way to winebarrel, jigtarrel, tarrydiddle-den is 20 which is one score and they used to count sheep in scores and pen them in scores of 20 and then we found that there was loads of different dialects of this bloody one the rum rhyme and when we first went out and played it it was very well received at the folk clubs we played at and one or two people came up to us and said ‘I see you’re using the South-ease dialect, there is another dialect from Rottindean and another one from Stanmer’. It was like ‘woah! This is too much detail’. But a lot of the people, a lot of the folkies, a lot of the local historians knew of this and y’know it’s got a slight comedy edge to it that song, but basically again reading one of Bob Copper’s books where he talks about the different festivals the farmers had where when it was shearing time this is what that was all about, it was all about shearing

52 time. You know the rumours about the shepherds and the sheep can leave to your own imagination but, they used to have these huge big celebrations with real ale and food when the shearing had finished and one of the lines is ‘I don’t want to hear the sound of bells again until this time next year.’ And they would be the sheep bells obviously. So that was inspired really by 2 things reading the story about the annual shearing and putting the one the rum rhyme to it. Where are we now? Erm, I suppose I’m doing these from memory. The latest one is the Sea of Providence Sea of Providence MO And that’s, I think, one of our best tracks. It’s perhaps a little bit heavier and a little bit more rocky but the folk story behind it is probably one of the best. I did know of this story many many years ago and it’s in a book I’ve got at home on Sussex disasters which is a great place, you don’t get many happy ones. It’s only when large loss of life and calamitous loss of money occurs that anyone writes it down. But Sea of Providence was all about the 1747 wreck of La Nympha Americana which was a ship that had been captured from the Spanish at Cadiz in a battle with the Royal Navy and been converted into a, not a passenger ship, it was a merchant ship and word had got round, probably through the customs officers that this ship was carrying the most incredible amount of valuable cargo and in today’s terms – it had quicksilver on board which is highly valuable material – in today’s money it was worth well over £30million plus all the usual brandy, tobacco, erm, y’know all the other things that they would trade – spices and jewellery and arms. Anyway, the ship was wrecked off Birling Gap, near Cuckmere Haven, and it was just such a terrible story because there were 120 lives lost on that ship and the wreckers or the ‘Seaford Shags’ as they were known. A Shag is a - Bonnie said she’d never sing that word but she does, we always have a grin about it on stage when she sings it – because Shags are birds that sit in holes on the cliffs and the Seaford Shags were wreckers and smugglers who used to hide in small caves along the Seven Sisters and Seaford Head and along that area there. And we found yet again another poem about it and we used quite a bit of the sort of the poem we actually put the poem on, it was a poem that was written before but just about sea disasters and we used parts of the poem in the song so that was part of the source. But also the whole image of these wreckers and coast guard, not coast guard then – they were customs officers – deliberately let all the crew and the passengers drown they didn’t do a thing to save any of them even when they were begging for mercy to be saved from the waves but they couldn’t be roped out of the water. They didn’t want anyone, any survivors that could tell on them, but they did get found out and they found, I think it was 9, bodies on the way home the following morning, it was a November night, and 9 of the wreckers had drunk so much brandy that they’d collapsed and fallen into a stupor on the way home and they found their bodies frozen to the South Downs next day. So, but the passion and the violence involved in that whole thing was just too good not to be in a song. So let me have a look at the… set list. Cos what we’re doing at the moment is we’re trying to – the band is going to change after this year cos obviously Bonnie, er Richard, erm Chris is moving to Devon so it’s Chris’s last gig. But we have a new line up everyone in place and we may well use this as a way of relaunching a lot of this Sussex stuff. Ok, so No More Heroes No More Heroes MO Just a quick one on that one. That was written basically using stories I’d read about press gangs going into pubs and inns and taverns along the coast and basically taking people by force to go and man the ships. So no special thing about that one really but it’s quite a nice song.

53 The Poacher MO That was inspired by – it’s basically there’s a big estate in Wivelsfield Green, where I live, and this estate in the 1930s held a massive, massive pheasant shoot and all the nobility and royals or whatever used to come down to this place and as a shooting estate it was second to none. I saw a channel 4 series on – this is going back a few years – a channel 4 series and there was a book about it as well and the book and the series denoted the collapse and the breakdown of most of the big country estates in England and also the plight of the workers on these estates, those below stairs, the servants and the, particularly the gamekeepers and how an estate like this estate would have had probably 10 gamekeepers working full time, living in and being quite well paid. And then on the other side of it the poacher would get transported - obviously before the end of the Victorian times – for stealing pheasants or rabbits even. And part of this song was the futility of actually being transported to Australia for stealing a pheasant. Then I found out that the government of the time were trying to populate the colonies with people who had farming and agricultural skills and the best way to get them was to send the poachers over there because they knew that they’d set up and be successful. But the song is really written around the futility of that and also the contrast between the chap trying to steal something to feed his family and the stately home where the opulence and the money was just so at odds with the poacher’s plight. That was quite a good one. And I think probably the last one is Man to Man. Man to Man MO Was inspired, again, by a couple of stories in a book. We’ve got a host of these books. And also by, we did a visit to Hastings, to the caves and Hastings Castle and all that stuff. And there was a big thing on smugglers so being me I got really interested in smugglers and read it all up. Just the barrenness of the Romney Marshes on the other side of the county and into Kent and all the network of people, in many cases in quite responsible positions like the local parson, the magistrate, the sheriff, all the people that were involved with the smuggling industry. It seemed too good. There are other people that have written songs about smugglers as well but this is specifically about the Romney Marsh smugglers. And there was a line on a, there was a, in Hastings Caves there are a number of different friezes with models, a bit like Madam Tussauds, in the act of smuggling. They’ve got barrels, they’ve got guns, they’ve got all the clobber on and there was a couple of poems there about ‘baccy for the parson, baccy the clerk, and brandy for the magistrate’ or whatever and it was the interest in the fact that people in authority that, probably like now, the big money is behind the naughty stuff. And that was just one about smugglers. MO We’ve got a file with ideas in, there’s no end. The next subject that I’ve been reading up about is the gunpowder because Sussex had – and these stories are all based on Sussex as well which is quite unusual – but there were lots and lots of gunpowder factories in Sussex. Most of the military factories in Naploeonic times and before then were along the South coast and southern counties because of the proximity to the continent, so you manufactured canons near where you were going to use them and the gunpowder factories were – I mean we could probably laugh about it now – but they used to blow up and all the workers would be blown to pieces and killed. No health and safety and this ridiculous ban on smoking anywhere now, they had to go outside to light their clay pipes at the gunpowder factory but frequently used to set off the powder, blow the place up. But there’s got to be a good song in there for that. There’s a more latter one that someone gave me, a story about a ship in Seaford Bay in the second world war that was full of

54 armaments that blew up and apparently the bang could be heard in London. There’s lots of stories like that that we’ve still got in the can, I suspect that what will provoke us to writing more songs like this will be actually finding a completely new story that suddenly catches the imagination. It’s quite hard to go back on a story you’ve been through and think ‘let’s write one about a gunpowder factory blowing up’ it’s not that easy to find the words. The chorus is probably going to have ‘bang, bang, bang,’ in it! ET So do the words then come easily if it’s an idea… MO The good ones come very easily and they’re quite simple to complete. Folk songs are really easy to write because they are typically telling the story or part of the story and it’s – I mean Bonnie and I wrote one about – I’d read about the – I’d done a lot of reading on American history – and I got really into gold miners in 1949 so we had a song called ‘The Gold Rush’ about the 1949 miners, it’s not a Sussex story at all but the story was interesting and I thought ‘wow, that’d be good for a song’. So now it’s a question of finding a story that inspires you to write a song. Who knows?

Laurel Swift LS Ok, one of the songs I wrote was Midsummer Carol and the idea was that you get Christmas carols and there’s big harmonies and that’s pretty fun but there must be other times of year when you get carols as well. And there are some May carols and there were Easter carols but they kind of became not used. Like God rest Ye Merry Gentlemen was the tune was originally a May carol but somebody wrote winter words so I was like ‘I’m going to write a midsummer carol’ for singing at festivals (which nobody has but that’s not the point). So I knew what occasion I wanted the song for but I didn’t, but I’ve never really written I hadn’t really written any songs at all at that point and I had a deadline as well! So the kind of process I did was I knew that I wanted a chorus that was made up partly of nonsense words so I just kind of doodled around with words for that. And then.. ET Why did you want the chorus to be nonsense words? LS I don’t know really… just for the kind of relief of not singing words probably – just thought it’d be fun. And yeah, and the I had, I did have a four line poem that I’d written that I quite liked and I decided that I’d use that as the basis of the song so it was, what was it..? I can’t even remember it, but basically I took, and I wanted to work up to the poem so the poem was the point of the song. So the first verse, the last line of the first verse would be the first line of the poem, the second line of the poem would be the last line of the second verse and then the third line of the poem would be the last line of the third verse and then you get the actual poem and then you’ve got another verse kind of building on from that so it kind of had a story to it round this one little idea so I didn’t have to write any real words I just wanted to give an impression of summer but it was all just words bumbling around to kind of put this poem inside it so it was: ‘friends for a second, lovers for a day/our paths cross and then soar away/our worlds collide with flying sparks and then once again you break my heart’ or I break your heart it could be either way round. So the first verse is setting the scene for summer. So all I did for the process of writing it was, I’m ok at writing couplets so I can manage 2 lines and the rhymes at the end but I couldn’t manage more than that so I just wrote loads and loads and loads of couplets and then I wanted the idea of having the, all the different moons happening, so like harvest moon and September moon so I had a bit from May day til harvest moon and that

55 spans the festival season. So I had all these pieces of paper literally all over my desk and I started changing the order and sticking them together. Some of the best lines were just like a last minute thought. And from there it was, I’m better at writing tunes anyway. I knew I wanted it to be in four parts so I wrote the tune part but then when I wrote the second part, I, with part songs they don’t always come in at the same time, they have a bit in counter – not counterpoint – homophonic texture and then it goes into different people coming in at different times which meant I could play with the words and take words out of other people’s parts and not really change the meaning but change the order of it. So the bass part has a lovely bit where it goes ‘our starry spirits rise’ whereas the other lines are slightly longer with ‘skies are starry and our spirits rise’ or something. That’s one song. We do quite a lot of songwriting with Shooting Roots – and it’ll be like making up words to go with a tune to help them to remember the tune. I’ve got a few that I’ve written – usually when I’m really pissed off and I sit down at the piano and I’ll just be going like that and the ‘oo, a chord’ and then eventually whatever’s bugging me the most will come out in a line and then I’ll be ‘oh, that makes quite a good line for a song’ and kind of go on from there. I’ve written a few songs to calm myself down when I’m really fed up about something usually I’m thinking about it and thinking about it and finally get to the point when y’know it’s not worth crying over and it’s like ‘oo, that would make a nice song’. usually you’ll have to sit down with it and move things around. I did a composition in April and I did some songwriting in that and again, it was, I wanted to do an instrumental piece but I wanted a singer to kind of link the sections so although it was an instrumental piece it kind of had a narrator, narrative to it. So I had, I’d been through a book of folklore on plants and picked/stole some bits and then stole couplets and then added some extra bits around them to make it make more sense and I decided it didn’t matter – I was trying to write complete songs so one part of the composition would be a complete song but I decided that having a narrative would be easier for the audience to listen really hard to 2 lines and then think about them for a minute of music and then have the next little bit or a related thought so it’s just kind of strands of thought so I was quite pleased with that little bit but it wasn’t so much songwriting as orchestration. ET Where did the idea for the whole composition come from? Was that something you were asked to do specifically or was it..? LS It was a thing called The Steel which encourages folkies to do songwriting, to do composition, and you had to apply to showcase a piece but if you got it then you actually had to write the piece in order to showcase it! So I had to – for the application - I had to come up with an idea so I think I used the idea of my garden as a kind of quiet retreat and a place of calmness from London and it always used to be when I was a kid like festivals were the retreat cos it’s where you come to and it’s your own little world and everybody’s friendly and it’s all the music you like and stuff. But then as I’ve got older and I’ve worked in the industry it’s like festivals are just like Oh My God! So I go home and my garden’s like the retreat so I was combining the 2 – writing folky music about my garden so that’s where the idea came from. And then what I was going to do was going to nick lines from lots of folk songs and get any lines that referred to garden or referred to solitude or referred to calm and steal them and then recombine them and write new tunes and make them into new songs but I got really stuck when it came to the bit of trying to find - like all the references to garden were actually rude, generally referring to girls and it’s only new age folkies who write about solitude and calm – you don’t get old age folkies.. so that was the point I went to the book of folklore

56 on plants instead and just tried to find out some things about plants and there was a thing of like – there’s a rhyme that goes ‘when kissing’s out of fashion then gorse is out of bloom’ cos gorse blooms all the year round so I set that to little bit – I don’t think I ever used that one. Then I also found out that parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme meant something or other but I can’t remember what! Sorry! I can’t remember what the second line of the song was but they were symbolic of something. ‘if ivy climbs and…’ it was like if ivy does this before this month then the person you love is going to turn up at Sidmouth this year. If it doesn’t then they won’t. The composition was that I’d written lots and lots of little sections on the day before the rehearsal I’d got 4 minutes of bits and no 12 minute composition so I just got to whack it all together and I think that pressure of having a deadline makes you creative. The day before I put the MP3 on to record and just st and played for 20 minutes and then sang for about another 10 minutes and then I spent all of Sunday transcribing it and I used all of that as the basis of the composition. ET Do you actually sit in the garden and write tunes or is it that you go out there to retreat totally from it and then come back in? LS In general I just go out there, yeah it’s more like go out there for total calmness and calm space. The other one is go and sit up in the room at the back of the house and look over the garden and other people’s rooftops and just sit there til you’re chilled out til you think ‘yeah I could go and play now’. Usually the thing is press record on the minidisk and play. There’s some things I’ve written songs and tunes where I’ve found a trad thing I like but it’s a 13 part tune and some bits of it are really good and I’ve just worked and worked away at it and kind of done cut and paste but then rewritten the gaps and that sort of thing. I think it’s always getting obsessed with one line as well – there’s one line in a song that’s like ‘and all the birds are singing boldly’ and I was like ‘I want that in my song – how’s it going to fit in?’! so it kind of came in ‘all the birds are singing boldly as amber drowns the sky/ and I wonder if in your lifetime the stars will shine brighter than in mine’ and I was just standing there in the garden going ‘why can I see orange?!’ and all the birds tweeting cos they think it’s dawn. So I think always one line of observations or comments and then you can usually build something out of that – what did I mean by that sentence? Unpeeling the lines. ET For you do you find that the tune always comes first? LS No, I think the words are the important thing so I think… I find writing tunes easy and I find writing tunes for songs easy and I’m not protective of a bit of tune – I’m happy to change it to make it fit the words better but I think in songwriting the words are what you’re trying to say. Sometimes there’s like a tune can be an instrumental – you’re not really trying to say anything, you’re just filling time with voices but I still think you want the words first and then your tune should emphasise the bits that are important.

Ruth Notman RN To start with I’d usually tend to – I first started when it was source material, I was listening to source material and then listening to loads of artists and wondering how they got from the source material stuff. So by arranging first, learning how to arrange songs then I started to write songs. Then the process would probably be content first. If I think of the content usually I think of maybe a story, a popular story, then give it characters. If you have a character or something. I tend to pick a character or something like that and then it’s – after that you generally get a story and then I’ll think of events that

57 are going to happen through it and then it’ll be, I’ll go on to the actual lyrics, then start writing the lyrics then that leads onto the rhymes at the end of them and stuff, simple things like that. And then I’ll probably make a tune to go with it, then the melody, so I’ll probably get the melody and the chords at the same time. I arrange them at the same time – a lot of people, some people write them and then arrange them afterwards, I tend to arrange them as I go along. If I’m with another musician then that changes the arrangement. For example when I was writing with Bryony Bainbridge we’d sit down and I’d have, I’d probably come to her with an idea or she’d say I’ve got some lyrics here and she’d say you play the piano on that and we’ll play the chords together and I’ll play you what automatically comes to me in my style and then she’d put on top what her style would be and fuse it like that. Then if I brought to her a set of lyrics and she’d change the lyrics and stuff so that’s a good thing about working with other people because – it depends what style you’re writing in. If you’re writing in a traditional style then obviously – well I tend to study, well I have studied in one song like the local dialect, well my – it’s a new song that I wrote for one of my coursework pieces and I did it about the Derbyshire Dales so I had to listen to a lot of sources like Derbyshire sources, like a lot of the wording and stuff like that and I listened to that quite a lot. It’s not a massively long process. ET So you do quite a bit of research? Do you tend to find, you say you did a local dialect song, do you also local stories? RN Well where I come from there aren’t many, there’s not that much because it’s all mining and I find that a bit tedious. I prefer the proper traditional stuff like stuff that goes back a bit further. I prefer to go back a bit further so in my local history there’s not really that much but there are some things that you take influence from , like in a lot of traditional songs the general storyline, the theme doesn’t really change that much it’s still pretty much the same. ET So do you come across a theme or an idea in, say, other traditional songs and find you want to do one along similar lines? RN Yeah, sometimes, it’s like even though you don’t mean to do it, but sometimes you’re fusing songs together and even though to anyone else it doesn’t sound like it but because you’re fusing songs together it is just like rearranging them but you change the words and stuff. Definitely take a lot of influence from others and the songs they do, especially the themes. ET And you build the characters around that and make up the whole story just from a few ideas? ET Some of the others I’ve spoken to have said that they gwt a first line, I mean, do you get that as well? RN Not really because it takes, I wouldn’t say that I’m a natural person to, I work hard at it but sometimes I’m lucky if I’m writing more contemporary songs then it’s easy because it is just about a good first line and then you can carry on to a little chorus but it’s different when, I think there’s a certain amount of intellect involved when you have to do folk songs because, especially if you’re dealing with traditional people who like traditional songs if you’re gonna try and write a traditional sounding song and if it sounds pants they’re gonna shout you down. ET So it’s got to really feel..? RN You’ve got put something – cos I think you can tell ET Again, that’s something other people have picked up on – if you’re going to tell a story it’s got to be one that people believe. Song style and so on. When you write more contemporary songs are they ones you wouldn’t necessarily perform at a folk gig? RN Well, if I do it’ll be like it’ll be to contrast from everything that I’ve done before and I’d usually play it at the end or something like that but I wouldn’t usually

58 play it in a gig, no.

Gren Bartley (assisted by Clover Abbott)

GB When I first started writing songs I always used to start with a tune - I was a guitarist first and i started writing songs a lot later. So I’d come up with interesting melodies and round that I’d just start throwing words at it, not random words but kind of I dunno, a lot of song writers have these ‘meaningful words’ which they try to use in every song. I’ve heard that a lot actually. And I don’t have a list of words which people use but I’ve heard people say they have a list of words. Certain melodies on the guitar, cos I’ve always written on the guitar, the guitar tune when I first started. certain notes on the guitar just seemed to lend themselves to certain words, just the way they, the way it bounces around on the strings just sounds like a word almost. It’s not like the guitar’s talking to you but it’s not far off! These words just seem to fall into place over these notes. So cos I started with that then I just started filling in the blanks. Since then I’ve got more and more into song writing I’ve realised that it’s actually the lyrics now which are a hell of a lot more important to me than the guitar part. So now I’ve started writing a lot of poetry, writing a lot of random prose or little stories or whatever, in a little songbook that I have - I take the songbook with me everywhere, actually I don’t have it on me! But if I did have it on me I would have carried it with me everywhere. You kind of look through that and sometimes you’ll have a particular prose that even if you need to arrange the lyrics somehow, or even if it’s already there it just seems to fit into a certain rhythm pattern. Often I write songs with another tune in my head so you kind of have that melody anyway and then you kind of mess around with it afterwards. But it means that you always have that kind of rhythm there already even if you don’t have the music as such you already have that rhythm. So then you can concentrate more on the words. And you can start writing about things that are important to you. Or are, at least, important to me. However, when I am writing about these things it tends to be - the songs I write about they aren’t something that happened yesterday or last week - they tend to be something that happened six months ago or years ago, which is just coming out now. I think a lot of the time songs take that time just to work themselves out in your head, a gestation period - yeah. I’ve never written a song about something that’s just happened. From that you start messing around with a guitar and you go ‘ah, those lyrics that I wrote 2 months ago about something that happened 2 years ago might work well with this tune

ET Do they tend to be life experiences that you write about?

59 GB Yeah, I think so. I just read a great passage actually by a singer, Devon Sprall(sp??) and she seemed to put this very well. Great songwriter. She was saying that you need to find a delicate balance between being subtle and almost cryptic and then, how she put it was ‘and then a carbon copy of your bedside diary’. Which is pretty horrible. And you need to find a nice little balance in the middle there. And it’s true, you’re writing these songs about things that happen to you but you don’t want to be too obvious and you don’t want to be too cryptic so people don’t know what the hell you’re going on about. A nice delicate balance I think is the way forward.

C Do you ever think about what other people will hear in them when considering what you’re writing?

GB I do, I do. It’s a communication thing I think. You don’t want to be too obvious, you don’t want to give too much away. You’re an act on stage and you’re trying to put a message across and you want people to identify with what you’re singing and if you’re too literal about what happened to you I think it becomes a little bit more difficult for people to relate to it.

ET Bit too much like reading the personal diary?

GB Absolutely, yeah.

ET INtrusive rather than inclusive?

GB yeah, yeah, so if you can find that just nice little margin of vagueness where people can go ‘oh yeah, that happened to me’ and they think you’re talking about a past love when in fact you’re talking about a pet. I don’t know it could be anything. As long as people can associate with it it’s great. It is a communication - you are up there entertaining people or trying to drag people into your little story, your little world. So you have to be quite vague I think.

CA Use some examples - talk about some of your songs

60 GB ‘Favourite Red Coat’ (FRC) for instance, I still think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s a song which was - I’d split up with a girlfriend years before - but I didn’t write it from that point of view and I had a friend who lived in my hall at university who was on a couple of floors below me - really good friend - who was going through a similar thing at the same time so I totally wrote it from his point of view and the song is going on about Peter this and Peter and this is my friend from a couple of floors down. That made things a lot easier when it came to writing cos I didn’t have to be too literal about what happened to me. I didn’t really know the full story of what happened to him so you can fill in your own blanks a little bit. But then, because it has that vagueness to it, that anonimity I think that people can relate to that a little bit better.

CA But you did use a lot of present cues for that song, like things that you’d taken from our relationship

GB True, very true. The last verse for instance is kind of looking round the room thinking ‘well, I’ve got all these things, nothing’s really that bad.’ I think anyone can do obvious things like books, a cup of coffee and a coat, I mean the song’s about his favourite red coat. Putting those things in keeps it fresh. And songs will evolve over years and years and years and hopefully I’ll be playing that song in a few years to come, I may leave it for a while then come back to it in a few years but I do like it and, as I say, I think it’s the most accessible song that I’ve written and people seem to associate with it and little things like that, even if I do change the lyrics maybe in years to come just to keep it fresh i think that’s important as well. It always sounds formulaic and it’s not, you don’t *need* something that everyone can immediately associate with 0 you just need to have that overall feeling that people may have been through that before, obviously not everyone’s been through that but...

ET So do you kind of get an ‘oo, this could be a song’ type of feeling or does it come to you that it is a song and you just need to write it down? Or is it a conscious thought that ‘this needs to be a song’? Or does a line come into your head?

61 GB I think a line comes into my head and a feeling of that kind of little area that I’m going into, that my head’s going into and I start out writing a song but after one or two lines I just get into writing a poem and just getting all the ideas down and often I’ll have two or three lines and then some other things’ll start popping into my head so I have to write them off to the side and remember that for a later verse then maybe come back to it in a day, a week, a month and think ‘okay, yeah, I’ll put that bit in at the end now or, as I said, it just takes a bit of time for these songs to kind of arrange themselves in your head, but, that first, when you have that first line down you either knock out the rest of the song and you’ll have all these ideas just kind of popping out everywhere and you write them all down and hopefully get some kind of order and some kind of sense out of it, or you get nothing. And you have this one line and you think ‘yeah. Don’t really know where to go with that’. And maybe, I read through my songbooks a lot and find old things and think ‘ah, maybe I could do something with that now, I remember where I was right then so I can go back there’ or it’s gone forever. But my songbook is full of just one or two lines dotted around which sometimes they turn into songs and sometimes they don’t.

CA That writing poetry thing seems to be a recent change, about 6 months to a year ago you just went [raspberry noise] and a song came out?

62 GB It is a very new thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of very poetic songwriters like Devon Sprall, Kelly Joe Phelps, whose an old hero of the guitar, and whose lyrics were very simple and bluesy has gone very poetic recently and although I don’t quite get everything that he’s saying and it’s not really my cup of tea anymore I still kind of appreciate what he’s trying to do. Tom Waites as well, he just has an ability to describe things which, he must be, he just has a totally different thought process to everybody else – it’s strange what that guy can come up with. And then you get the very descriptive songwriters, I think Tom Waites falls into that category as well, but also David Francey, who is a Scotsman who moved to Canada when he was young, he’s now about 45 and he played here, at Towersey, 2 or 3 years ago? I’ve got all his cds, absolutely wonderful, one of these songwriters who can describe things in the simplest possible way but just make it sound beautiful, absolutely beautiful. So that’s all really started influencing me in the last year or so. So from there, every time I get an idea I think it’s worth just putting it down on paper even if it’s.. I’ve got a song written on the back of a cigarette packet which I’ve now stuck on my noticeboard. I can’t really read most of it anymore but it’s there. I found another one on a slip of paper in a – my bedroom’s a mess at home, it’s like half office, half bedroom, there’s papers everywhere – and I found a piece of paper which I don’t even remember writing but I quite liked it so I copied it into my songbook and (actually I just stuck the paper into my songbook) and it’s there and it is just so important to write all these things down because I do read through them, all my old songbooks, and you do kind of go back and visit these places that you were just as you wrote them and even if you don’t remember exactly when and where you were but the feeling’s still there and you still know what you were going on about. And I just think it’s very important note things down in the book. And hopefully that’s what all these people I admire are doing as well or I’m getting it all wrong! Eric Bibb, another hero of mine, says he often wakes up in the middle of the night, about 4 in the morning, and goes downstairs, writes a song and he knows within half an hour whether he has a song or not or if it’s just not going to go anywhere. If it is going to go somewhere then he takes another couple of hours to finish it and that’s quite similar to what I do, I don’t do it at 4 o’clock in the morning but I know pretty quickly if it’s going to turn into a song. Then it takes a bit of time whether minutes, hours, day, years for it to finish. But it starts out writing a song and it either happens straightaway and you get all theses ideas down and if you have that melody on your head then it’s got that structure already. Or it can take a long time to do. I think I’m probably closer to what Eric Bibb does rather than someone who spends a lot of time over writing songs.

CA You don’t angst over it – you don’t sit and cross out words and rewrite them or do anything. You don’t look at it and change words you tend to get it out and then that’s it, isn’t it?

63 GB Yeah, yeah, sometimes they’ll change but the thing is, I feel like I’m contradicting myself a little bit but it really isn’t that rigid. I don’t just write songs that way. It’s so hard to do that ‘cos I try and force myself to do it sometimes and it’s just impossible. Sometimes they just take a long time, sometimes they happen in 5 minutes, sometimes you have the guitar part like that, sometimes the guitar part comes a lot later, sometimes you start with a guitar part, sometimes you start with the lyrics, sometimes you start with the tune, it’s ah…

ET Do you think there tends to be some sort of trigger for it? Or is it just sort of wandering along with, not a blank mind, but not really thinking about anything else? Maybe visual clues might help trigger things. So, you’re friend’s break-up took you back to something… Is that the sort of thing that would happen often?

GB I think lyric wise that’s very true, as for the music, I guess it sounds pretty obvious that what you’re writing about is obviously what you’re thinking about is going to come out more in the lyrics than in the tune cos a tune’s a tune – some people might shoot me for saying that – but a tune is just a tune to carry the words – doesn’t explain why I wrote so many instrumentals but anyway… I think a lot of – you can trace back a lot of my songs to one or two other songs and although they now sound, y’know when I’ve finished my songs, it sounds nothing like the songs I had in mind when I was doing them. I don’t know, just need a trigger, one great line, one nice little melody, even if it changes, it just gets you started. I think getting started on a song is probably the hardest bit. Sometimes you’ll have a good day and write 4 or 5 songs in a day and then you won’t write anything for 2 months, it’s not that you’re not writing anything it’s just that you just don’t finish a song for 2 months and it’s strange.

ET Again, does something happen 2 months later and you suddenly go ‘oh, I know!’

GB Yeah, actually it does. And I wouldn’t know how to say what triggers that.

CA Is it reading through your songbook?

GB Yeah, you read through it. I’m desperately trying to learn things all the time, especially on the guitar and I feel that the way to get better with my writing is I just write a lot and then you become a little bit more fluid with what you’re trying to say and you get a better contact between your writing hand and your brain.

CA That’s quite a recent trend as well, isn’t it?

64 GB It is, yeah, and I’ve been working very hard at just writing everything. Whereas with guitar I’m always trying to learn new theories although I’m not classically trained or anything so there’s a lot of gaps in my guitar playing knowledge so I’m trying to fill those in all the time. Sometimes I go ‘ah, that chord there could fit into that song that I didn’t know where to go with 2 months ago’ and that actually happens quite a lot.

ET So just a chord on the guitar and you go ‘oh’?

GB Yeah, it’s just a different way to finish the melody. It can give you so many more avenues to go with the lyrics and that happens quite a lot actually – I’d not thought about that til now. It was very much an unconscious thing, now it’s conscious! It’s very much a combination of finding these new chords on the guitar, finding interesting ways to play a melody and then hopefully getting a bit more fluidity between your hand and your brain and writing these things down

CA Can I ask some rapid fire questions about some of his songs that he’s written? How did you write ‘young love’?

GB Young Love - that was really quick. I had the lyrics first but the tune came about 5 minutes later. That was a ridiculously quick song to write – literally about 10 minutes. There’s only 3 verses and all the verses are pretty similar but it’s just a quick banjo tune – I’m not very good on the banjo yet so I only really knew one tune on it anyway so I played that and then sang the lyrics over the top and that’s what we got.

CA Three Years Gone?

GB Three Years Gone. Now, that’s a bad song to talk about because I realised I didn’t have any fast songs in my set so I wrote a fast song.

ET So, with that one did the tune come first?

65 GB The tune definitely came first. I came up with a nice riff and just used that for the basis of the song. And it’s true, I actually tell this story onstage, that it was part of a trilogy of songs which got written over about a week, of a girl who ran away, sorry a guy who ran away from his girl because he was feeling restless and that’s the first song, then the middle song is him going ‘oh no, that’s a terrible mistake’ and coming back (C: 3 years later). The last song was her answer. I tell this onstage – I don’t play the first song cos it was rubbish and that happens a lot, I throw away so many songs just cos they’re not very good, 3 Years Gone was the one in the middle which is the one I wrote first out of the 3. Then the answer, I really was never happy with – I just couldn’t seem to put those things down very well. Again, those avenues between what I was thinking and what I was writing just weren’t there yet and I’m still working on them.

CA Moral Lasts?

GB Ok, that was one of those deep seated songs. Which – I only started writing songs when I was, what? 22? So 3 years ago. And I strongly believe that everyone has at least one really good song in them. And I think my… And then you have to work really really hard on the rest. Favourite Red Coat was the song I believed I had which was always going to come out eventually one way or another. Fortunately it came out in a nice song instead of alcoholism. Moral Lasts is another one that was quite deep seated but it’s quite a lot about family disruption and those kind of experiences came to me as a kid. Not that I had a horrific childhood by any means but those kind of things stay there for a long time and just sort of wash around in your brain and then if you become a songwriter they pop out in a song and if become an artist or a novelist or whatever they come out a different way.

CA City of Sleep. Oh, oh, Moral Lasts - you were going to dismiss that one but then you decided to keep it

GB I was, yeah, but that was because you told me it was good.

CA You were going to throw it away and then came back to it. Have you done that with any other songs?

GB Three Years Gone I did that with. I thought ‘I can’t believe I’ve just written a fast song just for the hell of writing a fast song.’ Then I thought ‘actually I quite like it’ so I kept it.

CA Ok, City of Sleep

66 GB City of Sleep. That was the first song actually that I’ve been really proud of the process. The lyrics came first but they were very different to how they are now on the album. I changed those lyrics a lot just to get them right, to exactly what I was thinking and I really thought about it, then I added a chorus much later on cos I thought ‘ok, this is going to turn into a song’. And then the music came months after I wrote, in fact, maybe 4, 5 or 6 months after I wrote the lyrics.

ET What was the trigger for that?

GB The trigger for that one? Well, I split up with her (Clover) for a short time. And that’s what the song’s about. Obviously very powerful emotions for me and, as I say, really proud of how those came out. It was another song I was going to throw away. I felt like I’d worked it too hard.

CA You wrote it entirely when we were broken up didn’t you? When did the music come? After we got back together?

GB The music came after.

ET So the tune came after you got back together?

GB Yeah

CA Was that immediately?

GB No, not immediately. It was a couple of months after

ET Was it almost that you were happier in your personal life and therefore felt able to finish the song?

GB I’m very reluctant after I’ve. It kind of contradicts what I was saying but it only applies to certain songs where I’d be very reluctant to go back to them and especially when they’re as emotionally based as that, I’d be very reluctant to go back to them and change it cos I’m not in that place anymore. Whereas some, like 3 Years Gone aren’t about me, third person thing, it doesn’t matter if you go back and change the lyrics as long as you keep the story the same it’s fine. And it’s a very literal song it’s talking about things that happened to somebody else or fiction but happened to somebody else. Whereas a song like that is all very much about emotions and how you’re feeling at a very particular time. So I’d be very reluctant to go back to that song and change it.

CA What about Teacher Talks?

67 GB Teacher Talks – that’s a ridiculous song, let’s not talk about that one. I don’t play that song anymore.

CA One of his first songs. He wrote it very very strong nasty lyrics. Awesome tune but because he doesn’t like the lyrics anymore he doesn’t play it and I’ve said ‘why don’t you rewrite it? Write some new lyrics but keep the tune?

GB I don’t know. That tune’s done now. It had it’s lyrics and they weren’t great. I would quite happily do a similar tune but I wouldn’t be able to do the same tune because that’s the Teacher Talks tune and I wouldn’t use that again

ET So you find that then? A tune has its lyrics?

GB I’m a very loyal person. That tune has to stay with those lyrics, it’s a loyalty thing.

CA There has been a definite shift in your songwriting. Your early songs and method was quite different to your…

GB Yeah, it was always the guitar first when I started because I was a guitarist to begin with. The lyrics were certainly a lot more simple than they are now and…

CA He’s also got into poetry as well

GB Yeah, songs like Past Lovers as well. That was an interesting song, it was, again, very literal about stuff that I just wouldn’t be able to write about anymore, it’s just an incredibly cheesy song and I wouldn’t be able to do those anymore (at least I hope I can’t do those anymore!).

ET So you feel there has to be an honesty in the song?

GB Yes, very much so. I think if there’s no honesty there, even if it’s a song like 3 Years Gone, about something else, about somebody else it’s got to be… I’ve got to believe it.

ET So, if it doesn’t feel true…

GB I think that’s so important – the singer has to believe what they’re singing

CA You have tried a couple, written stories, just made up stories, haven’t you? But they never stuck.

68 GB When it comes to writing in the traditional folk style, you know these old folk ballads. They’re tough to do cos I’m just not that literal when it comes to writing. There are ways of writing things like that, I mean Richard Thompson can do it, Kate Rusby can do it, and I’m not sure what it is they can do but they can keep these songs – great story, exceptionally literal so everyone knows what’s going on but they’re not cheesy, they’re not clichéd, they’re not just full of a million things you’ve heard everywhere, in every other folk song. I’m not sure how they do that.

ET How do you feel that your songs fit into the folk genre?

GB There seem to be a lot of – although not so many male – but there are a lot of young songwriters on the folk scene at the moment. I’ve seen Kate Fagan this weekend who was fantastic, Martha Tilston who’s out there. And they’re not writing these literal folk songs anymore, they’re writing very much about emotions and I think that’s where I fit in. I’m not sure if I’ll always fit there but right now that’s what I’m aiming for, aiming towards. And there are a lot of other influences – because music has become so much more accessible these days, like via the internet or to the radio or cds or whatever.

ET There does seem to have been a shift, doesn’t there? If you look back to the 60s revival they were doing quite political, telling stories about struggles and so on and now it isn’t quite so much like that, it’s stories, people.

GB There’s so many more influences now, as I said, you can just find these random cds from some guy who’s writing about subjects you’ve never even thought to write about and you can find these cds in any shop. Whereas in the past you’d be stuck to a very small circle of friends and in the folk revival of the 60s they’d be listening to the radio and the old field recordings or blues players. It’s so much more varied now.

ET Is it because it’s traditional instruments, what makes it the folk?

GB It seems to have gone backwards almost. The 80s, bless ‘em, were awful for the folk industry because everyone was into synthesizers and dance music and – that’s so generalized, that’s not what I mean at all – but all these new instruments were coming in and so much more technology was available that people were excited by that. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work for the folk scene from my point of view and I think from most people’s point of view cos it seems to be going back to acoustic guitars, fiddles, melodeons, accordions, you know, all the traditional instruments which people were playing hundreds of years ago.

ET So it’s going back to ‘real’ folk music, it’s people making their own music on the more traditional instruments and it’s what they want to write about because that’s what the original folk songs were. It’s changing and developing.

69 GB It’s another delicate balance between writing about, writing folk songs about things you’ve experienced but keeping them accessible for everybody else. There’s a very certain subset of people who come to folk festivals and listen to folk music, generally, just looking round here, everybody’s white for a start, the age groups are either 16-30 or 55 and over. So you need to be writing about things that people like that can associate with or there’s no point in singing to these people, otherwise you need to go and sing to people who are into that kind of music. So, yeah, there’s a delicate balance there as well. It is important that the folk music is always evolving because that’s pretty much what it is. There’s so many different genres of folk music from various periods in the past. To keep it new now it is important for people to write about what they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing but it still needs to be accessible.

70