This review ran first over at Green Man Review.
He took out the maid and he hung ‘er up to dry,
And there was three fiddlers passin’ by.There was one o’ them he took three lengths o’ her hair
Ayee, O an’ sae bonnie, O
There was anither o’ them took her breast bone.
And the swan it swims sae bonnie, O
There to make a fiddle-head to play a tune upon.“Twa Sisters”
Ewan MacColl and his wife Peggy Seeger collected extensively from traditional singers in Britain. In addition to books of their own songs and various small collections, they produced two anthologies about the music of Britain’s nomadic people: Travellers’ Songs of England and Scotland, and Doomsday in the Afternoon: The Folklore of a Family of Scots Travellers, The Stewarts of Blairgowrie. I found this book in a dusty old shop near the Old Quarter — it’s a rare book, but not impossible to find as it was done in American and British editions.
This is true musical ethnography. Travellers’ children still have no compulsory rights to education in Britain or Scotland. None of Ewan MacColl’s informants could read or write, so he literally took their music and gave it the first written record it ever had. The Travellers — Tinkers and Rom, ranging from those who are still living in horse-drawn caravans to those who have settled down — are a crucial source of local music in England and Scotland, as they exist on the fringe of society, where change is much slower than in the mainstream. The remembrance and singing of traditional folk songs has often been an aspect of the culture of marginalized people.
Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was born Jimmy Miller, Ewan has had as much influence on British folk music as Pete Seeger did on American folk music. Born in Scotland and later living in London, Ewan was originally a playwright during the ’40s, but during the early ’50s he turned to promoting British traditional music during the so-called folk revival in the UK. In the late ’50s, he and his wife, Peggy Seeger, collaborated on a series of Radio Ballad productions for the BBC, from which we get legions of his fine compositions. One of those Radio Ballads was on the Travellers. Ewan had, like many of his fellow Left-leaning musician friends, a deep interest in those they perceived had been marginalized by society. The Travellers certainly met his criteria of one of these groups.
This was the first major study of the Travellers since Alice Gillington’s Songs of the Open Road, published in 1911. The couple collected songs from England and Scotland over a fifteen-year period beginning in the early ’50s. The book contains 131 songs, some in multiple versions, along with the music and comprehensive notes relating the songs to both their folkloric and historical backgrounds. Travellers’ Songs of England and Scotland includes traditional ballads and broadsides, bawdy, humourous, and tragic songs covering subjects such as drink, fucking, dancing, working, and death. (Lots of folks end up in the cold, cruel ground.) Several of the songs herein are reputed never to have been collected before, but who can say for sure?
What the book does not contain is many songs ’bout the Travellers themselves. A mere seven of the songs are ’bout the Travelling life: “The Gypsy Girls,” “Diddling Songs,” “The Moss o’Burreldale,” “Jal Along,” “Mandi Went to Poov the Grais,” “The Atching Tan Song,” and “Hi, Bara Manishee”. All great songs, but everything else is standard fare, including 19 songs from Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads! Not that this isn’t interesting stuff, but really now — the title is accurate only if you accept that the song sources are Rom and Tinkers. That much is true, but these folks are more, culturally speaking, English and Scottish than they are Rom and Tinker.
So hunt the book down for the supplementary material more than for the songs themselves. It’s a very good book, but not the definitive collection of Travellers’ music.
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977)
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