recording `the william morris songbook`

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RECORDING ‘THE
WILLIAM MORRIS
SONGBOOK’
This autumn sees the production of a double CD entitled ‘The
William Morris Songbook’, a collection of traditional and other
songs which Morris may either have heard or known during his
lifetime, or which – had he lived long enough – he would most
probably have also liked, and learned. Here, Eddie Farrell, who
along with Frankie and Catie Farrell is a member of Farrell Family, the band which has recorded the CD, explains the reasons for
the project and for the choice of songs.
A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it or it
could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or
who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke
and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and
where the peace is (Woody Guthrie speaking to Alan
Lomax, 19 September 1940)
As David Goodway recently pointed out, William Morris
(like Joan Littlewood and Brendan Behan) consciously
employed song as a political weapon. The Morris family also
liked to play and sing songs from the Scottish and English
traditions; Jane played the piano, Morris himself and their
elder daughter Jenny the mandolin, and May, their other
daughter, the guitar. In other words, as in the case of a number
of families more famous for their music than the Morrises (the
Coppers of Rottingdean – neighbours of the Burne-Joneses? –
the McPeakes of Belfast, the Stewarts of Blairgowrie, and
nowadays The Unthanks, or Waterson-Carthy), the Morrises
had a ‘family band’.
As another (somewhat more modest) band which plays in
the same traditions (and the Irish), some time ago we
wondered whether it might be interesting (and therefore fun!),
to record a collection of songs which Morris himself might
either have heard during his lifetime (or even have known and
sung), or which, in the case of more recent songs – and had he
lived long enough – he would no doubt instinctively have
liked and learned, owing to the points these songs make
regarding those social and political issues in which Morris
himself was interested (or would later have been). This idea led
us to develop ‘The William Morris Songbook’ – not a CD of
Eddie Farrell, photograph Brendan O’Sullivan
Morris’s own songs, which are nowadays not very easy to
obtain – but of songs which Morris – had he known them –
would probably have learned and sung.
As such we see our eVorts as very much part of the ‘story of
history’ which Morris himself used (for example in his
romance A Dream of John Ball) in order to make important
political points. Or as Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son put it:
… one of the things … I learned from … my mother
and my dad … is that … wanting to make the world a
better place is not something that started with The
Weavers. … They … continued a tradition that’s probably been going on for as long as people have been
around. … That’s the job of being a human … to make
the connection to the future and hold on to the connection to the past. (Arlo Guthrie, Harp- A time to sing! US
National Public Radio, 20 April 1985)
First Nation Australians see the world as an endless,
unfolding story, and regard those people who ruin it, and
themselves, as having literally ‘lost the plot’. This is our
contribution to that story, and these are our songs.
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disc one
The Cutty Wren (Trad. arr. Farrell Family)
A very ancient ritual song which may originally refer to the
pagan custom of the sacrificial ‘King who must die’. According to folklorist AL Lloyd, during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 –
the setting for A Dream of John Ball (‘John the Red Nose’?) – it
was adapted by the rebels to refer to King Richard II. They
demanded that all Church lands be given to the people. Richard initially agreed to this, but of course once the rebels dispersed, he betrayed them. The tune was used (as ‘Green Bushes’) by Vaughan Williams in his English Folk Song Suite, and by
George Butterworth in The Banks of Green Willow.
Clerk Saunders (Child 69; Trad.)
As indicated, the Morris family loved to sing and play ‘Scotch
Ballads’. The story of Clerk Saunders was painted both by
Morris’s great friend Edward Burne-Jones, and by Elizabeth
Siddal, wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and so is something of
a pre-Raphaelite icon. I learned this version from the singing
of the great June Tabor, a piece of hubris I still regret.
You Noble Diggers All (Winstanley, arr. Farrell Family)
A song from the ‘English’ Civil War of 1642–1649. The Diggers were a radical group who in 1649 occupied and began cultivating common land at St George’s Hill, Surrey and other
places. Their manifesto (A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed
People of England) demanded that all common land be
returned to the people, it having originally been stolen from
them. The song is said to have been composed by the Digger
theoretician and activist Gerard Winstanley. Ironically, St
George’s Hill these days is a gated community, and therefore
most probably occupied by a modern collection of ‘oppressing
lords of manors, exacting landlords and tithe-takers’.
The Mores (words by John Clare; tune arr. E Farrell)
I was looking for a song about the Parliamentary Enclosures
(1760–1820) – when many poor people were driven oV the
land (and the big landowners made a fortune), and the English
landscape changed radically, often overnight – and came
across these verses by the poet John Clare (1793–1864), who
witnessed many of these events at first hand. The melody is
used for several songs well-known to traditional singers; in
England Lord Franklin, and in Ireland, The Croppy Boy.
The Chartist Anthem (Arr. Farrell Family)
The anthem of Chartism, a mainly working-class movement
for political reform in Britain (1838–1848). The tune is an
ancient one, used, by Ewan MacColl for example, for the
medieval ballad Johnnie O’ Breadisley (Child 114), which everyone at the time would probably have therefore known. Chartism took its name from the People’s Charter of 1838 which
demanded – among other things – universal adult male
suVrage, secret ballots, no property qualification for being an
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MP, all MPs to be paid, all constituencies to be the same size,
and perhaps best of all, annual parliaments. Now there‘s an
idea!
The Durham Lockout (Tommy Armstrong, arr. E Farrell)
One of a number of ballads about nineteenth century life in
the Durham coalfield by the pitman songwriter Tommy Armstrong (1848–1920). This one is about the great strike or more
correctly ‘lockout’ of 1892. By that time Morris had almost
ceased campaigning politically, but had been to Northumberland to speak during an earlier miners’ strike (1887). I learned
the song from the singing of the great Bob Davenport.
Willie McBride (‘The Green Fields of France’; Eric Bogle, arr.
E Farrell)
Probably the finest anti-war (but not anti-soldier) song ever. I
remember, when I was a child, seeing ‘the old people’s’ mantelpieces with rows of photographs of young men in uniform,
almost all of them dead’. Now I’m one of the ‘old people’, the
memory remains. The song has been recorded many times,
but again, never quite like in the version by June Tabor.
Two Good Arms (Charlie King, arr. E Farrell)
My father told me about the two Italian anarchists Fernandino
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927 for a murder
and robbery they almost certainly did not commit: he called it
‘a true example of American justice’. During 1887–8, Morris
was part of a campaign to free the earlier ‘Chicago Anarchists’,
falsely convicted of terrorism, four of whom were also executed.
Hijos del pueblo (Trad, arr. E Farrell)
A song from the Spanish Civil War, popular with members of
the anarcho-syndicalist militias of the Confederacion Nacional
de Trabajo (CNT). I learned it from a modern-day cenetista,
Ramon Muns i Andreu, a very fine Catalan singer I met in
Barcelona on the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish revolution
in 1986. While recording it, I was struck by the similarity
between the Spanish Anarchists’ vision of the Earth under
socialism – ‘¡Bello jardin la tierra sera!’ – and Morris’s description of England in News from Nowhere; ‘… a garden where
nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt …’.
The D-Day Dodgers (Harry Pynn, arr. E Farrell)
My father, who served in the Royal Navy during World War II,
taught me parts of this song, and I filled in the rest ‘oV the net’.
Nancy Astor, the first woman member of the UK parliament
to take her seat (although not the first to be elected) is said to
have described Montgomery’s Eighth Army, at that time liberating Italy from fascism (and therefore not taking part in the
Normandy landings of 1944), as ‘D-day Dodgers’. Among the
‘dodgers’ were Major Denis Healey (beachmaster at the Anzio
landings, and later ‘Labour’ Chancellor of the Exchequer),
features
StaV Captain Richard Hoggart (author of that great book The
Uses of Literacy), and Lance Bombardier Terence Arthur
(‘Spike’) Milligan.
Plane Crash at Los Gatos (Woody Guthrie, Martin HoVman;
arr. Farrell Family)
Woody heard about this plane crash – in which the passengers
killed were described as ‘just deportees’ – on the radio. Martin
HoVman later set Woody’s poem about the crash to music.
Conditions for migrant labour have clearly not improved
since 1948, as witnessed by the death of the Chinese cocklepickers on Morecambe Bay in 2004. Julie Felix popularised
this song in the UK during the 1960s, which is when I first
heard it.
the death penalty, finally abolished (for most oVences) in 1965.
Evans and his family shared a house with John Christie, later
shown to have been a serial-killer. Someone recently remarked
how fortunate it is that the death penalty has already been
abolished in this country, as modern politicians, whose every
action is governed by focus groups, would never have the guts
to do it. Evans was granted a Royal Pardon in 1966.
The H-Bomb’s Thunder (John Brunner, arr. E Farrell)
Science-fiction writer John Brunner’s song became the
anthem of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
during the late 1950s. The melody is a variant of the great nineteenth-century Welsh hymn tune, Calon Lân. Frankie’s mother Prue was on some of the earliest CND Easter marches, from
Aldermaston to London, during the 1960s.
If you miss me at the back of the bus (Carver Neblett, arr. E. Farrell)
A song from the American Civil Rights movement which
refers – among other desegregation issues – to Rosa Parks’s
refusal in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, to give
up her seat in that part of the bus reserved for white people,
thus sparking oV the successful ‘bus boycott’. My
generation learned this song from the singing of the great Peter
Seeger.
Catie Farrell, photograph Ewan O’Sullivan
disc two
Dirty Old Town (Ewan MacColl, arr: Farrell Family)
The song has been recorded many times, but we include it as
epitomising the spirit of the 1945 Labour government, and of
big city Labour councils elected post-war, who wanted to
sweep away all traces of the poverty in which their parents and
grandparents had lived. Thanks to subsequent Tory administrations, the housing they put up often turned into the slums
of the future.
Go down you murderers (‘The Ballad of Timothy Evans’; Ewan
MacColl, arr. E. Farrell)Along with the Daily Mirror (in the
days before it became a comic), Ewan MacColl’s ballad of the
execution for murder in 1950 of Timothy John Evans played a
key role in Labour MP Sidney Silverman’s campaign against
What have they done to the rain? (Malvina Reynolds, arr. E. Farrell)
A song from Stage 1 of modern environmentalism (‘Enthusiasm’), when it was widely believed that all we need to solve the
‘ecological crisis’ is good intentions. The song was originally
about nuclear fallout, and protests which led to the Test Ban
Treaty of 1963, but it could also be extended to refer, for example, to ‘acid rain’, thus demonstrating its versatility. As Joan
Baez said of it, ‘the song is gentle, but it doesn’t protest gently’.
The Seal Children (Paul Metsers)
A song from Stage 2 (‘Realism’), Paul Metsers’s wonderful ballad commemorates the Greenpeace protest against the mass
slaughter of Hood and Harp Seal pups in Canadian waters oV
Newfoundland in 1977, a killing which does indeed unfortunately ‘continue’, if in modified form. The song is also philosophically comprehensive, recognising not only the ‘value’,
and the ‘rights’, of other animal species, but also of human
responsibility to future generations.
Between the Wars (Billy Bragg, arr. F. Farrell)
I used to think that the ‘1960s’ ended in 1973, with the first ‘oil
spike’ caused by the formation of OPEC. But perhaps what
really came to an end a few years later was the ‘historic compromise’ between capital and labour which had led to the
greatest general prosperity and equality ever seen (in the western world at least). For me, Billy Bragg’s song sums up this
compromise perfectly – ‘pay us a decent wage and guarantee
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Country Life (Steve Knightley, arr. F. Farrell)
As Steve Knightley’s excellent song rightly points out, it is not
just the industrial cities which Thatcherism has devastated.
‘What went wrong?’ As people on the Somerset Levels and in
the Thames Valley who were recently Xooded have found out,
if you carry on voting for politicians who promise to cut rates
and taxes, eventually there is no infrastructure, and no-one
there to help.
Farewell to Welfare (Grace Petrie, arr. C. Farrell)
A song by a fine young song-writer, Grace Petrie, describing
the emergence of ‘the precariat’ – mostly younger people who
(if they are lucky) work zero-hours contracts, for (at best) the
minimum wage. At the same time we are increasingly governed by a political class which comes from a privileged background, and which knows nothing of that kind of life: a government of rich posh boys who have never done a day’s work,
governing a population many of whom have never had the
opportunity to do one. If taxes are continually lowered, and
no-one is working for wages, who is going to pay for the
future, and a country in which we are all ‘proud to bring
up kids’?
Frankie Farrell, photograph Ewan O’Sullivan
us a steady job, and we’ll behave’. But the election of Thatcher
and Reagan put an end to all that. Clearly, the class war did not
‘end’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but was renewed with
greater intensity.
Coal not Dole (Kay SutcliVe, arr. Farrell Family)
Thatcher’s key strategy was to destroy organised labour using
anti-union legislation, most of which remains unrepealed,
despite subsequent ‘Labour’ governments. As recently released
Cabinet papers confirm, she also wanted to get her own back
on the miners for their defeats of the Heath government during the early 1970s. This song, from the 1984–5 Miners strike,
composed by a miner’s wife from the Kent coalfield, implicitly
asks, ‘What are we all going to do when the pits close? We can’t
all sell each other tickets?’ Catie’s maternal great-grandfather
George Cranston, a miner, was killed in a pit accident in
Broomside Colliery, Motherwell, on 14 December 1935.
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The Old Man’s Song (Ian Campbell, arr. E. Farrell)
Ian Campbell met an old man in a café, who told him his life
story, which Ian then turned into a song which points out that
the problems we face today have been going on for longer than
many think. Capitalism hasn’t just failed to work since 2008 –
it never has, except at an unacceptable cost to nature and to
human lives. The tune is the traditional Scottish A Pair of
Nicky Tams, which Ian no doubt learned from his father Dave
Campbell.
Ringing of Revolution (Phil Ochs, arr. E. Farrell)
For me, the (male) singer whose work best epitomises the
1960s is not Dylan, but Phil Ochs. Ochs used to introduce this
song (e.g. on Phil Ochs in Concert) as depicting a house in
which the last of the bourgeoisie are sheltering from the encircling socialist revolution. ‘Everyone on the inside spiritually
resembles Charles Laughton; everyone on the outside physically resembles Lee Marvin’. Nowadays for Marvin read Bruce
Willis, but the trembling, morally bankrupt bourgeois on the
inside – it surely has to be Tony Blair (or his mate Mandelson).
There is Power in a Union (Billy Bragg, arr. Farrell Family)
In News from Nowhere, Morris makes it clear that his fictional
socialist revolution only succeeded because of the existence of
the ‘combined workers’, a federation of formerly disparate
trade unions which acted together, rather than just in pursuit
of their own members’ interests (a feature of Victorian trade
unions of which Morris was critical). Since its defeat by
Thatcherism, the UK trade union movement is probably at its
lowest ebb for three hundred years, but paradoxically, only
precisely the kind of organisation described by Morris can
features
only economic game in town was perhaps their biggest
mistake (and not true anyway). And banging on about ‘hardworking families’ (Whatever happened to ‘to each according
to their need …’?) when most young people have little or no
secure work, often cannot aVord a home, and certainly not a
family, is, as Paul Mason has recently commented (‘The
young, skint and self-employed need a radical new labour
market’, The Guardian, 20 July 2014), guaranteed to produce
disconnection from the entire generation about whom Grace
Petrie wrote her song.
Graeber concludes:
Eddie and Catie Farrell, photograph Ewan O’Sullivan
fully engage with the range of problems likely to be brought
about by the twenty-first century. As one of these problems
may well be ‘What to do when the oil runs out?’, such a
federation – like the CNT of the 1930s – will need to be ‘green’
as well as ‘red’.
After I finished recording The William Morris Songbook I realised that it had taken on, as Tony Pinkney might say, a ‘metanarrative’ of its own. It began as a collection of songs and ballads which Morris himself may have known, or probably
would have enjoyed had he lived long enough, but then I realised that in fact the Songbook also tells a story (brieXy alluded
to above) – of the rise of the labour movement during the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, of the ‘historic compromise’ (to borrow a phrase) between capital and labour of
the mid-twentieth century (which brought not only some of
the greatest prosperity but also some of the greatest equality
western society has ever seen), the beginnings of environmentalism, but then of the ‘demise’ of social democracy after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and the elections of (among others)
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The same scenario has also recently been discussed by
David Graeber (‘Savage capitalism is back – and it will not
tame itself ’, The Guardian, 30 May 2014) where he argued
that although the Soviet Union – as we all now know – did not
in any respect really represent socialism, the threat of its very
existence persuaded much of capital to concede to a limited
set of demands from organised labour, for fear of what might
happen if it did not. (‘Always keep a-hold of Nurse …’) But
once the Wall was gone, the threat was also removed, and
‘savage capitalism’ was reborn.
Social democratic politicians were bamboozled by the
events of the 1980s, and do not seem to be showing much sign
of recovering. Conceding the idea that ‘the free market’ is the
If we want an alternative to stagnation, impoverishment and ecological devastation, we’re just going to
have to figure out a way to unplug the machine and
start again.
As ever, Morris, in the shape of News from Nowhere, oVers
the solution, but this time, now that we recognise that the
Earth is finite, the ‘Combined Workers’, like the CNT of old,
will need to be green, as well as red. Ecosyndicalism anyone?
Eddie Farrell
Frankie Farrell, photograph Brendan O’Sullivan
Acknowledgments: We would like to Paul Metsers for helping
us record The Seal Children, and our long-suVering engineer
at Plymouth Music Collective, Andrew ‘Doc’ Collins, for his
humour, fellowship, and his sterling eVorts on our behalf.
The William Morris Songbook is available from Farrell
Family, PO Box 149, Liskeard, Cornwall, PL14 9DB, price £16
plus £1.75 postage and packing (£3.75 Europe, £5 outside
Europe; please make cheques payable to ‘Farrell Family
WMS’), or online at www.farrellfamilyband.co.uk. Email:
[email protected].
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