Selection of Songs and Stories

As a 16 year old A.L.Lloyd was sent from England to Australia ... his family like so many had been decimated by the effects of the Great War and Lloyd's voyage to Australia was organised by the British Legion in a scheme whereby he was designated to work as a farm labourer. He arrived in Sydney on SS Euripedes in 1924.

He spent six years working mostly on sheep stations in NSW. He returned to England in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression carrying in his head a number of Australian bush songs he'd heard from his fellow workers. He also carried his experience of trade unionism in ihe bush as a member of the Pastoral Workers Union which he'd joined in 1925.

Lloyd educated himself in the bush on the NSW Stevenson Station via the Bush Workers Postal Loan Scheme run by the Sydney Library Service.

Back in London in the period of massive unemployment he educated himself about folk song and folk lore in the British Library. He was to become a major influence on the folk song revival in Britain and to be regarded as one of country's most influential folklorists. His influence would extend to the United States, Canada and Australia.

This presentation is designed allow you explore the fascinating and complicated influence of Lloyd on the 1950s folksong revival in Australia. You will have to opportunity to discover the many sides of Bert Lloyd that reached back to Australia between 1939 and his brief return visit in 1970.

Sovay the Female Highwayman (A.L.Lloyd)



Children Folklore broadcast (A.L.Lloyd)



The Drover's Dream (A.L.Lloyd)



Shickered As He Could Be (A.L.Lloyd)



Rocking the Cradle (A.L.Lloyd)



Click Go the Shears (A.L.Lloyd)



Click Go the Shears (Burl Ives)



Morton Bay (Simon McDonald)



The Golden Vanity (Simon McDonald)



The Bare Belled-Ewe 1891 version of Click Go the Shears
(Chloe and Jason Roweth)



Peg and Awl (Pete Seeger)



The Contract Horse Breaker (A.L.Lloyd)



Hold On Hamilton (A.L.Lloyd)



A.L.Loyd – Translator of Kafka 

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis - arguably the greatest, most famous and most unnerving short work of literary fiction ever written - is a hundred years old in 2015. This centenary edition offers the first complete English translation of Kafka's text (by A. L. Lloyd from 1937) plus a richly detailed new introduction to the story by novelist Richard T. Kelly, describing its genesis and the life of its creator.


In The Metamorphosis' unforgettable opening sentence we meet travelling salesman Gregor Samsa - on a rare overnight stay in the apartment he shares with his family, paid for by his ceaseless labour - who awakes one morning 'from a troubled dream' to find himself 'changed in his bed to some kind of monstrous vermin'.

There is nothing which The Metamorphosis could be surpassed by - one of the few great, perfect poetic works of this century.' Elias Canetti

'My greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order, Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's [Metamorphosis], Bely's Petersburg and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.' Vladimir Nabokov

Russel Ward On Bert Lloyd for A Radical Life 1988

Folksong and Fury p. 243 

The year 1956 saw the beginning of something new or, more correctly the resurrection of something old under the Australian sun. The ‘folk revival’  began. Ten years later folksinging in pubs  growing band of devotees spread the news that Australia had after all an ethos and a history of its own, something quite distinct from and more than a mere appendage to British imperial history. Something, in short, as different in spirit from Kipling's flying-fish-strewn 'Road to Man-dalay' as Banjo Paterson's 'Waltzing Matilda' or the old convict song about Moreton Bay. There is always something mysterious about the cause of great changes in taste. We shall never know exactly why many people, quite independently, suddenly became interested in Australian folksongs in the 1950s.

I saw it happening but I am no nearer now than I was then to understanding the process or to allotting some kind of credit rating, or pecking order, to the persons involved. Two of them in fact were `foreigners'—i.e. non Australasians. Burl Ives, the spherical, jolly, Yankee folksinger, astonished the nat-ives by singing a few Australian folksongs that many of them had never heard of. One, though undoubtedly genuine, greasy-wool Strine, I have never heard again since. In an American accent, naturally, Burl sang of the abominable station cook who 'ruined my constitooshun while shearing at Fowler's Bay'.

The other pioneer of the folk revival was an Englishman, A.L. Lloyd.  This singing Englishman probably did more to preserve Australian folksongs for posterity than anyone else but Banjo Paterson himself. Like many a likely lad in convict times, Bert Lloyd was shipped out to Sydney in the early 192os for his country's good. So were hundreds of other fifteen-or sixteen-year-old British boys from poverty-stricken backgrounds.

Their passages were paid by several charitable organisations which sought to strengthen the Empire by filling Australia's 'great open spaces' with healthy breeding stock, and at the same time to give the waifs a better chance in life than their homeland could offer. Bert worked first, he told me long afterwards, for cow and wheat cockies at ten shillings a week and keep.

Like thousands before him he soon heard that better wages and more congenial work were to be had on the pastoral runs further out west. When he reached the station country, however, his voice betrayed him. Every squatter, as the pastoral proprietors were still called, held as a cardinal article of faith that English-men were useless for station work. So Bert set about changing his native Cockney accent into a passable imitation of broad Strine. Only then could he get work at the correct Australian Workers Union award wages. He tried most things in the next few years, mostly about the shearing sheds—tar-boy, picker-up, rouseabout and slushy to the cook—but all the time he was committing to memory what older work mates called old bush songs. Many of them like ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ and ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ were well known, but may other like ‘All for My Grog’, were not. The song describes in brutally realistic terms the old bush custom  of ‘bluing one’s cheque’, at the end of the sharing season or whenever the work had enough in his pocket to get drunk.

The young English migrant with his heard full of Australian songs returned home in time olive through the great depression in his own country and to become its best folksinger. He came back to Australia only once for a brief visit about 1970, but in the 1950s he freely gave to young Australians who visited him in London all that he knew of their heritage.

John Blacking on Percy Grainger 
(A Common Sense view of all music pp. 21-22)

Percy Grainger's emphasis on the complexity of folk music and the potential musicality of ordinary people, and his belief in the value of widely differing kinds of music have been upheld by the work of ethnomusicologists. Attempts to trace the evolution of the musical art from simple to complex, from one-tone to twelve-tone music and beyond, and to fit all the music of the world into such schemes, have proved fruitless. Musical systems are derived neither from some universal emotional language nor from stages in the evolution of a musical art: they are made up of socially accepted patterns of sound that have been invented and developed by interacting individuals in the contexts of different social and cultural systems. If they have been diffused from one group to another, they have frequently been invested with new meanings and even new musical characteristics, because of the creative imagination of performers and listeners. Role distinctions between creator, performer and listener, variations in musical styles and contrasts in the apparent musical ability of composers and performers, are consequences not of different genetic endowment, but of the division of labour in society, of the functional interrelationship of groups and of the commitment of individuals to music-making as a social activity. Distinctions between music as 'folk', 'art', or 'popular' reflect a concern with musical products, rather than with the dynamic processes of music-making. Such distinctions tell us nothing substantive about different styles of music, and as categories of value they can be applied to all music. 'Popular' music as a general category of value, is music that is liked or admired by people in general, and it can include Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Sousa's marches and the 'Londonderry Air' . Far from being a patronizing or derogatory term, it describes positively music that has succeeded in its basic aim to communicate as music. The music that most people value most is popular music; but what that music is varies according to the social class and experience of composers, performers and listeners. Similarly, as Grainger pointed out, 'folk' musicians strive for artistic perfection.  As Eric Gill said, 'It isn't that artists are special kinds of people. Its that people are special kinds of artists' And And so we could say that the goal of all folk is to make artistic popular music.

Ewan MacColl & A.L.Lloyd – South Australia

Lloyd and MacColl along with an array of backing musicians initiated a new approach to singing sailors songs and sea shanties. In some ways they became a standard guide for the younger folk singers in America, Britain and Australia.

A.L.Lloyd – John Barleycorn

Doc Watson – Three Days with Doc – A.L.Lloyd

Celebrated Working Man – A.L.Lloyd

Old Bitch Fox – A.L.Lloyd

Geordie – Lloyd

The Provenance of Click Go the Shears

Until I discovered this newspaper publication of the iconic shearers song in 2014, using the National Library of Australia's TROVE PROJECT, there had long been  speculation and argument about where and when it might have been composed. One old shearer recalled hearing it around the time of the 1891 shearers strike, another had heard it during the Great War. None of the singers remembered all the verses but all of them knew that the tune was "Ring the Bell Watchman" (an American song from the civil war period).

The earliest set of words published seemed to be from Percy Jones who published it in a Catholic magazine in 1946. Jones passed it on with a number of other songs to the American ballad singer Burl Ives who toured Australia in 1952 and sang it at his concerts and broadcast it on ABC radio. Thus it was that most Australians first heard the song sung with an American accent. A.L.Lloyd first recorded the song for the American label Riverside Records in 1956 under the editorship of the folklorist Kenneth Goldstein.

The date of publication 1891 is of particular interest to historians because it was the year of the Shearer's strike in Queensland. The considerable forces of three Australian States were pitted against the shearers who were taking a stand for the Eight Hour Day and against a reduction in pay and conditions being demanded by the employers. The leaders of the strike were sentenced to three years incarceration with hard labour on St Helena Island in Moreton Bay, until released in November 1893.

Julian Stuart, one of the legendary strike leaders wrote:

The Shearers' Union Union began in Creswick, in Victoria, in 1886 and in New South Wales the same year ... but it was not started in Queensland until a year later, when the first move was made at Blackall, on the Barcoo. We had heard about the new idea but did not know much about organising; nevertheless when a delegate came along with tickets we generally ruled up and adopted the Union as our new religion. The squatters made big efforts to crush the movement in its infancy and for the first two or three years scarcely a shed was allowed to start without a trial of strength. 

Julian Stuart, "Part of the Glory" (Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1967)

Shearers library at Barcaldine – During the 1891 strike

Notes

Before Percy Jones published the song two New South Wales newspapers had published different variants:

The Sydney newspaper the World's News Sep 1939 p. 44. published a version under the title "The Shearer's Song" and shortly after the Wellington Times of 21 Dec 1939  p. 9. published a slightly different version using the same title. It is certainly possible that Percy Jones was shown one of these articles when he visited Sydney in 1940. So it is that we now know that much of the discussion concerning the provenance of the song was pure conjecture. What I find interesting is that all of the old timers who recalled verses from the song knew its tune better than the complete song and yet estimated its age with a surprising degree of accuracy. The lesson is that we should be very wary of the dismissal of the memories of those who preserved what they could recall of the songs that they carefully retained in their repertory and kept in their heads for posterity.    

Some 30 songs and poems were composed in support of the shearers at the time and despite defeat the strike had the political outcome of encouraging the foundation of the Australian Labor Party which would become the first such party in the world to win an election.

T.U.S. Trade Union Shears – Made in a Sheffield Co-op and a favourite of Australian Shearers

 Download "Shearers Strike"  (Songs and poems of 1891 first published in Labour History)

(Notes from Ron Edwards Big Book of Australian Folk Song)

The conditions under which shearers live and work are unique and it is because of these that so many songs have been preserved. A nomadic community, always numbers of men together and generally a fair distance away from the entertainments of the city, these circumstances are ideal for the creation and preservation of songs.

The most popular of these songs today is undoubtedly CLICK GO THE SHEARS, based on a tune popular around the turn of the century 'Ring the Bell, Watchman.' However, the song itself may not be as old as that.

At present I am a little inclined to think that it may date from the period 1910-20 if only for the negative reason that none of my informants can recall hearing it before that time. Quite often a person may not be able to remember the words of a song, but will remember whether or not he has ever heard it, and so far, the earliest date I have for it is from a Mr Sanday of Charters Towers, who first heard it in Collarenebri, N.S.W., in 1923 or 24. He could only remember the chorus, which was similar to that given here and like that also went to the tune 'Ring the Bell, Watchman,' (he could not remember whether the last word was yoe or ewe).

'Tiger' O'Shane of Cairns first heard it while on the track on the way to Cordilla Downs station in South Australia in 1926 or 27. It was sung by a shearing mate, Ernie Clarke, and contained a verse telling how the shearers arrived at the shed or the start of the cut, and of the transport they used. Unfortunately, he could not remember how this verse went.

However, it is worth noting that in Gumsucker's Gazette vol. 4, no. I, 1963 a fragment of the first verse and chorus appeared, with a note to say that it had been collected from B. Miles, Swifts Creek, East GippsIand, who remembered it from sixty years ago (i.e. 1903).

  

Lloyd recordings

A List of Albums:

English Street Songs (LP, Album)

Riverside Records RLP 12-614 1956

Australian Bush Songs (LP, Album, Mono)

Riverside Records RLP 12-606 1956

REVIEWS – Keystone Folklore Quarterly
Riverside Records, RIP 12-606, Australian  Bush Songs, sung by A.L. Lloyd. 12" LP, Riverside Records, RLP 12-603.
A.L. Lloyd's Australian Bush Songs stands as the high point of Riverside's initial ventures into the field of folk songs. A.L. Lloyd is as genuine a folksinger as one could hope to find in this day of radio, concert hall, and night club performers, ranking with his co-worker in England, Ewen MacColl, and our own Woody Guthrie. His experiences aboard Antarctic whaling ships during the 1930’s caused his to be sought out for the part of the shantyman in the recent film version of Moby Dick. Mr. Lloyd learned the songs in this album—first hand as a young sheep-herder and shearing shed worker in New South Wales in the early shearing-shed worker in New South Wales in the early 1930s Half the songs are concerned with the life_and experiences of the sheep hands the remainder give us glimpses of outlaws, farmers, miners, and cattle drovers. The singing is robust and unpretentious, presenting a vigorous song-picture of a young frontier land carving out its own individuality through toughness, hard work, and a spirit of independence. It is a picture that in many respects parallels that of the development of our own American West. The outlaws bear much resemblance to our own western badman-heroes, tempered some what with the characteristics of the English highwayman-hero. The sheep hands, at work and at plays have much in. common with the American cowboy. It is hoped that this is not a one shot effort and that Riverside Records and Mr. Lloyd eventually add more to the very small number folksongs from the land down under that is commercially available at present. 

A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl & Chorus With Alf Edwards - Row Bullies Row (8")

Topic Records T.7 1957

The Banks Of The Condamine (10", Mono)

Wattle Recordings C 4 1957

A.L.Lloyd & Ewan MacColl & Chorus With Alf Edwards - The Blackball Line (8")

Topic Records, Topic Records T.8 , T 8 1957

Across The Western Plains (LP)

Wattle Recordings D1 1958

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - Champions and Sporting Blades (LP)

Riverside Records 12-652 1958

Ewan MacColl & A. L. Lloyd - Blow Boys Blow 5 versions

Tradition 1960

The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (LP, Album)

Folk-Lyric FL 121 1960

The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (LP, Album)

Selection Records JGB5001 1960

The Unfortunate Rake 
Folkways Records FS 3805 1960

A. L. Lloyd With Peggy Seeger, John Cole (3), Ralph Rinzler - Outback Ballads (LP, Album)

Topic Records 12T51 1960

English Drinking Songs 2 versions

Riverside Records 1962

Ewan MacColl And A. L. Lloyd - Thar She Blows! Whaling Ballads And Songs 2 versions

Riverside Records 1962

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - A Sailor's Garland 3 versions

Prestige International 1962

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd, Peggy Seeger - Musical Score From The Film: Whaler Out Of New Bedford. Based On The Original Panorama Of Whaling Voyage Round The World And Other Songs Of The Whaling Era (LP) Folkways Records FS 3850 1962

Ewan MacColl & A. L. Lloyd - Off To Sea Once More Vol. II (LP)

Stinson Records SLP 81 1962

A. L. Lloyd And Ewan Maccoll - English And Scottish Folk Ballads 2 versions

Topic Records 1964

First Person - Some Of His Favourite Folk Songs 2 versions

Topic Records 1966

The Best Of A.L. Lloyd 2 versions

Prestige International 1966

A. L. Lloyd, Anne Briggs, Frankie Armstrong with Alf Edwards and Dave Swarbrick - The Bird In The Bush (Traditional Erotic Songs) 3 versions

Topic Records 1966

Leviathan! Ballads & Songs Of The Whaling Trade 3 versions

Topic Records 1967

A. L. Lloyd, Martyn Wyndham-Reade* and Trevor Lucas - The Great Australian Legend - A Panorama Of Bush Balladry And Song 2 versions

Topic Records 1971

Frankie Armstrong, Roy Harris (3), A. L. Lloyd, Martyn Wyndham-Read - The Valiant Sailor (LP, Album)

Topic Records 12TS232 1973

Roy Harris / A. L. Lloyd / Ian Manuel / Bernard Wrigley / Martyn Wyndham-Read - Sea Shanties (LP, Album)

Topic Records 12TS234 1974

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd And Roy Harris (3) - Bold Sportsmen All - Gamblers And Sporting Blades (CD, RE)

Topic Records TSCD495 1998

England & Her Traditional Songs - A Selection From The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs (CD, Album, RM)

Fellside Recordings FECD173 2003

An Evening With A. L. Lloyd (CD)

Fellside Recordings FECD220 2010

Turtle Dove - England & Her Tradtitional Songs Vol. 2 (CD, Album, RM)

Fellside Recordings FECD260 2014

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - Great Child Ballads Not Included In The Child Collection 2 versions

Washington Records

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Volume 5 (LP) Washington Records WLP 719

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (the Child Ballads) (2xLP) Riverside Records

12-621/622

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Volume 3 (LP) Washington Records WLP 717

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Volume 2 (LP) Washington Records WLP 716

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Volume 4 (LP) Washington Records WLP 718

Street Songs Of England (LP, Album)

Washington Records 737, VM 737, WLP 737

Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd - The English And Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Volume 1 (LP)

Washington Records WLP 715

Ewan MacColl & A. L. Lloyd - Bold Sportsmen All (10")

Topic Records 10T36 1958

All For Me Grog 2 versions

Topic Records, Topic Records 1961

A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl - Gamblers And Sporting Blades (7")

Topic Records TOP71 1962

Bert Lloyd Accompanied By Alf Edwards - England And Her Folk Songs (7", EP)

Collector Records JEB 8 1962

A. L. Lloyd And Ewan MacColl - Gamblers And Sporting Blades (7", EP, Mono)

Topic Records TOP 71 1962

A. L. Lloyd , Ewan MacColl , Harry H. Corbett - Blow The Man Down (7", EP)

Topic Records, Topic Records TOP98, TOP 98 1965

Ten Thousand Miles Away - English And Australian Folk Songs (2xCD, Comp, RM)

Fell side Recordings FECD219 2008

Bramble Briars And Beams Of The Sun - Traditional English Ballads Sung By A L Lloyd (2xCD, Comp, RM)

Fellside Recordings FECD240 2011

Alan Lomax, A. L. Lloyd - Bulgaria (LP, Comp)

Columbia Masterworks KL 5378

A Poet of Andalusia 1953

The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Apr 1953  p. 9

SOMETHING PERSONAL

A Poet Of Andalusia
By LEON GELLERT

WHEN General Franco’s Fascists entered Granada in August, 1936, one of their first misdeeds was the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca, the most acclaimed poet of his generation. They seized him and shot him and burned his works in the Plaza del Carmen. As is usual in the violent clashes of creeds and systems, the most intellectual was the earliest to be exterminated by a gross misconception the assassins considered that this display of zeal would further their cause.

The result of this gesture was, of course, that Lorca was immediately installed among the world's martyrs and his writings elevated to the indisputable status of gospel. But though his martyrdom made him more widely known, his fame by no means rests upon that alone.

Years before he died, his poetry had come to represent, for the bulk of the people, the passion and the tragedy of Spain. Lorca lived a privileged existence. He was born in 1899 and studied law at the universities of Granada and Madrid, where he became a brilliant practitioner in most of the arts. Besides being a poet and a writer and producer of plays, he was an accomplished musician and painter. He described himself as “not merely a playwright, a poet, or a simple student of the rich panorama of man's life, but as an ardent passionate believer in the theatre of social action."

LORCA concerned himself with the most esoteric forms of modern art. At the beginning of his career he was in the Spanish avant-garde, playing with such notions as dadaism. And yet most of his work is closely associated with the life of the common people — particularly of the gypsy-folk of his native Andalusia.

There are several translations of his poems, notably those by Roy Campbell, Stephen Spender and J. L. Gill, and A. L. Lloyd. Mr Lloyd's translation, "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, and other Poems," which first appeared in 1937, has just been re-issued by William Heinemann. All but one of these pieces are taken from the original "Romancero Gitano" (Gypsy Ballad-Book), the collection which brought Lorca world-wide recognition.

Although many of this Spanish poet's expressions may be perplexing to the average English reader, his work has achieved a universality of appeal that extends far beyond his popularity in Spain.
Mr Lloyd tells of how he, himself, has discovered such out-of-the way Lorca enthusiasts as a grocer’s daughter in a Moravian village, a miner in Wales, and the manager of a cinema theatre in a distant Norwegian village.

TO those of us who are unfamiliar, personally, with the customs and character of the Spaniard in his habitat and who, furthermore, are obliged to rely upon translations, much of the phraseology of Lorca must remain obscure.

Nevertheless, although most of Lorca's poems are founded on a traditional romantic form, occupying a position akin to the popular ballad, they must not be mistaken for mere folk-songs.

"The language," says Mr. Lloyd, "is of a kind not known before Rimbaud; the nervous sensuality is foreign to the austere pieces of traditional currency. Lorca's ballads are essentially creations of modern art, and often the popular scene appears as if lit with ten-thousand-watt flood-lamps."

In that blinding radiance objects stand out like fragments of flint, throwing fierce angular shadows.

Even the religious romances throb with violence and sensuality. But, as Arturo Barea, one of Lorca’s biographers, points out, "sex, cruelty and death are prominent in the projection of religion in Spain. Nowhere are the images of the martyred saints so blood-spattered and horrifying — particularly the virgin saints. The fusion of the mystical and the carnal, in which often the exaltation is lost and only the cruelly remains, is part of the folklore of Spanish Catholicism.

"In the 'Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia,' the intense and desperate visions evoked by the poet are but formalised types of the fantasias that sear the Spanish imagination from early childhood." Here is a passage:—

Naked, Flora goes
up the little stairs of water.
For the breasts of Eulalia
the Consul demands a platter.
A jet of green veins
bursts from her throat . . .
On the ground, unruly,
Her severed hands writhe,
still crossed in a feeble
decapitated prayer.
And through the red holes
where once were her breasts,
tiny skies are now seen
and rivulets of white milk.
A thousand little trees of blood
cover all her back,
and oppose their moist trunks
to the scalpel of fire.
Yellow centurions, grey-fleshed,
and sleepless in their harness,
reach the sky, clashing
the silver of their armour.
And as a passion of manes and swords
Is shaking in confusion,
The Consul bears on a platter
the smoky breasts of Eulalia.

It should be noted that Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, exerted a strong influence on Federico.

LORCA was a burly creature, massive of bone and warty of visage.
He was fond of music and magic and laughter. But it was said of him that he could not experience joy unless he could feel the thorn. No bright flower but had its bitter root.

When he was not the poet of the flood-lamp he was the poet of the sun and love. But the sun was always a midday sun, beating down with its terrible glare on the bull-ring and the feverish crowds; and love always went hand in hand with death.

Knives and torment and blood abound in his glittering phrases. No wonder that, on his approach, colleagues shouted: "Here comes Federico. Now we can paint the town red with poetry."

Lorca was shy and unenthusiastic about the publication of his own work. On one occasion he fled to New York to take refuge from his fame, and was appalled. He described America as "a Senegal with machinery."

... the Negroes who empty the spittoons,
the young men who tremble
under the pale terror of
their directors,
the women drowned in mineral oil,
the multitude of the hammer, the violin or the
cloud,
. . . must shout though their
brains burst on the wall,
... must shout with a voice so
bold
that the cities tremble like
little girls,
and the prisons of oil and
music burst open,
because we want our daily
bread.

THE "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter" is the longest piece in the collection of Mr. Lloyd's translations.

Sanchez Mejias, the matador, was a friend of most of the Spanish poets, and Lorca mourns his death in the ring with a deep personal grief.

Critics regard this lament, which synthesises the poet's own emotions with the nation's feeling of unrest before the Civil War, as the pinnacle of Lorca’s poetic achievement.

The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor horses, nor the ants in your own house.
The child does not know you, nor the evening,
for you are dead for ever.

The surface of the stone does not know you,
Nor the black satin where you are destroyed.
Your own dumb memory does not know you,
for you are dead for ever.

Autumn will come with its shepherd horns,
its misty grapes and clustered mountains.
But none will want to look you in the eyes,
for you are dead for ever.

There will be many who will be confused and irritated by Lorca's symbolism. To these I commend a passage from an essay by John Lehmann:—

"Each poet writes within the material surroundings of his age, and these surroundings have changed during the last five hundred years at an accelerating pace. Each change presents a field for new symbols, and only new symbols or a new arrangement of ancient symbols can give us the shock of simultaneous recognition and wonder that fully captures our imagination and opens it to the action of art. Without the heritage of the great poets of the past we should indeed be lost in the wilderness, but without the works of the poets of our own time we might even lose sight of that heritage, unable to distinguish where it stood in the landscape of our lives, our civilisation."

Two Interviews with Lloyd (1969 and 1970)

Mark Gregory A.L.Lloyd interviews

1. Published in Australia in Overland Magazine

Transcription recorded of a recorded interview with
A. L. Lloyd at his Greenwich home in London in December 1969.

http://folkstream.com/reviews/lloyd/

2. Published in Britain in Musical Traditions Internet Magazine

Transcription recorded of a recorded interview with
A. L. Lloyd at his Greenwich home in London 20 September 1970.

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/lloyd.htm

Edgar Waters – New Source of History

Australian National University Newspaper Woroni 23 Jul 1964  p. 4

At the first seminar arranged by the newly-formed A.N.U. Historical Society, Dr. Edgar Waters discussed the place folk songs have in historical studies.

Dr. Waters's main point was that folk songs, being an oral form of literature, have the same sort
of value as written literature in cultural and social history. Folk songs cannot only give a picture of contemporary life, but they can also give insight into all thought, feelings and behaviour of the people who sing them.

Historically-speaking, folksongs are important not for their aesthetic qualities, but for what they have to tell of the ordinary life of the singers themselves.

History has no use for formal definitions of "folk-songs." Its main concern is the song itself—who sang it? When did they sing? Why did they, sing it ? How long was it sung for? What changes; did it undergo?

Answers to the questions are often very, difficult, although illuminating at the same time, The example Dr. Waters chose to illustrate, his talk was from a collection of industrial songs of England. The song, "The Poor Cotton Weavers' dates from about 1815, i.e., the period of all post-Napoleonic Wars depression, and was sung in the cotton manufacturing areas of Lancashire. Fifty years later the song was still circulating in broadsheet form and even today variations are still sung in Lancashire..

The theme of the song is the life of the cotton weavers working under the pre-factory age system of "putting out." The song describes a weaver's clothes, food, attitudes to religion and the Anglican Church and the effect of industrial changes upon his earnings.

No amount of prose can capture the intimate expression of working class life contained in the song. One very interesting point illustrated by the song is the absence of Marxian revolutionary feelings in all cotton weavers' even though they are fully aware they are being exploited by the capitalists ?

"For to think au mun work-to keep
him an' his seco,
All the days o' me life, an' when
to die in their debto.
But au'll give over this trade
and work wi' a spade- .
Or go' an' break stone on the road."

When interviewed later, the President of the new society, Mr, Scott Bennett, said the Historical Society had two main aims. The first was to publish a regular historical journal of high quality to which undergraduate students will be encouraged to submit their best work. The inaugural issue is planned for publication in third term. The Society is holding seminars at which students and others will be invited to present, and discuss papers.

"Undergraduates will benefit considerably from having to defend their work before critical audiences," Mr. Bennett said. Two such seminars have already been held and it is hoped to have a third one this term. .
—M.B.G.

************

A.L.Loyd on Industrial Folk Song (The Meaning of Folk Music) 
From Folk Music in School Robert Leach and Roy Palmer (1978) pp. 27.–28.

When Aa was young an' in me prime,
Wey aye, Aa could hew,
Wey, Aa was hewin' aa1 the time.
Now me hewin' days are through, through,
Now me hewin' days are through.

At the face the dust did flee,
Ee aye, Aa could hew,
But now that dust is killin' me,
Now me hewin' days are through, through,
Now me hewin' days are through.

Aa've lain doon flat an' shovelled coals,
Ee aye, Aa could hew;
Me eyes did smart in the dust-filled holes.
Now me hewin' days are through, through,
Now me hewin' days are through.

Aa've worked wi' marras,' an' they were men,
Ee aye, Aa could hew,
Aye, they were men an' sons o' men.
Now me hewin' days are through, through,
Now me hewin' days are through.

It's doon that pit ne mair
Aa'll see, he aye, Aa could hew,
But Aa'll carry it round inside o' me,
Now me hewin' days are through, through,
Now me hewin' days are through.

marras – mates

Finally we come to a kind of composition that represents a drastic expansion of the conventional frame of folk song. Indeed, some would say it falls right out of that frame, but it is nonetheless a community song originating from below, destined for a tightly knit audience, and based on a traditional pattern, particularly where the verse.form is concerned.

First, the model from which the poem derives: it is a children's street song of derisive character, particularly common in the back alleys and tenement courtyards of Glasgow:

I married me a wife, amen, amen,
I married me a wife, amen.
I married me a wife, she's the plague o' my life,
Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end, amen.
I sent her for butter, amen, amen,
I sent her for butter, amen. Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end, amen.

And so on through a litany of domestic disasters, to the catastrophic Judgement Day. Using that lyric form (and nowadays no creations are more deeply folkloric than the self-made street and playground songs of city children) the 'bard of the Clydeside working class', Matt McGinn, made a song whose natural concert hall is the smoke-filled room of a workers' meeting.

With fire an' with sword, a-men,
With  fire an' with sword, here come the men of war,
Ah. the world must be corn-in' tae an end.
With fire an' with sword, amen, amen,
With fire an' with sword, amen,
With fire an' with sword, here come the men of war,
Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end.

Wi' their bayonets an' their bombs, amen, amen,
Their bayonets an' their bombs, amen,
Wi' their bayonets an' their bombs they'll be tearin' down our homes.
Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end.

There's blood upon their hands, amen, amen,
There's blood upon their hands, amen.
There's blood upon their hands in this an' other lands,
Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end.

They massacred the young, amen, amen,
They massacred the young, amen.
They massacred the young tae make them hold their tongue.
Ah, the world must be comin' tae an end.

Oh, will they have their way, amen, amen?
Will they have their way, amen?
Will they have their way, or will the young folk say
That the world will not be comin' tae an end?

The song ranges far beyond the domestic horizon that hitherto seemed to us characteristic, and even a sine qua non, of folk song. But the working class has a wider horizon nowadays, and perhaps this kind of composition is symptomatic of the process by which home-made song, emerging from below, owing little to the establishment culture of the entertainment corporations but much to that unofficial culture of which folk song is a component begins to move towards a new style, a broader ambience. a more ample perspective.

The song, 'With fire and with sword', is here given as transcribed from the singing during a mass meeting of shipyard workers in Glasgow in March 1971. Vietnam and Kent State were in the mind then, but the song reflects an ever-present care, particularly with men whose yards find it easier to get war contracts than peaceful ones.

Not folk song? As the folk change, their songs change: it's a truism.

A.L.Lloyd – Bush Ballads 1965

The Canberra Times 20 Aug 1965  p. 15.

Notes

Dave Arthur in his 2012 biography 'Bert the Life and Times of A.L.Lloyd' records that in October 1969 Douglas Cleverdon directed a Commonwealth Festival concert of Australian songs and ballads at the Royal Court, in which he used Bert and Martin Carthy along with contemporary poets. 

An Australian Poet who is not mentioned in the article but who was present is the now famous Les Murray.

The stage design by the celebrated Australian artist Arthur Boyd involved slides of Boyd's paintings projected onto a twelve-foot screen. As part of the same festival Bert performed a programme of sea shanties, accompanied by Alf Edwards on concertina, entitled The Seven Seas. 

For this, in addition to Martin Carthy, Bert brought in Enoch Kent, Anne Briggs and Bob Davenport (one of Bert's favourite singers). Bert sang 'Do Me Ama', 'The Maid on the Shore' and 'The Rambling Sailor'. 

Carthy sang 'The Dockyard Gate', 'The Ship in Distress' and 'The Green Beds', 

Briggs did 'Lowlands of Holland' and 'Lowlands', 

Davenport belted out 'Little Sally Racket', 'Go to Sea Once More', 'Greenland Fishery', 'Lord Franklin' and 'Rounding the Horn', 

Kent sang 'Lovely on the Water' and 'Farewell Nancy' and they all joined in on 'Heave Away My Johnny', The Diamond' and 'Leave Her Johnny Leave Her'. 

Folk Song in England 1970

Tribune 13 May 1970 p. 8.

Folk-song

THE famous folk singer A. L. Lloyd is about, to visit Australia, and in FOLK SONG IN ENGLAND you will find the results of his lifetime of study of English folk song. His main theme concerns the
relationship of the evolution of English society—tracing how, after the primitive development of ritual song, lyrical song began to flourish with the growth of the towns and merchant society. There are many subsidiary themes concerning, for instance, English modal music and the decorative art
of English singing. An invaluable book for the young folk singer. International Publishers, $10.00 (25c).

Available from: —
SYDNEY.
New World Booksellers, 425 Pitt Street.
MELBOURNE.
International Bookshop, 2nd Floor, 17 Elizabeth Street.
ADELAIDE.
People's Bookshop, 180 Hindley Street.
BRISBANE.
People's Bookshop, 205 Brunswick Street, Valley.
PERTH.
75 Bulwer Street. Pioneer Bookshop

Peter Kennedy – November 18 1922 – June 10 2006

As a collector of folk song and music in the 1950s, Peter Kennedy, who has died of cancer aged 83, helped to define the direction of the English folk revival. He was England's equivalent to the American musical folklorist Alan Lomax, although he never achieved Lomax's fame in the academic and wider arts communities.

Peter's father, Douglas Kennedy, succeeded Cecil Sharp as director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS); his mother, Helen, had been founding secretary of the English Folk Dance Society in 1911; and his aunt, Maud Karpeles, was Cecil Sharp's biographer. His great-aunt was Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, song collector and author of The Songs of the Hebrides. His great-grandfather, David Kennedy, was a famous Scottish singer, who toured the British empire, reminding Scottish emigrants of home. So there were only two alternatives for Peter: he would either be immersed in folk music and dance or he would rebel against it. He ended up ploughing a middle ground - as a rebel who pushed at the boundaries.

Born and brought up in London, he was educated at Leighton Park, a Quaker school in Reading. He had an early taste for documenting folk music while helping to film the world's first international folk dance festival in London in 1935. At this time, however, he was put off by the genteel, classroom approach to folk dancing. Instead, he was intrigued by the technical aspects of the theatre but, as there were no suitable courses, he was advised by Alexander Korda to study three-dimensional design at the Architectural Association. This training was utilised when he became a model maker for the North African landings in the second world war.

Peter returned to peacetime England and a folk dance movement that his father was radically changing. Out went the classroom approach and the 17th-century dance repertoire. Instead, he encouraged easy access to traditional dances, lively music played by dance bands and the dance caller, borrowed from America. This was more to Peter's liking and, in 1948, he joined the EFDSS staff. His first posting was in the north-east, where he discovered a radical tradition of music and dance. He was taken to the village of Cambo, where the local fiddle player, Ned Pearson, played for folk dances such as Morpeth Rant, as well as for party games, the lancers and the foxtrot. He also encouraged the local clogdancing tradition.

When Peter moved to the west country in 1950, he used a north-eastern model to present a mixture of dances, songs and stories using, wherever possible, local village performers and dances. This was a revolutionary approach. A series of successful radio programmes usually featured Peter's own band, and he even tried to teach Princess Margaret to play the melodeon.

Peter helped the growing popularity of English folk dance with recordings and books. His publication, The Fiddlers Tune Book, provided the essential repertoire for the growing number of folk dance musicians, and is still in print. Work for the BBC brought him into contact with the Bristol sailor and shanty man, Stanley Slade, whose premature death just days before he was due to be recorded by HMV convinced Peter of the urgent need to document traditional singers and musicians.

This was in the early days of tape recorders, and Peter used a prototype portable machine developed by Scophony-Baird in nearby Wells. He worked alongside the emerging BBC natural history unit in Bristol, and was once involved in playing recordings of African elephants to Indian elephants and recording the response. He kept the blank tape in his archive for the rest of his life!

By this time, 1950, Lomax was based in London, and he enlisted Peter's help in recording the English volume for Columbia's World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. Kennedy and Lomax lobbied the BBC for a more systematic approach to collecting folk music and, in 1952, the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme was established; Peter was appointed one of the two principal fieldworkers. The important Sunday morning radio series, As I Roved Out, which ran from 1953 to 1958, was devised by Peter and often featured stories of singers he had recorded, such as Bill Westaway from Dartmoor, whose father was the original source for Widecombe Fair.

Peter also assisted Lomax with recordings in Europe; he recorded Serbian bagpipers, the McPeake family from Belfast, and some years later helped Brian Epstein obtain a set of Irish uillean pipes for John Lennon. He also used his expertise to record many of the emerging revival folk singers, including Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd.

In 1975, he published his mammoth collection, Folksongs of Britain and Ireland. This collection was accompanied by a series of tapes, later CDs. Eventually, he established a catalogue of more than 450 CDs and DVDs. He received a lifetime achievement award at the Celtic festival in Ontario in 2003 and, belatedly, the EFDSS Gold Badge in 2005. He is survived by his second wife, Beryl, the three children of his first marriage (to Eirlys), and a stepson.

· Peter Douglas Kennedy, folklorist, born November 18 1922; died June 10 2006

A.L.Lloyd the Second revival

A.L.Lloyd – Second Folk Song revival – From Folksong in England pp. 395-397.

What we are experiencing is the second folk song revival in England. The first one occurred some time at the beginning of the present century and inspired, and was inspired by, the great collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger. It came about when educated people, mostly of liberal outlook, stumbled on the riches of poetry and music preserved by working people in the countryside, and began to make some of those treasures more widely available. The consequent revival had its greatest effect among middle-class people, musicians in search of a national idiom, educators, and others less serious with a fancy for quaintness. That first revival produced work of immense value, but despite the fact that it introduced folk song into schools it had no broad popular effect. In urban England, authentic folk song remained 'queer music' to most people.

The present revival appears under no such polite auspices. It followed the American folk song revival that began in the I 930s when many workers, notably miners in the folk singing districts of the upland South, began to accept enthusiastically the political ideas of the newly-formed and energetic Congress of Industrial Organisations. Distressed workers in backward areas took to trade unionism with a fervour similar to that of religion. For them it was a powerful deliverance, to be celebrated and fathered with song. The singing organizer and the militants folk song–foreshadowed some years previously by syndicalist popular minstrels such as Joe Hill–became important to American labour during the tense times of the Depression.

At the same time, in an attempt to bolster national morale, the U.S. government was sponsoring made-work schemes that involved an exploration of the roots of the American folk tradition, and repositories such as the Folk Music Archive of the Library of Congress were enriched by thousands of field-recordings garnered by searchers subsidized from the national treasury. Much of this was made available to the public and thousands of city-dwellers became acquainted with the authentic folk music of their country for the first time. Singers were brought from remote country districts to perform the ballads of hard times in union balls and concert arenas, and enthusiastic students were neglecting their academic studies in favour of perfecting their five-string banjo technique.

The two factors of revival, the spontaneous and the state-inspired, combined to form a new consciousness of folk song in America. In this atmosphere and mainly through Radical encouragement, performers such as Josh White, Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, came into prominence, and groups of urban singers emerged, such as the Almanacs and their successors, the Weavers, whose repertory was a mixture of traditional folk stuff and folk-style polemical song presented with absolute informality.

This kind of folk-song-with-teeth seemed to be what many British youngsters were waiting for. For some years, a handful of devoted persons such as Ewan MacColl in England, Hamish Henderson in Scotland, had been proselytizing on behalf of traditional song, but their efforts became properly fruitful only as the American example became clear. The BBC had helped to pave the way, first of all with programmes by Alastair Cooke, later with productions by D. G. Bridson presenting the leading figures of the U.S. revival. When, after World War II, American recordings became more readily available in Britain, the influence of the transatlantic folk singers spread widely. Some of the American material had an engaging impetuousness and a handy simplicity of harmonic structure, and youngsters found that with even the most rudimentary skill they could provide a passable performance.

Chain-gang songs were every-where, their Mississippi mumble further blurred by the inflections of Wigan and Walthamstow. The exploited peach-pickers of Bethnal Green and Batley consoled themselves with the "Worried man blues". The skiffle movement ran through the country like wildfire. From this exotic beginning, the British folk song revival grew.



The revival was strengthened by the enquiring minds of many young people who, searching for the roots of jazz found themselves led to American folk song and thence back to their own shores, to an interest in their native stuff and a desire to perform it. True, they incline to treat their traditional music in a variety of non-traditional ways, with voice-production, instrumentation, rhythmical treatment, etc., borrowed from the world of commercial light music. Whether the material is thereby enriched or impoverished is arguable; it is less arguable that, through new treatments, many fine folk tunes and texts are made valid for thousands of performers and listeners whose musical interests would otherwise be limited to the banalities of Denmark Street.

The folk song revival had its deep effect on ballad-makers in our industrial areas where, as we have seen, the creation of workers' song had sharply diminished in the years between the Wars. With the revival workers' home-made song once again acquired prestige. For instance, the appearance of a collection of the folk songs and ballads of miners in at a time when the songs had almost disappeared even from the miners memory of ageing coal-fields to try to emulate fired some youngsters in the ate the creations of their fathers and grand fathers, particularly as, with the emergence of folk song clubs particularly in the mining all areas, traditional-style song was becoming the rage.

Characteristic of this new wave of creators of workers' song is John Pandrich of Newcastle, formerly a coalface worker in the Dudley and North Walbottle pits, later engaged in the survey department in a pit running some miles out under the sea. A favourite song of his making is "Farewell to the Monty", written in 1959 when the Montague Colliery at West Denton was closed by the National Coal Board, and the colliers transferred to new pits further east. The Montague was an out-of-date pit and conditions in her were bad, but she had produced a lot of coal in her time, and the colliers had affection for their old workplace on that account; moreover they were reluctant to leave her for a colliery fax from their present homes. The ambivalence of sentiment gives the song unusual tension.