Humphrey With His Flail

Squeaky shoes

2012-01-11T09:19:00.003Z

Shortly before Christmas my shoes were in a terrible state of disrepair, so my partner bought me a new pair of boots. They are warm, they are comfortable, and they took virtually no breaking in.
The only problem is that they have flexible soles of some man-made substance, and they squeak. Not just a little, but with every step I take. In London crowds that isn't so bad, but in quiet side streets or late at night it can be quite embarrassing, to say the least.
I was suddenly reminded last night, as an otherwise silent street echoed to my squeaking feet, of a comment I heard in the early 1980s from a schoolfriend in south London. When a teacher's shoes creaked he turned to me instantly and said 'He hasn't paid for his shoes'.
I'd never heard this before and didn't understand. He explained that shoes only squeak until they're paid for. I was delighted by this, and had forgotten it completely until last night.
Maybe I should buy my own shoes in future.

Season's greetings

2011-12-24T17:06:00.003Z

The last month has been spent catching my breath a little. Any PhD was always going to be a marathon with a particularly gruelling last leg: after a serious health interruption to my work in 2010, this year's efforts felt like even more of an uphill struggle.
But that struggle is now over. The viva went well and the examiners demanded only minimal revisions. These were accepted, a hard copy was lodged at the University of Hertfordshire, and an electronic copy is now available online at the University's Research Archive.
So much for catching my breath. I've had the great pleasure of working in the Folklore Society's Library over the last few weeks while I reorient. I've submitted a book chapter on ghosts in white sheets, and I've started to think about future projects. These include turning my thesis into a book: I've begun thinking about proposals, and will get those into better shape early in January. I'm also planning on getting back on the conference trail in 2012, so I'm drafting paper proposals over the next fortnight as well.
Suddenly it doesn't sound quite like a break, but it's certainly the start of something new. Here's to 2012, and the season's best to you.

On Carey Street

2011-11-21T10:33:00.004Z

The period at the end of a PhD is peculiar. Even though the thesis is completed, and even when the viva is over, there's still a panoply of fiddly (and time-consuming) things to get done. I'm now all done, bar binding the hard copy of the dissertation, but it means I've been rather preoccupied and haven't been able to get back to gainful employment in any meaningful way up till now.
So perhaps it wasn't coincidence that, laying in bed last night, the phrase 'on Carey Street' came back to me. I'd first heard it when giving directions to the Seven Stars, a pub on Carey Street WC2. The person I was telling beamed delightedly and said 'So you really would end up on Carey Street!'
The phrase entered local proverbial usage to mean bankruptcy. Carey Street sits behind the Royal Courts of Justice, and provided one entrance to the bankruptcy court. Later, a drinker in the Seven Stars also explained this to me.
I doubt how widespread the usage is, as both of these informants were over 60. It isn't listed in the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, and it would appear to be a recent coinage, possibly of literary origin. The bankruptcy court only moved to Carey Street in the 1840s, where a new building was erected for it in 1892.
From Carey Street it's still been possible (just) to see the bankruptcy court, which was moved in the 1960s to the Thomas More building (the ill-fitting tower block at the Clement's Inn end of the RCJ). This may eventually change, as four Bankruptcy Registrars will shortly be located at the Rolls Building on Fetter Lane. The Rolls Building is unlikely to be visible from Carey Street. It won't stop people ending up on Carey Street.

Katharine Briggs evening 2011

2011-11-10T12:46:00.004Z

Before I head off to the South East London Folklore Society for my talk tonight I should mention last night's Katharine Briggs evening at the Folklore Society. I'm a bit thick-voiced after the reception, which is normally an indicator that a jolly time was had: there were a number of comments to the effect that the Briggs evening is acquiring a customary life of its own as a seasonal event, with regular visitors and a formalised tradition of how it all unfolds. It was also a nice chance to meet other scholars I didn't know, authors whose books I'd reviewed but whom I didn't know, and people I'd so far only spoken to on Twitter.
The Briggs lecture was given by Michael Rosen on 'The Folk Tradition: What Do We Do With It?' (The accompanying picture, blagged from his website, shows Mike at the Ledbury Poetry Festival). His engaging performance was really about the folk traditions that play out in his work. He laid particular emphasis on the range of such traditions and the interactions involved in eliciting and documenting them (for example in getting children to collect from each other and from their parents). Much of this isn't overly controversial for contemporary folklorists, but it was refreshing to hear a reasoned and entertaining defence of collecting whole repertoires rather than selective documentation. It was also very nice to hear the audience respond with a realisation of the wealth of folkloric material they have heard throughout their lives.
The Katharine Briggs book award went to Herbert Halpert and J.D.A. Widdowson, Folk Tales, Tall Tales, Trickster Tales and Legends of the Supernatural from the Pinelands of New Jersey: Recorded and Annotated by Herbert Halpert between 1936 and 1951 (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). I'm very excited about this book, which sounds remarkable. I've long admired Halpert's fieldwork and his scholarship, and I'm pleased to see recognition given to what, in some ways, was a pinnacle of his work. Receiving the award John Widdowson said the book had become Halpert's 'life work': towards the end of his life he had almost lost sight of publication because of his ongoing research and annotation. Widdowson also paid tribute to their publishers. Where other publishers had wanted to cherry-pick stories and ditch the scholarly apparatus that make the project so valuable, Edwin Mellen took the manuscript on in its entirety. That was almost the most encouraging part of the story. It is still possible to produce books of serious scholarly folklore research. That is also cause for celebration, and is a fitting tribute to Herbert Halpert and his work.

The AFS on proposed changes to research ethics models

2011-10-28T10:39:00.003+01:00

The American Folklore Society have recently issued a statement on proposed changes to consent requirements for fieldwork. The AFS's response, with their existing statement of principles on research ethics, can be found here.
Fieldwork ethics is important. It's about how we deal with people as humans, how we document, report and reflect their lives accurately and respectfully. The AFS statement is well worth reading, as it is a sane and humane approach to research ethics in this field.
It also bears reading here in the UK, too, where the marginalised character of Folklore in academia means that university research ethics policies may also be designed primarily with laboratory research models in mind. The absence of legislative guidelines may not mean there isn't a general trend in that direction, particularly in the absence of an authoritative and respected body which represents a recognised field of study. (The Folklore Society here is certainly respected, but is perhaps easier to ignore in the absence of Folklore departments).
When discussing ethics clearance for my recent doctoral fieldwork I initially came up against a number of expectations that clearly derived from scientific research models: some academics seemed baffled when I said that anonymisation might not always be appropriate, and might in fact be insulting depending on the nature of the tradition being examined. I'm happy to say that a school-specific ethics committee (which has been more active since the introduction of oral history modules there) worked with me in a constructive way, helping me to move away from this 'human subjects' laboratory model. Anybody who is undertaking field research needs to think about these questions, and needs to think about the ethical structures they require.

Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids

2011-10-24T15:45:00.008+01:00

We've lately seen something of an enthusiasm amongst artists for vernacular culture and tradition. The results have been exciting, with the creation of new works going alongside a very broad championing of the folk arts. From his background as Art Director in the fashion world Simon Costin has sought to build a Museum of British Folklore. Grayson Perry is exploring the world of vernacular artefacts. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane curated the Folk Archive. Whatever their artistic impulses and interpretations, all of these projects have addressed actual folk practice and its artefacts.
They have also, refreshingly, looked at folk practice in a broad way, encompassing existing traditions, revivals and adaptations, and newly developed customs. (In this respect they are building on the work of Doc Rowe, as they acknowledge). More needs to be said about the nuances and differences between these registers of vernacular practice, of course, but they all need documenting and considering as folklore.
Sara Hannant's beautiful new book Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey through the English Ritual Year (Merrell Publishing) belongs with this same trend. She documents a selection of events across the year, from the Allendale Tar Barrel Parade (1 January) to The (Insert Name Here) Mummers (28 December). For each event a short explanatory text introduces some of Hannant's vibrant and evocative photographs.
It is primarily a photographic book - a snapshot of some parts of the ritual year that have caught Hannant's eye and lens - and it is gorgeous. There are particularly striking shots of processions at night and/or involving fire. You can see some of the pictures in a portfolio on her website (and an exhibition has just opened at the Horniman Museum if you're around south London over the next year), but the Hinton St George Punkie Night procession (below) gives some idea of her best. (For me the outstanding shot is of a burning Lewes bonfire effigy of David Cameron and Nick Clegg). She also captures well the informal solemnity of such seasonal events: members of the Druid Order processing down Primrose Hill at the Autumn Equinox, or a break for a bag of chips at the kerbside during the Sowerby Bridge Rush-Bearing Festival. The qualities are combined in a great shot of the Britannia Coconut Dancers dancing round Bacup in falling snow (further down the page). It's serious, ridiculous and intense, and Hannant has a sympathetic eye for the people who participate in or watch these customs.
She has focused her attention on England in order to 'explore notions of national identity' (p.10). It is unclear whether this actually gets beyond documenting what seasonal customs are currently practised in England (although that in itself would be valuable), but it certainly throws up some interesting questions for future researchers.
What is interesting about the book is its combination of the old, the new, and the thought-to-be-old. Here, certainly, are the older 'star attractions' of the English seasonal year (Padstow, Lewes, Bacup, Abbots Bromley), but Hannant also does a very good job with more recently established and civic events. She notes the involvement of local folklore enthusiasts in the revival or invention of some traditions, many of which have existed in their current form for only 30-40 years. Here, alongside May Day customs and morris dancing, are civic carnivals and trade association events like the Pearly Kings Harvest Festival. There are also some striking sequences on recently established events like the Hastings and Deptford Jacks-in-the-Green.
These pictures point to one of the book's more intriguing features. Hannant is interested in questions of the beliefs embodied in seasonal customs. Some of these are fairly recent developments within Anglican tradition: Painswick's 'Clypping', for example, for all its claims of age, owes much to the Victorian antiquarianism of enthusiastic Church of England pastors. Hannant has documented further many of the emergent traditions around what we might loosely call neo-pagan beliefs. She is particularly good at covering the range of events around specific dates like 31 October (Ottery St Mary's tar barrels, the Antrobus Soulcakers' Play and Glastonbury Samhain events).
To some extent she has thus documented a new ritual year, one which has arisen only in the last two decades, although an ancient heritage is claimed for it. Her text does not deal with this in any great depth, although she is largely sympathetic to its practitioners (and has made much use of Ronald Hutton in her background reading, so her sympathy is well-informed). It may be up to others to tease out the relationship between these events (and between them and their supposed forebears), but that is not really the point of Hannant's glorious book. It would, of course, be nice to hear more about the background to events like the London Beltane revival (and there may be an error in the location here), but the novelty of documenting it so well still justifies its presentation in this way here.
It is a mark of the book's quality that it does point directions for such future consideration, but that should be taken as a bonus to its other, rather more evident, qualities. The book is an attractive celebration of a wide range of seasonal observation. It deserves to be seen widely and enjoyed. It should trigger further interest in seasonal events, drawing attention both to their existence and - hopefully - to their implications and meanings.

Pinch bottom day

2011-10-06T14:48:00.004+01:00

I came across the following sentence last night. I find it rather beautiful: it sums up what's interesting and fun about folklore and its research.
'1 May in Fittleworth [Sussex] was once known as "Pinch Bottom Day", although I cannot find out why' (1)
And no, I don't know why, either. Exciting, isn't it?

* * * * *

1: Tony Wales, We Wunt Be Druv: Songs and Stories from Sussex (London: Galliard & EFDSS, 1976), p. 10.

Katharine Briggs Award shortlist 2011

2011-10-05T10:03:00.009+01:00

The judges have announced this year's very strong shortlist for the Katharine Briggs Award. The book prize was established to encourage the study of Folklore, to help improve the standard of Folklore publications in Britain, to establish The Folklore Society as an arbiter of excellence and to commemorate the life and work of Katharine M. Briggs. The shortlisted titles (alphabetical by author) are:

Gary Fine and Bill Ellis, The Global Grapevine: Why Rumours of Terrorism, Immigration and Trade Matter (OUP, 2010)
Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate, 2010)
Herbert Halpert and JDA Widdowson, Folk Tales, Tall Tales, Trickster Tales and Legends of the Supernatural from the Pinelands of New Jersey: Recorded and Annotated by Herbert Halpert between 1936 and 1951 (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010)
Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (OUP, 2010)
Steve Roud, The Lore of the Playground: One Hundred Years of Children's Games, Rhymes and Traditions (Random House, 2010)
Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard UP, 2011)
Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2011)
Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-tale Films (Taylor and Francis, 2010)

My congratulations to all the authors. The winner will be announced at the Katharine Briggs Evening, 9th November (see the FLS Facebook page or the website for further details). The Briggs lecture will be given by Michael Rosen on 'Folk tradition: What do we do with it?' Alessandro Portelli, one of the shortlisted authors, will also be in London the night before to give the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture at the Bishopsgate Institute.

A Watchet Sailor

2011-09-23T09:56:00.005+01:00

I recently spent a happy 3 weeks holidaying in Watchet on the Somerset coast. The small harbour town's development was tied up with the import and export of minerals, particularly iron ore from the neighbouring Brendon Hills. Earlier it had hosted a Saxon mint which was plundered by the Vikings, and there are a couple of good local legends around the church and the big local landowners.
For anyone interested in folk song and its collection in England, Watchet means shanties. It was the home of the remarkable singer John Short (1839-1933). Between April and September 1914 Short sang 57 songs, most of them shanties, to Cecil Sharp. He was the main contributor to Sharp's English Folk-Chanteys, providing 43 of its 60 songs.
Short had started work in the local coastal trade at the age of 14, but in 1857 moved onto deep-sea vessels. For the next 50 years he worked at sea, eventually moving back into the coastal trade. His time on the Union ship the Levant, running the Civil War blockade under a British flag of convenience, earned him the enduring nickname 'Yankee Jack'. When he finally came ashore, to look after his ailing wife, he worked in Watchet harbour.
He heard his first shanty, Cheerily Man, on his first deepwater trip. Thereafter he made a point of trying to pick up a new shanty on every new vessel, which may explain some of the range of his repertoire. This is also worth noting when we think about traditional singers' active pursuit and preservation of songs. Short was a fine melismatic singer, as the notation of a complex piece like Carry Him to the Burying Ground reveals. In his later years Short served as Watchet's town crier. The town still has a crier, but I doubt that he could share John Short's boast that his voice could be heard for 2 miles with the right wind.
What is striking in Watchet is how far Short's fame within the folk revivals has intersected with his local celebrity. There is a statue of him in the centre of the Esplanade overlooking the harbour. (I do not particularly like Alan Herriot's statue, although I prefer it to his other local statue of the Ancient Mariner). Short's former residence is marked with a slate plaque.
Some of this may reflect the interest of folk song collectors (Sharp's picture can also be found on local information boards), but that is not quite the whole story. The town's good Boat Museum has a range of Bridgwater 'flatners', local boats built for inland work along the coast. These are now making a comeback as leisure vessels, and the museum has a nice recent example named after Short. The impression is of a celebrated local figure who has also become known to the outside world through his very specific talents. These reflect on and augment his local standing.
That is both charming and appropriate. In Watchet we get a real sense of a singer as a person, and of his repertoire as reflecting that person's enthusiasm and activity. There has been a healthy push towards such an approach when thinking about folk song (1), but Watchet's relationship with John Short gave me the fullest sense of how this might work.
It was appropriate, then, that in the Watchet Town Museum I picked up the first volume in a projected 3-CD set of all John Short's songs. Short Sharp Shanties Vol. 1 was put together under the auspices of Tom and Barbara Brown. They have brought together an eclectic group of lead singers, each of whom was given free rein with the arrangement of their songs.
The result is a diverse collection that highlights the move from shanties as historical worksongs to their current presentation as social and performance pieces. One of my big dislikes of shanty sessions is their lack of variety. That is not the case here. There are some more 'traditional' representations of shanties as worksongs, but Short's musicality is given full credit both in straightforward hauling shanties like Shallow Brown (and I warm more and more to Jim Mageean's singing) and in Carry Him to the Burying Ground. Sam Lee's singing of the latter is assured and complex, but I do not find his reading of songs yet as compelling or convincing as, say, Jackie Oates's fine take on Fire! Fire! here. Jeff Warner's banjo points to the breadth of Short's musical adventuring. I'm a big fan of Jeff Warner, and particularly enjoyed his warm and delicate Won't You Go My Way? (He touches on John Short's repertoire on his new solo album, too). At its best, this CD points to the same tendency seen in Watchet: these songs are part of a man's life, and are part of how he lived that life. In celebrating the songs, we have to celebrate the singer.

* * * * *

1: See, for example, the article on Short in Still Growing: English Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection, ed. Steve Roud, Eddie Upton and Malcolm Taylor (London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 2003), pp. 79-80.

Some burial folklore in literary sources

2011-09-14T10:01:00.003+01:00

Whiling away my holiday with some light reading I came across several rather throwaway references to folkloric practice and belief. It is the casual manner of their introduction into literary fiction that makes them compelling as folkloric record. I was particularly struck by some references to burial practice.
The idea that a piece of land has been left undeveloped because it covers a plague burial ground has become a common one in London in recent years. Steve Roud has described the motif as 'a real growth area' (1). It may have developed alongside other similar ideas: in the late 1970s my father told me that a grassy corner of carpark outside the Fox on the Hill pub on Denmark Hill remained bare because it covered a Roman burial ground. (Pragmatism - and access to maps of Roman cemeteries - suggest that it remained undeveloped, rather, because it was awkwardly triangular and too narrow for a parking space). I'd associated the development of the motif with the post-war period, but a passing reference suggests a slightly earlier flourishing.
In Chapter 5 of Sax Rohmer's 1916 sequel The Devil Doctor (US: The Return of Fu-Manchu) we find exactly this kind of emergent pseudo-historical legend. Dr Petrie believes an islet in a south-west London park is naturally occurring. Nayland Smith is scornful in such a way as to point to the creation of authority in a legend:
'Nothing of the kind; it is a burial mound, Petrie! It marks the site of one of the Plague Pits where victims were buried during the Great Plague of London. You will observe that, although you have seen it every morning for some years, it remains for a British Commissioner resident in Burma to acquaint you with its history!'
Thinking folkloristically we might take this last assertion as evidence of the recent development of this legend. (I read this courtesy of Project Gutenberg, so I should also tip my hat here to the recently-departed Michael Hart, its founder and the inventor of the e-book).
This assertion of the 'history' of this legend is in marked contrast to another reference to burial practice I came across in fictional form. In Ambrose Bierce's short story 'A Holy Terror', a gold prospector is tipped off about a plot in a cemetery. He digs through a grave, and with chilling Biercean understatement, finds that 'This frail product of the carpenter's art had been put into the grave the wrong side up!' (2) The lack of explanation creates the effect: the detail relies on a reader's knowledge that burial upside-down is reserved for those likely to cause supernatural disturbance otherwise. (People are buried upside-down to prevent them clawing their way to the surface after death).
This is still a relatively late reference to prone burial. A recent historical survey found the last documented incident of the practice in 1916 (3). Of course, this is the sort of practice that is difficult to establish: it requires a degree of trust in the researcher that may not be inevitable given the rather extraordinary and infrequent practice. Ruth Tongue claimed to have been told of such things in Somerset in the early years of the 20th century (4). There must be some doubts about this: she said she was told of such things because she was a 'chime child', born at midnight. She wasn't. She was evidently a remarkable and gifted storyteller, but her reliability as a witness might be questionable. The Bierce reference, though, does suggest some wider familiarity with the idea.

* * * * *

1: Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City (London: Random House, 2008), pp. 117-119.
2: Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939; first pub. 1892), p. 121.
3: Caroline Arcini, 'Prone Burials', Current Archaeology, 231 (June 2009), 30-35.
4: Ruth L. Tongue, 'Some Odds and Ends of Somerset Folklore', Folklore, 69.1 (1958), 44.

Paremiology and literature

2011-09-05T11:34:00.004+01:00

I've long been interested in the relationship between folkloric items and their presentation in literary material. (It's one of the things I touch on in a talk I'm giving on St Clement's Day celebrations to the South East London Folklore Society in November). There is, I think, a tendency to underestimate the capacity of literary authors to be inventive and adaptive with traditional material, and to assume that how they present an item in their fictional, created world is identical to the way it is used in the ethnographic world around them.
A corresponding tendency is to look at literary works primarily for their folkloric content. I confess to a sinking feeling on learning that Archer Taylor's first reaction to a William Faulkner novel was 'He doesn't use many proverbs!' (1) This seems to me to miss the point on a number of levels, but that might simply be because there is no further record of what he made of the novel as a work of literature.
However, paremiology is actually an area where a straightforward reading of folkloric material can be possible in literary text. I was reminded of this after some summer escapist reading, having finally got round to Arthur Bernède's Belphégor (1927). Many of the characters use proverbial expressions, but they do so in direct speech. One might have to take into account personal characterisation employed by the author, but the proverbs here are familiar and seem to employ standard forms. Characters describe a situation more than once as 'clair comme l'eau de roche' (clear as crystal). Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau record the phrase but give no historical antecedents (2).
Rey and Chantreau do not record the expression 'Un homme prévenu en vaut deux' (forewarned is forearmed), found in Belphégor, but it is noted in online collections of French proverbs along with the variant 'un homme averti en vaut deux'.
Another other proverbial item that leaped out at me was when the protagonist insists 'j'ai toujours eu pour principe de ne jamais vendre la peau de l'ours avant qu'il fût à terre' (I've always made a point of never selling the bear's skin before he's down). While the second part of the phrase is variable, the bearskin element is widespread, most famously found in La Fontaine's Fables. Rey and Chantreau note that in Middle French the specific mention of 'the bear' wasn't necessary (3).

* * * * *

1) Quoted in Jan Harold Brunvand, 'My Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business: The 1999 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture', Western Folklore, 58.1 (1999), 4.
2) Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau, Dictionnaire d'Expressions et Locutions (Paris: Le Robert, 2007), p. 201.
3) Rey and Chantreau, pp. 664-5.

The anniversary of 'Folklore'

2011-08-29T17:00:00.011+01:00

Having just got back from my holiday I thought I'd better catch up with one of the more important anniversaries in the history of the discipline of Folklore.
On 12 August 1846 William John Thoms, under the pen name Ambrose Merton, wrote a letter to The Athenaeum magazine. It was published on 22 August. In it Thoms wrote of 'what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-bye it is more a Lore than a Literature, and would be more aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folklore, - the Lore of the People)' (1).
It's a convenient marker for the start of Folklore as a self-identified discipline, but the letter makes no claims for inventing the discipline, pointing back as it does to the work of the Grimms and the earlier popular antiquarians. Rather, it begins to delineate the idea of what folklore is ('the manners, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time') and encourage its collection ('how much may yet be rescued by timely exertion').
It's the start of a great exploration, so it's no surprise that folklorists take it seriously. Last year's Folklore Society weekend on Death in Legend and Tradition was held in Brompton Cemetery, where Thoms is buried. On behalf of the Society Dr Jonathan Roper laid a wreath at Thoms's grave (top) and gave a short eulogy (left). Jonathan's article on 'Thoms and the Unachieved "Folk-Lore of England"' is available free here.
I'm pleased to commemorate the occasion, and give credit where it's due.

* * * * *

1: The letter is reprinted in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 4-6.

Decorating the bride

2011-07-28T12:36:00.004+01:00

The latest issue of Folk London (254, Aug-Sept 2011) contains this interesting little comment from the editor, Peter Crabb-Wyke:

'When I first started work in The City in the late 1960s it was customary for girls who were about to marry to be decorated by their work mates. It was a regular sight at Liverpool Street to see some poor girl on her way home on a Friday night with streamers pinned to her clothes and usually an "L" plate on her back. When I returned to work in the Square Mile in the '80s the custom seemed to have died out and friends who worked in the West End in that era have never heard of it. Do any of our readers have memories of this custom, or better still photos?'

At around the same time Peter recalls seeing girls decorated, George Monger documented the practice in some Essex industrial centres. Monger recorded the practice from Harold Hill and Ongar, places accessible to the City for commuters. Some other comments around the same time suggest the practice was probably widespread. (1)

Peter's call for memories or photos is welcome, and I hope he gets some results, but it would also be interesting to know if there is any connection with the current practice of the costumed hen night trip. Many of the costumes are almost standardised (pink cowboy hats, wings): this may reflect commercial availability, but it would be interesting to know if there's any understood connection with older traditions. The L-plates certainly remain popular, and have also become part of the commercial repertoire.

* * * * * * *

1) George Monger, 'A Note on Wedding Customs in Industry Today', Folklore, 82.4 (1971), 314-316.

Sharing the Harvest

2011-07-20T13:48:00.007+01:00

I recently received an e-mail advising me that the National Library of Australia's bookstore is now online. I was on their mailing list having previously bought a quite wonderful CD from them. Hopefully the launch of the online store will enable them to get round some of the rather charming problems I'd had with their manual system - the CD was initially out of stock, and took about a year to arrive, by which time I'd forgotten having ordered it.

The CD, though, turned out to be a real treat, so I'm pleased to see the store lists it as still being available and in stock. (The Australian Dollar also seems to have strengthened since I bought my copy: the CD costs Aus$19.95 before postage, which today works out at about £14).

Sharing the Harvest is a 2-disc set of John Meredith's field recordings of folk songs and tunes made in the 1950s. There are some pieces generally familiar from Australian, Irish and British traditions (there's a strong selection of Irish/Australian bandit songs), but also some less well-known items.

As ever with field recordings, there are are variations of quality for several reasons. Some are technical, some relate to the age of the performers, some to the recording context, and none makes any difference to the value of the collection. There are some truly exceptional traditional performers represented here, like Sally Sloane. The dropping out of the odd word cannot detract from a performance like Sid Heather's great The Wonderful Crocodile, anymore than the unprompted accompaniment of Ron Manton's dog during what he could recollect of The Banks of the Condamine.

Revisiting the CDs, I'm struck again by Meredith himself. Born in New South Wales in 1920, Meredith had learned the button accordion from his bush worker father, and played for local dances. Moving to Sydney to work for a drug company, he became involved in a folk revivalist movement promoted by the Australian Communist Party. In part they were driven by a cultural nationalism, but this led to a renewed interest in bush songs. Meredith was introduced to a retired shearer, Jack 'Hoopiron' Lee (who can be heard here).

There's an interesting technical aspect to this amateur drive to research. In the 1950s, portable recording equipment was becoming more widely and cheaply available. Meredith, who did not have the technical ability to transcribe a tune, was still able to purchase a tape recorder and go out looking for songs. He was able to record tunes and songs long before he found a scholarly collaborator in Hugh Anderson who could help him prepare them for publication in book form.

Meredith was quite rightly recognised for his fieldwork. The NLA bought his tape collection in 1963, and encouraged further fieldwork to record the oral histories of performers. Meredith resumed fieldwork in the 1980s in collaboration with the Music Department at the University of New South Wales, further adding to the NLA's documentation of vernacular culture.

However, the availability of this technical wherewithal extended well beyond those like Meredith who dedicated themselves to the quest for traditional music. I have heard several stories of people in the 1950s recording domestic parties at which there was singing, in part simply because they now could. These less formal, less directed, recordings may still be lurking in attics and cellars. It's worth keeping an eye open for these things, as they may offer small but valuable contributions to our knowledge of vernacular singing.

John Meredith at the Holbrook Woolpack Museum, c.1990, playing the late 'Pop' Craythorn's accordion. (Photo by Rob Willis from the NLA Pictures Collection)

Songs of Love and Emigration

2011-06-14T14:49:00.004+01:00

I'm not quite out of the thesis woods yet, but am beginning to start thinking about research/interests/life generally after I finally finish. One part of this has involved catching up on some recent CD releases. I've finally picked up a copy of Songs of Love and Emigration, a 2 CD set of songs recorded by London Irish pensioners.
I already knew something of the project, having had the privilege of hearing one of the singers, Andy Higgins, several times at Sharps Folk Club. The 21 singers here perform a wide range of songs and recitations from folk songs, popular theatre pieces, to a song from the repertoire of John McCormack. Gerry Diver has contributed an impressive and sensitive backing to all of the pieces.
I hope that someone also recorded these singers in the settings where they actually sang most of these pieces, but that's not a criticism of this project. It's interesting to hear songs that might not get an airing in the folk world, invested here with evident emotional significance. Anne Morrissey sings Galway Bay, for example, quite beautifully. It is a song that reminds her of leaving Galway for America at 19, and you can hear that in the performance.
What's also interesting is the evidence of a continued tradition of making songs and poems. There are poems here performed by their authors, but the song that caught my attention immediately was John Butler's The Gracie Blue. I knew nothing of this song, or the story attached to it.
It relates to an event in Schull Harbour in 1947, when local traders were passed dud cheques by a conman in an ornate naval uniform. The song sung by John Butler appears to have been just one of a number of local compositions on the subject. It isn't the song sung at the end of this lovely local oral history film, for example:

The Gracie Blue: A People's History from El Zorrero Films on Vimeo.

Here is folk poetry, commemorating an otherwise forgotten incident in local history, and it's got me very excited about getting onto another research project in due course.

Across the Forest review

2011-04-21T13:12:00.005+01:00

Supernatural beliefs are a difficult area to write about. A lot of contradictory assumptions are made – they’re dying out or they’re flourishing, they reflect experience or discussing them indicates no experience, they are exactly the same as artistic representations or artistic representations have changed them forever etc etc etc. All too often comments on belief are based on these preconceptions or, just as bad, are based on the assumption that commentator and original source had a common understanding of the concepts and entities being described.

One step towards overcoming these assumptions is just to go and ask people about their beliefs and experiences. (This seems obvious, but it also seems to need repeating). Problems still arise with interpretations, but at least you then have a starting point of people’s own testimony. It’s a real pleasure, therefore, to see such testimonies documented on film, and publicly available.

Across the Forest, dir. Justin Blair & Matthew Vincent, 2009 (79 mins) contains footage of interviews conducted in Romania. The interviewees describe their experiences of, and beliefs in, various supernatural beings. Many of these are stunning (‘binding’ a corpse to the grave by stabbing a nail through its heart), and informants are allowed to give their own accounts of experiences and belief (the man who insists ‘The dead do come back’ also states categorically that ‘without experiences people don’t believe’).

Blair and Vincent deserve credit for retaining the native terms here (strigoi, varcolaci etc), although these are often compared with English equivalents (vampire, werewolf etc). Strigoi are often compared to vampires: they have a lot in common with ghosts of the uneasy dead, but it would be forcing the issue just to translate the term, not quite accurately, by either word. They are strigoi, and we see here what this actually means. This is particularly important given how far notions of ‘Transylvania’ have shaped popular representations of supernatural beings, including the vampire of film and literature.

The film’s greatest strength is its refreshingly unflashy presentation of the interviews in extended sections. This is welcome for two reasons.

Firstly, it gives due weight to the speaker’s own account and interpretation of their stories. These unfold more fully than if they were implied in more heavily edited soundbites. This is not to suggest an absence of editorial direction, as I will discuss below, but it does place the emphasis on the interviewees. All of the interviewees are identified, but their names are listed during the end credits, a device more suited to the soundbite editing style eschewed here. Given the construction of the film it might have been better to have identified them as they appeared, but that is a minor quibble.

Secondly, the longer interview clips also give the viewer some idea of the narrative context for the stories. While most of the interviews are individual discussions, we do see some group storytelling contexts, and we hear about others.

This is significant, because one of the driving motivations for the film is the idea that ‘These beliefs are quickly dying out as the world modernizes around the tiny villages’. The evidence may be slightly skewed here, as the interviewees are mostly older people, so we do not see transmission of the stories to younger generations. However, family narrative traditions are revealed, and interviewees themselves do engage in some way with changing patterns of belief. It takes nothing from the interviews as evidence of individual positions to think that further work needs doing on how they are transmitted.

A related question is my biggest concern here. Blair and Vincent refer throughout to Transylvania. This seems a little too imprecise for the social context. One informant simply talks about being Romanian. There is evidence of social context within the interviews, including evidence of fluidity of labour across the region (one informant discusses a Moldovan indentured servant).

This may not be a big deal here, beyond flagging further questions for consideration in interpreting and analysing the testimonies here. Transylvania may just be intended as a general geographical term, but it needs a little more caution given its popular literary uses.

Perhaps I became more sensitive to this given the film’s one big weakness. The interviews are intercut with other footage. Most of the slideshows of establishing shots are unexceptionable. However, I found some strident soundtracking and night-vision footage of the filmmakers en route redundant. This left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. This footage has no narrative significance, and the sub-Blair Witch night vision seems to be pointing to a literary and cinematic culture of supernatural representation somewhat different to the rest of the film. (Some of the slides fall into the same category). This felt at best like a slight loss of nerve, at worst like a manipulation of the interviews.

But this caveat should not discourage anyone from getting hold of this film. It is distracting, and points to areas for future study and consideration, but it does not undermine the remarkable interviews in this film. There is much to enjoy, savour and contemplate here, and it is worth your time

More information, and details of how to order the DVD, are at the film's website.

Not cold reading but cold calling

2011-04-01T15:54:00.003+01:00

Things here are busy and tense with work on my thesis, and blogging's had to take a backseat.
However, I was delighted to receive a pre-recorded junk advertising call a month ago, as it fell within the scope of my work. 'My name is Chris', declared the recorded voice. 'I am a clairvoyant and a parapsychologist ... I have already helped people with my parapsychological gift'.
This is the first time I've heard such an advertising cold call in this field. Also striking was that this was the first time I'd come across that vernacular use of 'parapsychology' to mean 'psychical'.
I'm delighted to have been able to include this in my thesis. If only Chris had told me how to get it written faster.

A Green Man

2011-02-16T18:02:00.004Z

I've only just got round to picking up a copy of Jacqueline Simpson's recent book on the folklore of pub names (1). It is the kind of well-researched delight we have come to expect from her, and I'm enjoying it very much.
I'm also extremely chuffed to find myself mentioned in the acknowledgements there. When she was researching the changing iconography of Green Men in pub signs, Jacqueline had asked around for any images people might have. She was thus able to describe a number of signs, including 'The Green Man on the corner of Plashet Grove and Katherine Road (London E6) [that] shows a "wild man" figure carrying a tankard and standing next to a barrel' (p. 121).
Here's the photo on which she based that description. I'd taken it in part because the pub was closing down, and I felt there should be some record of the motif in use there before evidence of it disappeared. The building was subsequently demolished, and a block of flats is nearing completion on the site.
There had been quite a lot of local interest in the pub because it was one of the older buildings in the area. (Although it wasn't a great pub by the time I knew it). I'm pleased that such interest can also be used to inform other research.

* * * * * *

1: Jacqueline Simpson, Green Men and White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names (London: Random House, 2010).

A meme streak

2011-02-10T12:32:00.002Z

Last night's Newsnight saw Paul Mason appealing to the notion of 'memes' for the circulation of radical ideas. (He'd already floated the idea on his BBC blog). I hadn't intended to get into the question of meme-theory here yet. It's quite a broad field, as I've found in my doctoral research.
I've not been convinced by memes thus far. To a great extent they seem like a judgemental short cut advanced by disapproving scientists to account for religion without viewing it in any broader social context. To quote an abstract by Susan Blackmore, 'Not only does the God meme satisfy minds that were not evolved to accurately assess the origins of the universe or the likelihood of life after death, but wraps itself up in religious memeplexes that use threats and promises to ensure their own propagation'.
There are a number of problems with this. For one, it doesn't really account for contrary theories held by minds presumably at exactly the same evolutionary disadvantage. As some critics have noted, there does not seem to be a tendency for bad memes to be countered by good ones. In the work of Richard Dawkins, for example, there is a tendency for bad memes to be countered by rational criticism, which doesn't seem to have memetic status. (1) Indeed, some scientists have pointed to this problem more generally. Lewis Wolpert has written 'Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult. Is the word "bird" a meme, and is the second law of thermodynamics also one?' (2)
This tendency of memetics reveals a lack of familiarity with the study of traditional narrative and its transmission. Schrempp has pointed out that folklorists have long dealt with the transmission of traditional narrative elements - 'less ideologically and more scientifically', he notes archly - in trait and motif studies. (3)
A related problem, with more serious implications, is the implication that these motifs are themselves responsible for their own transmission. (This is clearer in Blackmore's writings than in Dawkins's). Folklorists' examination of motifs and types does not proceed from the assumption that the stories are transmitting themselves. What sounds like the ultimate in materialism from the memeticists is a way of removing human agency from cultural artefacts. It gives the idea supremacy in its philosophical framework. If you tell a myth, or believe in a god, this is evidence of your human failings in the face of quasi-genetic elements, rather than any cultural expression.
Distasteful though I may find it intellectually, however, the 'meme' has acquired a certain folk life as a way of representing transmitted ideas. You do find it in popular discussion, and in that respect it must be taken seriously. It exists as a popular and vague definition. (I don't like the popular use of 'folklore' to mean something false, but I recognise it exists, and has to be factored into any appraisal of emic analysis).
What's interesting about Mason's appeal to memes is that you see that process at work. Although he pays lip service to the notion of self-replication, in practice he actually abandons much of the contentious baggage because he sees it in terms of agent-driven communication: 'ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory ... seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes'.
I still find it a vague and unhelpful concept, in origin profoundly ignorant of any study of traditional communication, but there does seem to be some attempt to use memes now to express something closer to the items that people transmit between themselves. There seems to be some attempt to restore human matter to the transmission of non-material artefacts between people. To restore the folk to the folklore, maybe?

* * * * * * * * * *

1: Gregory Schrempp, 'Taking the Dawkins Challenge, or, The Dark Side of the Meme', Journal of Folklore Research, 46.1 (2009), 91-100.
2: Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 30.
3: Schrempp, 'Dawkins', 98.

The legal historian of cannibalism at sea

2011-02-02T11:00:00.006Z

I'm sorry to hear that the legal historian AW Brian Simpson has died. There's plenty of detail in Christopher McCrudden's obituary in The Guardian.
Simpson's probably best known to folklorists (and most general readers) for Cannibalism and the Common Law, his classic account of the Mignonette tragedy and its ensuing legal case. (This established the precedent in English law that you could not kill someone to eat them, even in the most extreme of circumstances). I've written on the case here before.
It's an excellent book, rich with ballad and customary evidence, and it's invaluable for anyone trying to understand the clash between folk culture and the law. I used it extensively when I was working on Thackeray's poem about cannibalism at sea 'Little Billee' for an article in the Folk Music Journal, 9.5 (2010).
I don't know whether Brian Simpson ever saw this article, but he was certainly uppermost in my mind when I came to illustrate it. He had quoted a broadside ballad about the Mignonette, 'Fearful Sufferings at Sea: Lad Killed and Eaten', but wrote that he had never seen a copy of the ballad. It was serendipity that, while looking for ballad illustrations in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, I came across that very ballad in Ralph Vaughan Williams' own collection. It now adorns the cover of that issue of the journal. Its inclusion was always intended as, and remains, a small tribute to Brian Simpson's sterling work.

Ratkings

2011-01-17T10:44:00.006Z

Fiona-Jane Brown has a complaint about the last of the BBC's Aurelio Zen adaptations (which aired last night). At no point. she says, did anyone mention what the 'Ratking' of the title was. As a rattophilic folklorist, I'm happy to oblige. (F-J knows, by the way, she just thinks other people should too).
The rat king is a phenomenon whereby rats apparently become knotted at the tail while they are in the nest. The famous image here is of an example from Rucphen, but there are one or two other good examples in museums around the world. The Rucphen one has been x-rayed and, yes, the rats, really are knotted together at the tails. (It's been suggested that the tails were broken and had re-knitted, which might cast a doubt on the idea that this occurred naturally when they were young).
So, there's a question-mark over whether this really is naturally occurring or whether it's been 'arranged' at some point. Apart from the actual object, what's interesting from it folklorically is that it's attached to reports of intelligent social behaviour from the rats. The rat king supposedly occurs in the nest while the rats are young, which would be a problem for their future development. Rats, though, have a reputation for cleverness, and for looking out for each other, so other rats are supposed to bring food back to the nest for the afflicted animals.
This ties in with all sorts of other folklore about rats' social behaviour. There are contemporary legends reported from Germany of two rats, each holding the end of a straw in their mouths as they scuttle round a farmyard. On closer inspection the trailing rat is found to be blind, and is being led around by its colleague. As rats swarm, there are also tales of a dominant rat leading them in their flight, and their flight is also taken as prescient of impending danger. (There's a story about rats swarming down main roads away from the bombing during the Coventry Blitz).
Just before Christmas I had the chance to see some of Walter Potter's taxidermy tableaux. The theme of the intelligent rat recurs throughout his work, although it's perhaps less well known than his kittens. In 'The Friend in Need' (below) a rat is caught in a trap. There is a concerted and intelligent effort to free him by his friends. Potter seems to have broken the faces of his rats to make them seem less visually ratlike, but it's clear that he's still dealing with folkloric ideas about rats.
In another tableau Potter portrayed rats stealing eggs. As P.A. Morris puts it, 'This is an evergreen topic of folklore in the countryside, even today. Potter admitted that he never saw such a thing himself, but created the case based upon what a clergyman (presumed to be a reliable witness) had told him'.(1) Right there you have the folkloric idea, and its transmission.
There was also a tableau of rats attempting to steal wine. This was based on another story resting on similar ideas about their intelligence. Rats are reputed to dip their tails into wine or oil, and then lick the fluid off it. (This image, and the egg-stealing, can be found in reproduction in this article about Potter).
That was a new one on me, but it fits perfectly with the other folklore about them. I really never will stop finding them fascinating.

* * * * * * * * *

1: P.A. Morris, Walter Potter and His Museum of Curious Taxidermy (Ascot: MPM, 2008), p. 63.

Shoes on telephone lines

2011-01-12T11:47:00.010Z

The new year finds me beavering away, wrestling full-time with finishing the thesis. So, to remind myself of some other folkloric things I love, here are some shoes thrown over telephone lines. There are all sorts of reasons for it as behaviour. I don't know why these are here, and I don't claim to have any handle on all of the reasons why they might be. That's part of the attraction of studying folklore. These were photographed in Goodwood Road, London SE14, on 16th March 2010.

Season's Greetings and a Horse Disguise

2010-12-23T15:39:00.002Z

I'm now deep in the throes of writing my thesis, and unable to get away from ghosts no matter how hard I try. I even received a Christmas card this morning illustrating the M.R. James story 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'. The card's manufacturer insists that 'Ghost stories are a tradition at Christmas'. This is true enough, and there's plenty of scope for research into traditions of telling literary ghost stories for seasonal entertainment, but I've put any other research projects on hold until I'm done with this thesis.
I'm looking forward to an end to this odd year, and looking forward to the promise of a new one. I can't think of a better way of marking the season than with a photo of a splendid winter house-visiting custom from East Kent, the Hooden Horse. This picture is of the St Nicholas at Wade horse. I had a rare chance to photograph them out of season (and away from their home turf) on 29 March 2008 when they performed at the Kent Gathering of Traditional Music in Frittenden. (Along with their history, Ben Jones's fine website on hoodening also has details of the script they used that day). It was a treat, and the thought of it cheers me up for the new year.

All the best for Christmas and the New Year

Remember, remember ...

2010-11-05T18:04:00.004Z

Sitting at my desk I'm becoming aware of a rise in noise levels now it's got dark and the rain's eased up. A combination of Bonfire Night and Diwali means it may be about to get too noisy to carry on working.
A Leeds informant, in his early 40s, was telling me recently about their favourite Bonfire Night prank as children. They would steal the front-gates from local houses to use on their bonfires.
The theft provided an additional source of entertainment. A local man navigated his way back from the pub by working his way along the front hedges, singing all the while. There would be a sudden lull in his singing when he came to a gate that wasn't there to support him any more, and he would fall unceremoniously into a neighbour's garden.

Halloween: Trick or Contemporary Legend

2010-10-30T12:51:00.004+01:00

Halloween in the UK this year has seen a higher degree of debate about the history and transmission of the festival than I can recall from previous years. In particular there's been an attempt to trace its transatlantic migrations more accurately than the knee-jerk 'it's an American festival' of some of the tabloids.
I'm also struck by the extent to which some older local formulations seem to be reappearing in discussions of the chaos around Halloween. In a report on home repairs after Halloween pranks, Santander General Insurance refer to the damage done during 'mischief week'. (They reckon nearly a quarter of British households have experienced damage, which may be why my local council is enforcing a ban on selling flour and eggs to under-18s for the duration).
But, of course, the real meaning of Halloween is the Contemporary Legend ... I'm delighted to see a return of the 'doctored Halloween treat' story, with this report that LA County Police are warning parents of an increasing number of marijuana-laced treats. (This is a difficult legend, because of the hideous ostension attached to it historically).
In the story linked to here, I particularly like the vagueness about the products themselves. LA County Director Public Health Jonathan Fielding has apparently said they are a risk 'because of the lack of information regarding their manufacture', while the story recommends detecting them 'by smell'.
The real pointer to the legendary character of this report, though, comes in this succinct statement: 'Although the Sheriff's Department has never received a report of laced Halloween treats being distributed, it is nevertheless warning parents about this new potential threat.' You have been warned.

Folklore in the news means cold on the way

2010-10-19T16:12:00.004+01:00

The early arrival of eight Bewick's Swans (Cygnus columbianus) in Gloucestershire has, surprisingly, made the national press. The reports aren't about how attractive these small swans are. Rather, they focus on the distances they travel. 'Prone to ceaseless wanderlust', in the words of one ornithologist, Bewick's Swans fly some 2,500 miles from Russia/Siberia to overwinter in Britain.
More particularly, the press are interested in the date of their arrival. These birds have arrived a couple of weeks earlier than last year's migrants, and journalists have started reaching for Folklore. This, fairly standard version, was in the Telegraph: 'According to folklore, their early arrival signals the start of a long, harsh winter'. This makes a sort of sense, as Bewick's Swans fly south-ish to get away from Arctic winters, and early movement might indicate an early worsening of the weather behind them.
Looking at Richard Inwards's 1893 collection Weather Lore: A Collection of Proverbs, Sayings & Rules Concerning the Weather (repr. London: Senate, 1994), turns up a definite association of swans with bad weather. Inwards notes a Scottish belief that 'When the white swan visits the Orkneys, expect a continued severe winter' (p. 134). More generally, their flight is associated with rain or hurricanes. The rain connection seems quite venerable: Inwards quotes Dryden's translation of Vergil:

The swans that sail along the silvery flood,

And dive with stretching necks to search their food,
Then lave their backs with sprinkling dews in vain,
And stem the stream to meet the promised rain

They're a lovely sight, but it might be time to wrap up warm.

Gilda O'Neill

2010-10-07T18:01:00.004+01:00

I'm shocked to learn of the sudden death of Gilda O'Neill at the age of just 59. I first came across her work because of an interest in hop-picking. Her oral history of East London women hop-pickers, Pull No More Bines: Hop-Picking: Memories of a Vanished Way of Life (London: Women's Press, 1990) was a brilliant study. It combined a sympathetic ear with an acute eye. She successfully achieved the balance of writing in an informed and objective way about something she also remembered experiencing. (It's still in print, now published under the much less evocative title Lost Voices).
She tried to bring serious thought about history to an audience that might not have had much opportunity for serious study. Her books were accessibly written, and focused on the East End working class life she had grown up with. They are rich with the minutiae of folklore and history. Her book about women's socialising A Night Out with the Girls (London: Women's Press, 1993) seems less well known than her big histories, but I remember being struck by its sheer pleasure at the social events it was examining, and the thoughtful points it made about them along the way. I haven't read any of her novels, but everything I've heard about them suggests she brought the same determined combination of accuracy and accessibility to that genre too.
Having benefited from a return to education as a mature student, she worked hard to inspire people from the same background as her to consider its possibilities. The photo shows her (right) talking with Maggie Semple at a National Reading Week event in 2008. Given this government's likely curtailment of adult education opportunities, her enthusiastic contribution on this front deserves mention.
Her accounts of working class life in the East End sought to celebrate the lives of ordinary people, and to use their history as a prism through which to view current events. She leaves a valuable body of work that remains a pleasure to explore.

Honouring the Dead - Officially and Unofficially

2010-09-30T19:01:00.007+01:00

At the Folklore Society AGM and Conference in March, my eye was caught by some trees in the staff car park at Leeds Trinity and All Saints University College. They were decorated with ribbons and flowers - the usual markers of vernacular commemorations of the dead. On closer investigation, it emerged that all of the trees also bore an official, manufactured, plaque. These were an official dedication to a deceased member of staff from the College itself. I do not know which came first, the official or the unofficial celebration, but it was a striking example of vernacular custom and practice being recognised and adopted officially.

Recalled to Life

2010-08-31T11:17:00.008+01:00

This weekend sees the latest in the Folklore Society's Legend and Tradition weekends. These are highly successful themed weekends, taking place outside of academic venues and (mostly) outside London. Having participated at last year's event on The Sea I can confirm that they are great fun.

This year's, unusually, is in London, but this was decided by the possibility of a magnificent venue. For where better than Brompton Cemetery to hold a weekend on Death in Legend and Tradition? The papers are the usual engagingly eclectic mix of entertainment and information. Some will be academic, and some won't be, which is one of the triumphs of the legend weekend format.

I'm looking forward to catching up with some old and new friends. The speakers include Scott Wood of the always-interesting South East London Folklore Society, Alan Murdie of the Ghost Club, Andrew Bennett of the Folklore Society etc etc. I'm looking forward to catching up with Helen Frisby, who is talking about English Folk Funerals: she and I have been corresponding through the FLS News on the subject of corpse-touching.

It'll be nice, too, to meet up once more with that very fine storyteller Pete Castle. I've expressed ambivalence about storytelling before, but I really enjoyed the week I spent listening to Pete at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2007. (The photo opposite is of Pete singing 'Hopping Down in Kent' at the opening ceremony of the Festival). It was also a great pleasure to hear the appreciation of punters and technicians alike for his storytelling. One sound engineer said his perfect afternoon would be sitting with a cool beer listening to Pete tell stories.

Of course my trip to the cemetery is also about my ongoing doctoral research, but I'm delighted to find that I still just enjoy the subject for its own sake. In part, too, I'm using this weekend to ease me back into a social world of folkloric research after the traumatic disruption of the last few months. In the cheesiest of Victorian anthropological manners, Death may ease my passage back into life.

Ate Doornbosch

2010-08-13T17:50:00.006+01:00

I am sorry to learn, belatedly, that Ate Doornbosch (right, photographed in 2005) died last month at the age of 84.

As ever, I won't repeat the work of the obituarists. There is a nice Dutch tribute by Louis Peter Grijp, who had written well about Doornbosch in the book Blues en Balladen: Alan Lomax en Ate Doornbosch, twee muzikale veldwerkers. Ken Hunt wrote a fine obituary (in English) in The Independent. Dutch commentators have noted that the Independent piece was some way ahead of the Dutch press, which barely marked his passing.

I am pleased that his death has been noted. A lot of Dutch-language ethnography and folklore remains largely unknown because it is published in a minority language, (I was surprised to find that J. G. Frazer had made this complaint in 1934), but there is nothing negligible about Doornbosch's work.

In the field, building on the work of his colleague Will Scheepers, Doornbosch recorded around 5,000 folk song items. (Scheepers herself had recorded around 2,000). For any collector this would represent a substantial achievement. For a collector working in the second half of the twentieth century, in a country that appears to disregard its folksong heritage even more than the English, this is worthy of great admiration. Doornbosch began broadcasting a weekly radio programme, Onder de groene linde (Under the Green Lindens), in 1957. It ran for 1,316 episodes, before it was finally wound up in 1993.

Doornbosch played his field recordings on the show. This helped fuel the Dutch folk revival of the early 1970s, but it also generated wider attention from other tradition-bearers. As with the BBC's broadcasts of the 1950s, Doornbosch received correspondence from listeners who had heard a song and knew something similar, and would he be interested ... He was, and thus other singers were documented.

Aside from the ongoing spread of his research in this way, it meant that his collection focused on domestic singers, many of them women who were at home in the afternoons when his show was on. This led to a focus on rather different singing traditions than the largely male pub-singing events that dominated English fieldwork in the years immediately after the war.

Doornbosch's chief interest was narrative songs. It sometimes seems odd that he overlooked occupational song in his fieldwork, given his sympathetic interest in the working lives of singers. However, his focus on narrative songs and ballads gives his collection real depth in this area.

He was rather poorly served by CD releases of his field recordings for a long time, although there were some magnificent songbooks. The lack of available recordings was rectified in 2008 with the release of the boxset Onder de groene linde (left). The 9 CDs contained 163 of his and Scheepers' recordings. The songs were fully transcribed and translated in the handsome book that went with the set, while a DVD in the package contained two television documentaries on Doornbosch, and the last broadcast of the radio show.

His well-documented collection is also an integral part of the Dutch Folksong Database hosted by the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam. Here you will find song texts, tune transcriptions, and also sound recordings. Not everyone enjoys listening to field recordings, but there are some magical gems in his collection. Just to give an idea, try this performance of 'Jan Alberts stond op en die zong er een lied' by Douwe Johannes Booi. I picked it more or less at random: it's a version of 'Heer Halewijn' (Child 4), which was one of Doornbosch's favourite songs. (Georgina Boyes has suggested that much of A. L. Lloyd's writing on 'The Outlandish Knight' was taken wholesale, and without attribution, from Doornbosch). There's more like that throughout his collection.

I want to stress the qualities of the performances he documented because there's been a tendency to treat them as somehow secondary to the significance of his ethnographic research. Some Dutch scholars I spoke to were sceptical, ahead of the CD release, that domestic recordings of elderly singers would find an appreciative audience. Ate Doornbosch's exhaustive researches in some areas of Dutch song have informed our thinking about transmission and geographical spread of material, certainly, but they have also documented something truly wonderful in folk life.

Research into Folkloric Subjects Continues, but ...

2010-07-17T18:22:00.006+01:00

These are odd times for an English folklorist looking at academia. Marginal disciplines are expendable as far as university financing goes (a situation already apparent under the last administration, but approaching apocalyptic levels under the present one). Folklore, which has never had a secure standing in English universities, is disregarded as an academic subject.
Yet research continues in areas of folkloric interest, and some of it is rather undermined by the absence of any knowledge of work in Folklore as a discipline. I have lately seen some postgraduate research into Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). ICH was outlined in a UNESCO Convention (to which the British government did not sign up) as 'a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development'. ICH was conceived of as the lore behind the artefacts of folklife, and the Convention set out to protect this by administrative measures.
Celebrating the importance of such lore is valuable, and European ethnologists and folklorists have enthusiastically sought to use the ICH Convention to raise awareness of folklore and its study. Of course, this leaves the question of how far folklore can (or should) be protected by fiat. Encouraging an environment where lore is respected sufficiently for its transmission to be possible is one thing; preserving a tradition which no longer has any inherent life of its own is quite another.
Certainly there is a tendency to look at ICH from the needs of institutional bodies rather than the participants in, and bearers of, the traditions being protected. As was cynically joked about institutional resistance to gypsy horse fairs in England: 'How do you know if an event's traditional? If the local council is trying to ban it ...' (The photograph, left, comes from a Travellers Times article on the 2009 Horsmonden Horse Fair).
I may be doing the postgraduate researcher a disservice, but the questionnaire I saw showed no awareness that there was any history of such questions within Folklore. The researcher seemed to view the questions largely from the perspective of administrating bodies. Maybe I am wrong: I look forward to the dissertation.
It was rather more depressing to find a similar position being taken by senior researchers at the Institute of Education, Professor Sue Hallam and Dr Andrea Creech. (I have not yet read their full report, Music Education in the 21st Century in the United Kingdom: Achievements, Analysis and Aspirations, and what follows is based on their press release). Among their findings is the suggestion that restricted playlists limit access to a range of musical styles, and that this may have a damaging long-term impact on, for example, participation in brass band and folk music.
Some aspects of this are incontrovertible. Less folk music on the radio means fewer people will hear folk music on the radio. Put like that, it's hardly a shocking statement. Hallam and Creech also recognise other factors at work, particularly socio-economic ones. Much of the community basis for brass bands, for example, was eroded by the destruction of the heavy industry that had built those communities in the first place.
Yet this report appears during a particularly strong resurgence of interest in folk music. Why should that be, and yet not be reflected in their research? The radio is only one source of music now, as they note, and the do-it-yourself quality of much internet radio broadcasting is making a wide range of traditional musics easily available. (The English Folk Dance & Song Society has responded by drawing attention to the increased participation of young people at festivals and clubs).
More importantly, their focus on music transmission is chiefly on formal music education. This is the focus of their research, but there seems to be little recognition of the extra-mural folk transmission, learning, and making of music. The transmission of much folk music takes place through an informal group of like-minded enthusiasts - through a folk group, in one of the ways folklorists have understood that concept. Without investigating that, much is missed.
There seems to be little acknowledgement of any of the ways in which folklorists have examined groups, transmission, and folklore itself. Hallam and Creech's press statement came out at around the same time that Professor John Widdowson's 2009 Katharine Briggs lecture on the future of Folklore in English Higher Education was published (1). As I have said, I think the political climate was already making the kind of academic reconstruction envisaged by Widdowson unlikely even in November 2009. It is now, surely, dead.
In some ways Widdowson (right) followed Malcolm Taylor's Briggs lecture the year before. Taylor, unlike Widdowson, doesn't see the future of Folklore as depending on academic posts, although they both agree on the need for collaborative efforts by interested parties (eg the Folklore Society and EFDSS) in raising the profile of their work and their archives.
That's certainly a big part of the task ahead, but how do we ensure that research and documentation can continue to the same standard? I don't think this is easy. The work of earlier folklorists in fighting to establish academic status for the subject is of inestimable importance. (There was some earlier mention of this in relation to Richard Dorson in the US). Much of the work that has been done by academic folklorists is eminently readable and accessible. Some of it's harder, but just as important. It could, and should, be taken up more widely to provide a popular serious framework within which folklorists - academic or not - can work.

* * * * * * * *

1: J. D. A. Widdowson, 'Folklore Studies in English Higher Education: Lost Cause or New Opportunity?', Folklore, 121.2 (2010), 125-142

St Swithin's Day

2010-07-15T10:50:00.005+01:00

It being St Swithin's Day today, I thought I'd reprint the following local ghost legend from Gilmer County, West Virginia:

Annie Reaser had come to help with the house-work, as a member of the family. Our flattering attention to her store of folklore brought out the tale of a ghost who caused forty days rain because he did not like his resting place.
'He was a good man' said Annie 'And he liked the church so well that he never missed a meeting day, and he was there for evening prayer meeting, in time to light the candles and hand the hymn books around.
'When his time came to die, seeing he was a lone man with no row of family graves in the churchyard, the deacons thought of letting him lie close to the church he had served so long.
'So they laid him right near, but a little too close, for when a rain came, the drip from the eaves of the church fell right down on the new-made grave. Careless like, too, they forgot to bury his measuring rod alongside his coffin.
'Soon, strange tales were told about folks hearing a clatter at the back of the church, and some said the measuring rod was never laid twice in the same place. But the noise stopped when anybody went to look, and few did that, for it rained and rained all that spring, and no one could put in crops, nor a garden either.
'Week after week, that rapping agin the church walls kept time to the hymn-tunes the folks sang, and the rain beat on the roof like drums. At last, one late spring Sunday, the deacons and elders had a meeting, after the preaching, and all agreed something must be done. Next morning, they came with spades and shovels, and picked out a place at the far end of the churchyard.
'No sooner was the first spadeful of ground dug up, than the sun shone through the mist, and the sky cleared off. So they laid the old man alongside his friends - and his measuring rod, they buried that too. They read the burial service over him once more, for good measure, and there he lies, quiet and peaceful, till the Judgement day. But you watch and see - if there comes a hard rain on the fifteenth of July (they say that was his birthday), it'll still rain every day for forty days.''
(Blanche Whiting Keysner, 'The Measuring Rod', Keystone Folklore Quarterly, 1.2 (1956), 14-16)

Blanche Whiting Keysner, who recalled Annie Reaser's tale, noted that this was a migratory version of St Swithin's story, although his name had been lost along the way. According to the local English tale, rain on St Swithin's Day will be followed by 40 days of rain as the saint's burial was delayed for 40 days by bad weather. Here that motif survives, but it doesn't really make sense in the context so it's expanded by the slightly confusing detail about rain on the coffin, and augmented with another local tradition about burying the measuring rod.

I came across the article because Indiana University is making freely available online some journal holdings that are not so easily found (certainly in British libraries). These will migrate eventually to Google Books, but at the moment they're hosted on the HathiTrust Digital Library. They include: Keystone Folklore; Keystone Folklore Quarterly; Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review; and Folklore Historian.

HathiTrust has some other holdings of interest for folklorists. I suspect I'll be spending some time with them over the next few days - after all, it has just started raining.

St Clement

2010-06-20T18:25:00.005+01:00

This weather vane sits on top of St Clement Danes church in the Strand, London WC2. A church had stood on the site for a long time - according to one tradition, it was founded in the 9th century by Danes expelled from the City of London. (The boundary between the City of London and Westminster was only a little way to the east). It was gutted in 1941 during the Blitz. After the war it was handed over to the Air Council, who raised funds for its rebuilding. In 1958 it was reconsecrated as the Air Force church, a role it still has today.
The church has become the focus of a number of unstable traditions. Its very foundation legend is debatable: Steve Roud writes 'On the question of the Danes, there is no simple answer'. (1) The churchbells now peal the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' four times a day, although the meaning of the current words is just as questionable as the song's attachment to this church, rather than St Clement's Eastcheap.
The weather vane is a nice example, having nothing to do with the nursery rhyme, the Danes, or the RAF. It is stamped with an anchor, representing St Clement, the patron saint of sailors. Happily, given the altogether unclear history of any of the traditions involved, St Clement's own past is equally murky. Even some sympathetic sources query whether he died a martyr. The most common version of his legend is that he was killed by being thrown into the sea with an anchor round his neck, hence his invocation by sailors, and, later, his adoption as the patron saint of anchor-smiths. This was logically extended to blacksmiths, too, although it isn't exactly clear when. Blacksmiths were widely honouring him by the early nineteenth century, but there had already been a long history of St Clement's Day (23rd November) as a day of general festivity, marked by fishermen and bakers amongst others.
I like the uncertainty. I like the whirling mass of stories out of which all sorts of customs emerge. I particularly like this weather vane, because it symbolises a group of motifs and themes which have now largely been superseded by other traditions. You could so easily miss it.

* * * * * * * * *

1) Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City (London: Random House, 2008), p. 114

Traditional story about Cuvier

2010-05-12T14:19:00.008+01:00

I had half an eye on the third part of the BBC programme The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion last night. The third part of the series, 'How Did We Get Here?', dealt with the rise of scientific assessments of biodiversity. Along the way, presenter Michael Mosley (left) looked at the contribution of the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Mosley told this story about Cuvier (pictured below). I've transcribed the story from the broadcast programme:

There's a story about Cuvier which I like, which I think really sums up the man. It's late at night, and Cuvier has gone to bed, when one of his students, dressed in a devil's costume, bursts into his room and cries 'Cuvier! Cuvier! I have come to eat you!' Cuvier opened one eye, calmly looked the student up and down, and said 'All animals that have hooves and horns are herbivores. You cannot eat me'.

I've always liked this story, too, and it seems to have had an oral circulation. Augustus Hare recalled being told the story in Suffolk in 1894. Hare's version concerns 'some young men ... determined to frighten the famous naturalist'. His version doesn't change tense, as Mosley's does, but this might be because it was written down. Hare's punchline is a bit pithier than Mosley's rather classroom description, too:

Cuvier looked at him. 'Carnivorous! horns - hoofs - impossible! Good-night;' and he turned over and went to sleep. (1)

It's always a pleasure to hear a tale with some kind of traditional life being told orally, and it's a delight to hear them crop up on television.

• • • • • • • • •

1) reprinted in The Penguin Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 394

Dorson, Hospital, and Folklore Lived

2010-05-06T22:49:00.016+01:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about Richard M. Dorson (1916-1981). Dorson was one of the key American folklorists after the Second World War, responsible for cementing the reputation of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Anyone interested in the early development of folklore in Britain should read his book The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and the two-volume anthology he edited to accompany it, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
Dorson fought, above all, to establish Folklore as an academic discipline. He saw a university basis for the discipline as the way to ensure the training of new generations of folklorists. He was fierce in attacking 'fakelore', a word he coined to summarise 'the pseudo-scholar creating folklore for the mass culture', as he once put it. There's lots to argue with, to dispute, and to disagree with, in his conclusions, as well as in the positions he advanced in defending them, but his writings still burn as a passionate and reasoned championing of a marginal discipline that should be valued.
I was delighted to find that a couple of ghost traditions had attached to him. One is very funny (his ghost appearing in a dream to Henry Glassie to give him some important advice), the other is a deeply touching account of Nancy C. McEntire seeing his apparition. The stories are in Elizabeth Tucker, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 51-53.
He'd already been on my mind, though. He was a clever fieldworker, and able to turn his clarity of vision onto his own situation. In 1972 he was hospitalised with arteriosclerosis, and underwent by-pass surgery. On his recovery he wrote 'Heart Disease and Folklore', about the procedures he saw in the hospital, and the folk medicine preventing such heart conditions. (It's reprinted in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 124-137).
I thought about that article a lot during a recent stay in hospital. I did observe a little of the changed folklore of nursing, but mostly I just lay there. I don't remember anything of the accident that laid me out, so I've renewed respect for Dorson's attentiveness on the ward. When he came out of hospital, he investigated folkloric mechanisms for managing stress and maintaining 'emotional equilibrium'. I wasn't in hospital because of any heart condition, but I was delighted with the concluding hypothesis of Dorson's essay. It's been a bit of an effort writing this, but now that I'm out again I'm happy to embrace Dorson's hypothesis fully: 'folklore lived, not studied, is the surest preventive of heart disease'.

Wild Signs

2010-03-25T18:09:00.005Z

I haven't bothered to advertise my publications here, beyond putting them in an easily missed box at the bottom of the page, but I thought I would make the effort to note one new publication. I'm really pleased that the British Archaeological Report volume Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History, ed. Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal, Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology, 6 / BAR S2074 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010) is now out. It's been a while coming, but it's well worth the wait.
The book is expanded from the proceedings of a panel on graffiti at the 2005 TAG conference at the University of Sheffield. (TAG is Sheffield's The Archaeology Group). Jeff and Tim, who convened the panel, made a point of sending the Call for Papers over to the folklorists in the university. I gave a paper on Banksy's rat stencils and their relationship to folklore about rats, and I was glad I'd gone. It was a broad and diverse panel, and it triggered a lot of my subsequent interest in graffiti. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe's photographs of obscene tree-carvings done by Basque herdsmen in Western American states really got me enthusiastic about occupational graffiti. I haven't seen the whole book yet, but I've had the pdf of my chapter and the illustrations are looking good (which matters in a book about graffiti).

Graffiti is one of those areas that's being studied in a lot of disciplines, and it's all too easy not to know what else is out there. So I'm delighted to know this is.

Ghost Questionnaire Closing Shortly

2010-03-22T17:07:00.002Z

As I've mentioned before, I'm into my writing up now. I've also just been reminded that the period of fieldwork I'd agreed with the university Ethics Committee is about to expire. I will therefore be taking down my ghost questionnaire in the next two weeks. If you've been thinking about completing it but haven't got round to it yet, now is your last chance.

This post gives some background information to my research, if you want some idea of where I'm coming from. I'm interested in hearing from you whether you believe or not.

FLS AGM Conference on 'The Supernatural'

2010-03-12T18:38:00.005Z

I'm looking forward to the Folklore Society AGM and Conference at Leeds Trinity and All Saints University College, Horsforth, Leeds. It takes place between 26 and 28 March, and is dedicated to 'The Supernatural'. You can still (just about) get the advanced booking rate. The registration details are available here. There is now a draft programme available. There's lots of interesting things I'd actually go and hear even if I wasn't giving a paper myself (which isn't true of all the conferences I've been to, I must say).
Friday 26 March
Registration opens at 2pm, and tea will be available. The Folklore Society AGM, which is restricted to FLS members only, is at 3pm. At 4pm Eddie Cass will give the President's Lecture, which is open to all. This is on the subject of 'Alex Helm and His Collection of Folk Performance Material'. It will be followed at 5pm by a wine reception, and dinner at 6pm.
Saturday 27 March
9:00 Jacqueline Simpson (FLS), 'The Ambiguity of Elves'
9:45 Ariella Feldman (University of Birmingham), 'Jane Eyre: Fairy and Witch Power: A Study of Gender'
10:30 Mikel J. Koven (University of Worcester) and Gunnella Þorgeirsdóttir (University of Sheffield), 'Televisual Folklore: Rescuing Supernatural from the Fakelore Realms'
11:15 Coffee
11:45 Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University), 'Contemporary Urban Fantasy and the Lessons of Folklore'
12:15 Maureen James (University of Glamorgan), '"Tatterfoals, Will-o-the-Wykes, and the Old Lad": Exploring Supernatural Beliefs in Lincolnshire'
1:00 Lunch
2:30 Peter Robson (University of Sheffield), 'Thomas Hardy's Ghosts'
3:15 Paul Cowdell (University of Hertfordshire), '"I Have Believed in Spirits, From That Day unto This ...": Oral Narratives, Belief, Literary Adaptation, and Transmission'
4:00 Tea
4:45 David Clarke (Sheffield Hallam University), 'The Supernatural Content of the MoD UFO Files'
The day's proceedings end at 5.30.
Sunday 28 March
9:30 David Hunt (FLS), 'Perception of Time in Folklore: Transitions between Mortality and Immortality'
10:15 Gideon Thomas (FLS), '"Lady Margaret Was Standing in Her Own Room Door ...": The Roles and Meanings of Revenants in a Selection of Traditional Ballads'
11:00 Coffee
11:30 Irene Petratou (Panteion University of Athens/Kapodistrian University of Athens), 'Supernatural References in Advertising: The Case of "Supernatural Women"'
12:15 Lunch
2:00 Close

Academic and/or Scholarly? Or just serious?

2010-02-21T19:31:00.004Z

As you’d expect of someone involved in postgraduate study, I read a lot of academic books. I can’t stand academic books that are only written for other academics. I’ve always enjoyed finding serious scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that is also readable and accessible.
Many works of folklore scholarship, particularly, make important theoretical points, but they do so in a comprehensible and engaging way. I’m not suggesting that folklore is immune to academic jargon and the publication of self-indulgently baffling pieces for their own sake – career-minded folklorists are under just as much pressure to publish too much and be pleased with their own cleverness as graduates of other disciplines – but that, at its best, folklore never loses sight of its engagement with real people. This also means making folkloric research available to readers outside the academy.
I’ve been thinking again about readerships and scholarship this week, having just read an overdue English translation of Claude Lecouteux’s Fantômes et revenants au moyen âge (‘Phantoms and Ghosts in the Middle Ages’). Lecouteux is one of the outstanding scholars of mediaeval afterlife and supernatural beliefs; this book was a major contribution to our understanding of the interaction between Latin ecclesiastical literature of the Middle Ages and Germanic traditions, and I’m pleased to see it being made available to an audience that cannot read the French original. Other important French works in the field, like Jean-Claude Schmitt’s Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in the Middle Ages (1), have already appeared in translation, and this work belongs alongside them.The translation, however, may not. It is not that it is particularly bad. For the most part it reads well enough. It seems, rather, that the translator and his publisher have a slightly different aim to the author. Lecouteux’s book was certainly about the influence of Germanic pagan traditions on Latin Christian material, but the English subtitle (in particular) is rather overstated: from the neutral description of the French title the translator (Jon E. Graham) has entitled the English book The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind (2). There is little justification for this in the French. (By way of comparison, Jean-Claude Schmitt’s book was originally called Les revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale – ‘Ghosts: The Living and the Dead in Mediaeval Society’).
Of course, the publisher specialises in esoteric literature, and so wants to make the work appeal to their readership. They go about this the wrong way, by confining it to that readership. They let down the author, and in doing so they patronise their own intended readership.
They fail the author not in the text, but in the scholarly apparatus. The footnotes, frankly, are a mess. Graham and his editor appear to be unfamiliar with most of Lecouteux’s source material, and not to care very much about it. One need not read mediaeval Latin, for example, to recognise the name of M. R. James, who edited some twelfth and thirteenth centuries English ghost stories. He turns up in the footnotes here as M. R. Graves.
Latin authors’ names and works have standard English renderings, which are different from their French equivalents: what we get here is an unhappy mixture of the two, with some novel mistakes thrown in to confuse things further. We find the standard English Cicero, Ovid, and Pliny, sure enough, but sitting alongside ‘Petronious’ [Petronius], Virgil’s ‘bucolica triennio’ [Eclogues], and the really odd ‘Titus-Livy’ [Livy]. This is clearly taken from the standard French form ‘Tite-Live’, but it is further compounded by a typo in the relevant footnote, making it ‘Titus-Levy’. As it happens, most of these mistakes are then not included in the index, making the book even harder to use.
I read no Danish, but it took me around 30 seconds online to correct the spelling mistake in the title of Svend Grundtvig’s collection of folksongs. Why didn’t an editor do the same? There is a cavalier attitude to translated quotations: some are given in standard English translations, others are translated from French translations, some old French passages aren’t translated at all. There is no acknowledgement that some works of French scholarship have already been translated: was it really not possible to find an English translation of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, for example?
If you read French, this translation in no way replaces the original text. If you don’t read French, the translation is useful, but you will still need some other help with the references.
So why is all this a problem?
It’s offensive towards the publisher’s target audience, as it assumes that none of this matters that much to them. This becomes a self-fulfilling argument: if the footnotes don’t enable you to find source material, you tend to stop looking for it. Yet here is a readable and serious work of history: if any work were capable of obtaining a wider readership it’s this one.
Whatever use one makes of such a book, it will depend for its effectiveness on its accuracy in these areas. I’m not here talking about academia, but about scholarly standards, which can be upheld by anybody. It’s about taking a subject, and an audience, seriously.

* * * * *

1: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
2: Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind, trans. Jon E. Graham (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2009)

Pepper's Ghost

2010-01-31T17:07:00.004Z

Posts are likely to be somewhat irregular for the rest of the year, as the writing up of my ghost research is now underway. I won't be taking down the questionnaire opposite for a while yet, but if you'd still like to participate, now is the time.

I've spent most of the last month writing about the historical appearance of ghosts. Part of this has involved looking at popular representations of ghosts in woodcuts, on stage, in films and so on. For a splendid woodcut (used a great deal through the 17th century), check out the ballad 'a true and perfect Relation from the Faulcon at the Banke-side; of the strange and wonderful aperition of one Mr Powel a baker lately deceased' in the Bodleian collection.

Of course, I've been having a look at everybody's favourite 19th century theatrical effect, Pepper's Ghost. It was all done with mirrors, as seen below.

Pepper's Ghost was tricky to fit into existing stage mechanics, it seems, but thrived in dedicated fairground shows. It's still highly regarded - here's a design for a recent model.

I also enjoyed learning that it was so popular that it entered London slang. By the mid-1860s, London cabbies used the term 'Pepper's Ghost' to refer to passengers who ran off without paying their fare. I don't know how long this usage lasted. Is there an equivalent term in use today?

New Year's Eve in East London

2009-12-31T17:04:00.003Z

In October 2001 I spent an enjoyable afternoon with Don Jackson from Manor Park (E12). Don was extremely entertaining company, with a repertoire of music hall songs and a seemingly endless supply of jokes and stories.

Don was then in his early 60s, and had recently retired. He was living in his parents' former house, and recalled the New Year's celebrations in the street. At midnight, all the families would come out beating dustbin lids with pokers and making as much noise as possible. If anyone had a bugle, he said, they'd play that too. Gradually, over the years, fewer and fewer families joined in, and the custom had died out in the early 1960s - 1962 or '63, he reckoned.

It seems to have been widely observed locally. The following year I met Ellen Cordery, from the Bonnie Downs area of East Ham (E6), a mile or so south of Manor Park. When I mentioned this custom she said that it still persists (just) in her area. Her daughter supported her in this.

A couple of years later I had the opportunity to hear it for myself. A family who stayed briefly in my street (E7, roughly halfway between Manor Park and Bonnie Downs) came out at midnight with their pots and pans. They were the only ones who did it. They moved away shortly afterwards, and I have never heard it since.

Whether you're beating pots and pans to welcome it in or not, have a good 2010.

More on traditional songs - and a Christmas treat

2009-12-24T15:58:00.004Z

A couple of nights ago my regular folk club, Sharps, held its Christmas party. There was a certain preponderance of comic songs and party pieces, inevitably. Ruth Bibby did some clogging, which was a treat - there's a photo of her dancing here, but it's not quite the same as seeing her dance on a pub table.

There was a nice couple in from LA. I didn't catch their names, but the chap stood up and sang his party piece, 'Aunty Maggie's Remedy'. He'd learned it from his father, who'd sung it at family parties in the north of Ireland. The singer didn't know where it came from, and nor did I, but it was a fun little song that suited the evening admirably.

Of course, when I got home (and sobered up) I did some searching around for it. It turns out to be a song by George Formby Junior. As a special festive treat I'm posting here the clip of him singing it in his 1941 film 'Turned Out Nice Again':

So, of course, it isn't remotely a traditional song. However, it was clearly learned traditionally, and the singer understood it as belonging to party entertainment, ie it already has a specific place in his understanding of vernacular singing events. It's also worth noting that the melody had changed slightly in his learning and singing of it

While folk clubs may be the place for hearing what we've always (traditionally?) understood as 'traditional' songs, a whole body of other popular song is also entering a vernacular singing tradition. There's a body of material of a certain age that's becoming part of the repertoire of domestic singing events. I prefer George Formby Senior's songs, personally, but George Junior's material is clearly part of that developing tradition. (I was struck by this some years ago when Ricky Tomlinson sang 'My Grandad's Flannelette Nightshirt' in a party on 'The Royle Family').

Maybe it's time to acknowledge these vaudeville pieces the way the folk scene of the early 1970s did with music hall songs. (Thinking of which, I sang a disgraceful Sam Mayo song, by the way). After all, there are plenty of people out there now who still use such songs and their singers as cultural touchstones. Earlier this year I was in Sainsbury's, East Ham, where there's a popular cashier named Mary. An elderly man saw her across two checkouts and shouted 'Mary! Mary!' before breaking into 'I fell in love with Mary from the dairy ...'

And so, partly because I've thus now authenticated it as entering tradition, but mainly because it still makes me laugh, here's a Christmas gift of the Cheeky Chappie himself, Max Miller. Miller's the name, lady, there'll never be another ...

Izzy Young

2009-12-15T11:23:00.005Z

On a trip to Stockholm in the summer I finally got around to visiting Izzy Young's Folklore Centrum on Södermalm. (It's on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan, about 5 minutes walk from Mariatorget T-Bana station).

Izzy Young (pictured right on his 80th birthday) is a splendidly ornery chap. He was born in 1928 in New York. He's one week younger than his schoolfellow Tom Paley. Bob Dylan wrote one of the best descriptions of Izzy: 'Young was an old-line folk enthusiast ... His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room. Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good natured. In reality, a romantic.' (1)

Izzy opened his Folklore Center in Greenwich Village in 1957. The Center was a commercial venture, built on his romantic attachment and commitment to folk music. The Center sold books, records, magazines and instruments, and was a venue for concerts and events. It also became a focus for the emerging folk music scene. It was the place to go to learn about this music and the people who made it. Izzy keeps an extraordinary archive of cuttings, books, magazines, photographs.

You get some idea of Izzy's passionate romanticism from the battle to allow folk musicians to congregate in Washington Square Park. The city authorities were attempting to clamp down on these informal gatherings by insisting performers had permits. In 1961 the Parks Commissioner refused to issue permits. Izzy and about 500 musicians went down there without permits. The NYPD sent down a riot squad. Izzy was indefatigable in soliciting support for the musicians. I spent a happy half hour studying his scrapbooks of letters and press cuttings about this period.

He's probably best known because of his association with Bob Dylan, but that reflects the obsessive scrutiny of many Dylan fans rather than Izzy's own preoccupations. He was instrumental in staging concerts by many of the musicians who emerged from that Greenwich Village scene. (When I was there Izzy was very pleased that a 1967 Tim Buckley concert at the Center had finally found a CD release).

Like Tom Paley, Izzy also got the bug for Swedish music. In 1973 he closed the New York Center, and moved to Stockholm. The Folklore Centrum moved to its present location in 1986.

Izzy still stages small concerts in the Centrum. There is still a commercial aspect to it, although this is these days very much dependent on what material Izzy can obtain. He complains that people don't buy things from him, then admits that he doesn't have much for them to buy.

But he does still have the most magnificent archives and library. He complains that people don't know what to make of the Centrum: the uses that could be made of Izzy's resources depend on people having a sufficiently passionate interest in all aspects of the music. Go in and ask him about something. He showed me files of correspondence on the question of copyright of Leadbelly's music. He has an extraordinary knowledge of, and passion for, folk-derived musics from around the world. He loves poetry, and learns verse every day. We talked about Charles Aznavour, Swedish fiddle music, Mike Seeger, Zimbabwean vocal groups, Phil Ochs, Jacques Brel ...

I may love different aspects of folk music to Izzy, but in the Folklore Centrum I felt right at home. It's worth dropping in.

******

1: Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), pp. 18-19

Josh Beasley

2009-11-20T17:23:00.016Z

On the 26th September I was in Greenwich. I don't get down there much, and I was struck by a lengthy wall of memorial graffiti on the Thames Footpath, just outside the Greenwich entrance to the Foot Tunnel.

Beginning at the left hand end of the wall, the heavily-covered memorial is clearly dedicated to 'Josh' (see above).

Seventeen-year old Josh Beasley went missing on Christmas Eve 2007, after going out skating with friends. His body was found further up the river a month later. He had drowned.

As is the case with other people who have died tragically young, Josh was commemorated by his friends in a number of ways. Photos on the Facebook Memorial page show that not only were memorials drawn here, but it was also the site of extensive floral tributes.

As ever, the messages are emotional, and great creative skill has been expended in the cartoons and images.

What surprised and impressed me was that the wall was still covered in these memorials nearly two years after Josh's tragic death. Other memorials I have photographed, like those to Khaleel Khan, were removed soon after their appearance. I hope that this means a more sensitive attitude to the grief enshrined here. It may be that the memorial is subject to constant renewal by Josh's friends.

Briggs Award winner

2009-11-14T14:28:00.003Z

The Judging Panel commended Ronald Hutton's book Blood and Mistletoe (Yale UP) as a further contribution to his ongoing work on the origins of contemporary witchcraft.

They noted Owen Davies's Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford UP), strong bibliographical work, as Runner-Up,

The winner of the 2009 Katharine Briggs Award is Kathryn Marsh for The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children's Songs and Games (Oxford UP). Building on work by Iona and Peter Opie, Julia Bishop and Mavis Curtis among others, this is a serious and impressive book on change and development in childlore. The Panel's full citation will be published in Folklore, but I'd like to add my congratulations.

Shortlist for the Briggs Award 2009

2009-11-08T23:32:00.003Z

The Katharine Briggs Award is the annual book prize of the Folklore Society. There's a particularly strong shortlist this year, with the Judging Panel saying they were 'pleased to report ... a substantial number of good quality entries'. (The length of the list gives some idea of this, as many previous shortlists have only been about 6 books long).

Alphabetically by author, the shortlist is as follows:

Bever, Edward, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan)

Davies, Owen, Grimoires: A HIstory of Magic Books (Oxford UP)
Evans, Nicholas, Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (Wiley-Blackwell)
Fimi, Dimitra, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan)
Hutton, Ronald, Blood and Mistletoe (Yale UP)
Marsh, Kathryn, The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children's Songs and Games (Oxford UP)
Mees, Bernard, Celtic Curses (Boydell & Brewer)
Newton, Michael, Warriors of the Word: The World of Scottish Highlanders (Birlinn)
Sumpter, Caroline, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Macmillan)
Sutherland, Alex, The Brahan Seer: The Making of a Legend (Peter Lang Ltd)

The winner will be announced, as usual, at the buffet following the Briggs Lecture. That takes place this coming Tuesday, 10th November, at the Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London, at 6.30pm (more details here).

I'm also very much looking forward to the lecture itself. Professor John Widdowson, a former President of the Folklore Society, will be speaking on 'Folklore Studies in English Higher Education: Lost Cause or New Opportunity?'. Professor Widdowson played a crucial role in establishing the Centre for English Cultural Tradition (CECTAL) at the University of Sheffield. I did my Masters in Folklore there in its later guise as the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NatCECT).

Like many English folklore scholars I have some anxieties over the future (and, indeed, the present) of it as an academic discipline here. That isn't a national/regional concern: although it fares somewhat better in Scotland, it is still not in a particularly strong position, and even some of the bigger American schools have been affected by cuts and retrenchments. Indeed, what makes Professor Widdowson's lecture even more valuable is his long experience at Memorial University, Newfoundland. It may not make comfortable listening, but I expect a customarily thoughtful and incisive appraisal.

Exploring the Extraordinary

2009-11-01T14:31:00.003Z

I find it quite difficult to blog about my current research. Discreet items of collectanea are one thing, but I'm cautious about pre-empting my longer-term analysis. So, it's nice to be able to mention what a good time I had yesterday at the Exploring the Extraordinary network's first one-day conference in York. (The bill is here, if you want to see what you missed).

I've developed something of an aversion to interdisciplinary conferences: too often there's no sharing of disciplines, no searching for points of contact, just some monomanic shouting and no listening. Yesterday, by contrast, was a rather pleasurable sharing of methods and interests. I had little in common with most of the speakers - I'd go so far as to say that I probably disagree quite strongly with some of them - but there were points at which our researches overlapped, and we were able to share material at those fringes. (I had an interesting chat with David Woollatt, for example, who's working on contemporary Spiritualism: it's peripheral but not unimportant in my work on ghost beliefs). I enjoyed it greatly. (Thanks Hannah and co for the efficient organisation, too).

I think the network's a useful resource, and will become even more useful the wider the breadth of scholarly approaches and disciplines it embraces. The JISCmail list is here, if you want to sign up, and they also have a Facebook group.

Eyam's plague

2009-10-26T19:06:00.005Z

I'm becoming increasingly interested in weather vanes as an indicator of local identity. This delightful rat is in Eyam in Derbyshire. Eyam is rather a lovely village, and its local history attractions are very much geared to the story of the plague outbreak of 1665-6.

I'm deeply fascinated by folklore about rats, so I couldn't resist this. What's perhaps most striking about it is that, according to the local legend, the plague didn't arrive in Eyam with an influx of rats. A local tailor is supposed to have received a parcel of cloth infested with fleas carrying the disease.

Even such a rattophilic folklorist as I am can hardly feel that the rats are getting a bad press out of this, though. One folk indicator of plague outbreaks is that the rats start dying. Indeed, to go back to an unrelated post, Tom Dudley died of the plague after removing the corpses of five recently-dead rats from the water closet of his business premises behind Darling Harbour in Sydney.

Roud 166

2009-10-13T16:17:00.002+01:00

On 1st July this year the Daily Mirror reported that Aurica Cosmescu had been hospitalised in Brasov, Romania, following a shooting accident. She was wearing a black and white jacket when she was shot by a man hunting magpies.

This potentially tragic accident is a striking echo of the traditional song 'Polly (or Molly) Vaughn (Bawn)', number 166 in Steve Roud's Folksong Index. In the song the incident is usually blamed on poor light or weather conditions. Polly pulls her apron over her, sometimes to keep off the rain. Her lover is out hunting and shoots her, believing her to be a swan. In Harry Cox's charming Norfolk phrase, 'He shot his own truelove in the room of a swan'. The lover is appalled at what he has done. His relatives tell him not to run away but to stand trial, as no punishment will follow for his terrible mistake. Here's a version recorded in 1952 in Arkansas that tells the story up to this point.

Older versions of the song from the British Isles don't stop there. When the lover gets to court, Polly's ghost intercedes on his behalf. She appears and tells the court that this was an accident. This is a nice embodiment of the belief that those who have died untimely deaths are more likely to become ghosts, and will intervene to finish some unresolved business before they can rest.

I've just been learning Harry Cox's fine version of this song, 'The Fowler', and will be singing it at the Spectres at the Feast event in a couple of weeks.

Graffito

2009-10-03T19:03:00.001+01:00

I've long been intrigued by this graffito, which has stood for some years in Wild Court, WC2. The photo was taken in 2006, but it's still there. And I still don't know what it means.

Das volk dichtet

2009-09-27T00:17:00.004+01:00

Piers Merchant, the former Tory MP for Beckenham (later an adviser to UKIP), died earlier this week. A member of the Major government, he stepped down after a particularly asinine sex scandal. (Even one of the local papers recalled him chiefly as 'Tory sleaze MP').

As somebody who'd grown up in Beckenham I watched the unfolding scandal with some amusement. Most of all I enjoyed a letter in the Guardian of 3rd April 1997, noting the following local piece of graffiti:

'Piers Merchant is a slag'

Archive material on the Custom of the Sea

2009-09-25T17:35:00.005+01:00

Whilst having a look at the Time Online Archive blogs, I came across this review of their coverage of the Mignonette case. It's good to see the archive material in this extraordinary case.

In 1884 the Mignonette was sailing to Australia when it ran into difficulties. The crew were left in a lifeboat without supplies. They killed a turtle, and drank their own urine. Richard Parker, the cabin boy, drank sea water and fell ill.

After 17 days they were in trouble. In accordance with the Custom of the Sea the captain, Tom Dudley, proposed that they draw lots with a view to killing and eating one of their number. The other two crewmembers, Edwin Stephens and Edmund Brooks, were not keen on the lottery. As Parker was already ailing, Dudley suggested they kill and eat him.

They did so.

On their return to England, Dudley, Stephens and Brooks made no secret of what had happened. They were surprised to be arrested for murder. There was a clear determination on the part of the British legal system to establish a test case: Dudley and Stephens were convicted. The statutory death sentence came with a recommendation of mercy given the circumstances, and they were released after six months' hard labour. (A. W. Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law is a brilliant survey of the legal machinations in the case).

Many of the comments on the Times Archive blog have suggested that the cannibalism is less horrific than the murder. This is not quite the point. When Tom Dudley got back to shore he was quite candid about what they had done, and why. He fully expected their actions to be understood, as indeed they initially were. The Custom of the Sea included the killing. Indeed popular tradition had it that they were only brought to court because they had not observed every nicety of the Custom and drawn lots. I was interested to see that that argument also made its appearance in the Times comments, too.

The pattern of killing and dismemberment may seem outrageous now, possibly because we have so little context for it, but it seems to have been fairly standard throughout the 19th century. There are plenty of historical and literary sources for comparison. Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket features a very similar killing. Poe's narrative was probably based on survivors' accounts from the whaleship Essex. By a bizarre coincidence, the victim in Poe's novel was also called Richard Parker. For a more darkly comic account, but still conforming to this model, try Canto the Second of Byron's Don Juan.

I was initially interested in the subject because of the songs and ballads dealing with it. Here are two broadside ballads that deal with the historical case of the Francis Spaight, an emigrant ship which capsized in 1835. The crew drew lots before killing and eating Patrick O'Brien, a cabin boy. There are plenty of other serious songs and ballads on the subject, and they are all remarkably similar. I'd argue that this is because it was all too well known as a possibility.

As the Custom of the Sea came to be less of a threat, you also begin to find more comic songs on the subject. The Custom of the Sea comes to be, as it is for most of the people who have sent comments to the Times blog, so remote as to be culturally alien.

I was talking about this very subject at the Folklore Society's recent Sea in Legend and Tradition weekend. I have also written on it at greater length in a forthcoming article on William Makepeace Thackeray's poem 'Little Billee'. The article will appear in the next (2010) issue of the Folk Music Journal.

Ghost hoaxes

2009-09-09T14:05:00.010+01:00

Peter Millington has sent the following to the Talking Folklore newsgroup:

The Boots branch in Lincoln was built over a section of the old Roman city wall, and the public was occasionally allowed in to view it in the basement. Apparently the shop’s porter was a bit of a card. Every now and then, he would dress up in a Roman soldier’s costume, and walk silently across the distant end of the basement within the view of the sightseers. They would then swear that they’d just seen a ghost – naturally.

Whether or not the visitors were put wise to this wheeze I was not told, but it seems likely that the Lincoln Boots ghost could have entered local folklore. Can anyone tell me if this happened?

In the course of my ongoing research I've come across similar stories of such practical jokes. One hotel night security officer used a remote control to switch a ceiling fan on, creating unexplained spectral effects with the emergency lighting. Like Peter, I've also not come across the evidence of these stories actually entering local tradition.

What intrigues me is their relation with actual ghost beliefs. (This short introduction gives more information about my research). Reimund Kvideland has suggested that these kind of practical jokes indicate a decline in the belief, but he also acknowledges that such practical jokes could be used, too, "to defend a belief or to secure its continuation." (1)

Certainly they rely on traditional images and motifs which may not reflect current belief: one practical joker told me his intended victim had simply said "You look bloody silly in that [white sheet]" when the "apparition" happened. But this imagery, and the fakery, may also serve to reinforce a different set of beliefs. Discrediting an incident like this may not discredit the historical body of beliefs and images on which it relies, but may serve to nuance and reinforce them further.

--------------------------------------------

1) Reimund Kvideland, 'Legends Translated Into Behaviour', Fabula, 47.3/4 (2006), 261

Skansen

2009-08-25T11:06:00.004+01:00

On a recent trip to Stockholm, I spent another happy day in Skansen. Founded in 1891 by Artur Hazelius, Skansen is basically a large folklife theme-park. Hazelius brought together historic buildings from around Sweden - there are mills, a church, farmhouses, a Sami settlement, village workshops, a funicular railway, etc etc - and laid them out in a park on Djurgården, an island in the middle of the city. It was designed to show off all aspects of Nordic life, so it also has a zoo.

This year I stayed on into the early evening and heard a fiddle recital in the Delsbogården, followed by a folk dance display. Both were definitely of an historical cast. The musicians and dancers were costumed. The dance was set up as a recreation of a 19th century wedding dance, with the presenter explaining where the different dances had come from, and how they had reached these fictional festivities.

I am not particularly a fan of costumed re-enactments and revivals, as there often seems something stale about them. Music on Skansen is a rather more complex phenomenon, however. In the early years of the park, large musical gatherings were organised. These were costumed, but they brought together for the first time some of the outstanding traditional musicians from around the country. Fiddlers predominated, but these events also brought to the fore a number of other musical instruments and styles which were nowhere near as familiar as they are today, including Sami yoiking, and the nyckelharpa which now seems almost quintessentially Swedish but was extremely localised at the time.

Coincidentally I picked up on this trip an excellent 3-CD reissue of the earliest documentary recordings of Swedish traditional music - 'Swedish Fiddlers from the Past / Äldre svenska spelmän' on Caprice Records (CAP21604). These phonograph recordings were made by ethnomusicologist Yngve Laurell between 1913 and 1920 at the musical gatherings on Skansen.

The subsequent dance music revival owes an enormous debt to the performances captured by Laurell. Many of these traditional players went home at the end of the summer seasons and themselves took an active role in collecting and preserving tunes. Olof Tillman, for example, was recorded by Laurell, probably in 1920 (he was working as a carpenter at Skansen as well as playing music). On his return to Dalarna he enthusiastically began noting down local tunes. He taught his sons, with whom he played extensively in later life. When he was recorded for Swedish radio in 1957 he described the extinct dances he had reconstructed. The participation of traditional musicians in what we might too easily describe as revival events should never be underestimated.

Khaleel Khan

2009-08-17T22:46:00.019+01:00

At about 12.30am on Saturday 30 May, 16-year-old Khaleel Khan was cycling with his cousin and two friends on Ron Leighton Way in East Ham when he was hit by a police car. Police and witnesses agree that the car was not using its siren. There is some dispute about whether its blue light was flashing. Khaleel hit the windscreen of the car, flew into the air, and then hit the road. He was pronounced dead half an hour later. The cause of death was a severe fracture of the neck at the base of his skull.

In a familiar pattern of memorialisation, the crash scene was shortly decked with tributes. Flowers, messages, and photographs were left along the barriers of Ron Leighton Way. Such wayside shrines have become a traditional form of memorialisation. (See, for instance, the tributes included in Scott Wood's photographs of such shrines).

What was so striking about the tributes to Khaleel Khan were their scale. Aside from the floral and paper tributes, friends also tagged the pavements of Ron Leighton Way and the walls facing the accident site.

The tributes covered walls on the Holme Road side of Ron Leighton Way.

There are nicknames and school affiliations, using SMS emoticons and referring to Khaleel by his initials (KRK).

The messages also ran across walls on the other side of Ron Leighton Way, and into the side street by the market.

The memorials were even run across the upper storey back wall of shops on East Ham High Street North.

Folklorists have a duty to record these memorials, a melancholy tribute to creativity. The photos here were all taken on Friday 5 June. The tags are already being erased.

Marking the passing of three greats

2009-08-15T17:34:00.007+01:00

I was dismayed to return from holiday to news of the deaths of a number of people I admired greatly.

Mike Seeger was the son of musicologist Charles Seeger and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. His older half-brother Pete was already playing banjo. Mike and his younger sister Peggy learned from the string of influential visitors to the house - John and Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, etc. Mike became an accomplished musician, playing banjo, guitar, fiddle amongst others.

Mike became involved in locating and recording traditional musicians. He was responsible for Elizabeth Cotten's debut recordings. She may not have been difficult to track down (she was working as the family nanny), but he also sought out and learned from musicians like Dock Boggs, Eck Robertson, the Stoneman Family, and others. He channelled what he learned about their music into his own performance. (Jeff Todd Titon has some nice comments on Mike Seeger's musical abilities here).

He was hugely influential on the course of the Folk Revival of the 1950s/'60s. The New Lost City Ramblers (formed in 1958 with John Cohen and Tom Paley) played a big role in demonstrating that this music did not have to be sanitized to reach an audience. He continued studying and learning traditional American musics. He never wrote much, but made every performance a practical demonstration of his thorough-going understanding of the music.

By contrast Edward D. Ives, known universally as Sandy, was an academic folklorist and fieldworker. He wrote a series of important monographs on poet/songsters, and the transmission of their songs into local oral tradition. In these he sought to understand the complex networks of local relationships and traditions, and how these find aesthetic reflection.

If that all sounds grimly academic - it isn't. His books are hugely readable, and show on the page the qualities that made him such an effective and brilliant communicator in the field. His book Joe Scott: The Woodsman-Songmaker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) begins with a poignant account of being contacted by a Welfare Department. Sandy's Christmas card to an informant, Herby Rice, was 'the only coherent piece of paper the man possessed' (p.xxvii). It is unsurprising that his guides to fieldwork remain so valuable and useful.

I was introduced to Sandy Ives' work by Dr Julia C. Bishop when I was a postgraduate student at Sheffield. Julia was also employed part-time on the James Madison Carpenter collection, to which end she shared desk-space at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. One of her great delights in this was that Stanley Robertson, who has died aged 69, was in the office next door.

Stanley was a gentle and intelligent man, conscious and proud of the immense Scottish Traveller traditions he was carrying. He had a huge repertoire of ballads, and was an outstanding storyteller. (There are several CD releases of his material). He was also an able piper. He was courteous and generous with his time at Aberdeen, even if he could be very funny about academic studies of his traditions: 'They tell me what it is that I'm doing; it's very interesting'. He was a marvellous writer, publishing plays as well as collections of his stories.

He was also, in his quietly determined way, an intransigent opponent of prejudice against Travellers. It was this championing of the enormous cultural wealth of Travellers that had brought him to Aberdeen University. Ian Olson has written a fine obituary in the Scotsman, with more information.

I only saw Stanley perform once. I remember him telling a ghost story, and being helplessly entranced by his narration. I remember specific details, and the astonishing uncanny atmosphere he created through his absolute narrative mastery. He described a specific type of rain, and simply recalling the hand movement he used is enough to explain it all again to me. He was a very great man.

Folklore in local novels

2009-08-10T19:18:00.008+01:00

I whiled away some time on holiday reading a Dutch translation of Joost Hiddes Halbertsma's Frisian novella 'It Heksershol' (The witch-hole, a local name for the village of Molkwerum).

I'm always wary of reading local novels as simply ethnological records. There are two main dangers. One is that authors don't get the artistic credit for adapting folk culture in their own literary constructions. (They cease to be artists, and become just observers). The other, especially problematic with authors who are consciously attempting to establish the literary credentials of a minority language, is that the broadly political aspects of their work tend to get sidelined. Such writers are often trying to create a regional cultural identity in their work, rather than just reflect one. This involves a highly focused use of source folkloric material.

That said, such novels do rest heavily on local folklore. Halbertsma's account of how Gosse Knop sold his soul to the devil, the amazing things that happened to him on his travels through Friesland, and how he came to a bad end, weaves rich elements of local lore into its narratives. These can be teased out: they're not the whole picture, but they add to it.

In one sequence Gosse has lost his shadow, which is discovered when he steps into the light during a dance. That's the point of the episode, but Halbertsma enriches it with all sorts of details about the dance itself. He tells us when such a dance might be likely (after an auction), the instrument they danced to (a fiddle), and even some of the dances and tunes (they dance the Schotse-drie, and Gosse's predicament is revealed during the Utrecht march).

It's also possible to hear something of the spoken language culture. This has the huge caveat, of course, that I read it in a Dutch translation and not in its original language, but the sound of language is emphasised in some of the stories. An origin story is offered for the name Ameland. According to the skipper of a boat, Heintje Pik (the devil) had given names to all of the islands along the Frisian coast and written them down in his notebook. Beneath the last name he wrote 'Amen', but then realised that he'd forgotten one of the islands, so he wrote '-land' after it. Because Heintje is from Amsterdam he doesn't pronounce the -n at the end of words, so Amenland becomes Ameland. This isn't just a story directed against Amsterdammers, it gives a sound to history.

Sexuality of Unborn Male Child

2009-07-13T23:28:00.002+01:00

A nice sexual rumour that I heard in the ticket queue at Waterloo Station on the 1st August 2005:

Two white women in their early 20s, either students or recent graduates, were discussing families and gay children. One mentioned a belief that if you have unprotected sex whilst pregnant with a boy, he will grow up to be gay. Neither of the women believed this.

I had not heard it before or since, and I wondered how widespread it might be.

The Ghost of Michael Jackson

2009-07-06T17:02:00.008+01:00

The death of Michael Jackson has triggered a frenzy of folkloric activity. Tasteless jokes are already proliferating, as they do after any personal tragedy. Rumours are circulating about his death and burial.

It was not surprising then when television footage appeared that seemed to show a ghostly figure stalking Neverland. As a folklorist researching belief in ghosts, I'm much more interested in the responses on message boards than I am in the footage itself. Where parapsychologists study the reality or otherwise of the phenomenon, folklorists look, as Linda Dégh put it, at 'the nature of human creativity to be discerned through the report of such experience'. (1)

So from the perspective of my research, it's fascinating to see the very people who are most devoted to the memory of Michael Jackson also being the most critical in their assessment of the images on the film. News reports from the message boards have covered a wide range of responses, from the simple analysis of the phenomenon per se ('It's clearly not a shadow because ... there's no one there to make a shadow, plus it's completely see through'), via the hopeful ('Maybe it was Michael, telling us that he is still here with us in spirit'), right through to the dismissive ('You guys are craaaaaazy! It's too tall to be Michael ...')

What was most striking about the last quoted correspondent, RebeccaMJ, was that her comments rested on a body of implicit belief about spirit activity. Michael Jackson wasn't roaming Neverland, she wrote, because his spirit is "resting and at peace. Only disturbed souls creep around'. RebeccaMJ is clearly expressing a hope for the star's post mortem peace, but she is also dismissing this particular ghostly phenomenon by validating a much wider set of beliefs. I've come across this narrative device before, and I'm interested in probing it further.

________________________________________________

1: Linda Dégh, 'Foreword', in Leea Virtanen, "That Must Have Been ESP!": An Examination of Psychic Experiences, trans. John Atkinson and Thomas Dubois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.xii

Bob Lewis CD review

2009-07-02T13:31:00.006+01:00

Ahead of next week's Folklore Society event involving Bob Lewis, I'm reposting here a review I wrote in Folk London of Bob's 2003 CD The Painful Plough. Apart from the link to the Veteran Music site, it's as written and published at the time.

THE PAINFUL PLOUGH – Bob Lewis (Foxide Music, RUST105, available from Veteran Music)

I’m always surprised that so few people seem to listen to recordings of traditional singers. There are some really excellent traditional singers still around, and Bob Lewis from Sussex is amongst the very best.

Like his earlier release, A Sweet Country Life for Veteran, the new CD contains songs that Bob learned from his mother, along with songs picked up from other Sussex singers like George Belton and Cyril Phillips.

Bob Lewis has a wonderfully warm voice. His delivery, too, is an absolute treat – understated and with minimal adornment, he concentrates on getting each song across with maximum clarity. This allows him a huge flexibility with his material. He is, I think, at his best on some of the intense and melancholy pieces he had from his mother (Live All Alone and Spread The Green Branches are standout songs which can only cause regret that Bob’s mother – a shy woman, apparently, but with an astonishing repertoire of great songs – was never recorded herself).

He also handles more rumbustious material well. Although not a barnstormer like Gordon Hall, he puts over comic songs like Farmer Giles or A Trip to Southend with great charm and humour. This fits neatly with Vic Smith’s useful notes describing him finding the intensity and formality of folk clubs as ‘rather strange’.

There are 16 songs (and a recipe!) on this CD. From the wistful to the comical, they are all characterised by Bob’s supreme mastery as a singer. This CD is an utter delight, repaying repeated listening. Go and buy one.

The Singers and their Smocks

2009-06-25T17:01:00.018+01:00

Gavin Atkin, in his interesting comments on an earlier post, really hit at a whole number of historical problems within folklore. Folklorists are often mocked for our seeming obsession with self-definition, but these are big (and unresolved) issues within the discipline. In part, therefore, what follows is me thinking out loud, and in part it's a revisiting of points I've made elsewhere in various forms (and which I hope to see published at some stage). It's hardly intended to be definitive, even if I thought that were possible.

I'm by no means convinced that we share a common understanding of the notion of 'folk' itself. Within the folk music world, particularly, there has been a tendency to use the word as if we all agreed on its meanings, without actually clarifying how we understand it. Perhaps that's a negotiation to avoid opening several cans of worms ... 'Folk', in these terms, is both the people performing the lore, and also an adjective describing the essential character of the lore.

Although in practice it's often used as a synonym, 'tradition' seems somehow clearer. It seems to imply some kind of transmission, and isn't predicated on the idea of which groups might have such a tradition. 'Tradition' seems to recognise that any group of people might have such a thing of their own, regardless of who they are: there will be traditions of the officers' mess, just as there are of rural pubs.

Of course, that still raises the problem of the transmission itself. As Gavin indicates, what do we do with a song that's only recorded rarely? One of the things I'd been thinking about before the Sing London launch was the place of composed political songs. (I'd been pondering this following the news that one of the murderers of Victor Jara was finally to be tried for his role in events in the Chile stadium, Santiago). We know, for example, that the National Agricultural Labourers' Union published a songbook for singing at meetings. This was the first such national union, and the music was an integral part of its recruitment and meeting campaign. The songs have not turned up that often in oral tradition, but they have turned up: Walter Pardon had several, which he'd learned from his uncle, a local union organiser. (See Mike Yates' interesting article on them). The very character of the songs might suggest they wouldn't just turn up everywhere, but they have a certain authority within their tradition.

However, once we start talking about 'tradition-al' in musical terms, it suggests that the song belongs to a certain and specific tradition, and adds (for some commentators) criteria other than just transmission. Some critics have required anonymity of origin, and the implication of a certain age. 'A Grand Dream of Napoleon' but not 'Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner', if you like.

Is this a form of inverted snobbery? Is this an attempt to create something noble and worthy out of pub-singing by discreetly sweeping aside other aspects of the tradition? That would hardly seem tenable to anyone who'd spent time in a folk club, but it does seem to inform some thinking about traditionality in music. Dave Harker, for example, notes that Cecil Sharp thought the song 'Dicky of Taunton Dene' '"had all the character of a traditional ballad", whereas country people knew it to be a townsman's mickey-take of a caricatured yokel'. (1) Whether Sharp liked it or Harker didn't doesn't ultimately change the fact that people were singing it. Interpretative distaste is misplaced here, as it takes the emphasis away from the singers themselves.

Which is where the smocks come in.

This is Howard Millen, a fine singer from Bethersden in Kent. The Millen Family have an interesting repertoire of part-sung 'glees', which they recorded for a rather good CD, 'Down Yonder Green Lane'. A couple of these songs also appeared on the recent Kent compilation Oyster Girls & Hovelling Boys. Alongside this repertoire, Howard has an extensive assortment of comic songs from all over the place. Indeed, with other family members and neighbours, he toured the south east as a comedy rustic act called the Cider Sippers. It's a surprisingly resilient tradition: there have been several attempts to retire the Cider Sippers, but they still keep getting offers of gigs.

For these gigs, Howard wears this smock. It's about 100 years old, and Howard's older brother Gerald has talked thoughtfully about the significance of its style and pattern. Howard got the smock from his father-in-law, David Wickens. I asked if David had ever worn it for work. Oh no, said Howard, just for singing comedy songs round the pubs, where Howard (an idiosyncratic and entirely self-taught musician) sometimes accompanied him on piano. Howard, a countryman himself, follows this tradition of comedy rusticism. They sing 'Buttercup Joe' (a big hit in the 1920s for Albert Richardson), along with various songs learnt more recently from Wurzels albums.

This was clearly a big tradition. Over in Sussex, Cyril Phillips (left) was singing at harvest suppers, also wearing a smock and performing music hall songs parodying rural life. He even seems to have carried a folding five-bar gate for his act! Among his songs were music-hall pieces like 'The Rest of the Day's Your Own' (known to some singers in Kent as 'The Farmer's Boy', confusingly enough).

There is a danger that we base our judgements on vernacular singing on what we would prefer singers to be singing rather than what they are actually singing. Bob Lewis, who sometimes sang with Cyril Phillips at harvest suppers (see the splendid photo below), said that he initially found folk clubs an odd and intense experience, quite distinct from the pub singing he had actually experienced. He said he became aware of an artificial idea about who was or wasn't a traditional singer. In particular, he thought there was an idea that anyone who had ever earned money singing, or had dressed up and performed any kind of music hall or light entertainment turn, couldn't be a traditional singer. His conclusion makes depressing reading: "As a result, I suspect that they wrote off or dismissed quite a lot of really good singers, who they didn't bother to get to know when they weren't doing their turn".

This clearly indicates a sensitivity to different kinds of songs, but without dictating what traditional singers do or don't sing. As I say, I think this is a complicated question, not least because of the residual weight of earlier thinking (which isn't always explicit, and which we can't just ignore). I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to discuss tradition and traditionality with Bob Lewis at the forthcoming Folklore Society Members' Evening event. In particular, I'm looking forward to celebrating a rich and varied set of singing traditions in all their complexity.

Cyril Phillips (left) and Bob Lewis

-------------------------------------------------------

(1) Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong' 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p. 197

Proverbs in current use

2009-06-14T19:49:00.007+01:00

You never catch a fox in the same trap twice.

I heard this last week from one of the workers who had occupied the Enfield Visteon factory in April. He used it when referring to the role of Unite, the union at the plant, in alerting management to a challenge on the question of pensions.

This doesn't feature in W.G. Smith, The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. F.P. Wilson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Sing London/Singing History, and the Take Six website

2009-06-08T14:19:00.010+01:00

Two interesting events in London this week have set me thinking again about traditionality in music.

Tonight, June 8th, at the British Library, Sing London launch their regional Singing History booklet. This is one of a series of eight such local pamphlets, which will be supported by educational material, covering Oxfordshire, Plymouth, Sunderland, Manchester, Norfolk, Kent, and Birmingham. The booklets will also be available for download here, where four are already online at the time of writing. The London booklet is not currently available there, but is on the British Library site.

The booklets vary in quality, and I'm unimpressed that some unfinished booklets have been uploaded. The Sunderland booklet lacks an introduction or acknowledgements (evidently having used the Plymouth template for the latter), while the Oxfordshire booklet lacks some pictures and has the wrong cover. Notwithstanding its rough edges, the Sunderland booklet is the clearest-designed as an educational tool. I'm looking forward to the Kent booklet, which has been put together by the educational group Music for Change, and seems to cover a fairly broad range of local occupations.

As an organisation, Sing London are more interested in the vernacular practice of singing than in traditional song per se. For someone used to the folk scene, this makes a refreshing change. There are domestic song traditions that are not usually included in folk song collections, although they are clearly thriving. At a now-defunct karaoke night in E7 I would sometimes hear unaccompanied rebel songs and country ballads in with the usual pub r'n'b and pop power ballads, suggesting (at the very least) that singers had other repertoires of songs apart from their karaoke favourites. It hinted at different registers of singing.

The Singing Histories lean more towards the folk scene. According to one press release, the project 'aims to preserve regional songs by making them accessible to new audiences, thereby giving folk music back to the folk'. Sing London have worked on this with the English Folk Dance & Song Society. Accordingly they cover some good songs collected by earlier folksong collectors, and the London launch will also publicise the recorded collections in the National Sound Archive. In the case of the London booklet, this means a number of songs mentioning London recorded from traditional singers from outside the city, which may not exactly reflect the city's music.

Some of the booklets also contain songs written more recently in 'the folk idiom', ie written and sung in a folk club culture. I am not dismissing such songs (I have written some myself). Many songs by Cyril Tawney (right), for example, have a very wide circulation. (One is in the Plymouth booklet). My anxiety is that they may not reflect a more representative and/or thriving singing culture. Perhaps I am unnecessarily over-sensitive on this count - the London booklet does contain 'Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner', after all, which I don't believe I've ever heard in a folk club - but I have always been uneasy about presenting folk-club composed songs as being synonymous with the tradition they aim to reproduce. They can, and do, acquire a traditional life in certain social groups, but at the moment of composition they are not traditional. They are awaiting the selection of the folk process. This may be the problem in publishing broadside songs which never attained any broader traditional circulation: they have an historical value, but may not reflect actual traditions of singing.

The notion of the 'folk idiom' itself is somewhat problematic. It is based on a selective recording of folk songs by earlier collectors, who cherry-picked from singers' repertoires. In many cases they were more interested in (some) songs than in where and when they were sung. The folk clubs developed, to some extent, to perpetuate this model of folk song and folk singing. I'm not saying that it's wrong (it has developed in its own way), just that it may not adequately reflect wider aspects of traditional singing. There has also been a tendency to draw a line of equivalence between the traditions of the folk club and the traditions of the singers from whom club singers learnt their songs. Both are certainly traditional, but they are not quite the same.

Viewing 'tradition' as a series of artefacts can underplay the dynamic role of the people who actually perform that tradition. After all, if a tradition has to be 'given back' to the folk, might this not suggest that 'the folk' had already stopped using it as a tradition? This slightly curatorial tendency rubs up against Sing London's overall purpose of getting people to sing.

Any apparent contradiction here may only be resolvable in the practice of singing. I don't hold with the contrarian view that, because the collectors were only reflecting part of the repertoires of singers, we should therefore reject everything they actually did collect. I'm delighted, therefore, that on Tuesday evening at 6.30pm the EFDSS's 'Take Six' website goes live. This lottery-funded project has seen the digitisation of six manuscript folksong collections covering the first half of the 20th century - Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Francis Collinson (below), George Gardiner, Anne Geddes Gilchrist, and brothers H.E.D. and R.F.F. Hammond.

I've been previewing the site for a while now, as I have a special interest in Collinson's work. It's a complete digitisation of every page of manuscript, fully indexed and searchable. In the case of the Gilchrist collection, this means that the complicated cataloguing has finally been standardised. Full access to the images of the manuscripts will be followed by an educational outreach programme. It's a great resource, and gives some idea of the riches that lurk in the corners of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Hopefully it will facilitate further local research to place the collected songs in the broader context of vernacular singing.

I've been mulling over ideas like these for some time now. A couple of other recent events have also been preying on my mind, but I'll come back to them. First I have to go off and sing.

Research into Contemporary Belief in Ghosts

2009-05-31T20:48:00.003+01:00

My current research project, conducted at the University of Hertfordshire, is into contemporary belief in ghosts in post-war England.

All of the post-war opinion polls and surveys suggest that belief in ghosts has been steadily on the rise over the last 60 years. What might this mean? Does it mean that more people believe in ghosts? Or that they are more prepared to say so? One question that goes unasked is what people actually mean when they say 'ghost'. Might the increase in stated belief mean a change in popular definitions?

Accordingly, I've begun my research with some simple (but big) questions. What do people mean when they say 'ghost'? How is this understanding reflected (or not) in their beliefs? Are the things people believe the same as the stories they tell? What is the relationship between belief or non-belief and experience? How do these beliefs fit into other, maybe more orthodox, beliefs?

Quite apart from library research, these questions clearly demanded fieldwork amongst believers and non-believers. I've been conducting interviews, and also distributing a questionnaire. The plan is to continue this field research early into 2010, and then spend the majority of next year working through my findings.

My research is primarily into the situation here in England. Because of the University location, I'm concentrating to some extent on Hertfordshire. However, this is by no means a restricted or parochial survey - there have been huge demographic shifts in the post-war period, and I am interested in the ways in which ghost beliefs may reflect changing cultural influences. As such, I'm more than happy to consider broad comparative international material.

So, within those parameters, I am looking for participants and informants. The questionnaire is available to download below. and it can be returned to me electronically. I'm interested in as broad a range of responses as possible, from believers and non-believers alike. I'm also looking to identify possible informants for interview. This is more restricted geographically than the questionnaires, obviously, but I am still rolling out the interview programme and still looking for participants.

Questionnaire for download

Local names (SE1)

2009-05-21T14:08:00.006+01:00

I used to take my boys to play football up at - well, you'd know it as Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, but we all call it Bedlam Park.

I noted this from Mrs Barbara Jeffery in 1998. Mrs Jeffery was approaching retirement at that time, and had lived all her life in and around south east London. The park she was talking about now houses the Imperial War Museum, in a building purpose-built as the Bethlehem Mental Hospital in 1815. The last patient moved out in 1930, and Lord Rothermere bought the site, donating it to the London County Council as a tribute to his mother, Geraldine Mary Harmsworth. Mrs Jeffery was taking her sons to the park in the early 1970s, but her usage of the place-name remained current at the time of collection.

Keith Summers

2009-05-10T18:04:00.008+01:00

As the 4th annual festival in his name comes to a close, it might be a good time to acknowledge here the life and work of Keith Summers, who died 5 years ago. Other people knew him better, so I don't just want to rehash their obituaries or memories, which are better off being read in full on the Musical Traditions site (obituary and memorial page). I just want to pay tribute to a thoughtful and intelligent fieldworker.

Keith was very much in the finest traditions of amateur collectors. He'd fallen in love with traditional music, and began making recordings in the late 1960s. He found singing traditions still alive, and documented them enthusiastically. He travelled up to East Suffolk from his Essex home, and made a series of invaluable recordings. These were released commercially: highlights featured on Topic's Voice of the People CD set, and the recordings are now lodged at the National Sound Archive. He wrote sensitively about both the traditions he found there, and his own place in recording them, in his monograph 'Sing, Say or Pay!', which is the best introduction to his musical voyage of discovery.

Keith was never restrictive in his musical tastes: he recorded extensively in County Fermanagh, and was enthusiastic and passionate about all forms of traditional music. The breadth of his taste was a marker for the range of Musical Traditions magazine.

What distinguished him as a fieldworker - he disliked 'collector', preferring 'recorder of traditional music' - was his instinctive realisation that this music reflected a social life. As a sociable fellow, he was at his ease in situations where people shared company and music. People liked being around him, and musicians recognised that not only was he good company, he knew what he was hearing, too. It's a mark of the man that he was able to get practical jokes out of some notoriously prickly characters.

His sociability may have led to him being underestimated, but he was sincere and enthusiastic. I've few proud moments as a singer, but hearing Keith call me a 'good old boy' after a song is one of the proudest. He could be hilariously, obscenely, funny. I'd introduced myself because my Dad was born in his home town, Southend. When he discovered which pub my Dad was born in, Keith waved his arms in horror, saying 'Fuck me that's a rough pub', all in one breath. When he found that I was a West Ham fan he even became rude (he was a loyal Southend fan). I once heard Ken Hall introduce Keith at the Musical Traditions club in Fitzrovia with the words 'God help us, anything could happen'. It did. Keith sang 'Always the Bridesmaid' (one of his specialties) and (as ever) brought the house down. It wasn't affected: singing was a genuinely social event. He also remains the only person I've ever heard in a folk club sing 'Davy Crockett' (with missing lines completed by Doc Rowe); it illustrated a point about Southend's Saturday morning cinema clubs, and deep-sea fishing. Or maybe it was illustrated by them. It certainly said a great deal.

I didn't get a chance to know him well, but I knew and trusted his judgement, just as the musicians he recorded did. He valued them, and his recordings show that. We should value him for that.

After the Ball Parody

2009-05-03T18:27:00.003+01:00

An earlier post about a parody of a popular song brought in a number of responses. Gavin Atkin (now of Marden, Kent) sent me this one, which he remembers his father singing:

After the ball was over

She lay on the sofa and sighed

Put her false teeth in salt water

And took out her lovely glass eye

Propped up her leg in the corner

And hung up her wig on the door

And the rest of her went to by-byes

After the ball!

I've also been told that this was current in Herts/Cambridgeshire in the late 1970s/early 1980s. (I'll post the variant if I can get it taken down accurately).

I never tire of these parodies, and I also never tire of body-part songs, so expect more (and feel free to send me more).

May Day, 1954, Ashford, Kent

2009-05-01T16:42:00.004+01:00

In Ashford, Kent, the garland-carrying is less ostentatious. A correspondent writes on May Day, 1954:

'This morning three girls (looking the Marsh or Gipsy type) came to the door with a pole held between two girls with a thick navy cloth draped over it. - "Would you like to see the garland?"

'I was busy and refused. We have only been here three years, and it was only when they had gone that I remembered that it was May Day. I went to our neighbour next door and asked if it was a local custom. She said that in the old days and up to the last war children brought these wreaths or garlands to the door on May morning always covered. In answer to the question you lift the curtain and criticise the garland - saying if it is better or worse than the others you have seen; and if it is up to standard you reward with a copper or two.'

Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (St Albans: Paladin, 1977; first pub. 1959), p. 283

My mother grew up in Ashford, but does not recall this custom.

Doc Rowe

2009-04-30T16:26:00.009+01:00

I'd like to acknowledge publicly the debt I owe to Doc Rowe, who remains one of the most inspirational fieldworkers I've ever had the pleasure to meet, as well as being thoroughly good company. He continues to add to one of the most important post-war collections and documentations of folklife in the British Isles, and long may he do so.

The photo was taken in Sheffield, 2007, and shows Doc (left) receiving the Coote Lake Medal from Professor Will Ryan, then President of the Folklore Society.

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean Parody

2009-04-30T14:21:00.001+01:00

I heard this from a classmate from Forest Hill in the early 1980s:

My granny went down to the cellar

To see where her gas-leak could be

She struck a match for to see better

Oh bring back my granny to me

The Old Owl

2009-04-29T14:25:00.007+01:00

There was an old owl, lived in an oak

The more he saw, the less he spoke

The less he spoke, the more he heard

So take a tip from this wise old bird

- recorded from Howard Millen of Bethersden, Kent, 2007