The legal historian of cannibalism at sea

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.

Gilda O'Neill

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.

Ate Doornbosch

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.

Marking the passing of three greats

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.