Hairdressers and contemporary legends

A trip to the barber this morning set me thinking about some of my earliest exposure to contemporary legends, long before I got interested in folklore. (Barbers' are still a good place to hear contemporary legends: my 2001 documentation of 'The Grateful Terrorist', submitted for a class paper at Sheffield, came back with a gleeful supervisor's comment that 'My hairdresser told me this one!').

When I was around 12-13 one of my closest schoolfriends, Billy, told me a story related to him by his older sister Tessa. One of Tessa's friends worked in a hairdresser's salon. She'd been cutting a man's hair, and had noticed suspicion movements under his gown at about crotch level. These continued, she put two and two together, and slapped the filthy masturbating swine in outrage. He looked completely baffled, and as the gown fell away it revealed him hard at work polishing his glasses ...

Billy told this as a true story. He was a very funny storyteller (as was Tessa, I must say) with a seamless string of true-sounding narratives and jokes. I've no doubt now that if I'd probed the reported experience I'd have found that it didn't actually happen to Tessa's friend, it was something she'd heard from someone else, who probably also had told it as a true story although its source was still somewhat vague.

Billy also reported a story from Tessa's husband Nick, who was a teacher. After taking a class on a day trip to the zoo Nick had been suspicious of the quiet on the coach on the way back. When he went to see what was happening one of the pupils unzipped a holdall, and out jumped a penguin ...

Again, Billy told this as an experience of Nick's. Again, I suspect that probing it would quickly have revealed a much less certain chain of narratives. (Both stories remain excellent, I must say). The age difference between Billy and Tessa was probably an additional factor in the transmission - these were sophisticated, rather adult, tales to our aspirant adolescent ears, which is another reason they remain so memorable. They probably added to the accumulating material that eventually led to me getting interested in folklore.

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.