CONTENTS
EVE LANGLEY AND DANCING WITH THE CONCERTINA
DID SALLY KNOW HARRY?
JIG DOLLS IN AUSTRALIA AND BEYOND
WOMEN AND THE COACHING INDUSTRY IN AUSTRALIA
WHAT IS FOLKLORE?
AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL DANCE
A BUSHRANGER IN AMERICA
POINTED PARODIES
THE LOSS OF MARNEY
THE GUITAR IN AUSTRALIA
TEX MORTON SINGS AN AUSTRALIAN SONG
THE DIVERSITY OF AUSTRALIAN TRADITIONAL MUSIC
THE MUSIC OF STRANGE BANDS
A. L. LLOYD IN AUSTRALIA: SOME CONCLUSIONS
*
EVE LANGLEY AND DANCING WITH THE CONCERTINA
by Tony Smith
In much early Australian literature, the fiddle and the concertina both find a voice.
On concertina.net there have been a number of posts about the instrument’s portrayal in novels, short stories and poems. The works of Henry Lawson receive special mention.
In The Pea-Pickers (1942) by the remarkable Eve Langley the narrator Steve describes Gippsland folklore as remembered by her mother from around the early 1900s. In Langley’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Joy Thwaite says that the novel uses ‘highly charged, intensely imagistic prose’. Thwaite notes that Steve (and Eve) was ‘equating creativity and artistic freedom with masculinity, while yearning constantly for sexual fulfilment’. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/langley-eve-10784
Meanwhile Wikipedia notes that Langley’s writing belongs to a ‘tradition ... that explores the conflict between being a woman and being an artist’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Langley. Her work is unusually poetic for the Australian context. Indeed her references to classical mythology suggest that the world inside her head is remote from the context of the Australian bush. Perhaps this is one reason that she immediately empathises with Italian labourers, whom she romanticises.
At one point (p.9 in the 1958 A & R edition) Steve’s sister Blue plays her fiddle. The tune is a bushman’s waltz ‘Monaro’ – their father was from NSW – and Steve asks their mother Mia ‘for the pleasure of the next’ and describes four ‘holds’ she uses. The closest I could find to this tune is ‘Back on the Monaro’ a polka, on the authoritative website ‘Bush Traditions’. https://bushtraditions.wiki/tunes/index.php/Back_on_the_Monaro
“The first hold was the ‘pump-handle’ in which the hand and arm of the partner were energetically raised up and down.
‘Water very scarce now’, I remarked as I worked for it. ‘Only two rims left’.
I next adopted the ‘vase’ which is characterised by the grace of the couple’s arms stuck out from the gent’s side like the handles of a vase.
Then followed the ‘dried fish’, in which, without perceptible style, but with frozen eyes and set face and stiff carriage, the couple revolve in silence.
Last of all came the ‘indifferent’, where gent negligently holds the concertina behind his partner’s neck and plays as he dances with her”.
This last pose might seem unlikely and indeed bad mannered, but there is evidence of it elsewhere. Warren Fahey’s ‘Australian Bush Orchestra’ album includes an interview with Bathurst’s Susan Colley in which she described dancing and playing concertina simultaneously. Fahey asked her what her partners thought of that and she replied that they stood it. This might have been an unusual gender role, but dancing with concertina does not necessarily entail putting the instrument around the partner.
Later (p.21) Steve says: “... Harrison’s concertina was going, making a wistful rainbow of sound as though he were throwing the concertina all around his head as he played. I found out later that that was just what he was doing. The sound of the concertina was old, sad, sweet and reminiscent ...”
Again, there is evidence that this was a playing style favoured by old players. I can recall the much missed Peter Ellis swinging the instrument as he played and the effect this created. Concertina virtuoso Wayne Richmond has similar recollections.
Later when Steve gets misty-eyed over some recorded Hawaiian music she confesses that she had forgotten that “she had come to Gippsland to listen to old traditional songs of bushmen”. Nevertheless, when she and Blue move to the north-east alpine region of Bright, Myrtleford and Mount Buffalo for hop-picking, Steve also finds poetic inspiration in the traces of Chinese labourers and prospectors who worked there in earlier times.
The concertina seems to be everywhere. They ask one old bushman for tunes popular in his youth such as ‘Rorie O’Moore’, ‘Just As the Sun Went Down’, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ and ‘My Father Was a Frenchman’. Blue is quick to learn these and Italian songs on her fiddle. Another character refers to that “sobbing note of the violin when Blue plays ‘Alice Benbolt’; that surging crying note when she double-stops the strings”.
When courting, Steve sings Verlaine’s ‘Chanson d’Automne’:
“Long songs begin/ On the violin / Of autumn trees,
And my heart throngs/ With that sad song’s/ Monotones”.
And as she yearns to discover minds like her own, she admits that these are “singing dreams”. But Blue brings her down to earth – “ We’ve got to get food somehow”.
Steve certainly hears some traditional songs and tunes as well as popular tunes of the day. There are for example a couple of references to the ‘Prisoner’s Song’ released in 1924. The Italians also sing Fascisti songs, which helps to place events in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
Steve also enjoys the folk music of Italians on harmonica, guitar and mandolin and opera sung unaccompanied. Perhaps given the romantic disposition of Steve – who derives from Eve’s own experiences – she will find music everywhere she goes. She often mentions the songs of native birds, especially the pee wee that seems to sing her name.
Steve even writes a song about music disappearing: (p.289):
“... and through the dusk the blackbird cries alone
Ah, who has robbed the joy of last September,
Muted the lips and drowned the music low?
‘Twas I, ‘twas I that in the dark remember
The singing lads of long and long ago”.
And later: “That night we played the new songs we had learnt from the Italians and the Australians. Staring at each other as we played in even time, on mouth-organ and violin, we thought back sadly on what was now the remote past. It would never happen just the same, again”.
I must return to the original theme of dancing with the concertina. Being neither a dancer nor a concertina player, I sent an early version of this paper to several people who kindly sent their comments. Concertina fettler and musician George Bolliger said the idea was exciting but folklorist Warren Fahey said he considered the idea fanciful. Multi-instrumentalist Alan Swift thought he remembered the round-the neck technique being used with button accordion.
Folklorist Graham Seal recalled seeing an illustration, possibly from The Bulletin or one of the ‘Larrikin’ publications such as The Bird O’Freedom. This suggestion touched on a few relevant themes. I then turned to Melissa Bellanta’s book Larrikins: A History. Larrikins were a sub-culture in mainly urban Australia 1870 to 1930, peaking between the depression of 1890 and the start of war in 1914. Interestingly cross-dressing like that which caused Steve and Blue so many problems was part of the Larrikin idiom.
The cartoon above is from the collection of Dave Johnson who is an acknowledged expert in both bush dance and the playing of concertina and fiddle.
Bush musicians and collectors of folklore are practical types. It seems unlikely that Eve Langley’s novels would be prominent in their reading. But the references to music generally and to dancing with the concertina specifically indicate that The Pea-Pickerscontains material that stimulates further exploration of some barely acknowledged themes.
© 2025 Tony Smith
*
Did Sally Know Harry?
By Rob Willis
Sally Sloane and Harry Schaefer were two old-time musicians and both played an important and significant part in the preservation of our early folk song and music traditions. Both managed to learn, perform and pass on the old songs and dance tunes that were played and sung in the Central West of NSW, which coincidentally is my home territory.
Sally learnt her songs and tunes by ear as did most players of her era. This meant that the music was constantly changing as each musician adapted, altered or added their own variation.
As a result much of their repertoire varied greatly from whatever the ‘original’ was.
Harry Schaefer was different as he could read music but also had the ability to pick up a tune from another player aurally and write it down later for future reference. Harry was in fact recording the old music and our notes below will explain further. However, from our interviews with those who knew him he played ‘by ear’’ most of the time.
Here are some edited references about them both from the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website.
Harry Schaefer 1876-1954 was the youngest of eight children. His father Carl Schaefer immigrated to Australia in 1857. He had worked as a violinist while in Germany but refused to teach his children music as he regarded farming to be a more suitable occupation. Despite this Harry Schaefer and his brothers would steal their father's violin and teach themselves to play. After his first marriage in 1899 Harry Schaefer bought a farm near Parkes, New South Wales. By this time he had mastered many instruments including the fiddle, strohviol, flute, tin whistle, piano, clarinet, accordion, cornet and various other brass instruments. He was a self-taught musician probably learning dance tunes aurally from older musicians he met while growing up in Victoria and in the Parkes/Forbes district.
Harry had the ability to be able to learn a tune very rapidly by ear and then transfer it to written notation. He was recording this aurally learnt music before the advent of audio recorders. Rob Willis was fortunate to obtain his many handwritten manuscript books of notated dance and other tunes in the 1990s. The Schaefer manuscripts are diverse and include transcriptions of rare dance tunes from the mid 1800s as well as popular published dance tunes common during the early to mid twentieth century. It is assumed that Schaefer transcribed these tunes for other musicians who did not play by ear, and also to keep a record for himself. The dances that appear in the manuscripts include waltzes, mazurkas, polkas and varsoviennas. Schaefer's transcriptions are possibly the only example of an Australian bush dance musician keeping a written record of their own repertoire. Harry’s books are now housed in The National Library of Australia.
Sally Sloane 1894-1982 The songs of Sally Sloane are considered to be one of the most important sources of Australian traditional folk music ever collected. Sally was born Eunice Eveline Frost in Parkes NSW to Sarah and Tom Frost in 1894, and was taught music by her mother who sang and played many instruments. Sally Sloane is known mainly for her substantial repertoire of songs but she also played the concertina, button accordion (bush accordion), jews harp, piano, fiddle and the tin whistle. Other songs that Sloane sang were learnt from older singers in her area, often friends of the family. Sally married John Mountford in Dubbo, NSW in 1911 and had five children in the first six years of marriage. The marriage ended and Sally Sloane never married again but took the surname of her partner of 35 years, Frederick Cecil Sloane. John Meredith, folklore collector, discovered Fred and Sally Sloane in 1954. Over the next seven years Meredith visited Sally Sloane over sixty times and collected more than 150 dance tunes and songs from her. Her songs have been archived as part of the Meredith Collection at the National Library of Australia.
As a collector of social history, music and folklore and living in the region I was aware of both Harry and Sally and even though we were never personally acquainted felt a strong a strong connection with the two of them.
The late John Meredith, folklorist and wise person filled my head with tales of Sally and her songs and music during the many hours we travelled the roads on our recording trips for The National Library of Australia. Merro would often state that Sally was “the best that he had ever recorded”.
I came across Harry Schaefer through my involvement with and recording of the traditional musicians who were still around Forbes in the 1970s. He was well respected and indeed shared his music with many younger players.
My friendship with the late Biddy McClenehan nee Schaefer, Harry’s niece, also prompted more curiosity. This resulted in oral history recordings and research with locals and the finding of Harry’s handwritten music manuscript books. They were treasures and resulted in a monograph, The Music of Harry Schaefer, that friend and fellow music enthusiast Graham McDonald and I published in 1995 with assistance from the Australian Folk Trust. This is now available for free download here.
Sally and Harry’s songs and music are now being played and sung worldwide.
Sometimes the ‘bleedin obvious’ escapes our attention and it was not until recently when researching for another local music project that a series of coincidences struck me. Harry Schaefer and the Frost (Sally Sloane) family lived in the Parkes area in proximity with each other, within 10 kilometres to be exact.
The Frosts were well known as a musical family and certainly Harry was one of the premiere dance band players in the district and in constant demand for dances and I started wondering if they could have know each other?
I also remembered that in my early research on Harry and my recordings of members of the Schaefer clan (who were also a very musical family) that it was mentioned that Harry had indeed played with several of the ‘Frost boys’ They had given me several photos of groups that included some of the Frost family.
The clincher came recently, thanks to Trove, when I came across the mention of a dance at Kamandra which is a small location just outside Parkes and also where the Frost family lived . The Schaefer Orchestra played for it and members of the orchestra were listed in the online newspaper. The list included A Frost and R Frost. The Frost players are also mentioned in other dance references with the Schaefer orchestra.
The other coincidence is that the Frost family lived at Kamandra and Sally’s mother died and is buried there. The included image is of Harry and a group of fiddlers. All are relations except for the fiddler in the hat who was named as “one of the Frost boys” by the late Biddy McClenehan, Harry’s niece. Two of the guests at the other image a Schaefer family Christmas also includes members of the “Frost family from Parkes”.
Let’s have a look at the timeline and known facts:
· Sally Sloane was born Eunice Evelyn Frost to Thomas Frost and Sarah Ann Deans on 3rd October 1894 in Parkes.
· Many of her songs and tunes were passed on from her mother who had in turn learnt them from her mother. Various sources also mention that Sarah, Sally’s mum also played several instruments.
· Other early sources of songs and tunes for Sally were Peter Owen of Parkes, Jack Archer, an itinerant railway worker, Harry Bartlett of Parkes, Annie Shaw of Parkes.
· Parkes in this era was a tight knit community and it follows that most musicians would know each other.
· Sally left Parkes about 1911 but stayed in contact with her mother who remained in Parkes
· Sally’s mother Sarah Ann Frost passed away on December 19 1947, at age 88 in Kamandra, Parkes.
· Harry’s mates Bob Frost and his son, Arthur Frost, also lived at Kamandra.
A lot more digging needs to be done, however I would like to think that if Harry did not know Sally personally at least the two families, particularly Sally’s mother, knew each other both on a musical and social basis.
*
JIG DOLLS IN AUSTRALIA AND BEYOND
Tony Smith © 2021
Since I gave a paper on jig dolls at the Australian Folklore Network Conference at the National Library of Australia in Canberra (Easter 2018), there have been several developments. I am pleased to share these with you via Transmissions. [i]
A jig doll is a jointed doll which dances on a surface. Usually the operator controls the doll with a stick attached to the middle of the back. This stick can in turn be moved in various ways such as by a foot pedal. Some dolls are operated by a string passing through them between two end poles. The operator manipulates the tension on the string. Jig dolls like Henry act as a folk percussion instrument as well as providing support to dance tunes and songs.
The Brightest of Entertainers
Not long after the 2018 conference, Graham Seal brought to my attention a recent book on jig dolls: The Brightest of Entertainers by Pat Pickles and Katie Howson. [ii]
I was able to let surviving author Katie Howson know that she had produced a very valuable resource. I was also able to tell her about some developments in Australia she might note for the future. The book concentrates on England but does mention the scene in some other countries.
Howson points out that jig dolls are not puppets. Puppeteers can control the parts of their puppets such as arms and legs directly. The jig doll operator moves the doll and the way the doll is constructed causes the movement. Obviously the maker’s skill is important to both. Some puppets do not have moving parts, but are used to cast shadows or to illustrate a story. Most puppets would not be considered percussion instruments. There are stick puppets which resemble jig dolls reasonably closely but also glove puppets and marionettes on strings which are operated very differently.
More Jig Dollars
Following my address in 2018, some ten conference participants bought very plain dolls and sticks. The dolls were made by the Central Tablelands woodcrafters and were sold at cost including a donation to the Leukaemia Foundation, a charity supported by myself and another jig doller Steve Wilson aka The Man with the Concertina. I hope that they have been able to decorate the dolls and to use them. The main jig doll or ‘limberjack’ maker at the Woodies, Colin Borny passed away in 2019.
Rob Willis mentioned that the Forbes museum had a doll and when I contacted the museum, curator Bruce Adams kindly sent me photographs. The doll is in excellent condition. It was given to Helen Mitchell in 1937 by the remarkable Paul Wenz [iii]. The French born Wenz was a grazier, wool merchant and writer who associated with contemporaries Miles Franklin, Dorothea Mackellar, Nettie Palmer and Frank Clune. He was a translator and had novels published in French (‘The Sundowner’) and English (‘Diary of a New Chum’) and his literary work was described as bearing the influence of the Bulletin magazine, the Bushman’s Bible.
The Forbes doll is labelled ‘Claquette’ and is a doll with black face in red livery. In these more enlightened times, it is unlikely that we would construct jig dolls with black faces lightly. Certainly, children do have black dolls to ensure that they are not subject to stereotypes, but making a subservient black doll dance is a dubious representation of race and colour. It is important for historical accuracy however, that museums hold such items.
A lovely surprise was that Dave South, a fiddler from north Queensland informed me that when he returned home, he made a jig doll of his own. I am proud to be thought of as ‘godfather’ to his Goombuckly Gus. Dave, his partner and Gus have travelled extensively across remote areas of the north, and Gus features regularly in photographs of noteable folk sites such as the birthplace of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The trio have been invited to extend their stays in a number of localities so that Gus could reprise his performances.
Gus has kept up with the times as well and soon sported a mask for the ‘lockdown’. I sent Dave my take on the masking issue. [iv]
I remain reluctant to introduce Henry to a session. Perhaps the song ‘The Spoons Murder’ which describes what can happen to intrusive percussionists has given me pause. [v] I have continued to use jig dolls in my busking, although the pandemic lockdowns have made appearances less frequent. I tend to use the dolls sparingly because they are loud. They are fine outside empty shops but I am reluctant to use them where people are working close by. They do however, earn their keep on special occasions such as Saint Patrick’s Day and at Christmas when Henry dons a red elf’s hat. Observers have given the dolls onomatopoeic names such as ‘clacker’ and ‘rat-a-tatter’.
I continue to have interesting conversations when on the street. One three or four year old girl in her summer frock with hands behind her back approached one morning and asked ‘Do you take cash?’ I assured her I did. A little boy around the same age, coin in hand came up with his Mum and asked ‘Is that you making that noise?’ I had to admit it was me, caught as I was with whistle in hand. Infants occasionally dance uninhibitedly with Henry (aka Henery).
Senior citizens also find something to say. A grandmother expressed a wish for simple toys to make a comeback: ‘anything without a screen’ she said. Another woman heard me playing ‘The Drover’s Dream’ and said she had not heard the tune since she was in First Year in high school over fifty years earlier. She recognised the tune as she had written a play for a competition run by the local radio station, and had included a scene where a swaggie sits under a tree and sings the song.
Another woman said that the last time she had heard the whistle was fifty years earlier when Jimmy Galway gave a recital in Sydney. He would pack away his golden flute occasionally to play something Irish. She could not remember the tune. Fortunately, I was able to perform ‘Cronin’s Hornpipe’ which I think was the tune. But these busking tales are getting away from the jig dolls!
Steve Wilson uses marionettes a la planchette he has made himself. Another example of such dolls being used is by Paul Kelly on a Galway street corner, accompanied by hurdy-gurdy. It is noticeable that the way Paul has his dolls strung means that their movement is limited. [vi] Steve has his strung between two posts and by pushing the near post he can control the tension on the string pretty well. The movement his ‘political’ dolls achieve is also a tribute to the way Steve has constructed them.
Jig dolls and puppets
While jig dolls are not strictly speaking puppets, they do share some characteristics. Some of the puppets located online are irresistible. There are clips of infants interacting with puppets but in many cases, the puppeteer uses recorded music.
The great thing about some performances is that they are set to live music and that they tend to support the music rather than vice-versa. Des Dillon is one puppeteer who belongs to the folk arts category for two reasons. The first is that his construction work is clearly folk art. The second is that his vision has his puppets set firmly within the folk music idiom. Jig dollers can increase their understanding by seeing a good puppeteer at work.
Here are four examples of Dillon’s artistry. In the first two ‘Accordion Girl’ and ‘Sharon Shannon and Des Dillon in Tigh Ned, Inis Oirr (Inisheer), St Patrick’s Day 2019’ Dillon accompanies the figure of the world’s favourite melodeon player on his harmonica. This is lone hand operation par excellence and would be excellent for busking! [vii]
Dillon is able to use his harmonica with support to replicate the melodeon sound, leaving his hands free to operate the puppet. Both instruments make sound with vibrating reeds. Players of both would realise that the ten ‘holes’ play the same pattern. On the harmonica and a one row melodeon, all of the notes on blow or push, are the notes of the tonic chord. In the key of C for example, all the blow/push notes are C, E or G. The remaining notes between are found on suck/pull (or draw). In order to maintain this pattern on both instruments the central octave – from about the third or fourth button or hole - runs blow/draw, blow/draw, blow/draw, draw/blow (push/pull, push/pull, push/pull, pull/push). Both instruments have an intuitive, ‘folk’ feeling which is one reason the melodeon remains more popular than the heavier piano accordion, especially among ‘ear’ players who do not read music.
In ‘All the Ways You Wander’ Dillon collaborates with John Spillane who sings and plays guitar. The puppetry enriches the song and demonstrates how puppets come alive in the hands of a player as good as Dillon. The puppets in this song are extremely realistic and there is no need for sophisticated stage scenery or lighting. The performer involves observers by inviting their use of imagination. There is something quintessential about these puppets, so that we all appreciate them, regardless of how old we happen to be. [viii]
Dillon also has some life size puppets. He can operate these solo, inviting one doll onto the dance floor with him. There is for example, a youtube clip of him dancing in a ‘wedding interval’ with the wedding ceilidh band backing him.
There is a remarkable clip of some set dancing at the 2018 Gathering in Killarney. Although this performance was before the Covid pandemic emerged, this clip prompts the thought that if dancers are worried about finding Covid-free partners, Dillon might have provided the solution! [ix]
Perhaps one donor summed up the relationship between my jig dolls and me. Donors of course, are entitled to be critics. On this occasion I was playing for Henry to dance and this gent put it plainly: ‘You’ he said, ‘are very good. But he is brilliant!’
[i] See ‘The Jig Doll in Australia: Untapped Potential’, https://ozfolknet.wordpress.com/papers-from-the-national-folklore-conference/
[ii] The Brightest of Entertainers: Jig Dolls from England and Beyond, East Anglian Traditional Music Trust, Stowmarket, Suffolk 2018.
[iii] Maurice Blackman ‘Paul Wenz (1869-1939)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 12, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wenz-paul-9048
[iv] ‘Mask Up, Ned!’, http://thecud.com/live/content/mask-ned
[v] Con ODrisceoil ‘The Spoons Murder’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_11JDYcZX44
[vi] Hurdy Gurdy by Paul Kelly – Galway, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owlb7zg6YfE&list=RDOwlb7zg6YfE&index=2
[vii] Accordion Girl, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z8JoJWktLs; and Sharon Shannon and Des Dillon in Tigh Ned, Inis Oirr (Inisheer) St Patrick’s Day 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwLdlMYypEw
[viii] All the Ways You Wander John Spillane and Des Dillon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KQR2tzzjUM
[ix] Des Dillon Puppets Dancing, the Gathering, Killarney 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxRaZxZof2I
*
WOMEN AND THE COACHING INDUSTRY IN AUSTRALIA
by
Rachael Anderson
*
WHAT THE 'F' IS FOLKLORE?
Folklore is often defined like this statement from the popular ‘Folklore Thursday’ operation in UK:
“The traditions, beliefs, customs and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.”
This is fine, as far as it goes – and this might be as far as you want to take it. If not, read on and we can start developing a more nuanced understanding of folklore,
Another way of describing folklore is that it is ‘stuff you know that you don’t know you know’. We learn it by cultural osmosis, usually unwittingly, within the family group, at school, at work, within our respective cultural, ethnic and religious groups. It can also be gender-specific, again reflecting and reinforcing shared ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’, a basic function of folklore – good and bad.
Because we generally aren’t aware that we are bearing folklore, we tend to take it for granted. It is commonplace, everyday, apparently trivial and it is only when it is brought to our attention, (perhaps by a folklorist asking if you know any old songs or stories), that we may become aware that we are all ‘folk’ and that we all have ‘lore’.
A useful way to explain folklore is by giving some examples of the many forms it takes (not an exhaustive list):
· Stories – family, local legends, ghosts, buried treasures, work, hobbies like fishing and ‘the one that got away’ factor (change over time); modern legends, yarns …
· Beliefs – luck, weather lore, folk medicine …
· Customs – blessing of the fleet, saints’ days, April Fool, Valentine’s Day, births, deaths, marriages, initiations, celebrations, commemorations ‘cracker night’, autograph books …
· Arts, crafts, skills learned and practiced informally - needlework, gardening, DIY, Making do …
· Music, song, dance, verse …
· Children’s - games, rhymes, ‘it’, scissors/rock/paper …
· Language – occupational jargons, regional speech, slang, proverbs
· Humour – jokes, parodies, e-lore
Here is a pretty good explanation of folklore and what folklorists do, again from the ‘Folklore Thursday’ site.
FOLKLORE FAQs
Below are a few of the FAQs about folklore, together with some readings:
Does folklore have to be orally transmitted?
No. Before writing, printing, electronic communications and the internet, it was. Since then it has always mingled with and, in some cases, been entirely transmitted, through non-oral channels.
Is folklore all good?
Folklore is affirming, heavily involved in group identities and shared, grassroots experience and perception, including humour. Unfortunately, folklore can also be the vehicle for the transmission of negative stereotypes of race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender. Ethnic jokes, blonde jokes, dingo jokes, discriminatory yarns, the more misogynistic male bawdry, etc.
Is folklore ‘true’?
No – and yes! Folklore abounds in misinformation, exaggeration and good old-fashioned errors (legends, both old and modern; the supernatural; historical myths, stereotypes…). But while these things are not historically or verifiably ‘true’, belief in them is usually an indication of their significance in the worldview of the person/s bearing the tradition.
Where does folklore come from?
Everywhere. It can derive from elite and popular culture, or it can originate at the grassroots level among social groups. Whatever the origins of particular songs, stories, beliefs or customs, there is always interchange between different cultural levels. Folk remedies, for instance, can and have been shown to be work medically. Any number of folk songs and parodies began life as popular or art compositions.
Who are the ‘folk’?
All of us. All known cultures have folklore. Whatever forms it takes, it is always reflective of group identity, of belonging to a group with a shared set of perceptions and understandings about the world, themselves and other groups.
Does folklore have to be old?
No. The idea of tradition, that underlies all approaches to the study of folklore, is about bringing elements of the past into the present and preserving them through performance, repetition, practice etc. for the future. As part of this process, folklore is continually being recreated through the loss of some things over time and replenishment through new historical experiences and understandings. But even while a folk genre such as an urban legend or internet meme might seem up to date, often they retain elements from earlier traditions. Ghost stories have been around forever, but new ones are continually being created utilizing the same old elements – ‘old wine in new bottles’, as someone once described folklore, possibly after one too many.
Do pre-literate peoples have folklore?
Yes, but not in the way often assumed by early anthropologists and folklorists. In Australia, a great deal of Aboriginal myth, song, dance and custom was collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and published as ‘folklore’. As folklore is now understood to be a primarily informal type of expression and practice it is not appropriate, and indeed offensive, to refer to the central mythologies and spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal or other indigenous people as ‘folklore’. Adherents of Christianity would be offended if their deeply-held religious beliefs were referred to as ‘folklore’.
Of course, Aboriginal people do have a body of folkloric practice and expression that is not part of their central belief system/s. These may include non-spiritual dance, song, story, children’s play, arts, crafts and related skills, bush tucker and medicine, etc.
Why is folklore important?
Because all humans have folklore – often variations of the same folklore – which is a very strong indication that it is a highly significant, almost certainly primal, aspect of our existence on the planet. Understanding folklore and the complexities involved has got to be good for promoting those things we all want – peace, understanding, tolerance, equality and justice, among other positive things. Knowing the dark side of the Force helps us understand how damaging negative stereotypes and traditional slurs can be.
If only we could make of use this universal human resource to bring about a better world, as a number of recent books have advocated, including:
Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America. By Bill Ivey.
2018. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 185 pages. ISBN:
978-0-253-02969-0 (hard cover). Review at http://www.jfr.indiana.edu/review.php?id=2307
The Expressive Lives of Elders: Folklore, Art, and Aging. Edited by
Jon Kay. 2018. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 207 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-253-03707-7 (soft cover). Review at:http://www.jfr.indiana.edu/review.php?id=2339
A few other books worth a look:
Dundes, Alan. Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Dundes, Alan, ed. International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
McNeill, Lynne S. Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013.
Simms, Martha C., and Martine Stephens. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. 2nd ed. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011.
Graham Seal, The Hidden Culture: Folklore in Australian Society, OUP, Black Swan Press, 1989/1996. Some examples are dated, but basically useful if you can find one in a library.
Graham Seal
Australian Social Dance
An analysis by Peter Ellis
(edited by Rob Willis, 2019).
Full original at
The Revival
When the Bush Music Club formed in Sydney in 1954 out of a nucleus of followers of the original 'Bushwhackers' Band (Sydney), the interest was in the collection and performance of Australian bush songs. There was little knowledge by these 'city slickers' of the actual dances that were associated with these 'bush tunes'. Apart from that it was at a time when standard social dancing was in decline and it remained unpopular for a generation or two.
As Shirley Andrews has often bemoaned it was very difficult to find young people, particularly amongst males, who could waltz or polka at all or who could be encouraged to learn: yet so many of the true Australian dances popular in the bush relied on this accomplished skill. However, it was possible to entice these people to take on 'learn as you go'single figure folk and set dances which could be walked through briefly. The patrons could gleefully leap and bound about unrestricted by earlier social graces. It was the time of instant mania and 'do your own thing'.
Concurrently (in 1950s) National Fitness Camps were promoting this style of dancing in the form of revived British and European folk dances as a major part of their recreation. This overflowed into a similar presentation in the school system, and particularly as a substitute for sport and phys-ed on rainy days. Also several prominent founders of the Bushwhackers' Band and Bush Music Club were members of the Eureka League and had definite views on folk dance which would have eclipsed any focus on the ballroom derived social dances that had evolved, nevertheless, by the folk process in the bush. It was a period of romanticism that folk dance and music was not contaminated by commercialism or whims of society, and purely a working class spawn. At least now we are coming to realise it was more a free for all in Australia and definitely a two way process across various levels of society.
Dance - Last Century's Fashions
Most of the dances came to Australia via the ballroom, and only rarely as a direct folk import but were originally taken from 'the folk'and 'dressed up'for introduction into the upper class ballroom. Then, on arrival in Australia as the 'latest fashion', the dances were snapped up by all levels of society in a frontier country anxious of news of anything new from the old country.
Gradually these ballroom dances and the music percolated throughout the country and quickly moved back via the folk process from courtly grace to neat and precise, sometimes exuberant, folk dance, often quite removed from the overseas original. And so it was the waltz in particular, and the polka and quadrille, all originally from Europe, that were the basis of our true 'bush dances'.
Origins of the'Bush Dance'
However, the early members of the Bush Music Club(s) were dancing the Bridge of Athlone, (Waves of Tory - an Irish dance previously unheard of in Australia), Polish 'Krakoviak', Serbian Kolo and Swedish three part original folk form of Varsoviana. These had been adopted as part of the Bush Music Club dance performance more as light occasional variety to the Australian song which occupied the main program.
Immediately through association this set the scene for the early somewhat erroneous use of the term 'bush dance'. This had mushroomed by the 1970's with the conversion and adoption of many British and Irish folk dances and music as the core for 'bush dancing'.
In the absence of available printed music (city folk musicians are generally trained sight readers in contrast to the traditional bush musician) a new book 'Begged, Borrowed, and Stolen 'was eagerly taken up as a source of tunes for the British, and particularly Irish dances. The authors Chris O'Connor and Suzette Watkins made no pretences that the tunes were Australian or for bush dance selection. It was simply a collection of music favoured by players in the Celtic Club of Adelaide. In this context the book was fine, proving extremely popular throughout the country and providing a more than adequate repertoire for musicians and their sessions of performance of Celtic music. However in a similar way to which British and Irish folk dances had been inappropriately dubbed bush dances, 'Begged, Borrowed and Stolen 'was quickly adopted as the bible for bush dance music.
As a secondary source of material Max Klubal's 'Music for Australian Folk Dancing' was also widely used. In both cases the major proportion of Celtic tunes provided were generally only suited to the Celtic dances and quite inappropriate to be applied as often the case for use for the social dances that really did survive in the bush and country scene. Most of the Irish tunes in these books were not known in Australia and it is astonishing to find that the very good danceable set tunes of Irish origin that were known by most of our pioneer musicians will not be found in either publications. On the other hand, Max Klubal did include several tunes that were suitable for dances including Varsoviana, Berlin Polka and Pride of Erin.
The newer Bushwackers Band (Melbourne), Cobbers and several others continued to perform Australian bush songs but did much to further promote the domination of celtic music and dance, not without a certain amount of 'ketchup' and commercial promotion.
The New Revival
In the last decade the tide has turned and various dance and musician groups attached to the Bush Music and Folk Clubs, Colonial and Heritage Dance Groups and the Traditional Social Dance Association of Victoria (TSDAV) have done much to raise the Australian profile.
Likewise the work of collectors- John Meredith, Shirley Andrews, Alan Scott, Brad Tate, Rob Willis, David de Hugard and others have contributed to putting the Australian tradition into perspective. Similarly recent publications - Australian Folk Songs Vol.2 by John Meredith and the Collector's Choice series by yours truly are at least providing an authentic balance for the selection of appropriate tunes for dance music.
Even more recently the joint efforts of Rob Willis and David De Santi in the 'Pioneer Performers'series published through 'Carrawobbity Press' with support by the Wongawilli Colonial Dance Club is to be commended. And the range has not been limited to New South Wales and Victoria, as the most recent publication takes in a 'Queensland Selection' collected by Mark and Maria Schuster who are likewise making valuable contributions to the cause. Some further material from Ma Seal of Kimba, South Australia has also been published.
The purpose of this work is to attempt to describe the intrinsic characteristics of the various dance music categories, relate to original Anglo-Celtic (as distinct from contemporary introductions) and European origins and the form introduced via the ballroom and the final moulding by the most important factor - the tunes and the way they were played by our own traditional dance musicians.
Peter Ellis, Bendigo, April 1995..
A BUSHRANGER IN AMERICA
A version from the USA
‘The people round know me right well – they call me Johnny Troy’. The trouble was that no-one did know a bushranger hero named ‘Johnny Troy’, not in Australia, at least. So, who was he, if he ever existed?
There were several incidental mentions of him and his deeds in historical documents and folklore. He featured briefly in a poem titled ‘The Convict’s Tour to Hell’, probably composed by ‘Frank the Poet’ (Francis McNamara), in or before 1839. The poem is a celebration of convicts and bushrangers, including the famous Jack Donohoe, shot dead in 1830. Troy is mentioned in the same breath as the now much better-known Donohoe. The poem is fantasy of a convict, Frank himself, visiting hell, where he finds all the despised overseers and gaolers writhing in eternal agony. When the devil hears that Frank was a convict in life he immediately says that he has come to the wrong place. Convicts should all go to heaven. When Frank reaches the Pearly Gates, he confronts St Peter who asks:
where's your certificate
Or if you have not one to show
Pray who in Heaven do you know?
Frank answers;
Well I know Brave Donohue Young Troy and Jenkins too
And many others whom floggers mangled
And lastly were by Jack Ketch strangled.
Frank is allowed straight into heaven where he is made ‘a welcome guest’, along with his old convict mates.
But that was about all anyone knew of this Irish bushranger until the 1950s, when American folksong collectors began to hear a ‘Johnny Troy’ ballad – mainly among lumber jacks. It seems that while Johnny Troy’s vigorous song had faded away in Australia, it had been well received by the Americans, who often sang it together with a couple of other Australian bushranger ballads, ‘Jack Donohoe’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. It is likely that these songs reached America during the California gold rushes, which explains how they got there.[i]But there was still no news of the lost bushranger in Australia. Until some solid research by the late Stephan Williams turned up the whole true history of Johnny Troy.[ii]
John Troy, aged eighteen, was transported for burglary and felony from Dublin aboard the ship Asiain 1825. He was a weaver by trade and drew a seven-year sentence. Soon after arriving here, he was found guilty of robbery and served two years on the Phoenix‘hulk’, or prison ship. After completing this sentence, Troy’s record was one of continual ‘bolting’ from iron gangs and involvement in mutinies aboard convict ships, details of which appear in his ballad. He served time at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) and after being returned to Sydney in 1831, escaped again and took to bushranging. After a busy period of robbing travellers, in company with other fugitive convicts, Troy was betrayed and recaptured in 1832.
He was tried with three others for highway robbery. The court heard from numerous witnesses and policemen and eventually the judge ‘summed up at considerable length’, sending the jury to consider their verdict at 7pm. No doubt anxious to be off home or to the pub, the jury came back a few minutes later with a guilty verdict for three of the defendants. John Troy, Tom Smith and Michael Anderson were, unusually, sentenced to hang immediately. The judge was clearly not in a good mood as the legislation for capital punishment clearly provided for a three-day break before execution.
In the event, there was a respite of a week but on August 18, 1832, Troy and Smith (Anderson was reprieved) were led out to be hanged in Sydney Gaol. ‘Great crowds assembled to view the awful termination of their lives’. Troy accepted his sentence saying, ‘he had committed many offences, and deserved to suffer death.’ He preferred death to a lifetime in a penal settlement. He also claimed, in proper outlaw hero style, that Smith was innocent. After some words from the clergy present, the executioners fiddled with the ropes ‘in their usual bungling manner’. The condemned men, both carrying red handkerchiefs, were finally put out of their misery and ‘after some convulsive struggling, were ushered into eternity.’[iii]
And Johnny Troy did, however undeservedly, achieve an immortality of sorts. Hanged criminals were usually thrown into cheap coffins and carted off for burial in the 'Public Nuisance' cart used to collect dead animals from the streets. But in this case the bodies of Troy and Smith were given into the care of a cousin of Troy’s. There was an Irish wake around the bodies that night and a subscription taken up for good quality coffins. Next day, the coffins were taken out and laid in front of the house of the bushrangers’ betrayer, a man named Donohoe. The red handkerchief Troy had been holding at his death was thrown ominously at the traitor’s door. The police had to break up the crowd, which gave ‘three groans’ for Donohoe and a long procession followed the dead men to their final burying place.
Troy was a convict hero. The ballad that celebrated his real and imagined activities is much like those romanticising other bushranger heroes, real and mythic. Troy is born in Dublin, ‘brought up by honest parents’ but is transported to NSW after robbing a widow. He escapes and with three companions takes to the bush – ‘Four of the bravest heroes who ever handled gun.’ Robbing on the highway, they come across an old man and demand his gold watch and money – on pain of having his brains blown out. The man pleads that he has none of these and also has a wife and family ‘daily to provide.’ On hearing this, Troy refuses to rob the man, gets back on his horse and throws the man fifty pounds ‘to help you on your way.’ The song concludes in proper Robin Hood style with the verse:
The poor I'll serve both night and day,
The rich I will annoy;
The people round know me right well;
They call me Johnny Troy.
In another American version, the story includes Troy’s death ‘on his scaffold high’ as ‘a brave young hero.’
Why Troy was forgotten in the place where he committed his crimes and died for them is a mystery. Perhaps there were enough bushranger ballads and legends around to satisfy the demand. People are still singing many of these in Australia, where they are a strong element of folk tradition. Johnny Troy lives on only in America, though he is in good company, or bad, there. The tradition of the outlaw hero that runs from Robin Hood includes American badmen as well as our bushrangers. Jesse James and Billy the Kid, among many others, are celebrated in the same Robin Hood style, and just as controversially, as Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and Ned Kelly.[iv]
Page 2 of the USA version
Notes
[i]Porter, Kenneth W. 'Johnny Troy': A 'Lost' Australian Bushranger Ballad in the United States, Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1965: 227-238 at http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=965759253841134;res=IELLC, accessed August 2017 and Kenneth Goldstein, notes to LP by Ellen Stekert https://outlook.office.com/owa/redir.aspx?REF=uGDzIsjlRKV7AAi2uiMuTkjGP8W_Z1kfDm1FbqmyGwnbKgjVlN_UCAFodHRwczovL3Byb3RlY3QtYXUubWltZWNhc3QuY29tL3MvTTQxYUJ2VVZwcjVwdHI_ZG9tYWluPWZvbGt3YXlzLW1lZGlhLnNpLmVkdQ, accessed August 2017. See also Library of Congress for a version collected in California prior to World War 1 at https://www.loc.gov/item/2017701036/, accessed May 2019.
[ii]Stephan Williams, Johnny Troy, Popinjay Publications, Canberra 2001 (revised from original 1993 edition). It is fitting that Stephan Williams resurrected this story of the vanishing bushranger as he was himself an unsung hero of Australian folk history, mainly through his impeccably researched series of self-publications issued under his Popinjay imprint.
[iii]Stephan Williams, from the Sydney Gazette, 21 August 1832.
[iv]Graham Seal, Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History, Anthem Press, London, 2011.
This post is from my recent book, Great Bush Stories
See also Paul Slade’s essays on bushrangers and related matters at http://www.planetslade.com/bushranger-ballads.html
*
POINTED PARODIES
Trivial and harmless though they seem, folk parodies can pack a powerful punch in politics, wartime, at work, in institutions, in childhood and anywhere a laugh is sorely needed.
Parodies are one way that folk express their irritation, opposition or awestruck incredulity at what the dominant system serves up – whether it is children, soldiers, workers or any other group, we all have that need to send up, satirise and generally take the piss out of – well, almost everything - but the grins have sharp teeth…
We have collected many parodies through the years and, by popular request, here are a few popular ones from our live performances and presentations…
KIDS
ON TOP OF SPAGHETTI (pre-1950s)
On top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese,
I lost my poor meatball when somebody sneezed.
It rolled off the table and onto the floor,
And then my poor meatball rolled out of the door.
It rolled down the garden and under a bush,
And then my poor meatball was nothing but mush…
There are several more verses …
FLICK (1950s)
If there are whiteants in the floor,
Borers in the door,
Silverfish galore
Get a Flick man, that's your answer
Remember, one Flick and their gone.
In the Cold War fears of the era this became:
If there are Russians in the floor
Soviets at the door
Communists galore -
Get an A Bomb, that’s your answer
Remember: one flash – and they’re ash!
DAVY CROCKETT
Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett movie c. 1952? One of earliest global cross marketing campaigns – film, coonskin caps, guns, costumes, etc + Top 40 ballad.
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Bravest state in the land of the free
Whipped his pa when he was only three
Killed a bear with a hickory tree
Davy, Davy Crockett,
King of the wild frontier
Kids across the world gleefully parodied this, including in Australia:
Born on a tabletop in Joe’s café
Dirtiest joint in the USA
Killed his ma when he was only four
Used Mortein Plus forevermore
Davy, Davy Crockett,
The man who is no good
WHAT HAPPENED TO WONDER WOMAN’S BOSOM?
Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin flew away
Wonder Woman lost her bosom
Flying TAA
THE SORBENT SONG
Sorbent toilet paper – or ‘tissue’, to be proper – has been a staple of Australian shopping lists since the 1950s. Around that time, the company featured an advertising jingle that went:
‘What’s the gentlest tissue in the bathroom you can issue?
New, new, new, new Sorbent
What’s the biggest-selling brand of toilet tissue in the land
New, new, new, new Sorbent …
This was quickly subverted:
What's the gentlest fibre you can use to wipe your Khyber?
New, new, new newspaper.
If it’s aggravating you can read it while you’re waiting,
New, new, new newspaper.
If you’ve got the runnies,
You can always read the funnies
New, new, new newspaper …
HAPPY LITTLE CONDOMS
The famous ‘Happy Little Vegemites’ song was parodied when the HIV-AIDS epidemic first appeared in the 1980s and the previously suppressed topic of prophylactics came to the attention of younger children through public health campaigns. The original Vegemite jingle goes like this:
We're happy little Vegemites, as bright as bright can be,
We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea.
Mummy says we're growing stronger every single day
Because we love our Vegemite,
We all enjoy our Vegemite,
It puts a rose in every cheek.
In the AIDS scare of the late 1980s, the kids turned it into this:
We’re happy little condoms,
We come in packs of six
You buy us at the chemist and you stick us on your ----
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
A popular TV series generated these items of children’s humour:
Oh, the Addams family started
When uncle Festa farted
They thought it very funny
When he blew up the dunny
And landed in the sewer
A drain of raw manure
The Addams family
Blurt, blurt.
Variant:
The Addams family started
When uncle Festa farted
The children were disgusted
They stuck their dicks in custard
The Addams family
Drop dead!
WAR
BLACKBOY
‘I’d Love to live in Loveland (with a girl like you’) was the pre-World War 1 original (Bing covered it) of a ditty the WA diggers sang in Blackboy Hill training camp:
I'd love to live in Loveland with a girl like you.
And ev'ry day a holiday with skies of baby blue.
Where roses bloom forever, and sweethearts are always true,
I'd love to live in Loveland with a girl like you.
The parody said it all:
I’d love to live in Blackboy for a week or two
And work all day and get no pay and live on Irish stew
The potatoes they are rotten and the meat runs after you
Yes, I’d love to live in Blackboy for a week or two.
MY LITTLE WET HOME IN THE TRENCH
From Gallipoli, to the tune of ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’)
I've a little wet home in a trench.
Which - the raindrops continuallydrench; - ? -
There's a dead, Turk close by
With his toes to the sky,
And he gives us a beautiful stench.
Underneath in the place of a floor
There's a mass of wet mud and some straw
And the Jack Johnson’s tear
Through the rain-sodden air
On my little wet home in the trench.
There are snipers who keep on the go,
You must keep your napper down low -
And their star shells at night
Make a deuce of a light
Which causes the language to flow.
Then bully and biscuits we chew,
For it's weeks since we tasted a stew,
But with shells dropping there,
There's no place to compare
With my little wet' home in a trench.
DIGGERS’ HYMN (WA version, also a Victorian version; from World War 2. Collected from ‘a bloke on the cab rank in Albany’, GS 1980)
From the streets of old Perth city to Cottesloe by the sea
The Aussie girls are showing us how silly they can be
In the good old days before the war the Aussie girls were gay
But now they’ve gone completely mad on the twirps from the USA
With their dashing Yankee accents and their money flowing free
They have stolen all the hearts but those who have used their eyes to see
But when this war is over and the Yanks are no more seen
They’ll prefer an Aussie dustman to the glorious marine
So here’s to the girls who have been true to the boys of the southern cross
They have helped the brave to see it through, it will never cost a loss
But the girls who skinned the digger for the glamour and the swank
When this war is finished it’s the Aussies they’ll have to thank
CHEAP CHARLIE
From the Vietnam War. ‘Uc-dai-loi’ seems to mean ‘an Australian’)
Uc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie,
Saigon Tea cost many, many P,
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie
Uc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie,
He no give me MPC,
MPC cost many, many P,
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie,
Uc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie,
He no go to bed with me,
For it cost him many, many P,
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie,
Uc-dai-lo, Cheap Charlie,
Make me give him one for free,
Mamma-san go crook on me,
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie,
Uc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie,
He give baby-san to me,
Baby-san cost many, many P,
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie,
Uc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie,
He go home across the sea,
He leave baby san with me
Uc-dai-loi he Cheap Charlie
WORK
THE BOSS(An update of one of Aesop’s fables)
When the lord made man, all the parts of the body argued over who would be the BOSS.
The BRAIN explained that since he controlled all the parts of the body, he should be the BOSS.
The LEGS argued that since they took the man wherever he wanted to go, they should be the BOSS.
The STOMACH countered with the explanation that since he digested all the food, he should be the boss.
The EYES said that without them, man would be helpless, so they should be BOSS.
Then the ARSEHOLE applied for the job.
The other parts of the body laughed so hard that the ARSEHOLE got mad and closed up.
After a few days the BRAIN went foggy, the LEGS got wobbly, the STOMACH got ill and the EYES got crossed and unable to see.
They all conceded defeat and made the ARSEHOLE the BOSS.
This proves that you don’t have to be a brain to be BOSS …
JUST AN ARSEHOLE.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY WANTED
DEATH OF EMPLOYEES
Satires on official forms, policies and regulations are especially rich on the subject of requesting leave. This one has been around since at least the 1960s:
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
DIRECTIVE E/E/A. 5769/1 URGENT
TO: ALL employees
RE: Standard Procedure Instructions in Case of Death of Employees
It has recently been brought to the attention of this office that many employees have been dying whilst on duty, for apparently no good reason at all. Furthermore, the same employees are refusing to fall over after they are dead.
Where it can be proved that the employee is being held up by a bench, counter, desk, typewriter, or any other support which is the property of the Department, a 90 day period of grace will be granted.
The following procedure will hereforth be strictly adhered to:
If after several hours it is noticed that an employee has not moved or changed position, the Department Head will promptly investigate. Because of the highly sensitive nature of our employees and the very close resemblance between death and their natural working attitude, the investigation will be made quietly so as to prevent waking the employee if he or she is asleep. If some doubt as to his or her true condition is felt, the extending of a pay envelope is a fine test. If the employee does not grasp it, it may be reasonably assumed that he or she is dead.
NOTE: In some cases, the instinct to extend the hand for the pay envelope is so strongly developed that a spasmodic ‘clutcher reflex’ action may even occur after death. In all cases, a sworn statement by the dead person must be filled out in full detail on a special form provided for the purpose. Fifteen copies will be made, three copies to be sent to the Commonwealth Department, two to the State Office, and two to the deceased. The others, in accordance with usual routine, will be promptly lost in the Department’s files.
POLITICSAND PROTEST
HAWKE IS MY SHEPHERD (popular photocopy lore from the era)
HAWKE IS MY SHEPHERD I SHALL NOT WANT,
HE LEADETH ME BESIDE STILL FACTORIES AND ABANDONED FARMS,
HE RESTORETH MY DOUBT IN THE LABOR PARTY,
HE ANOINTETH MY WAGE WITH TAX AND INFLATION,
SO MY EXPENSES RUNNETH OVER MY INCOME.
SURELY POVERTY AND HARD LIVING
SHALL FOLLOW THE LABOR PARTY,
AND I SHALL PRAY FOR THE DOLE
AND LIVE IN A RENTED HOUSE FOREVER.
And:
I'M GLAD I'M AN AUSSIE,
I'M GLAD I'M FREE,
I WISH I WAS A DOG
AND HAWKE WAS A TREE.'
Parodies have long been a favourite of political and social protest, here are a few:
HERE WE ARE IN RISDON GAOL (To ‘The Limejuice Tub’)
Chorus:
Here we are in Risdon Gaol, holding out on taking bail
We have trespassed so they say , on National Parks they took away .
Verse 1
December 4th it was the day , when folks began to make their way
To set up camp in sleepy Strahan, in readiness for hundreds more.
Verse 2
As the blockade date grew near , Federal cabinet bowed to fear
World Heritage status "let it hold", but stop the dam "we're not so bold" .
Verse 3
The papers cried “that’s folly, Sirs, this Wilderness must be preserved ! "
The protests came from near & far, to save South West Tasmania .
Verse 4
These hollow men had had their way, but Dec 14th was our day
News went out around the world , the blockade banners were unfurled.
Verse 5
So it went 4 frantic days, Blockade news was all the rage
200 arrests some out on bail , all the rest in Risdon gaol.
Verse 6
Prison bars can 't hold us in, come January we'll start again
While rivers flow on to the sea, they 'll give their life to you and me.
FAIRBRIDGE FADE AWAY
These ditties were sung by kids in Fairbridge homes in NSW and WA. To the tune of the hymn, ‘There is a Golden Land’)
There is a mouldy dump, down Selly Oaks
Where we get bread and cheese, enough to make you choke.
We get sawdust in our tea, eggs [and meat] we never see.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away.
Fade away, fade away. Fade away, fade away.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away
and:
There is a mouldy dump, down Fairbridge way.
Where we get bread and jam, three times a day.
Eggs and bacon we don’t see, we get sawdust in our tea.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away.
Fade away, fade away. Fade away, fade away.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away
There are thousands more of these. And they are still being created in response to private and public issues and problems of every kind. Here are some relating to the controversy over the Adani coal mine: https://carboncanaries.com.au/
*
by Graham Seal
In 1961 the historian Lloyd Robson visited St John’s Home
for the Aged in New Town, Hobart. Like a few other historians and folklorists
of the period, including Russel Ward and
John Meredith, Robson was seeking out old Australian folk songs. In the
retirement home he interviewed and recorded Mr J H Davies, a veteran of the
Tasmanian whaling industry, then aged 88 (born 1873). Davies went whaling as a
teenager and over the course of his adult life learned a small but highly
important stock of songs including ‘The Waterwitch’, ‘The Cyprus Brig’ and a
version of the Sydney larrikin song, ‘The Woolloomooloo Lair’. He also knew a
whaling ballad about a tragedy that took place off the Tasmanian coast more
than a century before Lloyd Robson turned on his tape recorder.
The Tasmanian whaling trade was established with shore based
operations in 1805 and expanded rapidly in the 1820s. From 1828 to 1838 it is
thought that almost 3000 southern right whales were harpooned by Tasmanian
whalers. From the 1840s whale numbers declined and it was necessary to change
to deep sea whaling. By 1849 the Hobart whaling fleet boasted 34 ships and
whalemen from around the world worked in the industry. The fishery declined
from the late 1870s due partly to overfishing and the last deep sea whaler out
of Tasmania, the Helen, returned home
in 1900.
Whaling was a dirty and dangerous business with many
disasters and high fatalities. On 5 November 1859 the brig Grecian sighted whales off the SW Cape. Mate R (Robert, Bob) Marney
and ‘his boat’s crew’ of five men were lowered into the sea. They gave chase
and harpooned the whale. The small boat was dragged by the whale until
nightfall when the Grecian lost sight
of it. For some unknown reason Marney and his men did not cut themselves free.
They were never seen again. The mother of the boat steerer, a man named named
Macfarlane, chartered a private search vessel but nothing was ever found.
The loss of six men from a small community was a deep shock
that resulted in a ballad documenting the incident. ‘The Loss of Marney’ is
based closely on a broadside usually known as ‘Lady Franklin’s Lament’ or just
‘Lord Franklin’, probably first published in 1852. It commemorates the loss of
Franklin and his crew in their famously ill-fated attempt to find the North
West Passage from 1845. Franklin had been Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania from 1837-1843
and his commemorative song would have been popular there, providing a model for
the ballad Mr Davies sang for Robson so many years later. Although Marney was lost
a generation before Mr Davies was born, he knew some of the men who had served
with him on the Grecian and from whom
he presumably learnt the song, which seems to have been quite popular in
Tasmania. Robson also collected another version from Captain Harry O’May of
Hobart (which gives the name of Marney’s ship).
The
Loss of Marney
Far
out-ward bound, far o'er the deep
Slung
in my hammock I fell asleep,
I
had a dream which I thought was true,
Concerning
Marney and his boat's crew.
With
all his crew he sailed
away
Lost
in the darkness one stormy
day *
Off
yon green island out far from here,
Where
we lost Marney and his boat's gear.
There's
Captain Kennedy of Hobart-town,
There's
Captain Reynolds of high renown,
There's
Captain Robertson and many, many more,
They've
long been cruising Macquarie shore.
They
cruised east and they cruised west,
Round
the sou'-west cape where they thought best.
No
tale or tiding could they see or hear,
Concerning
Marney or his boat's gear.
In
Research Bay where the black whale blow,
The
sad tale of Marney they all do know,
They
say he's gone like a many many more,
He
left his home to return no more.
As
we draw nearer to Hobart shore,
I
saw a fair maid in deep replore,
She
was sobbing, sighing, saying pity me,
I've
lost my brother, poor Bob Marney.
(2
lines missing)
I've
lost my brother, no more to see,
I've
lost my brother, poor Bob Marney.
·
hypothetical
reconstruction of part lines missing from original recording.
The ‘Captain Reynolds of high renown’ is probably Michael
Reynolds, born in Hobart in 1830. Reynolds went whaling in the Pacific at the
age of 16. He became captain of a whaler, though if the song is accurate he would
have been a very young captain in 1853. It seems likely that folk memory has
inserted his name into the song long after the originating events had faded
into the past.
‘The Loss of Marney’ is an example of a local occupational commemorative
ballad produced by ‘piggy-backing’ on a more widely distributed broadside original
that had passed into oral tradition. The notion of loss resonates through the
two songs, aided by the Tasmanian connections and the chronological coincidence
of the Lord Franklin broadside and the loss of the six whalemen. The song is still
occasionally sung by Australian folk revival performers.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Australian Folksongs http://folkstream.com/027.html
L L Robson ‘Some Tasmanian Songs’, Australian Tradition July 1965, 9. And see http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/17761788?selectedversion=NBD6942460
for a recording and some details of the original interview).
C H Ringrose in The
Age, Sept 21 1935, 4. (In this interesting reminiscence, Ringrose uses the
phrase ‘his boat’s crew’, suggesting that he was also familiar with the song.
He also gives information on ‘The Waterwitch’, another of Mr Davies’ songs, and
on Tasmanian whaling generally). https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19350921&id=HOxjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yZUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3321,1969890&hl=en
S Chamberlain, ‘The Hobart Whaling Industry’, PhD Thesis, La
Trobe University, 1988.
M Nash, The Bay Whalers, Canberra, 2003.
APPENDIX
Likely broadside source of ‘The
Loss of Marney’
*
THE GUITAR IN AUSTRALIA
by
Graham Seal
The earliest Australian references I have
found to this instrument are in advertisements for sale of goods in the early
nineteenth century, the earliest at 1806.[i]
There are a few other occurrences in newspaper advertisements up to 1824 when
guitars seem to be in abundance, along with other musical instruments being
made available in the colony, presumably as merchants developed a market in the
growing population. In 1826 we also find advertisements seeking to employ
teachers of guitar beginning to appear, a sign that there is some demand for learning
to play. The advertisements appeared for some weeks, suggesting there might
have been a shortage of guitar teachers. By 1828, guitar instruction books are
beginning to be advertised,
The instruments themselves are generally
described as ‘beautiful’ or ‘fine’ or ‘handsome’ and often identified as
‘Spanish.’ By 1830 it was possible to buy guitars ‘of a very superior kind.’[ii]
Sellers seem cagey about naming a price for them, usually saying that the items
can be viewed at such and such an address or premises. The maker of the instrument was sometimes named in
advertisements, though this was unusual at this time.
The description of the guitars as of
Spanish derivation suggest they were strung with gut rather than wire[iii],
though an interesting description of the Sydney Markets in 1826 refers to
Portuguese barbers ‘playing, or, rather strumming a wire-strung guitar …’[iv] Guitar
strings are also advertised for sale, suggesting a reasonably brisk trade. But whatever they were strung with, it
is safe to say that the guitar was firmly established in Australia, or that bit
of it that was operating in the mid-1820s, by that time. By 1831 guitars were
being sold in Van Diemen’s Land and the following year a Mrs Davis appeared on
a Hobart stage accompanying herself on the guitar.[v]
But who else played
it? And where and for what occasions? Most commentary on these questions
suggests that the guitar was restricted to parlours and more intimate, mostly
private venues and was used to play music of a more genteel and refined kind
than that usually associated with colonial folk music.
Another reason often
given for the apparent absence of the guitar from colonial folk music making is
its delicate construction (thin woods, glues likely to fail in the climate).
This, and the instrument’s relative lack of easy portability mitigated against
it travelling ‘up the country’ as settlers pioneered the new land. And, as always, there were economic
considerations. The gut strings in use at the time were extremely expensive.
But in October 1832 we catch a glimpse of a
lower social level of guitar playing. Samuel Hamel was commanded to keep the peace
after ‘twanging on an old guitar in his master’s yard in the middle of the
night, to the great disturbance of the poultry …’[vi]
Another incident the following year
involved a very drunk Frederick Dawson serenading a young lady of his
affections by ‘twanging on an old guitar, and growling out in a fine mezzo
soprano, the following travestie [sic] of that popular air "Alice
Gray":
"She's all my fancy painted her,
She's forty, fat, and fine;
But her heart it is a butchers,
And never can be mine.
He swears she's fatter than his beef,
So sleekly fed on hay;
Oh! My liver's all consuming,
For a kiss from Dolly Day."[vii]
How this might have endeared the beloved to
Frederick must remain one of history’s mysteries. A few months later ‘A Lover
of Music’ wrote to the editor of another Sydney newspaper:
On passing a house in Pitt-street, the other
evening, not a hundred miles from Mr. Terry's, my ears were arrested by a burst
of very delightful music, seemingly produced by two or three flutes, a guitar,
and violin which together realised the most delightful harmony. On enquiry, I
found the performers all young men, who were passing the evening luxuriating in
sweet sounds. I contrasted the effects of this music with that I had heard at
the theatre, and thought the latter suffered by the comparison. Now, Mr. Editor,
when we have so many Amateur musicians in Sydney, why have we not public
concerts, &c, ?[viii]
It seems reasonable to argue that the
guitar, in one or more forms, was fairly firmly established in the music-making
of both ends of the social spectrum by the 1830s. From concerts for the discerning
to caterwauling by the inebriated[ix],
the guitar had arrived. In Sydney and Hobart, at least. The rest of the country
barely existed.
[iii] Steel
strung guitars are usually said to have evolved in America around the end of
the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, becoming standard by the
1920s. However, metal strings of brass or bronze are known to have been used on
instruments as early as the medieval era and almost certainly much earlier.
[vii] The Sydney Herald Aug 29 1833, p. 2. Also indicating the early existence of a healthy tradition of parodying popular songs
of the day.
[ix] Several
similar incidents appear in newspaper reports, suggesting that the guitar was a fairly common instrument. By the 1830s, in the hands of the
lower as well as the upper classes.
Graham Seal
(Originally published as ‘From Texas to Tamworth via New Zealand: Tex Morton Sings an Australian Song' in Telling Stories Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012, Edited by Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni. Monash University Publishing, 2013.
Robert Lane (TexMorton) and an early New Zealand band, c 1930?
August 20 1936, Columbia Recording Studios, Homebush, Sydney.
New Zealander Robert Lane records ‘Wrap Me up in My Stockwhip and Blanket’ for the Regal Zonophone label. It is his fourth recording session but the first time he has performed a traditional Australian song rather than one from the American country and western repertoire or his own compositions in that style. Twenty year-old Lane, in the persona of ‘Tex Morton’, has just become the unlikely godfather of a new vernacular music genre.
Robert Lane was born in 1916. About 1932, after a few precocious years in local New Zealand music making, he left for Australia and turned himself into ‘Tex Morton’. This was the start of an astounding half-century career as a country music pioneer, showman, entrepreneur, actor and, eventually, legendary character in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, parts of Asia and Europe. But it was in Australia during the years between 1936 and 1941 that he produced a large number of seminal recordings, many of them being hits of the time.
In those early works, Morton’s song making produced a new musical genre that was an extension of a grassroots Australian tradition hybridised with American country music. What is now usually called ‘Australian country music’ is typified by 4/4 or ¾ rhythms and simple tunes carrying down-to-earth stories. The steel-string acoustic guitar was the favoured instrument for balladeers of this school and, in Morton’s case at least, employing harmonic accompaniments that rarely moved far from the three basic chords. These were delivered in a rhythmic strumming style occasionally punctuated with staccato bass runs played close to the bridge with a thumb pick worn on the knuckle rather than the end of his thumb. Stylistic elements were drawn mostly from American traditional music genres, mainly country and western, cowboy or hillbilly, as they were variously known, together with the yodel, of which Morton was a noted exponent. There were also some elements of mainly white country blues, including occasional spoken lines of expression and/or commentary.
These appealing capsules of music and narrative formed a rudimentary but powerful imaginary and quickly became a popular way to share those things that mattered in the lives of many Australians, mainly but not solely, in the bush. It remains so today.
THE TEX MORTON REPERTOIRE
Morton’s recorded work has been estimated to number possibly 1000 songs. These include what are now considered country standards from American singers such as Gene Autry and Goebel Reeves, among others, Morton’s own compositions and some traditional Australian songs, such as ‘Billy Brink the Shearer’ (1939) and ‘The Stockman’s Last Bed’ (1940). There were also sentimental tearjerkers like ‘There Are Tear-Stains on Your Letter, Mother Dear’ (1937), original songs based on aspects of bush life and labour, such as ‘The Wandering Stockman’ (at the same session as ‘Wrap Me Up in My Stockwhip and Blanket’ in 1936 also recorded subsequently in 1960 and 1961/2) and his popular horse songs ‘Mandrake’ (1941), ‘Aristocrat’ (1940), ‘Rocky Ned’ (1939), as well as his later surprise hit ‘The Goondiwindi Grey’ (1973).
Morton also wrote and recorded a number of songs based on his and others’ experience of life on the track and popular attitudes during the depression years of the 1930s. These songs, such as ‘Fanny Bay Blues’ (1937) about Darwin gaol, ‘Sergeant Small’ (1938) and ‘The Ned Kelly Song’ (1939) include some pointed social commentary. ‘The Ned Kelly Song’ treats the Kelly story in tongue-in-cheek style, not unlike many of the earlier Kelly folk ballads and songs. But it ends with a reference to the economic difficulties of the depression and directly invokes Kelly’s bush Robin Hood image, notably in the final verse:
‘Cos when I look round at some people I know
And the prices of things that we buy
I think to myself, well perhaps after all
Poor Old Ned wasn’t such a bad guy.
The depiction of Sergeant Small, a Queensland policeman notorious among itinerants for treating them especially roughly, caused that song to be banned from the airwaves, perhaps the earliest incidence of such a thing in Australian popular music history. Morton’s depiction of being trapped by the Sergeant disguised as a bagman, taken to the cells and beaten up by a number of policemen was too close to the actual experience of many who travelled on the ‘rattlers’ to be allowed public airing. He sang:
Riding down from Queensland on a dirty timber train,
We stopped to take on water in the early morning rain,
I saw a hobo coming by, he didn't show much fear,
He walked along the line of trucks, saying any room in here.
Then I pulled the cover back saying throw your blankets in,
He dropped his billy and his roll and he socked me on the chin.
Chorus:
I wish that I was fourteen stone and I was six feet tall,
I'd take a special trip up north, to beat up Sergeant Small.
He took me to the gaolhouse, he got me in the cells,
I realised then who he was, it was not hard to tell.
I've worked for Jimmy Sharman, and at fighting I'm no dunce,
But let me see the fellow who can take on five at once.
Such sentiments and the possibility that they might incite illegal behaviour against the police were not the usual content of the popular songs of the era – or of any other. This handful of what were effectively ‘protest songs’, though the term was not then in use, contrasted with the primarily sentimental ballads that Morton mostly churned out, including hokey send-ups of ‘hillbillies’ like ‘The Martins and the Coys’, recorded on the same session as ‘Sergeant Small’.
Morton drew on the Great Depression era reservoirs of popular disaffection. His songs expressed his knowledge of, and empathy with, the common lot of average Australians at the time. His legacy in this respect has been recorded by folklorists and others who have documented musicians and non-musicians. Many of these individuals, particularly indigenous Australians, refer back to Morton’s music, his travelling shows and his visits to their homes and camps as an inspiration for their own work. This often provided them with a means of developing self-respect and the ability to express their problems, and those of their people, in songs of their own framed in similar musical and narrative styles.
Part of this process of cultural transference involved selected Morton songs being adapted by many of those who heard them. ‘Sergeant Small’ and ‘The Ned Kelly Song’ have passed into Australian folk tradition, as has Morton’s reworking of the American ‘Beautiful Texas’ into ‘Beautiful Queensland’, a song that also lived on in Lord Howe Island tradition. The survival and adaptation of commercially produced songs in oral tradition is a strong indication that they hit a popular chord at the time of their recording and original performances by Morton in his travelling shows, and that they continue to have meaning for their singers and their listeners.
Morton’s own compositions also link with important themes and issues of Australian folksong tradition. The convict ballads, with their antagonism to the penal system are a reference for ‘Fanny Bay Blues’. The free and easy, if hard, itinerant lives of the overlanders, swagmen and other bush labourers of the nineteenth century is the basis of songs about the bagmen of the 1930s who travelled by train (illegally) rather than by horse, but whose ethos and experiences were very similar. Morton used terms derived from American country music, such as ‘hobo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘durn’. But he early perceived an interest in his audiences for recognisably Australian story songs that used Australian terms and told Australian stories. From that momentous fourth Regal Zonophone recording session in 1936 he sang Australian traditional songs and his own compositions in that style, such as ‘Wandering Stockman’ (as opposed to the American approximation: ‘cowboy’). According to his later recorded reminiscences, Morton also began to sing in a consciously Australian rather than American accent around this time. At the next session, two months later, he recorded his own ‘The Yodelling Bagman’ together with ‘On the Gundagai Line’ and in July 1937 recorded his ‘Fanny Bay Blues’.
‘Fanny Bay Blues’ hybridised an Australian locale (Darwin and Alice Springs) and attitudes towards uniformed authority, with American country music-derived terms like ‘doggone’ and ‘dame’. But these borrowed words appear as part of a very local narrative about being gaoled for ‘ridin’ on the rails’. The lyrics fuse the imported and the local in a musical narrative that is a combination of country, blues and the masculine itinerancy of the bush tradition:
I’m living at the jailhouse ‘cause I can’t get no bail
Got twenty days in Fanny Bay for ridin’ on the rails
The doggone beds are lousy, the walls are made of tin
If I had a durned can-opener no dirty cop would keep me in.
Chorus
I’ve got them Fanny Bay Blues
But it ‘s not much use escaping from this here Fanny Bay
Cause a man can’t walk the desert and there ain’t no freight for days
Yodel
I once had a woman, a good one it is true
But she left me for a rich guy, just shows you what a dame will do
So I left my home next morning to come out and look for gold
But it don’t grow round on bushes or trees? [inaudible] like I was told
Chorus
Now I used to live in comfort, life went without a hitch
But now I ain’t got nothing 'cept that doggone Queensland itch
And them Fanny Bay blues
When I leave this jailhouse I’m gonna pack up all my things (Yes, Mr man – spoken)
And you bet I won’t quit runnin’ till I reach Alice Springs
Yodel
Spoken – Man, man, ? (inaudible).
Morton drew on his experiences of bumming around the east coast of Australia busking, doing casual work and riding ‘rattlers’ like thousands of other men of the time. His close friendship with Lance Skuthorpe the younger, son of bush legend Lance Skuthorpe (1870-1958) - crack horseman, yarn spinner and writer - provided Morton with a direct connection to the bush tradition that included the ballads and legends of pioneering, itinerancy, bushranging and convictism. Through these experiences he devotedly collected songs and scraps of bush song and verse that he often refashioned in his genre of Australian country. In later life Morton often said he had been inspired by the activities of A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864-1941) who, a generation earlier, had located a number of such songs that he included in the various editions of his Old Bush Songs from 1906.
AMERICAN INFLUENCE
It has been suggested that, as Morton’s mainspring was American country music, this somehow excludes him from the Australian vernacular music tradition. This is a misunderstanding of that tradition based on the view that its main musical influences are British. While Irish, English and some Scots influences are certainly important, a now considerable body of fieldwork and research confirms that many other musical genres have been adapted into a variety of Australian musical traditions. Many of these genres came here from the United States of America. Musical influences from that country are a strong part of the Australian bush song tradition, with such classics as ‘Click Go the Shears’, ‘Gentle Annie’ and ‘Waiting for the Rain’, among many others, having tunes that are of nineteenth century American popular music origin. Many of these were channelled by blackface minstrel and other American entertainments that passed frequently through Australia at the time. Other American items derive from Australian trade union connections, particularly through the Industrial Workers of the World who brought union songwriter and martyr Joe Hill’s ‘Where the Fraser River Flows’ (c. 1912) to Australia, where it was adapted to local needs.
The genre of Australian country music, long despised by the mainstream recording and radio industries as ‘hillbilly’ music, shared the cultural underdog status that ‘folk’ music also had, apart from its brief commodification in the 1960s. While the aesthetic and philosophy of country embraced the recording and radio industries, by and large the folk revival set itself against such ‘commercial’ channels of production and distribution, preferring to develop an active backyard industry of festivals, concerts, folk clubs and home-grown recordings sold at gigs and heard, if at all, on community radio. This attitude stems from the broadly leftist origins of the British, American and Australian folk revivals and the 1950s identification of anything American, including country music, as capitalist and so ideologically suspect. This led to a doctrinal rejection of popular culture, construed then as commercial, imported American culture. From this point of view, Australian country, with its American cowboy hats, fake American accents and often sentimentalised songs about relationships gone wrong, dogs and utes instead of political and social comment was seen as reactionary and alien to the Australian ethos.
On the other hand, to the country music crowd, the folk scene looked like a crowd of longhaired, bearded, pot smoking hippies and lefties. This image was furthered by the determination of mainstream media to represent ‘folkies’ as shaggy-bearded droners of monotonous ballads, performed with finger in ear and disdain for the professional production and performance values of the commercial music industry. The ironies are that both folk and country musicians drew upon the same aspects of the bush tradition of song, verse and attitude for their material and their aesthetic and both saw themselves - and represented themselves - as keepers and purveyors of Australian national identity. Despite an increased level of musical interactions between musical styles since the 1980s, the two camps have generally remained apart from each other, with the country music scene focussed on the Tamworth Festival and the folk scene on the National Folk Festival in Canberra.
CONCLUSION
Tex Morton’s brilliant early career occurred a generation before the folk revival got underway here and before the Australian country music scene became a self-conscious socio-cultural movement. He linked into and extended an existing bush (or ‘country’) tradition and added an up-to-date dimension that resonated with the troubles of the times and spoke to those people who suffered most from their consequences.
Morton’s empathy and engagement with people in their everyday lives, attested in recorded and other evidence, shows him consciously adapting and reworking the Australian components of his repertoire. In his many travels throughout the country he actively sought out songs from bagmen, indigenous communities and anywhere else they might be found, incorporating at least some of these into his performing and recording repertoire. His understanding of this material, as well as its value as performance, was that it related closely to the lived experience of many Australians. It made his shows and recordings especially appealing to a substantial sector of the population. While his motivation may have been mixed between commercial popularity and an apparently deep interest in everyday life, Morton’s contribution was to ensure the continuity of the Australian bush song tradition into and through the early era of the electronic media of radio and sound recording.
Beyond the musical stylistics and genre conventions of country music lyrics, Tex Morton’s early work established an enduring strand in Australian vernacular song making. That strand insists on a notion of ‘authenticity’ as expressed in use of vernacular speech, the evocation of everyday experience, often with a note of social – though rarely overtly political – criticism or complaint, all sung in at least an approximation of what is generally considered a ‘standard’ Australian accent. In one variation or another, this legacy of Tex Morton can still be heard in country and folk performances, sound recordings and YouTube performances.
The brief moment in which Tex Morton blazed his early career passed rapidly from economic depression to World War 2 and a host of new social, political and economic concerns and different popular musical forms. But his influence on Australian language, sensibility and vernacular authenticity, both in commercial popular music and in the buried traditions of grassroots music, provided an example that was followed by many, either through hearing his recordings or using his songbooks, by enrolling in his teach yourself country music guitar courses, by picking up his songs through oral transmission and/or by simply having his example as a balladeer in folk memory where it can still be retrieved today. The many obscure and less-so songwriters and singers who were influenced by one or more of Tex Morton’s vernacular incarnations include Buddy Williams, Aboriginal performers Dougie Young and Herb Laughton, as well as Mick Thomas and the band ‘Weddings, Parties, Anything’. There were, and are, many more, of course. Most famous of all, David Gordon Kirkpatrick, better known in his musical persona of ‘Slim Dusty’.
REFERENCES
Allan, Monika ‘Country Music in Australia’ in Davey, Gwenda and Seal Graham (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore, OUP, Melbourne, 1993. Hayward, Phillip, Hearing the Call: Music and Social History on Lord Howe Island, Lord Howe Island Arts Council, 2002. Meredith, John & Anderson, Hugh (eds) Folk Songs of Australia and the men and women who sang them, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979. Seal, Graham & Willis, Rob (eds), Verandah Music: Roots of Australian Tradition, Curtin University Books Fremantle, 2003. Smith, Graeme, Singing Australian, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2005. Walker, Clinton, Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000. Watson, Eric, Country Music in Australia, Rodeo Publications, Kensington, 1976, 2nd rev edn Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1982.
Graham Seal
*
THE DIVERSITY OF AUSTRALIAN TRADITIONAL MUSIC
Graham Seal
The
appearance of a book about Cape Barren songman Ronnie Summers, prompts some
reflections on Australian music traditions.
Ronnie’s
music combines blues, Cajun, Irish and country influences into a distinctive
Cape Barren style that embraces such apparent diversities as nineteenth century
schottische tunes, the Carter Family, the Cape Barren Island Football Song and
his own compositions. Ronnie – and the community of Cape Barren musicians of
which he is a part – take these various influences and meld them into a
distinctive regional style and repertoire.
A
number of other books, articles and recordings have also revealed strong and
distinctive musical fusions in places like Lord Howe, Pitcairn and Norfolk
islands, the music of Torres Strait recorded by Ron Edwards, Karl Neuenfeldt
and Nigel Pegrum and Darwin string bands
researched by Jeff Corfield, to mention only some. Ongoing fieldwork by
Rob and Olya Willis has identified a strong fusion of British (Irish and
English) indigenous and country music in the Nulla Nulla region of NSW, an area
that produced, among other country performers, Slim Dusty. There are no doubt
plenty more known to probably only a few collectors and many more yet to be
discovered.
This
work combines to give us a broader understanding of Australian folk music as
being almost entirely the ‘bush ballad’. Bush song and music is a vitally
important element of our musical heritage, derived from mainly British oral and
broadside ballad traditions, heavily influenced by the Kiplingesque adaptations
of writers like Lawson and Paterson, among many others. It was also heavily influenced
by American popular music of the nineteenth century, probably transmitted
largely through travelling minstrel shows and similar USA-based or inspired
entertainments that toured extensively here. It is an important musical genre
of the past that may even still be important among some agricultural and
pastoral communities.
But
it is clear now bush music is very far from being our only folk musical genre.
(And even within that field, broadly defined, there are many still-to-be fully
researched elements, such as the role of women’s music-making, particularly
with the piano, as demonstrated in Jennifer Gall’s recently completed PhD
thesis).
We
can now appreciate Australian traditional music and song as a probably very
great number of regional styles and repertoires characterised by at least three
identifiable elements:
· Ethnic – in the sense of deriving
from a variety of cultural traditions. Often these styles are kept alive within
the relevant migrant groups. Irish fiddling and singing styles, for instance;
Greek rebetika; Maltese Ghana, and so on.
· Regional – evolve from and
through the historical experience and environmental and occupational aspects (pearl
diving, tobacco growing, mutton birding, farming) of particular places – islands; locales with a distinctive
sense of identity often created by natural features such as mountains, valleys,
forests, etc.
· displaying multiple influences
from other traditions and styles, including but not necessarily restricted to
blues, country, Cajun, some religious music, twentieth century pop, as well as
the often already multicultural musical mixtures of the earlier tradition, which
included European social dance music, popular music of the period/s.
Many
of these influences have not come directly from the many migrant groups who
have arrived here since 1947, but from advances in technology, including recording,
radio, TV, film and the internet. You no longer need to be Irish to play any
particular style of Irish fiddle (probably you never needed to be, but being
brought up in such a musical tradition was a very strong factor in learning
that style. Now anyone can learn it and sound just as ‘authentic’). The global
recording industry invention of ‘world music’ has been another important
influence, particularly through the burgeoning music festival scene that
includes such eclectic events as Womad and the Woodford Festival, among others.
The
overall picture that emerges from this is of a diverse, rich and frequently
interacting cornucopia of musical styles and genres that go to make up what we
might reasonably call an Australian folk music tradition. The second important
point here is that, as with all healthy folk traditions, music is continually changing.
While tradition is often thought of and described as ‘hidebound’ or
conservative it is also a mechanism that allows for gradual change, if within
relatively constrained parameters. This is how musical traditions have always
evolved and adapted, and how they always will as long as human beings are doing
the playing.
SELECT
REFERENCES (many of the following have accompanying CDs, either attached to the
book or available separately.
Edwards,
R (comp), Some Songs from Torres Strait
Rams Skull Press, 2001
Gall,
J., ‘Pianos in the Bush: The historical role of regional
music-making in developing Australia’s cultural identity’, PhD thesis, ANU,
2009
Hayward, P 2002, Hearing the call: music and social
history on Lord Howe Island, Lord Howe Island Arts Council, Lord
Howe Island, NSW.
Hayward, P 2006, Bounty chords: music, culture and
cultural heritage on Norfolk and Pitcairn Islands, John Libbey
& Co, Eastleigh, UK.
Neuenfeldt, K & Magowan F (eds) Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music and Dance from Torres Strait
and Arnhem Land, Aboriginal Studies Press Aboriginal Studies Press:
Canberra 2005
Seal,
G & Willis, R (eds), Verandah Music:
Roots of Australian Tradition, Curtin University Books, Fremantle, 2004.
Smith, Graeme Singing Australian: A History of Folk & Country Music, Pluto Press,
Sydney, 2005
Summers,
R and Gee, H., Ronnie: Tasmanian Songman,
Magabala Books, Broome, 2009.
Have a look at some more on Youtube....
Forbes (NSW) Tin Can Band, 1918 (courtesy Rob Willis)
*
THE MUSIC OF STRANGE BANDS
Graham Seal
In 1945 the Adelaide Advertiser published an article titled ‘The Music of
Strange Bands’. It was a knowledgeable account of ‘bush’ bands using mainly
home made and instruments like gum leaves, spoons, cigar box fiddles, kerosene
tin drums and banjos made from old tennis racquets. These ‘found’ and hand made
instruments were often played in combination with ‘proper’ commercially produced
instruments, mainly the button accordion, harmonica, tin whistle, concertina
(usually Anglo-German) and triangle, among others. One of the bands mentioned
was the Wallaga Lake Band, a famous Aboriginal ensemble around the eastern
states,[i]
as well as at least one another South coast group and players in Victoria’s Gippsland
region.
The author, using the pseudonym ‘Eureka’ and obviously well travelled also described a large family band of teenage children and parents
The author, using the pseudonym ‘Eureka’ and obviously well travelled also described a large family band of teenage children and parents
‘…It had two concertinas, two accordians [sic], a cigarcione (a bush violin made
from a cigar box, wallaby sinews and bits of timber), a tin whistle, a bush-
made flute, a drum, gumleaves and several mouth organs. All instruments, except the accordians, concertinas
and mouth organs, were home-made. The drum was a section of a hollow log with
wallaby skins stretched over the ends.’
The point of this article was to draw attention to the invisibility of these ensembles and to
advocate the formation of an Australian ‘bush band’ using these instruments:
‘If these novel bush instruments were gathered together to form an Australian
bush band I believe that we would see and hear something outstanding.’
The article did not discuss the repertoires
of these groups, but emphasised their Aboriginality[ii]
and implicitly theorised a unique Australian sound.
Such instruments, of course, were also
played by other than Aboriginal musicians and were once fairly common in rural
Australia in the era when people had to make do for most things, including
their entertainment. But apart from the odd recording,[iii]
we now have hardly any record of the sound that these – or any other ensembles
of the pre-recorded past – actually made. They have become ‘ghost music.’ The
ignoring of this powerful and authentically Australian musical tradition, as
Eureka complained,[iv]
meant that we have little idea today of what this music might have sounded
like.
The Wallaga Gum Leaf Band c. 1920s
Have a look at some more on Youtube....
Cardboard Fiddle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoaExVwqWX4
Kero Tin Banjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkLXPit14Lk
[i] They had
the distinction of playing at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932
and had been in existence from at least the early 1920s.
[ii] In the
condescending racism of the period.
[iii] An
Aboriginal gumleaf band featured in Ken G Hall’s 1933 sound movie The Squatter’s Daughter.
[iv] The article
accurately observed that ‘Had these bands been in
America they would have been featured in films and on the radio. ‘
*
A. L. Lloyd in Australia: Some Conclusions[1]
by
Graham Seal
(Published in Folk Music Journal 9:l 2006)
In some quarters
the English folklorist Albert Lancaster Lloyd (1908-1982) was regarded as an
expert on Australian folksong. He certainly portrayed himself as such in his
various recorded works, BBC radio programs, publications and during his
Australian lecture tour in 1970. But his expertise, editorial practices and
interpretations were, and have continued to be, seriously questioned by many
Australian folksong collectors, most notably the leading collector of
Australian folksong, the late John Meredith.[2] This
article examines the ongoing controversy over A.L. Lloyd’s uses or abuses of
Australian folksong and assesses Lloyd’s contribution to the study of
Australian folksong up to the present, contrasting this with the oddly
fruitless search for Australian folksongs undertaken by an English folksong
collector who visited Australia during some of the same period Lloyd resided
there, c. 1924/5 to c. 1934. This issue is worth revisiting as the allegations
made against Lloyd’s practice go firstly to the professional and scholarly
obligation of veracity and also involve the accurate representation of the
character of an important aspect of Australian folk tradition.
In the early-mid
1920s, by one of his own accounts,[3] Albert
Lancaster Lloyd came to Australia as a fifteen year-old 'assisted immigrant'.
He found work as a rouseabout (general hand) and labourer in rural New South
Wales, particularly around Forbes, Cowra and the Western districts, where he worked
mainly in the wool industry. During this period he heard many traditional songs
sung by shearers and other bush workers and being interested in singing them
himself, wrote down the lyrics in 'exercise books' - 'not to 'collect', just to
learn them', as he wrote regarding his album First Person. Lloyd says much the same thing in the longest extant
account of his Australian experience:
…
Indeed, wherever I was, in the relatively densely populated parts of the bush
like the country round Cootamundra, or in the less populated country like that
round Condobolin, or in the parts barely populated at all, like the back
country around White Cliffs, I found that station hands and shearers did a lot
of singing. A great many of the songs caught my fancy, and I wanted to learn
them. They amused me; some of them struck me by their poetry, some struck me by
their tune, and I began to write them down. Not at all as a collecting thing -
at that time, I'd never heard of the business of folk song collecting. That was
a piece of sophisticated information that I only acquired later. So it was
entirely to suit myself that I used to write the songs down in exercise books.[4]
After a period of
possibly as long as nine years[5] he spent
some time in Africa and returned to England in the early 1930s. Here he continued
on a remarkable process of self-education and study, begun in the Australian
bush, that eventually made him a leading authority on folk music, song and
dance, not only that of Britain but also of Eastern Europe.
From around 1956
Lloyd had contact with Australian folklorists Edgar Waters and John Meredith
through the enterprise known as Wattle Recordings, established to make
recordings of Australian traditional music available to the public. Lloyd was
to record a long playing (LP) album of Australian material for Wattle, some of
which was from his own collecting in Australia and some of which was to be from
the collections of Australian folklorists, particularly those of John Meredith.[6] Also at
this time, Lloyd planned to write a book on Australian folksong (tentatively
titled 'Tales and Songs of the Australian Bush') and had made considerable
progress on this though the project was, perhaps wisely given his distance from
Australia, abandoned. However, throughout this period and indeed throughout his
life, Lloyd continued an active interest in Australian folklore, particularly
bush songs, an interest that resulted in a number of sound recordings, radio
programs and a lecture tour of parts of Australia.
But it was in this
earlier period that the ongoing controversy over Lloyd’s treatment of Australian
folksong began. Lloyd provided notes to five songs collected from Harry Cox by
Peter Kennedy in the 1958 edition of the Journal
of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. John Meredith took issue with
Lloyd particularly in relation to Lloyd’s views on the song ‘The Maid of
Australia’. Lloyd observed that the song ‘does not seem to have persisted in
Australia’ and that ‘Miscegenation is a theme that Australian folklore inclines
to avoid’.[7] Meredith provided evidence that miscegenation
was indeed a feature of Australian bush folk expression, and a fairly common
one at that, the strong implication being that Lloyd was not as well informed
about Australian folklore as he purported to be. The debate spread from the
specific issue of the frequency of miscegenation as a theme of Australian bush
lore to a more general suspicion that Lloyd was polishing especially the lyrics
of Australian songs and so presenting a false impression of the character of
the traditions[8].
The debate has meandered unresolved, with occasional eruptions, over the years
since.
In 1971 Lloyd made
an LP recording for England’s Topic Records titled The Great Australian Legend. (12TS203). This included a variety of
material, and notes, from various sources. Responses by Australian folklorists
to the versions of the songs presented and the notes to them were largely
negative. The main complaint was that the versions of the songs sung by Lloyd
were so complete, coherent and generally fine that they must have had
considerable lyrical and musical massaging, presumably by Lloyd. This was felt
to be a misrepresentation of the Australian tradition and Lloyd's notes to the
songs were, therefore, misleading, if not dishonest. These views were aired
publicly and privately and Lloyd defended himself by saying (as he had in his
notes), that he was not a folklorist at the time he collected the songs and
that he admitted to amending the songs to make them more 'singable' and, presumably,
more acceptable to the ears of a general audience unaccustomed to the styles
and techniques of traditional singers and their repertoires. Despite this, the
controversy pursued Lloyd, even after his death in 1982, shortly after which
John Meredith again published his views on Lloyd’s editorial practices.
Meredith did not
mince his words. ‘In my opinion, the best memorial A L Lloyd could have would be
a bonfire of all the phony concoctions he has passed off as Australian folk
songs over the last 25 years or so, the bulk of which has little in common with
Australian material collected in the field’. He went on to say that most of
Lloyd’s texts had been acquired from the work of other folklorists, including
Meredith himself, and that he had fitted to these songs ‘whatever British tune
Lloyd considered suitable – in other words, concoctions.’ Meredith referred to
correspondence between himself and Lloyd after the release of Australian Bush Songs (Riverside
RLP12-606) in 1956 in which he claims Lloyd ‘admitted making ‘settings’ of the
texts to other tunes, and further, stated that he had made so many alterations
and additions to, and arrangements of, his original field notes that he no
longer knew what was genuine and what was concocted.’
Meredith raised a
number of other matters in this piece, including what he called Lloyd’s
‘whining, gutless singing style’ his deliberate alterations of place names and
his statement that Australian songs tended to avoid bawdiness, a claim that
Meredith had also demolished in an article in the journal Meanjin in December 1958. [9]
While less blunt, another
noted Australian folksong collector, Alan Scott, weighed in with doubts about
Lloyd’s material.[10]
Others defended Lloyd,
including Brad Tate – though he also quoted the negative opinion of Lloyd’s
work by Ron Edwards, another leading collector of bush folksong:
‘His [Lloyd’s] collection is far more than unique, it is almost
miraculous. Every song and every tune is exactly what we would wish for; soppy
lines found in earlier versions have gone and all is sun-tanned, sardonic and
bushy, exactly as we like to imagine ourselves …’.[11]
These opinions
from the leading collectors of Australian English-language folksong raise
serious issues about Lloyd’s professional practice and his representation of
the Australian folksong tradition.
In 1993, assisted
by the Australian Folk Trust, I was able to examine the Lloyd papers held in
Goldsmith's College Library, London, with a view to (a) finding the original
exercise books in which Lloyd wrote down songs in the 1920s and 30s; (b) to
examine the papers for any other relevant material and (c) to determine, if
possible, the extent to which Lloyd may have reworked his material, or that of
others. This provided an opportunity to determine the extent to which the
criticisms of Lloyd’s practice made by a number of Australian folklorists were
justified.
AUSTRALIAN CONTENT
OF THE A.L. LLOYD COLLECTION
Goldsmith's
College Library purchased Lloyd's papers from his widow soon after his death,
the college having had a connection with Lloyd through its teaching and
research programs in ethnomusicology, popular and folk music. The collection is
extensive (over 30 notebooks of various kinds; nearly 60 box files and numerous
diaries and related miscellaneous items) and contains a good deal of
Australian-related material. While I was unable in the time available to
examine the entire collection, the notebooks were definitely not part of the
Australian materials.[12] It is
just possible that they may be elsewhere in the collection, though this is
thought unlikely by Dave Arthur who has used the collection extensively for his
own work and has also been particularly interested to find the notebooks.[13] Despite
this disappointing absence there is a good deal of other material that allows
some definite conclusions in regard to Lloyd’s treatment of his, and others’,
collected materials.
The collection is
in a miscellaneous group of folders, boxes and books, all of which were only
rudimentarily arranged. It contains a considerable amount of correspondence to
Lloyd from Australian folklorists and interested individuals (including one
informant). Unfortunately there are no copies of Lloyd's replies. There are
also a considerable number of handwritten and typewritten songs and musical
transcriptions, as well as radio scripts, drafts of articles, etc. related to
Lloyd's extensive folkloric interests and writings, scholarly and journalistic.
Despite the variety and the piecemeal nature of this material it was possible
to assemble an accurate idea of Lloyd's work habits and the effect of these on
the Australian materials in contention.
Copies and
versions of the following songs were found in the collection with notes or
other indications that Lloyd collected them during his Australian stay. Basic
informant details were also usually appended to Lloyd's notes and these are
reproduced here. A ? denotes where it is unclear whether Lloyd collected a song
himself, obtained both lyrics and music or obtained either from subsequent correspondence.
All place names are in New South Wales unless otherwise noted.
'The Buckjumper' -
Ernie Pope, Roma (QLD), 1932 (music & lyrics).
'The Wild Rover' -
E. Barratt, Forbes, 1929 (music & lyrics).
'Lime Juice Tub'
(Tar Boy's Tub) - Robert (Bob) Turnbull, Bethungra (music & lyrics).
'Bluey Brink' -
'Dad' Adams, Cowra, 1930. (music & v.1 only).
'1174' - Beach
Lewis, (railway ganger, Frampton, NSW) 'Ferndale', Bethungra, 1933 (lyrics,
tune 'Knickerbocker Line').[14]
'The Hungry Man
from Queensland' - Lyrics only sent by mail from J. Finn, Forbes, 1955. Lyrics
coll. A.L.L?
'Shickered as He
Could Be' - coll. A.L.L? (not clear from available information).
'The Castlereagh
River' - Bob Bell, Condoblin, 1931 (music & lyrics?).
'The Wild Colonial
Boy' - James Harrison, Bethungra, nd. (music & lyrics?).
'Bold Jack
Donahue' - Bob Bell, Condoblin, 1930 (music only).
'The Black Velvet
Band' - Bob Bell, Condoblin, May 3, 1930 (music & lyrics).
'The Moonlight
Ride' - Bogandillon, 1933 (This information from English Dance & Song 45:3, 1983 where the song is printed under
the title 'The Midnight Ride'). Two tunes for this item in Lloyd Collection but
no source information. See discussion below).
'Take it Off!' -
Robert Turnbull, Ferndale, Bethungra, 1927 (Shearing time).
In addition to
these relatively complete songs there are references to a number of others
scattered throughout the collection:
'Across the
Western Plains' - Lloyd notes that he heard it sung by a shearer named White
'on a station near Bethungra...’
'The Cockies of
Bungaree' - H. Burgess, Yarrawong. This is crossed out and replaced with James
Hamilton, Albury. Lloyd also had a version of this song from the late Rev. Dr
Percy Jones[15]
of Melbourne, who had collected it from 'One Spud Cock'.
'Banks of the
Condamine' - tune from Jack Lyons, Dubbo.
Other Australian
materials contained in the collection, though of generally unidentified origin,
include:
'On the Road with
Liddy'
'The Death of
Morgan'
'Rocking the
Cradle'
'The Bulls of the
Speewah'
'The Maryborough
Miner' ('The Murrumbidgee Miner' – see below)
'Johnny Troy'
(USA)[16]
ASSESSMENT
While there was
insufficient detail in the collection to allow any useful observations about
these items, there is enough information about other songs to allow some
general conclusions to be drawn about Lloyd’s folksong editing practices.
Although the original manuscript notebooks are not to be found in the Lloyd
collection, it seems from Lloyd's annotations to the music and lyrics that he
was particularly conscientious in acknowledging the sources of his own
material. This is also true of his annotations to items collected by others
(for instance, items transcribed from a tape of John Meredith field recordings
sent to Lloyd by Edgar Waters in 1957, consisting, it seems, of a good deal of material
collected from Sally Sloane, the famous traditional singer of Lithgow (NSW).[17]
It is important to
understand Lloyd's purposes for the use of this material. In most cases the
songs were used in BBC radio documentary and feature broadcasts during the
1950s and 1960s[18]
and also on recordings such as First
Person and The Great Australian
Legend. In the case of the BBC programs it was essential to acknowledge the
copyright owners of items used. As evidenced by the program credits information
included in the collection, this was generally done in a proper and
professional manner. In the case of the sound recordings, there does not seem
to have been the same institutionalised imperative for crediting of copyright
holders (a result, perhaps, of the folk revivalist attitude that folksongs
belong to everybody[19]),
though Lloyd is always particularly careful to acknowledge his and others'
sources in the drafts of the cover notes. These drafts, of course, did not
always appear complete on the limited space available for notes on the back of
commercially produced LP record covers. On the issue of Lloyd's professionalism
and conscientiousness with regard to acknowledging sources it seems fair to
conclude, from the evidence in the collection, that his practice was of the
highest ethical standard.
The related issue
of Lloyd's editing is more complex. It is clear from the material in the
collection that Lloyd altered lyrics and tunes[20] to make
the songs more singable, more interesting or more understandable to audiences
other than those traditional communities from which the songs were originally
collected. These alterations typically took the form of substituting one or two
new lines, usually with a sharper image or a better rhyme, as well as cutting
and/or amalgamating verses - processes that most performers of such material
apply to their performing versions of songs. The main point of contention in
regard to this is whether or not Lloyd properly indicated the nature and extent
of his editorialising.[21] As
Lloyd was, at the time he made these recordings, a folklorist as well as a
singer he clearly had an ethical responsibility to reveal the extent and nature
of any changes he had made to tunes and text for the purpose of performance.
FROM ‘THE
MOONLIGHT RIDE’ TO ‘THE MIDNIGHT RIDE’
In the case of one
particular occupational song, 'The Moonlight (Midnight) Ride', Lloyd appears
not to have done this. In the Lloyd collection are a number of typescript
versions of this song, which Lloyd claims to have collected in Bogandillon
(NSW) in 1933[22].
There is also a published text (and tune, though discussion here relates only
to the lyrics) that appears to have been the result of Lloyd's editorialising.
We can, in this case and that given later, make direct and detailed
comparisons.
In the case of the
earliest version, Text 1, the typescript original has a number of handwritten
alterations by Lloyd, mainly to verses 2, 6, 9 and 11. These appear between
square brackets.
TEXT 1[23]
The moonlight ride
Come lads, round
the camp-fire draw near and sit down
And I’ll tell you
my latest since leaving the town.
I’d drunk all my
money and felt pretty bad,
So I thought I’d
ride out, see what work’s to be had.
Well, it came to
my mind as along I did push
That the work’s
flamin’ scarce in this part of the bush,
But while passing
a station, I saw with delight [about nine in the night]
A woman as fair as
e’er came in my sight [I saw a handsome young woman all in the moonlight]
Her eyes they was
blue and her hair it was fair,
And her figure and
form was like Venus, I swear,
And: ‘Well ma’am,’
say I, ‘I’m bound for the bush,
But if you’ll
pardon my rudeness, I’m not in a rush.’
I’ve come down
from Queensland and Bourke I’ve passed through.
I’m looking for
work, have you any to do?’
I follow up stock
–work, can shear a bit too,
And I never saw
scrub that I couldn’t race through.
Show me a wild
filly, I’ll jump on her back
And have her broke
in, ma’am, in ten minutes flat;
Or if it’s an
outlaw that bucks in midair,
I just in with my
spurs, I’m a gluepot up there.’
‘Well, young man’,
says she, ‘I think I might take yer.
I can see by your
style you might be a horse-breaker.
[line obscured by
typewritten xxxs]
If you’re looking
for work, well that just suits me,
For my regular
stockman’s away on a spree.
My stock is
neglected, my work is undone [‘work is’ struck out, ‘fences’ substituted]
Let’s get mounted
up and I’ll show you my run.’
She climbed in the
horse-yard, and close to my gaze
Two pretty white
calves so peacefully grazed,
Then she leaned
down towards me [comma deleted] and the sliprail undone,
And [‘she’
inserted] let out two milkers, half creamy each one.
Well boys, I
unhitched my mettlesome steed.
He’s only a pony,
but still he’s no weed.
As she stroked
down his mane, well he neighed with delight,
And he put up his
head, he was ready for flight.
Between two fair
hillocks there ran a sweet lane,
And I
cantered right down [‘right down’ replaced with ‘along’] it and out on the
plain,
And the pony he
quivered and pulled at the bit,
[So] And I gave
him his head for he felt pretty fit.
Then down a slight
incline into maidenhair brush,
He started and
went though the scrub with a rush,
And he galloped
away and no spur did he need;
He had bone and
condition and came of good breed.
But after a while
boys the pace it did tell,
So I reined him in
gently to give him a spell.
We stopped for ten
minutes, I’m sure it’s no more,
And we started
again, boys, as fresh as before.
It was glorious
over that country to race
With a sweet
breath of wind blowing straight in your face
And two stars in
the north shining brilliant and strong,
And the whispering
breeze [‘whispering breeze’ replaced with ‘little night winds’] saying: ‘Sock
it along.’
‘Well’, she says,
‘my young fellow that’ll do for tonight.
Just pull up your
pony and you can alight.
I’m sure you are
weary and your pony is blown,
But you can work
here till my stockman comes home.’
So pulled off my
pony and wiped him down well,
Put him back in
the stable, for he needed a spell.
And I left for her
stockman, when he musters this land,
A colt in her yard
with a strange-looking brand.
These alterations
are incorporated into the typescript of text 2, which also bears a number of
further handwritten amendments as well as some further minor changes probably
inserted while typing.
TEXT 2
The moonlight ride
Come lads, round
the camp-fire draw near and sit down
And I’ll tell you
my latest since leaving the town.
I’d drunk all my
money and felt pretty bad,
So I thought I’d
ride out, see what work’s to be had.
Well, it came to
my mind as along I did push
That the work’s
flamin’ scarce in this part of the bush,
But while passing
a station about nine in the night
I saw a young
woman all in the moonlight.
Her eyes they was
blue and her hair it was fair,
And her figure and
form was like Venus, I swear,
And “well ma’am”,
say I, “I’m bound for the bush,
But if you’ll
pardon my rudeness, I’m not in a rush.
I’ve come down
from Queensland, and Bourke I’ve passed through.
I’m looking for work,
have you any to do?
I follow up
stockwork, can shear a bit too,
And I never saw
scrub that I couldn’t race through.
Show me a wild
filly, I’d jump on her back
And have her broke
in, ma’am, in ten minutes flat;
Or if it’s an
outlaw that bucks in midair,
I just in with my
spurs, I’m a gluepot up there.” (last two lines square-bracketed lh side by
hand)
“Well, young man”,
says she, “I think I might take yer.
I can see by your
style you might be a horse-breaker.
If you’re looking
for work here, well, that just suits me,
For my regular
stockman’s away on a spree.
My stock is
neglected, my fences undone,
Let’s get mounted
up and I’ll show you my run.” (last four lines square-bracketed on lh side by
hand)
She climbed in the
horse-yard, and close to my gaze
Two pretty white
calves so peacefully grazed
Then she leaned
down towards me and the sliprail undone,
And let out two
milkers, half creamy each one.
Well boys, I soon
unhitched my mettlesome steed.
He’s only a pony,
but still he’s no weed.
As she stroked down
his mane, he fair neighed with delight,
And he put up his
head, he was ready for flight.
Between two fair
hillocks [‘fair hillocks’ replaced with sweet rises] there ran a sweet lane,
[‘sweet lane’ replaced with ‘smooth track’]
And I
cantered along it and out on the plain, [‘out on the plain’ replaced with
‘never worked back’]
And the pony he
quivered and pulled at the bit,
So I gave him his
head, for he felt pretty fit.
Then down a slight
incline into maidenhair brush,
He started and
went though the scrub in a rush,
And he galloped
away and no spur did he need;
He had bone and
condition and came of good breed.
But after a
while, boys, the pace it did tell,
So I reined him in
gently to give him a spell.
We stopped for ten
minutes, it can’t have been more,
And we started
again, boys, as fresh as before.
It was glorious
over that country to race
With a sweet
breath of wind blowing straight in your face
And two stars in
the north shining brilliant and strong,
And the little
night winds calling: “ Sock it along.”
She says: “Well’,
my young man that’ll do for tonight.
Just pull up your
pony and you can alight.
I’m sure you are
weary and your pony is blown,
But you can work
here [‘here’ replaced with ‘for me’] till my stockman comes home.”
So pulled off my pony
and wiped him down well,
Put him back in
the stable, for he needed a spell.
And I left for her
stockman, when he musters this land,
A colt in her yard
with a strange-lookin’ brand.
Almost all of the
amendments square-bracketed in Text 2 are incorporated in this version printed
in English Dance and Song, 45:3,
1983, p.9, contributed by Martyn Wyndham-Read who had it from Lloyd. The
scansion is also regularized as indicated in Text 2, and the phrase ‘never
worked back’ became ‘never looked back’. The details of collection and
informant are given, but there is no indication of Lloyd's significant
editorialising changes. The title has also been changed (presumably by Lloyd,
Wyndham-Read or the magazine editor) to 'The Midnight Ride'.[24]
One of Lloyd's
amendments to Text 2 was to regularise the irregular 6-line verse 6 of Text 1
into a 4-line pattern. The end result of this is the loss in the published
version of the lines:
Or if it's an
outlaw that bucks in midair,
I just in with my
spurs, I'm a glue-pot up there.
While this
undoubtedly makes for better scansion and singing, etc. – as do many of Lloyd’s
other amendments - it also has the effect of making the song rather more
sophisticated than it was in Text 1. This may have been a case of making the
song better suited to a British audience, as the occupational term 'outlaw' for
a difficult horse is unknown there, but it also makes the song rather more
refined than in the earliest collected (presumably) version. It also slightly
weakens the sexual double entendre.
In the case of
this particular song we are also able to make a comparison with another version
collected by Ron Edwards from Steve Lewis in Chillagoe (QLD), in 1970.[25] This
version, 'The Moonlight Ride', is a recitation and reduces the story to six
verses, of which 3 and 6 are irregular. While this is of less concern to a
reciter than to a singer, it is interesting to note that the irregular verse 2
of Steve Lewis's version was also irregular in Lloyd's Text 1.
The Moonlight Ride
Come lads
around the campfire sit down,
And I’ll give
you my latest experience of town,
I’d been down a
fortnight and felt rather blue,
So I strolled
round one evening to find something to do.
As I passed
through a garden I saw with delight,
As pretty a maid
as blessed any man’s sight,
So black were her
eyes, raven black was her hair,
Her figure and
beauty you could not compare.
“Pray maiden”, I
said “ I am stock-riding through,
And I never saw a
scrub that I couldn’t dash through”,
“Young fellow”,
she said “The time that you called just suits me you see,
For my latest
stock-rider is out on the spree,
My work’s all
neglected, all things are undone,
If you follow me
slowly I’ll show you my run”.
So I followed her
slowly, the slip-panel she raised,
And close to her
knee-lands two pretty calves grazed,
A little higher I
saw, where her stays were undone,
Two handsome young
milkers, half creamy, half dun.
So I took from my
stable my mettlesome steed,
He may be a pony
but he isn’t a weed,
And I felt my way
gently down bosom lane,
And gave him his
head when he reached belly plain.
So he rattled away
with excitement and tense,
And didn’t stop
till we reached on a backline a fence.
And that ended the
best bits night of fun,
Of the greatest
stock-riding that ever was done.
And I left for the
next stockman that came to the land,
A young calf
yarded that needed a brand.
The Lewis version
is rougher and more direct than any of the Lloyd versions, even virtually
abandoning the double entendre in verse 5 in favour of a more direct expression
of sexual activity. To most people familiar with Australian folksongs, this
variant would seem to be more typical than Text 2 or the version ultimately
published in English Dance and Song.[26]
From this one
example it seems that Lloyd was indeed guilty of misleading publication of
material, as alleged by John Meredith and others[27]. An
extenuating circumstance, however, is that the published version was
contributed by someone who had been given it by Lloyd at some unspecified
earlier time. That person, the well-known interpreter of Australian folksong,
Martyn Wyndham-Read, might conceivably have made some singerly alterations. An
editor may also have made alterations (though in this case, it seems not). Lloyd
may not then, in these circumstances, have had the opportunity to provide more
detail. Similar comparisons regarding other disputed songs could be made,
though they would, of course, require extensive further research.[28]
There are numerous
other examples in the collection of Lloyd applying similar techniques to song
texts, particularly with regard to 'Bungaree/The Cockies of Bungaree'' and The
Murrumbidgee/Maryborough Miner'.[29] The
latter has been the subject of particular contention in this controversy and it
is possible to throw some light on it from the evidence in Lloyd’s papers.
FROM ‘THE
MURRUMBIDGEE SHEARER’ TO ‘THE MARYBOROUGH MINER’
Responding in the
Australian folk magazine Stringybark
& Greenhide to John Meredith’s ‘Depreciation’ of Lloyd, Brad Tate also
appended the text of a letter received from Lloyd in 1972 in which he said he
had ‘added one or two bits to the song, [‘The Maryborough Miner’] based on a
printed set of ‘The ‘Murrumbidgee Shearer’. However, on the subject of the
‘Maryborough Miner’ Lloyd unequivocally states ‘I heard The Maryborough Miner
from Bob Bell, of Condoblin, NSW, in 1934.’ There are a number of problems with
this statement and with what appears to be the history of Lloyd’s involvement
with this song.
In the Lloyd papers there are various copies of
a song titled ‘the Murrumbidgee Miner’ that look to be a halfway point between
the transformation of ‘The Murrumbidgee Shearer’ to ‘The Maryborough Miner’.
There are also several copies of a song titled ‘the Maryborough Miner’. Some of
the copies of both songs have Lloyd’s handwritten and typed amendments to line
3 of what is usually the second-last verse of both songs. In what seems to be
the earliest version in the Lloyd papers, almost certainly derived from that in
Paterson’s Old Bush Songs[30], first
published in 1905 and republished in several editions in the 1920s and early
1930s, this line begins as ‘I’ve puddled the clay at Bendigo, and I’ve eaten
kangaroo’. On subsequent sheets (mostly titled with the telling conflation ‘The
Murrumbidgee Miner’) this becomes: ‘and out on the paroo’, then ‘out on stony
Cue’ and finally, in the version titled ‘The Maryborough Miner’ becomes ‘and
chanced my arm at Cue’, as finally recorded.
There are a number of further points. In addition to this creative
reprocessing, the final version is also chronologically and geographically problematic
as the Cue (Western Australia) goldfield did not open up until 1892/3, forty
years after the eastern Australian goldfields strike at Maryborough (VIC) in
1852. And, by the 1890s, Cockatoo Island
(NSW) had not operated as a penal establishment for over twenty years.[31] Once
again, there is a problem with the date given by Lloyd in his letter to Brad Tate
regarding the year in which he had ‘The Maryborough Miner’ from Bob Bell. Lloyd
says 1934 by which time, according to some of his other accounts and most
subsequent estimates, he had left Australia. Also, the other items from Bob
Bell that appear in Lloyd’s papers were all collected in 1931, according to
Lloyd’s handwritten annotations on the typescript texts. Even allowing for
failing memory over so many years it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
Lloyd was mistaken in his recollections of the song he collected from Bob Bell.
There is no reason to doubt that Lloyd collected a song from this man, just as
he said. The question is which song did he collect?
On the evidence in the Lloyd papers, Lloyd clearly adapted a song titled
‘The Murrumbidgee Shearer’, first into one titled ‘The Murrumbidgee Miner’ and,
finally, into ‘The Maryborough Miner’. ‘The Maryborough Miner’ as recorded by
Lloyd and subsequently popularised through the Australian folk revival, is the
end-result of a creative adaptation process that begins with a text very close
to one published by Paterson. It cannot be the other way around. If a song
called ‘The Maryborough Miner’ already existed there would then have been no
need for Lloyd to create a new song of the same name and content. He clearly
did this. We must conclude, then, that Lloyd did not collect ‘The
Maryborough Miner’ from the singing of Bob Bell (or from anyone else) but may
have collected a version of ‘The Murrumbidgee Shearer’. He subsequently
reworked this song, with reference to the version of the ‘Murrumbidgee Shearer’
in Paterson’s Old Bush Songs, firstly
into a transitional text that he called ‘The Murrumbidgee Miner’ and finally
into one he called ‘The Maryborough Miner’. The passing of time may well have
played tricks with his recollection, but it seems that there never was an
Australian bush song called ‘The Maryborough Miner’ and the song now known by
that name was the creation of A L Lloyd in England during the 1950s.
Despite these
conclusions, my overall impression is that Lloyd was generally careful to
indicate that he had amended a song, even if he does not provide full details.[32] As most
of Lloyd's Australian material was promulgated in non-scholarly formats and for
general audiences, this is usual practice. Further investigation, involving the
sort of comparisons undertaken above, would need to be carried out to determine
the full extent of Lloyd's editorialising.
What can also be productively
concluded, even from this brief examination and in the absence of the original
notebooks, is that Lloyd’s work does provide evidence of the strong
continuation of the tradition of bush song making in NSW during the 1920 and
early 1930s. As this is a period in which there seems to be very little known
about such activities,[33] even
the limited and controversial information we have from Lloyd is useful in
establishing the repertoires in circulation at the time.[34] When
some future folklorists come to assemble a comprehensive survey or history of
rural traditions (a task that should soon be possible, given the amount of
collecting and research that has now been done[35]), the
information contained in the Lloyd collection will be of considerable value.[36] Whatever
the rights and wrongs of the controversy over his handling of songs (and on the
evidence presented here, there are both) we must conclude that A.L. Lloyd is
owed at least this acknowledgement in the history of Australian folksong
scholarship.
NOTES
[1]This article has its origins in a report by the author commissioned
by the Australian Folk Trust in 1992. Many other people and organisations made
this research possible or contributed to its execution, including the Western
Australian Folklore Archive, Curtin University of Technology; Dr Ian Russell;
Mr Dave Arthur; Mr Warren Fahey, Mr Robert Senecal and other Art and Music
staff at Goldsmith's College Library, London. I would also like to acknowledge
the often robust suggestions of at least seven members of the FMJ Board in the two drafts that
resulted in the final form of this article. Any interpretations or opinions
expressed herein are solely those of the author.
[2] Of the
numerous acknowledgements of Meredith’s status as the leading collector of
Australian folksong see Edgar Waters, ‘Folksong’ in Gwenda Beed Davey, and
Graham Seal, (eds), The Oxford Companion
to Australian Folklore. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1993) and the
entry on Meredith in the same volume; also John Ryan and Keith McKenry, ‘Select
Bibliography of the Writings, Songs and Music of John Meredith’, Australian Folklore 15, (August 2000),
16-27 and much of the remainder of this volume which is dedicated entirely to
the ‘unparalleled achievement of John Meredith (b. 1920 in the collecting and
recording of traditional Australian music, folklore and bush life’, cover and
title page. Meredith was awarded the Order of Australia and also the Companion
to the Order of Australia for his folksong collecting and related activities.
Meredith’s work is most accessible in John Meredith, and Hugh Anderson (eds), Folksongs of Australia and the men and women
who sang them, (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1967) and volume 2 of the same title
edited by John Meredith, Roger Covell and Patricia Brown, (University of NSW
Press, 1985).
[3] First Person cover notes,
(LP 12T118, Topic 1966).
[4] Mark Gregory ‘Folklore and Australia’ (Overland 45, Autumn 1970), an interview with A.L. Lloyd, available
at www.crixa.com/muse/songnet/reviews/lloyd/
[5] There are some doubts about the date Lloyd usually gave for his
return to England. He may have left Australia about 1930, rather than in 1932.
See Mark Gregory at www.crixa.com/muse/songnet/reviews/lloyd/)
where Lloyd gives ‘1924 or ’25 thereabouts’ as the date of his arrival and
Gregory, E. David, ‘A.L. Lloyd and the English Folk Song Revival, 1934-44’, Canadian Journal for Traditional Music,
(1997), especially endnote 3, who gives the date as 1924 and says he spent ‘9
or 10 years in Australia, mainly in New South Wales’, giving as the source for
this information Lloyd’s sleeve notes for his LP The Best of A.L. Lloyd (LP XTRA 5023, 1966, Transatlantic). This
seems to be the only place Lloyd mentions that he left NSW. See also note 13.
[6] This was presumably the Wattle recording released under the title Across the Western Plains (No. D 1).
[7] See John Meredith, ‘Miscegenation
in Australian Folklore’, Journal of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society 8: 4 (1959) referring to A L Lloyd
‘Notes to 5 Songs Collected by Peter Kennedy from Harry Cox, in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song
Society 8:3 (1958). Lloyd responded to Meredith’s criticism in the same
edition, 220. Meredith again referred to this disagreement and refuted Lloyd’s
position in an article titled ‘Study in Black and White’, published in Quadrant, 4:1, (1959-60) 59-62.
[8] On Lloyd’s editorial practices see Stephen D. Winick, ‘A. L. Lloyd
and Reynardine: Authenticity and Authorship in the Afterlife of a British
Broadside Ballad’, Folklore 115 (Dec.
2004), 286-308. Winick states: ‘…, there is a fairly general consensus that
Lloyd’s desire to claim the authenticity of tradition for folksongs overcame
his memory (or his honesty) on some occasions.’, 290. In the Australian context see Dave
Arthur, ‘A L Lloyd in Australia’, Root
and Branch 1 (1999), 10-13, noting that in Lloyd’s manuscripts he found ‘ …
informants’ names crossed out and changed, unverifiable dates and places
credited …’, 12.
[9] John Meredith, ‘A Depreciation of A.L. Lloyd’, Stringybark & Greenhide, 4:3 (1983) 14.
[10] Allan Scott,
Stringybark & Greenhide 4: 4
(1983) 3.
[11] Tate, B in Stringybark &
Greenhide, 4: 4
(1983) 1-2, quoted from Ron Edwards ‘The Cult of Lloyd’ in Northern Folk 6 (September 1966), 7-8,
which also voices doubts about all 25 of Lloyd’s Australian songs, as published
and recorded to that time.
[12] Correspondence between Graham Seal and Robert Senecal (Art and
Music Librarian, Goldsmith’s College, 4 and 13 August 1992, also ‘RS’, ‘Lloyd
Collection: Provisional list of Non-Printed Materials’, (August 1992).
[13] See Gregory, E. David, ‘A.L. Lloyd and the English Folk Song
Revival, 1934-44’, Canadian Journal for
Traditional Music, (1997) for further substantiation of the disappearance
of the notebooks.
[14] If the date here is correct (though we have no verification of
this), it would provide evidence that Lloyd was still in Australia in 1933. As
Lloyd provided the dates on the items in the collection, these cannot be
considered reliable given his various conflicting recollections of the dates of
his Australian experience.
[15] Jones made
an important collection of mainly bush songs that was unfortunately destroyed
by bushfire in 1983, thus making Lloyd’s Australian collection even more
significant as a record of what was and was not being sung in the bush between
the 1890s when A. B Paterson began collecting for his Old Bush Songs (1905, and subsequent editions) and the beginning of
serious folksong collection in the late 1940s and early 1950s. See entry
‘Jones, Percy’ in Gwenda Beed Davey and Graham Seal (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore 217-218.
[16] At this
time ‘Johnny Troy’ was known only in American versions, but see Stephan
Williams, Johnny Troy (Poppinjay
Publications), 2001, for evidence of the song in Australian tradition.
[17] This
appears to have come from a tape that Edgar Waters dubbed from John Meredith’s
work, Waters to Lloyd 6 November 1956, Lloyd papers; see also reference to this
tape in John Meredith, ‘A Depreciation of A.L. Lloyd’, Stringybark & Greenhide 4: 4 (1983), 14. The late
Sally Sloane is widely considered to be one of the finest Australian
traditional singers yet collected, see her entry in Gwenda Beed Davey and
Graham Seal, (eds), The Oxford Companion
to Australian Folklore, 348 and ‘Sally Sloane – A River of Tradition’ in
Graham Seal and Rob Willis (eds), Verandah
Music: Roots of Australian Tradition, (Curtin University Books, 2003)
142-3.
[18] Mainly the six-part ‘Folksongs of Australia’, broadcast on the BBC
Home Service in Oct-Nov 1963, as noted by Gregory, E. David, ‘A.L. Lloyd and
the English Folk Song Revival, 1934-44’, Canadian
Journal for Traditional Music, (1997) at http://cjtm.icaap.org/content/25/v25art2.html
though Lloyd’s papers suggest that there may also have been other radio uses of
the Australian material.
[19] See Graham
Seal,‘Who Owns Folklore?’, in Transmissions
12 (March 2004) at http://folklore-network.folkaustralia.com/.
[20] The music
of the songs has not been treated in this article as debate has centred mainly
on lyrics.
[21] See the discussion on Lloyd’s editorial practices in relation to A.
L. Lloyd, Corn on the Cob: Popular and
Traditional Poetry of the USA (London: Fore Publications 1945), in Gregory,
E. David, ‘Starting Over: A.L. Lloyd and the Search for a New Folk Music,
1945-49’, Canadian Journal for
Traditional Music, (1999/2000) at http://cjtm.icaap.org/content/27/27_gregory.html
[22] See notes 5 and 14.
[23] I have tried, as far as possible with a word processor, to
reproduce the features of the original typescript here.
[24] English Dance and Song
45:3 (1983), 9 (which refers to the version collected by Ron Edwards – see note
below - as a song rather than a recitation).
[25] Ron Edwards, Australian Folk
Songs (Holloways Beach: Rams Skull Press, 1972), 125.
[26] The melody published with this text is one of two for this song in
Lloyd's papers, though it is not clear from where these came.
[27] In addition to the sources already quoted, the following writers
have expressed reservations about Lloyd’s editorial practices: Vic Gammon, ‘A.
L. Lloyd and History: A Reconsideration of Some Aspects of Folk Song in England and Vic Gammon, ‘Some of His Other Writings’
in Ian Russell (ed), Singer, Song and
Scholar, (Sheffield: 1986) 147-165; Roy Palmer, 'A. L. Lloyd and Industrial
Song' in Ian Russell, I. (ed), Singer,
Song and Scholar (Sheffield: 1986) 133-147; Keith Gregson, ‘The Cumberland
Bard: An Anniversary Reflection’, Folk
Music Journal 4:4 (1983), 333-367.
[28] Materials towards such work are contained in Australian Tradition: Aug. 1963, Sept. 1964, Nov. 1965, Oct 1966,
April, 1967, Sept. 1967, March 1969, May 1970, Oct. 1971, Dec 1974. See also Australian Tradition March, 1964 for
Edgar Waters' article about Lloyd. There is also relevant information in Stringybark & Greenhide, mainly
between 1982-83.
[29] Photocopies of the other items mentioned are also provided in the
Australian Folk Trust report as examples of Lloyd's editing methods.
[30] A B ‘Banjo’
Paterson (comp. and ed.), Old Bush Songs Composed and Sung in the
Bushranging, Digging and Overlanding Days, (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,
1905) and numerous reprints and editions into the 1930s) contained ‘The Murrumbidgee
Shearer’. On the relationship between Lloyd’s texts for a number of his
Australian songs and those in Old Bush
Songs see Ron Edwards, ‘The Cult of Lloyd’ in Northern Folk 6 (September 1966), 7-8.
[31] It was
subsequently a reformatory for women and, later, for petty offenders.
[32] Lloyd adopted much the same practices for the American material in Corn on the Cob as he did for the
Australian material, and defended them in the same terms, see Gregory, E.
David, ‘Starting Over: A.L. Lloyd and the Search for a New Folk Music,
1945-49’, Canadian Journal for
Traditional Music, (1999/2000) who puts the situation thus: ‘On these
occasions, the mental tussle between Lloyd the singer and Lloyd the scholar,
the singer won out.’
[33] Relevant scholarship on this aspect includes Hugh Anderson. and
Dawn Anderson., On the Track With Bill
Bowyang, (Ascot Vale: Red Rooster Press, 1991).
[34] When Lloyd undertook a lecture tour of some eastern Australian
states in 1970, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (as it was then) made a
film for television broadcast in which Lloyd revisited the areas where he had
worked during his youthful Australian sojourn. It is thought that the
documentary, screened on the series ‘A Big Country’, was titled ‘Ten Thousand
Miles Away'. Despite extensive enquiries by Dave Arthur, the author and others,
the ABC has to date been unable to locate the film in its archives. Dr Edgar
Waters accompanied Lloyd and the film crew on the making of this film (Personal
communication).
[35] In addition
to the extensive work of Meredith, a considerable number of other individuals
and organisations have been involved in collecting and archiving Australian
folksong. For some indication of this work, a good deal of which is archived in
the National Library of Australia, see Edgard Waters, ‘Folksong’ in Gwenda Beed
Davey and Graham Seal, G (eds), The
Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore, Graham Seal and Rob Willis (eds), Verandah Music: Roots of Australian
Tradition, (Curtin University Books, 2003) and the National Register of
Folklore Collections at http://tracks.panthers.net.au/FOLKLORE_AUSTRALIA/REGISTER.html
[36] This is particularly so when we consider that another English
visitor traveling through Australia partly at the same time as Lloyd with an
ear out for Australian folksongs, failed to find any, with the controversial exception
of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, see Thomas Wood, Cobbers:
A Personal Record of a Journey from Essex, in England, to Australia, Tasmania
and some of the Reefs and Islands in the Coral Sea, Made in the Years 1930,
1931 and 1932, (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).
3 comments:
I have a fascination for the way people in remote areas or without access to tuition teach themselves to play an instrument. Aboriginal guitarist, Cyril Green, is an example of the ingenuity and perseverance sometimes used to learn the guitar. Raised in Walcha, NSW, Cyril and his brothers had a communal guitar and no knowledge of how to play it. Cyril explains how the group finally got it together without knowing the names of chords and communicated by looking – up, straight ahead or down for chord changes. Cyril was well-known Aboriginal singer, Jimmy Little's guitarist for nigh on 50 years and despite having suffered a mild stroke some time ago is still one of the finest guitarists we have recorded for the National Library collection. We will be visiting Cyril, a true gentleman and his lovely wife Hazel again soon to record more of their stories.
Made this short video of Cecil during our National Library recording session at his home in Armidale, NSW.
We have also recorded stories from The Nulla near Kempsey about how they would listen to 78 records to try and work out guitar chords and had no idea how to tune the instrument. Other fascinating tales are from our Indigenous mates on Cape Barren Island and how they figured out the chords but had no names for them – so the names became “over the top” for G, “the flat one” for A and Hank’s chord for C (learnt from a Hank Snow record).
Anyone have any stories about learning an instrument?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ld18DY3-x0
Rob
Another one to add to the collection - from my childhood (circa mid 1950s). The Pepsodent (Toothpaste) jingle was "You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent". This became "You'll wonder where your dentures went, when you brush your teeth with wet cement."
Denis Mckay
I also remember a parody of the Pepsodent jingle. Racist & rude, with several verses concerning a Chinese couple. I was in Grade 5 or 6 when I heard it from a boy in my class at Eureka St. State School in Ballarat, in the late 1950s. Can't believe I can remember every word of this rhyme, but almost nothing about what went on inside the classroom.
Judy McKinty
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