by Colin Harper
It had all started for Wizz in the days before even skiffle: ‘All us kids used to hang around on the jazz scene, but we didn’t really understand jazz, it was just fashionable. And then when skiffle came along that was easier to understand, and we discovered the blues through that.’ As early as 1955 Cyril Davies had been running the London Skiffle Centre upstairs at the Roundhouse, a pub on the corner of Soho’s Wardour and Brewer Streets. Born in Wales in 1932, brought up in Buckinghamshire and by this point running his own panel-beating yard in South Harrow, Davies had a ferocious reputation as a man not to cross, a man whom Alexis Korner’s biographer Harry Shapiro believes to have been ‘caught in a strange fantasy world of violence and paranoia’. But Davies also had a passion for the blues, was courteous to women and good pals with Steve Benbow: ‘He was a hard case,’ says Benbow, ‘always got money out of people who owed him, throwing typewriters out into the street and all that. But he was a nice man, actually. I always found him so anyway. We had great fun together.’
Primarily an accomplished twelve-string acoustic player, though latterly – through turning on to Muddy Waters’s Chicago sound – a pioneer of amplified harmonica, Davies made only a few recordings before his untimely death in 1964, and these can only hint at the extent of his influence. But it is as much for the platforms he provided for others as for his own musical work that he remains an icon of British blues and folk. As soon as the craze caught fire, the London Skiffle Centre, running more or less weekly, became a successful enterprise. Then, as Alexis Korner recalled, ‘One day Cyril said to me, “I’m fed up with all this skiffle rubbish, I want to open a blues club, will you run it with me?” I said yes. One week we shut down with a full house – the next we opened the Barrelhouse Blues club and three people turned up.’29
The chronology may be a little squeezed for effect (the new club took several weeks to open) but the end result rings true enough. And very probably all three punters that night went away with a truckload of inspiration and returned at some point as performers themselves. ‘Alexis was a great opportunist,’ says Chris Barber. ‘I was at school with Alexis, knew him a long time. He sometimes did certain things which were ethically, business-wise, a bit questionable in order to further his objective. His objective was stated to be the furtherance of the blues but that was never going to happen without the furtherance of Alexis Korner as well. Which is fair enough. Without enlightened self-interest we wouldn’t have millions of jobs in the car industry because Henry Ford wouldn’t have bothered.’
The Blues & Barrelhouse club, convened in a long room holding just over a hundred people, would run on into 1961 and towards the end would play host to the earliest stirrings of Davies and Korner’s seminal electric band Blues Incorporated. Noise-wise, the landlord of the Roundhouse was having none of it and pulled the plug. By January 1962, Chris Barber was assisting Cyril and Alexis in an electric R&B interval set during his own band’s weekly residency at the Marquee club, at this time located in the basement of the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street. Two months later Cyril and Alexis had grasped the nettle and taken a risk on starting their own club in Ealing in West London. It was Britain’s first bona fide R&B venue, and a story in itself. But the importance of the Blues & Barrelhouse club had been the breadth of its musical policy. Advertised as a ‘folksong’ club, and featuring regular spots from the likes of Alex Campbell – a melancholic, hard-travelling Glaswegian and almost certainly Britain’s first folk-singing troubadour of modern times – it ran in parallel with the decidedly stricter regime operated by Ewan MacColl at his own club, the Ballads & Blues. Some of the impressionable youngsters, eager to grasp whatever musical exotica was available, went to Davies and Korner’s club at the Roundhouse, while others kept themselves abreast of the pub-crawling movements of MacColl’s venture. Some, like Wizz Jones, managed both.
‘I was taken to Alexis’ club by a friend,’ he says. ‘I didn’t play guitar then but we just walked through the door and there was Big Bill Broonzy. And the following week I saw Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams, then Muddy Waters and Otis Span. I used to go there every week. Cyril Davies would be playing twelve-string guitar, Alexis would be sitting on a stool playing the mandolin – and he introduced me to the music, really, along with Ewan MacColl. Ewan was very heavy about the tradition. I admired him, I thought he was a brilliantly talented guy, but he couldn’t resist being phoney at times. I heard him on the radio years later saying, “Oh, what was that song I wrote? Oh yes, ‘Dirty Old Town’ …” I had to laugh! The guy was a genius, but he couldn’t resist putting on that show.’
‘The artist,’ wrote Ewan MacColl in one of his many published polemics on folksong, ‘is concerned with constantly extending his own awareness of reality and communicating his vision to those around him.’30 Of all the architects, builders and foremen of the British folk revival, the figure of MacColl looms largest. ‘I knew his singing and met him a few times,’ says Chris Barber, ‘but I never knew what his vision was.’ MacColl’s contribution is still difficult to analyse. He imposed strict rules in his clubs but clearly bent them for his own performances; he championed the tradition with an iron grip but wrote some extraordinarily beautiful and enduring pop songs; and he had an opinion on everything and regularly gave the press controversy on a plate. He also knew exactly what he was doing. From the early days of the folk revival right through to the late sixties, when his views had little relevance to the Soho scene that Bert Jansch represented but still held currency in the regions through the sheer stature of his reputation, it was impossible to ignore Ewan MacColl and always compelling to hear what he had to say.
‘He made himself visible,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘His perception was that if the movement was to get off the ground, somebody had to stand up and be a target. He made himself the target and people discussed it – people got furious with him because he insisted in his club if you were English you sang English songs, if you were Scottish it was Scottish songs. Ewan had absolutely nothing against having musicians from other cultures. All he said was, “This is my club. In my club you will play by my rules. I don’t want to hear you sing an American song when there are a load of Americans sitting over there who could do it better. If you want to sing an American song, go and start your own club.” His influence was both positive and negative. Regarding the presentation of traditional music, there were perhaps a handful of people who were unaffected by Ewan. But he and Bert Lloyd are basically responsible for the way the English revival sounds.’
For the revival to sound like anything at all, it would need to disseminate more than a handful of records. While the buying of unadulterated folk music on record was never a thing of epidemic proportions in Britain, it did become a minority occupation of some widespread virtue at its peak in the 1960s. But during the fifties the industry was so minuscule that MacColl himself made more records for labels in America (Prestige, Tradition and Riverside) than in his home country. And what was his home country? MacColl let it be known during his lifetime that it was Scotland, suggesting that he had been christened Jimmie Miller at Auchterarder in 1915 and later, as a nationalist statement of sorts, adopted the name of an obscure figure from Scottish literary history. It is now believed that he was born and raised in Salford, near Manchester. When he left school at fourteen he went immediately into political theatre, strengthening his resolve to make a difference through the bleak experience of life during the Depression of the 1930s. In 1946, as playwright, actor, director and singer, he co-founded the Theatre Workshop company at Kendal with Joan Littlewood, who became his first wife. For eight arduous years Theatre Workshop, most of that time without a base, pursued a vision of ‘revolutionary theatre’, offering Marxist messages on bare stages to the working-class masses in the netherworld beyond London. It was during a run of one of his plays as a peripheral event to the Edinburgh Festival in 1948 that MacColl met Irish songwriter, wit and raconteur Dominic Behan. Brother of the more celebrated Brendan, Dominic had been invited up by folklorist
Hamish Henderson.31 Along with Ewan, Hamish and Dominic, the great ‘source singers’ Jeannie Robertson and Jimmy MacBeath were there and a singing session ensued. Some time later Behan was invited to a musical evening in London:
‘The evening,’ wrote Behan, ‘consisted of Ewan MacColl singing some of the songs he had published and I capped it for him by tapping him for a “dollar” – maybe that was the first money I had ever gotten for singing a folk song and, in the tradition of the song, was the payment for begging. Not long after this Ewan got a loan off the Theatre Royal, Stratford-atte-Bow, from Joan Littlewood, and proceeded to hold folk evenings there on each Sabbath. He invited, among others, me and Rory McEwan and a chap from Botany Bay called Bert Lloyd who had possibly the worst voice and the most inane repertoire that all but gave reassurance to the public that transportation had its good points too. We left the Theatre Royal to try our hand in London and took up residence at the Princess Louise pub of High Holborn where we proceeded to entertain the masses and, by God, do I mean masses.’32
Inspired in 1950 by an encounter with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist whose father had discovered Leadbelly, MacColl had determined to devote his considerable energies to exploring and reviving the indigenous folk music of the British Isles, with a notion to mustering its venerable authenticity to the furtherance of his socialist views. Theatre Workshop’s entire existence had been fraught with crises and in 1954, when the company made Stratford in East London its base, MacColl’s interest in the medium waned. Songs that Ewan had composed – in his head rather than on paper – had always been a strong part of Theatre Workshop’s productions, but were ephemeral in nature. ‘Dirty Old Town’, inspired by his upbringing and originally a set-change interlude in his 1950 play Landscape With Chimneys, was the unique survivor from those days. Now there was a new cause with songs at its very heart – old songs, new songs and a great hope beyond hope ‘to arrest the plasticisation of the popular culture’.
Over the next few years MacColl gathered around him like-minded or suitably impressionable individuals including Bert Lloyd and Dominic Behan; American banjo/guitarist Peggy Seeger; Geordie singer Isla Cameron; Scottish traditional singers Isobel Sutherland and Rory McEwan; Sussex traditional singer Shirley Collins, who would also travel with Lomax in America; Londoners Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner (subsequently renowned among the cognoscenti as Madeleine the Rag Doll and Gabriel the Toad in Bagpuss); Liverpool songwriter, humorist and mathematician Stan Kelly; organiser of the ensuing Ballads & Blues club Malcolm Nixon; budding journalists Karl Dallas and Eric Winter, and others whose names concern us less. They were mostly, if not entirely, members of the Communist Party and they were not afraid to say so. What these people generally were afraid to say was anything in contradiction of MacColl.
‘He was a very moody man,’ says Steve Benbow. ‘One minute he was fine, the next he was very bad-tempered.’ While Steve had accompanied MacColl on a couple of records, his easy-going pragmatism in music and political soft-focus were hardly conducive to membership of MacColl’s inner circle. In any case, Steve was a stopgap for MacColl until such times as Peggy Seeger – whom MacColl had met early in 1956 and fallen deeply in love with – could surmount the problem of acquiring a UK work permit. By 1959 a solution had been realised with daring ingenuity and Ewan and Peggy would become partners in both music and life. By that stage Eric Winter and Karl Dallas, both day-job reporters, were contributing occasional items on folk music to the most substantial music paper of the day, the Melody Maker.
Winter became the initial champion of the folk revival with what was by the turn of the sixties a more or less weekly column in that publication. He was also the editor of Sing.33 But by the time Bert Jansch had established himself in London, during 1965, Dallas was the Melody Maker’s chief chronicler of the genre. He would remain for many years the most vigorous, influential and informed folk music journalist in Britain.34 As with MacColl, the mantle of a big fish in a small pool meant Dallas and his published views, throughout the sixties and beyond, were a regular source of debate and controversy amongst the growing numbers of those who cared. Many musicians suspected his very name to be an affectation, and those who felt in some way ignored, misrepresented or badly reviewed would refer to him derisively as ‘Fred Dallas’. In fact, both names were genuine and the man’s left-wing credentials consequently impeccable.
‘I was named Karl Frederick Dallas, after Karl Marx and Friederich Engels,’ he explains, once and for all, ‘and was enrolled in the Independent Labour Party on the day I was born. I was always meant to be called Karl. My mother left my father, who was a wandering political agitator, because of his drinking and went back to her mother, who said she wouldn’t have a child with a German name about the house, so I became Fred for the next twenty-five years or so. When I began in journalism, I was already known in political and musical circles as Fred Dallas, and to try to keep the two worlds separate I worked under the name Karl as a reporter. However, I first met Ewan at a social at my branch of the National Union of Journalists, so when he recorded my “Derek Bentley” song [on Chorus From The Gallows, 1960] he credited it to “Karl” since that’s how I was introduced to him.’
Dallas eventually tired of the confusion and became simply Karl, ‘which brought me to the attention of a witch-hunting MP who wrote about me in the Daily Telegraph and I got fired from my day job’. The loss to mainstream reportage was, in retrospect, to the gain of folk music. Initially joining Billy Smart’s Circus as advance man, in which position he toured Britain – seeking out its hotbeds of folk music and reporting back to the MM along the way. Dallas later secured and expanded his niche at the paper. The growing quantity of his input, from odd reviews and a weekly column tucked away in a corner to more substantial features, would reflect the growth of the folk boom itself.
The origins of the Ballads & Blues club were in a BBC radio series of the same name. One of numerous commissions offered to MacColl in the wake of the modest international success of his play Uranium 235, the series consisted of six half-hour programmes. Each dealt with a different theme such as war and peace, love, and the sea. In that respect alone, the Ballads & Blues series was a forerunner to MacColl’s more celebrated and groundbreaking Radio Ballads series, which began in 1958 with the broadcast of The Ballad Of John Axon, using the recent heroic death of a railwayman to explore the life and heritage of the British railway system and its workers. A further seven hour-long programmes on a given theme were commissioned. By including the reminiscences, hopes and fears of real people expressed in real regional accents, alongside specially composed songs with often unusual and exciting accompaniments, the Radio Ballads not only became cornerstones of the folk revival in Britain but revolutionised the whole concept of radio documentaries.35
Ewan had already done a fair amount of work for the various strands of the BBC as actor, singer and apologist for experimental theatre. But in 1954 something as daring as the Radio Ballads would have been unimaginable. It was enough to be gathering in a BBC studio with a group of like-minded souls, choosing a theme and simply singing ‘ballads and blues’ on that theme to whoever was out there listening: ‘Each of the [Ballads & Blues] programmes featured seven or eight British and American songs about their subjects,’ wrote MacColl, ‘sung by American singers Big Bill Broonzy, Jean Ritchie, Ma Rainey and Alan Lomax. Bert Lloyd, Isla Cameron and Ewan MacColl sang the British songs. Humphrey Lyttleton’s band were there to provide instrumental colour. The main objective of the series was to demonstrate that Britain possessed a body of songs that were just as vigorous, as tough and as down-to-earth as anything that could be found in the United States.’
The ethos of the later Ballads & Blues club would be similar. MacColl stated many years later that the club began in 1954. Certainly, it was inspired directly by the radio series and by the success of a trio of musical benefits at Stratford for the perennially penurious Theatre Workshop.36 By 1957 the name was appearing in adverts tucked away in the M
elody Maker’s jazz listings, with the club firmly established as a regular entity at the Princess Louise pub in High Holborn. It had the sheen, even then, of a forum for folksong as a puritanically intellectual activity. MacColl himself despised accusations – which dogged him long after he had severed his ties, acrimoniously, with the Ballads & Blues – that he was catering for middle-class leftist intellectuals. The plain fact that he had, by 1964, formalised the loose coterie of his acolytes under an almost self-evidently notorious banner as the ‘Critics Group’, with a mission to analyse the content and presentation of traditional song, did not seem in his view to constitute evidence for the prosecution. Taunting his detractors with vitriol about ‘the intellectual brick-layers and existentialist Irish navvies’ who were to be found when his clubs were in session, and accusing the weak-willed of shying away in fear from the idea of ‘a popular movement in music based on something other than mere entertainment’, MacColl nevertheless ensured that his published tirades were not so dogmatic as to pin him inextricably against a wall of expectations concerning the imminent rise of a genuinely populist folk movement without some kind of get-out clause: “Can it compare in numbers with the twist or rock public?’ asks the critic with a superior smile. But can Shakespeare or Beethoven or Brecht compete with the bingo emporiums? And does the fact that they cannot compete make their work invalid?’37 And so he went on.