by Colin Harper
Nobody did more for the cause of the folk song than MacColl, and even years later, out in the regions where folk clubs were flourishing by the late sixties, his influence could be felt and his every murmuring was like something writ large upon a tablet of stone. By that stage MacColl was firmly ensconced in London at the helm of his even more rigorous post-Ballads & Blues vehicle the Singers Club, while Christy Moore, a young bank clerk from Ireland, was carving out a niche for himself on the thriving club scene around Manchester: ‘He had a huge reputation in those days,’ says Moore, ‘because he was the godfather of the whole scene really. There were a few other people – Bert Lloyd, a lovely man, and Dominic Behan – who would have been mentioned not quite in the same breath but perhaps in the same sentence! But by then there was an aspect to the man, a lot of which was based on rumour. You’d have all these stories emanating from London of “MacColl said this, and MacColl did that,” and so on. It wasn’t really my experience of the man but then again, had I gone to the Singers Club and done the kind of set that I did on a Saturday night I’d probably have got fucked out of the place!’38
MacColl was never one to shirk from confrontation or compromise his principles. At some point in 1959, seemingly over the summer, he had a row with Malcolm Nixon, the organiser (hire of premises, advertising, and so on) of his club. The reasons are unclear. Some believe it was simply that Nixon wanted to commercialise the operation and/or become a professional agent for folk musicians and/or become MacColl’s manager – doubtless hoping to capitalise on the pulling power of an individual now established as the leader of a movement. In the event, Nixon took the name Ballads & Blues while MacColl retreated from view for a while and licked his wounds.39 He soon re-emerged with a new loyal organiser in fellow Communist Bruce Dunnet.
‘I’d started going to the theatre round Stratford when the first Ballads & Blues nights were run,’ says Dunnet, ‘with Ewan MacColl and Tom Driberg, the Labour MP who later became chairman of the Labour Party. He was MC. I was going because it was advertised in the Daily Worker. People got fed up going out to Stratford so they moved it to the Princess Louise. Malcolm Nixon, who was also a Communist, had been British First Secretary of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. He left that and became an organiser of folksong clubs with Ewan MacColl, and according to Ewan he fiddled them, stole the name Ballads & Blues and went off with Long John Baldry.’
The six foot seven Baldry, born in London in 1940, had the added distinction of being a young, white blues singer of unassailable stature. In the days when very few blues recordings were available and everyone was doing Broonzy, Baldry sought out and mastered the most obscure and extraordinary material – the likes of work songs and field-hollers recorded at Parchman Farm prison by Alan Lomax and available then on album as Murderers’ Home. He performed with breathtaking authenticity and tantalised audiences with a melange of natural charisma and whimsical affectation. ‘He’d come down to the Gyre & Gimble,’ says Wizz Jones, ‘where Davy Graham would be playing through the night, being totally ignored by more or less all the punters, and start singing in a really loud voice. He’d sing half a song and stop – “Oh, to hell with it,” he’d say – and then start into something else. It was years before I saw him finish a complete song onstage.’ Skiffle, jazz, folk or blues: if there was a platform to perform on in London during the late fifties and early sixties Baldry was on it. He was also, like Malcolm Nixon, a homosexual, and would become more flamboyantly so as the sixties progressed.
By September 1959, after the club’s usual summer break, Malcolm Nixon had established his breakaway Ballads & Blues at 2 Soho Square, headquarters of the cine technicians’ union, the ACTT. Seemingly, the club had already moved to these premises prior to the split. Among its regulars was Andy Irvine, subsequently a major figure in the reawakening of Irish music, then just another shy young man with a Woody Guthrie fixation.
Irvine was born to Irish parents in 1942 in Finchley in North London. His mother was a musical comedy actress and his older sister an actress too. Like Bert Jansch, Andy Irvine was something of a loner in his youth and aspects of his enlightenment are similarly comparable: ‘I was brought up with a wind-up gramophone and a bunch of scratched 78s. I sat behind the sofa, where the machine was, all my childhood and listened to these songs [from the 1930s] – they were great songs. I was vaguely brought up as an only child, kind of secretive. But, in retrospect, when I began to grow up, or pretend to grow up, I was kind of searching for music that I liked. Then rock’n’roll came in about 1955 or ’56 and my friends of the time thought that was great – Bill Haley 78s – but I wasn’t into it. Then one day I heard Backstairs Session, which was an EP of Lonnie Donegan singing “Midnight Special”, with Dickie Bishop and Chris Barber on bass, and I thought that’s where it’s at!’40
Irvine was particularly impressed with Dick ‘Cisco’ Bishop, largely on account of his nickname (‘he made an EP himself, which sold about eight copies, one of which was to me’), and consequently purchased a Melodisc LP, the only one available in Britain at the time, of tracks by Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. As Irvine puts it, the record blew his mind, he began to learn the songs ‘with all the mistakes carefully copied’, and wrote letters to get to the source of this wonder. Remarkably – with postal addressing of the ‘Woody Guthrie, America’ variety – contact was eventually made. In an age when information and recordings to do with such matters were like gold-dust in Britain, an interest in Guthrie meant an equal fascination with his acolytes, one of whom, ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliott, was living in London at the time. The year was 1959, Malcolm Nixon had his new, improved Ballads & Blues up and running and one night the guest was Jack Elliott. Andy went to the club and followed Jack home on the tube to where he was staying. ‘The next day I made up a tape of Woody Guthrie recordings I thought he mightn’t have heard, as by that time I had quite a collection, and put the tape through his door. He rang me up and we became firm friends.’41
Andy was also fascinated with the Ballads & Blues, which he had been attending since at least May that year, a few months prior to the split. He was aware of the Soho scene, but this was something on a higher level. Besides, he had a crush on Peggy Seeger: ‘I can see Ewan MacColl now,’ he says. ‘He’d get a couple of bottles of brown ale brought in from the nearest pub and he’d sit on a chair backwards – he was quite frightening – and sing these old ballads. I didn’t like it much at the time but then Peggy would play something nice on the banjo and I’d like that, and I always enjoyed Stan Kelly’s humour. In fact, when Ewan wasn’t there it was like the mice playing when the cat’s away. Everyone was a lot looser, Stan would be great fun – people would shout up witty remarks and Stan would answer them back. You wouldn’t dare do that when Ewan was there! But, for good or ill, a lot of people followed him. I found him to be very intolerant. He certainly never spoke to me and I was happy enough of it.’42
It was not until he moved to Ireland in 1962 that Andy found other musicians of his own age with whom he could feel comfortable both musically and socially. There was, he believes, ‘a middle-class aspect’ to the early years of the folk revival. Elaborate parties in Hampstead are recalled, revolving around people on the wealthier fringes of the movement like cabaret singer Noel Harrison, the landed gentry Rory and Alex McEwan and Cy Grant, a lawyer and regular songster on the popular TV satire show That Was The Week That Was. Malcolm Nixon’s Ballads & Blues set, Jack Elliott and all manner of American émigrés would also be on the guest lists. Even MacColl was not unknown to turn up at such frivolous events and sing something abjectly untraditional.43 He made the rules. ‘I was somewhat overwhelmed at the time,’ says Irvine, ‘because here were all these famous people and they were grown up and I was seventeen or eighteen and didn’t feel grown up. I’d drink too much and collapse in a puddle.’
Nevertheless, he was certainly impressed with some of these people in performance at the Ballads & Blues – Long John Baldry, Rory McEwan and Robin Hall & Jimmie
Macgregor. Macgregor had a Gibson mandolin, ‘so he was God!’ Youthfully impressionable as he may have been, Andy was also canny enough to realise there was something distinctly absurd about MacColl’s preoccupation with rule-making: “I remember him introducing somebody who had an American accent and saying, ‘Don’t be fooled by this man’s accent, he’s actually from Portsmouth”. And it was definitely a case of justifying this man coming along to sing songs from Portsmouth. People rarely got a chance to just get up and do a turn in those days but in any case you wouldn’t have dreamed of getting up and doing anything other than songs from your own place of origin, although I do remember Long John Baldry being allowed to do one or two numbers as a fill-in. I don’t see how Ewan could have justified that – singing the blues and coming from Kent or wherever it was!’44
Ewan was no longer master of the club he had created, the foundation of the whole British folk club explosion in the following decade. But he was only biding his time until, in June 1961, he could announce with war-mongering zeal his new command centre for the fight against mediocrity and commercialism: the Singers Club. Other people were getting on with the business of playing music, entertaining people and earning a few bob. ‘With the folk movement,’ says Chris Barber, ‘and this applies to a certain part of the jazz movement, there were a lot of peculiarly narrow-minded people going around concerned with things that are absurd to have narrow minds about. With all these debates – what’s cool, what’s not, how you should do this or that, what’s PC – the polarity of it overtook the opinions of the serious judges. The trouble was, as Big Bill always said, “All these things are folksongs. I never heard a horse sing one yet”.’
It was not unusual for Big Bill Broonzy or any other visiting blues artist to play at the Ballads & Blues club when he was in town – there were so few places to play, and blues and folksong were still bound loosely together. ‘In those days in the folk scene any American was God,’ says Steve Benbow. ‘Except Burl Ives – and he was the best of the lot! I remember some sort of get-together at Topic Records’ place at 17 Bishops Bridge Road. Everyone made a record for Topic in those days and I guess it was a party for all their artists. Alex [Korner] was there, I think Cyril was there. But Ewan wasn’t there. I met Brownie McGhee there, and played with him, but I’ve never forgotten old Sonny Terry said to me, “Could you show me where the toilet is?” So I led him across this room, round various tables and chairs, up some stairs and he said, “Right, it’s okay baby, you can go now.” He came back, followed exactly the same route, didn’t bump into anything, got his harp out and blew. Incredible!’
With bona fide blues legends now stopping in town at regular intervals the young Wizz Jones had been presented with a golden opportunity. It was 1957, not long after he had discovered the Blues & Barrelhouse club, and he had been going across London with a borrowed machine recording two visiting American troubadours in the Woody Guthrie mould, Andy Irvine’s new pal Jack Elliott and banjo player Derroll Adams: ‘I met Ewan MacColl on the train one day and he said, “Come along to my house and record Big Bill Broonzy, he’s staying with me.” This was before I even played the guitar. And I passed up on that opportunity.’
Around the same time that Wizz was giving himself something to regret Martin Carthy, another legend-in-waiting, had discovered a coffee bar in Hampstead called the Loft: ‘I’d gone down there having heard of this great Scottish singer, Robin Hall, who used to sing a song called “Down In The Mines”. It was a new song to me. He was the big hero then for all of us. And I thought, “This is really fantastic, much better than skiffle.” We worked the same coffee bars after that but not together – he was the idol.’45 Hall, born in Edinburgh in 1937 and just arrived in London, was an extraordinary singer with a clear, soaring voice and flamboyant personality. At college in Glasgow he had become familiar with a local musician, Jimmie Macgregor, who was also now trying his luck on the London scene – initially as a member of the City Ramblers, subsequently of Steve Benbow’s Folk Four: ‘Robin would come to art school dances in Glasgow,’ says Macgregor, ‘and would always get up and sing. He had this kind of idiosyncratic attitude to the blues – he used to do thirteen-bar blues and seventeen-and-a-quarter-bar blues. Which was very interesting.’46 No doubt. But fate had perhaps already decreed that there would only be room for one Scot in that generation with that level of idiosyncrasy – Bert Jansch. Instead, capturing the hearts of the mainstream and never venturing far off the beaten track in guitarish tom-foolery, Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor would become the British folk movement’s first TV stars.
Rory and Alex McEwan had been the first to perform occasional folky spots on the BBC’s popular magazine programme Tonight, closely followed by Cy Grant and Noel Harrison. But it was the newly constituted duo of Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor who truly nailed the gig and made it a platform to launch a very successful television-based career. Individually, Hall and Macgregor had gone to the 1959 International Youth Festival in Vienna. They ended up onstage together and found an unlikely and influential fan in the international bass-baritone opera singer and cultural figurehead of the American left, Paul Robeson: ‘He was amazingly encouraging to us,’ says Macgregor. ‘He was particularly taken with what he saw as our promotion of songs from our own country. We were actually just enjoying ourselves. But I thought at the time if a man of that calibre gives you a nod of approval, maybe you should take yourself a wee bit more seriously. So when we came back to London we started to work on a repertoire and out of the blue we were asked to go on the Tonight programme.’
The offer was not entirely unsolicited. Bruce Dunnet, an Edinburgh Scot himself, had rung the producer in January 1960 and asked what they had planned for their Burns’ Night edition on the 25th. Dunnet’s ruse to get his protégés on was successful. Jimmy and his wife Shirley were members of Steve Benbow’s Folk Four at the time. Steve had already appeared at least once on TV with a traditional song called ‘Football Crazy’ which he had learnt, in its Irish variant, from Ewan MacColl. MacColl had himself learnt it from the celebrated Irish broadcaster and uilleann piper Seamus Ennis. It subsequently transpired, as with all these things when an element of success is involved, that the song was not wholly traditional. But it was of no real consequence. Neither was the mildly out-of-joint nature of Benbow’s nose. It had, after all, been ‘his’ big number. Robin & Jimmie performed a rousing version of the song in Scots dialect as their three-minute spot on Tonight and their careers were made. They released it as a single in August for the specialist label Collector and, presumably in response to demand, it swiftly reappeared with a picture sleeve on the more widely available Decca. They became regulars on Tonight and by 1964 were hosting The White Heather Club, a cheesy but popular Scottish television variety programme, and touring internationally on the back of it. ‘I suppose we were quite snooty about it,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘but you got gigs where you could in those days. They did make an album called Scottish Choice, though, [in 1961] and it was something of a landmark because it was the first time one of the major labels had let people sing the songs they did the way they did without messing them about.’
Carthy himself was a man who could appreciate both the pitch-perfect quality of Robin Hall’s singing and the raw excitement of live music in coffee bars. Born in Hatfield in 1940, he was a well-trained chorister and was also, for reasons that have never been made clear, learning the trombone. ‘I could take a piece of Orlando Gibbons or a madrigal and sight-read it,’ he once recalled. ‘If you’d have put a folk tune in front of me I couldn’t have sight-read it – my sight-reading wasn’t terribly good. But because I knew how Orlando Gibbons worked I could guess the intervals.’47 The life-defining moment for Carthy was hearing source singer Sam Larner at the Ballads & Blues and being bewildered, entranced and overwhelmed by music he could not immediately understand on a technical level but was inexorably drawn to. But that was a little down the line. In 1956 his choirboy’s voice had broken and he had just heard Lonnie Donegan. A
guitar that his father owned was about to come in handy. The young trombonist was likewise not unaffected by Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and, as was everyone, by the outburst of colour that seemed to arrive overnight with Elvis Presley. ‘Life is a lot more complicated now than it was then,’ says Carthy. ‘If you didn’t wear grey trousers you wore brown or black trousers. And if you didn’t have a pair of black shoes then you had brown shoes. When the song “Blue Suede Shoes” came out I actually didn’t believe there was such a thing as blue suede shoes. I thought it was a joke – because it was all monochrome then.’48
Starting off with a skiffle-inspired repertoire, the Loft was the first coffee bar Carthy sang in, before moving on to Soho. It was 1957, he was seventeen, and things were starting to fall apart for him at school: ‘I was taking my A-levels a year early and totally blew it out. I managed to leave before I was expelled, just for being a slob. I couldn’t be bothered.’49 Down at the Gyre & Gimble Martin found a like-minded soul. It was a scruffy-looking fellow called Jones: Wizz Jones. And his repertoire was as gloriously eclectic then as it is today: ‘He wasn’t playing skiffle then,’ says Carthy, ‘he was playing a real mixture of stuff. The first song I heard him sing was ‘The Mole Catcher’. He could switch from that to Big Bill Broonzy at the drop of a hat – and did.’
So where did people get their songs – their English songs – from in those days? ‘The Mole Catcher’ was a music-hall number that had the intrigue and aura of a genuine traditional song. But Carthy was as yet more consumed with the music of Broonzy and Elizabeth Cotten, wronged author of Chas McDevitt’s ‘Freight Train’ hit. They were passions that would still be declared forty years later in his own press material. The certified classic of the early Carthy repertoire, when it had found its feet by the turn of the sixties, was ‘Scarborough Fair’. It would emanate, like the repertoires of many, from Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. ‘You got songs from wherever the hell you could,’ says Carthy. ‘I don’t know where we got songs from. We just picked them up from each other I guess, but there was a feeling of pride in finding something nobody else had.’ Publication of The Penguin Book Of English Folksongs, destined to be a seminal sourcebook for a generation of young singers, was just around the corner. Edited by Bert Lloyd and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, it was available by February 1961.