Aspects of Political Song

Organisers, songmakers and singers tell about how they became involved with song,
their influences, and their thoughts on the songs of others.

BEGINNINGS

“I discovered what a folk song was when I came to Edinburgh University, aged 18. I began to learn songs, and in summer went home to my local folk club with my new guitar and songs. I found much later my mother knew Geordie songs, though she was a card carrying member of the Tory party, because she taught English country dancing, and she’d used the songs in her teaching work. I must have learned the songs in quite a different way from her. She'd never thought to teach me about what she knew, she’d restrained herself from handing it on.” John Barrow

“I was immersed in politics from an early age, and prior to the folk song revival, because my parents were political, and because of the quasi-religious attitudes of the Socialist Sunday School movement I went to. There was a kind of utopianism in the songs, the building of the New Jerusalem. Quite a lot of the songs related to the need for working class people in the cities to get out into the country. There was an element of what later became the Woodcraft Folk.
“My father and mother were both cultural socialists as much as economic and political socialists. They were involved in the arts. They were interested in choral singing. My father was interested in commercial popular entertaining. And they were both actors, interested in drama. I was conscious of the use of political songs parallel to the use by religious groups of songs which were ideological. My first awareness of deliberately political songs was ‘The Red Flag’ and the ‘Internationale’, and ‘The Very Fat Man that Waters the Workers' Beer’.” Ian Davison

“I'd always written songs. I started with poetry as a child, and I wanted to be a writer. I joined the Perth Folk Club in about 1960, and I used to sing every week. I got that I just wrote a song to sing. Some of the first ones were dreadful. But one of the first songs was for John Walton, who was killed, he was a pillion passenger and fell off. “When a young man dies without any warning, The sky is dark.” I started off being influenced by American songs and singers - Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan were examples for me, and Joan Baez. I always heard Scots, my father was a real 'man of independent mind'.” Sheila Douglas

INFLUENCES

“I just missed the skiffle phenomenon. I listened but I bypassed it into solo guitar. The folk stuff started coming at me from every angle. My father sang cowboy songs, my mother sang Burns songs, I was meeting people like Norman Buchan who had ideas about more modern songs. I started to formulate my own anti-antiquarian ideas. I was keen to see what was modern in folk song and in songs written in folk song style. I was worried even at that time that the wonderful work that MacColl and Seeger were doing could turn quite antiquarian. I was conscious that a lot of their songs were about ways of life that were already disappearing. A lot of folk song material was being valued just because it was old.
“A Tory could value these older songs just as much as a left winger. They could be an antiquarian hobby, and that happened. Strange alliances developed, clubs which stayed ethnic and accepted the attitude that you should perform in your own ethnic tradition. Some people spotted right away that one of the attractions of folk song as it emerged from the song carriers was a dangerous one of the exotic.” Ian Davison

“I had been involved in the ‘Folk scene’ from my school days in Inverness. There was a guy called Duncan MacLennan ran the folk club in Inverness. Duncan had been to University in Aberdeen, where he met people like Jeannie Robertson. He was a great traditional singer. One of the people I liked a lot was Hamish Grant who had a tremendous voice for bothy ballads and for big ballads. He studied as a doctor in Aberdeen and knew Andy Hunter and knew Jeannie Robertson’s songs. Dylan’s first LP came out about 1963 and I heard his songs through covers by Peter, Paul and Mary. The Corries were touring at this time and always filled the local music hall. I liked them as a trio with Paddy Bell. The Ian Campbell Group with Dave Swarbrick also played Inverness and they were my favourites at the time.
I came down to Edinburgh and the whole place was really awash with music. There was the Crown, the folk club of the University, which had different names and moved through lots of lifetimes. There was the Triangle; in Randolph Place at the West End and a club in the chaplaincy centre in George Square that I think became the Edinburgh folk club.” John Greig

My greatest influences are Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Flann O'Brien, Bert Jansch, Betty Frieden, John Lennon, Vladimir Illych Lenin, Hugh MacDiarmid, Tim Berners-Lee, Davy Graham, Doc Watson, Hank Williams, Jeannie Robertson, Ewan MacColl, Somerled, Bertolt Brecht, my mother (my mother, not Brecht's), my father (likewise), my grandparents, Calgacus, Dolina MacLennan, Crazy Horse, Sandy Denny, Martin Carthy, Clarence White, Sean O'Riada, Jack Mitchell, John Maclean, Big Bill Broonzy, Hamish Henderson, Robert Burns and everybody else I ever met, read, saw, heard or spoke with.” Dick Gaughan

“I try my best these days to only be influenced by styles of music and not by individual writers or singers. But here's a list of names of various people, only some and far from all, that I regard as playing some kind of a role in my formative process...in no particular order...
“Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Lightnin' Hopkins, Joan Baez, Robert Johnson, Jeannie Robertson, Joni Mitchell, Sleepy John Estes, Elvis Costello, Rolling Stones, The Clash, Pogues, Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Leon Rosselson, Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Ray Fisher, Luke Kelly, Belle Stewart, Ry Cooder, The Exiles, The Clutha, Dick Gaughan, Hank Williams, Lucinda Williams, Robert Burns, Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud, Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed and a host of others too numerous and unnecessary to mention. Recent fave listens include Gillian Welch, Old Crow Medicine Show, Alasdair Roberts, Madeleine Peyreoux and Levon Helm (an old fave recently rediscovered). Yeah. I think I'm done.” Alistair Hulett

“Hamish Imlach would add things when singing political songs. He was a master of that, I wish he had written songs. He was one of my heroes, he truly believed in the left wing principles, and he did it in quite a gentle and thoughtful way. He was a sensitive and thinking man. I was in bits at his funeral. There was no more gentle singer of political songs than Iain Mackintosh, but he got them out there. Another of my heroes is Pete Seeger. I was lucky enough to play with him in Tonder. Mr Seeger has written a lot of incredible songs, but also he has done the biz, he put his liberty on the line, done more than the rest of us singing at a safe distance.
“Norman Buchan was another hero, ‘101 Scottish Songs’, me and my brothers and I would learn each song, whatever it was, in his Weekly Scotsman column, and sing it together. He was political, but most of the songs he printed were traditional. I came up through that rather than in a family full of protesting people, then Dylan came along and influenced a lot of Scots who didn’t think about the protest nature of songs so much.” Ian McCalman

“I grew up with protest, very much at grass roots level. My first involvement was with my parents, in a Communist Party theatre group, there were a couple of songs written then. That led straight on to CND, and I was running up against political song there as well. Hand in glove wi that in oor hoose went an interest in jazz, matched by an interest in blues. We had recordings of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White. From the point of view of understanding the blues, being an expression of people - not necessarily downtrodden, that's not the way we saw it - but expressing their own position in life.
“In terms of political song, I got it with my mother's milk, and it's never changed. And every so often you have to write things yourself, because whatever issues you get involved wi, there's a requirement for a song, so you do it when you need it. It seems as natural to me as breathin.” Stuart McHardy

Dick Gaughan is an inspirational performer for me. I saw him thirty years ago at a CND concert in Stirling, and I always recall he said you've got to get up and do something. I signed up. I didn't know him, but he taught me a lesson that someone charismatic on a stage can influence people.” Ian Walker

THOUGHTS ON POLITICAL SONG AND PARTICULAR SONGS

“Karine Polwart’s ‘Where Do You Lie, My Father?’ is about Srebrenitsa, but also about anywhere! I have raved about it, and some other people don't get it. Half of the people on the folk scene just want to be listened to. Belle Stewart told me that there were two kinds of singer, one says ‘Listen to this voice', and the other says, 'Listen to me'.” “I went to Methil Folk Club. Jim and Maureen knew I had this song, re the Michael Colliery Disaster, they said 'Don't sing the song just now, it's too soon, too near what happened. The colliers had been afraid to go down below the ground, there was a fire had been burning down there for years.
“The next Xmas they asked me to sing it there. I was introduced, 'She's going to sing The Michael song'. I was standing there singing to people that it had happened to, and I didn't like it at all. One of the men had been going to go down, and he had a cold. I said I felt awful about the song, and he said, "Don't worry, if it hadn't been a good song it would not have moved me." You are showing a bit of yourself to an audience.
“Political songs are to express what you think about a particular situation. Not necessarily right, in fact, they're very biased, but for the listener in a 'protesting' audience to say, "Oh yes, I agree with that". Tunes people would know, because they wanted people to join in.” Sheila Douglas

I've never heard anyone singing a Whig Jacobite song, though there are plenty of them. We love a loser. I said to Mick Broderick 'You're a bizarre guy, like a lot of the rest of us you're a left wing Jacobite Marxist Socialist conservative Presbyterian. How many people who sing J songs know the slightest thing about the Stuart monarchy. People who are republicans sing J songs. I think they are singing about an ideal of somebody who was popular, singing about something good that might have happened, though BPC was not universally popular in Scotland. And of course people can be attracted to the tune, and the language and images are brilliant in some of the songs. They are sung now for different reasons, sometimes from a basis of ignorance. Geordie McIntyre

“I see political song as part of a continuum, at one extreme there are songs which have a political implication without anything explicit in them at all, what I call communitarian songs, songs that have a social setting in or implied in them, without any expression of ideology. That's at one extreme. At the other extreme there are simply slogan songs, which are meant to be overt propaganda and are not reluctant to show that. Songs that contain within them very often slogans as part of the actual song.“In between there is a terrific spectrum of openness, or deviousness running right through these songs. Some are intended for general consumption, and some are intended for an occasional limited use with less political audiences, but they have a certain amount of fairly clear politics in them.
“I think there's a terrific spectrum within political song. The best definition of it is to do with the authors or composers of the songs, rather than the actual songs. It's a political consciousness in the singer, it means that almost every song that's written will have a political implication, no matter how disguised it may be. It is not easy to give a neat definition that covers all that, because it's a huge spectrum.” Ian Davison

“All songs are political in one sense. You can write a song about politics, or a political issue, or an incident. Songwriting can be a piece of journalism, or a piece of history, datestamping an incident. Political song in terms of performance and writing songs, you’d be hard pressed to find no political line in most songs. Many [old] ballads are political, they contain things that are instructions or are acknowledging the political temperature of the day. I prefer things in songs to be personalised. Not so much having a hidden meaning, but use of the writer’s skill, layering something so it’s not too overt.
“The longer lasting political songs have those layers inside them, so the true meaning is not specific. An example, re the use of humour, is ‘Twa Recruiting Sergeants’, a favourite of mine. Examination shows there’s a great skill of wit, irony, juxtaposition of the powerful and the ridiculous, hyperbolising the situation. Underpinning that is a very serious anti-war motive, in the rejection of the urging that he should go to war. That is not explicit in the lyric, but all the apparently ridiculous events going wrong that are suggested to him are just everyday occurrences to the plough boy. He rejects the advances, the game is up for the recruiters, he sees through their guile and outsmarts them. That is the narrative I find around the song. The writer uses their skill, and they acknowledge that the audience has skills too, of understanding and relating to the song. The surrounding narrative can change over time. That’s all right. “‘What’s so wrong about being misunderstood?’ The new interpretation and perception is probably far stronger, will last far longer than what was intended originally.
“‘Protest song’ is a horrible weak description. Slogan songs have purpose. ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie’ is a song, hugely effective, it makes no bones, you sing it on the march. When you get to the concert at the end of the march, you expect songs to have more depth. It has to do with functionality.
“The carrier of a song is the melody. In the Scottish tradition tunes are often up for grabs, the lyric is what’s first. Sometimes writers are clever enough to refer to the originals they work from. Ian Campbell’s ‘Old Man’s Song’ used the tune of ‘Nicky Tams’ – a slightly ridiculous music hall and bothy ballad song that has just lovely images, it is not scared to poke fun, it has a buxom woman and a comic scene in church for instance.
“Ian hangs on it a terrifically poignant song, with great sense of period throughout. He chose a tune which does not refer to that, or has a sense of carrying that kind of density.” Rab Noakes

In Tim Neat’s account of how the song ‘The Seven Men of Knoydart’ evolved, Hamish Henderson was at a protest meeting in Glasgow, and then wrote the song overnight on the boat to Belfast, inspired by what he heard at that meeting. As I understand it, that meeting was after the land raid event. A major issue in the politics of the time was land for returning ex-servicemen. Clann na h’Alba in Glasgow had the same idea, with support from some lordly figures. Elsewhere, for example, at Scoraig, the laird allowed them to resettle amicably.
“Lord Brocket was an extremely hateful figure, his Nazi leanings would not be lost on a post-war world. Hamish was writing raw material, not anti-English at all, but the ‘wa wa’ tendency in land ownership was the target. English people were on our side in these struggles. The problem is perhaps Henderson’s use of the word ‘Sassenach’, which means ‘Saxon’. The song is raw and funny, and hits at behaviour of landowners. James Hunter writes in ‘The Claim of Crofting’, about the land raid at Balelone, that that action was successful in the end.
“I had heard Archie Fisher sing a short version of a song, ‘Kincardine Lads’. I learned it came from Kincardine in Easter Ross. I found a full set of words, from Davie Ross of Dounie, it tells of setting up a still and avoiding the gaugers. The gaugers were based at Dalmore Distillery in Alness, I’ve found out who wrote it, the father of an SNP activist, it has thirteen or fourteen verses, and names local people.
“Singer songwriter Jim Hunter who lives at Lochailort, he’s a blues rock singer. One of his first songs was about a failed attempt to get land back in that area. Their priest who accompanied his flock to North America led these MacDonalds to try to buy the land back once they were a bit better off. Unsuccessfully! The song is ‘The Way of the White Cloud’. People come to songs that have a political message, that may celebrate a far gone event as an argument that other people should remember these injustices. Land issues are a major source of song. Munlochy is a story of land use. Before we had our own Parliament, the iconic motif of Scotland and change. Losing your land is fundamental to losing everything else.
“My friend Willie Mackay of Reay on the North Coast, is the village bard, he would recite a poem at the Hogmanay dance re the doings of the last twelve months. He came to our first festival in Dingwall, and after the festival wrote a little poem, contrasting between the festival and the bus tours arriving at the hotel the next day, the tourists’ normal expectations versus the heightened ones of our own musical activities. Sometimes these things are best as poems, but some of his poems were put to tunes by a friend of his from the North Coast, so they became songs.” Rob Gibson

“How is the political sense activated? When Alistair Hulett was out in Australia, he wrote a song called ‘He Fades Away’, which is a straightforward narration of a man dying from asbestos poisoning from the blue asbestos mines in Australia, and the effect that has on his wife and family and so on. It’s a story with no overt political content but it’s very political. It outrages by the content and could motivate people to political action.
“On the subject of warfare and the generalisation of experience, God knows how often I’ve listened to a good Dubliners’ version of Eric Bogle’s ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. I think this is a very powerful, very strong song about a specific phase in a war involving Australians. But it’s so easy to generalise to a universal, political situation.
“Related to but different from the idea of generalisation is the power of association of songs. What makes a song political can be just associative. So where groups of people are engaging in political or “political” activity, via a sub-culture like for example the punk sub-culture, there may be some overtly political songs attached to it like ‘Anarchy In The UK’, but then the whole of the music, the whole song becomes political because it is an identifier for the sub-culture group. So in some ways, you can call anything political.
“Talking about differences between Scottish and English political song, I think nowadays there is more of an international element to the Scottish songs. Scots are always reaching out to identify or support or link to political causes in other areas. Maybe it’s because they feel that they’ve been put through the mill politically and socially by the English and the English don’t feel that – I don’t know. But certainly the evidence of Scottish support in song for the Anti-apartheid Movement or for Chilean refugees for example is much greater than in England. The Spanish Civil War is another good case. More people went to the Spanish Civil War from Scotland than any other country.
“I think there’s as much political song activity as there’s ever been. A constant question you’d hear, especially after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was “Where are all the political songs? People are not writing political songs any more.” They are! Simple Minds in their hey-day probably had a fairly straightforward method of disseminating their songs by performance or via a record company. Now there’s a much wider spectrum for dissemination. Now anyone can just record and put it up on Face Book or My Space – interesting because they can escape the censorship of the record company, of the multi-national organisations, of Government – unless they’re somewhere like China. So I think there’s still as much political song, still as much political activity, but it is very different.
“Apartheid doesn’t exist any more, but there are still songs being written about the situation in South Africa, about the HIV crisis, about the fact that black economic empowerment has maybe gone a little awry, and that the real grass-roots proletariat are not benefiting in the way they should have done. There’s still the songs there, but shifted, and it’s more complicated than just saying “Apartheid is wrong, bang!” That’s easy, but it’s when you say “Ah, but there’s difficulties about black economic empowerment” – it’s more complex.
“When we’re doing workshops in the Centre, I put up on the board what I’ve called the three ‘A’s. Appropriation – you take an existing tune. Adaptation – you change the words. Association – the song gains power by being associated with the original. Now there’s your song – you can go and sing it! A standard example of that is one of Alistair’s Govanhill Pool songs, ‘We’ll Swim Again for All That’. Obviously it’s based on ‘A Man’s A Man’. It uses that tune, it uses some of the original’s words, it’s a fairly trite, comical song about welly boots – but the power is there because of the association with the original. And I can listen to that song and it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, this ridiculous song about welly boots and things. It’s because it’s got the power of the original. Now the only question is, how does that affect people who may not know the original?
“And another really interesting question, how does being exposed to that kind of song, with its associations, how can that radicalise people into general activism? Can the guy who might go along to the meeting to protest about the closing of the Govanhill Pool become generally imbued with a sense of activism? In a song in the same album, Alistair uses the first two verses of the Joe Hill song and it’s only in the 3rd verse that the Govanhill Pool comes in – at which point it’s become a world cause and the spirit of Joe Hill is there, fighting for Govanhill Pool, and it’s incredible. And that’s the power of the three ‘A’s, and that’s why people do it. And there’s nothing wrong in that.” John Powles

‘We’ll Have A Mayday’ began to seem like a sad song in latter years, when Tony Blair came in. It was a good song because it did not overstretch itself. It said, ‘This is what we’ve come from. Some of our parents had bloody miserable lives, and we deserve better. And the only way we can get better is by putting people in that will make a change the way we want to see the change, and keeping them on their toes.’
“Therefore it was quite straightforward, not at all abstruse. It reminds you that the bosses have their hands in your pockets as often as they can, emptying them as quickly as they can and you’d better watch out for them. In that sense it wasn’t a sophisticated song, but it was a song to say to people ‘Remember where we’re from, and remember how we can operate if we operate together.’” Ann Neilson

We will sing in a few days at the MacIntyre Clan Gathering in Oban, our last song will be ‘Come by the Hills’, written by W Gordon Smith in the 60s. The first verse is reflective of the love of the land. The second verse begins “Come by the hills to the land where life is a song”. You can't get more romantic than that verse - life isn't a song. "And even the wind sings in tune". Taken out of context, MacGonagall couldn't have done better. Then his last verse has Come by the hills to the land where legend remains. Where stories of old fill the heart and may yet come again. And here's the line that gives it a political slant. Where the past has been lost and the future has yet to be won. That line, and almost the whole song, made me think about how so much Scottish history has been excised by omission. There was only one school history book of the 1960s that mentioned The Crofters' War, it had been airbrushed out of history, we could have been the Soviet Union, reshaping history by selection or omission.
The past hasn't been lost, but some people would like elements of our past to be lost. That is one of the strengths of the retroactive song. We sing that great song ‘The Seven Men Of Knoydart’, about land ownership, "The sacred rights of property shall never be laid low". Very little has changed in the Highlands. These people are still behind their big wall in their big estates, and can pay for anonymity. That's still a reality. So these are songs that are valuable to sing.
They're good songs in themselves - in structure, poetically and musically, but they also have a story to tell. Whether they lead to action is another issue. When I hear people say they do not sing political songs I groan, because I think they do not think enough about what they do sing. Geordie McIntyre

"One of the songs I sing is an American one, ‘Bread and Roses’. It’s an inspiration, about women millworkers so long ago in the USA, striking and marching at a time it was really hard to march. The song is not just about money, though money was so important, but about roses. We need to struggle for money to feed our kids and put a roof over our heads, but if we don’t have roses, you don’t have a rich life. It’s about quality of life. One of the lines in the song is “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses”. People need to grow up with hope, and the good things about them, not material things but enjoying where they are, enjoying music, having education – that’s the roses.” Cathie Peattie, Singer, MSP, Grangemouth

“Songs like the ‘Wee Magic Stane’ throw ridicule and poke fun in a light hearted way. Politicians are not lighthearted. Music lifts the consciousness in a different way. The fun and cleverness of ridicule is there in Nancy Nicolson’s songs, the warmth and humanity in them, but also the sharp edge that says “Look at this”. Without alienating people it invites them to come into the song.
I’d always been interested in folk song, since in the 1950s I saw Dolina MacLennan in the Waverley Bar, Archie Fisher, Jean Redpath, these were motivated singers putting a point of view. That sort of couthiness and laconicness, and catchiness, the sense that it’s a wee bit of fun, and that you can join in, I think it does marshall a kind of conscious solidarity of opinion after a while. It enters the bloodstream of people’s thinking when they sing these songs. So a campaign that is making songs is an amazing thing.
“It is related to the idea that in all cultures when people do things like going to war they have done so with pipes blaring and drums beating. You can align a regiment behind you with music. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ marching as if to war, because they are for peace.
“It is unavoidable that people will be angry, and express their anger. Not all political songs are in harness to idealism for the good. Sometimes the rancour and sense of being a victim is not enlightened in a benign way. There can be a war in words, enflamed and exasperated by differences between classes. We’re all blood and bones and heart, and brought up by mum and dad, and struggling to find our way in the world.
“I was just looking at Tannahill’s ‘Braes o Gleniffer’ song, such a beautiful poem song, and also political, Johnnie is marched away to war, breaking the heart of a woman. When you invite people’s affection for the places of beauty in the land of their birth, holding them precious and beautiful, is a deep kind of statement of relationship we have to land. The respecting all living creatures is in a wide sense to do with the politics of living.
“When people have to speak, in song or otherwise, to give a voice to something, then you must be heeding the zeitgeist. It’s an expression of the soul of the age, singers and musicians who are moved by songs, expressing something that invites itself to be expressed about the age. It should and must be heeded. It is a very primitive thing – if somebody is hurt or moved, and you have a kind of congregation of voices moved or inspired, then just as slaves in the USA sang to hearten themselves and bring them together, it is deeply significant. Things are expressed in novel or song. But song enters the consciousness. When songs are sung they become more available, more universal, like a mantra entering the consciousness because of the music and the rhythm.
“Part of its significance is that it brings people into contact with each other. Now, people are separated by being glued to the solitary confinement of screens. When voices are joined in song, something actually happens, it’s hard to define, they are psychic emotional realities.” David Campbell, storyteller