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Origins of the Australian Folk Revival, A tribute to the pioneer field collectors of the 1950s by Keith McKenry (c)1997
From a concert at National Folk Festival, Canberra, Friday 10 April 1997 - alas, Bob Bolton's photos of this Festival are not available.
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We are here this afternoon to celebrate the first decade of the Australian folk revival, and to honour the Revival's pioneers.
Our story commences in 1950, in the extended flush of relief, recovery and optimism that followed the end of the Second World War.
The Communist Party in Australia is riding high, especially in Queensland where, in 1944, and again in 1947, Fred Paterson, a communist lawyer from the State's North, has been elected to Parliament.
But it's the beginning of the Cold War, and Fred and his fellow travellers of the left (so welcome during the war against Hitler and Tojo) are soon to be frozen out of the corridors of power, and characterised by their opponents as menaces to society. But it is to this group that we owe most of our recorded heritage of folk song. Here is how it happened.
Prior to 1950, there are no published collections with music of Australian folk song. Sure, there are a number of publications with ballad texts, but the conventional wisdom is that the songs themselves have long died out. Indeed, even back in 1905 when Paterson first published Old Bush Songs he wrote of the songs in the past tense, as items belonging to an earlier era
The
first collection of Australian bush songs with music appears in 1950,
courtesy of the writer Vance Palmer, native of Bundaberg (like Bill
Scott) and leading advocate of the cause of Australian literary
nationalism. Vance, now 65 years old, has garnered together some 13 old
ballads from various sources, and publishes them in a song folio
entitled Old Australian Bush Ballads.
Not being noted as a
musical type, Vance calls on the classical composer Margaret Sutherland
for assistance with arrangements. Margaret, in turn, calls upon her own
instinct for appropriate melody when there was no-one who remembered the
original tunes. Their aim, Vance writes, is "to make a songbook that
could be used in a popular way, thus preserving contact with the simple,
democratic tradition of campfire and track that is one part of our
inheritance". Significantly, the folio cover notes the songs as
"collected by Vance Palmer" with "music restored by Margaret
Sutherland".
The songs in the Palmer-Sutherland folio are
- Ballad of Ben Hall
- Ballad of Jack Lefroy
- Banks of the Condamine
- Broken Down Squatter
- Flash Jack from Gundagai
- Old Bullock Dray
- Old Keg of Rum
- Overlander
- Road to Gundagai (Lazy Harry's)
- Song of Ballarat
- Song of the Free Selector
- Stockman's Last Bed
- Wild Colonial Boy
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This
leads directly to Manifold's collaboration with a 19 year old Victorian
who, possessing a Diploma in Art from Swinburne Institute, has hitched
up to Brisbane with a tenor recorder (which he can't play) and has been
co-opted by Manifold into his home group of players. That young artist
is Ronald George Edwards. Together they produce the highly successful
ballad broadsheets, the Bandicoot Ballads, Manifold providing most of
the songs, and Edwards the lino cut illustrations and production.
The first 4 Bandicoot Ballads are released in 1951. They are |
| Bandicoot Ballads, |
- The Wild Colonial Boy
- The Banks of the Condamine
- The Death of Ned Kelly (a Manifold poem he set to a traditional tune)
- Van Dieman's Land (learned by Manifold before Second World War)
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Meanwhile,
down in Sydney, there is action on other fronts. A music teacher,
Doreen Jacobs, has established the People's Choir, and gives music
classes in her spare time. She sets to music several pointed historical
ballads by Vance and Nettie Palmer's daughter Helen, one about the
Eureka rebellion and another about the 1890s shearer's strikes in
Queensland, The Ballad of 1891.
In one of Doreen's music classes
is a 16 year old People's Choir member, Chris Kempster. Encouraged by
Doreen, Chris sets to music several Australian poems and these find
their way to the Third World Youth Festival for Peace, held in Berlin in
1951, where they are included in the Australian Delegation's souvenir
song book of the Australian Delegation. One is a lovely setting of Louis
Esson's Bush Lullaby, the other a setting of Lawson that is destined to
become a classic of the folk revival. Indeed, and a few years hence
will lend its name to the pioneering Australian musical play Reedy
River.
In 1952 the Australian Youth Carnival for Peace and
friendship takes place in Sydney. The People's Choir (now renamed the
Sydney Singers), takes part. So does John Manifold, down from Brisbane
for the occasion. (WE HAVE THIS BOOK- SONGSTERS BOX)
Together with a dozen or so volunteer singers
and instrumentalists Manifold compiles and performs a program of bush
songs, recitations and dances. This is the first time Australian bush
songs have made it to the concert stage in living memory.
The
Songbook for the Carnival, is entitled International Songs, and includes
text and music for 21 songs (among them Pete Seeger and Lee Hays'
Hammer Song, and Ed McCurdy's Strangest Dream, as well as songs from
Korea, Viet Nam and elsewhere). It includes 7 Australian songs, 3 from
Vance Palmer's 1950 folio and
- Ballad of Eureka (Helen Palmer's words, Doreen Jacobs' tune)
- Reedy River (the young Chris Kempster's setting of Lawson's poem)
- Van Diemans Land (similar to the Bandicoot Ballads version)
- Freedom on the Wallaby (Doreen Jacobs' setting of Lawson).
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One
of those taking part as a member of the Sydney Singers is 37 year old
John Meredith, who hails from Holbrook in rural NSW. A member of the
Australian Soviet Friendship League and lacking one kidney, John has
arrived in town by bicycle (via Melbourne, Mildura and Cairns). Having
met up with members of the Eureka Youth League, he has joined the
Communist Party, and become Treasurer of its Petersham Branch.
John
works in the pharmaceutical industry and lives in a group house at
Clovelly, run on strict (STRICT!!) communal lines. There is a piano in
the house, and once a month the left-over monies from the housekeeping
fund Party Night, where everyone gets around the piano and sings. Each
person is permitted to bring one guest. Joy Durst, (then Joy Althorpe),
one of the commune's inmates, plays the piano. Joy is later to become
one of the revival's prime movers down in Melbourne.
Like many of
his contemporaries of the Left, Meredith is interested in Australian
ballads (he too has a much loved and battered copy of Paterson's Old
Bush Songs), and sets about the arduous task of looking in libraries for
tunes to match with them. This is frustrating work. John has however
one notable success - a song known only from Charles Macalister's 1907
book Old Pioneering Days in the Sunny South where the tune is noted as
"Irish Mollie, Oh!". John locates a tune by this title in Old Irish Folk
Music and Songs by P. Joyce and finds it fits perfectly.
The
song, as fitted by Meredith, has become a folk standard. John makes the
acquaintance of other folk song enthusiasts in Sydney, including Edgar
Waters, who works at the NSW State Library, and through him Russell Ward
who at that time is compiling material for his thesis which will appear
six years later as The Australian Legend.
Later that year (we
are still in 1952) the popular wisdom that old bush songs, having been
lost to memory, must be researched in libraries is blown spectacularly
out of the water at, of all places, North Sydney Railway station. This
happens when Mrs Hilda Lane, a member of the Sydney Singers assists an
old man, blind and tapping his way, into the Station. They talk for a
while, and she finds the man, Jack Lee -"Hoopiron" to his friends -
knows and sings old bush songs. He is 77 years old, and was born in
Booligal in 1876.
Hilda introduces Hoopiron to Russell Ward, and
shortly after invites fellow Choir members John Meredith and Chris
Kempster to her flat one Sunday afternoon to listen to the old chap
sing. They take the entire afternoon to write down the music of one
verse of "The Backblock Shearer", and soon realise what a marathon task
lies ahead of them if they wish to transcribe Hoopiron's songs.
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John
Meredith receives considerable help in his field collecting from both
Nancy Keesing and Russel Ward. Both are collecting texts of bush
ballads, Nancy for the books entitled Australian Bush Ballads (1955) and
Old Bush Songs (1957) in which she collaborates with Douglas Stewart,
and Russel for use in his doctoral thesis, published in 1958 as The
Australian Legend. The two collectors frequently make contact with good
performers and never fail to pass them on to John for recording, so that
the tunes might be preserved.
In 1953 the next four Bandicoot Ballads broadsides appear. These are
- The Drover's Dream
- Andy's Gone with Cattle
- Bold Jack Donahue
- Moreton Bay
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Meanwhile,
unbeknownst to the folksong collecting clan in Sydney, a collection of
Australian folk songs with texts and music already exists in Melbourne.
This collection, by the Rev. Dr Percy Jones, Vice Director of the
Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, has been assembled over a number of
years, since the early 1940s.
.
Jones' collection had its origins
in his desire for Australian songs for choirs to sing. He was assisted
in his quest by a journalist from the Melbourne Sun newspaper, who ran a
column asking for old songs. Readers sent in many texts, but to get
tunes Dr Jones had to visit the people and transcribe the tunes by hand.
He didn't do this often, but over the years did assemble and arrange a
folio of some dozen songs, including
- The Wild Colonial Boy
- Botany Bay
- Click Go the Shears
- The Dying Stockman
- Oh, the Springtime It Brings on the Shearing
- A Nautical Yarn
- The Old Bullock Dray
- The Stockman's Last Bed
- Wild Rover No More
- The Station Cook.
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But
there are Australian voices in the wings! In 1953, the same year as
Burl Ives' visit, Dick Diamond's musical play, Reedy River is produced
by the Melbourne New Theatre. It contains a dozen or so Australian
songs, around which Diamond has shaped his story. The songs include
Doreen Jacobs' setting of Helen Palmer's Ballad of 1891, and the title
track, Chris Kempster's setting of Lawson's Reedy River.
Back in
Sydney, interest in field collection - sustained by repeated discoveries
in the suburban woodwork of marvellous old timers who remember old
songs and tunes - is blossoming. On 16 January 1954 the Australian
Folklore Society holds its inaugural meeting, at John Meredith's house
at Heathcote. The announced aims of the Society are the recording,
publishing and popularising of the folklore of Australia.
Early
in 1954, Meredith has idea of forming a small ensemble to sing the songs
he has collected. His neighbours Brian Loughlin and Jack Barrie readily
agree to be in such a group and they go into rehearsal. John plays
button accordion, Brian the lagerphone, which they had met with during a
holiday trip to Holbrook earlier that year, and Jack the bush bass, a
one-stringed tea-chest affair which had been described to John by one of
his workmates. They give their first performance dressed up in false
whiskers and nineteenth century clothes: it is a roaring success. After
much deliberation they choose a name, the Bushwhackers, then invite
Chris Kempster, guitar, and Harry Kay junior, a mouth organ player, to
join them.
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Anyway,
back to 1954. The Bushwhackers' style and repertoire makes them an
immediate success. They secure radio engagements and go on weekend
tours. It is during these tours that John makes many contacts for
recording. When they perform at Newcastle, Lithgow and Mudgee they
appeal to people who know old ballads to get in touch with them. Soon
every weekend John can spare away from the band is spent in one of these
towns with his tape recorder and accordion.
In 1954, too, Dick
Diamond's Reedy River has its second production, by the New Theatre in
Sydney. This production has instruments on stage, a major innovation
(for in the earlier Melbourne production there was just a piano in the
"pit"). Not only do the Bushwhackers play a major role in singing many
of the songs, but also two songs collected by John Meredith are added to
the program.
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Another
bush singer John Meredith recorded around this time [in April 1954,
according to Edwards] was Edwin (Ted) Goodwin. Dr Ces English had
attended Ted at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, had several
conversations with him on the subject of folk songs, and learned Dennis
O'Reilly from him. He introduced John to him. When Ted, then aged 73,
had recovered from his illness he called on Meredith at Lewisham, where
an afternoon was spent recording songs and talking about old times.
Goodwin
[born c.1882] had for most of his working life been a timber-cutter in
the Nambucca River district on the North Coast of NSW, and there he
learned his songs, most of which had a distinct Irish flavour.
Songs collected by John Meredith from Edwin Goodwin
- Dennis O'Reilly (co-collector Dr Cecil English) (First [and best] collected version; a
- close relative of "With My Swag All on My Shoulder" included without a tune in Old Bush Songs)
- Bold Jack Donahoe [version sung by Alan Scott] (First [and a very fine] collected version, with one line forgotten in the third verse. When Meredith publishes the song in
- his 1957 collection, Songs From the Bush, he includes the following line, to make the verse complete: We'll fight but not surrender, our freedom to maintain'.)
- Old Bark Hut (words from Old Bush Songs) (version not published as such, but appears to be first time a tune for this much published text is collected. In 1954 [according to Edwards] the song appears as Bushwhacker Broadside No 2, with a tune arranged by John Meredith. Was this the Goodwin tune?)
Dennis O'Reilly was published in Speewa Vol 1 (2) in September 1954. Ted died in 1955.
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Later
that year (1954), Meredith makes contact with Sally and Fred Sloane,
then living in Lithgow. John has regular two-monthly recording sessions
with them until 1961, for Sally, who was born in Parkes in 1894, keeps
remembering items. John wrote that "there seemed to be no end to the
songs and tunes she knew. The bulk of these were learned from her
mother, but several came from her step-father and other bush workers".
Among the many songs collected from Sally were
- The Wee One
- Death of Ben Hall.
Nov
'54: Melbourne Cup Day. A fellow named "Duke" Tritton turns up at the
Bulletin offices in Sydney, with information about ballads. He's
responding to an article Doug Stewart had written that mentioned
'missing' verses and songs. Doug is too busy to see him (it must have
been approaching 2.20pm). Could Nancy? Nancy does, and Duke sings
Goorianawa, and a number of other bush songs. Nancy misses listening to
the cup on the wireless.
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In
August 1955 the Bushwhackers play and sing at Dame Mary Gilmore's 90th
birthday party, and are embarrassed when she laughingly says, after
hearing "Click go the Shears", "How real you made it seem: Why, I could
even smell the shearing shed!" The band is at the time wearing dirty old
flannels that have seen out some 150 performances of Reedy River and
unknown Bushwhackers recitals besides, and suddenly realises it has
developed a pretty strong shearing shed aroma!
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In
1955 the Wattle Recording Company is formed, giving a further impetus
the to work of collecting and popularising folk song. Both the
Bushwhackers' and Wattle's first disc is "The Drover's Dream" (and The
Bullockies' Ball), sung by "Alan Scott and the Bushwhackers". It is an
immediate success: initially some 200 discs are pressed - ultimately
over 20 000 are sold.
On 19 May 1956 Duke Tritton introduces
Meredith to Ted Gibbons, licensee of the Centennial Hotel at Gulgong.
Meredith books in at the hotel for the weekend, having previously placed
a notice in the local newspaper to say he is looking for traditional
singers of bush songs. Five performers attend, backed up by interested
spectators.
One of the locals recorded in Gulgong's Centennial
Hotel this day was Bill Coughlin. He was seventy when recorded, but had
learned "The Union Boy" at Cassilis during a shearers' strike in 1902,
when he was 16 years old.
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In
Queensland, too, there has been great activity on the collecting front.
A Federation of Bush Music Groups has been established in Brisbane -
these groups include John Manifold's Bandicoots, Bill Scott's Moreton
Bay Bushwhackers, and Stan Arthur's Wayfarers.
In 1956 thirty old
bush songs, collected and arranged by Group members are published in
the Queensland Centenary Pocket Songbook, edited by John Manifold.
- The songs include
- Augathella Station
- Bold Tommy Payne
- Wallaby Stew
- Waltzing Matilda (Qld version)
- The Reedy Lagoon
- Australia's on the Wallaby
- Old Black Alice
- Bullocky-O
- The Convict Maid
%20p.20.jpg) |
| Singabout, Vol. 3(4), 1958, p. 20 |
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Things
also have been happening on the folklore front south of the Murray.
Ron Edwards has returned from his sojourn in Brisbane, and has set up
his Rams Skull Press on Melbourne's outskirts at Lower Ferntree Gully.
In Feb 1954 he publishes The Dying Stockman, the first of seven Black Bull Chapbooks dealing with aspects of Australian folk song. A full
listing of the chapbooks is
Feb '54 The Dying Stockman, notes by Hugh Anderson.
March '54 Two Songs of '57, with notes by Hugh Anderson
1956 Botany Bay Broadsides, with notes by Hugh Anderson
1956 Songs of Billy Barlow, with notes by Hugh Anderson
1957 Three Street Ballads, by Russel Ward
1957 The Violin, the Banjo and the Bones, by John Manifold
1957 Australian Song Index (to 1956), by Hugh Anderson.
Then,
in August 1955, the Folk Lore Society of Victoria is formed in
Melbourne. The meeting, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ned
Kelly's birth, includes among its participants Wendy Lowenstein, Ian
Turner, a Mr Miles Maxwell (who sings Kelly ballads), and Ron Edwards
and Glen Tomasetti (who sing "folk songs both Australian and European").
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1957
Songs From the Bush published by Allan & Co. 10 songs, 'collected
and edited by Meredith and others, arranged by Alfred Hill'.
1957 Old Bush Songs edited by Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing, published by Angus and Robertson.
1957 7" EP Australian Bush Songs, sung by The Bushwhackers Band, issued by Wattle Recordings. Songs are
- The Hut That's Upside Down
- Australia's on the Wallaby
- Click Go the Shears
- Black Velvet Band
- Drover's Dream
1957
10" LP Australian Traditional Singers and Musicians, Wattle Archive
Series No 1, issued. Field recordings by John Meredith and other members
of the Australian Folklore Society. Sally Sloane occupies all of Side
1, and part of Side 2. Others on Side 2 are Herb Gimbert (tin whistle),
Duke Tritton and Edwin Goodwin.
1958 Russel Ward's The Australian Legend.
1959
12" LP Songs from the Shearing Sheds, sung by the Bush Music Club,
issued by Festival Records. Members of band making recording: Jamie
Carlin, Brian Loughlin, Jack Barrie, John Meredith, Alan Scott and Peter
Francis.
1959 10" LP Queensland Centenary Record, sung by the
Bandicoots Concert Party (John Manifold) and the Moreton Bay
Bushwhackers (Bill Scott), issued by Wattle Records.
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In
1962(?) John Meredith, receives his first government support, a grant
of five hundred pounds from the Australian Literature Fund, to enable
him to prepare a book based on his field recordings. The grant
represents six months' pay for Meredith, and he is able to take six
months leave of absence from work to do the transcribing for what
becomes Folk Songs of Australia.
In June that year, while working
hard on the book project, Meredith suffers a heart attack. He is
obliged to resign as editor of Singabout and ceases for some 18 years to
collect in the field. Instead John pursues research and writing
interests in fields relating to Australian folklore and social history.
Having
completed the work for Folk Songs of Australia, John's tapes lie idle,
and he decides they should go to a library. Over twenty years later, in
1986, when I interviewed him and Ron Edwards together for the National
Library, John put it this way:
...the tapes were just sitting
there idle and I thought "Well, they're going to rot away to nothing",
and I thought they should go to a library, and somebody suggested the
National Library, and I was going to give them to them, and somebody
said, "No, don't be silly, they've got money to buy things like that".
So I wrote and asked them did they want to buy them and nothing happened
for a while, then they asked me, "How much?" So I worked out what it
cost me. There was seven years' work, so I reckoned I'd spent about a
hundred pounds a year on fares and tapes, so that was the way I costed
them, just the cost of fares and tapes, which worked out at seven
hundred pounds. So I sold my thirty hours of recording to the National
Library for seven hundred pounds.
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1964 12" LP Australian Traditional Singers and Musicians of Victoria, Wattle Archive Series, issues. Contains tapes of Simon McDonald and others recorded by Norm O'Connor, Maryjean Officer and other members of the Victorian Folk Lore society.
1964, too, sees the culmination in two books of John Manifold's work on Australian folk song: Who wrote the Ballads? and the Penguin Australian Song Book.
.
The Penguin book, in particular, is of major significance. It contains many songs not available previously in book form (including some upon which Manifold exercised a heavy, but silent editorial hand). It remains to this day a key reference and source book for singers.
1965? 12' LP Dinkey Di! We Love Singing Fair Dinkum Australian Songs, sung by The Bush Music Club (10th Anniversary album), issued by Festival Records. Record review from Electronics Australia states "One is struck with the sincerity of the group as they are obviously trying to preserve an art form which they believe to have genuine merit. One may disagree with them in this regard either generally or in connection with some of the songs in particular (do they collect and preserve ALL Australian folk songs? Surely one must exercise some discrimination...), but one can hardly doubt their sincerity".
While all this was happening down South, Ron Edwards has been living the life of an artist up north, on the beaches outside Cairns. Much to his surprise, he finds among the locals a wealth of bush singers, yarnspinners and craftspersons. Before long he his mixing his work as an artist with that of a folklore collector. Over the next 30 years (and more, for he is still going strong!) Ron collects many hundreds of songs and yarns, and the material for 7 major books on bush craft. So prolific is his collecting of songs, for example, that single-handedly he makes North Queensland in a numerical sense the folk song capital of Australia.
In 1966 the first fruits of Ron's renewed collection appear, in the form of four further 'parts' to his Overlander Songbook, published by Rams Skull Press (now located in North Queensland).
.
The same year the first issue of Ron Edwards' Northern (later National) Folk, is published in Cairns. Following on in the tradition of Singabout and Australian Tradition, it runs to 45 issues between 1966 and 1971.
In 1967, after many years in the preparation, John Meredith's seminal publication, Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them (co-author Hugh Anderson) published by Ure Smith. To this day this book remains the most important single volume to emerge from the Australian folk revival.
The publication in 1967 of Merro's Folk Songs of Australia seems a good point at which to end this concert. The folk revival continued, and indeed, John Meredith, Alan Scott, Ron Edwards, Wendy Lowenstein, Bill Scott and other pioneers of the folk revival continued to make major contributions to it.
We owe our pioneer collectors a profound debt of gratitude. There is only one way we can discharge that debt properly, and that is by taking the songs, the poems and the tunes "from all our cultures" out of the archives and into our consciousness, our shared sense of identity.
1967 Bill Scott's Complete Book of Australian Folklore
1969 Second (much enlarged) edition of Edwards' Overlander Songbook.
1970 Alan Scott's A Collector's Songbook, published by the Bush Music Club. Contains words and music of 31 traditional songs collected by Alan. Republished 1993.
1987 John Meredith's Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them. Volume Two (co-authors Roger Covell and Patricia Brown) published by NSW University Press
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