The erosion of manual labour has resulted in the loss of a once vibrant folk song tradition – but, writes Michael Church, there are still traditions and pockets of community life where the music thrives
I was born in Conwy, a fishing village in north Wales, and many of my earliest memories are of singing. World War II was at its darkest hour, and my father was fighting in France. There was no cinema, and nobody we knew had a gramophone. So singing was an integral part of daily life.
For me it began as my mother sang me to sleep at night with ‘Golden slumbers kiss your eyes’, a lullaby written in the 17th century by Thomas Dekker. The Beatles appropriated it for their Abbey Road album in 1969, and more recently John Lewis harnessed it for a Christmas TV advert. Other songs I grew up with included ‘A frog he would a-wooing go’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ – ‘Oh, tis my delight/ On a shining night/ In the season of the year’. We used to sing ‘Ten green bottles’ when we went for walks, and also that mysterious counting song ‘Green grow the rushes, Oh’, although we hadn’t a clue what it meant.
Recently I sat down with a friend who’d grown up in the same era as me, but in Cumbria, and we started to swap memories of the songs we’d sung. After 15 minutes we’d jotted down 30, and our memories were still coming thick and fast… ‘D’ye ken John Peel’, ‘Bobby Shafto’, ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Cockles and mussels’ and the 17th-century marching song ‘The British Grenadiers’ (‘with a tow-row-row’ etc). Sea shanties like ‘The keel row’ and ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’ loomed large because they were so satisfying to sing.
Some of these songs we learned in school, but singing on walks or on coach trips or at parties was something we took for granted, because to us it was as natural as breathing. Only now do I realise what a wonderful tradition our folk songs represented, and how completely many of us have lost it. It was once a shared musical hinterland, but as an activity in which everyone participated – as opposed to a performance-art by specialists – it’s a mere shadow of what it once was.
Anecdotal evidence tells us this sense of loss is widely shared across Europe and America, because the musical heritage is not being passed on. Parents reared musically,
