On Tuesday, August 6, there were two contrasting events each looking at the songs and history of English industries.
Where Is My Boy Tonight? presented by Megan Wisdom and Mossy Christian at the Methodist Church, was an eclectic fifty minutes of song with archival voices and images, supported by musical accompaniment on several traditional instruments. They explored stories from England’s East coast fishing communities, the hardships of the industry and the loss of life during storms at sea.
The piece was beautifully curated, moving between song and recordings of members of the fishing towns, with supporting projected photographs and text. The audience joined in whenever a familiar shanty was included, such as Windy Old Weather. The voices of Wisdom and Christian were delicious to listen to and perfectly blended as they accompanied the songs variously on penny whistle, accordion, squeeze box, violin and tabletop harmonium. The acoustics of the Methodist Church, however, were less kind to the archival recordings of Flamborough fishermen talking to each other, which were largely inaudible and might have benefited from subtitles. The more contemporary recordings were easier to listen to and everyone enjoyed the ghost story from Southwold in Suffolk.
In 1910 folklore revivalist Cecil Sharp visited Flamborough on England’s North East coast and discovered wooden sword dances being performed by teams of eight, a tradition that is kept alive today. In the audience was Rosie Cross whose family came from Flamborough and whose relative, Mrs Mary Cross, had still been alive and teaching the sword dance in the 2010s. Rosie Cross said: “I have done some research into my family’s connection with the sword dances and it has been wonderful to be here, to talk to Mossy and learn a bit more.”
Also on Tuesday, at the Harbour Hotel, Jez Lowe brought his A Worked-Out Seam, looking at the folk song tradition emerging from the coalmining industry. Lowe had been invited by the Folk Festival to perform this year and he used the opportunity to give a short reading from his fourth detective novel, The Keeker Seam, which is set against a backdrop of English mining communities of the 1800s.
The event was free flowing and, in ninety minutes, Lowe set out to explore the relevance and future of coalmining songs in the face of the environmental, social and political landscape of our current times. Starting with Black Diamonds, Lowe sang both traditional songs and his own music written across four decades in response to having been born into this community. Between the songs, Lowe roamed widely with entertaining anecdotes of his life growing up in a community that experienced the annihilation of the 1980s pit closures. Although Lowe himself had never worked down a pit, his father and several school friends had worked there and many of the stories came from their experiences. Lowe sang the powerful Trimdon Grange Explosion, a traditional North East folk song written by “The Pitman Poet” Tommy Armstrong, commemorating the mining disaster of 1882.
During the time of the pit closures, Lowe was asked by the BBC, with next to no notice, to knock together a topical song in response; the result was Coal Town Days, with its resonant chorus of “Howay man they’re liars and they’re cheats”. Members of the audience responded passionately to the question of whether these songs from a bygone era were still relevant, saying that they felt it was vitally important to keep the songs alive so that we both remember and learn.
Both Where Is My Boy Tonight? and A Worked Out Seam stand elegiac testimony to the importance of not forgetting the music and songs of those who have gone before us.
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