Why the Old Songs are Important
Delving into the history of ballads and old folk songs from Scotland to Argentina
“And the song of everybody is the same song”
Violeta Parra
The purpose of a writer, an essayist, or a songwriter is to collect thoughts and stories, weaving them together to create meaning. Why forget the old stories when they remind us of what we are?
After some years away, I am back in Scotland, my native land, collecting and gathering the old songs. Many people have done this work before me: Hamish Henderson, Norman Kennedy, and Gordeanna McCulloch. Where I live, in Glasgow, it is heartening to witness so many young people delving into the archives too, organising events and talks to reclaim the old songs, music, and histories. Yet it is still a struggle to emphasise their relevance here, many having eschewed traditions and songs in Gaelic and Scots, looking towards America. The irony is that much of the American country and blues favoured by my countrymen was birthed in Scottish and Irish immigrant communities.
Traditional Scottish songs have parallels with the songs I have collected from other cultures: songs about miners, fishermen, weavers, and loved ones lost overseas to cruel wars that serve no one but despots and landowners. They are nostalgic, compassionate, and highlight the hard conditions of exploitative work. For some of us, these dreadful working conditions and bloody wars seem like ancient history, but we carry those histories in our bones. This tension between tenderness and strife is represented masterfully in Scottish activist and folksinger Matt McGinn’s (1928 - 1977) “Coorie Down (Miner’s Lullaby)”.
Lie doon, my dear, and in your ear,
To help you close your eye,
I'll sing a song, a slumber song,
A miner's lullaby.
Your daddy's doon the mine my darling,
Doon in the Curbly Main,
Your daddy's howkin' (quarrying) coal my darling,
For his ain wee wean (own little child).
There's darkness doon the mine my darling,
Darkness, dust and damp,
But we must have oor heat, oor light,
Oor fire and our lamp.
Your daddy coories (nestles) doon my darling,
Doon in a three foot seam,
So you can coorie doon my darling,
Coorie doon and dream.
The song talks about the harsh conditions of working in a coal mine, but it is addressed tenderly to the miner’s children, his hard labour presented as an act of self-sacrifice and love.
The conditions of miners are echoed more profoundly and bitterly in the Spanish Civil War song, “La Hierba de los Caminos”:
The mine owners,
have bought a weighing scale.
to weigh the money
that they steal every week
from the poor miner.
This song, interpreted here by Chilean band, Quilapayún, was popularized by Victor Jara (1932 - 1973). Jara was one of the leaders of the Nueva Canción movement in Chile, which campaigned against authoritarianism, corrupt leaders, and landowners. Many of those singer-songwriters, less concerned with the shape of their beloved (vis-a-vis Ed Sheeran), were interested in humanity, and the right for people to live peacefully. Indeed one of Jara’s greatest songs is “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” (The Right to Live in Peace), and also “Manifiesto”:
My guitar is not for the rich,
no, nothing like that.
My song is the scaffolding
built to reach the stars.
For a song has meaning
when it beats in the veins
of someone who will die singing
the truthful truths.
My song is not for fleeting praise
nor to gain foreign fame,
it is for this strip of land
to the very depth of the earth.
It is poignant and tragic that Jara was eventually murdered for the crime of singing truthful truths. After Salvador Allende, the socialist president, was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet’s violent coup, his fascist henchmen went after Jara. He was found dead, his fingers mangled, his greatest weapon crushed, the ammunition of song, which touched the hearts of so many in Chile, and across the world still today.
Song is dangerous, and has always been considered so. In Scotland, our national bard Robert Burns (1759–1796) is known for his scathing and biting political songs and verses. Yet they were more of a light-hearted poke at wealth and pomp than a genuine attack or criticism of the establishment:
What though on hamely (simple) fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey (coarse wool clothing), an’ a that;
Gie (give) fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ (all) that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae (ever so) poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
“A Man’s a Man for A’ That” by Robert Burns
This is why Burns was safe, and still so popular today in establishment circles. It is not to criticise Burns, I am very fond of his verse, and his gorgeous ballad, “Now Westlin Winds” is part of my repertoire.
In contrast, Robert Tannahill (1774 - 1810), a later contemporary of Burns; a working-class weaver, and prolific songwriter, has somewhat faded to obscurity. He wrote about the lives of the working class, as well as anti-Irishness, rife in Presbyterian Scotland (arguably up to this day), and racism in a time when those subjects were taboo. He also wrote about the spoils of war and its effect on the lives of ordinary families.
THE cold wind blows,
O'er the drifted snows ;
Loud howls the rain-lashed naked wood ;
Weary I stray
On my lonesome way,
And my heart is faint for want of food.
Pity a wretch left all forlorn,
On life's wide wintry waste to mourn ;
The gloom of night fast veils the sky,
And pleads for your humanity.
On valour's bed
My Henry died,
In the cheerless desert is his tomb ;
Now lost to joy,
With my little boy,
In woe and want I wander home.
Oh ! never, never will you miss
The boon bestow'd on deep distress,
For dear to Heav'n is the glist'ning eye,
That beams benign humanity.
“The Soldier’s Widow” by Robert Tannahill
Along with these bitter verses, Tannahill also penned heartfelt, romantic odes to the nature of his native Paisley. The right to roam on land is particularly pertinent in Scotland, where today private land ownership accounts for 83% of rural land.
Glasgow poet and academic, Jim Ferguson’s well-renowned thesis on Tannahill expounds on this:
Rather than reading his (Tannahill’s) pastoral mode of song as a retreat from the political into social conservatism, Tannahill’s songs can be seen as a defence of his own way of life, and that of other artisans, from attack by the new economics of the industrial and free-market capitalism. There is an implicit assertion of the ‘right to roam’ in the songs, for example, in ‘Contentment’, he makes a clear connection between happiness and the idea of an unencumbered freedom which involves not only an implicit right to roam but also a disavowal of social hierarchy, wealth seeking and ambition:
Though humble my lot, not ignoble's my state,
Let me still be contented though poor;
What Destiny brings, be resigned to my fate,
Though Misfortune should knock at my door.
I care not for honour, preferment, nor wealth,
Nor the titles that Affluence yields,
While blythely I roam, in the hey-day of health,
'Midst the charms of my dear native fields.
Ferguson, Jim (2011) “A weaver in wartime: a biographical study and the letters of Paisley weaver-poet Robert Tannahill (1774-1810)”
Many of these old folk songs, far from being whimsical and nostalgic, are biting social commentaries.
As James Connolly, the Irish Republican leader, assassinated by the British army for resisting centuries of British occupation and oppression, proclaimed:
“Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few and not the faith of the multitude.”
Yet, having led a political Rebel Choir for many years, I have distanced myself from the marching music, and divisive political slogans. It is the songs that speak of people, simple stories and pastoral scenes that have the staying power, and a truly clever songwriter knows how to write words layered with multiple meanings.
The Scottish Gaelic weavers from the islands have a rich history of clever songs that they sang whilst “waulking the tweed”. Waulking the tweed was an action the women made to cleanse woven cloth, eliminating oils, dirt, and other impurities, and making it shrink by friction and pressure. It was a steady and strong back-and-forth movement. It was exceedingly repetitive work, therefore singing the songs gave the women a sense of comradery and encouragement during arduous shifts.
The songs were laden in symbolism and code words. For example, “red cloth” referred to the British Redcoat army, who inspired fear and terror amongst Highlanders in their endeavour to extinguish the customs and traditions of what they saw as wild, savage territory. “Mhorag”, a woman’s name, was code for Bonnie Prince Charlie, considered to be the true King of Scotland by the Jacobite cause. The songs also spoke of loved ones going over the Irish Sea to fight, or work, and never returning.
There is much power in sharing sorrow and pain. No problem was ever solved by wallowing in misery, and no dispute resolved through passive despair. Yet the acknowledgement of suffering is an important political tool. Verses about lamenting loved ones lost to war, and the drudgery of poor labour conditions alert the collective that they do not suffer alone. What’s more, verses of hope and beauty remind us that life does not have to be this way.
The oft-touted argument, usually by boomers who benefitted from cheap housing and the post-world war benevolence of the state, is that things have got better. These stories are the medallions of the suffering they inherited from their parents, the emotions that they carry stifled and repressed in their chests. It is true that here in the UK, where I write from, we do not witness the same hopeless drudgery and toil of hard labour nowadays, nor the starvation and deprivation under feudalism that large swathes of the population were subjected to.
Yet we have new problems. Growing obesity due to stationary lifestyles (and this is not through choice, it is purposeful and engineered), poisonous processed food, lack of access to true nutrition; a demand we remain chained and attentive to our phone at all times, the erroneous belief peddled that we will miss out on connections or opportunities if we aren’t. We suffer from a lack of easy access to nature and the old ways that used to sustain us, without relying on Amazon, or supermarkets; growing mountains of waste; a lack of understanding and appreciation of resources; how things are grown and produced; a culture of demand and now, and no time to rest mentally. The poor are being attacked in new ways, and dying of new, insidious diseases: we are a nation riddled with addictions.
I attended a talk by Scottish islander and folklorist Margaret Bennett, who talked about the difficult conditions of growing up on the Isle of Skye, but also spoke of the comradery, the neighbourliness, the huddling together on cold, winter nights to tell stories and sing songs. She quoted: “When the TV came in the front door, the stories went out the back door”. Now we have TikTok, Instagram, and all manner of screens and empty conventions that disconnect us from each other. They say loneliness is the new killer, and I believe it's true. What use are our televisions, mod-cons and singing washing machines if we don’t have each other to sustain us?
Stories are important, and songs are important. They remind us of each other and collective compassion
Violeta Parra (1917 – 1967) was a prolific Chilean songwriter and folklorist, travelling the country to collect old songs and learn the old ways of playing. She grew up in poverty (and never truly escaped it), playing music in the streets with her siblings to put bread on the table. She was a lifelong Communist, weaver, and troubadour. She sang about the lives of the working class, the poor, and state oppression. In her autobiography, she wrote:
"I'm not protesting for myself because I'm a small thing, I'm protesting because the beggar's sorrows go to the grave. I call God to witness that he won't let me lie, you don't have to walk a metre outside the house to see what happens to us here and the pain that is living."
Parra’s songs were rebellious, challenging hierarchical structures, but they were full of love and compassion for humanity. Take her song “Volver a los 17”, which was banned during the time of the Pinochet regime:
What feeling can do
Knowing hasn't been able to
Nor the clearest beginning
Nor the widest thought
The moment changes everything
As an obliging enchantor
Gently moves us away
From resentment and violence:
Only love with its science
Makes us so innocent
Love is the whirlwind
Of original purity
Even the fierce animal
Whispers its sweet trill
It stops the pilgrims
It frees prisoners
Love with its care
Turns the elder into a child
And the bad, only affection
Turns the elder into a child
And the bad, only affection
Turns them pure and sincere.
The song speaks of returning to simpler times. I suppose that’s what I am calling for now too. When we call out for a return to simpler times we are not merely revoking the past. I understand it more as a call to return to ourselves. And though Violeta was a Communist, I believe she must have been a Sufi too without knowing it. She appeals to love, and the heart over knowledge.
Shamz of Tabriz (Rumi’s teacher) said:
“If a person believes he can educate people by just teaching them how to read and write, he is a sweet little veiled one. Such a person has no authority nor any knowledge about anything. If he believes he can educate them by love, this means he has some wisdom.”
Speaking on a radio interview about her epic song, “El Gavilán”, Parra said:
“This song has to be sung by me because pain cannot be sung by an academic voice, the voice of the conservatoire. It has to be sung by a suffering voice like mine that has been suffering for forty years.”
The message of pain and suffering cannot be transmitted through a studied voice, but a voice that has lived it, and has the ability to transmit that.
Whilst knowledge empowers us, it is the recognition of ourselves and compassion that truly reaches us. I believe it is poetry and music that grip our hearts and move us to act, more so than lofty words shouted from a podium. We know how impactful poetry and song are by the fact that they are so often censored, while bards are exiled by authoritarian regimes.
Reading Don Quijote, I couldn’t help but chuckle darkly at the part where Don Quijote’s priest and niece burn his books in a bid to quell his fervour for delusional quests of chivalric knighthood. When they find his poetry volumes, the priest ventures that they are probably harmless, yet Quijote’s niece responds that these are also dangerous ammunition for his fantastical projections. She warns that Quijote may be at risk of becoming a poet, “which, as they say, is an incurable and infectious disease”.
“Changes in musical style and form have generally been reflections of changes in society.”
So said music anthropologist John Blacking.
Therefore, it is not only the changing form of music but the structure that we can pay attention to. Rap and Hip Hop, though at times highly commercialised, came from humble origins. It was a way for ethnic groups in white-majority societies to tell stories of truth and pain as a result of social exclusion and racism. The common use of sampling in Hip Hop, that is, borrowing from other styles of music, celebrates and references the cultural melting pot, the spread and exchange of music across borders.
Blacking argued that,
“Musical structures can therefore be seen as products and reflections of social, as well as musical processes.”
How do we facilitate the hard truths of oppression and suffering being openly talked about, without being shut down, or thought of as “too political”? Through the exchange of songs. Sometimes, as a music lover, I bewail the fact that booming bass and excessively autotuned voices are pumped out from shops and bars wherever you go. But isn’t it significant that the soundtrack of our lives is drowning out our thoughts?
Is there a kind of plea there? Stop numbing yourself. Stop thinking, and become aware of your body; become aware of the bass notes vibrating; the dissonant autotune rattling your eardrums. We live in an overstimulated world, and so the music reflects this: overstimulation; annihilation of the senses.
John Berger, talking about stories, said:
“What’s unsaid one time can be said on another occasion. But the unsayable can never be said – unless maybe in a prayer, and God would know that, not me. Before the unsayable we are alone. And this, I believe, is why stories are told.”
[Foreword to I Could Read the Sky]
And, relating it to music, Berger elaborates:
“The unsayable, the invisible, the longing in music, they all become clear. They are what music is about.”
Music communicates to us the stories we are afraid to tell everyday. Yet I often worry that there is a more sinister element to a noise-polluted society. Music may reflect the times, but are the stories being drowned out? One important aspect of storytelling and indeed, making music, is the importance of the contrast between speaking, and silence.
Berger explains this technique as:
“Timing is the skill of playing with silence, of distributing it cunningly, of hiding it so that the listener comes upon it with surprise and delight.”
It is those variations, the pauses in the words and the music, that help us to pay attention. Rumi said:
“If you are silent, your speech becomes brighter, because both the light of silence and the value of speech are hidden within silence.”
Perhaps the suffering of the exiled poet is a kind of divine justice. Without the poet’s absence, or prohibition of his words, we would not be imbued with that sense of light and brightness when we stumble upon the words. It is then that we can truly pay attention.
Argentinian singer-songwriter, Atahualpa Yupanqui, was exiled by José Félix Uriburu’s fascist government in the 1930s, and his songs were banned. His father was part Quechuan, belonging to the indigenous tribes of South America. Yupanqui was born Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburu but changed his name in homage to the Incan Kings. His name means “the person who comes from far away to say something”.
Yupanqui was a Communist and travelled throughout Argentina to learn from the indigenous tribes. His songs, like Violeta’s, were full of love and compassion, lost shepherdesses, weavers, and fisherfolk. Of course, singing about indigenous cultures and ordinary working folk was considered dangerous.
What strikes me about Yupanqui is how much, as an artist known for his voice, he spoke about silence. In the documentary, Un Río Que No Cesa de Cantar (A River that Does not Cease to Sing) he said:
“Silence is necessary, even in music it is part of silence. Without silence, there is nothing creative. Silence is a halt and, if possible, the pulse of thought so that one can then fly firmly to what one believes is good and healthy for the soul.”
He also famously told a journalist that he did not study singing, he studied silence.
The work of these poets, bards and troubadours does not only remind us of the essence of living, the love of humanity and the world, but urges us to stop and listen. We are reminded that silence is not merely a void, but the story that is not being told, and needs to be. It is also the silence that brings us closer to knowing – beyond words, facts, and sounds – something deeper, wiser and profound.
How the universe is like a bellows!
Empty, yet it gives a supply that never fails;
The more it is worked, the more it brings forth.
By many words is wit exhausted.
Rather therefore, hold to the core.
Lao Tze
P.S. In the silence of my readers I intuit the sound of appreciation, but sometimes, and in today’s noisy world, responding helps. If you like my work, feel free to tip me. Thank you so much for your time and attention.
Love this! Gonna read it again properly when I have more time.