| Description | The Sub Collection consists of sound recordings transferred onto CD-ROMs; tape boxes; documents which were found enclosed in the box with the tape; and reel to reel tapes containing the original sound recordings.
Time periods: the original recordings were made from 1947 to 1978. Some traditional songs and music may be centuries old. There are many songs and music contemporary with the recordings.
Geography: The project includes not only songs and music from the British Isles, but from several countries in Europe including Greece, Italy, Hungary, Albania, Rumania. There is also music from Africa, India, Japan, China, North America, Trinidad. There is a particular emphasis on the West Midlands (Birmingham and Black Country) for recordings with traditional singers.
Language: The recordings are mostly in English, Scottish and Irish (including Gaelic); there are local dialects, especially from the Black Country. Some songs in the Grey Cock Folk Club performances are in Italian, German, Bengali. A. L. Lloyd’s lecture and programmes include songs in Rumanian, Albanian, different African languages etc.
Music: A large variety of musical instruments are recorded, including autoharp, banjo, concertina, dulcimer, fiddle, flute, guitar, hurdy-gurdy, jew’s harp, Northumbrian pipes, uillean pipes whistle.
Subject Matter: There are many recordings which relate to the use of the tape recorder and to broadcasting and documentary skills.
The recordings with traditional singers, often elderly women and men cover much of their life histories along with the songs they learned. They come from both rural and urban backgrounds and there is much about work (e.g. chain making, mining, farm work, factory work and domestic work) and life experiences such as childhood, religion, entertainment, travel, childbirth, poverty, death. There are also interviews with travellers about the traditions of their way of life.
Much of the interview material is of local interest to Birmingham and the Black Country and illustrates dialects, work and life there in the earlier part of the twentieth century. There are also interviews with people from Dorset, Shropshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Ireland, Scotland etc. Folk music covers a huge range of subjects, touching most aspects of human life, from birth to death, love sex, violence and murder.
There are a considerable number of recordings of folk music and song by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, many from long playing records they recorded, and also many talks and teachings given by them on the skills and techniques of singing and performing.
There are also songs about sea and the navy; industrial and work songs, songs about myths and folklore; Irish and Scottish traditional songs; travellers’ songs and story telling; songs addressing the politics of both sex and class.
There is also material on racism in society, particularly in the recordings of travellers and for example, in the recordings of Charlotte Brooks, a black woman involved in education in Washington U.S.A. in the 1960s.
The fourth section includes recordings of classes and talks by Ewan MacColl and discussions with the Critics Group on a wide range of subjects relating to songs, singing, song writing, story telling etc. There are also recordings about political satire and drama. |
| AdminHistory | The Charles Parker Archive comprises the sound recordings and working papers amassed by H. Charles Parker D.S.C. M.A. (1919-80) during his lifetime. Charles Parker was born in Bournemouth in 1919, joined the Navy and commanded a submarine during the Second World War and was awarded a DSC; took a degree in history at Queen's College, Cambridge and joined the BBC in 1949. In 1954 he moved to Birmingham as a radio features producer, and was employed full-time by the BBC until 1972. He was passionate about the cultural importance of the oral tradition and folk song and devoted much of his life to activities through which he could demonstrate their significance and continued relevance. Through the BBC he did his most famous work on the development of radio documentary techniques, his 'radio ballad' Singing the Fishing winning the prestigious Prix Italia for the BBC in 1960. There is widespread recognition of the contribution he made to the art of broadcasting in the media today, a fact reflected in the biographical The Ballad of Charles Parker broadcast by the BBC in 1995.
Parker's colossal energy was reflected in the other projects he was involved in, which extended far beyond his official work for the BBC, into lectures for the Workers' Educational Association, the National Association for the Teaching of English, and the Polytechnic of Central London; extra-mural projects such as his collaboration with Arnold Wesker on The Maker and the Tool in 1962, and engagement in the Folk Music Revival of the 1960s and 1970s as a performer. His encounters with working people in his work for the BBC, and his association with leading figures in the Revival such as A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, led him to adopt an increasingly political stance on a broad range of social and cultural issues. After leaving the BBC in 1972, he turned his unique talents as a performer and producer to the service of radical theatre, becoming a founder and mainstay of the Banner Theatre of Actuality in Birmingham. He died during rehearsals for a Banner production in 1980.
Charles Parker was a central figure in the debate about 'Culture and Society' which resonated through the 1960s and 1970s. This was a dispute about the relation of 'High Art, Pop Art and Mass Society', begun by F.R.Leavis and Edward Thompson in the 1930s. During the 1950s it had been taken up by the New Left, and was widely debated in artistic and intellectual circles. A key book in the debate was Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) which contrasted the working class culture of the 1930s with the Americanised pop culture of the 1950s, to the detriment of the latter.
Parker, like Hoggart, was deeply suspicious of modern pop culture and concerned about its effects on working class culture, but unlike Hoggart, he was actively engaged in attempting to resist American capitalism. He developed his views through lecturing on folk music to a series of Workers' Educational Association classes in Birmingham in the 1960s, and came to believe that the vibrancy of vernacular speech was the key to good communication, and that educators had to learn from its example in order to communicate well in the era of electronic information. Secondly, he argued that the development of capitalist industrial society was in danger of destroying the social and historical roots needed to establish personal and collective identity, and that this posed critical problems for the well-being of society. He also remained strongly influenced by Christianity, which many of those who shared his political views found difficult to reconcile with his other tenets. There were undoubtedly contradictions and complexities in Parker's views, but had he developed these lines of thought, and his related critiques of pop culture and the folk revival, as a coherent body of thought, he might have shared some of the limelight which writers like Hoggart, Adorno, Marcuse and McLuhan enjoyed in the 1960s.
Parker was, however, essentially a practitioner rather than a theorist, and believed that it was through local, regionally-based initiatives close to working-class communities that the trail had to be blazed. In the mid 1960s, he pursued an impressive range of activities. He was in regular contact with a group of folk singers and artists in London working under the direction of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and known as the Critics Group. The Critics Group was collecting a repertoire of regional songs which they were recording for Argo Records. Parker was the driving force behind the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre, which undertook a similar hunt for songs from the Midlands. Some of the results were issued on the Topic record, The Wide Midlands (1971). The Folk Centre also presented concerts by luminaries such as Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, the Exiles and Ravi Shankar, and organised semi-formal folk sessions, which developed into an independent club, the Grey Cock Folk Club, after 1967. Parker's classes therefore took place not as a detached intellectual activity but as an active element in a thriving, non-metropolitan sub-culture.
Parker had been involved with theatre from his years at Cambridge, and by the early 1960s he was involved with a theatre group called the Levellers, who performed at St. Peter's Church, Harborne, where he worshipped in Birmingham. Parker's interest in documentary folk theatre attracted a group of people who were both active in the folk revival and committed to anti-racist and anti-fascist political ideas. Through the shows that Parker produced with this group, he worked towards a distinctive form of drama documentary in which tape recorded speech or other actuality, newspaper clippings or historical material, for example, provided the base into which traditional or contemporary folk song was woven.
Much of the technique was already in his head in 1962 when he prepared The Maker and the Tool, a multi-media documentary drama for presentation at six festivals in major cities run by Arnold Wesker in association with the Trades Councils. It came to full fruition, however, after Parker left the BBC. In the autumn of 1973 a new theatre group, the future Banner Theatre Company in embryo, was gathered from the regular performers at the Grey Cock Folk Club. The initial project was to produce a version of Parker's radio ballad, The Big Hewer, known as Collier Laddie. The show combined Parker's established mix of actuality, folk song and slide projection with dance and movement. Collier Laddie was produced at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, and was so successful that the group decided to take it on tour. From this success, the Banner Theatre Company was born, and over the years 1974 - 1980, Parker was involved in a series of shows with the company which gave it a considerable reputation in both the Labour movement and the community arts world.
At his death, Parker left a very substantial archive of sound recordings of speech and music, his working files of correspondence, notebooks, notes, transcripts of lectures, production books, and articles, and a library of over 1,000 volumes on the subjects of oral tradition, song, music and politics.
The recordings included in the ' A Future for Ordinary Folk' project include, in addition to interviews and lecture work from the 1960s and 1970s, those made with three organisations of which he was a member: the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre, the Grey Cock Folk Club, and the Critics Group.
The Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre, as mentioned above, was started in 1965 with the aims of collecting and carrying out research into Midland folk material from both oral and printed sources; disseminating such material through publication, performance and other means; furthering and developing the knowledge of all aspects of traditional folk music and, to this end, establishing a collection of books, recordings and documents dealing with folk music and other relevant material. At the end of the first year, according to a membership notice [in MS 4000/1/8/13/1] the members had already collected over four hundred items of Midlands song from oral and printed sources and prepared a selection of the material for publication; had acquired tapes of most of the traditional singers of Britain; had promoted a seminar on singing style by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger; had organised a successful concert in Birmingham by Ravi Shankar; and had performed at the Singers' Club in London and at the midlands arts centre in Birmingham. The Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre had also affiliated to the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The centre produced a long playing record in 1969 called The Wide Midlands and a book Songs of the Midlands.
The Grey Cock Folk Club grew out of the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre, starting in 1967 as a performance outlet for material being collected. It was named after the ballad discovered and collected by members of the Folk Centre from a Birmingham singer, Mrs Cecilia Costello. Performances at the club were recorded for research and information purposes and were included as part of the tape collection of the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre.
The Critics Group was a group of singers and musicians who met regularly with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger from 1964 to 1971 to explore the art and politics of performance and provide criticism for each other. As well as the development of folk singing they took part in theatre projects such as the 'Festival of Fools', giving annual performances based on political satire. They also recorded, in 1966, as a radio ballad, a modern version of 'Romeo and Juliet' for schools. The group were also involved in the 'Folksingers against Vietnam' anti-war movement and in the Women's movement. Again, recordings were made of the sessions for reference and educational reasons.
Persons recorded on these Critics' Group tapes were (in alphabetical order): John Andrews; Frankie Armstrong; Rex Benjamin; Bob Blair; Brian Byrne; Jim Carroll; Phil Colclough; Pat Creedy; John Faulkner; Luke Kelly; Donniel Kennedy; Floyd Kennedy; Sandra Kerr; Pat Mackenzie; Jim O'Connor; Roy Palmer; Charles Parker; Brian Pearson; Jimmy Ross; Irwin Silber; Dick Snell; Denis Turner; Jack Warshaw; Terry Yarnell. |