SCC Field Diary - Day One

SCC TRIP ONE - Day one Mon 13th August, 2012
London to Oxfordshire to Herefordshire
Sam Lee, Becky Lee and James McDonald

Photo: A Perseid meteor lights up as it streaks through the Earth's atmosphere, as seen and photographed by Ron Garan while aboard the International Space Station on August 13, 2011. Copyright: NASA (Public Domain)

After a night of celebrating British popular music at the London Olympics closing ceremony, I purged myself of recent, fleeting tunes with a spot of star-gazing in the middle of Clapham Common, my local park. The annual meteor shower called the Perseids (so called as they appear in the north east of the sky near the Perseus constellation) had come to town again. Despite the light pollution all around my friend and I as we lay on the grass, we must have seen a dozen meteors burning up as they collided with our atmosphere overhead.This experience of silently staring into the vastness of space in the company of a friend was a suitable way to transition from London life to what I was about to do the following day: Monday the 13^th of August 2012 was the nominally first day of collecting for the Song Collectors Collective. This first trip, as I have explained in my previous blog post, has been supported by the Irish Arts Council and focuses on collecting songs from Irish Travellers.

I arrived into Oxford station in the afternoon and met with Sam Lee and his sister Becky who had been at a music festival at which Sam and his band were performing at the weekend. Though Sam and I have quite a few leads for people to meet up with across Britain and Ireland, indeed we’ve already met with quite a few of them in the past, it was a new path of investigation that we began with.

Sam’s sister Becky was an amateur boxer when she lived in Oxford. As we were in the area, and Irish Travellers have an (in)famous affinity and acknowledged skill at boxing (attested by a recent Olympic silver medal won by bantamweight John Joe Nevin), we decided to make enquiries through her former boxing coach. Zar, a head-teacher at a local primarily school, who knows of a few Traveller sites through both his work and through his involvement with the sport. He recommended a nearby site for us to visit and when we arrived there we spoke with a few young men from the Joyce family who, unsurprisingly, were much more interested in talking about boxing than songs, but they recommended that we visit a woman called Ellie in another camp nearby who they said was a good singer.

When we arrived at Ellie’s trailer, the three of us were welcomed in and we talked for a while about what we were doing, the songs we were interested in and the singing amongst the Travellers. All the while we chatted, Ellie, aged 72, sat upright in a comfortable reclinable chair, while Sam, Becky and I and some of Ellie’s family sat around her on the cushioned window-side seat. As we began to enquire about what songs Ellie knew and where she had learnt them from, she assured us that her singing days were long over and she couldn’t remember the old songs. When Sam suggested the names of certain songs, she said that she did indeed know of the songs, maybe even used to sing them years ago, but they was since forgotten. But a cup of tea later and Ellie was reciting verses of one of the old songs, hesitantly at first but then with the flow and sensitivity of a bard, letting the poetry paint a picture in the minds of each listener. We all fell silent and watched the story play out like a movie in our minds. A couple of verses in, Ellie couldn’t recall the next line so started the verse again, this time singing it to help her remember. What we heard was the delicate, measured voice of a consummate tradition bearer. The song was Shanagolden, which Ellie explained is the story that so often is expressed in Irish song: the loss of a loved one as a consequence of oppression from the ‘Saxon stranger’:

‘Then came the call to arms, love, the heather was aflame 
And from the silent mountains, the Saxon strangers came. 
I held you in my arms love, your blood ran free and bright,
In the fields by Shanagolden, on a lonely summer's night.’

This song was written by Sean McCarthy, the Bard of Finuge (Co. Kerry), in the 20^th century, but has the timelessness of a traditional ballad. And it was with a few more timeless songs from the tradition that Ellie was to treat us that afternoon: her versions of The Bold Trooper, The Jolly Thresherman, and The Barley Straw or The Wheaten Straw (Roud 118, Child 279) as she has it; a song traced back to the court of James V of Scotland in 1525. Within an hour of meeting Sam and Becky at the station in Oxfordshire, we were being entertained with ancient music from a magical singer.

Photo: Ellie and her family with me and Sam in the middle. Copyright: Song Collectors Collective, 2012. songcollectorscollective@gmail.com

Other unexpected gems that afternoon were in hearing a bit of cant spoken by Ellie’s daughter-in-law Maggie and a couple of yarns and a wonderful telling of a ‘coach and horseman’ ghost story by Ellie’s husband John. We’re really looking forward to spending more time with Ellie and her family who were as welcoming as anyone could possible be and said they’d be happy for us to come back and do some recordings for the Song Collectors Collective project when we next pass through the area.

That evening we hit the road for Sam and Becky’s parent’s house in Herefordshire and were again welcomed with open arms and a welcome bottle of wine. As well as recounting the wonderful afternoon we’d had, I told Sam’s mum Stephanie about the Perseid meteor shower that I’d enjoyed the night before and she spent the next half hour lying on the picnic table outside staring at the sky. Story and lore passed on and the eternal remained present, relevant and utterly beautiful.