Open Writing

Social Song

...Street parties to mark Victory in Europe Day, Victory in Japan Day, and Armistice Day were times of celebration and singing. The return from war of fathers, husband, sons and daughters brought more songs, not so much of victory or loss but to share the joy of being alive, home and safe at last. Then it was time to get on with life in post war austerity Britain, but the music didn’t stop...

Dermott Ryder celebrartes the ubiquity of "social'' song.

In those years of growing, before the now ubiquitous motorcar made us hurry everywhere and, paradoxically, the hypnotic television screen glued us to our lounge chairs, I can rarely recall hearing songs described as folk songs.

True, numerous peripatetic and otherwise unemployable academics had travelled the country noting down songs from the folk they met along the way, collected them into books, claimed ownership and called then folk songs but that idiosyncratic pastime ceased to be relevant with the coming and universal distribution of the gramophone record.

I am willing to accept that the term folk song came into useful common usage for a time, but time passed it by. Then, after the last elderly village school music teacher went to her reward, it lost clarity of meaning. Since the nineteen sixties the description folk song been used so indiscriminately that it is almost meaningless. I much prefer the term ‘Social Song’ simply because it makes more sense to me. It embraces traditional songs, authorship mostly unknown, and contemporary songs, authorship mostly known. Above all other considerations it recognizes and honours the songs we sing for pleasure and for comradeship.

As a child, and even growing into youth, the songs of the Irish Diaspora were an inevitable and inescapable part of my life. My family background made it so. Grandparents, parents, family and family friends often carried with them songs so much a part of their lives that they could not be forgotten. They ranged from maudlin to music hall and from relentless revolution to gentle nostalgia. There were other influences too. The comings and goings in the aftermath of the Second World War filled my young world with expectation, excitement and, naturally, with songs all ready for singing.

Street parties to mark Victory in Europe Day, Victory in Japan Day, and Armistice Day were times of celebration and singing. The return from war of fathers, husband, sons and daughters brought more songs, not so much of victory or loss but to share the joy of being alive, home and safe at last. Then it was time to get on with life in post war austerity Britain, but the music didn’t stop.

On the radio, throughout the nineteen-forties, band shows were always on the air and dancing, whether in the parlour with the carpet rolled back or in the local drill hall or conservative club, was the Saturday night escape from the workaday week. Britain needed all the cheering up it could get in the late forties and early fifties.

On our parlour piano Chopin and Liszt vied for time with each other and with the honky tonk contributions of our visiting American cousins. We called them Yanks, or GIs because everything they owned or expropriated was Government Issue. They, the gum chewing army of occupation, the ever-present distributors of nylon stockings, canned Spam, Pall Mall cigarettes and bouncing babies, also lived for song and dance music, bebop and jive. Their energy was boundless and their ability to acquire vast quantities of gramophone records was unparalleled in my experience. One of them, Gung Ho Gordon Gatellier, a name impossible to forget. also had an Indian Brave motorbike.

With hindsight I must confess that not only did I not recognize the advent of cultural imperialism. I enthusiastically embraced it as, on our family gramophone, Jimmie Rogers, Gene Autry, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby did battle with Al Bowlly, Ray Noble, Lesley Sarony, Lesley Holmes, Donald Peers, Flanagan and Allen, Roy Fox, Bert Ambrose, Jack Payne, Jack Hylton, and Vera Lynn.

Later, inexorably, time and tastes again moved on, the old campaigners rested on their laurels and new musical visionaries emerged to claim centre stage.

I suppose I moved on too, or did I? Is it possible that I didn’t move on at all, that I merely bought a bigger record rack, then a tape recorder, then a cassette player and now a CD burner and player, all to feed my habit? Have I, over the years, simply changed the storage and retrieval media and in doing so not moved on at all but simply enlarged my collection of 'Social Song'? Yes, yes, I rather think that must be it.

© Dermott Ryder

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Dermott writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au