Singing in the Streets (1951)

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INTRODUCTION — Ewan McVicar
FROM HERE AND THERE

Alan Lomax's 1951 gleanings of children's lore were gathered in a crowded city, a sparsely populated island, a suburban street in Aberdeen, a school playground in Edinburgh, a vigorous singing class in South Uist, and in quiet conversations with people not yet famous.

Early in his visit to Scotland, Lomax had the good fortune to encounter the remarkable and gifted collector of children's lore, James T. Ritchie, whose books and films give an unparalleled view of the richness of Edinburgh children's games, songs, and play activities in the 1950s. Ritchie led one of his principal informants, sweet-voiced Peggy MacGillivray, through the complexities of skipping game and song. Lomax's subsequent visit to record Ritchie's Norton Park pupils reprising their singing role in Ritchie's film The Singing Street provides a neat comparison between MacGillivray's singing style in an interview context and singing with her peers in the natural open-air habitat of the songs.

Later in his visit, Lomax recorded a group of Aberdeen children under the leadership of 10-year old Jack Mearns, who 50 years later provided a fascinating account of Lomax in action and reconstructed who performed what.

We have included a number of English rhymes on this CD, in part because Lomax recorded very few children's songs in England in 1951, and in part because of the high quality of the material from singer Ewan MacColl. His upbringing in a Scots family living in Salford, England, gave him a wonderful command of Scots adult song, yet the childlore he recorded here for Lomax was almost all English.

Alan Lomax's continuing interest in children's game songs led to the creation of a wonderful CD (Rounder CD 1716) and a book on children's game and pass-play songs in the eastern Caribbean, Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean, written with J. D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes (1997).

CONTINUOUS RE-CREATION

These recordings are not nursery rhymes — rhymes or songs taught by adults to children. Rather they are the folklore of children themselves, first heard from their pre-teen elders, learned along with their peers aged seven to ten, and abandoned when puberty struck. Some of these children's songs travel the globe in multiple guises. Others droop and wither before they can be collected and preserved. Those that survive adapt to local languages and conditions, and versions multiply like those of the Child ballads made and preserved by adults.1 The children's songs are created and re-created as they are adapted, glued together, or chopped into fragments. They drop their tunes and become rhymes, other tunes are then applied to them. Sense becomes nonsense and is rewritten to become sense again.

They function to develop language, memory and physical co-ordination. Children utilize many of them to accompany physical play activity: group or individual selection for games ("counting out" and elimination), group game songs, for use with a ball, and for skipping, hand-clapping, elastic ropes, and so forth. Others are used for performance and include wordplay and parody verses, or narrative ballads of more than one stanza, often featuring surreal humor.

In general, the girls learn and use the play songs, and the boys sing the songs about football and violence and earth, bawdy songs and rhymes. Some perform- ance songs and ballads are performed in common by girls and boys. Many songs of all types exist in both bawdy and "polite" versions (see "Aunty Mary Had a Canary"), but few bawdy songs were offered to Lomax: children tend to protect tender adult ears.

Variants of songs and rhymes blossom like flowers in a meadow, but children and adults tend to have strong views about which text is the "correct" one, the associated activities, and where the songs originated. "The Wind Blows High" is considered to be Irish because the folk group the Dubliners recorded an Irish version; "Johnny Todd" is stated to be from Liverpool because the tune was used for a TV police drama series set in that city; the Newcastle version of "When The Boat Comes In" is claimed as the original and definitive text. Yet there are old, distinctively Scots versions of all three songs.

 

THE SCOTTISH WOOLBAG

Scottish children's lore has attracted much attention from interested adults, and many fine collections have been published. Robert Chambers was the trail- blazer in 1826. The end of the nineteenth century brought a flood of them — a survey of Golspie in Sutherland in 1897, Games and Diversions of Argyleshire in 1901, Robert Ford's general account in 1903. Early in the twentieth century, Gavin Greig and the Rev. James Duncan gathered songs from all ages in Northeast Scotland, while in Edinburgh the Rymour Club swept up gems and dross. Alan Lomax credited William Montgomerie for his help during the 1951 trip. In 1947, Montgomerie and his wife Norah had published the first of several assemblages of Scottish Nursery Rhymes, collected from oral and printed sources. At the same time, the most produc- tive collector of Scottish children's lore, James T. Ritchie, was beginning to uncover and report a wonderful harvest within a single Edinburgh school.

Later, Scottish material is strongly in evidence in the series of seminal books by Iona and Peter Opie, who wrote that "Scottish children seem to be in a happy position. They know most of the English child's rhymes . . . and they also have their own hamely clinky rarely known to children outside Scotland." After quoting some examples, the Opies report: "Pluckings like these from the Scottish woolbag of oral song seem to be as numerous as they were in the eighteenth century."2

HOW MANY SONGS?

Here is a small number-crunching exercise to illustrate variety and change in the repertoire. Of the 50 Scottish and 20 English children's songs and rhymes on this CD, only 10 overlap with the 130 or so that Gavin Greig and Rev. James Duncan3 collected in Northeast Scotland in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s and '70s, the teacher Ian Davison collected4 over 500 distinct songs, rhymes, and ballad fragments from Glasgow schoolchildren and found versions of 15 of the items on this CD. (Although versions of nine items included here were found both by Greig-Duncan and Davison, the texts in each collection vary radically.) Finally, of the 18 items from the streets of Salford in the early 1920s recalled here by Ewan MacColl, only two were also collected by Lomax in Scotland.

TWO TO SING

Some of the songs heard on this disc are always asso- ciated with particular tunes, but many draw on a ' limited supply of floating tunes that are amended as they are applied to and shuffled for texts. They include march and dance tunes, music hall tunes, and the tunes of popular songs. Mostly only the first strain of a melody is employed, sometimes only the first line.

A few tunes that are applied to numerous children's texts have a long Scots pedigree. The internationally known tune for "London Bridge" derives from one part of the nine-part "Gabhaidh Sinn An Rath Mor" ("We Will Take the High Road") bagpipe march that in the fifteenth century belonged to Clan MacIntyre of Cruachan. The march was appropriated by the Stewarts of Appin, who played it in battle. This eventually led to it being called the "Sherramuir March," a Scots text about the 1715 Battle of Sheriffmuir. "The Merry Matanzie," more widely known as "The Mulberry Bush" or "Nancy Dawson," appears in the Scottish Skene manuscript of around 1620.

IN PERFORMANCE

We are fortunate that these recordings include not just lyrics, tunes, and descriptions of how the songs and rhymes were used, but also a variety of perform- ance styles. Alan Lomax noted in a 1951 BBC radio broadcast5 how the singing styles of five- to seven- year olds differed from those of older children. In his spoken introduction to "The Wind, the Wind," he said:

Sometimes these rhymes sound very simple and monotonous, but that is because they were never meant to be sung indoors. When the children take them into the street and the complex rhythms of play begin, then one can hear a subtle and refined musical art at work, which is as old as humanity. Listen to these Aberdeen children at their skipping with the rope smacking the pavement.

This is not folklore in action, overheard by the tape recorder. All performances are mediated by selection, and most are in some sense rehearsed. They include solo and small group performances physically placed for optimum recording quality, a professional adult presentation, a group that had already been selected and recorded for a film, and a tightly rehearsed choir. Although singing and the sounds of the movements associated with game activities can be heard, the singers are not the players. The presence of children in action in an outdoor setting changes performance style, as can be seen from the example of Peggy MacGillivray, who in the context of an interview gives melodic performances but who also participates in vigorous and at times joyous outdoor group performances.

 

IN MEMORY

The listener's response to this album will in part be guided by individual memories of childhood and child lore — a lore that we've all had a share in. Childhood memories were also important in identifying the original performers on this CD, which led to much media interest and to reunions of participants in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

 

IN SEQUENCE

The songs and rhymes on tracks 1-7 provide an introduction to the range of material that Lomax recorded. The remaining tracks are grouped according to function, as described by the informants or by James T. Ritchie (although, as the notes indicate, a song used for a game by one informant might be used to swing ropes by another informant and as an amusement rhyme by a third). Tracks 8-22 are game songs, virtually all of which are widely known and have been documented in wonderful detail in The Singing Game by Peter and Iona Opie and in Brown Girl in the Ring. Tracks 23-26 are songs and rhymes for ball bouncing; Tracks 27-33 are songs for skipping; and tracks 34-38 are rhymes used for choosing who was on which "side" or was "it." Tracks 39-43 are narrative songs and ballads with a story and more than one verse that were often used for "guising" — going from door to door at Hallowe'en in costume (or disguise) and performing for cash, sweets, or fruit. The final tracks, 44-56, are amusement songs, utilizing word play, fun, surreal humor, parody, and naming, shaming, and proclaiming individuals.

 

INFORMANTS

The informants include urban children in Edinburgh, suburban children in Aberdeen, island speakers of Gaelic, a major collector of Scottish children's song, and adult recollections from two pillars of the British folk song revival.

Cedar Place Children, Aberdeen

When Alan Lomax visited Cedar Place, a mile north of Aberdeen City center, to record the well-known sweet-voiced bothy ballad6 singer John Mearns and his wife, Alice, he also recorded their son Jackie Mearns (age 10 at the time) and a group of his young friends who lived and played together in the street — Pat and Jennifer Cushnie; Jim and Willie Hunter; Jack and Kathleen Mearns; Norma and Tom Watt; and Arthur, Christopher, and Gwen Ronald, who "lived round the corner." Jack Mearns has vivid memories of the day:7

Alan was unaccompanied on his visit to my parents' flat in Cedar Place, a quiet cul-de-sac in Aberdeen. The children were recorded in the street outside my home and my parents were recorded within our home. . . . When Alan was trying to record us singing and skip- ping, someone always tripped on the rope. Alan then arranged for two children to "Caw the Ropey" [turn the rope] while the remainder sang. . . . I saw that he had a guitar in his campervan. After all the recording was over, and in response to my constant pleading, my father eventually asked Alan if he would be willing to play for us. Alan immediately agreed and retrieved his guitar. He sat down on the piano stool and started singing an up-tempo American country song. While he was singing he stamped loudly on the floor with his foot. My brother and I were mortified because, as we stayed in an upstairs flat, we were never allowed to make a noise with our feet. My father always reminded us that "It was Mrs Browns roof." Our horror quickly changed to sheer delight to see that Alan was being allowed to do what we children were forbidden to do.

Garrynamonie schoolchildren, South Uist

Garrynamonie, now spelled Gearraidh Na Monadh, is a mile from the south coast of the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist,8 birthplace of the Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald. The school9 was demolished in the late 1990s, but the schoolhouse is still in use. The confident "choir" singing of the children, and their strong Gaelic accents, lead to an initial suspicion that their four songs in standard English were taught to them in school, but closer listening identifies the unclear and illogical textual variations that are a hallmark of oral learning from child to child. One of the singers, Annie McInnes nee MacLellan, explained that the songs were "action songs that must have been brought into the islands during the war, when a lot of young people came in. We were Gaelic speakers, and we probably didn't know what we were singing." Kate MacPhee taught the choir and was an inspirational teacher, "A lovely person; she wrote plays in Gaelic." Three 1951 pupils at the school have been contacted, and none has a recollection of Lomax's visit. The school might seem isolated and distant to city dwellers, but Lomax would have been one among many visitors brought by Calum MacLean, whose brother was the poet Sorley MacLean.

Hamish Henderson (1919-2002)

The Perthshire-born, Edinburgh-based Hamish Henderson, who was a collector of song and story, a discoverer of many key tradition bearers, a poet, songwriter, and towering figure in the Scottish folk revival was Alan Lomax's guide and companion in Edinburgh and on his collecting trips in Northeast Scotland. Lomax wrote to Henderson that:

I've been traveling the roads of the world, hitting the high places and low places, the rough and the smooth, for about twenty years, recording folksongs and ballads from all sorts of people, but I have never had such kind and warm-hearted treatment from anywhere as from the people of Scotland.10

Ewan MacColl (1915-1989)

Arguably the most influential figure of the British folk revival, Ewan MacColl (born Jimmie Miller in Salford, near Manchester) was a singer, songwriter, playwright, co-creator of the BBC Radio Ballads, and a collector. Alan Lomax recorded MacColl singing Scots ballads, Gaelic songs learned phonetically, and much else. MacColl recounted his experiences recording for Lomax in his autobiography, Journeyman.11

According to MacColl, it was the girls who "taught us [younger children] to sing . . . scores of the kind of rhymes and songs used in skipping games." There are contradictory accounts as to whether or not MacColl introduced Alan Lomax to Hamish Henderson.

 

Peggie MacGillivray,
pupil at Norton Park School, Edinburgh

Edinburgh-born Margaret Hunter MacGillivray, now Margaret Currie, was 15 years old on July 12, 1951, when Alan Lomax recorded her.. A wonderful informant and performer, she is melodic and confident in performance and articulate and clear in her accounts of how the songs were used.

 

Norton Park schoolchildren, Edinburgh

Included on this disc are some of the songs (with the same texts and tunes) heard in the film The Singing Street, in all probability sung by substantially the same group of girls. James T. Ritchie noted that the female singers for the film were Peggy MacGillivray, Audrey Fraser, Harriet Sandison, Joan Grant, Hazel Agnew, Marjorie Lock, and Laura Gardner. (Boys called Williamson, Smith, Peffers, and Stewart also sang for the film but were not recorded by Lomax.) However, the names of Christine Halloway, Mary Gray, and Emma Thomson are employed in the songs and perhaps they participated. All the singers on this disc are female aged 12-15 years and were recorded on an unknown date in 1951. The Norton Park School lay on the border between the city of Edinburgh and its port of Leith, next to the Easter Road football ground, home of the Hibernian Football Club. The building is considered of "architectural worth," and has been converted for use by community groups. These songs would not have been learned at Norton Park, but at nearby primary schools, such as Ferrier St., which the informants attended between the ages of 5-11.

 

Dr James T. R. Ritchie (1908-98)

The major collector of the songs, games, and stories of Edinburgh schoolchildren, Dr. James "Docky" Ritchie was a much-loved and respected teacher and gifted communicator. His film, The Singing Street, with its astonishingly evocative 1951 scenes of Edinburgh children at play, was made with a group of colleagues, the Norton Park Group, a few months before Lomax interviewed him. The famous documentary filmmaker John Grierson called it "the best amateur film I ever saw."12 Ritchie also produced several highly acclaimed radio programs and two books, which have been republished recently by Mercat Press.

 

Unidentified English child

Two short items (tracks 36 and 58) were recorded in the midst of a number of songs from Ewan MacColl. The child is not his eldest son, Hamish, who was a few months old in 1951. Is this the son of a colleague in Theatre Workshop?

 

—Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, July 2003

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chambers, Robert. Popular Rhymes of Scotland. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1870.

Ford, Robert. Children's Rhymes, Games Songs and Stories. Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1903.

Lomax, Alan. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Pantheon, 1997.

Longstaff, Margaret. Reflections from the Golden City. Article in Scottish Book Collector during 2000.

MacColl, Ewan. Journeyman. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990.

Montgomerie, N. and W. Traditional Scottish Nursery Rhymes. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1985.

Opie, Iona, and Peter. Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford: OUP, 1969.

_______. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford, OUP, 1959.

_______. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: OUP, 1997.

___________. The Singing Game. Oxford: OUP, 1985.

Ramsay, Rev A. A. W., et al. Nicht at Eenie. Warlingham: Samson Press, 1932.

Rea, E G. A School In South Uist: Reminiscences of a Hebridean Schoolmaster, 1890-1913. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1997.

Ritchie, James T. R. Golden City. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1965.

___________. The Singing Street. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964.

Rymour Club, Miscellanea of the Edinburgh; 1906-11.

Shuldham-Shaw, P., and E. Lyle, et al. The Greig-Duncan Folk

Song Collection. Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1980-2002. Eight volumes.

UNPUBLISHED
Ian Davison's card index is now in the possession of Ewan McVicar.

RADIO SCRIPTS
BBC Home Service
A programme of Scots ballads and folk songs collected in
Scotland. Recorded on August 13, 1951.

Folksong from the Lowlands: A Ballad-Hunter Looks at Britain (an eight-part series). Program 5, transmitted November 29, 1957.

RECORDINGS
Brown Girl in the Ring. Caribbean Voyage. Rounder CD 1716, 1997.

World Library of Folk and Primitive Music: Scotland Volume 3. Rounder CD 1743, 1998.

FILM
Films from the Golden City, four short films made by The Norton Park Group [Ritchie, McIsaac, Townsend, and Geissier], including The Singing Street. Available from The Museum of Childhood, High Street, Edinburgh. 

THANKS TO: Margaret Longstaff, niece of James T. Ritchie,for access to his papers and other material; Linda McVicar; Jack Mearns; various former pupils of Norton Park and Garrynamonie Schools; Rogier Kappers for copies of radio scripts; Iona and Peter Opie; School of Scottish Studies.

 

FOOTNOTES

1  Ballads identified and codified by scholar Francis J. Child in his five-volume The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898).

2  Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, pp. 26, 28.

3  Published in Volume 8 of the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, 2002.

4  Unpublished, held as a card index.

5  BBC Radio broadcast, recorded August 13, 1951. Bothy ballads are about the work and life of farms and farmers in Northeast Scotland.

7  Names, description of the visit, and notes about the use of the songs all come from letters from Jack Mearns to Ewan McVicar in 2002.

8  "I slipped away home (after a South Uist ceilidh) through morning mists which reached out of the lochs like soft white hands past the loch where the swans were like stars on the dark water .... In daylight, South Uist is somewhat bleak; green mountains along the eastern shore — but along the Atlantic beach a narrow machair with scattered crofts — the thatched cottages of rough hewn stone indistinguishable in the distance from the stones of the plain. The people are poor but there's no nicer folk on earth. They remind you how to live, how to be human." —Alan Lomax, BBC Radio broadcast, recorded on August 13, 1951.

9  F. G. Rea's A School in South Uist, a vivid account of this school 100 years ago, has recently been republished.

10  Letter (dated September 20, 1951, to Hamish Henderson) printed in The Armstrong Nose.

11  Journeyman, p. 50. Pages 60-65 give a fine detailed account of street games and activities in Salford.

12 Quoted by John Heyes in the introduction to the 1999 edition of Golden City.

13  See also the Rounder CD 1716, Brown Girl in the Ring.

 

CREDITS
Recorded between 1951 and 1957 by Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson, and the MacLeans of Raasay Collection Producers: Anna L. Chairetakis and Jeffrey A. Greenberg

Introduction, song notes, and transcriptions by Ewan McVicar
Sound Restoration / Mastering Producer: Steve Rosenthal
Mastering: Phil Klum, Jigsaw Sound, NYC
Original tape transfers made by Michael Miernick
Production Coordinator: Matthew Barton
Art Direction and Design: J Sylvester Design, NYC
Photos: Front cover and inside photos by Raymond Townsend from the books Golden City and The Singing Street by James T. R. Ritchie (Published by Oliver & Boyd, London, 1964 and 1965). Alan Lomax photo by Shirley Collins Associate Editor: Ellen Harold
Editorial Assistant: Nathan Salsburg
Editorial Consultant: Susan Salsburg
Series Coordinator for Rounder Records: Bill Nowlin
Series Consultants: Bess Lomax Hawes, Gideon D'Arcangelo

 

SPECIAL THANKS:

Elliot Hoffman, Rogier Kappers, Linda McVicar, Dr. Margaret Longstaff, niece of James Ritchie, for access to his papers and other material, Jack Mearns, Margaret Currie, Pat & Jennifer Cushnie, Jim & Willie Hunter, Annie McInnes, Kathleen Mearnes, Arthur, Christopher, & Given Ronald, Norma & Tom Watt, and Hunter College of the City University of New York.   Every effort has been made to make these historic recordings sound as goodas they did when they were made in the field. All transfers were made from the original source materials using the Prism 24-bit A to D converters and e Prism 24-bit Noise Shaping System.

The Alan Lomax Collection is planned to include 150 or more albums. The Collection is organized into various series, yet will also contain other unique releases as well. The Rounder Records website will always have the most up-to-date information, and the Alan Lomax Collection portion of the website can be directly accessed at: http://www.rounder.com/rounder/artists/lomax_alan/ or for more info, email: info@rounder.com

The Collection currently comprises:

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler
Southern Journey Series
Caribbean Voyage
Classic Louisiana Recordings
The Concert and Radio Series
Portraits Series
Prison Songs
Christmas Songs
World Library of Folk and
Primitive Music
Deep River of Song
Italian Treasury
Folk Songs of England, Ireland,
Scotland & Wales
The Spanish Recordings
American Patchwork Videos
Lomax film work available through
Vestapol Videos


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