Debt we owe to the folk revival of the sixties

feeling of owing quite a lot to that man, whom I never knew, and to all

the others who contributed to what is loosely described as the folk

revival in Britain.

We are all, one way or another, products of the forces we are exposed

to when young. The inquiring mind, as much as any other potential

characteristic, needs stimulus. Growing up in small-town Scotland, there

was certainly room for encouragement to question what passed for

authority and assumed values.

I suppose that each generation, to lesser or greater extent, draws its

critical faculties from some movement in society. Equally, there are a

multitude of reasons why the sixties were a period of particular

ferment, as if the lid had been taken off suppressed suspicions about

the integrity of the status quo.

But the role of folk-song in its more political forms, which soon

spread into other branches of music and popular expression, should not

be underestimated as an agent for change. And it was not only the

substance of what was sung, but the style of those who wrote and sang

it, that jostled the consciousness.

Coming from Dunoon, I encountered all of this in particularly stark

and, I have not the slightest doubt, influential form. The Holy Loch was

at the kernel of the Scottish folk revival, which came faster and more

acerbically than in the rest of Britain. Song, and song with humour,

were powerful instruments of protest.

I was talking about this yesterday to Norman Buchan, who recalled the

contrast with Aldermaston, where they sang worthy songs of aspiration --

The Family of Man -- and impending doom -- Hark the H-Bomb's Thunder. At

Holy Loch the words of Josh MacRae, Maurice Blythman and Buchan himself

rasped with ridicule as well as political comment.

The horror with which many, but by no means all, of the local populace

greeted this influx served to heighten the challenge that it posed. Even

at that age the gut didn't take long to tell you whether you stood with

contemporaries who carried banners saying ''Go Home Weirdies,'' or with

those who laughed, sang, and stood against the nuclear presence.

There is no doubt that the folk revival helped politicise a large part

of that Scottish generation. The wonderful songs of MacColl and Seeger,

on every subject of principled dispute, national and international, were

matched by those of songwriters whom their example encouraged. A

tradition of song as a political weapon was revived, though it now

scarcely flourishes.

Yet the astonishing point is that it had, before the late fifties,

come close to being moribund. The few who sang at all of struggle, to a

wider audience, were more likely to draw their material from the United

States of the early twenties, or indeed rural Britain of the nineteenth

century. Song had largely lost its place as a vehicle for contemporary

comment.

Particularly in urban life, the common people were on their way to

sacrificing one of their most potent forms of expression -- the song of

ridicule or challenge to authority; the song which commemorated

struggles which would never find their way into school textbooks; the

song which reflected the dignity of work forms which society held in no

high regard.

Since the fifties were before my conscious time, I am bound to take

Norman Buchan's word for it that this process was at an advanced stage

before the folk revival set in, and that front-runners in the process of

retrieval (alongside the great Hamish Henderson) were Ewan MacColl and

Charles Parker when they trawled the country with tape recorder in

search of spoken experience, which was then transformed into the Radio

Ballads.

Some of the songs which emerged, like Freeborn Man of the Travelling

People and Shoals of Herring, became ''standards'' of the folk revival.

I remember hearing Charles Parker, in later life, talk with great

bitterness of how the BBC sacked him because of inadequate output or, as

he suspected, the political impact of his work. But seldom have there

been more seminal radio programmes.

Folk music has always been an unsatisfactory term for a vast range of

forms, tied together only by the fact that they came from the roots up,

as expressions of popular culture. But the other massive service which

the folk revival achieved, particularly in Scotland, was to rescue from

increasing obscurity the vast range of traditional music which we now

tend to take for granted.

Once again it seems extraordinary that less than 40 years ago most of

that fantastic heritage of music was unknown to the great mass of the

population, neglected and perhaps even despised. The hundreds of bands

who play, write, improvise in the traditional genre are direct

beneficiaries of the folk revival, as are those of us who simply enjoy

the music.

Perhaps if there hadn't been a folk revival around in the sixties, I'd

have ended up doing what I am doing and thinking what I think. Maybe

there would have been equal influences from other sources. Life might

not now be very different if it had never been touched by the humour,

anarchic spirit and good tunes. But I suspect that it would have been

very much poorer.