devised by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker & Peggy Seeger

A UNIQUE PROJECT IN THE HISTORY OF BOTH BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND BRITISH RADIO

Ewan MacColl scripts, song lyrics & music
Peggy Seeger orchestration & music direction
Charles Parker production

Devised by Ewan MacColl, radio producer Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger, the Radio-Ballads set out to crystallise in words and music the experience of different ways of life - the words being supplied not by actors but by the real occupants of those lives and jobs, whether miners, fishermen, boxers or teenagers. The eight programmes were first broadcast by the BBC between 1958 and 1964. Six of them were subsequently issued on LP but have been unavailable since the early '80s. Song of a Road and The Body Blow have never hitherto been issued in any format. 'The radio-ballads,' wrote a reviewer at the time, 'are about the way we live now, attempting to give this life the quality of epic - "to make", as the documentary film-maker John Grierson once said, "the everyday significant."' The social historian Eric Hobsbawm, writing as Francis Newton in the New Statesman, called them 'The most valuable products of the British folk-music movement'.

A 16 page full colour booklet (as reproduced here) describing the series and its background is available separately (and at no charge).
In their book of songs, I'm a Freeborn Man, the The Radio-Ballads were described by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger as:

... the work of a team of singers, songwriters, technicians, instrumentalists and others who were consciously attempting to apply the techniques of folk creation to one part of the mass media - radio.

From our viewpoint today, this description appears to understate the strength and vision of the concept. For a generation of musicians, broadcasters and media writers, the term radio-ballad is an icon, a benchmark, a milestone. When they were first broadcast, our daily lives revolved much more around the wireless than nowadays, even though network television was by then already well established, and for many listeners the cultural impact was profound and enduring.

For today's listening public, the term radio-ballad may no longer carry that weight of meaning, but these programmes are as entertaining and stimulating as when they were first created. Perhaps this series of CD re-issues will help to put into context so much that followed in both radio and television and will find new resonance among older and younger listeners alike.

The series was originally transmitted on the BBC Home Service as follows:

The Ballad of John Axon 2 July 1958
Song of a Road 5 November 1959
Singing the Fishing 16 August 1960
The Big Hewer 18 August 1961
The Body Blow 27 March 1962
On the Edge 13 February 1963
The Fight Game 3 July 1963
The Travelling People 17 April l964

Immediately after The Ballad of John Axon was first broadcast, letters started arriving at the BBC requesting that the programme be repeated, which it was, on 5 August l958. Several of the programmes were repeated one or more times on the Home Service after their first broadcast, during the period up to l964. Singing the Fishing, which won the Prix d'Italia in October 1960, was also re-broadcast on the BBC Home Service and later on Radio 4 a number of times. More significantly, there were quite a lot of people - particularly teachers - who wrote to Charles Parker singing the praises of the radio- ballad format as a learning resource and enquiring whether copies could be made for educational use. Parker was particularly inundated with requests for LP or tape copies of On the Edge, soon after its first transmission. Letters were also received from listeners who found the texture of some of the programmes sometimes so rich that they missed much of them in a single hearing, and felt frustrated.

Parker had recognised almost immediately that there was a ready-made audience for LP versions. Even before John Axon was broadcast, he was conducting a memo-writing campaign aimed at the BBC mandarins responsible for what were then called 'transcription rights', insisting that, with the co-operation of MacColl and Seeger, the necessary contractual formula could be found to make commercial release possible.

After protracted negotiations between the BBC, Parker, MacColl and Seeger, and various record labels (including Topic and Folkways) during the sixties, the Argo label eventually acquired commercial LP rights from what was then called BBC Enterprises. Managed by Harley Usill, Argo was a satellite company of Decca, specialising in spoken word (particularly the Shakespeare plays, and classical and contemporary poetry), documentary recordings of steam railway sounds, early music and some traditional folk music. The LP versions of the radio-ballads were supervised by Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl and six of them were released on the Argo label between 1965 and 1970 with the following catalogue numbers:

The Ballad of John Axon (1965 DA139)
Singing the Fishing (1966 DA142)
The Big Hewer (1967 DA140)
The Fight Game (1967 DA141)
The Travelling People (1968 DA133)
On the Edge (1970 DA136)

They remained in the Argo catalogue until 1980 when Decca took over the label and all were soon deleted. This re-issue by Topic is the first time the original masters have been released on CD. Song of a Road and The Body Blow were never released on LP; the Topic CD release is their first in any format.

Nowadays we take for granted the use of speech and music montage in documentary radio and television, particularly when real people talk about themselves, their lives and their views in response to the unseen programme-maker’s questions. Such ‘eye-witness' reporting is inevitably processed through an editorial filter and can often distort or misrepresent the subject's own frame of reference. Yet when it is sensitively done it gives the listener or viewer the feeling of being addressed personally by the speaker.

The collaboration between MacColl, Parker and Seeger, under the aegis of a BBC that was both more tolerant of eccentricity and at the same time more sceptical of radical creativity, was at first allowed sufficient time and money to re-invent the documentary radio format, producing what the writer Albert Casey described as the 'imaginative recreation of experience'. In an article in The Teacher published in January 1964, shortly after the radio-ballad team was disbanded by BBC executives, who deemed the programmes to be too expensive and too long to produce, Casey remarked:

The radio-ballads are about the way we live now, attempting to give this life the quality of epic - 'to make', as John Grierson once said, 'the everyday significant.'

What we hear today in these recordings is a seamless, organic relationship between words and music, that gives dramatic form to different ways of life. A number of key elements contributed to the creation of this new form. These were summarised by Parker in one of his subsequent articles: the innovative use of the tape recorder; the re-assertion of oral tradition; the re-direction of the dramatist back from the 'slice of life' concept of drama to a concept of 'drama and ritual'; and the replacement of the actors in their usual role as mimic of experience by real people -the living voice of the past.

But it was MacColl's experience in popular theatre combined with MacColl and Seeger's conscious use of folk style lyrics, melodies and instrumentation that allowed Parker to experiment and break new ground. In the Radio Times of 2 July 1958 Parker introduced The Ballad of John Axon and, aware of the effect that the radio-ballad form might have on an unsuspecting public, gently warned: 'we took liberties with conventions you may cherish'. Of course, this new form did not arise ready-made from these various strands, but evolved as the first programme was researched and developed. Parker later described how this came about:
At first MacColl and I intended to produce a formal musical, i.e. with actors and dramatic scenes, but when we went to meet John Axon's widow to gain her permission to do the programme, we took a tape recorder with us, to record background material for preparation of the script, but talking with Mrs. Axon and John Axon’s workmates, we soon realised that here in the authentic words of the original men themselves as captured by our tape recorder, was the staple of such a programme.'

The recorded material had to be used as an element in its own right, and not as a basis for words to be put into the mouths of actors. And so finally emerged the radio-ballad form, dispensing entirely with a narrator and with dramatic scenes, using simply the three elements of lyric, music and actuality recordings with effects. The seed of this creative breakthrough, from Parker's point of view, was attributed by him to his interest in the ballad form, which had begun in the summer of 1942. He had been serving as a submarine officer in the Mediterranean, and was convalescing in a hotel in the mountains of Lebanon, where he met a group of US airmen and for a week all they had to do was drink, play bridge and sing. Later Parker wrote: 'mostly we sang, and in the course of that week I learned Casey Jones and many other American ballads'. For the next five years he sang Casey Jones whenever opportunity offered, but it wasn't until he joined the BBC that he realised there was an English industrial folklore as well as American.

MacColl had first met Parker in the mid-Fifties when recording a talk for the North American Service of the BBC and was later invited to take part in a programme written by Alan Lomax and produced by Parker for Midland Region radio. But it was not until 1957 that Parker gave MacColl his first commission: the script for a radio feature about the steam-locomotive driver John Axon, posthumously awarded the George Cross for an act of heroism. The epic quality of the story had made a profound impression on Parker and the original brief was to write a dramatic tribute to one man's bravery, using the existing radio conventions of actors, narrators and caption voices. The initial field recordings (referred to in Parker's notes, above) were to have formed the basis of a dramatic reconstruction performed by actors and musicians, but the strength and depth of the material persuaded MacColl to rethink the concept. Imperceptibly, a hybrid format emerged in which the words and voices of those involved in the story became the building blocks on which the narrative and music were constructed. The difference was that, through careful tape-editing, the voices themselves would retell the story and communicate to the listener the excitement of the moment, without the need for actors or additional script.

MacColl and Parker had returned from the field with over forty hours of recorded material. MacColl later wrote:

The impact of this great mass of material was staggering and it was immediately apparent that what we had got in the can was a unique picture of a way of life, told in words which were themselves charged with the special kind of vitality which derives from involvement with a work process. Furthermore, it seemed to us that the railwayman’s speech was full of the same kind of symbols and verbal nuances as those which inform the ballads and folk songs of our tradition, and it was obvious that one could not re-write it without reducing and falsifying it.

MacColl wrote the music for John Axon in ten days, 'conceiving each song either as an extension of a specific piece of actuality recording, as a comment on that recording, or as a single frame for a collection of actuality pieces. 'This framework of songs evolved from the actuality and, in the search for a robust and appropriate form MacColl echoed the speech patterns and accents of the railwaymen, choosing to orient them towards the American railroad-song tradition. He then made a rough assembly on tape of the songs and actuality, which MacColl himself acknowledged was a long way from his original conception. However, by this time, Peggy Seeger had returned from touring in Europe and Asia, and MacColl invited her to work on the programme, particularly to write accompaniments to the songs and incidental music tailored to the edited actuality. This could be said to be the defining moment: Seeger's arrangements were to transform the apparently disconnected sequences of recorded speech into a series of smoothly flowing episodes. The radio-ballad was born.

Parker had initial reservations about the use of actuality and the abandonment of narrator's and actors' voices, but despite this he realised that MacColl's conception was a formidable challenge and one that he was prepared to meet. In 1957, this was by no means a simple task: there were no multi-track recording facilities, everything being recorded on quarter-inch single track tape. Parker locked himself in an editing room at the BBC Studios in Maida Vale and transformed himself into a master editor, creating the sequence of music and actuality by splicing together tape 'ranging in length from pieces yards long to shreds and slivers of microscopic size'.

When The Ballad of John Axon was first transmitted on 2 July l958, this marriage of the ballad form and tape recording technology was hailed in the national press as a remarkable innovation, and the response was described by Parker as 'staggering'. MacColl later recalled that the publicity it received was comparable with that of a controversial play or a piece of banned contemporary literature. The radio critic of the Sunday Times had written: 'As remarkable a piece of radio as I have ever listened to'. The Observer's reviewer had been equally enthusiastic: 'Last week a technique and a subject got married and nothing in radio kaleidoscopy, or whatever you like to call it, will ever be the same again.'

The programme was described by Adrian Clancy in the Daily Mail as 'ruthlessly realistic... it is the strongest radio profile of a hero 1 have ever heard'. Tom Driberg, in an uncharacteristic congratulatory piece in the New Statesman, concluded: ,a generation from now, listeners will surely still be moved by the recording of The Ballad of John Axon.'

Four years later, in an article in the magazine New Society, Parker wrote:

It was immediately apparent that here was a form which could achieve something of a breakthrough in popular art; for by speaking in the unquestionable accents of everyday experience, we were able to evoke that thrill of recognition by which a listener was able to identify himself with the action; at the same time the musical setting gave overt dramatic or lyrical significance to that everyday experience, and in musical accents entirely appropriate to the speech, and able to awaken echoes of traditional popular modes - folk echoes if you like - in the listener. The effect was to infuse ordinary life with the sense of an ultimate reality, and judging by the response, this, despite Denmark Street and all their works, was what people wanted!

Prophetically he added: I contend that the radio-ballad is, potentially at least, a new art form; that as such it has implications for an emergent popular art extending far beyond the confines of radio.

The BBC chose it as the British entry for 1958 Prix d'Italia (the prestigious 'Academy Award' of its day for the radio medium, hereby putting its own seal of approval on the work.

It was within this context that the team began work on the second radio-ballad, Song of a Road, the story behind the building of the Ml, the first motorway to be built in the UK. But, despite the euphoria surrounding the first radio-ballad, Parker's head of department insisted that Song of a Road be less subjective, more appropriate to a project of national importance. The result, MacColl later acknowledged, was an 'unhappy blend of radio-ballad and radio feature.'

Although MacColl and Seeger considered they had failed to create something as interesting and innovative as John Axon, the playback of over 80 hours of recorded actuality taught them an invaluable lesson about the relationship of speech to social class and to traditional songs. The implications enabled them to analyse field recordings in the subsequent programmes, before construction of the musical framework and allow the selection of actuality to be controlled by MacColl and Seeger, thereby freeing themselves at an early stage from the typed transcript. The selection would be based on 'speed of utterance, rhythm, pitch and timbre of voice and the speaker's effort pattern.' Moreover, MacColl and Seeger decided that 'radio-ballads should not be primarily concerned with work processes, but with people's attitudes and responses to those processes; in other words, not with things, but the way people related to things and the way in which those relationships were expressed in words. 'Song of a Road was never released as an LP, but the programme did succeed in synthesising a variety of musical styles into a unity and, along the way, create several enduring songs, notably Hot Asphalt.

It was Singing the Fishing, the third in the series, that established the radio-ballad as a new form. It won the Prix d'Italia for radio documentary in October 1960 and was eventually transmitted in 86 countries. Singing the Fishing was critically lauded and, most significantly, the people whose livelihoods were the subject of the programme - the men of the English and Scots herring fleets -hailed it with enthusiasm. The production took three to four months to complete, with the team recording 250 tapes of conversation with fishermen and their families. Parker later described the richness of this material as 'all but overwhelming'. MacColl gives a very clear account of the innovative production technique for Singing the Fishing in the chapter on radio-ballads in his autobiography Journeyman (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990) and it is worth reproducing here the following passage to illustrate the meticulous attention given to the way the music weaves in and out of the actuality:

Actuality was pre-edited, timed and assembled in sequence on master tapes with leader tape in between each cue. Sound effect sequences wore built up on additional tapes. Tape machines for feeding in actuality and sound effects were installed in the performance area of the studio and tape machine operators became members of the musical ensemble. Gramophone operators were upstairs in the cubicle, practising dropping the needle on exactly the right groove for effects that could not be pre-assembled. The studio layout was Charles's brainchild and by adopting it we found it possible to record complete sequences in one go, sections in which music, songs, actuality and sound effects dovetailed or flowed into one another. Singers and musicians were no longer working in the dark but could match every nuance of speech, could alter vocal density so as to ride with a speaker's changes of pitch, resulting from a rising or lowering of the emotional level. In the same way, pulses and rhythms of speech could be matched exactly by a musical instrument without destroying the guidelines of the musical arrangements. For the tape- machine operators it meant that actuality feed-ins could be conceived as continuations of a melodic line, that the first heavily accented word in a passage of speech could be made to coincide with the accented beats in a bar of music, that short passages of actuality could be interpolated between the verses of a song in place of musical tags or that they could be fed between two lines of a stanza and serve as refrains. In short, the tape machines became another instrument in the orchestra.

Although it took nearly a week to record all the sequences and the process was exhausting for everyone concerned, Singing the Fishing was, without doubt, the first fully integrated work produced by the radio-ballad team and as such is remembered and quoted more than the others as a perfect example of the new form. The field recording, research, musical scoring and recording techniques were adopted for all the subsequent radio-ballads to greater or lesser extent.

The next radio-ballad, The Big Hewer, about the lives of coal-miners in the Northumberland, Durham, South Wales and East Midlands coalfields, was rewarded by The Times with a review entitled: 'Poetic documentary with worker heroes' and described the first three radio-ballads as being 'among the few landmarks of post-war radio'. Parker noted that the coal-miner even surpassed the fisherman in the richness of his imagery and power of expression, and MacColl observed that the experience of creating the programme certainly shattered many of Parker's illusions about the men who worked at the coalface, and indeed about society as a whole.

The epic stories and locations that lay behind John Axon, Singing the Fishing, The Big Hewer and, to a lesser extent, Song of the Road, seemed to many commentators the limit of the reach of the radio-ballad form. But it was The Body Blow, the radio-ballad which followed The Big Hewer, that MacColl and Seeger considered to be their most innovative, stretching the concept further and creating an appropriate form for themes and subjects on a smaller canvas.

The Body Blow was originally conceived as an exploration of the psychology of pain, but the project eventually focused on the subject of polio myelitis, through 'a journey into the minds of two partially and three totally disabled people'. Inspired partly by the montage sequences in Alain Resnais' film, Last Year in Marienbad, the programme was made in a much shorter time and with a considerably smaller budget than the previous radio-ballads. Despite scepticism in t he print media before its transmission, the critics hailed it as a tour de force. It was never released as an LP, but tapes have since been used in hospitals and health care centres to help train nursing staff.

With the next radio-ballad MacColl and Seeger were able to recognise the epic even in the common-place: On the Edge deals with young people poised between childhood and adulthood. The field recording techniques fine-tuned through the previous programmes allowed the teenagers to speak directly and freely, debunking the myth that youngsters would never be willing to talk to adults about 'their hopes, anxieties, fears, doubts, bewilderment, dreams, fantasies'. On the contrary, MacColl noted

It was as if they had been waiting for someone to listen to them and once started there was no stopping them.

In conceiving the music, MacColl deliberately struck back to one of the most ancient forms of traditional music - the quest ballad - creating an almost perfect match between the sincerity of the ballad form and the revelations of the young people interviewed. The tone of the programme is captured in the remark of one teenager: 'You turn a corner and it could be something beautiful. Or it could be a cliff edge.' Once again the press was adulatory, some critics describing the MacColl-Parker- Seeger partnership as the inheritors of Brecht, others speaking of the elegiac quality of the spoken and sung sequences. MacColl later commented that he thought the praise was unmerited, saying that 'the team had allowed itself to be overcome by the richness of the actuality'. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, the broadcast of On the Edqe was followed by hundreds of requests for copies from teachers and those concerned with the welfare of teenagers. Three months after that broadcast The Beatles were at number one in the singles chart with From Me To You and the teenagers represented in On the Edqe were soon to be the focus of everyone's attention all over the world.

The radio-ballad team then turned its attention to professional boxing, 'in an attempt to escape from the huge canvas of industry and the intensely private world of the sick and the adolescent'. Thinking that the subject might lend itself to a more a light-hearted approach, they found that everyone involved insisted on comparing the ring to the world outside, and that boxers saw themselves as latter-day gladiators, forcing the team to re-think the objectives.


The result was The Fight Game, an ironic allegory, drawing on the epic, echoing the fact that boxing was once the theme of many broadside ballads. In Parker's note for the Radio Times of 3 July 1963, he remarked:

The bout itself provides an immediately dramatic form, which lends itself admirably to radio-ballad treatment, while its essential contradiction - man, impersonally, against man - meant that we could use irony as never before.

The final radio-ballad was considered by MacColl to be the perfect subject for the new form: the gipsies and tinkers, The Travelling People. Despite the pressures of tighter budgets and production schedules, the team travelled extensively in England and Scot land, recording over 300 hours of 'people talking about what it means to be a tenth-rate citizen in a civilised land'. MacColl and Seeger wereable to take the pace and style of their original music from the tradition of storytelling that is part of the travellers' way of life. It produced a natural synthesis with the actuality, and, as Parker remarks in his original sleeve note, inspired MacColl to write at least two songs that made such an impression on the folk who were the subject of the programme that they took them into their own repertoire and were later reported by collectors, who recorded travellers singing them 'ready to swear to their antiquity!'

Among many changes that the BBC introduced in the mid-Sixties, the closure of the unit that produced the radio-ballads was decried in the press and Parker's own mission to keep the form alive from within the new structures of BBC Radio ended in relative obscurity, with Parker eventually being sacked from the Corporation in 1972. MacColl and Seeger continued to develop the thematic approach in their own LP recordings, notably the albums recorded with The Critics Group for Argo. When Parker died in 1980 and the radio-ballads experienced a brief resurgence of interest, he was called 'the brilliant initiator of the radio-ballad technique'. This hurt MacColl and Seeger on two counts: establishment recognition of Parker's ideas earns too late to make more radio-ballads, and more important, Parker had metamorphosed into being the 'father of the radio-ballad', despite his own public apologies to MacColl and Seeger in which he acknowledged MacColl's primacy in their conception and recognised Seeger's major role in the creation of the form.

Many broadcasters and writers working today within radio and television are perhaps unaware of the contribution made by MacColl, Parker and Seeger in the radio-ballads to their medium. Some however will know that the radio-ballads continue - in the words of Francis Newton in the New Statesman, 26 July 1963 - to be 'the most valuable products of the British folk-music movement'.

Laurence Aston