John Ward
Congress
ION Music
3 April 2023
Unlikely though it may sound, in September 1903, the sleepy seaside East Suffolk town of Lowestoft played host to 800 performers and crew of 40 different nationalities and 500 horses as part of the UK tour by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganza, which had opened in London in Dec 1902 and closed in Burton in Oct 1903, the Lowestoft date being part of the second leg. Indeed, the show played eight European tours between 1887 and 1906. The Lowestoft date was, however, of particular interest to John Ward, a folk singer-songwriter and author-cum-poet-cum playwright, it being his hometown and only discovering of its connection to the legendary frontiersman and subsequent showman William F Cody while visiting his grave on a Colorado road trip. His interest piqued, he delved into research, the results of which are Congress, a double CD, a book, an art & photographic exhibition, a BBC Radio Suffolk programme and a live show.
Congress is described as having a variety of styles which reflects the fishing heritage of the UK’s east coast and the international nature of the travelling show and takes its title from the original definition meaning a meeting of adversaries during battle. The CD features 23 tracks, songs and instrumentals, of which only two are not self-penned, performed by the core band of Ward, his wife Lynne, Les Woodley, Ian Sainsbury and Jim O’Toole variously on guitar, violin, whistles, keys, percussion, banjo, mandolin, accordion and double bass. In an appropriate circus barker manner, it begins with Come All, a bluegrassy call to potential audiences, some lyrics taken directly from the poster, exhorting audiences with the prospect of a twice daily “pre-eminent exhibition of universal interest/A veritable kindergarten of history facts” to be “Personally introduced by the one and only/One grand ruler of the amusement realm, Colonel W F Cody” and featuring “Eight hundred people, four special steam trains/Five hundred horses …(and) One hundred American Indians“.
A brief military-sounding instrumental march with snare and whistles, Cavalry sets up The Wind, flute, violin and field recordings evoking the atmospherics of the Great Plains as the wind brushes through the long grasses like whispered dreams, a pulsing intro and spare guitar pattern relocating the setting to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for The Old Ways Gone, a Lakota lament about the changes wrought by the arrival of the white man (“The buffalo are no more/The iron horse cuts, the earth is sore/Now what is there left here for”), a great nation now reduced to recreating their history and defeat for entertainment.
Featuring Ward on guitar and a persistent tribal rhythm bodhran, the bluesy There Is A Dream introduces the central character of Soaring Hawk and the unsettling visions that disturb his sleep (“a darker dread grips/The air suffocates/The light strikes me blind/And I awake”), the focus then shifting to Lowestoft for Lowlands with the accordion, harmonica and violin arrangement and revised lyrics of traditional shanty Lowlands Away, another dream, this of local fisherman Jack, about “strange black shapes that flow as one”.
The shanty mood’s maintained for Haul Away, where, to cello, accordion and field recordings, the driftermen haul their nets “to bring the shimmer in”, drawing a parallel with how the village’s lives depend on harvesting the wild plain of the shifting seas (“We’ll go hungry should we fail”), just as the Lakota depended on the buffalo.
Jack’s wife Maggie, sung by Lynne, enters proceedings for This Woman’s Work (Maggie’s Song), a spooked, pizzicato strings, hammered dulcimer accompanied trad-folk styled account of her working day (“Make up the breakfast, make up the beds/Keep the house clean, pull the needle and thread/Cook up the dinner from whatever you can/In one arm the baby, the other the pan”).
Keyboards and piano underpin the slow, hymnal-like Adrift, a lament sung, though not specified as such, in the voice of Native Americans uprooted from their land, adrift and lost, metaphorically if not physically (“Will this cruel sea come and claim me/And take me down before I cross?/Where is the strength that could sustain me/and bear the weight of all I’ve lost?”).
They do eventually strike land with the deceptively upbeat, jaunty chorus-friendly Coming Into London as the show arrives at the capital (“Where the hungry mass and the well fed few pass but never meet/Terrace rows back to back where rats run in the grime/Narrow alleys blind and chill where the sun will never shine”) to the sound of banjo, keys, violin, accordion and Victorian street sounds. A tolling bell transports us back to Maggie for the slow dirge Fever (Who is Next?), as her son lies sick with diphtheria before the perspective shifts again on the rolling rhythm Scars Of Light with its echoey mixed back vocals sounding like an antediluvian CS&N as it tells of the Lakota family locked inside the iron horse travelling the rail tracks (the metaphorical “scars of light/That spread their web across the land”) as they travel from one show to the next, again recalling how they have been brought to re-enact their bitter defeat (“Our life rubbed out by treaty snare/By devil’s rope, by cleaving rails/The iron horse killed yet this is where/We live to tell the victor’s tale”). With deliberate irony, its followed by the gospel traditional This Train, riding the harmonica rails into the accordion and violin-anchored The Show Goes On, a slow ballad in the behind a painted smile tradition (“How many times must I endure defeat before I can leave this earth?”), striking up the band for John At The Sideshow, a medley of lively shifting style instrumentals designed to conjure the show’s multinational nature replete with handclaps, cittern, banjo and recorder.
The thrill of the show continues with the romping music hall jollity of Oh What A Spectacle (“Brimstone smoke and thunder flash/Drumming hooves and cymbals crash/Cannon roar and sabre clash/We gasp and shout ‘hooray!’”) offering up “History right before our eyes”, that segues into the sort, dark-toned drums and bodhran heavy The Chase with the roars of the crowd that in turn gives way to another soundscape, the brooding, ominous Lost in Endless Space as Soaring Hawk has his vision. That’s then manifested in the brief guitar and piano-shaded “I was/I am/I will be” lyric of Break the Dam before he finds final freedom and peace (“let the waters wash me/From the cell of sorrow/Let the cool wind lead me/To where despair can’t follow”) in the slow, atmospheric folk-gospel The Great Spirit, sung unaccompanied with three-part harmonies save for accordion drone.
It draws to a close with a promise for the future in She Holds the Hand That Holds the World, a slow piano, violin, bass and guitar arrangement celebrating motherhood (“I watch as round your finger the tiny hand curls/You hold the hand that holds the world/One small step to the future, the unknown land/That I may shape but never understand/Yet every soul that has gone/Lives on in that precious face”), the child born to Standing Cloud, the wife of Soaring Hawk.
It ends then with accordion and Jack back in Lowestoft, returning to fishing in Back To The Sea Once More and a fading reprise of Haul Away, closing with the threads of previous refrains being pulled together on the piano-led Come All Finale, revisiting the call to see the performance in a more downcast note given what we have learnt. The theatrical nature is evident throughout this solidly crafted and well-performed work that subtly comments on two tribes separated by an ocean, both struggling with the forces that would overwhelm them and looking to find hope on the horizon while bitterly reminding that history is ever written – and celebrated – by the victors.
More live shows are planned for 2023, the first being at Southwold Arts Festival, Suffolk, on Monday, 26 June.
The album can be ordered here: http://www.johnward.org.uk/