For anyone who listened to our recent Folk Show (Episode 139), it opens with Georgia Shackleton singing Windy Old Weather from her new solo album, Harry’s Seagull (currently a Featured Album of the Month, reviewed here). Directly after, you can hear an excerpt of Sam Larner, an English fisherman and traditional singer, singing the same song. The recording was taken from Singing the Fishing, the third programme to feature in the original Radio Ballads, created by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Segger, one that is now to be brought to life on the stage…
The Radio Ballad Singing The Fishing, a gripping and enchanting tale of the East Coast Herring Fishing Industry, is to be brought to life in a new stage show by the theatre company Crude Apache. Their new show will take place at the Maddermarket in Norwich in late January, following on from their sellout show at the Maddermarket in 2020 about the Norfolk Broads: At the Turning of the Tide, the company will take the audience out to sea and into the world of the herring fishing industry from 1892 to the nineteen-sixties.
The production is based on the Radio Ballad of the same name, produced by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and ex-submarine commander turned recording pioneer Charles Parker. The Radio Ballads was a groundbreaking documentary series in the late 1950s and originally broadcast on the BBC Home Service and the first ballad, ‘The Ballad of John Axon’, was aired in 1958. It was the first musical documentary of its kind.
Using all of MacColl’s original songs and based on the original musical direction by Peggy Seeger, the company weaves music and narrative together into a gripping and enchanting tale of man’s battle against the elements, the sea, the vagaries of a capitalist marketplace and two world wars.
Singing the Fishing is a human story of joy, triumph and tragedy, with a large ensemble cast and multi-instrumental acoustic band bringing the music and story to vivid and dramatic life.
The show is dedicated to the memory of Ewan, the generosity of Peggy and the legacy of the fishermen of Great Yarmouth and the East Coast.
Singing the Fishing runs from Wednesday the 24th – Saturday the 27th of January 2024 at 19:30pm with a matinee on Saturday at 14:30 pm.
Details and tickets: https://maddermarket.co.uk/event/singing-the-fishing/
The Radio Ballads
The following is from a 2014 Folk Radio interview with Peggy Seeger (by Katie McCabe) in which Peggy provided a great insight into the making of the Radio Ballads:
In 1957, when the BBC airwaves were dominated by the received pronunciation of Richard Dimbleby and co, Ewan MacColl, together with Birmingham radio producer Charles Parker and the musical prowess of Peggy Seeger, finally brought the sound of regional accents to British radio. The Ballads offered a new approach to radio broadcast, combining field recordings of working people with folk songs inspired by their experiences. The project began when Ewan was commissioned by Charles for a radio feature on John Axon, a Stockport train driver who gave his life trying to stop a runaway locomotive, fighting through scalding hot steam to apply the breaks, as the train roared downhill in February 1957. But were it not for Ewan MacColl, his story wouldn’t have made it much further than community legend. After collecting 40 hours worth of interview material with Axon’s widow and friends, he convinced Parker that their voices, rather than actors should be used to tell the story on air.
“The first time we made a Radio Ballad, Charles and Ewan went out and recorded and came back with analogue tape. The script was written, and the tape was chopped into little bits. Then they called on me to do the music,” Seeger recalls, “I was green as grass – I had no idea how to create an ongoing musical score.” In the years that followed, they created a recording on the fishermen of Great Yarmouth and the Scottish northeast coast for Singing the Fishing, explored the devastating impact of Polio for The Body Blow, ventured down the mines of Northumberland and Durham for The Big Hewer and into the ring to document the lives of professional boxers for The Fight Game. For the final instalment, which aired in 1964, Ewan and his team spent almost a month in tents, kitchens and caravans, at horse fairs and around campfires in Glasgow and Aberdeen, investigating the rich cultural diversity of the travelling community.
After their many hours of recordings, Peggy, Ewan and Charles would sit in the recording studio with musicians like Dave Swarbrick and Bruce Turner, cueing in the voices of the interviewees as though they were an oboe or concertina. Overall, the Ballads are inherently masculine, entrenched in themes of male manual work and male grievances – but they are all, collectively, a celebration of life, more specifically, of working-class life. “I come from middle class where we’re more polite…and we don’t have hands on contact with the earth and with its running. The gypsies did, the fighters did…there’s a lot of body contact with working people, and it entranced me,” says Seeger.
…Although Peggy was responsible for many of the interviews, and musical arrangements, she’s keen to point out that Ewan MacColl was the “kingpin” of the project, “nothing could have happened with the Radio Ballads without the informants, and without Ewan. He came from working class stock, whereas Charles and I didn’t. Ewan just had an entire dramatic approach to it…he was widely read, and he had folk songs at his command…I did embark on a Radio Ballad about women when Ewan was still alive, but some of the things that they told me Ewan just couldn’t face it…incest, men preying on their daughters, the violence of the men against the women…a picture of women’s position in society began to come out very clearly to him, and he was appalled.”
Three of the Radio Ballads were later made into films. Peter Cox’s brilliant book ‘Set into Song’, which tells the story of the Radio Ballads, explains how the Ballads had a huge impact on documentary makers in the ’60s in both radio and television and were even used in BBC training courses. In 1971 Philip Donnellan adapted the Radio Ballad ‘Singing the Fishing’ into a TV documentary called ‘Shoals of Herring’, which was televised on BBC 2 in 1972. Donnellan wanted to show the fishermen’s struggle and how they were being exploited; he felt the original Radio Ballad lacked political edge…something Ewan MacColl would never have taken kindly to. Whilst many Scots families owned their fishing boats Donnellan saw the English fishermen as wage slaves to the big fishing industrial groups. He also blamed those industrial groups for the fishing industry collapse…fishing for profit. Extra stanzas were added to the songs to reflect the decline.
You can watch the documentary below, which is in five parts:
You can also listen to an audio documentary featuring the above-mentioned Peter Cox. It provides a great background to the Radio Ballads as well the main characters: Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker.
Singing the Fishing runs from Wednesday the 24th – Saturday the 27th of January 2024 at 19:30pm with a matinee on Saturday at 14:30 pm.
Details and tickets: https://maddermarket.co.uk/event/singing-the-fishing/