Songs of protest

Mark Brown

IT IS more by accident than by design that I end up meeting folk singer Alistair Hulett in the famous Clutha Vaults pub on the north bank of the river Clyde in Glasgow city centre. Hulett is a member of the campaign to save Govanhill swimming pool from closure, and the Clutha is a hop, skip and a jump from the Glasgow Sheriff Court, where he has been lending moral support to a number of his fellow protestors who are on trial.

Nevertheless, the pub is an appropriate place for me to meet him to discuss Them and Us, the Edinburgh International Festival’s series of concerts showcasing Scottish political song, which has been programmed in conjunction with the Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University. Along with neighbouring bars the Victoria and the Scotia, the Clutha has long been steeped in the radical folk tradition in the south-west of Scotland, and many performers continue to play their music there.

Hulett, who is a longstanding socialist, will be performing in a late evening concert of what are described in the Festival brochure as "Scabrous Songs".

"They are definitely political songs," he says. They stand, he believes, in a long tradition of Scottish folk songs which aim to take a deep bite out of their intended target. "They are songs which are hard enough almost to be libellous," he says with undisguised pleasure.

He will, for example, be singing a rather pointed song about a well-known Scottish QC who has connections to a fairly renowned, blue-clad Glasgow football team. In addition, says Hulett, there will be "a song about police corruption, and a song about Labour career politicians. I feel quite easy with both topics."

But if the songs that Hulett will be performing give the impression that the series is concentrating on the most modern folk songs, nothing could be further from the truth. The first concert, which shares its title with the Them and Us series as a whole, will consider Scotland’s political song over 400 years.

Other concerts in the series will be concentrating on subjects such as Jacobite song tradition, issues around religion, and the music of the three most influential Scottish political folk singers of the 20th century - Matt McGinn, Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson.

Although the songs of that triumvirate are famously left wing, other works included in the programme - be they eulogies to Prince Charles Edward Stuart or even aggressively loyalist songs about Northern Ireland - clearly are not. So does this mean that Scotland’s political folk tradition isn’t quite as socialist as many believe?

"The folk tradition is largely left wing," says Hulett. "But yes, you will find forelock-tugging songs along the lines of, ‘God Bless The Squire’, you will find right wing, racist folk songs."

Indeed, he acknowledges, there is a history, typified most recently by the pro-folk music comments of British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, of the far right trying to lay claim to the tradition.

"Cecil Sharp, the great English folklorist, described folk music as the music of the labouring classes," Hulett explains. "I would defy a fascist like Nick Griffin to find something that he can hang on to there, because he hates the working class, especially when it has internationalist consciousness."

The 20th-century history of folk music - interestingly, in the United States as much as in Scotland or England - bears out the singer’s contention that the tradition has tilted much more heavily to the left than to the right.

In America, Woody Guthrie was just one of many leading folk artists who have been associated with the US Communist Party. And in Scotland, the Communist Party and the Labour left became heavily involved in the development of folk music. The late Labour MP Norman Buchan, whose wife Janey is a key organiser of the festival series, played a major role in the political development of Scottish folk music in the all-important years after the Second World War.

Just as the establishment in the US was attempting to use the abstract paintings of the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to prove that the capitalist system was more culturally free than the Soviet system, so the artistic friends of the USSR enlisted their work in the Cold War.

In the foreword to a 1962 book entitled 101 Scottish Songs, we see Norman Buchan employing a popular derogatory term for America (Tin Pan Alley) in his celebration of the folk tradition. "In an age apparently dominated by commercial jingles and the short-lived products of Tin Pan Alley," he writes, "increasing numbers of youngsters have found expression and satisfaction in the folk-heritage of Scotland."

In the 1960s and 1970s there was a plethora of left wing orientated folk music publications. They included the Rebel Ceilidh Song Book and the pamphlet Ding Dong Dollar, which contained the lyrics to numerous anti-Polaris songs and was sold during early Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrations. Some of the songs, such as glowing hagiographies to Fidel Castro, give a strong sense of the influence of the Communist Party, whilst others, such as the songs of protest against the Pinochet coup in Chile, were more unifying of radical Scotland.

As if to complicate matters further, however, the Communist Party’s belief in what it called the "national roads to socialism" played a major role in uniting the radical and nationalist strands in the Scottish tradition. The songs about the famous ‘Red Clydesider’ John MacLean (a number of which are bound to appear on the bill of the McGinn, MacColl and Henderson concert) are a case in point. The earlier songs refer to his opposition to the First World War as an example of his internationalism, whilst the later works identify him as a national hero.

For Hulett, the coming together of these strands can create some peculiar political contradictions. "The notion that Scotland is a colony is one that’s very prevalent in the folk scene. There’s a tendency in Scottish folk music to want to wrap itself in the Saltire," he explains. Consequently, he says, we see nostalgic songs of support for the Jacobites continuing to be sung by people who would otherwise be considered to be Republicans.

"You have to acknowledge that the Scots tradition is very adept at the scabrous song," says the singer. "Jacobite songs like ‘Cam ye o’er frae France?’, are utterly scathing of the corruption of the house of Hanover. Where they fall down is that they’d ask us to believe that the house of Stuart was somehow superior."

This complex mix of the historical and the modern, the internationalist and the nationalist, is something which can still be heard in Scottish folk music today. And it will undoubtedly be a theme running through a song series which many people will be surprised to see appear on the International Festival programme at all.

"You would expect it [political folk song] to be either on the Fringe, or on the fringe of the Fringe," admits Hulett. Nonetheless, he insists, the festival organisers haven’t attempted to water down the rich tradition before placing it on the ‘official’ stage.

"We haven’t been asked to censor or compromise ourselves in any way," he says. "I think we should take the opportunity."

The series Them and Us: Scottish Political Song, The Hub (0131-473 2000), Tuesday until August 30