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…which came out of:
What accent should old ballad words be transcribed in?
(Trigger Warning: this is an issue I have strong opinions on which many will not share)
This was sparked off by reading an interesting set of stories which were related to themes from Child ballads – but not retellings of them (Harris, 2023). The ballads were presented as:
…the soundtrack of our shared humanity, depicting the struggle of ordinary people; their dreams, and sometimes their nightmares. (Harris, 2023, p. ix)
Sounds good. I enjoyed the stories, and appreciated the twists in the re-imagining, but there was one thing that niggled. Direct quotes from the texts that Child gives were given as chapter introductions. An example:
Noo come ye in inta wir ha’
An come ye in amang wis a’
Now he’s gaen in inta der ha’
An he’s gaen in among dem a’ (The Child Ballads, no. 19: King Orfeo)
And that jarred a little. I’d guess that the words that the original source felt that they were saying were:
Now come you in into our hall
And come you in among us all… etcetera
…but the educated and properly-spoken collector has rendered them, possibly accurately, in peasant-speak, and Harris has accurately quoted her source. The quote is from Child’s 19, version A, “obtained from the singing of Andrew Coutts, an old man in Unst, Shetland, by Mr Biot Edmondston” in 1880 (the text Child gives was interspersed with a refrain that might be Danish imported into Unst). In both contexts, I can see why that literally phonological rendition was done, and I can partly agree with the point of it – ethnographic accuracy in the original notation, and honest quoting – and appropriateness for the mood of the stories (though the stories themselves are written in straightforward, direct, language, which I like) – by Harris.
But still, as a general thing, I feel that this ‘accentisation’ contributes to a feeling of ballad source people as other, exotic, intellectually-unwashed creatures, rather than sensible and thoughtful people like you or me. I felt the same when I was in a choir which sang, among lots of other music, some ‘Negro Spirituals’ (yes, I know, and I did grumble a bit at the label. It was quite a long time ago), and the choirmaster encouraged us to sing the words ‘properly’: so we should be singing “dat were de ribber ob Jordan, etc”. I didn’t like that, and I think most would not like it now. So, if songs were recorded or noted from working-class people in Scotland, is singing them in some sort of 19C Scottish peasant accent a kind of Alba-face, in comparison with blackface?
[‘Scotland and ‘Scottish’ become problematic when talking about accents, anyway – more later].
On the other hand, I do feel that sticking with grammatical and dialect variations is more acceptable than trying to reproduce accents. I tell several stories from the Western Isles, and I have no qualms about having characters say (in my faint North Worcestershire accent), things like ‘come away in’, or ‘I should talk to him, so’, or even the Gaelic ‘at all’ – though I might not use the more idiomatic ‘at all, at all’ (idir, idir). I may be being inconsistent here.
Thinking about this led me on to thinking about singing ‘in an accent’. Back when I was starting to sing (1960s), it was fashionable to put on some kind of peasant accent for traditional (and other) songs – Mummerset, East Angular, Oirish, Geordietyne, whatever. Yes, that was me, too, back in the mid-to-late-20C. I’ve tried to supress it for 30-odd years now, and not always succeeded.
One of my first traditionalish records was Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd’s English and Scottish Folk Ballads on Topic. Very influential on me. Lloyd sings in his distinctive Welsh/London/Australian voice, with maybe a bit of added yokel, but MacColl’s songs are in a variety of scenery-chewing old-time accents. They’re definitely SPLENDID PERFORMANCES, and MacColl can get on top of a ballad brilliantly, and I was impressed enough to learn some – and still perform them, in my West-Midlands-schoolteachers’-son voice – but listening to the versions by MacColl nowadays is toe-curling, whereas I can comfortably take Lloyd’s slightly-odd delivery.
The yokel-accent thing has largely faded in the folk clubs, but it’s been replaced by Deep South California in a lot of cases, especially when singing material from the 60s singer-songwriter revival, but also when singing non-US material. It is quite interesting to hear Reg Meuross songs re-interpretated as Woody Guthrie would have done them, but I still think ‘what’s wrong with your own voice?’
As seen by people outside the circle of performers, a peasant accent may still be expected. I was in a general singers’ sort-of self-help group, with people doing a wide variety of music, when someone sang a traditional Irish song, unaccompanied, in their own, slight, generic-Midlands accent – very nicely. The first comment from others was ‘have you thought of singing it in an Irish accent?’ It would be seen as more ‘authentic’ that way, I guess. Goodness ☹. But that raised an important point. The singer replied that they were of Irish descent, and their family was from Cork (I’m making up the regions – I can’t remember which they actually were), and the song was collected in Northern Ireland – so should they sing it in the Southern accent that they’d grown up with and were familiar with, or in a ‘more authentic’ Northern manner? That baffled the group a bit – ‘well, you know, just Irish’. The desire for Irishisation seemed a bit patronising and caricaturing.
Certainly, if you take the task seriously, doing conforming-to-the-source accents is pretty difficult. Some of the songs I really like were collected from Travellers in the West Midlands, who I’m sure spoke quite differently from Baring-Gould’s Dartmoor sources, or Kidson’s in Yorkshire. I can’t do any of those accents (in fact I’ve no idea how late 19C West Midlands Travellers spoke), and I have enough trouble learning the words and tune, without bothering with anything else. This could mean that almost everyone who does a peasant-style accent is in great danger of doing a fake and thoughtless imitation of nothing in particular. (To be fair, MacColl, who was an actor, probably did try to get his local accents right – though I’ve seen criticism of his efforts from local speakers).
Are there cases where accentisation is necessary for effective performance? I think some old-timey/bluegrass harmonies maybe just don’t sound right done in posh Received Pronunciation accents, so I’m hypocritically forgiving about those. If it’s part of a theatrical performance – adding musical veracity to an everyday story of 19C country folk – the accent is required, though the wonderful music for Bill Bryden’s wonderful production of The Mysteries all those years ago was done in the singers’ natural voices (not all of which were strongly accented) as I remember, while the actors spoke consistently in Northern accents (though maybe not medieval ones), and that worked – but it wasn’t a realistic production.
It can be argued that using an accented form is necessary for rhyming. If one line ends in ‘right’ and the rhyme line ends in ‘meet’, then you have to say ‘reet’ in your best Geordie, right? (I mean, ‘your best Geordie, reet?’). I don’t think so. Not every line has to rhyme, and I don’t believe that listeners notice that much. ‘You Are My Sunshine’, which is well-known and well-loved (though I find it a bit sinister), has only one rhyme in the whole song, in the chorus, and a few vague assonances elsewhere, but no-one cares, or even notices. I sing plenty of stuff that doesn’t rhyme on every line of every verse, and no-one’s complained. Un-accenting can be awkward for stress, though. ‘Ye’ and ‘you’, or ‘me’ and ‘my’ work differently in a line, and I do sometimes slip into the accented or dialect form for the odd word if it sings better. The same goes with using the dialect historic present: ‘sings’ not ‘sang’; ‘goes’ not ‘went’, ‘plays’ not ‘played’, though using the historic present in narratives comes pretty naturally to me, even if my GCE English teacher would have objected.
I don’t think a requirement for ‘authenticity’ is an excuse, even if you could do an authentic accent and style of delivery. That’s because I don’t think anything we do is authentic – except authentic to ourselves and to our relation with the audience, in which case ‘putting on an accent’ would seem to be inauthentic.
An additional observation: In all the times I’ve heard ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ (and I’ve heard it a lot of times), I can’t remember ever hearing it sung with an Australian accent, though it’s an Australian-themed song through and through. If you’re going to put on an American accent for ‘Rambling Boy’, why not Australian for ‘Waltzing Matilda’? Admittedly Eric Bogle (who speaks with a pronounced Scottish accent), who wrote it, sings it with only a very slight Scottish accent, and no trace of Australian that I can detect. That’s good, and maybe people follow his example, though more may have learned it from June Tabor (who sings it with a faint, soft, Irish accent, I think, though I’m not sure what accent it is – not Warwick, where she grew up, anyway). It’s not surprising that Bogle sings with a less pronounced accent than he speaks – the nature of singing, if you’re going to enunciate your consonants and give room for the vowels (and we should all do that, in respect for our audience, even for audiences who aren’t deaf like me – see Martin Carthy’s comments on diction and clarity*) then it tends to flatten out accents. I remember the first time I heard recordings of Sam Larner I couldn’t understand anything he said because of his accent, but his singing was quite clear. The same shift applies with the great Scottish traveller singers. So, again, putting on an accent to sing is inauthentic in reference to traditional sources.
So, I would prefer people to show respect for the vocal tradition handed down to them from their parents, siblings and schoolfriends, and be prepared to sing in the voice they grew up with.
[This might not apply to Old Etonians (though I’m not aware of any in the folk scene – I believe there are plenty performing in popular music)]
* Carthy: “Well, it’s actually even more practical than that. Diction, I think, is so important. A lot of people, if I’m honest… their diction stinks. Frequently, if I didn’t know the song, I wouldn’t know what the hell they were saying. It’s something you have to learn yourself. I can go up to singers and say, “Watch your diction”, and they’ll go, [heavy on the sarcasm] “Yeah, right! Thanks for that!”
https://tradfolk.co/music/music-interviews/martin-carthy/
Reference
Harris, Joanne (2023) Maiden, Mother, Crone London: Gollancz
This started with a discussion in the ZoomChild online ballad session about ballads which aren’t in the Child collection, and some of the suggestions below come from that group: thanks to them.
Some background, if you haven’t heard of Child Ballads:
In the late nineteenth century Francis James Child (then Professor of English at Harvard University) published five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which he intended to be a complete collection of the surviving old ballads of England and Scotland, derived from extensive research into antiquarian publications and cooperation with several other scholars. Ballads can be defined as narrative songs with a simple verse structure, and Child was looking for ‘ancient’ ones. There’s endless debate about the provenance and status of such songs. You can read all about Child’s publication, with links to digitised versions, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads and https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196779/ The 305 songs in that collection have come to be known as ‘Child Ballads’ and his collection was taken by some in the late 20C folk revival as a definitive source of the Great Songs of Old. This over-simplified things. Child does have many famous songs: Three Ravens, Tam Lin, The Cruel Mother, Edward, House Carpenter/Demon Lover… but there were other powerful ballads, in print or in the oral tradition, that he missed or that were only collected after his time: the Trees They Do Grow High, Polly Vaughn, The Bitter Withy, The Leaves of Life, and more.
Main story:
Of course, there are many newer songs which are ‘ballads’ (as opposed to non-narrative ‘lyrical songs’) which are now in the ‘folk’ repertoire. So we had a short discussion in a Zoomchild session about which of those were notable, and maybe up to the ‘Child standard’ (though not all Child’s examples are that good) and so ‘Child-ish’.
That started me thinking, and I started making up a list of ‘modern ballads’ by racking my brains. That didn’t do much good, predictably, so I looked through my record collection for examples in an unstructured way.
I was looking for what might be ‘ballads’, again defined as narrative songs with a fairly simple verse structure, delivered in a very broadly defined ‘folky’ way. That produced a long list of examples quite quickly, some of which seemed ballad-y to me, and some less so, and I started to get confused about what I was doing. Here’s my examples (below), and my attempts to resolve my confusion. Some of this is me laboriously working my way to rather well-known points.
Characteristics of Child-style ballads (which I’ll call ‘Ballads’, with a capital B, below; the modern ballads I’ll generally call them ‘songs’) are said to be that they’re usually in the third person and cover one particular incident (though some, like Lord Bateman, cover a wider history). Many modern narrative songs in my list below are first person (you could make all kinds of social and psychological ‘me-generation’ points out of this, but it might just be a shorter chain from composition to performance, so modern songs are more personal than long-existing anonymous ones), and some are whole-life biographical or autobiographical, rather than one-incident. But even some of those still seem very ballady. Perhaps one criterion is whether you can imagine telling the events as a story, rather than as a song.
Most Ballads aren’t explicitly judgemental. They are clear about actions which are right, wrong, or foolish, and probably secure in the moral framework that the audience will apply, but there’s usually little explicit moralising. Modern ballads may hammer the social or moral point rather more. Some will challenge accepted moral frameworks. The same applies to commentary on psychological or emotional states. In Ballads, people are frightened, angry, guilty or sad and that’s about it. Modern songs are more self-examining.
But I came to feel that the biggest difference that makes some narrative songs seem less ballady is style, both narrative and linguistic. Ballads’ action is very much to the point, and the language is compact and polished, even when it’s repetitive or a bit archaic. Many modern songs, though they do have strong narratives, lack both these qualities. I feel that there are three stylistic dialects (and to some extent vocabularies) in the full range of songs we deal with: Ballad, broadside (including pastoral), and modern (which reaches its extreme in the singer-songwriter voice). I’m not good enough at linguistic analysis to be clear about the differences, but I do think that I can feel when a song is traditional, rather than modern-composed. I know that Steve Ogden is starting a linguistic analysis of traditional songs, and maybe comparing these with broadside versions: should be interesting.
One feature of modern songs is conscious wordplay. The Ballads can have splendid passages. Lord Bateman:
She has rings, rings on every finger, and on her middle one she has three;
She has enough gold around her middle to buy Northumberland from under thee
and sometimes neat alliteration, but not things like Mike Waterson’s:
Her husband he was a hunk of a man, and a chunk of a man, and a drunk of a man;
He was a hunk of a drunken skunk of a man
in A Stitch in Time.
That’s as far as I’ve got in my understanding.
Here’s the list that grew, in no particular order – I think many more examples are available, but this is enough to be going on with – with some comments which some may find controversial. I’ll put the ones which seem to me to be most in the spirit of the old Ballads in bold. Many of these songs are now in the modern version of the oral tradition – they’re widely sung in varied arrangements, often by people who don’t know the original source and who learned their version from others’ cover versions, and some get changed a bit along the way.
I’ll be interested to see others’ examples and comments on this assortment.
Mike Waterson: A Stitch in Time; Winifer Odd
Cyril Tawney: Sally Free and Easy; The Ballad of Sammy’s Bar
Archie Fisher: Witch of the West-Mer-Lands
So hyper-ballady that it’s almost a parody. I think it’s great, especially as done by Alice Jones.
Paul Carbuncle: Pig Farmer
This may not be known outside the EMidlands, so here’s a link. The same story cropped up in an episode of Gentleman Jack – and in a contemporary murder case. It’s probably been going on for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHamTErPzOg
Marty Robbins: El Paso
Jeff’s Blake’s suggestion, and a great modern example. There are probably others in this tradition, and lots in Country Music generally, but I don’t know that genre very well.
Woody Guthrie: Ballad of Tom Joad; Pretty Boy Floyd
And lots more, I guess. Guthrie seems to me to be much like a modern broadside writer, rapidly producing songs on current issues for popular consumption, only a very much better writer than most.
Bob Dylan: Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol (though the moralising isn’t traditional); Ballad of Hollis Brown – maybe, though it’s very poeticised.
Eric Bogle: The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
Angeline Morrison: Slave No More
Eliza Carthy: Mr Magnifico: though stylistically not very ballady
Bertolt Brecht: Pirate Jenny/The Black Freighter; The Wife of the Soldier
Richard Thompson: Galway to Graceland; 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Linda Thompson: No Telling (What a Love Song Can Do)
Chris Wood: Hollow Point; One in a Million
I find ‘One in a Million’ too syrupy, really, though it’s definitely a traditional theme: appears widely in folktales. Maybe turning it into a song, with the requirements of rhyme and rhythm, softened the language too much.
Gillan Welch: Caleb Meyer
Show of Hands: Galway Farmer
Dave Sudbury: King of Rome
Then there’s a lot of stuff which is more traditional in feel or origins, especially from the U.S.A., but is post-Child:
All those ‘Murder Ballads’: Ekefield Town, Omie Wise, Little Sadie, Tom Dooley/Dula
Well, they’re called ballads, and they’re narrative, but they’re all rather short, and the action is horribly predictable. Tom Jones’ Delilah (written by Mason/Reed and not really the jolly sing-along it has become), maybe comes out of the same tradition.
Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe His Corn
Everyday Dirt
Billy the Kid
Frankie & Johnnie
Stackolee
Charles Guiteau (must be post-1881, after all)
Death of Ben Hall/Streets of Forbes
There has recently been a discussion on Twitter about a supposed ‘New Folk Police’ who want to ban (or at least discourage) the performance of songs with too much violence, misogyny, prejudice…. I guess this replaces the ‘Old Folk Police’ who wouldn’t allow modern songs, guitars, songs which weren’t From Your Cultural Background, whatever, in their clubs. I’m not sure either kind of cancel culture really exists or existed, but the issue of acceptability or suitability of traditional songs for modern performance is an interesting one, and is something I think about in choosing what to sing myself. I didn’t get involved in the Twitter debate, partly because it’s not a good idea to get involved in Twitter debates, but also because I find it difficult to follow arguments and responses the way Twitter handles them, and it’s not made for presenting any extended argument.
So, I’m writing something here, partly to clarify ideas for myself. [later note: it seems I come out as a pretty Politically Correct Singer. If my wokeness is likely to offend you, you could stop reading now].
I have recently come to think that there are some (a very few) songs which I just find unacceptable. I have resolved to walk out the next time someone sings that jolly rape song The Two Magicians: not sure if I’ll have the nerve to do it. Same goes for the anti-Semitic blood libel song Little Sir Hugh. I think there are probably some others which don’t come up in discussion (or performance) because no-one would find them acceptable – like whatever a British equivalent of the Horst Wessel song might be, or The Ballad of William Calley (still available on YouTube, last time I looked) in praise of Lt Calley, who was convicted of murdering 20+ Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre. There must be plenty of 19C songs mocking African-Americans and using the N-word which came out of the great popularity of Minstrel troupes in Britain, though some less offensive songs from that tradition do still get sung, like Stephen Foster’s Hard Times [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE8L843iUy4].
[There are interesting discussions about Foster’s attitudes to slavery and how that’s reflected in his songs. For instance http://andrewhidas.com/the-stephen-foster-problem/ and Steven Saunders The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies American Music, Vol. 30: 275-289]
There seemed to be three strands in the Twitter discussion: songs with extreme and gratuitous violence, the whole spectrum of misogyny in traditional songs, and the rights and responsibilities of the performer. Hunting songs and animal cruelty were also mentioned. Here’s my understandings and preferences.
Violence: Classic ballads, which are old-fashioned and dramatic, are quite likely to contain violence. If that’s essential to the plot most people don’t object. Even the bloodbath at the end of Little Musgrave/Matty Groves makes sense in context (two deaths in this version; some have three): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtVkYMFueWs
I’m pretty comfortable with The Baron of Brackley, which has an indeterminate number of Highlanders slaughtered in an argument over cattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stN21MWL6s8. It’s true-life crime, anyway: it records an incident from September 7, 1666 (though the details in the ballad don’t match the court records). I sing it myself.
One defence of the violence in traditional songs is in catharsis or in working through something that does have to be faced. So Fay Hield on Twitter said:
For me, narrative violence is very welcome in songs, it gives a space to explore it, work out how we feel about it and shape our understanding of the world – in the same way we do with horror movies/soap operas etc…
But sometimes the cruelty seems to overwhelm every other aspect. Prince Heathen is an example (I’m not providing a link) where increasing privation and humiliation is loaded on a woman to force her into submission. I showed the words to someone who isn’t familiar with old ballads, and they said ‘well, it’s just porn, isn’t it?’ But maybe Andrew Rose, the British Sailor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAfeItxM0FU), about a captain’s sadistic treatment and murder of a young sailor, and his subsequent punishment: ‘Captain Rogers, you must die’, is a Dreadful Tale rather than being at all titillating.
Traditional song violence is often overshadowed by that in popular TV crime series.
That example leads into the subcategory of
Violence Against Women This is so common that there’s a genre name: Murder Ballads. I once heard Tom Paley say ‘most of American Traditional Song is about a guy taking his girl out on a date and killing her’. A bit of an exaggeration, but there are a lot (more in the US than UK, I think). He may have been introducing Willow Garden/Rose Connelly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9HjllAe9oI
Of course, these really are true-life crime songs: you can find direct parallels in the newspapers pretty much every week. One defence of these songs in the Twitter debate was that they served as a Useful Warning To Young Women. I wondered if that was really necessary: many young women will have got the point already.
Willow Garden shows one issue with many of these songs: aesthetically, they’re really well-made, and are compelling pieces. I used to sing Harry Cox’s Apprentice Boy/Ekefield Town: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Igd1mPR3Q), a splendid song, quite blithely, struck by how closely it matched current cases, but I gradually turned against it. At least it is a sombre song, which doesn’t underplay the cold brutality of the killing, and has the promise of damnation (and hanging) for the killer: ‘No rest, no rest, all that long night, no rest no rest could I find. The fire and the brimstone all around my head did shine.’
Clarence Ashley’s Little Sadie is brilliant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXGAj1e3SdE), but it’s just too casual and ironic: ‘Went out last evening about half-past nine. Met Little Sadie and I blowed her down. Went back home and I went to bed .44 smokeless under my head’ – and eventually, in some versions, the judge says ‘I don’t know whether to hang you or not, but this killing of women just has to stop.’ Well, yes.
Even more casually, I can’t be doing with the happy family singalong style of Banks Of The Ohio.
BUT, I found a compromise (or ‘providing context’ as it can be spun) by only doing Ekefield Town when I can pair it with John Jones’ song for Oysterband The Oxford Girl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZrQ-nplRes) which summarises and deconstructs all the excuses/justifications which might apply in the murder ballads. Brilliantly constructed song, too.
General Misogyny It’s not always murder: there’s rape as well (and quite a bit of that is date rape – that’s not a modern concept). You can find your own examples, but Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ItLkca3Gfk) will do.
Cunning girls can often escape the threat of rape – or gang rape in the case of Maid on the Shore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EkJS8R-Z0E by Martin Carthy (When his daughter Eliza recorded it many years later, she left out the rape threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HJYwBDN-nY). So there are plenty of songs that give agency to women (courage, ingenuity, sometimes magic) in the face of attack. This leads into an important point that Helen Lindley (https://helenlindleymusic.com/home) made in the Twitter discussion:
The indirect stuff [devaluing of women] is the dangerous bit, and the bit we are very able to change when singing. I’m still toying with this myself, and where to draw lines of what I find acceptable. It goes right down to women mostly being described by looks and men by character. This depiction of women is currently my main area of interest. I’m finding old ballads where the woman is the one in control, or at least making sure she gets what she wants, but these are the songs no longer being sung and the tunes are often non-existent. I want to bring these songs, that portray women taking the initiative, out because I think it’s important to show the songs did exist in antiquity. And it gives us another kind of song without the woman being a possession. Though I’ve noticed in many of these songs that all the men have names, even the servants, but the central woman is ‘the Lady’ or ‘the daughter’ so giving her a name is important to me. I guess we’re all working together but separately on improving the content we perform.
That statement ‘we are very able to change when singing’ got me thinking about small changes I had made – and could make more – in my versions of traditional songs. I’ve written a little bit about that elsewhere: https://folkbeeston.club/weekly-blog/f/18th-august
Broken Token Ballads are a special kind of abuse.
The fidelity of a left-behind sweetheart is tested by a returning soldier or sailor telling her that her lover is dead, sometimes with heart-rending details, and sometimes the ‘stranger’ offers himself as an instant substitute. Only when the bereaved lover tears her hair/falls down in agony/faints/angrily rejects the stranger does he reveal that it was all a lie and he really is her absent lover after all, sometimes producing a ring or other token shared between them to establish his identity, though most ‘broken token’ songs don’t actually feature a token. What a bastard. And they live happily ever after – or perhaps she is trapped in an abusive, coercive relationship.
[There are few non-exploitative broken token songs and stories, where the returning lover is difficult to recognise (missing legs, dreadful scars, ravages of time, etc.) and there’s no deception. My version of the story Jack and the Coat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqO34SzQrk&t=9s) has that feature.]
The Banks of Claudy is the most extreme example. The girl is lost, wandering ‘in sorrow and despair’, on a ‘dark and stormy night’, looking for Claudy Banks, where she was told she might find her lover. However when she does meet him ‘she did not know me, I being all in disguise’, and he tells her that her lover was drowned all on the coast of Spain. Only when she’s done the ‘falling in despair’ bit, with hand-wringing, hair-tearing, and vowing not to take another man but to wander all her life for his sake, does he reveal himself (ripping off the disguise, maybe) as that ‘handsome (or faithful) young man, and who you thought was slain’ and promises that they’ll ‘never part again’. Pig.
But it’s a great song, otherwise, in which love conquers all. The Plains of Waterloo is an even better song, not quite so ruthlessly exploitative, but throwing in the pathetic news that the lover’s fictitious last words were of his love ‘far from Waterloo’. I’m not sure whether to give up singing these or not.
Rights and responsibilities: should we be allowed to cancel aspects of our Precious Heritage culture, or censor or bowdlerise it to suit effete modern tastes?
I guess this is where the ‘policing’ comes in. Yes, of course we’re allowed, as performers (as academics or archivists things might be different). We’re performing our choice of material in our choice of way, and we’re not bound by any fixed canon. It’s not that kind of tradition. I have no qualms about altering anything I sing, in all kinds of ways, to suit the way I want to sing it. That doesn’t bother me.
Someone suggested that singers have no personal responsibilities because they’re only acting, after all, and everyone knows that it’s all artifice, and actors aren’t responsible for the scripts they’re given. I don’t buy this. Fair enough if you are an actor, doing Iago, or one of the Nazis in an Indiana Jones film, but standing up as an individual making your own choice of what to communicate is quite different. That interpretation would also devalue all the positive things people aim to convey in their performances, because they would be ‘only acting’ as well – goodbye protest songs.
I think there are one or two songs which are set up as character pieces – Sam Hall, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD5HlFbPrgw. I guess it’s reasonable to claim that as role play. Never wanted to sing it myself.
With the exception of the extreme examples mentioned above, maybe people have the right to sing what they want – but that does mean that they are obliged to bear the consequences of their choices. There are many songs which cause me to think somewhat badly of those people who choose to sing them, and if you’re known for singing stuff that others find objectionable, they also have the right to not ask you back, or not to be keen to invite you to sing. Rights are balanced by responsibilities.
Postscript: a category of traditional song that didn’t come up in the discussion is the sexually explicit ones, which are often very misogynistic. Four and Twenty Virgins/The Ball of Kirriemuir, The Good Ship Venus, Down the Back Alley Where Nobody Goes, Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine… There are lots of them. I think they’re the only songs, apart from nursery rhymes, that I learned in a traditional, oral, community-based way. My only real folk songs, maybe. Not heard much in the clubs, though there are some bowdlerised versions on YouTube, and Louden Wainwright did do a fairly straight version of Venus on the Rogues Gallery CD.
In the sleeve notes for the Harry Smith/Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, there are newspaper-headline-style summaries of some of the songs. My favourite is ‘Theft of Stetson hat causes deadly dispute: victim identifies self as family man’ (Stackerlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv_THWZ8-T8), though ‘Technological unemployment hits shoe industry’ (Peg & Awl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfLNYYxMQX8) is pretty good.
Here’s some similar press summaries I made up for mostly British traditional songs – along with contributions from the ZoomChild online singing group (in bold italics): thanks, folks.
Chance pickup in church results in high-society bloodbath
or: Toffs in love nest tragedy (though that could apply to other songs as well, I guess – it’s the kind of thing toffs get up to) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VUAJZ7zrF8)
Society wedding abandoned after plucky Muslim girl crosses continents to rejoin lover she freed from Turkish hellhole (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-_sy88Ijo0)
Plucky Joan foils mounted sex pest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsqgeVjEax8)
Faithless lover gunned down in early-morning ambush by cross-dressing ex-fiancée – new bride innocent victim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlPYBl7HGqA
Girl lured to death by marriage promise. Horrific tale of ready-dug grave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD5KE2FnoZw [From the US]
Girl lured to death by marriage promise (several more songs)
Girl lured to death (even more songs: too many to link)
Daring girl frees lover from satanic bondage. Relationship started in disputed woodland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhCAH4mNjNs)
Feisty cross-dressing percussionist forced out by army: fellow squaddies devastated
or: Royal guardsman is transvestite woman shock revelation
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErHBBJc2s8c)
Inter-racial love triangle led to wedding day slaughter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr7K_8cUhxU)
Plucky girl’s pretended modesty foils immigrant bluebeard
or: Would-be victim bribes parrot after slaying serial killer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U76yyS-sBHg)
Young widow regrets arranged marriage to schoolboy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukiUVsP3n-Y)
Virgin wife (34) regrets arranged marriage to pensioner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayMS7wOBJmw)
Wife regrets marriage, reflects on carefree teenage years (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_c9ndSJEZo)
Construction worker’s wife runs off with rich international trader: loses children, life, soul (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Q11HFtqFI)
Is too much grief dangerous? A warning from beyond the grave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwc9QK-pHe0)
Immigrant with chequered past smitten by rich girl in riverside tryst.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq01OuEGCfA)
All’s well that ends well: seducer of King’s daughter revealed to be reassuringly rich (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwqP_yoszCE)
Titled lady goes back to nature in gypsy sex romp. ‘No regrets’ she says
Or: Runaway wife found in compromising situation in field with folk-singing traveller group
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46volhHcffA)
Murderous mother warned of hellish fate by double apparition (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVRnXoWVP4g)
Fatal neighbourhood row over cows (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYKnHoR2Osc)
Shape-shifting date rape (I hate this song) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMgCR5fi6xM)
Narcissist tricks girlfriend into poisoned wine suicide pact
U.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1g2_kzkx4Q
or U.K. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkZkSGDvcXs
Homeless criminal living rough in woods involved in brawl, recruits another thug to his gang.
(but could be almost any of Child 117-154)
Son of former military dictator dies before he can achieve world domination. Grieving mother says, “He was allergic to all varieties of roses.”
Spurned psycho’s revenge horror
or: Psycho and nurse lover executed after castle bloodbath
Man flees after incest slaying
Cavalry cadaver benefits birdlife
North Atlantic whaling tussle. Whale 5 : Whalers 0
Double amputee admiral court-martials deserters. Dies
Crowdfunding wife gets deer poacher husband released from Death Row
alternatively:
Crowdfunding wife fails to get deer-poacher husband released from Death Row (but villain given bling handcuffs and top-of-range noose)
Marine shape-shifter in double shooting tragedy
He had to drown runaway girlfriend when ship stalled
Re-purposed body parts identify murderer bride at own wedding reception
Highland honour-killing. Woman dies in fire after refusing to break with Sassenach fiancé
Bride dies in sleep after man she jilted sings folk-song
Sleepy town honour killing (a neighbour said “we’re all really shocked, nothing like that has ever happened round here”)
Not sure which ballad this one is: sorry.
A few more US ones:
Members of 99% stunned by rising cost of food, medicine: forced to wear second-hand clothes. Hardly able to survive [This one will run and run] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6efQ_GyQW3o)
Psychopath killer sleeps with gun under pillow. Apprehended after making slow getaway. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXGAj1e3SdE)
Railway man struggling to keep to schedule killed in crash. Requests water with dying words. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utammENmG18)
And finally (with thanks to Paul Carbuncle): Robin Hood rescues three squires (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBR8pSh1ag4)
(The apocalyptic bit comes at the end – logical, really)
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been trying some things with the Artificial Intelligence Entity ChatGTP, and some of the results were surprising and maybe disturbing. The way the system works is that you type in a prompt – ‘write a summary of recent research on X’; ‘compose a letter to your mother about Y’ – or whatever, and within a minute or so, the system types back a coherent response. How well does it cope with folk music-type issues? Better and worse than I expected.
Since I’d just been writing about the song (or body of related songs) The Cruel Mother, I started there. My account will be a bit anthropomorphic (I’ll say something about that later).
Prompt: Write a defence of the mother in the folk song ‘The Cruel Mother’
ChatGPT obviously recognized the song referred to and responded with 200 words, clearly setting out acceptable points – the murdered children might have been the product of abuse, the mother might have felt that they would die anyway without community support, she did feel remorse… A good, solid job, though quite unimaginative. I can see why students would use it to fulfil essay requirements.
Now, every response is generated in real time, so if you repeat a prompt, you won’t get the same response as before. I repeated the prompt – and his time I got a broadly similar response EXCEPT that the events described had an important difference. In this version, instead of focusing on the mother who had just given birth, the focus was on her mother, the babes’ grandmother, and the original, young, mother is driven to despair and infanticide by her mother’s refusal to support her.
“Her [that is, the Grandmother’s] actions are a desperate attempt to protect her daughter from the same fate and preserve her own reputation. In a way, she is sacrificing her own humanity for the sake of her daughter’s survival and future prospects.”
BUT I have not been able to find any version of the Cruel Mother with this story – and I’ve asked people who know this stuff more than me, and I’ve looked in Big Books as well. ChatGPT is known for making stuff up – it’s become known as ‘hallucinating’. For instance, it fabricated an allegation of sexual assault against a law professor in the US, supported by citing a Washington Post article that never existed, in response to a request about sexual harassment on campus. https://decrypt.co/125712/chatgpt-wrongly-accuses-law-professor-sexual-assault. Completely false.
So it seems that ChatGPT hallucinated a significant variant to the ballad story – and it’s an interesting variant, and ChatGPT’s extenuation of the mother’s action, though I don’t think it quite makes sense, adds an interesting twist. I can see how that could be made into a worthwhile new song. This is effectively creativity, though it might be accidental. Mmm.
Then I thought I’d try it as a songwriter.
Prompt: Write a song about a mother who murders her newborn children
It wouldn’t do that: it couldn’t be doing with that sort of violence. Fair enough.
So
Prompt: Write a song condemning a mother who murders her newborn children
It was happy with that, and produced something which more-or-less scanned and rhymed and made sense – but was not a great piece of work. first verse and chorus:
She brought them into this world
Nurtured and loved them with care
But something within her broke
And the darkness took over there
Chorus:
How could you do it, mother?
Take the life of your own child?
You had a duty to protect them
But instead, your heart went wild
About what I’d expected. The same prompt produced a different song – but no better.
I asked for a song about Birds in the Spring. Same again:
Oh, the birds in the spring
Their melodies make my heart sing
Their colorful feathers so bright
They bring such joy and delight
Several species were named, with appropriate sounds and movements – hopping, flitting, singing loud or twittering.
The Copper Family have nothing to fear from this competition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpMNxVRSu3I
Then I asked for a folk song about the birds in the spring – not much difference, really. ChatGPT doesn’t distinguish between songs and folk songs.
BUT then I saw a post from Graeme Rothery saying that his brother-in-law* had asked for a song about Morris dancers saving the world from The Apocalypse and had got a surprising response – a very singable set of words.
Here’s the ChatGPT’s original text:
The world is ending, chaos reigns
The sky is dark, the earth is stained
But in a village on the moor
A band of men prepare for war
They don their hats and bells and sashes
They grab their sticks and swords and lashes
They form a circle, face to face
They dance with vigor, style and grace
They leap and spin, they clash and clatter
They chant and sing, they shout and chatter
They weave their swords in patterns bright
They cast a spell of joy and light
The villagers watch with awe and wonder
They feel their spirits lift from under
The gloom and doom that filled their hearts
They join the dance, they play their parts
The morris men have saved the day
They drove the apocolypse away
With music, laughter, dance and fun
They celebrate the victory won
I thought ‘I could do something with that’. So I thought up a tune and tweaked the words a bit. For all its worldwide reach, ChatGPT doesn’t really know about Morris, so I had to change ‘They grab their sticks and swords and lashes’ (unless this is about the S&M Dark Morris sides on the Dark Web – if anyone knows of those, let me know, I’d like to photograph them) and ‘They form a circle, face to face’
My version is here:
The world is ending, chaos reigns
The sky is dark, the earth is stained
But in a village on the moor
A band of dancers they prepare for war
They put on their hats and bells and ribbons
They grab their swords from where they’re hidden
They form up in sixes, face to face
They dance with vigour, style and grace
A band of dancers go to war
They leap and spin, they clash and clatter
They chant and sing, they shout and chatter
They weave their swords in patterns bright
They cast a spell of joy and light
They dance with vigour, style and grace
The people watch with awe and wonder
They feel their spirits lift from under
They lose the gloom that filled their hearts
They join the dance, they play their parts
They cast a spell of joy and light
The Morris dancers saved the day
They drove the apocolypse away
With music, laughter, dance and fun
They celebrate the victory won
We join the dance, we play our part
Sung video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9huy_qHDBGg
I’ve sung it twice in public so far, and it’s gone down well. Goodness.
OK, it doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s a better song than I could write. Not quite move over, Richard Thompson, but thought-provoking. Maybe our own creativity is mostly hallucination, and it’s not far behind us.
But then, if you believe that traditional songs are as good as they are because of communal authorship and evolution through transmission – which I do largely, though I know that’s only part of it – isn’t that what you’d expect? ChatGPT is the ultimate Voice of the People, or at least those people that type or scan stuff in online. Maybe if I repeatedly fed those clunky songs back in and asked ChatGPT to tweak them, we’d end up with something as good as All Things Are Quite Silent.
Anthropomorphism: it’s clear that ChatGPT’s pronouns have to be We/They, and although we call it ChatGPT, I just know that to itself it says ‘My name is Legion’. A friend tested it out by giving it a couple of very obscure but contentious questions on a subject in which he is an expert, and then argued with the responses. He told me that on the first question the system was a Good Student who modified and developed its answer in response to the criticisms, but on the second it was a Bad Student who got grumpy and recalcitrant and retreated to illogical justifications. As a result, he ended up unimpressed with its intellectual ability.
Additional note: June 2023: I said above: “So I thought up a tune” – but really what I did was to dredge up bits of all the hundreds or more traditional-ish tunes I’ve heard over the last 60 years and use the implicit musical rules (both formal and, again, traditional-ish) that my neural network now conforms to in some black-box-like way, and generate a tune that fits those parameters. What we call creativity – or pretty much the same as the AI entity was doing with its own corpus and rule structure. Mmm….
*Yes, I know that that’s a classic urban legend introduction – ‘I knew a man who knew a man whose brother knew a man who knew…’ but I think this one is genuine.
The Cruel Mother is one of those traditional songs which crops up all over Britain and North America. It occurs with different words, different tunes, and different refrains, and can be traced back to the seventeenth century at least, so is clearly very generally known and very generally accepted. The story is that a woman bears children (usually two) in secret, kills them, and is later visited by the spirits of the children, who tell her that she is bound for hell. Seems fair enough, really, but maybe it needs some explanation as to why that story is so widely accepted and passed on even now (there is a collection of links to performances of different versions by a wide variety of performers at the end of this piece). The Mainly Norfolk page for this song is very, very long: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/thecruelmother.html
The popularity of the song might be because it is something that frequently happens and keeps on happening, like the ‘murder ballads’ in which young men abruptly kill young women they’re going out with – cases which still occur often – or because the song expresses some important message which people need to be reminded of. But there’s another way of looking at it. Many versions are aesthetically splendid, and good to sing, but might give you ethical doubts (as do a lot of other traditional songs) – is this really a topic for entertainment? And is this another example of traditional song blaming women for wider problems? It was a song that I’d never thought to sing in public, without really considering why – but I would have had those concerns if I had thought about it. Recently, though, I’ve heard a re-imagined/re-written version from Fay Field on her record Wrackline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVRnXoWVP4g), which proposes some empathy from the revenant babes:
Oh, bonny babes come tell me true
What death I’ll die for the sake of you
Oh, mother dear, don’t torment thee
Thy sin is lesser than the loss of we
In this version, the mother is sentenced to (and welcomes, as is just) the usual penances (seven years each as a bird in the wood, a fish in the flood, a ringing bell), but there is a possibility that the babes’ intercession might save her from the flames of hell. There is recognition of the sorrow of the mother over her actions and her loss. I’ll go with that, and I’ve learned Hields’s version to sing myself.
[2023 edit I’ve just read David Buchan’s essay The Maid, the Palmer and the Cruel Mother (1967/2013), which gives another mother-sympathetic version. It’s in a pre-1818 manuscript from Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire. The murdered child (one this time) appears to the mother in a wood seven years after the birth, and ‘the bonny boy did on her smile’ before the usual ‘I would clothe you’ exchange, and at the end:
Oh bonny boy would ye tell me, what would bring my soul to thee
O Ye’ll fall down upon your knee, and pray to God to send me to thee
For now I am in heaven so high, praying for mercy to pity thee]
From a modern point of view, there are various reasons why one might have some sympathy for the mother. The pregnancy might be the result of rape or other abuse; there is little chance of survival of the babes anyway if the mother is outcast with no job or support; the mother may be suffering from post-natal depression or psychosis; or even that the accusation of murder is false: miscarriage and perinatal death were common and are still common. This might be seen as modern wokery, but a some accounts from the last few hundred years suggest that courts and people have had some sympathy for Cruel Mothers for a long time. Katherine Watson (2008) says:
Although the precise incidence of new-born child murder in England remains unknown, prosecutions were relatively infrequent, and conviction rates were higher in the 17th century than in later periods, as juries became increasingly willing to recognise the stresses placed on mothers who killed their own infants […] Even those convicted were, from the mid 18th century onward, rarely executed. […] In 1803 a new law repealed the statute of 1624 and created the lesser offence of concealment of birth (still specific to women accused of murdering illegitimate newborns), punishable by up to two years in prison; the concealment provision was extended to all mothers by the Offences Against the Person Act of 1828. Watson 2008:117
Most of my information here is taken from James Sharpe’s chapter on ‘Infanticide’ in his book A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England (quite a big book: there’s a lot to cover) which gives useful detail. [See disclaimer at the end of this piece]. Many women were hanged for killing their newborn children, so it’s not surprising that the theme is widespread in songs. However, the frequency of prosecutions (and maybe the frequency of murders) varied with social and religious changes. Sharpe claims a marked rise in prosecutions/convictions in the 16C:
As the 16th century wore on, though, it’s clear that attitudes harshened and religion lay at the heart of this shift in thinking. The Reformation and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation laid great stress on social discipline and instilling godliness into believers. Accordingly, in the more puritanical world of post reformation England, sexual immorality, along with all other areas of human sinfulness, came to be viewed more censoriously than it had once been. And since infanticide generally involved two sins – fornication and murder – it inevitably attracted particular moral opprobrium. Sharpe 2016:199
Sharpe points out that most cases were unmarried mothers – often servants – and were just those whose babies might well perish anyway. People had little sympathy for single mothers. ‘Wanton girls raising their bastards on the rates’ were identified as a social problem (then as now). It’s likely that the lives of children of an unemployed, unsupported woman would be dismal and short. As the serving maid says, quite reasonably, to the nobleman who tries to seduce her in The Nobleman and the Serving Maid (which I think I learned from Belle Stewart):
If I should fall with a baby, it’d be the very first thing you’d deny
And me and my baby would perish, while you in your mansion would lie
[The nobleman replies that he would actually ‘write out a cheque for some money, and build a fine cottage for you.’ Yeah, right.]
However, according to some versions of the song, unacceptable cross-class relationships could go both ways. One of the earliest versions known in a broadside from Pepys’ collection about 1690 is called The Duke’s Daughter’s Cruelty, or, The Wonderful Apparition of Two Infants whom she Murther’d and Buried in a Forrest, for to hide her shame, printed by J Deacon at the Sign of the Angel in Guiltspur-street, London:
There was a Duke’s Daughter lived in York,
Come bend and bear away the Bows of Yew,
So secretly she loved her Father’s Clark,
Gentle Hearts be to me true.
She lov’d him long and many a day,
Come bend, &c.
Till big with Child she went away
David Atkinson (1992) gives an account of the history, background and structure of the song, concentrating on this early version.
A similar relationship is repeated in Cecilia Costello’s version from the 1950s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn77PWkTSvs&t=171s):
There was a lady that lived in York;
All alone and aloney-o
She proved a child be [by] her own father’s clerk;
Down by a greenwood sidey-o
Costello says that her father told her to take note of the point of the story: “Don’t do what this woman’s done, what I’m going to sing to you.”
The people and the courts were aware of reasons for sympathy with accused mothers. To start with, the law might be loaded against them, and not all accused infanticides would be rightly convicted. The 1624 Infanticide Act gave the death penalty for concealing the death of an infant, and made a stillborn defence more difficult. The rules of evidence for infanticide were different from those for other murder charges, and effectively meant that a woman with a dead or missing baby had to prove that they had not murdered it, rather than the state needing to prove the murder [See the note in the comments below about a Midwife’s Certificate, which might have been evidence against a charge of infanticide]. Sharpe notes that after the 1624 act there was a rise in prosecutions, convictions, and executions, though he also notes the usual willingness of judges and juries to find ways of delaying or commuting sentences, something that happens when they think a law unjust. Eventually, an 1803 law put the requirement of proof of infanticide at the same level as other murders, that is, that the required proof was more stringent than previously.
By the 18C attitudes had changed. A quote from a reformer in 1771:
The modern exposition of this statute is a good instance that cruel laws have a natural tendency to their own dissolution in the abhorrence of mankind. It is now a constant practise of the courts to require that the body of the child should be found before any conviction can take place; and if it should happen that the mother had any child-bed linen or other preparations in her possession prior to her delivery it is generally admitted as a proof that no concealment was intended. Moreover it is not unusual to require some degree of evidence that the child was actually born alive, before the ungenerous presumption, that the mother was the wilful author of the death of her newborn infant, is permitted to affect her. These human deviations from the harsh injunctions of the statute have nearly amounted to a tacit aggregation of it. Sharpe, 2016:213
And Erasmus Darwin in 1767:
The women that have committed this most unnatural crime are real objects of our greatest pity; their education has produced in them so much modesty, or sense of shame, that this artificial passion overturns the very instincts of nature! – what struggles there must be in their minds! – what agonies! Sharpe, 2016:215
There are other ways of understanding the mother’s actions. Katherine Watson (2008) cites McDonagh (2003) to support the idea that “the idea of ‘altruistic killing’ […] that is, murder committed in the mistaken yet sincere belief that the killer is acting out of kindness for her victim […] was by no means unknown during the 18th and 19th centuries: literature of the period, which repeatedly used infanticide as a polemical tool, recognised that murder committed in order to save a child from a life of poverty, constraint or oppression was as much an act of sacrifice as a criminal deed.” Watson, 2008: 118-119. The idea of killing children to save them from worse things has been presented as understandable elsewhere, most strongly in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved in which Sethe kills her daughter rather than allow her to return to slavery. The novel was based on a case in a recaptured slave family from 1856.
Nowadays, we would think it possible that mothers were desperate, disorientated, depressed or psychotic, and not fully responsible. That is not necessarily a modern view. Sharpe quotes a judge summing up at an infanticide trial in 1865:
Human nature revolts against pronouncing the doom of death against some ruined creature seduced into vice, perhaps by someone far more guilty than herself, and then hurried into crime at the last moment by the bewildering, maddening influences of agony, shame, and terror. Sharpe 2016:220
Later in the 19C, another shift:
But perhaps the most striking aspect of 19th century cases of infanticide is the growing focus not on general issues of morality nor specific questions of medical proof but on the mother’s mental state. By the end of Victoria’s reign a common defence was that her actions had been influenced by the onset of puerperal fever, and it proved a very effective one. It’s not hard to understand why. A diagnosis of puerperal fever provided a neat explanation of how a woman could reject her maternal instincts so utterly as to kill her newborn or infant child: clearly the fever had rendered her confused, depressed, even homicidal. And this in turn seemed to fit nicely with the stereotype of the Victorian woman: a creature of irrational instincts who was far more likely to be sad or mad than to be calculatedly bad. Sharpe 2016:221
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, babies were still being killed, all the same. There are some recorded cases of children being killed by their parents to claim funeral insurance, and the practice of ‘baby farming’ in which babies were given for adoption through newspaper advertisements or brokers sometimes led to children being killed or dying of neglect. The song Mrs Dyer the Baby Farmer recounts a famous case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Dyer); Eliza Carthy recorded it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lsMd5ywTCg).
Sharpe points out a neat legislative brake on some aspects of this:
It was a form of insurance that rapidly declined after the passing of the Children’s Act of 1908 which, among other things, made it illegal for people paid to look after children to take out insurance on behalf of their charges. Thereafter there seems to have been a marked decline in the number of children murdered for insurance money. Sharpe, 2016:456-7
Thank goodness for foundling homes and orphanages, although there were still abuses there (see Hetty Feather).
Eventually the 1922 Infanticide Act made infanticide a non-capital offence. Actual practice seems to have been well ahead of this. The last British woman to be executed for the infanticide of her own child was Rebecca Smith. She was convicted of killing her infant son Richard, and was publicly hanged at Devizes, Wiltshire in 1849. After her trial she confessed to having poisoned seven of her other children (Watson, 2008). As a systematic child-poisoner, Smith might have been regarded as a mother who was outstandingly cruel, and more deserving of execution than others. Watson gives a thoughtful account of her case, which does not fit the usual disgraced servant model.
References
Atkinson, David (1992) History, Symbol & Meaning in The Cruel Mother Folk Music Journal 6, 359-380
Buchan, David (2013/1957) The Maid, the Palmer, and the Cruel Mother The Malahat Review, 1967 3, 98-107, reprinted in The Ballad and the Folklorist, 2013, pp3-13 ed Nicholson & Moreira pp3-13 Memorial University of Newfoundland
McDonagh, Josephine (2003) Child murder and British culture 1720-1900 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press cited in Watson, 2008
Sharpe, James (2016) A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England London: Arrow books
(Yes, I could have done wider research, but I was motivated by thinking about my attitudes to the song, rather than needing a detailed social history – and Sharpes’ account is a good read, with lots of fascinating case details (as his other books* are) – and anyway I should disclose that he & I were both keen members of our university folk club, before he went on to greater things. He’s a good lad.)
Watson, Katherine (2008) Religion, Community and the Infanticidal Mother: Evidence from 1840s Rural Wiltshire Family & Community History 11/2, 116-133
*On Witches, Dick Turpin, and the history of Bonfire Night
Thank you to members of the ZoomChild online group for ideas and comments when I was thinking about this.
Some versions of Cruel Mother online:
Fay Field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVRnXoWVP4g
Cecilia Costello: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn77PWkTSvs&t=126s
Fiona Hunter & Mike Vass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KMH5yWbvMc
Moishe’s Bagel with Fiona Hunter – The Cruel Mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8bVKO-Hf7E
Emily Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nCkpOSKBIo
Peggy Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyCmFks-Azc
Shirley Collins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_d88dl9kw
Gretchen Peters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcSHeJWermw
Owl Service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-K42PNKB8o
Alex Glenfield: Cruel Mother: Traditional ballad with overtone and throat singing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okUHezLZ8gY
Alistair Roberts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIOANdvjRqY
Last night I heard someone sing ‘The Little Ball of Yarn’ at a folk club, saying that he’d found this American song, and he thought that there should be a chorus to it, but he couldn’t find one. And the song wasn’t one I knew. Well, I knew ‘Little Ball of Yarn’ from way back, but not this one.
It seemed that this was the same song, but with different words, different tune and a different story. This does happen elsewhere: The Drowned Sailor comes in lots of forms, tunes and locations – but always has the washed-up body recognised by ‘the marks on his right hand’.
The version I heard last night was from the USA, and was about a young schoolteacher come to a village school:
It was many years ago, With my youthful blood aglow, I engaged to teach a simple district school.
I reviewed each college book, And my city home forsook, Sure that I could make a wise man from a fool.
He comes across the School Committee chair’s daughter:
When his daughter I espied, With her knitting by her side, As she wound up her little ball of yarn.
The action is gently described:
I the maid had wooed and won,
As we hunted eggs one morning in the barn.
When her work she laid aside,
Just to please me as I sighed,
And she wound up her little ball of yarn
…and they settle down together:
And as round the fire we sit In these days when shadows flit, And her trembling hands the stockings take to darn
In my memory I live o’er All those happy days of yore, When she wound up her little ball of yarn.
Here’s the sheet music, courtesy of Johns Hopkins: https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/139/059
There are several UK versions, manly collected from Travellers in the SE of England. Mainly Norfolk gives various versions, including text for the schoolteacher version: https://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/theballofyarn.html
All the versions I know are much more direct, and usually end with pregnancy:
Oh it was one fine summer’s day, in the merry month of May, I was strolling down my dear old father’s farm.
When I met a pretty miss, and I shyly asked her this, “May I wind up your little ball of yarn?”
“Oh no sir,” said she, “You’re a stranger, I can see, And you might do me some harm.”
“Oh no, my turtle dove, you’re the only one I love; Let me wind up your little ball of yarn.”
So I took this pretty maid, to a spot beneath the shade, Intending not to do her any harm.
And to my surprise, when I gazed into her eyes, I was winding up her little ball of yarn.
Here’s Ben Willett’s version, from the Topic record ‘The Roving Journeyman’:
and a lovely relaxed version from Mary Ann Haynes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixUOHhjoy2M
And, in the revival, Carthy in the 60s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osuT6jZo1oc
The New Lost City Ramblers from the USA do a non-schoolteacher and quite explicit version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqg7EhPlKj8
…and I’ve found other US round-the-back-of-the-barn versions on YouTube, but no recordings of the schoolteacher version.
There is a common chorus, though not in the versions above:
And the blackbird and the thrush, they sang out from every bush
Keep your hand upon your little ball of yarn
Sensible advice. Bob Roberts sings it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXr_5SqzMaE
But how and where did one version transform into the other? The first version above seems like it could be a Music Hall ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ piece, amongst lots of others. (but it doesn’t appear in John Baxter’s excellent Folk Song and Music Hall site [http://folksongandmusichall.com/]).
So was that a dressing up of the ‘romp upon the farm’ traditional piece? Or was the schoolteacher version pared down in the tradition to a barnyard romp? Neither process seems very likely from the recorded versions – they’re just too far apart – but something like that must have happened.
Any suggestions or information about intermediate versions would be welcome.
Paper presented at Folk Singing Symposium, University of Sheffield, February 2023
The debate, at various times over more than 100 years, about the nature, definition, origins and status of that music which has been perceived as ‘folk music’ has been wide-ranging (Sharp, 1907; Lloyd, 1967; Harker, 1985; Boyes,2010; Roud, 2017. Full references appear at the end of this post). Ideas about folk song range from describing it as a form that has evolved through oral transmission, variation and selection through to its being seen as a bourgeois construction which simultaneously exploits and disdains the culture of the working classes. That debate is fascinating, and will continue. This paper takes a different and more simple-minded approach. It considers the nature of the music which is actually being performed in a section of the British folk music movement. I am influenced by Lucy Wright’s (2019) description of folk processes:
[Folk] is what can happen when people, alone, or together, and regardless of anything, engage in cultural practices they create for themselves. p1
Wright gives examples including girls’ marching jazz bands and sewing circles. It seemed to me that singaround-style folk clubs and tune sessions fitted this description. If these activities are examples of folk processes, then the music that is performed as part of these activities can be regarded as folk music. I would argue that folk clubs are more of a ‘folk activity’ in Wright’s sense than CD-making and streaming, professional concerts, or festivals, the other main elements of the UK folk scene. This is the justification for this study, which intends to describe folk song behaviourally as those songs which people sing in folk clubs, and to examine the nature of those songs. This is a simple approach, compared with the theoretical and historical approaches in the debates referenced above, but has the advantage of being grounded in contemporary lived experience. So I decided to investigate those songs sung in two local folk clubs.
A Practical Definition of Folk Songs: Folk songs are the songs that people sing in folk clubs
The by now traditional folk club (Mackinnon,1993 and Hield, 2010 give definitions and descriptions) is a minor part, and probably a terminally declining part, of the whole folk music scene in the United Kingdom. It has been seen as a support mechanism for retired teachers and social workers, rather than having musical significance. However, it is an important activity to those taking part, and one in which most participants are active music-makers.
The songs performed by the floor singers in two East Midlands folk clubs in a number of sessions between 2017 and 2023 were noted. They were then identified and roughly categorised as to source and date to give a picture of what actively-produced folk music consists of in the lives of various practitioners in the early 21st century.
A complaint about the Victorian and Edwardian collectors in particular is that their accounts of singers’ repertoires were heavily edited, and that they deliberately and explicitly rejected material which they did not see as proper folk material. Anything that they regarded as popular song was not fit to be recorded. Yates and Stradling (2020) quote Sharp as saying in a 1903 lecture:
“For the first week or so, our captures were few and of small account. I could easily have filled my notebook with Music Hall songs, […] songs of the Christy Minstrel type, or with the popular songs of fifty years ago and less, such as ‘Grandfather’s Clock’, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’, ‘Woodman Spare That Tree’, ‘Wait Till the Clouds Roll By’ and sentimental balderdash of that sort. Gradually however we worked through that stratum and eventually struck a rich vein of Real Folk Song, of the kind we were searching for…”
This rejection of recently-composed and commercial material continued with important figures in the post-World War 2 revival. Lloyd (1975) says “show business corporations add their bit of confusion by annexing the term folk song to describe certain professionally made cabaret style products that have nothing to do with musical folklore either in the way they are created and spread nor in formal style, psychological climate or function”. He claims that the compositions of a Dylan or a Donovan are “not folk songs by any workable definition”. p385
However, there are a few cases, from Henry Burstow in 1911 to Walter Pardon in the 1980s, where singers who were sources for admired and ‘proper’ folk songs noted their full repertoires, uncensored by the collectors, or where collectors were careful not to exclude ‘non-folk’ material. I believe these repertoires are an interesting comparison with the current folk club repertoire, and I will discuss some of them in the last part of this paper.
The settings and the methods
All the songs sung by non-professional performers in a number of club sessions between 2017 and 2023 were noted. This was not done in a very systematic or well-ordered way. The study originally started with my idle curiosity to try to quantify how much of the material being performed could be described as ‘folk song’ in the sense that important revival figures of the past, like Cecil Sharp or AL Lloyd, would recognise it. I noted all the songs from six sessions of my most local club (Club B) in early 2020. The results from that were interesting, so I decided to extend the study. I knew there were records from another local club (Club A), where Paul Mansfield (2018) had made thorough observations in 2017, and where one of the club organisers had routinely noted singers and song titles for all the sessions that he attended for some years. Paul and the club generously gave me access to those records (for four years, from 2018 to 2022, interrupted by the pandemic, in the case of the club records), and I supplemented those by noting a further seven sessions from Club A in late 2022 and early 2023. This gave me a total of nearly 1650 performances.
Both clubs meet weekly for singarounds, with a guest night usually once a month. The number of attendees at both clubs is variable, but generally between 10 and 30. Both have a high proportion of performers among the attendees, often more than 80% at Club A. Club B usually has more attendees than Club A, but a slightly smaller proportion of performers, so the number of performers per session is similar between the two clubs – 10-15 or so, with most people having two songs during the evening. So the number of songs noted for each session is 20-30. About 20-25% of the performers are women in each club. The format in the sessions recorded was usually a singaround. Floor singers’ songs on guest nights were also noted. The repertoires of the guests are not considered here. They are operating to a different agenda from that of the local singers, with some requirement to provide novelty and distinctiveness, which can lead to quite different repertoires from those of the floor singers. My hope was to capture a picture of those songs that floor singers wanted to sing for their own pleasure and satisfaction, and for the pleasure and satisfaction of the small local community of the club. Of course, as Hield and Mansfield (2019) have pointed out, it is not the case that ‘anything goes’ on the folk club scene, but both these clubs do have a relaxed attitude to repertoire, and a wide range of music is performed, as will be seen below.
The strength of the data is that it has some natural validity. I don’t believe that people cared, or even noticed much, that the names of what was being sung were being noted, nor that they varied their performances accordingly. That’s not to say that some of these performers didn’t monitor their own repertoires, with spreadsheets or other records of what they’d sung when, and how often. The clubs had theme nights from time to time – like Burns’ Night, or an Irish Night, or the Christmas Party, or an awareness of Samhain or Hallowe’en – which influenced singers’ choices. But these choices were made for the occasion, not for the record.
Most of the performers are old. Anyone under 30 is viewed with surprise and given a possibly intimidating level of welcome and support. Most (but by no means all) attendees are retired from white-collar occupations. The level of experience and competence is vary varied. Some performers have been doing this kind of thing since the folk club boom of the 60s and 70s (and some are skilled and captivating musicians), some have only just started. In both clubs, all performances, even those which are technically poor or break down midway, are listened to with respect and given applause.
I am clear that this is not a representative sample of all clubs in the country. Although the two clubs are close to each other and there is some overlap of members and performers between the clubs, the clubs’ repertoires and atmospheres are different from each other. Other clubs throughout the country will differ again. I do think, though, that it is worth looking at this snapshot of the material that a large number of amateur musicians choose to perform in these settings.
There were three sessions at Club A where song names were noted by Mansfield in 2017, and 52 sessions from the same club noted in whole or part by the organiser between 2018 and 2022. There was a large gap in the club’s face-to-face sessions over the pandemic. There were online sessions during the lockdown, but these weren’t noted. I noted songs from 6 sessions at Club B in 2018, and from 7 sessions in late 2022-early 2023. This gave a total of 67 sessions, with the majority of records, 1252 performances, at Club A and 397 at Club B, a total of 1649.
There were some problems in identifying and categorising songs from the records available. The organiser at Club A did not attend every session, and even then not every song was noted because of fatigue, or toilet or bar breaks. Of those songs noted, not all were identifiable. Some performers give the names of their songs, some don’t, and those recording song names didn’t always know the songs themselves, so there were quite a few records which were distinctive lines from the song, rather than the official song title. It was usually possible to trace the title from these clues, but not always. Sometimes, also, the title noted is ambiguous: several songs, of different styles and eras, may share the same title. Eighty-one, just under 5%, of the originally noted songs were unclassified. These songs don’t appear in the following analysis, which is based on the remaining 1568 performances.
For my analysis, I wanted to categorise songs by date and source of origin. This is where things can get difficult. By careful scholastic research (i.e. Wikipedia, Mudcat, Folk Song and Music Hall, and Mainly Norfolk websites, with a bit of YouTube and general Google searching) it is possible to get dates and origins for most songs. But some of those will be wrong: in particular, people make very definite statements on sleeve notes (which are the main source for Mainly Norfolk) without necessarily having any evidence, and even the most scholarly-respectable sources aren’t always reliable, though Folk Song and Music Hall seems rigorous.
I categorised those songs which are known to have been collected from source singers, either in the first folk song collecting boom or more recently, as ‘traditional’ – even though I know that much of that material came via revival singers and may not have been performed quite as collected from source singers. I’ve also included as traditional some source-singer material which comes from well-known nineteenth or early twentieth century commercial sources, but have passed into general usage – Take the News to Mother, Grandfather’s Clock, etc.
I categorised songs with identifiable authorship from 1900 as modern, commercial songs. This includes ‘folk’ composers of the later twentieth century – Guthrie, MacColl, Paxton, Thompson. I dated songs from when they were first published, or appeared on record (or film in some cases). I know that many of the nineteenth century ‘traditional’ songs also have commercial or literary origins, and may not be fundamentally different from modern compositions, but I think it’s reasonable to make a distinction which would be meaningful to most of the club performers, and is made in many song books and record sleeve notes.
What came out of the data?
There were a small number of songs which dated from the nineteenth century or earlier, but had distinct non-folk originals: madrigals, or songs from sources like Pills To Purge Melancholy or Shakespeare. I classed these as ‘Old Composed’.
As discussed, I categorised classic folk songs as ‘traditional’.
All songs from non-traditional sources which could be dated to 1900 or later I grouped in 20-year categories: 1900-1919, 1920-1939, etc. Self-written songs, of which there were quite a few, I arbitrarily classed as being from 2010.
This gave the distribution:
Unclassified: 4.9%
Of the rest (excluding Unclassified form the percentage calculation):
Old composed: 2.7%
Traditional: 31.5%
1900-1919: 1.9%
1920-1939: 6.8%
1940-1959: 5.8%
1960-1979: 29.8%
1980-1999: 10.1%
2000-2023: 11.5%
As a bar chart, this is:
As a pie chart:
This shows that these are folk clubs: the largest single category is ‘Traditional’. But composed songs from the whole of the twentieth century are more common still, and songs from the 1960s and 1970s are the second largest category. The majority of those, but not all, are singer-songwriter ‘folk’ songs in the now-accepted non-traditional sense. However, the overall impression is that what people choose to sing in those folk clubs is a wide variety of kinds of music from a very wide range of periods. The songs are almost all anglophone, but not necessarily English. There are songs from many American sources, as well as Scottish, Irish and Australian.
A general judgement could be that these, mostly elderly, performers are mainly performing material which was popular in their youth – which explains the peak from the 60s and 70s. The ‘reminiscence bump’ effect, that older people remember more of their lives between age 10 and 30 than other periods (Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, 1986), is well known in the psychology of memory, and most people have an affinity with the music of their youth. But these performers are also willing to pick up on, and adapt, some more recent material – and to write their own songs.
Specific examples may make this clearer. The most popular composers or sources were:
Self-Written (several authors) 72 performances
Bob Dylan 37
Tom Paxton 35
Beatles 29
Ralph McTell 21
Richard Thompson 20
Paul Simon/Simon&Garfunkel 17
At 10-14 performances: John Denver; Carter Family; John Tams; Bert Jansch; Linda Thompson; Pete Seeger; Stan Rogers
The high proportion of self-written songs is different from that noted by Hield (2010) in Sheffield clubs, confirming that these two Nottingham clubs are not representative of any overall ‘folk scene’.
The most popular songs from 1500 performances (7-8 times each)
Traditional: Midnight Special
Traditional: Rose of Allendale
Paxton: Last Thing on My Mind
Tams: Rolling Home
Traditional: Leaving of Liverpool
Trad/Brumley: I’ll Fly Away
(All the ‘traditional’ songs here are really ‘traditional-ish’)
Most of these are here because they’re chosen as good rousing chorus songs to round the evening off. Last Thing on My Mind is a gently rueful song about a failed love affair – something that old men think about a fair deal (Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright was just outside the top 6). It’s worth noting that even songs and sources which might seem subjectively to crop up endlessly are a very small proportion of this very large body of performances. Indeed, the most striking thing about the records, after the fairly predictable preponderance of the 60s and 70s, is the great variety of songs and sources that people chose. A selection of ‘non-folk’ songs and modern(ish) ‘non-folk’ sources:
Everything Stops For Tea; Paloma Blanca; I’m Henry the Eighth; Tiptoe Through The Tulips; Paperback Writer; Bring Your Sweet Loving; It Was a Very Good Year; When a Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
Non-folk composers and authors: The Beatles; The Kinks; Sondheim; Coldplay; Fleetwood Mac; Leo Sayer; Alison Moyet; Jimi Hendrix; Bobby McFerrin; Mandolin Orange; Barenaked Ladies; Dropkick Murphys; Elgar; Sting; Bono/U2; Half Man Half Biscuit; Rice/Andersson/Ulvaeus; Webber/Rice; Mungo Jerry; George & Ira Gershwin; Irving Berlin
Here is a word cloud of sources:
The size of text is roughly proportional to the popularity of the source. (Wordcloud from jasondavies.com/wordcloud)
Note that round the edge, and perhaps difficult to read, are lots of composer/writer songwriter teams: Arlen/Harburg (composers of Over the Rainbow), Ager/Yellen, Ain’t She Sweet, Dubin/Warren, Keep Young And Beautiful, Rogers and Hart, Blue Moon, Leiber and Stoller: lots of Presley songs, and Goffin and King, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. These represent Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building-style material, and songs from shows like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Overall, the impression I have is that although there is a canon of traditional sources, and also one of late 20C folk revival performer material, that people draw on, they are prepared to sing a much wider range of material than that. The music performed in these clubs is drawn from much more general sources than the folk tradition as defined by the Victorian and Edwardian collectors, or by the late twentieth-century revival.
Any song which has:
interesting and meaningful words;
a tune the performer likes;
and which is capable of being performed with a simple accompaniment or no accompaniment
by someone without extreme professional skills,
is a candidate for becoming folk music in this sense.
It also necessary that the performer thinks it might be acceptable to the audience. Hield and Mansfield (2019) point out that that there are non-explicit restrictions in the clubs and it is not really true that ‘anything goes’. They say that in Club A a Max Bygraves song was (perhaps jokingly) seen as borderline acceptable. Singers sometimes do say ‘I’m not sure if this is the right kind of thing…’ but then bash on and do it anyway, and it should be clear by now that there is quite a large latitude of acceptability, in these two clubs at least. I get the impression that ‘folk-ish’ versions of unlikely material are welcomed in both clubs, on the basis of the creativity they show and the novelty they provide.
I think it would be better to call this vernacular music rather than folk music. Those people who enjoy music and want to perform in these settings are prepared to appropriate and adapt a very wide range of music for their own purposes. It turns out (perhaps unfortunately) that most things can be arranged for a simple strummed ukelele accompaniment.
Other repertoires
It is interesting to compare these findings with the repertoires of earlier source singers. The early collectors have rightly been criticised for not paying attention to the full repertoires of the singers they were collecting from, but we do have some complete records. I will consider the repertoires of Henry Burstow in 1911, Jim Copper in 1936, and singers around Blaxhall in the mid 70s. Yates and Stradling (2020) also give a range of examples of non-folk material in source singers’ repertoires, concentrating on material from the USA in British singers’ repertoires.
Henry Burstow, 1911
Burstow, the ‘celebrated bellringer and songsinger of Horsham’, listed 420 songs that he knew in his 1911 autobiography. Of these, he identified 82 as ‘learned from his father’, so those could be counted as traditional to some extent. There are many other well-known traditional songs: Our Captain Cried all Hands, Creeping Jane, etc. Both Lucy Broadwood and Vaughan Williams collected songs from him. I am not competent to evaluate the whole repertoire in detail, but it seemed to me that there are no more than 200 songs which would be recognised as ‘folk songs’. This leaves 200+ other songs – and they are of a very wide variety: patriotic songs from Dibdin, minstrel songs from Christy’s Minstrels, early and mid-nineteenth century broadsides, and commercial songs which were published as sheet music: Darling Nelly Gray (an anti-slavery song from 1856); My Helen Is the Sweetest Flower; Jeannette and Jeannot; Silver Threads Amongst the Gold, as some examples. Just the kind of songs that Cecil Sharp complained about. Burstow writes that he was an enthusiastic learner of songs wherever he could hear them, and names many neighbours as sources, but he also learned from “ballad sheets I bought as they were hawked around at fairs, and at other times from other printed matter” (Burstow, 1911 p108). It also looks as though Burstow had parodies, either by him or others, of commercial songs. Woodman Spare That Tree appears, but also Butcher, Spare That Lamb and Broker, Spare That Bed (no, I can’t imagine what that’s about). There were local singer-songwriters, too. He says that “Jim Manwell, bricklayer, Queen Street […] could compose songs on any subject” in “20 minutes or half an hour” (p108).
Jim Copper, 1936
The Copper Family has various songbooks compiled within the family over the years. Some were compiled with outside audiences in mind, but the one made by Jim Copper in 1936 seems to be a complete account of his songs. I was able to copy the index in the mid-1970s (Miller, 1976). The first page of the index also appears inside the back cover in Coppersongs (1995). He lists all the Copper Family favourites, like Cloddy Banks, Shepherd of the Downs, Spencer the Rover – thirty or forty classic folk songs in a list of 109 titles. There are comic songs: The Horse the Missus Dries Her Clothes On, You Don’t Get Many Pimples on a Pound of Pickled Pork. But there are also quite recent commercial songs:
1892 The Old Dun Cow; 1897 Asleep in the Deep; 1903 Are We to Part Like This, Bill?; 1905 Nelly Dean; 1910 Mother Machree; 1919 Old Fashioned Mother of Mine; 1932 Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
In my modern sample, there are very many songs from around 1970. For Jim Copper in 1936, all the songs above would have been more recent than Tom Paxton songs are for the modern singers. In particular, Brother, Can you Spare a Dime? first appeared in a theatre production in 1932, and Bing Crosby released it as a record in the USA in 1932. It was a contemporary song of social criticism, and in four years, it was in Jim Copper’s repertoire. Copper was more up-to-date then than people singing most of Billy Bragg’s songs are today.
Blaxhall repertoire, mid-70s
In 1980, Ginette Dunn published lists of all the songs known by the singers she knew of around Blaxhall as an appendix to her book The Fellowship of Song (Dunn, 1980). Blaxhall is the village of the Ship Inn, where several important recordings of traditional singers have been made. There are over 400 items overall, many of them songs that were known by several singers, so fewer than 400 individual titles. As with Burstow and Copper, the list is a rich mix of classic folk material with all kinds of other songs. As with Jim Copper, there were some quite recent additions to the repertoires. Three songs that were released in 1966 and were in the repertoire of Percy Webb were Old Shep (this is an older song, but it’s likely that it was learned from Elvis Presley’s 1966 version. It was also listed by Bob Hart and Geoff Ling), Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? with which Allan Smethurs won the 1966 Ivor Novello Novelty Song Award, and the already-by-then folk club favourite Fiddler’s Green. So the revival folk club culture was entering the repertoires of source singers, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t. If it was a good song, people would choose to sing it.
I feel that allowing for changes in the musical environment over a hundred years the repertoires of Burstow, Copper and the Blaxhall singers were not that different from those of the two clubs I’ve studied.
While source singers’ repertoires might be analogous to modern folk club repertoires, I think it’s conversely possible to see signs of the classic folk processes influencing modern repertoire and performance. Oral transmission, anonymisation, variation and selection are visible in the modern folk club material. (I discuss this evolutionary model here: https://millerpsych.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/how-does-music-evolve/)
I believe that many people (like me) learned their melodies by oral transmission by listening to performance on disc (or maybe via YouTube or streaming nowadays) though they might rely on printed sets of words and chord sequences.
Many popular songs have become anonymous: I had to search for the sources of many songs I know very well myself (like January Man), and misattribution is quite common: I’ve heard Take the News to Mother presented as a WW1 song, and Pete Seeger is sometimes said to have written Little Boxes, Roberta Flack The First Time Ever and some know Adele as the source of To Make You Feel My Love.
Variation of tune and words from the original composed or performed version is quite common. Sometimes this is musical error or poor memory, but some is quite deliberate. People have no hesitation in bending material to their own purposes or capability.
There is also a high level of selectivity. Although Bob Dylan is a very popular source, it’s almost always early Dylan which is used, and most of the old pop songs and show tunes which are used are the best of the bunch of their period – of course. Also, though it’s not visible in this fairly short-term sample, I believe that there is evolutionary selectivity. People pick up and develop selected songs, styles, and performance versions from their fellow floor singers – sometimes to the irritation of the source. Issues about ‘ownership’ of material have been discussed by Dunn among source singers (1980), and Mackinnon (1993) and Hield (2010) among others, in folk clubs, but just the fact that this is an issue where singers can readily identify rules and problems shows that borrowing and transmission are common. Among professional folk performers, oral transmission, variation, and selection can be quite explicit, as revealed in many of the sleeve notes quote on the Mainly Norfolk (2023) website. For instance, Shirley Collins (2021) says of her version of Barbara Allen (The Rose and the Briar) in the sleeve notes to her Domino EP Crowlink. “Of all the many versions I have heard, this one, with its sad two-part tune, haunts me most and best seems to evoke Barbara Allen herself.” The Mainly Norfolk page for Tam Lin (https://mainlynorfolk.info/sandy.denny/songs/tamlin.html ) gives lots of sleeve notes by various artists discussing different versions, borrowings, blendings, and modifications. My own version is more or less the AL Lloyd/Mike Waterson one (and we don’t really know where that came from), but I’ve changed bits (of course) and have recently found some extra verses I’d like to add in. That’s how it goes.
That all leads to a grand claim. That is that there really isn’t very much difference, allowing for historical musical and technological changes, between the repertoires, and transmission and development processes, of contemporary folk clubs and traditional source singers from the last two centuries. That is a grand claim, and needs some hedging. One criticism is that ‘allowing for historical musical and technological changes’ is such a big allowance that it devalues the main point. However, given how big those changes have been, being able to see any similarities between then and now seems significant to me. The other criticism is the tiny universe being examined: a couple of old-fashioned singaround clubs, frequented by a very narrow class and age demographic. Strange things can happen in groups like this, and there’s little justification for extrapolating that to any wider society. Fair enough, though I think a similar case could be made for parts of the professional folk world (still a small universe), as discussed above for variation and selection. Also, returning to Wright’s (2019) idea of self-organised culture as folk activity, some similar things maybe be happening elsewhere in non-musical areas. One of my non-folk friends asked me shyly (because they thought I might be offended) ‘Do you have any people in the folk world who are a bit like The Detectorists?’ I wasn’t offended. I told her that most of us were like that – and it’s good.
I’ve come across two supporting arguments elsewhere, one in folk-related literature, one more general.
Ivan Illich’s (1973) book Tools For Conviviality discusses technologies and ways of organising society (tools, in his terms) to promote individual autonomy, resist technological control, and secure justice and access to self-defined work for all. Big political aims, but his approach also makes sense for mutually satisfying group artistic activity. He gives a list of characteristics of such tools (p35 in the 1975 Fontana printing):
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired
The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally
They do not require previous certification of the user
The tools’ existence does not impose any obligation to perform them
Tools allow the user to express their meaning in action
The list makes sense if one substitutes ‘songs’ for ‘tools’:
Songs foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily sung by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired
The singing of such songs by one person does not restrain another from using them equally
They do not require previous certification of the singer
The songs’ existence does not impose any obligation to perform them
Songs allow the user to express their meaning in action
This seems a good description of how many clubs work. Perhaps the second ‘restraining’ condition does not apply if songs are jealously ‘owned’, and the third requires a ‘no auditions’ policy (I have heard of clubs requiring a couple of test verses in the gents’ before allowing newcomers to sing, but it never happened to me. Maybe it’s an urban legend).
The other supporting example I found was in Niall Mackinnon’s (1993) book The British Folk Scene. Thirty years before I had any ideas about folk song as vernacular or convivial music, his study of the British folk scene in the 1980s led him to say:
But artistic accessibility remains at the core – the fact that the music can be performed by anyone and not only by highly trained individuals. Conviviality and accessibility remain centre stage. pp66-67
The insertion of certain vernacular values into the modern British folk revival is as important as the content of the song texts and melodies. It is the mode of their production we that we should look at and is the reason why I have deliberately moved away from a concentration on textual analysis which bedevils so much literary and musical analysis. p68
(emphasis added in both extracts)
So Mackinnon is way ahead of me, and many of my ideas here are not original, but it is encouraging that Mackinnon concentrated on the structure and organisation of the scene in coming to his conclusions, while I started, 30 years later, at the other end, with the outputs of a limited part of the system, and we converged on similar judgements.
The most banal and clichéd summing up of what I’ve said above is the good old ‘folk music is whatever folk sing’, but clichés get to be clichés because they originally had some power, and may still do so. I would say that the music of the modern singaround folk club is produced, selected and developed in much the same way as the music produced by other non-professional groups, performing informally for themselves and each other, in the last century and before. As Lucy Wright (2019, p1) suggests, it is “what can happen when people, alone, or together, and regardless of anything, engage in cultural practices they create for themselves”.
Hugh Miller
Thanks to Paul Mansfield and to the organisers of both clubs for their help – and to all the performers of those hundreds of songs.
Some of my own repertoire: https://www.youtube.com/@HughMillerSongsStories
All photos here by me. If you want to see more of my stuff (I’ve done quite a bit of photography of folk performers) it’s at: www.hughmillerphoto.com
References
Boyes, Georgina (2010) The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival Leeds: No Masters Co-operative
Burstow, Henry (1911) Reminiscences of Horsham: being recollections of Henry Burstow, the celebrated bellringer and songsinger Horsham: Free Christian Book Society (facsimile from Gale, Cengage Learning and The British Library)
Collins, Shirley (2021) Sleeve notes to The Rose and the Briar Crowlink EP London: Domino Records
Coppersongs (1995) The Copper Family Song Book – A Living Tradition Peacehaven: Coppersongs
Dunn, Ginette (1980) The Fellowship of Song: Popular Singing Traditions in East Suffolk London: Croom Helm
Harker, Dave. (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hield, Fay (2010) English Folk Singing And The Construction Of Community PhD Thesis University of Sheffield
Hield, Fay & Mansfield, Paul (2019) Anything goes? Recognising norms, leadership and moderating behaviours at folk clubs in England, Ethnomusicology Forum, 28:3, 338-361
Illich, Ivan (1973) Tools For Conviviality New York: Harper & Row
Lloyd, Bert (1975) Folk Song in England Paperback edition, London: Paladin
Mackinnon, Niall (1993) The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity Buckingham: Open University Press
Mainly Norfolk (2023) English Folk and Other Good Music https://www.mainlynorfolk.info/folk/ accessed 20 February 2023
Miller, Hugh (1976) Index to the Coppers’ Songs Traditional Music No 3, Early 1976, p38
Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, (1986). Autobiographical memory across the lifespan. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical Memory Cambridge University Press
Sharp Cecil (1907) English Folk-song: Some Conclusions London: Simpkin
Wright, Lucy (2019) 21st-Century Folk Art
Yates, Mike & Stradling, Rod (2020) American Songs in the British Folk Repertoire Musical Traditions Website, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/old-new.htm accessed 21 February 202325.8.20
A friend of mine commented that there must be lots of ‘folk songs’ being written about coronavirus and the lockdown. I said, pedantically, that there are plenty of songs, raps, poems, whatever, being written and performed, but there’s no way of knowing if any of them will pass into tradition and become genuine Traditional Songs for a long while yet – 20 years at least. The same might apply to what’s been written about Grenfell Tower.
But that started me thinking – what momentous social events of the past that have been recorded in songs like this have become traditional? My first thoughts were “not many”, but then I thought I should make a bit of a search. That still produced the answer “not a lot,” but did produce some interesting examples.
What I did was not serious historical research, but I did try to be a bit systematic. To start with, I needed a definition of ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’. I stuck with ‘traditional’, because ‘folk song’ seems to have become attached to anything a middle-aged man sings to guitar accompaniment with a fake American or West Country accent.
A more generous definition comes from Lucy Wright, in her fascinating collection of photos: 21st-Century Folk Art: “Folk art is what can happen when people, alone or together, and regardless of anything, engage in cultural practices they create for themselves.”
Since I was looking for historical examples, that wasn’t really what I wanted, so I tried to limit the search to songs which had become more or less anonymous and were more or less widely known by people generally, at least to recognise, if not to perform. Of relatively recent social and political events, there are examples from the 60s like ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, maybe, from World War Two and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ from World War One.
I was looking for memories of more distant historical events, and I looked for songs which seemed to fit those criteria and were still in circulation in the first half of the 20th century. I concentrated on songs from the British Isles, though I was prepared to use a few examples collected in the States as evidence for the continued existence of some songs or themes. For songs that appeared in the various folk song books and collections I had, I counted songs that were recorded from people who sang them, not from printed sources.
This actually rules out most of the ‘traditional songs’ that people know. Elderly folkies like me will know lots of songs from the past about social issues, from Bert Lloyd’s Come All Ye Bold Miners collection onwards, and a strong tradition of performing these has grown up, but it’s a tradition of the late 20th century folk revival culture, with very little to do with the culture that existed before that. The current musical culture of the folk clubs themselves is even further away from a historical tradition. Last year, I did a bit of rough research recording what was actually sung over a few months in a small fairly traditionally inclined club in the East Midlands – an example of Lucy Wright’s 21st-century folk art. That showed that the largest group of songs came from the 1960s, many others were very recent, often written by the performer, and only one third were anything like traditional. Most of those ‘traditional’ songs were from the Sharp/Vaughn Williams/Lloyd kind of collections, or from the later 20th century popularisers of these collections, and not from any living or recently dead cultural tradition. So all that stuff I’d learned about Blackleg Miners and Border Reivers was a bit irrelevant, really.
Another problem was the broadsides. They worked as popular news and entertainment and they do reflect lots of important political and social events from the past, and they’ve been carefully preserved and mined for popular commentaries on these events. Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England is a fascinating survey of contemporaneous compositions, but he points out that only 20 of his 82 examples come from oral tradition, and one of his sources is a single copy of a broadsheet.
Palmer points out that “in some cases songs detach themselves from individual ownership and go travelling by themselves, multiplying into different versions, and becoming common property. By this stage the original author is usually forgotten; nor is he now the sole author for often a song is rounded and improved by those who learn it, sing it, and pass it on to others.” (p5). Those were the examples I was looking for, but many good songs recorded in broadside collections never made that jump. So, the problem is the same as might apply to potential coronavirus and Grenfell Tower songs: which accounts of historical events did ever become part of popular traditional culture in that way?
I searched through some books and lists and collections of recordings – not carefully selected, just what I had easily available. There is a list of what I used at the end of this piece. Then I needed to make a lot of very approximate and subjective decisions, heavily contaminated by my 50 plus years’ experience of all the distorting processes that are described above. I’d welcome commentary on, and disagreement with, my judgements.
So, what came out?
There was nothing at all, not surprisingly, about long-ago momentous events like the Norman invasion, the Black Death [Edit: Well, there’s Ring a Ring a Roses, and it’s suggested that other children’s songs are linked to historical events, but they’re often well-disguised] and other plagues, or the Wars of the Roses, though I did find two survivals from medieval times.
I found very little about specific short-term momentous events like the English Civil War or the South Sea Bubble, but there were commentaries on longer-term social issues. Some specific bits of history that do have various songs attached to them are the Jacobite Rebellion, the Napoleonic wars, the post Waterloo depression (perhaps, though I think that has been absorbed into general ‘hard times’ themes), and the siege of Québec. These are songs about specific events, but they are often tied to the personalities involved, like Bonnie Prince Charlie or General Wolfe. There are also some songs about other historical (and non-historical) figures, more as personalities than about the events they were involved in. It seems that up until the 19th century there were lots of songs about Robin Hood in circulation, but few of those came through to the 20th century. Dick Turpin has songs about him, though the songs don’t reflect the actual events or his personality. Jim Sharpe has given a convincing account of the full shortcomings of songs and stories about Turpin compared with the historical record. There is a song with a continuing life about Bold Wolfe and the siege of Québec. But the historical person who crops up most often in the British tradition is Napoleon. This may be because he has a variety of appeals, as well as great historical importance. Napoleon can be seen as a revolutionary and the champion of the common worker, and there are songs in praise of him, but also he was an important enemy of the country and there are songs about the Napoleonic wars, his defeat, and eventual tragic end – which is another good topic for a song.
[2023 Edit: Peter Wood’s 2015 book The Green Linnet covers songs in the tradition and on broadside on Napoleon, giving words and tune of many. He discusses the interaction between oral and broadside traditions, and the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of various songs. A useful collection]
There are two songs about medieval women which persisted beyond the broadsides into the 20th century. ‘Fair Rosamund’ tells the story of the relationship between Rosamund Clifford and King Henry the Second of England in the 12th century. ‘The Death of Queen Jane’ may well be an account of the death of Jane Seymour (1508-1537), wife of Henry the Eighth, after childbirth. [2023 edit: Maybe Queen Eleanor’s Confession, too, also from the time of Henry II. But I’m told it’s unlikely that Eleanor actually had it off with Earl Marshall on a boat trip, essentially the same story crops up elsewhere, and the sources people mostly give are antiquarian, rather than living tradition, though Lloyd says that Gavin Grieg got a version from Bell Robertson in the early 20C]
There are lots of 18th and 19th century broadsides giving the extended story of Rosamund Clifford, including how she was kept hidden in a labyrinth by Henry the Second but discovered and murdered by Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife. The bit about the labyrinth and the murder is not true, but there is evidence that Henry and Rosamund had a relationship. A fragment of ‘Fair Rosamund’ survived in the United States into the 20th century, which just involved Rosamund’s dismay at being noticed by Henry: the danger to an attractive young woman of coming to the attention of a powerful man. Perhaps this theme continued because it is a #metoo story with relevance down the ages.
The Death of Queen Jane is a graphic account of a long and difficult confinement which ends in the Queen’s death after a caesarean delivery, followed by a grand funeral procession. If it is an account of Jane Seymour’s death, then it isn’t accurate. Seymour died of an infection some time after giving birth naturally. But it’s a powerful story and an excellent song, so it may have survived just for those reasons.
There are particular social issues which occur in quite a lot of songs, but they tend to be generalised and historically extended, and the songs don’t necessarily reflect specific events within the general issues.
For instance, there are lots of songs about the continuing war between poachers and landowners and their gamekeepers. Some of those refer to specific places and specific incidents, although the places named can shift from version to version of the song. This general conflict extended over a long period of time, and drove the composition of many songs and kept them relevant over time, so that they were remembered and developed and became part of a tradition.
The same applies to songs of immigration and transportation. Some songs refer to particular crises and destinations, like the Irish famine or van Diemen’s land, but the issues continued and recurred over long periods of time, and again there are many songs which can’t be tied to any particular instance.
There are one or two long lived and quite common songs about infanticide: The Cruel Mother in one form or another. As Sharpe has pointed out in his history of violence in Britain, the incidence of infanticide, or certainly the incidence of prosecutions for infanticide, peaked quite markedly at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th. Sharpe attributes that to a rise in puritan principles of morality and a reduction in support for children born out of wedlock, which might lead to increased levels of infanticide and increased willingness to label the perpetrators as evil. It’s possible that the songs reflect this and can be tied back to the times when those changes took place. There are printed versions from the end of the 17th century onwards.
Another repeating theme is the press gang – obviously heartily disliked and presented as being a danger to individuals and to married couples, and also as a way of disposing of inappropriate suitors: “We’ll send him to the wars to be slain”.
There are songs about specific disasters, but I have the impression that it’s more of a general disaster theme which gets applied to particular cases, which may change from century to century. Fires, storms at sea, and at least in the last two centuries, mining disasters, are things that come along time and time again, and so the songs are more archetypal than historically specific, though certainly songs like The Gresford Disaster, which describes a mine disaster in 1934, and Three Score and Ten, describing the Great Storm of 1889, are quite precise [edit: though Three Score has the month of the storm wrong, I’ve read] . Whether they would stay specific down the centuries is not so clear. There are several songs about the Titanic which were recorded in the USA in the 20th century, but I don’t know of any well-known British ones.
The other generalised theme is The Hard Times Of Old England (or in the States, songs like How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, written in the 1920s) which could apply to the 1830s, the late 19th century recessions, the 1930s, the 1970s , the 2010s – and on into the future. Again these become less specific as time goes on and historical identifiers get lost. There were still people with a memory of eating nettles for lack of any other food in the 20th century, but boiled nettles aren’t called Waterloo Porridge any more.
So just as traditional songs in general become anonymized and reflect general community experience as they are passed down and changed, it’s possible that the historical events referred to in those songs become less individual, and those songs which have resonances with current disasters or injustices are the ones which continue in the tradition – but in doing that they become less historically specific. Traditional songs retain their hold because they reflect those things in people’s lives that don’t change much down the ages: sex and death, betrayal and revenge, food, drink and good times, religion and ritual – and war, oppression and social injustice, hard times and poverty are ever with us, and so political event songs about them become historically anonymized, just as authors and tunes become individually anonymized in the traditional process.
Song Sources
The BBC/Caedmon/Topic Folk Songs of Britain series
Those volumes that I have from Topic’s Voice of the People collection
Assorted other Topic and Leader recordings
Steve Roud and Julia Bishop The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs Penguin, 2012
(not Vaughan Williams and Lloyd Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959) because they say that theirs is a more specialised collection than Roud & Bishop’s:
“We have confined ourselves to songs and variants unpublished outside the pages of the journals of the Folk Song Society and English Folk Dance and Song Society […] versions of songs that have hitherto remained in what is practically a private collection.”)
Roy Palmer A Ballad History of England Batsford, 1979, carefully sifted
The list of titles in the various Copper Family Song Books which I copied on a visit to Bob Copper in the 1970s
Other sources
The two books by Jim Sharpe that I refer to are:
James Sharpe Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman Profile: 2004
James Sharpe A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England Penguin Random House 2016
also
Peter Wood The Green Linnet: Napoleonic songs from the French Wars to the Present Day 2015
Lucy Wright 21st Century Folk Art Social Art Publications 2019
This text was written as a replacement for a lecture I was scheduled to give, but was unable to because of other issues, on a module on The Psychology of War and Peace at Sheffield Hallam University. March 2020
One starting point in considering oppression and cruelty in many psychology courses is to look at studies which have constructed situations in which people end up behaving in cruel and oppressive ways, such as Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s study of obedience. There is a psychology of oppression & cruelty but there’s more to human behaviour in crisis than the cruel and neglectful, and it’s important to try to construct a psychology of resistance to oppression and cruelty. Both Milgram and Zimbardo were well aware of this, which is apparent if you read their own accounts of their research (Milgram 1974, Zimbardo 2007), rather than the condensed textbook versions.
This essay will describe a number of case studies of people who, in various ways, did the right thing in evil situations, and then try to disentangle aspects of motivation, situation or personality which might have been important in their resistance.
In fact, many of Milgram’s own respondents successfully resisted the pressures of the experiment. Milgram ran very many versions of the shock experiment, and in most of them people resisted at much higher levels than the 32% in the version usually cited. He was interested in what factors would allow people to resist the commands of the experiment, and he found many, so that there were many conditions (where the ‘experimenter’ isn’t physically present, where there is a ‘fellow teacher’ who resists the ‘experimenter’, where there are two ‘experimenters’ who quarrel, and so on) where obedience was very low. Even in the standard version, there were many who resisted. There is a video of such a person at 13:44–15:55 in this video https://vimeopro.com/celialowenstein/portraits/video/110417804
Milgram was rightly interested in these resisters, I’ll discuss his account of them later on.
Recently, Zimbardo has moved into explicitly dealing with ‘heroism’ (though he later questioned whether ‘hero’ was the best word) as in Franco, Blau & Zimbardo (2011).
Franco et al develop a typology of ‘heroes’, ranging from those who face physical peril, whether military or civilian, to those who show social sacrifice: good Samaritans, bureaucracy heroes, or whistleblowers (also religious and political figures, martyrs, political or military leaders, adventurers, scientific heroes, underdogs). They found that the public view favoured physical peril as being heroic, and compared with physical risk, “social courageousness items were marked as heroic less frequently, showed greater overlap with altruism and were frequently viewed as being motivated by neither heroic nor altruistic intentions” Franco, Blau & Zimbardo 2011, p8
You can see Zimbardo talking about this project and his ‘Hero Construction Company’ in a 2012 interview at http://vimeo.com/40425064. The section I use in the lecture runs from 6:44 to 9:02. Another part of the interview will be referenced later.
Some examples
It’s important to remember that at all times, in all places, there are people who stand up for doing the right thing. Historically, many of them end up being recorded as martyrs, unfortunately, but that can be the way heroism goes. Here is a quick run-through of some examples, arranged chronologically. I will come back to some of them in more detail in trying to give a psychological account.
Slavery-era USA: I came across a nice example in a reprinted collection of papers from the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, published in The Underground Railroad (Still, 2017). The Committee was part of the ‘Underground Railroad’, which was a network in the early and mid-19th century which helped to organise the escape of slaves from the southern states of the U.S.A. to the free states in the North. This was a serious crime in the southern states, and even if they reached the North, slaves were vulnerable to being kidnapped, legally or otherwise, back into slavery. Still records that in 1856 a police officer from the Mayor’s Force turned up at their office at a time when they were expecting a party of escapers to arrive, which caused them great alarm, but he told them:
“I have just received a telegraphic despatch from a slaveholder living in Maryland, informing me that six slaves had escaped from him, and that he had reason to believe that they were on their way to Philadelphia, and would come in the regular train direct from Harrisburg; furthermore I am requested to be at the depot on the arrival of the train to arrest the whole party, for whom a reward of $1,300 [a very large amount of money in 1856: slaves were valuable possessions] is offered.
Now I am not the man for this business. I would have nothing to do with the contemptible work of arresting fugitives. I’d rather help them off. What I am telling you is confidential. My object in coming to the office is simply to notify the Vigilance Committee so that they may be on the look-out for them at the depot this evening and get them out of danger as soon as possible. This is the way I feel about them; but I shall telegraph back that I will be on the look-out.” Still 2017, p246
This probably risked his job, and maybe prosecution. Good work, un-named police officer.
World War One: Not all soldiers are prepared to follow orders to kill. Harry Patch was one of the longest-surviving soldiers from World War One. He was a member of a machine-gun team, a main mechanism for delivering death, but he wrote in his memoir:
“The team was very close-knit and it had a pact. It was this: Bob said we wouldn’t kill, not if we could help it. He said ‘we fire short, have them in the legs, or fire over their heads, but not to kill, unless it’s them or us.’” Patch, 2007, p71
Early stages of the Holocaust: Paul Grüninger (Paul Groeninger in some English-language versions), was a Chief of Police on part of the Swiss border with Austria in 1938-39. After the Nazi occupation of Austria in March, 1938, the Swiss government decided to prevent the movement into Switzerland of Jewish refugees. They cited concerns about the risks of ‘overload’ of refugees/asylum seekers, foreigners who would have difficulty integrating. There was fear of foreign ‘overpopulation’ in a small country. Refugees were depicted as ‘rejects, the dregs of society’.
This reasoning might sound familiar to you.
In April, 1938 border guards were ordered to refuse entry to those crossing from Austria without an entry visa. Grüninger and his staff ignored these commands, and used several strategies to admit Jews ‘legally’, as well as illegally. They allowed 2-3,000 refugees into Switzerland. In April, 1939, he was suspended from duty. In 1940 he was convicted of allowing refugees to enter Switzerland illegally. He was dismissed and lost his pension and all other public employee privileges. He died in poverty in 1972. He was pardoned posthumously in 1995 (Rochat & Modigliani, 2000)
He later said of his motivation
“…we did not have the heart simply to send the refugees back and, who knows, perhaps even to condemn to death people who had been mistreated in the most shameful way in Germany […] we were guided also by the opinion of a large portion of the Swiss people, of the press, and of the political parties.” Rochat & Modigliani, 2000, p99
Later: From 1935 to 1943 Irena Sendler or Irena Sendlerowa worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw.
She also pursued informal, and during the war conspiratorial, activities, such as rescuing Jews, primarily as part of the network of workers and volunteers from that department, mostly women. Sendler participated, with dozens of others, in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and then provided them with false identity documents and shelter with willing Polish families or in orphanages and other care facilities, including Catholic run convents, saving those children from the Holocaust. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
There were a few options available. The first route led through the underground corridors of the courts in Leszno. Anonymous janitors were bribed. But what if the exit on the Aryan side was closed off?
The trolley tracks were the second route – Irena could count on the help of a tram driver she’d befriended, Leon Szeszko. The third option was to walk out together with the worker brigades. […] Route number four was the ambulance leaving the ghetto. Infants were carried across in crates and sacks. […] A loudly barking dog was bought so as to obscure the crying of babies. Irena Sendlerowa would bridle at being called a heroine, so let us call her a social activist. She saved 2,500 Jewish children. Not by herself, as she always emphasised. During the war and the time of the occupation, she dreamt of having dry shoes. Her interests were politics, history, and people. Culture.pl https://culture.pl/en/artist/irena-sendlerowa
The citizens of Le Chambon and André and Magda Trocmé: Le Chambon is a remote mountain plateau in south-eastern France, where people in many villages sheltered Jews from deportation and en route to escape to Switzerland.
When the deportations began in France in 1942, Trocmé
, the local pastor, urged his congregation in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (S.E.France) to give shelter to any Jew who should ask for it. The village and its outlying areas were quickly filled with hundreds of Jews. Some of them found permanent shelter in the hilly region of Le Chambon, and others were given temporary asylum until they were able to escape across the border, mostly to Switzerland. Jews were housed with local townspeople and farmers, in public institutions and children’s homes. With the help of the inhabitants some Jews were then taken on dangerous treks to the Swiss border. The entire community banded together to rescue Jews, viewing it as their Christian obligation. Yad Vashem https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/trocme.html
“We do not know what a Jew is. We only know men”, he said when asked by the Vichy authorities to produce a list of the Jews in the town. Hallie, 1979, p103
Trocmé urged his congregants to “do the will of God, not of men,” and stressed the importance of fulfilling the commandment in Deuteronomy 19:2-10 concerning the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter. Yad Vashem
I won’t go into the story of Oskar Schindler right here. The story is well-known and the book Schindler’s Ark, and the film Schindler’s List give lots of detail. I’ll discuss him later.
There are many more stories. The Yad Vashem Foundation instituted an award Righteous Among the Nations, for non-Jews who had rescued Jews during the Holocaust.
“In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values. These were the Righteous Among the Nations […] Contrary to the general trend, these rescuers regarded the Jews as fellow human beings who came within the bounds of their universe of obligation.” Yad Vashem Foundation
You can probably think of many well-known cases that might qualify: Paul Grüninger, Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, Raoul Wallenberg – but how many were there in total?
What would you think, given that in most of those times, in many of those places, helping Jews in any way was at least illegal, and in many cases could lead to being immediately killed or tortured. A dozen, a hundred, a few hundred, a few thousand?
My initial guess was several hundred or a few thousand. When I checked I found that by 1 January 2019, Yad Vashem had recognized over 27,000 Righteous Among the Nations from 51 countries.
So many. Not enough, obviously, but this kind of resistance is something that many people will rise to, if necessary.
Vietnam War: In the midst of the atrocities of war, there are always those who resist. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, there was a massacre in the village of My Lai, during which American soldiers spent hours killing, raping and mutilating between 300 and 500 defenceless civilians of all ages. You can easily find horrible details of this, so I won’t spell them out here. Amongst the soldiers on the ground, there were those who refused orders to shoot people. Here is an account from Harry Stanley:
Lt Calley ordered [me] to shoot these people and I refused, and he told me he was going to court-martial me when we got back to base camp, and I told him what was on my mind at the time. Ordering me to shoot down innocent people: that’s not an order, that’s craziness to me. I don’t feel I have to obey that. If you want to court-martial me you do that if you think you can get away with it. […] It was immoral to me.
You can see this brief interview Harry Stanley at 6:07 onwards at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ap96BUJgz4 This, and the clip with Hugh Thompson (below), are from the Yorkshire Television documentary Four Hours at My Lai. There are many horrible things in this programme, but the interviews with Stanley and Thompson are not horrible.
Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who was flying cover for the troops on the ground, started to realise that something had gone wrong.
During the mission as it was going on, we kept just reconning around: started seeing a lot of bodies. It didn’t add up, you know, how people were getting killed and wounded, and we weren’t receiving any fire – just didn’t make sense: there was too many casualties and how they were – the locations they were in – y’know, figured our artillery couldn’t do this – bodies in places the artillery didn’t hit – trying to get out of the village.
He landed his helicopter, and found a group of soldiers advancing on a group of women and children. Larry Coburn, Thompson’s door gunner:
“Warrant Officer Thompson was desperate to get these civilians – what he believed to be civilians – out of this bunker and into a safe area. He’s seen beforehand that what he was trying to do to help the people on the ground wasn’t getting done. He was convinced that the ground forces would kill these people if he couldn’t get to them first. He landed the aircraft between the American forces and the Vietnamese people in the bunker, got out of the aircraft, had us get out of the aircraft with our weapons to cover him, and he went and had words with the Lieutenant on the ground. He asked the Lieutenant how he could get these people out of the bunker. The Lieutenant said the only way he knew was with hand grenades, so when Warrant Officer Thompson came back to the aircraft he was furious, and he was desperate to get these people out of the bunker himself. […] He told us if the Americans were to open fire on these Vietnamese as he was getting them out of the bunker that we should return fire – on the Americans”.
Hugh Thompson: “When I did instruct my crew – my crew chief and gunner – y’know, to open up on them if they opened up on any more civilians, I don’t know how I would have felt if they had opened up on them, but that particular day I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. They were the enemy at that time, I guess”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4MFdDqpr4 1:34 to 4:50
Thompson and his crew recruited help from other helicopters, and airlifted over a dozen civilians to safety. Thompson was unpopular as a result of his actions. On later missions, his crew member Glenn Andreotta was killed, and Thompson broke his back in a crash. His actions were sharply criticised by some back in the States. Democrat Congressman Mendel Rivers publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at My Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialled.
Eventually, Hugh Thompson was awarded the Soldier’s Medal in 1998, thirty years after his actions.
“The Soldier’s Medal is awarded to any person of the Armed Forces of the United States or of a friendly foreign nation who, while serving in any capacity with the Army of the United States, distinguished himself or herself by heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.”
Characteristically, he initially refused to accept the medal, unless Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, his crew members, both received the same honour.
If you want to follow up more on My Lai, it’s worth finding out about those who played a heroic role in uncovering the massacre, such as Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haeberle.
Palo Alto, California 1971: The Stanford Prison Experiment
This was Philip Zimbardo’s ‘fake prison’ study, in which randomly assigned student ‘guards’ bullied and abused other students who were acting as ‘prisoners’. The accounts of the experiment usually say something like ‘after six days, because of the escalating abuse by the guards ,the experiment was terminated’, which gives the impression that Zimbardo made the decision. However, Zimbardo makes it clear in his book (Zimbardo, 2007) that the initiative came from Christina Maslach, and that he initially opposed her. Maslach was going out with Zimbardo at the time, and he had invited her down to the study site to see all the fascinating stuff that was going on. She was appalled, and directed him to stop the study straight away.
“…I challenged whether she could ever be a good researcher if she was going to get so emotional from a research procedure. I told her that dozens of people had come down to this prison and no one had reacted as she had. She was furious. She didn’t care if everyone in the world thought what I was doing was OK. It was simply wrong. Boys were suffering. As principal investigator, I was personally responsible for their suffering. They were not prisoners, not experimental subjects, but boys, young men, who were being dehumanised and humiliated by other boys who had lost their moral compass in this situation.” Zimbardo, 2007, p170
Maslach was a research student at the time, and Zimbardo was a faculty member, so her opposition was risky to her in a number of ways.
Maslach recalls: “…a bit of a tirade by Phil (and other staff there) about what was the matter with me. Here was fascinating human behaviour unfolding, and I, as a psychologist, couldn’t even look at it? They couldn’t believe my reaction, which they may have taken to be a lack of interest. Their comments and teasing made me feel sick and stupid – the out-of-place woman in this male world – in addition to already feeling sick to my stomach by the sight of these sad boys so totally dehumanised.” Zimbardo, 2007, pp170-171
In fact Zimbardo reluctantly accepted her judgement and stopped the experiment. “At the time it was a slap in my face, the wake-up call from the nightmare that I had been living” p170. (They later married, and are still married, almost 50 years later, happily as far as I know. This is pretty good going for academics.)
Iraq: Abu Ghraib Prison 2004: There was systematic mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by a small group of American Army prison guards. You have probably seen the photographs. This is often portrayed as being just like the Stanford Prison Experiment. (My interpretation of the SPE is very different from the standard textbook one, and it’s clear from Zimbardo’s (2007) detailed account that the standard version of what happened, let alone the psychological interpretation, is inaccurate. I think that both Stanford and Abu Ghraib show how lax management and a generally malign environment allow dominant individuals with bullying tendencies to emerge and control the abuse. But that’s for another lecture.)
Sergeant Joe Darby, a military policeman at the prison, was given a CD with lots of photos of Iraq by Chuck Graner, one of the abusers, so he could pick some to send home to his family. Amongst the city scenes and sunsets, he discovered the now well-known photos of the physical and sexual abuse of the prisoners by Graner and other members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Darby sat on the photos for several weeks, and initially tried to expose this abuse anonymously, because he knew it would be dangerous for him to blow the whistle on it.
Darby didn’t do anything in a hurry. ‘I’d been in the military and around a lot of these guys long enough to know we take care of our own,’ he said. He anticipated what would be said if he reported the pictures: ‘That I was turning in my friends, that I was a traitor, that I was a stool pigeon.’ […] ‘Is it going to be worth the possible retaliation?’ Gourevich & Morris 2008, pp235-236
In the end, he handed the pictures to the army CID. He was right about possible consequences. The identity of the whistle-blower was kept secret in Iraq, but Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, named him in a congress committee. Darby was immediately smuggled back to the states for his own safety. There were repercussions for his family, too:
His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when he was named, she had to flee to her sister’s house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor. That animosity in his home town has meant that he still cannot return there…… …After Donald Rumsfeld blew his cover, he was bundled out of Iraq very quickly and lived under armed protection for the first six months…… …Mr Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. They have done everything but change their identities.
Bryan (BBC News August 2007)
Rwanda 1994: During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Paul Rusesabagina used his influence and connections as temporary manager of the Mille Collines hotel to shelter 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus for several months from being slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia.
Rusesabagina’s story is well-known and well-documented, including in his own book An Ordinary Man (2007), and in the film Hotel Rwanda (2004).
I’ll discuss him in more detail later.
A psychology of Doing the Right Thing
So, lots of cases. What is the psychology of all this? There isn’t a simple answer, and there’s not very much research. I’ll discuss that, and then make some suggestions based on the examples I’ve described so far.
Milgram has an appendix on ‘patterns among individuals’ in his book, which discusses the characteristics of those who resisted, but found but found few consistent similarities in them.
In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience or to make the simple-minded statement that kindly and good persons disobey, while those who are cruel do not. There are simply too many points in the processes at hand at which various components of the personality can play complicated roles to allow any oversimplified generalisations Milgram, 1974, p226
Milgram’s study is difficult to replicate, for ethical reasons, but there have been further analyses of his archives, and versions with less damaging ‘punishments’ which have been run, which suggest some consistencies. Stephen Gibson did a rhetorical analysis of transcripts from Milgram’s studies.
“Analysis draws attention to the way in which participants could draw the experimenter into a process of negotiation over the continuation of the experimental session, something which could lead to quite radical departures from the standardized experimental procedure.” Gibson, 2013, p290
Modigliani & Rochat (1995) analysed film and audio recordings of 36 respondents in the version of the Milgram study which was conducted in an office building in Bridgeport, rather than at Yale, where the obedience rate was 47%. They hypothesized that “The sooner in the course of the experiment a subject begins to show notable resistance, the more likely he will be to end up defiant.” p107. After analysis they concluded “the lower the voltage at which subjects first question, object, or refuse, the lower will be the final voltage they will deliver.” p117, original emphasis.
Both of these factors show the dynamic nature of agreeing to cooperate with evil, as Milgram did in stressing the importance of the gradual escalation of the level of shock in his original design. They point out the importance of quickly grasping what is going on, and of having the verbal and social skills to negotiate with the malign authority, both of which will crop up in later discussion.
Morselli and Passini (2010) analysed autobiographies by Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King. They found that all three report the influence of parents: ‘a very strong and self-confident person’ (King); ‘incorruptible and had earned a name for strict impartiality’ (Ghandi); ‘My father possessed a proud rebelliousness,, a stubborn sense of fairness that I recognise in myself (Mandela). All three recalled how encounters with new social contexts, peoples and ideas in adolescence affected their relationship with authority, and all three stressed the importance of social relationships and a supportive social context in dealing with the hardship and persecution that resulted from resisting authority.
Philip Zimbardo recorded a long interview about his Hero Construction Company project in 2012, already referred to. It is available at http://vimeo.com/40425064. In this part of my lecture I used the section from 10:40 to 14:35. It’s actually an hour-ling interview and discussion. This is the summary of the points he makes there.
He differentiates heroism from altruism because those who do it are aware of the personal cost and risk. There are three kinds of heroes
These categories don’t fit clearly with the examples I’ve given above. Perhaps Hugh Thompson and Christina Maslach as impulsive and reactive, but the other examples seem to have elements beyond the categories above.
What’s the difference between them in terms of psychology? Zimbardo’s conclusion in the interview is that “we don’t have a clue.” Milgram reached a similar conclusion about disobedience:
My overall reaction was to wonder at how few correlates there were of obedience and disobedience and how weakly they are related to observed behaviour. I am certain that there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it. In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience, or to make the simple-minded statement that kindly and good persons disobey while those who are cruel do not. Milgram 1974 p226
However, in the last chapter of The Lucifer Effect (Zimbardo, 2007), and on his website, Zimbardo does suggest some characteristics of those who are successful in resisting evil:
Those are rather dense terms, and it’s worth simplifying them a bit.
Mindfulness: this isn’t the meditation stuff. It’s to do with clearly realising what’s going on, what the implications and consequences might be – and not being sucked into doing something inhumane without paying attention to it. It also applies to not being the kind of person who ignores injustice if it doesn’t affect them.
Hardiness/accepting interpersonal conflict: being prepared to accept disagreement, being unpopular, not being accepted if you stand up for what you think is right. This is pretty obvious in those who refuse to go along with bullying peer groups.
Extended time-horizon: thinking about future consequences, both for possible victims, but also for yourself. ‘If I walk away now, it’ll be easier for me right now, but I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’
Resist rationalising inaction: don’t be led astray by thinking ‘there’s no point doing anything – it won’t make any difference’; ‘it’s not my responsibility’; ‘other people can intervene more effectively than me’. The traditional challenge: ‘if not you, who? If not now, when?’ is an encouragement to ‘resist rationalising inaction’.
Transcend anticipating negative consequences: Being prepared to accept that this might turn out badly for you – but being prepared to do it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. This is a tough thing to do.
Two of the people from my examples have recorded statements about their motivation. Read through these, and see if they fit with Zimbardo’s categories.
The first is from The Making of Hotel Rwanda (George 2004) in ‘additional material’ on the DVD of the film Hotel Rwanda, about Paul Rusesabagina.
Rusesabagina: I didn’t have any other motivation. I just took in people. I helped them. I was willing to do it, and I really didn’t have time to think about all that… Because it took every second, every minute, every day, seven days a week, and I had to work very hard, and very fast, always to avoid the disaster.
Of course, at a certain given time, I knew I was going to be killed. But I didn’t take it that way. I thought that – dying: one day, we’ll all die – but, at least, dying without doing anything, to me, was a failure. That was why I had to fight up to the end.
Don Cheadle, who played Rusesabagina in the film: It was as selfish an act to him as it was a selfless act, in that he could not have lived with himself, and he could not, you know, have looked in the mirror and gone on, knowing that he had left however many it was in his care at the hotel to perish, at a time when he felt that he could have done more.
Paul Rusesabagina: I took it as an obligation, to help my neighbour – whether I know him or not. Because, even if I do not know someone, why should he or she die? Why should she be killed? Is there any reason to take out somebody’s life?
Terry George, Director: When I listen to him talk and people ask him does he consider himself a hero, and he says “No, I’m an ordinary man: that was my job to do that. That’s what I had to do” and I think that’s the strength of Paul, the inner moral courage, the desire to help the ordinary man, is the strength of the character.
Then this is Joe Darby talking about why he revealed the Abu Ghraib photographs, from ‘additional scenes’ on the DVD of Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008)
Joe Darby: I felt it was not only the right thing to do, but it was my job. I was my duty as an MP [Military Police] to do this, and I’ve never felt anything more than I was just an MP doing my job. My job in the army was to put people in prison for doing wrong, and that’s what I did. I would have been very, very happy if these people had been put in prison and it had ended there […]
I didn’t want it to become national news. I didn’t want to be labelled a hero or a traitor. I didn’t want people to know who I was. I just wanted people punished for the wrong they had done.
I don’t see myself as a hero or a traitor. I see myself as an MP who did his job and punished those who had broken the law. It was my burden to bear and, you know, I had to do it.
The resisters from My Lai show signs of ‘transcending anticipating negative consequences’. Harry Stanley: “If you want to court-martial me you do that, if you think you can get away with it.” Hugh Thompson: “I don’t know how I would have felt if they had opened up on them, but that particular day I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Bocchiaro & Zimbardo (2010) ran a variant of Milgram’s procedure (in which respondents were urged to give ‘learners’ insults instead of electric shocks). They found 60% refusers.
“To assess possible individual differences between disobedient and obedient participants, we compared the scores they obtained on BFQ [the Big Five Questionnaire]. No statistically significant differences were found on any of the five BFQ dimensions nor any of the 10 sub-dimensions.” p163 (added emphasis).
None of them thought that this behaviour was unusual or extraordinary. […] They believed they made a most obvious decision at that time in the experiment. Among the most common answers were “I think everyone would have done the same”. pp164-165
Another perspective
The examples I have given seem to show admirable characteristics like mindfulness, farsightedness, and courage, but there are also other factors which are not in themselves noble, or might not be seen as desirable in other circumstances. It’s possible that some of these admirable people would not be ones that you would choose as friends, or be comfortable working with. Some of them are people who chose to go against what was seen as right and reasonable in their society at that particular time, and they might not seem generally right-minded and reasonable people. Many of them broke the law in their actions, and those who are accustomed to breaking the law in other ways may find it easy to do, and be skilled at doing it, when the law turns out to be malign.
For instance, to maintain resistance in a hostile, dynamic environment, you need quick-wittedness, and social skill, to the extent of being the kind of person who can manipulate situations and persons to your own advantage. Schindler and Rusesabagina show this.
Oskar Schindler:
Because of his good business contacts, his conviviality, his gifts of salesmanship, his ability to hold drink, he had got a job even in the midst of the depression as sales manager of Moravian Electrotechnic. Keneally 1982 Schindler’s Ark p28
Johnathan Dresner: “He was an adventurer. He was like an actor who always wanted to be centre stage. He got into a play, and he couldn’t get out of it.”
Mosche Bejski: “Schindler was a drunkard. Schindler was a womanizer. His relations with his wife were bad. He often had not one but several girlfriends. After the war, he was quite unable to run a normal business. During the war, as long as he could produce kitchenware and sell it on the black market and make a lot of money, he could do it. But he was unable to work normally, to calculate normally, to hold down a normal job, even in Germany. […Everything he did put him in jeopardy. You had to take him as he was. Schindler was a very complex person. Schindler was a good human being. He was against evil. He acted spontaneously. He was adventurous, someone who took risks, but I’m not sure he enjoyed taking them … He was very, very sensitive. If Schindler had been a normal man, he would not have done what he did.” Silver, 1992, p147-148.
On the other hand, when
…two Gestapo men came to his office and demanded that he handed over a family of five who had bought forged Polish identity papers ‘Three hours after they waked in’ Schindler told the writer Kurt Grossman, ‘two drunken Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incrimination documents they had demanded.’. Silver, 1992, p149
‘I don’t know why he did it,’ they say. ‘Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oscar was an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system, and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it, and not to be overwhelmed.'” Keneally, 1982, p278
Paul Rusesabigina, an assistant manager of a luxury hotel in the capital city of a poor country, recounts that he was familiar with corruption and manipulation in better times
They gave me an office of my own, as well as the authority to dispense little perks here and there to favoured guests. An Army general who came infrequently would get a free cognac, or perhaps a lobster dinner. It made them feel appreciated, which is a universal hunger among all human beings. p58
I took my morning coffee at the bar, watched the comings and goings, made careful note of who the regulars were, followed the gossip about their careers, and saved up that knowledge for the frequent times when I would find myself clinking glasses of complimentary Merlot with a man whose friendship was another link to the power web of the capital and whose favour I could count on in the future. And the presence of beverages always kept the tone easy and social, even when the subtext of the discussion was quite serious. Rusesabagina, 2007, pp64-65
He used those skills to good effect later.
Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness, I used words in many ways during the genocide – to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I acted friendly towards despicable people. I put cartons of champagne in their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly.
I said whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Rusesabagina, 2007, p xvii
So as well as mindfulness, farsightedness, courage, quick-wittedness and social skill, manipulativeness and readiness to break the rules may be important. Alternatively, however, an unusual determination to follow rules and principles, unreasonable insensitivity to social niceties, and overwhelming confidence in one’s own judgement might be helpful. After all, these people may be completely rejecting what is currently seen as sensible and right behaviour, and may be inconveniencing or endangering their friends and neighbours, as well as rejecting their neighbours’ views about the oppressed. These characteristics may be associated with some degree of autism. Attwood (2020) notes that those with autism are usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind, and being honest and determined and having a strong sense of social justice. They may show remarkable honesty, and delay in the development of the art of persuasion, compromise and conflict resolution.
Moorehead (2014) comments on André and Magda Trocmé, the church couple who were important in encouraging the villagers to shelter Jews in Le chambon. “…they were also complicated, overbearing and strong.” p112; “Somewhat similar in temperament, both impatient, short-tempered, outspoken, highly-educated and apparently sure of themselves…” p114; “A colleague observed that Trocmé possessed an openness and a courage ‘unusual, alas, in our churches’, and that he had rarely met a Christian ‘so little frightened of the consequences of clarity’.” p115
A New York Times account of Sherron Watkins, who was the whistleblower who exposed the massive frauds in the Enron Corporation, describes similar characteristics:
In the cutthroat business culture of the Enron Corporation, where toughness and a sharp tongue were often prerequisites for success, Sherron S. Watkins could be noticeably tough and sharp.
One former colleague described her as ”a bull in the china shop” at times. Others mistook the Texan Ms. Watkins for a brusque New Yorker. But several former colleagues agreed that her toughness was rooted in a strong sense of business ethics and that she was unafraid to deliver difficult news, even to her superiors.
”In my experience, she was not afraid to speak the truth, even when it was uncomfortable,” said Stephen Schwarz, a former Enron employee who worked with Ms. Watkins, Yardley, 2002
Watkins herself describes her dependence on her Christian faith, and the importance of taking guidance from the Scriptures literally:
It was an unsettling time, the morning after the disclosure, I woke to camera crews surrounding our house. My hands were shaking, I was so nervous about the situation. I picked up my Bible and opened by chance to Hebrews 12. The first 3 verses say,
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” http://www.sherronwatkins.com/sherronwatkins/My_Passion.html (no longer available)
Although her actions are different from those of the people described here, Greta Thunberg is also someone who is prepared to take a stand against general indifference to a major problem. She sees her autism as a help in her actions.
I just know what is right and I want to do what is right. I want to make sure that I do everything in my power to stop this crisis from happening. I have Asperger’s – I’m on the autism spectrum – so I don’t really care about social codes. [..] It makes you different, it makes you think differently, and especially in such a big crisis as this, when you need to think outside the box. Interview with CBS This Morning, 2019
Everyone else is “OK, it’s very important, but I am too busy with my life…”, and I just thought it was very strange that no-one else was behaving in a logical way. What would the logical way be? To do something; to step out of your comfort zone. Interview with Democracy Now! 2019
I have heard a quote from Thunberg in which she says explicitly that neurotypical people are able to think ‘something must be done’, and ‘things can carry on as normal’ at the same time, but her condition means that it is literally impossible for her to do that – and that’s why her condition has given her the power to do what she’s done – but I can’t find it to give you the precise source.
The banality of good action
On the other hand, it may be possible to establish an environment which promotes the banality of heroism. Rochat & Modigliani (1995) comment on the villagers of Le Chambon:
Almost all of those involved in the effort at Le Chambon had not plotted in advance to counter the Vichy Government. Only gradually did they arrive at a path that flatly opposed the government’s policies and actions regarding refugees and Jews.
[…] In effect, they established an orientation of civility and kindness toward persecuted people and they proceeded to maintain this stance after it was officially outlawed by the authorities.
[…] They did one thing at a time, and one thing after the other, each move bringing them closer to becoming the rescuers we admire today. pp201-205
This is a passing point in this essay, which is worth developing more, perhaps in the context of Zimbardo’s account of the situational factors which encourage evil behaviour, which I mention in the next section.
Heroes
All cultures know about heroes, and traditional/mythical tales of heroes often describe their motivations. Franco & Zimbardo (2006), describe this as:
“…a code of conduct served as the framework from which heroic action emerged. In this code, the hero follows a set of rules that serves as a reminder, sometimes even when he would prefer to forget, that something is wrong and that he must attempt to set it right.” p35
My examples sometimes echo that. Harry Stanley: “It was just immoral to me”; Joe Darby: “My job in the army was to put people in prison for doing wrong, and that’s what I did […] It was my burden to bear and, you know, I had to do it.”
But Zimbardo also points out that Great Heroes are not a very useful example for most people. Almost by definition, they do stuff we can’t or wouldn’t do. Everyday heroes are better examples – and maybe ‘heroes’ isn’t the right word: People who do the right thing. It’s possible that there are many of those around.
Zimbardo, Breckenridge & Moghaddam, (2013) asked a nationally representative sample of 4000 participants from the general public in the United States “Have you ever done something that other people – not necessarily you yourself – considered a heroic act or deed?” 20% said yes. Among those:
55% had helped someone during an emergency,
8% confronted an injustice,
14% had defied unjust authority, and
5% had sacrificed for a stranger (organ donation or similar).
In this study, both blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to have performed heroic deeds. Zimbardo & al suggest that in contrast to an “exclusive” vision of heroism, which presents heroic leadership by exceptional individuals, an “inclusive” vision depicts heroism as integral to everyday life for ordinary people, and widespread volunteer participation in social life as normative in all democracies. The occasions people recalled may have been trivial compared with the actions of the Righteous Among the Nations, but both examples are encouraging.
General social support for right actions, even if it isn’t very strident, may also help individuals in doing the right thing. Grüninger said about his law-breaking; “we were guided also by the opinion of a large portion of the Swiss people, of the press, and
of the political parties” (Rochat & Modigliani, 2000, p99), and Gandhi, M.L. King, and Mandela all stressed the importance of support from others in their autobiographies.
Zimbardo is still convinced of the importance of the social environment in promoting good or bad behaviour.
…there are no special attributes of either pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both conditions emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving particular individuals across a dividing line from inaction to action. There is a decisive decisional moment when a person is caught up in a vector of forces that emanate from a behavioural context. These forces combine to increase the probability of one’s acting to harm others or acting to help others.”
[…] Among the situational action vectors [for evil behaviour] are group pressures and group identity, the diffusion of responsibility for the action, a temporal focus on the immediate moment without concern for consequences stemming from the act in the future, presence of social models, and commitment to an ideology. Zimbardo (2007), pp485-486 (emphasis added)
These factors can act to promote evil behaviour, but there is always the possibility turning them round to promote good. It’s worth noting that Christina Maslach has pointed out that refusing to obey malign orders, or resisting oppression isn’t enough: people need to do something to stop it – as she did at Stanford.
What would I like to be the takeaway messages from this piece?
In response to the oversimplified accounts of the psychology of obedience and conformity, based on the work of people like Milgram and Zimbardo fifty years ago, we should remember:
Resistant participants in Milgram’s study: Paul Grüninger; Oskar Schindler; Irena Sendlerowa; Hugh Thompson; Harry Stanley; Chris Maslach; Joe Darby; Paul Rusesabagina – and countless others. These are people who deserve our respect, but they are also people who deserve further psychological study, to hep to develop a psychology of Doing The Right Thing.
References
Attwood, Tony (2020) What is Aspergers https://www.tonyattwood.com.au/about-aspergers/what-is-aspergers Accessed 13 March 2020
Bocchiaro, Piero, Zimbardo, Philip (2010) Defying Unjust Authority: An exploratory study Current Psychology 29, 155-170
Bryan, Dawn (BBC News August 2007) Abu Ghraib whistleblower’s ordeal Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6930197.stm Accessed 14 March 2020
Franco, Zeno & Zimbardo, Philip (2006) The Banality of Heroism Greater Good Fall/Winter 2006/7, 30-35 Available online at http://www.lucifereffect.com/articles/heroism.pdf
Gibson, Stephen (2013) Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Rhetorical Analysis British Journal of Social Psychology 52, 290-309
George, Terry (2004) Additional Material Hotel Rwanda DVD
Gourevitch, Philip and Errol Morris (2008) Standard Operating Procedure London: Picador
Hallie, Philip (1979), Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There New York: Harper & Row
Milgram, Stanley (1974) Obedience to Authority NY: HarperCollins
Modigliani, Andre & Rochat, François (1995) The Role of Interaction Sequences and the Timing of Resistance in Shaping Obedience and Defiance to Authority Journal of Social Issues 51(3), 107-123
Morehead, Caroline (2014) Village of Secrets: defying the Nazis in Vichy France London: Vintage
Morselli, Davide and Passini, Stefano (2010) Avoiding Crimes of Obedience: A Comparative Study of the Autobiographies of M.K. Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr Peace and Conflict; Journal of Peace Psychology, 16, 295-319
Rochat, François & Andre Modigliani (2000) Captain Paul Grueninger: The Chief of Police Who Saved Jewish Refugees by Refusing to Do His Duty in Thomas Blass Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Rusesabagina, Paul (2007) An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda London: Bloomsbury
Silver, Eric (1992) The Book of the Just New York; Grove Press
Still, William (2017) The Underground Railroad London: Arcturus Publishing (first published 1872)
Van Emden, Richard (2007). The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches. London: Bloomsbury
Yardley, Jim (2002) Enron’s Collapse: the Employee; Author of Letter To Enron Chief Is Called Tough New York Times, Jan 16, 2002 https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/16/us/enron-s-collapse-the-employee-author-of-letter-to-enron-chief-is-called-tough.html
Zimbardo, Philip (2007a) The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
Zimbardo, Philip (2007b) Resisting Social Influences and Celebrating Heroism (chapter 16) in The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
Zimbardo, Philip (2012) talking about his Heroic Imagination Project: http://vimeo.com/40425064
Zimbardo,P.G., Breckenridge,J.N. & Moghaddam,F.M. (2013) “Exclusive” and “Inclusive” Visions of Heroism and Democracy. Curr Psychol 32, 221–233
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