My mother has always been into folk music and by osmosis I suppose so have I. Almost without knowing I absorbed the songs and the tales crooned by the great folk singers, not just from Liverpool but from across the world.
I might not have known who they were but I knew their music - Pete Seegar is one of them.
In the 1950s, Pete was in Liverpool and whilst here had two distinctive 12-sting baritone guitars built and designed by G. Stanley Francis.
Pete said that Stan's guitars were 'the best in the world' and Stan went onto make guitars for such luminaries as Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones and Lonnie Donegan.
Stan is still alive today and despite Martin making 'Pete Seegar Signature' models based on Stans designs he has never sought the acclaim.
Here is a lovely video from Pete Seegars Rainbow Quest with June Carter and Johnny Cash.
I'm sure i'll meet Pete one day... down by the riverside.
Welcome back after a long hot summer break. Well... sort of hot. I've spent the summer working on some exciting projects will should bear fruit shortly. In the meantime back to blogging.
Yep, you've read the title right. Music from a Saw. By rubbing a bow along the side of bog-standard carpenters saw the most unusual and amazing sounds can be achieved. And there was no greater proponent of it during the 1920s and 30s than Liverpool based Jack Robinson.
Jack Robinson, from the NML collection
Jack was born in Blackpool in the late 1800s. In the 1920s he moved to Liverpool and set up a barbers shop in Lodge Lane. He had always been musical playing ukulele, banjo and double bass but his expertise was in the Musical Saw.
The saw was popularised in America in the early 1900s. It's not certain when the saw came to Britain but Jack is widely considered to be the first 'professional' saw player in the country. I think we can claim that as another Liverpool first!
Jack's Saw and Bow are now in possession of the National Museums Liverpool. Visit their page for more info.
Now, I bet you're wondering what the saw sounds like? Think of a large tuba, ok... well it sounds nothing like that. It actually has a sort of ethereal otherworldly sound - like a modern Theremin.
Sadly no known recordings of Jack Robinson exist although during his time he played alongside great orchestras and in a solo performance on the RMS Duchess of York.
Here is Austin Blackburn (not a scouser) considered to be a modern Musical Saw maestro.
Bonus question: There was a famous Hollywood diva, a mega-star of the silver screen who was herself an accomplished Musical Saw player. Who was she?
Apologies for the brief hiatus, I was up a mountain in Morocco and blogging at 13,000 feet is no mean task.
I remember as a child being fascinated by the turntable on my parent hi-fi system. We didn't actually have many LP discs (my dad being an ultra cool trendy 1980s guy had ditched them all in favour of tapes) but my mum had a small collection of folk music.
One disc in particular was a favourite of mine, had a cover of two ladies standing by the famous Peter Pan statue in Sefton Park, Liverpool (a copy of the one in London). Their names were Jacqui and Bridie and they were Britains first female folk duo.
They ran a Folk Club in Liverpool in the 1960s, no mean feat considering the male dominated folk and pub scene at the time.
Sadly, Bridie passed away a few years ago and last year after 50 years Jacquie held the final Folk Club.
Whatever you think of their style and music they were a formidable presence in the Liverpool folk revival. A two part documentary 'Pink and Pleasant Land' was filmed as part of the final Folk Club and I think it paints a fitting tribute to two figures that broke the mould.
The album is now quite rare, it was called 'Hello Friend' and if anyone has it i'd love to get a copy.
Whilst viewing many old black and white documentaries about Liverpool it struck me how often the images were of children playing in the streets, accompanied by songs.
Skipping games seem to have their own traditional music and tunes.
From one generation to the next, skipping and playground songs seem to sustain themselves. I imagine if photographers and film-makers were allowed they would find that similar songs are being sung at skipping games nowadays as were being sung 100 years ago.
As a type of tradition music it's overlooked but when analysed gives us a window into class, religion and the concerns and worries of peoples every day lives.
It's widely believed that 'Ring o'Roses' is a song about plague and disease, whilst 'I like an apple and I like a pear' is really a song about the hardships of marriage to a unsuitable husband.
O I like an apple and I like a pear
And I like a sailor with nice curly hair
O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it
I'll be with him wherever he goes
He stands on the corner and whistles me out
He shouts Oo-ey, oo-ey, are you coming out?
O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it
I'll be with him wherever he goes
He bought me a shawl of red, white and blue
And when we got married he tore it in two
O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it
I'll be with him wherever he goes
Many women dreamed of a marriage to a nice sailor!
There are more sinister versions of this song, probably not sung by children but no doubt well known:
Before I got married I wore a black shawl But now that I'm married I wear bugger-all Still, I love him, can't deny him I will be with him where ever he goes
Before I got married I'd sport and I'd play But now, how the cradle stands in my way Still, I love him, can't deny him I will be with him where ever he goes
Another one has a casual mixture of contemporary references and ethnic identity.
Micky mouse is dead
He died last night in bed
He cut his throat
With a ten pound note
And this is what he said
Red white and blue
Me mother was a jew
Me father was an Irishman
And out goe's you
There are a certain number of set tunes or variations of tunes that seem well known right across the world. It would be impossible for us to tell where songs originally came from but we can assume that the hundreds of children that passed through the 'Gateway of Empire' that was Liverpool brought their own traditions and songs with them.
These songs are not specific to Liverpool, but they were very common here especially songs involving handsome sailors and beautiful maidens.
Sometimes life was better in the old songs...
It is telling that in a port city where men would often be absent for weeks on end and women were left to fend for themselves and their families the romantic ideal of a nice sailor coming home with the bounty of the world for his girl would have a strong resonance.
It's no surprise that the innocent girls who sang these songs would later become the tough and hardy matriarchs that seemed to rule Liverpools streets and alleys with iron fists.
Do you have any songs that you remember from childhood?
Today, as following the themes of recent posts i'm going to look at music in the context of urban regeneration.
In 1965, during the midst of the great urban renewal where the Victorian slums of northern Liverpool were bulldozed wholesale the BBC sent a documentary crew to Liverpool.
The premise of this documentary was:
"How urban regeneration tore the heart out of the Singing City."
The documentary hosts interviews with dockers, priests, seamen and even the famous police constable 'Herbert Balmer'. The highlight for me are the rare interviews with the women who kept the communities together when the men were away at sea.
For anyone who pines for the 'good old days' before they knocked the slum terraces down these interviews are a stark reminder of the utter deprivation, poverty and danger that haunted those terraces and tenements.
Listening to the stories of these people, it if difficult to believe that such poverty was still prevalent into the second half of the 20th Century.
This bleak image is constantly undercut by the use of music which is central to the film. Typical folksongs of the era are present in abundance (inclduing live recordings of Pete McGovern in local pubs) and even more remarkable is the recording of the childrens songs, sung on countless playgrounds.
These childrens playground songs and rhymes seem to echo through the ages but are held up to contrast with images of children in the same streets singing American blues music 'The Wood-chopping Blues'.
This documentary really shows the birth of the modern world where children still have to sleep in houses infested by damp and rats yet the police were deploying CCTV in the city centre (30:00 mins).
Britains first CCTV cameras? Liverpool 1965, showing the Metropolitan Cathedral half-built.
The picture below is a fascinating thing for me. At first glance it seems to be one of those Victorian street urchin pictures of Liverpool which seem to be ten-a-penny. It was discovered by Matthew Edwards and posted on the 'Liverpool Folk Song a Week Blog'.
In it, a group of children gather around an old black man. If you look closely you can see that the man is sitting with a thin plank of wood sticking out in front of him. On the plank are three 'jig-dolls', dancing.
The year is sometime before 1902, the place is a long-since altered area of Liverpool known as Bevington Bush. The cobbled streets and brick walls seem as far removed from a 'bush' as one can imagine, but for hundreds of years this was a small but well known hamlet of Liverpool.
So often these types of pictures are anonymous faces, but the old man with the dolls can be easily identified. His name was Seth Davy and he has a remarkable musical legacy.
In the 1960s Glyn Hughes wrote a beautiful lilting tune called The Ballad of Seth Davy.
You can hear a lovely version of the song here:
The Dubliners, also did a version which replaced the 'Bevington Bush' with the area of Dublin 'Beggars Bush'. Such things often happen in folk music, which I think is great in showing the universality of the themes covered.
On a personal note, my grandmother, a Scottie Road girl used to tell me about Seth Davy. She didn't remember him but her father did. He told her that as good as the Ballad was, it was wrong. Seth Davy more likely drank whiskey all the week and buttermilk on a Sunday!
There may be some truth in this, Seth Davy used to sing the old minstrel songs from American south. One of them, "Massa Am Old Stingey Man" includes the lyrics: -
"Come day, go day,
I wish in my heart 'twas Monday;
I drink good whiskey all de week,
And butter-milk on Sunday."
Who was Seth Davy? A black street-artist who knew the old American minstrel songs? He was a star of Liverpool in his day, known and photographed. Yet we know nothing of him, West Indian, West African, Jamaican have all been proposed as origins. Was he an escaped slave, fled 'cross the Atlantic? History remains silent - as silent as his dolls are now.
In the 1960s a wave of British culture crashed upon the shores of the US. All over America the sounds of British groups were blasting out of radios and a generation of US teens became swept up in the 'British Invasion'. It was The Beatles that led the vanguard, but the trans-Atlantic traffic was not just one way.
Dylans 1966 Wolrd Tour would prove to be controversial, it was his first tour after his famous change from playing acoustic folk music to 'going electric'. During this tour he made his second visit to Liverpool.
On 14th May1966 the bleak cobbled streets of north Liverpool became host to the 'coolest man in the world'. In a bizarre moment the essence of swinging bohemian sixties style would meet the post-war poverty of Liverpool's urban youth. He was due to perform that evening at the Liverpool Odeon, where he had first appeared a year previously.
Dylan and the photographer Barry Feinstein spent the afternoon before the gig wandering the austere post-war streets. Feinstein hated staged photoshoots and so when he stumbled upon a group of kids playing amongst the urban wasteland he realised had found the perfect photo opportunity.
Chris Hockenhall, a self-confessed 'Dylanologist', says:
“Dylan and Feinstein just seemed to have stumbled into what amounted to a kids’ playground. It was such a clash of 1960s culture. The kids looked like Victorian street urchins and Dylan looked like a man from Mars with his loud shirt and wild hair – that’s what fascinated me.”
The streets in the photographs are eerily deserted of adults - no doubt because it was the day of the FA Cup Final, Everton vs. Sheffield Wednesday (Everton won 3-2).
It's interesting to note that the musical origins of Dylan and the Beatles seem to be exact opposites of each other. The Beatles began as 'The Quarrymen' skiffle group, playing american folk music before moving into Rock and Roll whereas Dylan's development was the reverse.
Dylan's school yearbook claimed he: 'wanted to follow Little Richard' but by 1959 Dylan's tastes had changed. He had given up the electric guitars and taken up banjos and harmonicas and he began digging deep into Woodie Guthrie and folk music.
Dylan seems to have a fondness for Liverpool, one wonders if this is born from his close links with the Beatles (he famously gave them their first joint!). Only a few years ago whilst in the city Dylan took a history tour and was fascinated by John Lennons childhood bedroom in Mendips.
Perhaps though, Dylan's links with Liverpool are earlier. A year before he met the Fab Four, Dylan wrote and recorded a song called 'Farewell' (sometimes 'Fare Thee Well').
It's tune and words are taken from 'The Leaving of Liverpool' - a traditional folk song, well known amongst Liverpool households from the 1880 onwards.
Chris Hockenhull tracked all ten of the children down, all now grown and in their fourties, and recreated the photograph. Amazingly non of the children remember meeting the bohemian bard. Their grubby playground of cobblestones and bomb-shattered wastelands were a thousand miles away from the glitz of the swinging sixties.
Yet I wonder, when Dylan stood with those children on the steps of a warehouse in 1966, did he realise that most of them would've probably known the tune - if not the words to his earlier recording?
Hello and welcome to my new blog where I hope to be exploring the rich musical heritage of the City of Liverpool, England.
Now, you probably know about The Beatles - and you can't really talk about Liverpool music without mentioning them - but I want the scope of this blog to go beyond Merseybeat.
The name of the blog, 'Beneath the Beat' isn't just a nod to the fab four. It's a statement saying that beneath all music are the people who make it and listen to it. I want to focus on the music that came from everyday people - from the basements of pubs right up to the terraces of Anfield and Goodison Park.
It's an acknowledgement that for every Merseybeat there were other musical threads continuing through Liverpools history, not as popular but every bit as important. From the sea-shanties and folk tunes of the quaysides to the DIY punk of Eric's and the current resurgence in live jazz music in pubs and bars across the city.
I hope that over the coming months, you will find something here to interest you.
If you have any ideas or comments about what you'd like to see on here, please get in touch. It'd be great to hear from you.
