Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #133 (December 2007/January 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

The Radio Ballads: Thirty Years of Conflict The Radio Ballads: The Song of Steel

The 2006 Radio Ballads

History, Art, and Politics

by Kerry Dexter

Folk songs arise from the stories we tell each other: stories about lives, about work, about friends and families, and about the changes and challenges we face and what we think about them. That's a connection that has been celebrated and affirmed in a project from the BBC Radio 2 called "The 2006 Radio Ballads." Interviewers traveled across the United Kingdom, talking with people on six subjects ranging from AIDS to the troubles in Northern Ireland, and musicians were then commissioned to listen to the interviews and write songs inspired by what they heard. John Tams, Karine Polwart, Jez Lowe, John McCusker, Kate Rusby, Tommy Sands, Cara Dillon, Julie Matthews, and Bob Fox are among the artists who joined in the project, and many of them also joined in for a powerful and moving one-off concert mixing their songs and voices with the recorded voices of the people interviewed at the auditorium of Royal Glasgow Concert Hall as part of Celtic Connections in January 2007.

The concert and the programs paid tribute to an earlier vision, as well. This narrative format, interweaving real stories in the voices and accents of those who lived them, actual sound effects, and songs created when musicians reflected on this material, was an idea folk singer Ewan MacColl first came up with almost 50 years ago, when he was commissioned by the BBC to do an audio documentary about the life and death of railway man John Axon. At the time, all spoken narrative on air in a documentary was done by professional actors; voices of the actual participants were never used. MacColl, however, felt that those real voices were vital to understanding the story. He and producer Charles Parker, along with their newly recruited musical director Peggy Seeger ("I was as green as grass," she recalled in a BBC interview), worked to convince the BBC to let them try this revolutionary idea. They succeeded, and over the next six years eight radio ballads were produced despite tape players recording at different speeds, the now seemingly archaic cut-and-splice method of audio editing, and the transport of bulky recording equipment around the countryside. It was, as is noted in the liner notes for the second series of radio ballads, "a triumph of will and vision over rudimentary technology and logistics."

But does the idea still hold relevance 50 years on? Had technology and, perhaps, modern life left this way of telling stories and making songs back with those reel-to-reel tapes and sticky splicing tape? BBC Radio 2 decided to see what the idea looked like in today's world.

[cover #133]