The Radio Ballads of Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger
by Steve Winick

In February of 1957, English steam locomotive driver John ("Jack") Axon was heading home to Edgeley on his usual run. Suddenly, his brake pipe broke, filling the cab with steam and rendering his train unstoppable. Axon ordered his fireman off the train; he himself hung on to the outside of the cab, warning men in signal boxes along the route that he could not stop the train. Axon was killed, but his heroic actions saved many lives, including those of a trainload of children, and he was posthumously awarded the George Cross for bravery.

At first blush, it was not clear that these events would change the history of British radio, but they did. Soon after Axon’s George Cross was announced, the BBC commissioned Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl to produce a documentary about the incident. This documentary turned out to be a "radio ballad," a new genre of radio feature that is still held up as an example of brilliant technique by the BBC. MacColl and Parker changed the rules: Instead of a narrator and a group of actors providing the narrative, the producers instead went to some of the people involved (Axon’s wife, his fireman, and other railworkers) and taped "actuality," a combination of interview data and sound effects. Then MacColl composed songs and music, and his wife, Peggy Seeger, arranged and orchestrated them. MacColl then hired top folk-revival singers and instrumentalists to perform the musical passages, and Parker edited the actuality and the music into a seamless, flowing sound montage without connecting narration. The original radio ballad, The Ballad of John Axon, was broadcast in July 1958 and proved so popular that a new genre was born. Between 1958 and 1964, the BBC broadcast eight radio ballads created by Parker and MacColl, and a further two created by Parker and Ian Campbell.

The Topic CD series The Radio Ballads comprises the eight programs that involved MacColl and Seeger. The Campbell programs have not only been excluded from release, but are in fact never mentioned in the liner notes, or indeed in any official BBC-sponsored source. Be that as it may, the MacColl and Seeger ballads are undoubtedly an important moment in radio history and in the history of the folk revival, and many of them make surprisingly good listening today. The Radio Ballads fall naturally into two categories: The first four were about industrial topics, i.e., the railway, the building of a highway, trawling for fish, and coal mining. The second four were about social issues: the experience of polio patients, of teenagers in the early 1960s, of the boxing community, and of Britain’s itinerant tinkers and Gypsies. Each category produced a bit of a mixed bag.

The Ballad of John Axon [Topic TSCD 801 (1999)] is a triumph, especially considering its position as the first of the ballads. Most of the songs are done in a style somewhere between English and American folk, with MacColl’s voice and Seeger’s banjo dominating the proceedings and with important contributions from the likes of A.L. Lloyd (voice) and Alf Edwards (concertina). Even so, there are a few weird moments: When a driver reports that one of the best drivers he knows is from Jamaica, a faux-calypso number is inserted that is pretty clearly written by a middle-class Brit ("listen to me narrative, goin’ to serve me steam locomotive!"). Mostly, though, what remains with you are the speaking voices of Axon’s friends and co-workers, whether going through their daily routines or extolling the virtues of the English dawn as seen from the footplate, or describing the fateful day on which Jack Axon died. It’s ironic and a bit disturbing that the names of the singers and musicians are listed on the CD as a matter of course, but the names of the interviewees are only mentioned if they happen to be quoted in the brief introductory essay. Furthermore, MacColl’s own radical politics peep through in the songs even though they’re foreign to the workers he’s interviewing. After the railwaymen have spoken eloquently about their work being much more than a job, something at the core of their identities and indeed "in the blood," MacColl still puts the words "wage-slave" in the mouth of his fictional Axon narrating "The Manchester Rambler." These quibbles, though, are minor ones, and "Axon" remains a marvel today.