In this interview, British singer and folk song collector Sam Lee describes how he has discovered forgotten singers among British Roma and Travellers, how he learned to sing from them, and why it is important to keep their songs from being forgotten. He also explains why we have two ears and only one mouth.
Sam Lee has garnered attention for his innovative methods of presenting folk music. Last year his debut album "Ground Of Its Own" was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. (For audio and video, please see http://www.romea.cz/cz/kultura/jakub-patocka-cikani-jsou-nasi-indiani-rozhovor-s-britskym-zpevakem-lidovych-pisni-samem-lee).
We met at a festival in Rudolstadt. Fascinated, I went to buy his album from him after the concert and arranged to interview him in Náměšt’ nad Oslavou, Czech Republic during the Folk Vacation (Folkov prázdniny) festival.
When he realized I was a journalist, he wanted to give me the CD for free. I said I would be glad to buy it, and his eyes twinkled mischievously as he said: "What about half-price? Would that be fair?"
Earlier this month Sam Lee performed at the Colors of Ostrava festival and at Folk Vacation in Náměšti nad Oslavou, where audiences could see him and the members of his band perform for the two days he spent there as a guest of the festival before moving on to another performance at the "Hladce a obratce" Festival in Kremže. The following interview was conducted in Náměšt’ nad Oslavou.
Q: What first awakened your interest in folk music?
A: It began in my childhood, I used to take trips in nature with a rather extraordinary organization, which in many respects was very left-wing and progressive. They let the children participate in the decision-making about everything and taught them to take an interest in others, in society. It’s called Forest School Camps. It’s a bit similar to the Scouts, but much more free-thinking, non-conformist. They lead children to love nature and to be part of it. It’s not just about experiencing an adventure in nature, but about understanding and valuing it. Every evening we would sit by the fire, playing music and singing. I experienced an overwhelming amount of singing together there without ever realizing what kind of influence it would have on me. We sang lots of folk songs and traditional songs, old ballads, sea chanties, but also modern folk, we sang Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. It wasn’t until I was about 25 that I started to take a deeper interest in where the traditional songs came from. Music had always interested me, I was a DJ and I explored rock, pop, soul, Americana, and jazz. I’ve always loved music, but I think I felt something was missing the whole time. Traditional folk music, however, never lost its attraction for me. I started to listen more and more to who was singing traditional folk songs and how, and also to research where they came from. I started to pay attention to them in a way that had never even occurred to me before, and I discovered The Watersons, and from them there was a direct path to the music that inspired them. Whenever I was able to get hold of an original field recording, I was immediately fascinated and knew this was exactly what I was looking for. The Watersons and all revival music, really, had never affected that me deeply – I appreciate it, I do love something about it, but I don’t feel as connected to it as I do to the original material.
Q: What was the music that inspired the British folk revival of the 1960s?
A: Music from old field recordings, ethnographic recordings of old fishermen, Gypsies, Travellers, shepherds and peasants. Whenever I heard those original things, it was like being punched between the eyes. I can’t say I remember one particular breakthrough moment, but it gradually grew inside me. My head was full of songs I didn’t understand, but I felt there was something very special and fundamental stored in them. I longed to learn them all, to take them in. I was a collector of recordings, and for a time I was completely obsessed with it. This music fit my collector’s passion tremendously, but I felt it wasn’t enough just to own recordings of all the songs – I had to learn how to sing them myself, to know them by heart. At the time I wasn’t even thinking of becoming a singer who would perform in public.
Q: You made your living as a dancer then, right?
A: I did a lot of things, and dance was one way I made a living. I started learning how to sing those songs. I wrote the lyrics down in a book, learned them by heart, and I sang and sang. My head began to fill up with melodies, various tunes, phrases and verses. I started visiting the Cecil Sharp House, which is a traditional folk music center in London with an enormous library and collection of recordings. I learned to sing the songs by listening to the recordings. I told myself I would learn one new song a week there. It’s a remarkable place, full of lots of old guys who sing, some terribly, but some were seriously good, and all of them were unusual characters. I had saved up some money after performing in a dance production in the West End, so I offered to work for Cecil Sharp House as a volunteer, and that was how I began to work in some of the collections where I came into contact with the authentic field recordings, the original, complete ones, not the edited versions like the Topic company releases. Thanks to that I got to hear the stories connected to each song, and that was when I fully realized that all of the singers recorded had just been people living ordinary lives. It occurred to me that I might still be able to meet some of them, but everyone I talked to tried to convince me that none of the folk singers in those recordings were still alive. I set off after a man named Peter Kennedy, the most renowned British collector of those field recordings, he worked with Alan Lomax. I managed to meet Kennedy one year before he passed away. He let me go through his collection and listen to some of his recordings, and I realized that some of the people he had recorded in the 1950s had been just 15 or 16 years old at the time. It occurred to me that there still might be a chance to find them somewhere, I said to myself: "Aha! Some people who can sing like this must still be around somewhere." After meeting with Kennedy I was sure a folk singers’ community must still be in existence somewhere and that no one was paying any attention to it. Roughly at that same time I met Stanley Robertson, who became my teacher.
Q: How did you meet?
A: I knew him from the recordings. I had his album, issued by Topic Records, I had learned some of his songs, but I believed he was no longer alive, just like all the other old singers. I got a grant to promote the archival recordings from the Cecil Sharp House, so I traveled with them to various events and held workshops. In 2005 I went to a folk festival in Whitby, in Yorkshire, where this event dedicated to folk songs has been held for more than 60 years, and Stanley was singing there. It was a tiny concert, maybe 20 people in the audience, but he was one of the greatest carriers of the folk music tradition, in my opinion definitely more important than anyone else performing at the festival. The main thing is, he was alive.
Q: So you actually didn’t know back then whether he was alive or not?
A: No, it really surprised me. I was terribly happy. I went up to him at the festival immediately. He didn’t know I was a singer, but when we met it was immediately clear that he was a spiritualist, like many Gypsies and Travellers. He immediately recognized that we belonged to one another. His ancestry was Scottish Traveller – not Gypsy, but from the indigenous nomads in the isles. Their tradition goes back thousands of years. In February he turned up in London (the festival where we met had been the previous August). He didn’t know anything about where I was from. or where I worked, I had even forgotten to tell him my name! Suddenly he was standing in front of me at an event putting a cassette in my hand and saying "Samuel, learn these". I hadn’t even told him I sang, he just knew. He knew absolutely everything, he predicted my life entirely to me, including my career. He used to just say what was going to happen, and it would. I was astonished by that. A few days after that second meeting when he gave me the cassette, he almost died. He had a heart attack and a stroke, and it looked like his days were over, but he began to miraculously recover, and once he was back to life, he recollected many songs he had heard from his forebears as a child, ones he had forgotten over the course of his lifetime. Suddenly he was miraculously well, no one could believe it. He could live, sing, and walk again – he had escaped the gravedigger and his shovel as if he had received some sort of miraculous pardon. We met up again at that time and he told me I should come with him to Scotland. I started going to visit him there once a month. Every visit I sat in his living room for three days while he just sang and sang and sang, and I learned song after song from him. Sometimes we went out into the countryside, he showed me where the songs come from, where he had learned them, from which people, and where the Travellers lived. When he passed away in 2009, he wasn’t even that old, he was 69. We spent three years together in very intensive contact.
Q: How did you carry on after that?
A: I have remained very close to Stanley’s family and I still go to visit them. His son now does instructional programs about Scottish Travellers.
Q: You said their traditions are hundreds of years old?
A: Yes, they are the indigenous Scottish Travellers who have led a nomadic life since time immemorial and now are abandoning it. A few of them still travel, but it’s no longer legal. They say the origins of those nomads are older than the origins of the Celts. There is a complicated history of how the clans were driven off their land and forced to begin travelling, and it’s said they were originally connected to Scottish royal ancestry. It’s the same with the Irish Travellers, who are considered the descendants of the Picts.
Q: Why is it that in a country that has a reputation of being such a free-thinking society the Travellers can’t enjoy their way of life?
A: Why should Britain have the reputation of being a free-thinking country?
Q: From here [the Czech Republic] it decidedly looks like one.
A: Aha – but it definitely isn’t! You can’t do anything in England. Take, for example, the Colors of Ostrava festival here. A music festival in a factory? In England that would be absolutely impossible, health and safety regulations would make it impossible. It’s not done in an authoritarian style, but many things are simply not allowed. We have a strong tradition of a nanny state that sticks its nose into everything.
Q: What bothers the state about the Traveller way of life?
A: That happened after the war. As a result of industrialization and new technology, Gypsies and Travellers suddenly couldn’t find work because all the crafts they knew had been replaced by industrial production and cheap imports. Suddenly they became a culture in which Brits had lost interest. Relations began to deteriorate. That brought about the first wave of settlement. During the 1960s a new wave of travelling people turned up, the hippies, who basically moved around outside of society, and often their lifestyle involved drugs, which did even more harm. Then Margaret Thatcher came to power.
Q: In our country [the Czech Republic] she is spoken of as the exact opposite of a nanny state.
A: Seriously? She was the worst of them all. She shut down everything, systematically did everything in her power to deprive poor people of any kind of advocacy, backup, or benefits. She started a crusade against Gypsies and Travellers as well. She did her best to settle them in houses so she could tax them. She denied people their right to any kind of culture that was not under the control of her conservative regime. Those were very dark times in Britain. I don’t want to compare it to the communist government here, but as part of the development of Britain it was really a terrible decline.
Q: What you are saying is very strange, because the same policy against Roma people was applied here, by the communists. On the other hand, Thatcher, despite all of the criticisms that can be made of her, has the image here of a person who did her best to restrict the state and expand room for personal freedom.
A: I am not an expert on politics, but in reality it definitely did not look like that in Britain. She managed to masterfully create the public image of someone who is concerned about the public good, but in reality it was cruelly different. After all, no one who has the slightest interest in the public good sends a Christmas card to General Pinochet! She sent riot police after the Travellers, and they burned their caravans down. She forced them to live in houses. What will a Traveller do when you force him to live in a house? He’ll kill himself. Back then there really was a massive wave of suicides. Horrible things were happening. The situation essentially improved after the Labour Party entered power, Gypsies and Travellers got all kinds of support, but once the Conservatives were back in power they stopped everything, all support for Gypsy culture, education, and health care. What’s more, this terrible television program, "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding", started up, and it promotes the worst stereotypes. Relations toward Travellers in Britain are as bad today as they were under Thatcher.
Q: Do the cultures of the old Irish and Scottish Travellers mingle somehow with the newer Romany Travellers?
A: Yes. Marriages between Travellers from various environments are completely common, but their relationships are complicated and often even burdened by great hatreds. The Irish, the Gypsies and the Scots are three completely distinct communities, culturally and genetically, and the friction often comes from that. I started getting to know them thanks to Stanley. He was always a favorite, a very well-known figure among all Travellers. Naturally he was also recognized by the folk music world, not to the degree that I believe he deserved, but he was known. I was interested in knowing whether there were still other folk singers among the Travellers and I became a collector of field recordings myself. For me it’s an art form, a hobby, a passion, but I also consider it vital to document part of our cultural heritage that no one has ever documented before. Today I am still the only person in Britain collecting songs in the field. Some other people have turned up who I am training and who travel with me, but for the time being in reality I am doing this by myself.
Q: Are there still other communities in Britain besides the Travellers who maintain the tradition of live music and hand songs down from generation to generation?
A: There are a few, but they are isolated, and they are also much more integrated into the established folk or folklore community. There are still a few places here where people sing like that, but it’s not being handed down anymore. That means the existing generation of singers is the last. Naturally in Ireland that are places where this indigenous traditoin is strongly maintained. Then there are a couple of families here handing songs down from one generation to the next, one of the most famous is the Coppers.
Q: This is interesting to us because in the Czech lands there are still places where indigenous live folk music is handed down from generation to generation, although this is practically done exclusively in Moravia. The big question is why such traditions die out in some places and why they are maintained in other places that are geographically and socially comparable. Is it the case for the folk singers among the Travellers in Britain that they are the last generation, that they are not passing their music on to their children?
A: To a significant degree it is the case. In Ireland it trickles down here and there. You can find places where a few singers are still at it who know an extensive song collection, but their children or grandchildren know only one or two songs. In rare instances only one person is still carrying it all on. Today I meet people who are 70, 80, 90 years old who know how to sing 30, 40, 50, some of them even 60 songs. One woman, Freda Black, with whom I have spent a great deal of time, sings more than 100 songs. That’s an exceptional phenomenon, she’s 85 – but it’s not being passed on. Children aren’t interested. Why should they be? No one else sings those songs. Children listen to pop music (very bad pop music, while we’re on that subject). Part of what I am trying to do is to preserve these songs as living things, I don’t want to conserve them like jam. I am doing my best to keep them alive so they can be worked with in the future. What I am trying to do as an artist is completely separate from my work as a song collector. I do all the documentation, as a collector, and return the songs to their families, on the one hand so they will have them, and on the other hand so they see that the outside world appreciates their heritage and places a positive value on it, so a child can say: "When that white guy from London flew here to Ireland to meet our granddad or grandma and record their songs, we laughed at them and told them to shut up, but maybe something will come from it after all." My feeling, however, is that I am leading a lost battle. The songs are dying out. The old singers are dying and the youth don’t sign folk songs anymore. I tell myself that thanks to my work as a collector, and the relative success I have had as an artist singing Gypsy and Traveller songs, many one or two young people who have exceptional natural talent will decide not to become rap stars or pop singers, but will sing the songs of their own culture.
Q: Ed Vulliamy wrote an article in The Observer citing the legendary Joe Boyd, who said very nice things about you: That your singing is original both because you are learning directly from the source, and also because you are singing the songs they way they were originally sung, without instrumental accompaniment and with a very relaxed, flowing rhythm. It occurred to me that it might be difficult for the musicians you play with to accompany you. How do you choose them?
A: I think it’s not so difficult. I had to learn how to sing with a band, because I had never done that before. I was used to singing alone. All of the musicians in my band are excellent, very sensitive. I think the most important thing a good musician must master is being able to listen. I always say: "We were given two ears and one mouth, and that’s the ratio we should use them in."
Q: That’s nice. How did you find your musicians?
A: Different ways, some of them don’t have their roots in folk music at all. I have a very fine relationship with all of them, a lot of our music is based in improvisation, which is part of the folk tradition. The effort to have everything precisely lined up
belongs to modern music, but a folk singer sings the same song a little differently every time. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a saying by Gustav Mahler that I like: "To uphold a tradition means stoking the fire, not honoring the ashes." Like I said, I spent a lot of time in the library, and even though it benefited me greatly, I felt a bit like I was in a cemetery there. It was nice, but a bit cold and dead. It’s important to learn from the source. Stanley Robertson always told me a pupil and teacher must be connected "through their ears, eyes, and hearts". It’s not enough to listen to records, you have to experience the music live. That’s why it’s also important to me that I myself have enough time for teaching. I teach music students at university.
Q: Why, basically, is it important to save folk songs? When I asked you at the beginning what drew you to this type of music, you talked about your love of nature and about being brought up in the forest. Do you see any parallels there?
A: It’s very closely connected. It’s directly linked to the Gypsies, because they are our Indians. The elders among them were born on the road, in tents. They spent their life in nature. They spent their formative years in a culture that taught them to live in nature, to respect it and to learn from it. Some of the people I meet among them have had deep spiritual experiences of the sort one does not encounter very often in our settled world. As a child, I always felt very satisfied in nature, I passionately wanted to know the names of all the plants and trees, to known which plants are edible and what they can be used for. I spent a great deal of time in nature and my parents were very good at it, they let me go wild for as long as I wanted. As I was growing up I experienced many brilliant moments climbing trees, swimming in rivers, running around the woods. Folk music is the music of the earth. It is music that comes from people deeply connected to the landscape, and it is one of our ancient ways of communicating with Planet Earth. Brits, Czechs, Indians, all nations once knew song as a way of conversing with nature, their songs were sacred expressions of fundamental relationships and ties. Often, from many perspectives, this is ambiguous or not completely obvious, but in the final analysis the songs we are talking about are always sung by people with a close, deep tie to the earth, to the landscape, to nature. They would never call themselves hippies, but they lead the lives of natural people, they understand nature and respect it. Their songs are the musical expression of that love for nature. As a person who has always loved music and who has always loved nature, it couldn’t have turned out any other way with me. In folk songs I found something where my two great passions came together. I feel today that it was just a question of time before I matured into this.
Q: As a person who is "green" himself, I really like listening to what you are saying…
A: I thought so. I said to myself that a car this dirty can’t be driven by a settled guy from a corporation – my car looks exactly the same…
Q: That’s great. I mention it because you were talking about the sombre fate that lies in store for folk songs, about their inherent ties to nature, and it occurred to me whether there might not be some hope in the fact that more and more people are becoming aware of the need to change our relationship with nature.
A: I have a great affinity for the environmental movement myself, I have a lot of friends there who are always going somewhere to protest. I agree with all of their aims, but I don’t participate much myself. I don’t fully identify with the consensual culture of mass protests, where I have to accept that people show up at demonstrations carrying banners I would never sign off on. In my opinion, the environmental movement today is suffering from a lack of strong leading personalities who could give it a clear direction. Often their actions do themselves harm. It’s very similar to Gypsies and Travellers: One does something and all the rest pay the price. However, nothing is dearer to my heart than the effort to change people’s relationship to nature. All children should be led to respect nature. Every child should learn how to recognize animals, birdsong, plants and trees. That should be part of our basic education, because that is the only way to understand the environment we live in. Once someone knows that, he knows where he is, where he lives, and can understand the results of his behavior. In Britain, unfortunately, we live in a culture that is terribly separated from nature. This is because of our laws, which restrict access to the landscape, and because of agriculture, which has transformed into a terrible mono-cultural monolith and destroyed an enormous amount of natural habitats for rare plants. We live in a culture that loves the idea of nature, but in reality does not know what nature is. That will never change as long as children don’t have their own deep experiences and gain a strong emotional tie to nature. It’s the same with songs. In schools today, more folk songs are being learned, but that might also be detrimental if they become an unpleasant obligation, I get that. Rather, it seems to me that when I try to offer my music to these things, they make sense. It’s not a concept I take onstage, but many people have come to me on their own and told me they feel that my music is connecting them to nature and to the world of our ancestors.
Q: What are your future plans? You’re playing a lot of material that hasn’t been released, will there be a new album?
A: That’s coming up. It will be Gypsy and Traveller songs again, all of which I collected myself, and some of the songs that we are now playing in concert. It’s often said that as musicians develop, they do their best to make their music more and more popular, but for the time being I feel I would rather attempt something new and odd, find a weird way forward. I’m not interested in popularity, no.
Republished with the kind permission of the author from news server Deník referendum.cz.
