Monday 16 December 2013

The Wild and the Innocent

My favourite Audie Murphy western is The Wild and the Innocent (usual date 1959, the Audie Murphy web site gives 1958, directed by Jack Sher)...

http://www.audiemurphy.com/movies26.htm

Audie Murphy and Sandra Dee are the rustic innocents, who attract the interest of corrupt sheriff, Gilbert Roland (and here I have to put in the !).

There is this exchange between the sheriff and his sidekick - from memory...

Sidekick:  What do you make of them, Sheriff?

Sheriff:  Very dangerous.

Sidekick:  How so?

Sheriff:  She doesn't know how beautiful she is. 
             And he doesn't know he's in love with her.




Sunday 1 December 2013

A historical source...

I recently found that one of my first publications has become a historical source. Which is a bit spooky...

SEE...
John Davis, The London Drug Scene and the Making of Drug Policy, 1965–73
Twentieth Century British History (2006) 17 (1): 26-49.

'...It is important, though, to distinguish this sort of multi-drug use, spurred primarily by the junkies’ search for heroin substitutes, from the poly-drug use characteristic of the wider London scene that was rooted in eclecticism and experimentation. ‘The typical young user’, a Medical Research Council Working Party concluded in 1970, ‘is now much more often a poly-drug abuser than someone exclusively dependent on any one drug.’60 Hard figures are, as usual, hard to find. Elizabeth Tylden’s study of cannabis users found that whereas 80% of users surveyed in 1965 had used no other drug, this was true of only 11% of users surveyed in 1970; the proportion ‘on multiple drugs’ had risen from 2 to 21%.61 Patrick O’Sullivan, working with teenage users in Camden, found that experience increased with age: those approaching twenty had experimented ‘over the years... with most of the “soft drugs”…  Through experience and contacts they had therefore built up a good deal of drug knowledge of the kind lacking in those younger groups.’62...'

And Note 62 is

62  P. O’Sullivan, ‘A Square Mile of Drug Use’, Drugs and Society 2/2, November 1972, 14.

Thursday 7 November 2013

Further on 'Tolkien in Oxford'

My thanks to people who have made encouraging noises...

I have now been told that the BBC should be able to make available for repair the digital video version of 'Tolkien in Oxford', in order to restore the missing material.  The issues have been taken on board - well done.  I will sit in on this process, informally - and I should be able to review the paperwork, and ultimately make a lot more background detail available.

Judging from the amount of interest we really should put some more formal things out into the academic research record - and I do think we have a duty to the research record.  But, early days, let us solve the problems one by one, I make no promises, work loads, life...  You all know the routine...


P.O'S.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

Tolkien in Oxford

As, perhaps, an example of the strange, visible, inter-connected world that is developing...

I was contacted last week by Merton College, Oxford.  Next year is the 750th anniversary of the founding of the college, and as part of that they want to do something about their (current) greatest son, J. R. R. Tolkien.  And they wanted to speak to me about a project I was involved in in 1968.  Yes, I said 1968.

That was a short BBC film called 'Tolkien in Oxford'.  Leslie Megahey - later to be Head of Music and Arts BBC TV - was the director.  I have been told that somewhere I have been listed as 'writer' on the project.  Nothing so grand.  I think I was 'researcher' - in other words, the gofer.  Because I knew Tolkien's work and I knew Oxford I pulled things together as the director wanted them.  Most of the things you see on the screen I set up, the interviews, the locations, the room that stood in for 'Tolkien's study'.  You can see me in the extended Merton College sequence, as I choreograph the gaggle of 'tourists' weaving in and out of shot.

The film was made at a very specific time in the development of Tolkien's reputation.  The crew, for the most part, knew little about him.  I remember saying to the sound man, 'Look, this is exactly like interviewing Lewis Carroll.  In the future people will want to know everything he said, however trivial.  Save everything...'  But television shoots do not work like that...

Talking to Leslie Megahey and to Merton College over the weekend...  Comparing notes and memories, looking at surviving paperwork...

There is work to be done.  The film has appeared on the BBC web site - but the information given on the web site is wrong.  The actual film as displayed on the BBC web site is incomplete - notably at some points it has Tolkien talking gibberish, because explanatory captions have been lost.  For technical reasons the captions were floated in at the time of broadcast. 

We need to restore the captions and restore the end credits.  Clearly - because the film is on the BBC web site - the film has already been digitised.  So, maybe, that should not be too hard...


At the same time the film has become a sort of ur-document for Tolkien scholars and enthusiasts, but comment is a bit confused - partly because the research record is incomplete, and because very few people will have seen the film as intended, and as broadcast. 

Examples...


I have never seen a cineaste study of 'Tolkien in Oxford'.  Does it exist?  I mean something about how the approach of the young auteur seen here is further developed in later Leslie Megahey works - a narrative that is visual and filmic, quite elaborate camera sequences, Leslie himself taking over the interviewing, and so on.  Also, it is an Oxford man's film about Tolkien in OXFORD - the student body (in its myriad daftness) becomes a character, Merton College itself becomes a character, and in the final helicopter sequence the whole city becomes a character.  Tolkien in Oxford.

Leslie Megahey is increasingly recognised as a very significant figure in the development of BBC documentary - see, for example, the recent British Film Institute re-release of his Schalcken the Painter...

...or his study of Orson Welles...

So, Tolkien in Oxford...  Find ways to restore the film, find ways to rescue the research record.  For a start, does anyone have the original Radio Times to hand?


Patrick O'Sullivan

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Amazon/Createspace - strange experience

I created my song lyric book through Createspace, which is now part of
Amazon.  As I explained in one of the things I wrote about this project -
'Love Death and Whiskey - the Hollywood movie'  (it is on this blog, lower down...)  - suddenly in 2010 all the elements came together.  Self-publishing
such a book became not just possible but easy.  This has worked well - 
once you accept that you have to work within Amazon's rules and methods... 
For example, the print on demand source is in the USA...

The book has worked for me, as a little basket of samples - and in other
ways.  In working out ideas, in developing new projects.  The Amazon links
have meant that the book is visible throughout the world - and can be bought
throughout the world.

I keep an eye on the reviews on Amazon...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Love-Death-Whiskey-40-Songs/dp/095678240X

(Recently there appeared a review by a former lover...  And we have to
wonder what would happen to sales if we wrote to every former lover saying,
You really should look at this book - you might be in it...)

And recently there appeared on Amazon 3 copies of my book at absurd prices -
one copy at 6 pence, one at 7, and one at 8.  Including postage - which is
how these book dealers make a profit - that is £2.86, £2.87, £2.88.  How was
this possible?  Where had these copies of my book come from?

I bought all 3 copies.  And - of course - it turned out that 2 were signed
copies that I had given to friends or to contacts, as gifts.  Or samples...
Judging by the printing information so was the third copy.  So, all fair
enough...  Maybe...

But...  I seem to have created a problem for myself and the world.
Somewhere within Amazon an entity - I think it must be a computer, it cannot
be a human being - has decided that there is a market for my song lyric book
at around the £3 mark.  Amazon is now selling the book for £3, including
postage.

I look at the costs - Amazon's costs and my costs.  Clearly now, for Amazon,
the cost of producing a paper copy of my book is almost negligible...  Is
their print on demand source still in the USA?  I am tempted to buy a copy,
to see what they have done - but that would confirm the entity in its belief
that the ideal price for my book is £3...

Monday 3 June 2013

Robert Story Song Project – DRAFT REPORT - June 3 2013

Robert Story Song Project – DRAFT REPORT
June 3 2013
Patrick O’Sullivan
With Stephanie Hladowski

In preparation for the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, May 31, June 1 and 2, 2013, I wrote a series of articles for the village magazine, and, in discussions with the village community, decided that we should see if we could develop something special for the festival, especially for Gargrave – an exploration of the work of Robert Story, 1795-1860, the self-taught poet and lyricist who is associated with Gargrave.  I collected much Robert Story research material on one of my web sites


In Gargrave Village Hall I set up a little exhibition, the Robert Story Story Board – so that some of the research material would be available to members of the community who, for one reason or another, might not be computer users.  I am happy to report that, at the end of the festival this exhibition material was seized by a local archivist – he plans that it become a village, community resource.

For more on the autoharp, the UK Autoharp Association, and the Gargrave Autoharp Festival see…


This is a quickly written draft report about the Robert Story Song Project, May-June 2013.  This report will be distributed to a number of interested individuals and groups, and it seems best to make it, at this stage, a standalone report.  It will necessarily repeat material available elsewhere.

Amongst the interested are music performers and singers, historians of music, musicologists, literature specialists interested in the writings of the ‘labouring classes’, and language specialists interested in the language and the writing of the ‘lower classes’.  And this report will be distributed to them.  I thank them all for helpful discussions.

One of my starting points, in discussion with John Goodridge of Nottingham Trent University and his ‘Labouring Class Writers Project’, is that these writers wrote songs.  We should not approach song lyrics as if they were simply not very good poems.  But I think that that discussion could be turned on its head – I am not sure that our culture has any more a good understanding of the uses of poetry.  Or indeed much use for poetry.  But we certainly know about song – and never before in the history of cultures has so much song been consumed and enjoyed.

Looking at the work of someone like Robert Story, we should at least pay him the courtesy of understanding what he was trying to do, and his milieu.  And there are certainly difficulties.  For example John James, Story’s friend and biographer, praises Story’s lyrics:  ‘attuned to the finest heart-strings of mankind…  but withal chastely.’  I am not surely that we would nowadays recommend a book to a friend saying:  You must read this – it is very chaste.

But, at the same time – I have said this elsewhere – tracking the work and the life of Robert Story proved to be surprisingly easy.  Practically all of his work is freely available somewhere on the web, and through my academic work I was able to track his life through the nineteenth century newspaper archives.  It all proved to be far more interesting than I had expected – especially making visible, within a small village in Yorkshire, the bitter faction fights around the coming of political reform to England in the 1830s.

In developing the Robert Story Song Project I was able to look for support to Stephanie Hladowski, Bradford based singer and music teacher.  Stephanie has an exquisite, accurate singing voice – I have heard BBC Radio 3 announcers drool about her voice.  Stephanie is a regular at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  Her most recent project, a cd collaboration with guitarist Chris Joynes (C. Joynes), is in effect a meditation on the archives of Cecil Sharp House.

So that Stephanie brings special strengths to this repertoire and to the songs of this period.  I am indeed fortunate that Stephanie agreed to help plan the Robert Story Song Project, and agreed to perform at our festival in Gargrave.  Stephanie and I agreed that this would be an ‘Action Research’ project – learn by doing.  Can we make these songs work?

We had the usual problems that bedevil these projects, entirely dependent as they are on good will.  Two musicians we were working with had to drop out, one because of a family health crisis, the other because of unexpected work demands.  I myself had to spend much of the week before the Gargrave Autoharp Festival in Utrecht, in the Netherlands – when, in another part of my working life, a Research Network that I advise rejigged its schedule.

But what people like me have to do in these circumstances is master and distill the research material and present straightforward performance choices.  Stephanie Hladowski and I decided that we would present 3 Robert Story songs, illustrating 3 different aspects of his song repertoire and his career.

We decided on a reverse chronology.  The reasons for the reverse chronology will quickly become clear…




1.
1846
My William

By this late stage in Robert Story’s career his mannerisms and verbal tics had settled down and he had a well maintained lyricist’s toolbox.  He is able to directly draw on technique to capture emotion.  For example, his decision to use a six line stanza form, rhyming abcbdb, tracks the thought.  The listener at first expects a standard simple 4 line stanza, and the extra 2 lines, and that extra third rhyme, are like extra effort and thought being forced out of the grieving parent.

At the performance I quickly outlined to the audience Robert Story’s life and career, stressing the flight from Gargrave, the job in London.  ‘And in London – one by one – his children died…’  This introduces the song about his dead son, William – and I briefly mention the verse in which Robert Story wishes that his son could be buried in Gargrave, ‘that distant, rural, green churchyard’, where he played as a child.

In his song lyrics Robert Story usually gives us a good hook – ‘hook’ however defined.  The opening line of ‘My William’ is

My William died in London
In this lyric there is no hiding place.  The last stanza begins…

O London!  Fatal London!
How proud to come was I…

Stephanie Hladowski decided to set this song of a parent’s grief like one of the nineteenth century laments that she knows so well.  I was particularly struck by the way she handled those ‘extra’ two lines of the six line stanza.

She sang this song unaccompanied.  It was bleak, moving and authentic – a strange combination of appreciative adjectives, I know.  When she had finished there was a grim pause, as the audience processed its collective experience.  (And there is the reason for the reverse chronology – you should not leave your audience in that condition.)   And then, applause.




2.
1834
The Isles are Awake

We decided that we had to do one of Robert Story’s political songs.  Story’s political songs are, in fact, secular hymns.  He writes them like hymns – that is part of their success.  He is clearly drawing on hymn tradition.  In fact one of his songs, ‘The Church of our Fathers’ is set (by composer Robert Guylott) and presented as a hymn in the sheet music of the time, and can – I guess – be performed as a hymn.  But it is, in fact, part of a political campaign – it is a defence of the established Church of England.

Stephanie Hladowski and I felt that there was no point in beating about the bush, and that we should attack the song that, briefly, made Robert Story a national figure, which nailed his colours to the Conservative mast, and which became part of the bitter faction fights within Gargrave.  That song was ‘The Isles are Awake’.  

Again a 6 line stanza, this time rhyming aabbcc, and each stanza ending with some version of the hook line…

The Isles are awake to the voice of the King!

It is a difficult lyric – and my respect for the Conservatives of the 1830s is increased if their massed ranks managed to sing this song.  Robert Story’s splendid word for the reformers and radicals is ‘Destructives’ – the Destructives are opposed by the loyal Conservative.

Again, at the performance in Gargrave, I spoke very briefly about the political background – William IV, the monarch just before Queen Victoria, in a speech to the bishops making public his opposition to any further reform.  Story’s song gives vent to ‘the heart shout of Loyalty, fervent and true…’

Stephanie Hladowski set this difficult lyric as a campaigning hymn.  We could have done with a massed choir of fervent Conservatives, but there were just two of us.  I silenced my inner Destructive, and imagined that massed choir standing, fervently, behind me.

I think that the way to do these nineteenth century campaigning songs is, maybe, with choirs – many of the Chartist songs of the period work in the same way.  A little aside here…  If you stop looking for ‘Robert Story’ and go to the National Archives web site and look for ‘The Isles are Awake’, you will find that the text of this song has entered a number of nineteenth century family archives – as a broadside ballad, I think.  The National Archives do not know that the song is by Robert Story.



3.
1820
The Star of Eve

This is, maybe, not one of Story’s best lyrics – its diction references a more eighteenth century tradition.  The lyric did not make the ‘final cut’, the collection that John James published in 1861, after his friend’s death.  (Mind you, John James’ book was published in order to collect funds for Story’s widow – and he might have, delicately, abandoned this lyric about an earlier Gargrave amour.)   But the lyric is in Story’s own 1857 selection, where he tells us that it is addressed to Miss H -- of Gargrave.  And he tells us what song he had in mind as he constructed the lyric.  This is very common in the writers of this period – and this section of this brief report can be expanded infinitely…  We know it is a song when they tell us where to find the tune.

Robert Story had within him a storehouse of the tunes of the Borders and the North Country.  Here he had in mind a song by Robert Burns, ‘O Bonie was yon rosy brier’.  Stephanie took one of the tunes that has been used for that Burns text, set it in a comfortable key, with a nice chord pattern for the autoharp.  It is a very pretty tune.

We can make this lyric work, and this pretty tune.  The Star of Eve is, of course, the evening star, the planet Venus – and we are free to imagine this young couple walking out in the evening, and that bright star making a memorable evening even more memorable.  We are not free, of course, to imagine this rural excursion leading to anything unchaste.

In Gargrave we were able to seize Mike Fenton, England’s autoharp guru – and he quickly created a lovely autoharp accompaniment for the song.  And we hijacked Bob Ebdon, another singer autoharper, to join us.  It is called Action Research for a reason.  Bob found a very nice harmony line for the chorus.  So, Stephanie Hladowski’s backing singers were two large bearded men, one with a black beard, one with a silver.

And the songs of Robert Story were heard in Gargrave for the first time in 150 years…

I hope that this report has made clear my gratitude to Stephanie Hladowski, and her talent, professionalism and easy going adaptability…

Patrick O’Sullivan

©Patrick O’Sullivan 2013

Visiting Scholar, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University
Patrick O'Sullivan's Whole Life Blog http://www.fiddlersdog.com/
Back Up Email Patrick O'Sullivan <pad@fiddlersdog.com> <patrickos@irishdiaspora.net
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Tuesday 16 April 2013

Robert Story Song Project


Robert Story Song Project

This article, or a version of it, will appear in the Gargrave Village Magazine at the beginning of May 2013...

FIRST DRAFT

For Gargrave Village Magazine

Gargrave Autoharp Festival - the Robert Story Song Project

We are now in the countdown to the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, when - weather permitting - we will fill the village with music, on the weekend of May 31, June 1 & 2, 2013.

We are in Gargrave as guests, and – like good guests – should arrive bearing a small gift. From this rose the idea of performing some of the songs of Robert Story at our music festival. The usual reference and guide books mention Robert Story and his relationship with Gargrave – but what was the nature of that relationship and was it a happy one?

Our sources for the life of Robert Story are his own Preface to his 1857 Poetical Works, and the 'Life of Robert Story' that his friend John James wrote for the 1861 Lyrical and Other Minor Poems – that book was published after Story’s death in order to gather a little money for his widow.

As far as I can see the entries on Robert Story in the original 1885-1901 Dictionary of National Biography, and in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 onwards, are based mostly on those two sources. Also worth looking at is Robert Story's Preface to the 1849 Third Edition of his Songs and Poems - note, the Third Edition. John James' 'Life' is a great read - he was clearly very fond of Robert Story, but he does not pull punches.

There is little academic work on Robert Story - nowadays we can check this easily by using Google Scholar. As always when using such resources, go carefully - for example there was more than one poet called 'Robert Story' active in the early nineteenth century.

I first came across our Robert Story in Brian Maidment, The poorhouse fugitives: Self-taught poets and poetry in Victorian Britain, 1987. He is listed in Martha Vicinus The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature, 1974 - and in John Goodridge's current Labouring-Class Poetry Project at Nottingham Trent University. We are trying to rescue these writers from what E. P. Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity' - but you can see that there are already strange problems of nomenclature and preoccupation. Poor, working class, labouring class, self-taught - but how are they different from what we think of as 'mainstream' writers and the literary 'canon'? If the research record has heretofore been marked by condescension, we can say that there are now some decent studies of these Labouring-Class Writers - though maybe often about the special cases, like John Clare or the Chartist poets

From the work of John Goodridge's Project, it is clear that practically every local community throughout England had some local eighteenth and nineteenth century version of Robert Story. Indeed Robert Story is almost an ideal type, in his use of local patronage, local politics (in his case conservative politics), his poetic ambitions, successes and failures.

What is missing from the research record is the notion of song and performance. These writers wrote songs. They performed their songs, in specific circumstances, for specific communities - local songs for local people. Or they gave their songs to performers.

Is a song lyric a poem? Again there are problems of nomenclature - when the words 'lyric' or 'lyrical' are used in many not quite over-lapping ways. The academic literature tends to regard song lyrics as simply not very good poems - when they were written for different purposes, to different rules. If Robert Story is an almost ideal type of the 'Labouring-Class Writer', then the Robert Story Song Project at the Gargrave Autoharp Festival is a case study in ways to re-connect with this practice and this heritage. And demonstrate the songs' value through quality performance. In the longer term there is an intriguing academic research project here - we have already involved the musicologists.

A surprising amount of Robert Story material is now freely available on the Web - this was certainly not true five years ago. I do not want to clutter up your village magazine with Web addresses. So I have collected all the Web links in one place, here on one of my web sites...

www.songlyric.co.uk

We will also place in the Gargrave Village Hall a small exhibition of key documents - I have given up trying to not think of this as the 'Robert Story Story Board'. So that anyone who wants to find out more about Robert Story will now have a clear route forward - perhaps you can tell us which Robert Story songs you would like to hear performed at the Gargrave Autoharp Festival...

Patrick O'Sullivan

April 2013

PS I am still writing some sections of the web site, but the Subpages
1. Robert Story - The Works and
8. Robert Story's Songs - Action Research
are pretty complete