Taken from the album Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger & Charles Parker ‘The Travelling People’ 1968 on Argo Records. Written by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger. First transmitted on April 17th 1964 for the BBC Home Service, this compelling recording of radio-ballads (the last of 8 recorded between 1958-1964) proved so popular that the BBC were inundated with letters of praise and requests for repeat airings. 6 parts of the series became available on LP via Argo Records between 1965-1970, until the brilliant Topic Records released all 8 parts on cd direct from the original masters between 1999 & 2008. The radio-ballads were described by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger as ‘the work of a team of singers (Inc. A.L. Lloyd, Ian Campbell, Isla Cameron, John Faulkner & Joe Heaney), songwriters (MacColl & Seeger), technicians (Charles Parker), instrumentalists (Inc. Dave Swarbrick & Alf Edwards) and others who were consciously attempting to apply the techniques of folk creation to one part of the mass media…radio’. MacColl himself considered this particular subject, gypsies and tinkers, as perfect for the radio-ballad format, and you can clearly hear just how far the concept had come since the first broadcast. The BBC eventually got rid of radio-ballads and their unit dedicated to it shortly after these recordings were made, even going as far as to sack Charles Parker (producer of these recordings) in 1972, however over 5000 hours of recordings made by Parker are now available on the internet. MacColl & Seeger’s history speaks for itself and their contribution to British folk is only strengthened by this excellent collection.
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It’s important not to minimise Charles Parker’s role in the creative side of the interviewing, and also MacColl’s involvement in that. Some of the people interviewed are themselves traditional folk lynchpins – such as miner John Pandrich (Johnny Handle) and in this programme Belle Stewart. The social interviewing techniques they used varied from programme to programme, depending on what was necessary to get the best out of their subject – whether it was polio victims talking about pain, or groups of teenagers talking about problems of growing up. The travelling people is a brilliant exposition of dispossession. It’s also important that the music or song is interrelated with actuality – songs like Thirty Foot Trailer or Go, Move, Shift are never heard in their entirety as a song but are interspersed with verbal content, and distributed through the programme. The Travelling People and award-winning Singing the Fishing are perhaps the best and most balanced in this regard, but there is evolution and innovation – what Bergson called involution – in each programme, and the availability of the Topic collection makes following this development over the years possible. Parker was effectively sacked because he appeared, to the BBC hierarchy, as a class traitor, having become thoroughly Marxist under the influence of former Stalinist and Maoist MacColl; the official reason was that the ballads had become too expensive to justify. However, 21st century technologies enabled a second series, followed by some specials, to be produced by John Leonard and Andy Seward, to be created. It is perhaps testimony to MacColl and Seeger’s lasting brilliance that several of the UK’s leading folk songwriters were needed to replace their input.
Comment by Stephen Linstead on 6 September, 2025 at 8:57 am