les dawson
- Thread starter nine
- Start date
sufi
lala
The Good Old Songs
In a small pub on a main road in an area of Bristol due shortly for demolition, a very small man playing an ornate silver and ivory piano accordion, which seemed almost too large for him, sat perched on a bench by the bar, his feet did not touch the floor. He had a fat, pale mole on his jaw, his hair was white, he wore a grey pullover, he seemed grey and silver all over. Everyone was joining in singing, though they continued to drink and chat at the same time. A girl, the only young girl present, was kissing a whippet, covering its milk chocolate-coloured muzzle with lipstick in doing so. When everyone started singing ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ a man with a bristling moustache said:
‘That’s a melody that’s lasted fifty years and will last for fifty more, not like this wretched jungle beat of today that will hardly last till tomorrow. This song is full of nostalgia for me. It brings back to me all that bloody awful blood bath of the First World War and Waterloo station and the soldiers clasping their women, knowing they would never see them again. I was in the army for twenty-nine years. In the army, they used to say: “Never stand up when you can sit down, never sit down when you can lie down.”
With that, he sat down. The piano accordionist began to play ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream’ and everybody began to sing that except the moustached man, who said in an aggrieved voice: ‘I don’t know the words of this one.’
He and his moustache were out of their class in this pub, where empty Woodbine packets spilled from the ashes of an unused grate. He was there on purpose to buy a birthday drink for an employee, an old man in his seventies with a tattooed snake round his left wrist. This old man is a virtuoso banjo player in the British style; he plays solos such as ‘La Marguerite’, ‘Bless This House’, ‘Mr Jollyboy’, ‘Land of Dreaming Darkies’ and ‘N*****town’ (these last two presumably relics of the days of coon shows and blackface minstrels). The publican is also a banjo player; they plan, one night, to play duets together in the bar. That should be worth waiting for.
Sometimes one hears a banjo in a pub, but usually it is either a piano or a piano accordion, with perhaps a rhythm section of spoons or drums. Small electronic organs and organ attachments on pianos, however, are becoming more and more popular. One will occasionally find rock groups, fossils from the late 1950s; these are essentially noise machines and only to be found in the rowdiest pubs. These electric musicians have ornate, swept-back hairdos, are smartly dressed in navy suits and shoestring ties and perform with such a manic abandon that they all run with sweat by the evening’s end.
They are usually in their late thirties, if not older. They play early Little Richard, Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent hits such as ‘Beebop- a-lula’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’. Sometimes one is even lucky enough to hear ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
In the main, the atmosphere of the public bar is predominantly middleaged. The musician’s task is rather to promote general singing in the bar than to provide background music. There is music of some kind in perhaps two-thirds of the pubs of any size that have not gone over to muzak, elaborately arranged plastic bouquets, petty bourgeois interior decoration and the lager and vodka-and-lime trade.
Even in pubs without music, singing — usually unison but sometimes solo — will break out spontaneously at the saturnalian season of Christmas through to the New Year.
Then the solo singing will be in the nature of a party piece; every New Year’s Eve, for example, there is a ritual of persuading the regulars to do pieces such as the patter song ‘Sylvest’ (‘My brother, Sylvest, got a row of forty medals on his chest. He beat a thousand n***** in the west . . . My Brother Sylvest’). But, in the main, singing in our city is a communal thing. It has only been permitted in pubs for five years. Bristol is deeply puritan. No music, no singing; the only thing you used to be able to do in a public house was to get drunk.
On a Saturday night, every sing-song pub in the city must be echoing with the same repertoire. There are the songs that never die; whose broad, catchy melodies and lyrics expressing either honest sentiment or sometimes surreal humour insinuate themselves into the mind and are absorbed though never consciously learnt. The repertory ranges widely over time, from music hall favourites such as ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ through pops of the intervening decades up till contemporary songs in the traditional idiom.
These are the songs the mums and dads put into the hit parade, the songs of Ken Dodd, Val Doonican; the Australian group, The Seekers, (‘The Carnival is Over’, ‘Momingtown Ride’); and the American country and western singer, Jim Reeves. A chart-topping country number, ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, won a golden disc for the super-dramatic singing of Tom Jones. It was primarily the shillings of the public bar that must have kept him at the top for six long weeks. This song sells nostalgia and love of home; there is a savagely dramatic sting in the last verse. The singer has described in glowing terms the beauty of home; then -
I awake and look around me,
See the four grey walls that surround me,
And I realise that I’m only dreaming;
For there’s a guard and there’s a grey old padre,
On and On we’ll walk at daybreak
And they’ll lay me ’neath the green, green grass of home.
It is such a hot favourite that, at the football match, the entire throng sings aloud with it when it is played over the loudspeakers. The sweet predictability of tune and the directness with which they view the human predicament must account for the popularity ofAmerican country songs. ‘Distant Drums’ by Jim Reeves went straight from the mass media into the pubs, ‘Mary, marry me, let’s not wait, For the distant drums may change our wedding date.’ Reeve’s ‘Release Me’ has similarly caught the imagination — ‘Please release me, let me go, For I don’t love you any more.’ You can’t get a much more bald statement ofthe death oflove than that. Everybody seems to know the words of the song.
Inspirational songs are heavily featured, such as ‘I Believe’ and ‘Climb Every Mountain’. The popularity of ‘Climb Every Mountain’ is an indication of the popularity of the film, The Sound of Music ; every town where it is shown has had a story in its local paper about someone who has become hooked on The Sound of Music and seen it about 100 times. Most people have seen it more than once. But songs that have an arty flavour about them or are more specifically hymnal in type are left to the solo singer. These are such songs as ‘Bless This House’ and ‘Ave Maria’. Also, ‘Oh, My Beloved Father’, which has somehow developed religious connotations. When a person gets up to sing solo, he or she will feature a slightly different range of material, for example, ‘The Song of the Clyde’, ‘It’s a Grand Night for Singing’ or ‘The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life’. They are all so different in that they sing both chorus and verse of songs, inciting the rest of the pub to join in on the chorus with ritual gestures of the hands. When everybody is singing together, verses are usually jettisoned since the choruses are what everybody knows. Who ever heard, for example, the verse of ‘Daisy Bell’?
Teen music in general passes the pub by. Neither its rhythms nor its sentiments suit the Saturday-night-out singers. The only Beatles song to make the pub scene here (though it might be different in Liverpool) is ‘Yellow Submarine’, as being bouncy, humorous, panto-type song not too different in mood from ‘The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’ (‘Ha-haha- ha-ha, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, That’s the woody woodpecker’s song’: opportunities for bird and animal imitations are always welcomed, it is a fine thing to hear thirty or forty people all barking together in ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’)
The melodic patterns of modem pop, which often ultimately derive from American Negro blues, and the harmonic complexity of the music of the Beatles or the Beach Boys are from and of a different world, the allat- once world of the twentieth century, the postwar world. The public bar is stuck in a time before them. The linear melodies favoured in the singsong pubs, hopelessly and forever square, belong to an older world and retain, however remotely, some connections with the linear tunes of our own folk song.
In a small pub on a main road in an area of Bristol due shortly for demolition, a very small man playing an ornate silver and ivory piano accordion, which seemed almost too large for him, sat perched on a bench by the bar, his feet did not touch the floor. He had a fat, pale mole on his jaw, his hair was white, he wore a grey pullover, he seemed grey and silver all over. Everyone was joining in singing, though they continued to drink and chat at the same time. A girl, the only young girl present, was kissing a whippet, covering its milk chocolate-coloured muzzle with lipstick in doing so. When everyone started singing ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ a man with a bristling moustache said:
‘That’s a melody that’s lasted fifty years and will last for fifty more, not like this wretched jungle beat of today that will hardly last till tomorrow. This song is full of nostalgia for me. It brings back to me all that bloody awful blood bath of the First World War and Waterloo station and the soldiers clasping their women, knowing they would never see them again. I was in the army for twenty-nine years. In the army, they used to say: “Never stand up when you can sit down, never sit down when you can lie down.”
With that, he sat down. The piano accordionist began to play ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream’ and everybody began to sing that except the moustached man, who said in an aggrieved voice: ‘I don’t know the words of this one.’
He and his moustache were out of their class in this pub, where empty Woodbine packets spilled from the ashes of an unused grate. He was there on purpose to buy a birthday drink for an employee, an old man in his seventies with a tattooed snake round his left wrist. This old man is a virtuoso banjo player in the British style; he plays solos such as ‘La Marguerite’, ‘Bless This House’, ‘Mr Jollyboy’, ‘Land of Dreaming Darkies’ and ‘N*****town’ (these last two presumably relics of the days of coon shows and blackface minstrels). The publican is also a banjo player; they plan, one night, to play duets together in the bar. That should be worth waiting for.
Sometimes one hears a banjo in a pub, but usually it is either a piano or a piano accordion, with perhaps a rhythm section of spoons or drums. Small electronic organs and organ attachments on pianos, however, are becoming more and more popular. One will occasionally find rock groups, fossils from the late 1950s; these are essentially noise machines and only to be found in the rowdiest pubs. These electric musicians have ornate, swept-back hairdos, are smartly dressed in navy suits and shoestring ties and perform with such a manic abandon that they all run with sweat by the evening’s end.
They are usually in their late thirties, if not older. They play early Little Richard, Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent hits such as ‘Beebop- a-lula’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’. Sometimes one is even lucky enough to hear ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
In the main, the atmosphere of the public bar is predominantly middleaged. The musician’s task is rather to promote general singing in the bar than to provide background music. There is music of some kind in perhaps two-thirds of the pubs of any size that have not gone over to muzak, elaborately arranged plastic bouquets, petty bourgeois interior decoration and the lager and vodka-and-lime trade.
Even in pubs without music, singing — usually unison but sometimes solo — will break out spontaneously at the saturnalian season of Christmas through to the New Year.
Then the solo singing will be in the nature of a party piece; every New Year’s Eve, for example, there is a ritual of persuading the regulars to do pieces such as the patter song ‘Sylvest’ (‘My brother, Sylvest, got a row of forty medals on his chest. He beat a thousand n***** in the west . . . My Brother Sylvest’). But, in the main, singing in our city is a communal thing. It has only been permitted in pubs for five years. Bristol is deeply puritan. No music, no singing; the only thing you used to be able to do in a public house was to get drunk.
On a Saturday night, every sing-song pub in the city must be echoing with the same repertoire. There are the songs that never die; whose broad, catchy melodies and lyrics expressing either honest sentiment or sometimes surreal humour insinuate themselves into the mind and are absorbed though never consciously learnt. The repertory ranges widely over time, from music hall favourites such as ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ through pops of the intervening decades up till contemporary songs in the traditional idiom.
These are the songs the mums and dads put into the hit parade, the songs of Ken Dodd, Val Doonican; the Australian group, The Seekers, (‘The Carnival is Over’, ‘Momingtown Ride’); and the American country and western singer, Jim Reeves. A chart-topping country number, ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, won a golden disc for the super-dramatic singing of Tom Jones. It was primarily the shillings of the public bar that must have kept him at the top for six long weeks. This song sells nostalgia and love of home; there is a savagely dramatic sting in the last verse. The singer has described in glowing terms the beauty of home; then -
I awake and look around me,
See the four grey walls that surround me,
And I realise that I’m only dreaming;
For there’s a guard and there’s a grey old padre,
On and On we’ll walk at daybreak
And they’ll lay me ’neath the green, green grass of home.
It is such a hot favourite that, at the football match, the entire throng sings aloud with it when it is played over the loudspeakers. The sweet predictability of tune and the directness with which they view the human predicament must account for the popularity ofAmerican country songs. ‘Distant Drums’ by Jim Reeves went straight from the mass media into the pubs, ‘Mary, marry me, let’s not wait, For the distant drums may change our wedding date.’ Reeve’s ‘Release Me’ has similarly caught the imagination — ‘Please release me, let me go, For I don’t love you any more.’ You can’t get a much more bald statement ofthe death oflove than that. Everybody seems to know the words of the song.
Inspirational songs are heavily featured, such as ‘I Believe’ and ‘Climb Every Mountain’. The popularity of ‘Climb Every Mountain’ is an indication of the popularity of the film, The Sound of Music ; every town where it is shown has had a story in its local paper about someone who has become hooked on The Sound of Music and seen it about 100 times. Most people have seen it more than once. But songs that have an arty flavour about them or are more specifically hymnal in type are left to the solo singer. These are such songs as ‘Bless This House’ and ‘Ave Maria’. Also, ‘Oh, My Beloved Father’, which has somehow developed religious connotations. When a person gets up to sing solo, he or she will feature a slightly different range of material, for example, ‘The Song of the Clyde’, ‘It’s a Grand Night for Singing’ or ‘The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life’. They are all so different in that they sing both chorus and verse of songs, inciting the rest of the pub to join in on the chorus with ritual gestures of the hands. When everybody is singing together, verses are usually jettisoned since the choruses are what everybody knows. Who ever heard, for example, the verse of ‘Daisy Bell’?
Teen music in general passes the pub by. Neither its rhythms nor its sentiments suit the Saturday-night-out singers. The only Beatles song to make the pub scene here (though it might be different in Liverpool) is ‘Yellow Submarine’, as being bouncy, humorous, panto-type song not too different in mood from ‘The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’ (‘Ha-haha- ha-ha, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, That’s the woody woodpecker’s song’: opportunities for bird and animal imitations are always welcomed, it is a fine thing to hear thirty or forty people all barking together in ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’)
The melodic patterns of modem pop, which often ultimately derive from American Negro blues, and the harmonic complexity of the music of the Beatles or the Beach Boys are from and of a different world, the allat- once world of the twentieth century, the postwar world. The public bar is stuck in a time before them. The linear melodies favoured in the singsong pubs, hopelessly and forever square, belong to an older world and retain, however remotely, some connections with the linear tunes of our own folk song.
sufi
lala
Similarly, the massive sophistication of the lyrics of Donovan, Bob Dylan and Lennon and McCartney pass most people by; the singers round the piano don’t dig abstruse imagery and hippie allusion. They see the world with a grand simplicity just as in the old songs. Maybe this simplicity is often blurred by sentiment but that is nothing new and the basic concerns of affection and fidelity remain the same. There is also a cosy familiarity in singing the songs you have always known; many of these songs are loved just because they are known, are remembered because they are always sung.
The genius of the public bar remains Vera Lynn, whose voice, says Richard Hoggart, sounds the way a mill girl sings inside her head. Vera Lynn still represents a style of straight-out, open-throated singing from the heart which is distant, very distant, but all the same, not too unimaginably removed, from English traditional singing style. And English traditional singers will sing most of the pub favourites mixed up with far older ballads with perfect equanimity, anyway.
Margaret says she does not like music like the Rolling Stones and, besides, it would be too difficult for her to play even if she did. Margaret is the resident pianist at a pub down by the river; the walls of this pub are decorated with sailors’ hatbands, arranged in squares. She is accompanied by a drummer. She is plump and smiling, with carefully coiffed grey curls; she always wears a nice dress for her public appearances and appears brisk yet sedate. She dominates the bar. She can play anything and will pick up a tune the bar starts singing spontaneously and accompany them in any key they choose. Her experience is more or less typical. She says: ‘The favourites are songs like “A Shanty in Old Shanty Town”, “You Made Me Love You”, “Underneath the Arches”, “Heart of My Heart” and all the Al Jolson songs. Everybody seems to know them, young or old, and they ail join in. I never go into a pub except when I come here to play.
‘I started entertaining at the piano at the age of fifteen, doing amateur concert party work. My husband is a drummer. We played together at clubs until we got married; then I dropped it. It’s not my husband who plays here with me; he plays somewhere else on Saturday nights. Well, five years ago, when the ban on music was lifted, I came in here and sat down at the piano and the landlady gave me a permanent engagement. I’ve been playing three nights a week here for the five years since. I also play one night a week for keep-fit classes.
‘I get 30s a night from the management. They collect money in a beer mug for the drummer. Most pub pianists get 30s a night. I get a lot of pleasure from playing but I do it for the money, really. I need it, with two young children.’
Noel Coward made someone in Private Lives say: ‘Strange how potent cheap music is.’ Even flattened out by the rolling bass and smash-bang-wallop attack of the pub pianist’s typical style, a style emulated by the accordionists, the potency remains. Nothing brings back the past like a tune, especially a good old tune, just as the man with the moustache says. The sense of togetherness in a sing-song pub is marvellous. The unmusical voices blend, somehow, and there are smiles for strangers. It is a very good scene.
Angela Carter New Society, 1968
The genius of the public bar remains Vera Lynn, whose voice, says Richard Hoggart, sounds the way a mill girl sings inside her head. Vera Lynn still represents a style of straight-out, open-throated singing from the heart which is distant, very distant, but all the same, not too unimaginably removed, from English traditional singing style. And English traditional singers will sing most of the pub favourites mixed up with far older ballads with perfect equanimity, anyway.
Margaret says she does not like music like the Rolling Stones and, besides, it would be too difficult for her to play even if she did. Margaret is the resident pianist at a pub down by the river; the walls of this pub are decorated with sailors’ hatbands, arranged in squares. She is accompanied by a drummer. She is plump and smiling, with carefully coiffed grey curls; she always wears a nice dress for her public appearances and appears brisk yet sedate. She dominates the bar. She can play anything and will pick up a tune the bar starts singing spontaneously and accompany them in any key they choose. Her experience is more or less typical. She says: ‘The favourites are songs like “A Shanty in Old Shanty Town”, “You Made Me Love You”, “Underneath the Arches”, “Heart of My Heart” and all the Al Jolson songs. Everybody seems to know them, young or old, and they ail join in. I never go into a pub except when I come here to play.
‘I started entertaining at the piano at the age of fifteen, doing amateur concert party work. My husband is a drummer. We played together at clubs until we got married; then I dropped it. It’s not my husband who plays here with me; he plays somewhere else on Saturday nights. Well, five years ago, when the ban on music was lifted, I came in here and sat down at the piano and the landlady gave me a permanent engagement. I’ve been playing three nights a week here for the five years since. I also play one night a week for keep-fit classes.
‘I get 30s a night from the management. They collect money in a beer mug for the drummer. Most pub pianists get 30s a night. I get a lot of pleasure from playing but I do it for the money, really. I need it, with two young children.’
Noel Coward made someone in Private Lives say: ‘Strange how potent cheap music is.’ Even flattened out by the rolling bass and smash-bang-wallop attack of the pub pianist’s typical style, a style emulated by the accordionists, the potency remains. Nothing brings back the past like a tune, especially a good old tune, just as the man with the moustache says. The sense of togetherness in a sing-song pub is marvellous. The unmusical voices blend, somehow, and there are smiles for strangers. It is a very good scene.
Angela Carter New Society, 1968
