Sounds of liberty

Music, radicalism and reform in the Anglophone world, 1790–1914

Kate Bowan, Paul A. Pickering

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526106230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the long nineteenth-century the sounds of liberty resonated across the Anglophone world. Focusing on radicals and reformers committed to the struggle for a better future, this book explores the role of music in the transmission of political culture over time and distance. Following in the footsteps of relentlessly travelling activists – women and men - it brings to light the importance of music making in the lived experience of politics. It shows how music encouraged, unified, divided, consoled, reminded, inspired and, at times, oppressed. The book examines iconic songs; the sound of music as radicals and reformers were marching, electioneering, celebrating, commemorating as well as striking, rioting and rebelling; and it listens within the walls of a range of associations where it was a part of a way of life, inspiring, nurturing, though at times restrictive. It provides an opportunity to hear history as it happened.

CHAPTER ONE

Songs of the world

When Fabian socialist and pioneering social scientist Beatrice Webb described her research into the history of the Co-operative Movement, she used the metaphor of securing a ‘bunch of keys’. Going on to elaborate what in essence was her methodology, Webb identified the individual components of the bunch as ‘key events, key societies, key technical terms and key personalities’.¹ Drawing from Webb’s metaphor, which implies an approach very similar to our own, this chapter will take for its key the song. More exactly, as noted in our introduction, we have selected three songs from a vast array of possibilities to examine in close detail: Rouget de Lisle’s war hymn the Marseillaise, Robert Burns’s Scots ballad John Anderson my Jo and Chartist leader Ernest Jones’s labour song Song of the ‘Lower Classes’. In certain ways they can be understood as representative of different song types, with very different relationships between words and music, orality and notation.

The Marseillaise was written literally overnight at a crucial moment in the French revolutionary wars. Although it began its life as a fully notated, patriotic war song, it was soon to become unambiguously synonymous with liberty and, for a century at least, was taken up by almost every imaginable freedom cause. The music of this ubiquitous radical anthem remained unchanged and, notwithstanding its many adaptations, so did the sentiments of the original text. Indeed, its place in popular culture was effectively sealed. As such, the Marseillaise was – both in print and performance – the perfect example of a song serving as a form of ideological shorthand. For some the stirring melody evoked revolution and freedom, while for others it portended danger. No one was in any doubt what it meant. Of course, our interest is in its history beyond the borders of France, both its place in radical Anglophone culture and its presence in the mainstream press where it was a metonym for revolution. This requires no apology. As we shall see, for much of the long nineteenth century the Marseillaise was not simply or even primarily a French song; it was a song of the world. Burns’s John Anderson my Jo, with its many pre-existing variant forms, is an archetypal example of what Matthew Gelbart has identified as the ‘emerging category of folk music’ of the late eighteenth century.² A sentimental favourite, it was both part of a long-standing oral tradition and a popular inclusion in the late eighteenth-century ballad collections in notated form. It became a staple not only of Burns commemorations but also of celebrity singers and thereby found a place in the nineteenth-century Victorian parlour song repertoire. Ostensibly, the choice of this humble ballad over Burns’s more overtly political songs such as Scots Wha Hae and A Man’s a Man for a’ That, both of which figured prominently in radical song culture (and are noted many times throughout our book), may seem odd. However, numerous political parodies of the ballad appeared throughout the long nineteenth century. This process was both a common and complex one, and as such John Anderson my Jo serves as an example that allows us to examine it. Jones’s labour song, Song of the ‘Lower Classes’, never attained the anthem status of, for example, The Red Flag. It nonetheless found a deep-rooted place in working-class political culture, appearing across the world in predominantly labour publications. Written in the mid-nineteenth century – a key period of transition for both radical political and musical culture – the song assumed a central role in a lecture series given by Jones in London in 1856. Both the series and song were shaped by questions of class and respectability. We will argue that these questions had a direct effect on the different forms that the song assumed, which can be understood as an important attempt to bridge oral and print traditions. This chapter explores the genesis, history and travels of these three songs, charting their movements across the radical Anglophone world and considering their functions and meanings in different local settings.

The origin of the Marseillaise is well known. One evening in April 1792 after a lively dinner involving much champagne, French army captain and amateur poet and musician Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle accepted a challenge from his host, the Mayor of Strasbourg, to compose an inspirational song. By the next morning he had produced Chant de guerre de l’armée du Rhin. With the music and words both penned by a single author the song is unusually formal in that, unlike the other two case studies, it exists as a ‘single definitive version that was fixed in print’.³ For all that de Lisle was reputed to be a royalist – he later barely escaped the guillotine during the Terror – his war song was designed to protect the gains of the revolution (then still a constitutional monarchy) by carrying the French to victory against their Austrian enemies. Moreover, de Lisle’s words and music were sufficiently general that they could be taken up by republicans, most notably by the fédérés of Marseilles. As described vividly in Lamartine’s History of the Girondists, it was the fédérés’ awe-inspiring renditions as they marched into Paris and on to the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, signalling the end of the monarchy, which transformed it into the hymn not only of the French revolution but the French republic.⁴ Napoleon established it as the national anthem in 1795 only to ban it a decade later during the Empire; the proscription was continued by Louis XVIII during the Second Restoration. Rehabilitated in 1830, it was later banned by Napoleon III and so it remained until 1879 when it was once more declared the French national anthem.

The Scottish ballad John Anderson my Jo is a far cry from the bellicose French march. Burns’s song, the best known of the extant versions, is a testament to enduring love. It has also played its part in shaping Scottish cultural identity.⁵ It was published in 1790, two years before the Marseillaise, as one of Burns’s more than 200 contributions to James Johnson’s substantial collection, the Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803). Taking his place alongside notable figures such as Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson, Johnson was an important figure in the rise of literary antiquarianism and what has been called the ‘eighteenth-century British ballad revival’.⁶ Multiple versions and variants of John Anderson my Jo in both textual and musical forms are found in ballad collections from this period. Burns’s version as it appears in Johnson’s collection is as follows:

John Anderson my Jo, John,

When we were first acquent,

Your locks were like the raven,

Your bony brow was brent;

But now your brow is belt, John,

Your locks are like the snaw,

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson my Jo.

John Anderson my Jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither,

And mony a canty day, John,

We’ve had wi ane anither;

Now we maun totter down, John,

But hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson my Jo.⁷

Like many of Burns’s poems, it is a polite adaption of a far older and bawdier text, the second stanza of which is given below. Only the first line is common to both versions.

John Anderson my Jo, John,

When first that ye began,

Ye had as good a tail-tree,

As ony ither man; but now it’s waxen wan, John,

And wrinkles to and fro;

I’ve twa gae-ups for ae gae-down,

John Anderson my Jo.⁸

John Anderson my Jo is at once a tune and a poem. The origins of the gentle, lilting tune are, as is usual with oral tradition, equally unclear as the text. It appeared, for example, with this title as early as 1630 in the Skene MS; in 1731 it accompanied the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay’s words in John Watt’s Musical Miscellany and was used twice in Ramsay’s own Tea-Table Miscellany; it was printed again in James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion of 1752, and in James Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs in 1782.⁹ Scholars from the nineteenth century on, however, have noted its similarity to other tunes, in particular two English melodies, Paul’s Steeple and I am the Duke of Norfolk.¹⁰ One recent commentator has identified it as a Scottish fiddle song, surmising correctly that it ‘probably derived from a bawdy song’.¹¹ The multiple variants of both tune and text that are all John Anderson my Jo in the oral tradition exemplify the complexities of popular song provenance and remind us of Foucault’s insight into the fruitful but ultimately doomed pursuit of origins in his work on history and genealogy.¹²

Song of the ‘Lower Classes’ was written between 1848 and 1850 while Jones was in Newgate Prison, serving a sentence for conspiracy and sedition. Trained as a lawyer, Jones was the last leader of Britain’s first nationwide working-class movement, Chartism. On one level, the Chartist agenda appears innocuous to modern eyes; an unexceptional programme of democratic reform. But Jones was what was known as ‘a Chartist and something more’ – a man prepared to contemplate the use of political power, once gained, to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Founding editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The sounds of liberty
• 1 Songs of the world
• 2 The sound of marching feet
• 3 Votes for a song
• 4 ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’
• 5 Music, morals and the middle class
• 6 The challenges of uplift
• 7 ‘Sing of the warriors of labour’: radical religion, secularism and the hymn
• 8 Conclusion: ‘And they sang a new song’
• Index