On the Origins of the Cottagers’ Songs

The physical release of Oh Hark, The Cottagers’ Songs has been a long time coming. The five disc collection of urban folk recordings by Godfrey Palmer has long held a mythic status in the ambiguous intersect between ethnography and soundscape. They have been bootlegged since the mid 1960’s, but always in bad quality recordings: sound textures and dialogue between outbreaks of haunting singing, dripping taps and footsteps, flushing cisterns and road traffic when the doors to outside open. They have sometimes found their way into art and queer film, influencing the sound design in some of the underground films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, as well as the work of David Lynch, Gerald Aldhard, or David Bowie. The nature of the recordings - echo and solemnity, intimate conversation and rushed sexual acts, gobbling and groaning, slamming cubicle doors - and then the plaintive clear-voiced singing - defy categorisation: perhaps horror, awkward experimental ambient soundscape, social documentary.

It’s often been assumed that the recordings are not particularly authentic. Palmer, a name more often associated with amateur folksong transcriptions, has rarely been considered as the actual author of the works. Until now, there has never been much information as to where they originated, and throughout their time in the underground, they have accumulated legend and fanciful history, attempts to explain their provenance. Were the soundscapes made in a studio as part of a homoerotic horror concept album; or a mix of samples from choral recordings and location ambience audiotapes; perhaps a surreal collage of amateur audiotapes found in bric-a-brac shops. The raw earnest texture of the recordings, and the staggering beauty of the singing, raises so many questions about how the two could co-exist in the same context.

In fact, the enigmatic recordings were indeed the culmination of a lifetime’s work by maverick song collector and ethnographer Palmer. Research accompanying the remixing and releasing of the Songs has discovered much about the private life of this overlooked pioneer of the folk revival, as well as the journey the recordings themselves have made from private passion to influential soundscapes. Indeed, it was Palmer himself who prevented the material from being released during his lifetime, and even denied that they existed at all. But as he got older, he wanted to use modern techniques to release them in their best shape. There are many more recordings than those that were bootlegged, and Palmer’s preoccupation in his later years was revisiting his original recordings, and cataloguing the urban folk songs for public release. Palmer died during this process, but we have his wife to thank for the final high quality collection. She was his stalwart companion in his research and interest in these folk recordings, and urges collectors to think of them as ethnographic recordings - an aural documentary of where toilet traders exhibit unexpected artistic expression.

Palmer intended the recordings as ethnography in an effort to promote the real subcultures of Britain and refute the folksiness of folk music. Instead of the quaint rhymes of rural folksong, here is the earthy vulgarity of the urban working class. He wanted to fill in the areas redacted by folksong collectors and the mythologisers of Merrie England. This was not the England that Palmer knew - he was from the conurbation that sprawled between Birmingham, Coventry and Balsall Common, and knew intimately the increasing urbanisation, anonymity, and amoral opportunism of people drifting between labouring jobs and proletarianised service sector employment. It is through this lens that the remastered recordings should be evaluated.

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Godfrey Palmer is of course more familiar to us as a song collector, and a minor contributor to the revival of interest in folk music in the 1960s. He published several collections of folk songs, and occasionally performed with the folk bands The Cox Men and Slow Wood, but had a public skirmish with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which pretty much ended his involvement with the revival movement. The dispute was over the representation of industrial work songs and the political focus of some folk recordings, which Palmer claimed the society was trying to ignore with its preoccupation with anodyne pastoral songs. This was the only public glimpse we had of Palmer, but the research accompanying the remastered recordings shows how tirelessly Palmer worked on what he believed.

Palmer’s childhood was spent in the Forest of Arden, or whatever remained of it in the interstices of north Warwickshire between Birmingham and Coventry. He and his brother had little time to idle away summers in the rural landscape, as their father had quite a demanding programme of self-improvement and discipline in store for them. He was a musician, a ferocious woodwind talent. He occasionally played with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under George Weldon and Rudolf Schwarz, and was noted for his flamboyant skill with the bassoon. He insisted that his sons follow him into the same section of the orchestra, but it seemed that Godfrey just wasn’t suited. A private music tutor brought in by their father to try to find any innate talent commented on Godfrey’s “plum-red cheeks, clumsy big fingers and wayward mouth”. They tried various instruments in the woodwind family, but none fitted Godfrey’s ill-disciplined style of blowing. Nor were his lips suited to brass, and a brief attempt at the timpani began lifelong frustration and bitterness towards those with musical aptitude, especially as his brother Gabriel became a dazzling flautist.

Perhaps their father’s earnest hopes for his sons’ musical education lay in the material aspects of his own life. He was only an amateur musician, and his day job meant his spent his entire day in an insurance office. Later, when Godfrey looked back on this time, he realised the deep unhappiness of his father in having to squander so much of his time in the utter torment of uninspiring office work, and his wish for this sons to escape that fate. Godfrey recalled how his father trudged home from the commute back from Coventry city centre, wordless and unhappy, and only then found solace in the warm vibrato of his bassoon. Gabriel’s talent and hard work meant he was able to become a professional musician, even performing as a soloist on occasion. Godfrey could only envy the flamboyant virtuosity of his brother; his own musical abilities meant he could dabble at best, and there was always a frenetic and raw aspect to his playing, certainly those captured in the recordings we have.

Godfrey became a little reclusive, perhaps from the disappointment of letting his father down. He lost himself in books and magazines, spy novels in particular. The secret world of cold war spy novelists like Desmond Cory and Ian Fleming seemed to energise his imagination. Furtive meetings between agents, codewords, compromising situations and mysterious packages became something of a fixation for Godfrey. His family were disturbed by his idiosyncratic behaviour and extreme secrecy. He was unable to communicate with them, and spent long periods of time following and observing neighbours, writing up reports which he kept locked up in a special drawer. By the time Godfrey announced to his family that he had uncovered a Soviet plot involving a man across the street and the postman, Godfrey’s father had had enough, and got him a job in his insurance office.

The nature of the work had the required effect of crushing Godfrey’s imagination. Soon he was trudging back and forth to Coventry city centre with his father in a matching raincoat, and enduring the same empty hours. To alleviate the crushing boredom, he spent his lunch hours in secondhand bookshops, trying to keep his brain alive. He began to collect books, and to find nourishment not just their contents, but their physical presence. He would often discuss the quality of a binding, or the design of a dust jacket with the booksellers. Collecting became something of a hobby, although he often had to smuggle new acquisitions into the house, since the 1930’s suburban semi had few bookshelves. Godfrey must have been a lonely character in his room with his books, gently fingering marbled endpapers while his father and brother delighted in rehearsing their woodwind downstairs.

Over the next few years, as the drudgery of the back and forth to the office crushed his soul, Godfrey began to travel further from home to collect books. He often spent Saturdays and holidays travelling up to London, and spent the entire day on Charing Cross Road perusing antiquarian book sellers. But more so, he enjoyed the tonic of journeying out to more obscure destinations, always with the aim of finding an interesting secondhand volume, but increasingly because he was fascinated by the subtle differences in culture and attitude he experienced. He began to sit in cafes and listen to the conversation around him, delighting in the regional accents and strange ideas he encountered, especially when he journeyed out to East Anglia. It excited him when factory workers or farm labourers assembled at teashops or public houses, and their rough talk and strange vernacular became a mystery he wanted to understand. He began to note down their conversations, and it is believed he would sometimes follow his subjects around to continue capturing their talk. This activity became quite a central part of Palmer’s life for a while. It was partly escapism from the banality of his home life, but it seemed to awaken an interest in psychology or ethnography, of trying to understand cultures that had always been hidden from view, far away from the hushed anonymity of the suburban provinces.

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The year 1958 was perhaps Palmer’s annus mirabilis. Two things of profound consequence happened: Godfrey met his future wife, Sandy Buncle, at a tea shop in Daventry, and he also picked up a copy of Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs at a vintage book stall in Nuneaton.

Sandy was behind the counter of the tea shop, and had become irritated by Godfrey’s recurrent eavesdropping. She confronted him, and snatched up his notebook, in which he had transcribed the conversations taking place around him. At first he made something up about being an undercover policeman, and Sandy left him in peace. The pretence seemed to embolden him a little, and he elaborated the story, whenever the cafe was quiet, that he was investigating a gang who were using the tea shop to plot an armed robbery. The story soon began to grow ridiculously overworked, however, as he claimed that the gang were actually taking orders from Khrushchev, and were plotting to sabotage nearby factories. Perhaps Sandy humoured him because he was a slither of fantastic madness in the otherwise dreary regularity of the tea shop. They began to share the eavesdropping and note-taking, and worked together to produce elaborate descriptions of the lives of the clientele. Quite a few of the notebooks have survived, but there is very little that is so fanciful in them. Mostly the overheard conversations seem to focus on spiteful rumour and accusations of depraved sexual activity. It was Sandy that invited Godfrey to accompany her to witness the Plum Jerkum Border Morris Dancers perform at Priors Marston.

The dance was a revelation to Godfrey, and he was thrilled by the colours and movement and painted faces, the ornate orchestration and evocation of primal history. He took his notebooks out again, trying to get down the words of the dancers’ songs. In the following weeks, Godfrey and Sandy drove around many villages in the North Warwickshire and Northamptonshire area, seeking out the local morris men and both being enthralled by the dances, but also seeking to make a record of the events. They wrote down the songs as much as they could, and even attempted sketches of the costumes the dancers wore, but these were really not very good.

Soon, it wasn’t just morris men’s songs that the couple were collecting. They travelled to pubs and meeting halls, hotels and youth hostels, even factories and nursing homes to note down songs and conversations. The practice of song collecting was something they knew nothing about - the impulse behind their frenzied travel around rural and working class venues writing down words they didn’t recognise or songs they’d never heard before is something of a mystery. It was a way of escaping and entertaining themselves, perhaps, in that austere era, or a method of negotiating a relationship with English history and identity. Whatever their reasons, they were industrious and diligent, and produced 38 exercise books filled with song lyrics and transcribed conversations, as well as terrible drawings, in their first year.

As that year came to a close, and the onset of winter meant there were very few dances to document, Godfrey focussed again on book collecting. Picking up Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs was a revelation. Here was a collection similar to that which Godfrey and Sandy were compiling, put together by someone with the same motivation to collect and document the songs and dances of marginal cultures. Godfrey pored over the volume for days, in awe of the scope and spirit of the work. It opened his eyes to the tradition of song collecting, but it wasn’t long before he was immersed in the controversy surrounding the practice.

One of the things that immediately became apparent to Godfrey was how different in style, tone and subject matter the songs collected by Sharp were in contrast to his own collection. Those in English Folk Songs often took pastoral courtship as their theme, sometimes bawdy and playful, sometimes whimsical. The songs in Godfrey and Sandy’s exercise books were anything but - most indulged in descriptions of cruelty, punishment and masochism. Godfrey wondered why there was such a marked difference, whether this was evidence of regional differences in song topics, or changes through time. But these songs were meant to be oral tradition passed through the ages. Godfrey could not reconcile the stark differences.

It was when Godfrey became acquainted with the work of A. L. Loyd that he began to understand why his own collection seemed to differ from more official accounts of the English folk song tradition. Godfrey had picked up a copy of Loyd’s LP Blow Boys Blow (Songs of The Sea) at a car boot sale in Hinkley, and was soon influenced by the folklorist’s study of industrial folk music. The two corresponded, and it was during this exchange that Godfrey’s ideas about the folk music he and others had collected began to develop. Godfrey became convinced that Loyd’s representations of the working class in his collections of songs and theoretical writings was heavily biased by his socialism. He suspected that he had cherry-picked songs that portrayed the working man in an heroic light, an attempt to romanticise industrial workers that accorded with his political leanings. In the songs Godfrey and Sandy had collected, there was no heroism, or even self-respect. They were all songs of abasement and subservience, songs that gloried only in the feudal relationship between worker and master.

The exploration of theoretical ideas about folk songs made Godfrey more eager to collect further songs and recordings. He and Sandy began to carry around rather large and cumbersome recording apparatus to dances and song recitals. Primarily, this was to make transcribing the songs easier and more accurate, but it also means we now have an archive of the songs they managed to collect. The additional material that they accumulated made Godfrey even more convinced that Loyd was misguided. He began to see the same error in the work of Sharp, and publicly argued with the English Folk Song and Dance Society. The folk tradition as evinced by the songs recorded by these famous collectors was an entirely fabricated version of the truth, he claimed. Many songs in the tradition had simply been omitted, and most others had been bowdlerised. Any that did not fit in with the romantic myth of Merrie England were discarded. He accused Loyd and Sharp, and other collectors, of trying to manipulate the real culture of industrial workers, rural communities and marginal groups for their own agenda. Godfrey attempted to release some of his recordings to back up his argument, but no record label would risk publishing the often explicit and vulgar material.

Godfrey’s recordings have been studied in detail by subsequent researchers on folk traditions, and few could argue that the songs he managed to record glorify peasants in pastoral idylls or worker solidarity in industrial relations. What is most shocking about his song collection is not just the depraved language, although this is very shocking, considering they were recorded over 60 years ago, but how they subvert our expectations. Godfrey’s collection is far larger than Sharp’s (some have estimated over 10,000 recordings) but in very few is there concordance with folk song archetypes. Instead, songs such as “My Master Drives His Plough Too Hard” are predominantly about debasement and sadistic lord-peasant abuse, a desire to be oppressed, and feudal arrangements. The songs are fixated on punishment and retribution, slavery and masochism. From the body of songs emerges a picture of English rural labourers and industrials workers as utterly subservient to the landed gentry, who idolise anything the gentry do, no matter the dire consequences for simpleton peasants. Rarely does a lyric stray too far from someone being beaten or sodomised, and relishing it.

Like Godfrey, researchers have spent much effort in trying to understand why his collection is so different from others in the folk song tradition. There are no easy explanations. Could it simply be that the traditions of North Warwickshire and parts of Northamptonshire are particularly vulgar and masochistic? Annotations on the recordings show that Godfrey and Sandy travelled out as far as East Anglia, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Has the official folk song canon been sanitised, as Godfrey claimed? His collection remains controversial. Subsequent critics of the folk song revival have picked up on some of Godfrey’s ideas, notably Dave Harker’s Marxist interpretation in Fake-song: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’, and Georgina Boyes’ The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. However, these scholars do not reference the controversy of Godfrey’s own recordings.

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His public disputes with the established folk song community brought him some modest fame, but this period of Godfrey’s life was full of frustration. He was still dependent on the job in the insurance office, despite his modest fame. This left him with little time to fully indulge his passion for collecting more songs to further the body of evidence he was amassing against the folk establishment. He didn’t have the funds for a proper wedding to Sandy, so they had a small ceremony in a registry office. Sandy had hoped for a folk band to provide some entertainment for the modest reception afterwards, but since Godfrey’s falling out with most folk musicians, they had to endure the woodwind torments of his brother and father.

In the grey years of the early 1960s, Godfrey trudged back and forth from Coventry and met up with Sandy in the cafe. Since their marriage, Sandy had moved in with Godfrey at his family home, and they spent most of the time in his room, annotating their recordings when the bassoon recitals downstairs allowed. It seemed things might continue in this way forever, and Godfrey became ever more frustrated. This made their weekend sojourns all the more valued. They often travelled out as far as Shropshire or Bedfordshire, sometimes even Cheshire, packing their cumbersome recording apparatus and notebooks into a Morris Minor, and gleefully using their married names when checking into guest houses.

The drudgery of daily life meant they tried to record authentic song and spoken word from as far and wide, and as diverse a range of venues as they could manage. They visited working men’s clubs, village halls, light engineering works, abattoirs, warehouses, sports facilities, construction sites and more. Sandy even had an accident during a visit to a repair shop and broke a finger. They began to be a nuisance to many venues, as they moved their unwieldy equipment around, and quite often made people uncomfortable, so were increasingly asked to leave. Godfrey was driven by his determination to add evidence to his theory that folk was a comforting fantasy. The recordings piled up, as did the notebooks full of transcriptions.

It is probable that it was around this period that Godfrey began hiding alone in public conveniences. Perhaps it was a place of solace, away from Sandy’s demands for a family, the interminable sounds of woodwind at home, and the banality of his workplace. It seems that this was a separate project for Godfrey, something away from his and Sandy’s shared passion for song collecting, something more intense, perhaps even spiritual. The recordings were not collected or transcribed with their shared endeavours, but worked on in secret, and with much more care. It’s been speculated that perhaps Gabriel introduced him to the subculture after the celebrated flautist was caught with notorious cottager Atwater Gildon,but there is little reason to believe this.

The sound quality of this series of recording is so much better than the previous folk recordings of Godfrey and Sandy. There are genuine long silences, and moments of deep solemnity. Some have speculated that this means they must have been produced in a professional studio set-up, and would have required rehearsal. The layered textures of dripping taps, sliding locks, furtive slang, footsteps and urgent earnest sexual activity are put together with such balletic precision that they seem unrelated to the former recordings. There is a uniformity of production quality across the full disc set, suggesting that the same time and care was spent right from the very beginning. And there are no annotations for these recordings - they exist only as soundscapes interrupted by the harmonious singing and pure voices.

Of course, the genesis of these recordings, the locations they were made and the individuals captured in profoundly meditative song or desperate carnal exchanges is not known. Previously, Godfrey had taken great care to annotate his notebooks with the locations he had collected songs, or logged conversations and gossip. The indexed notes are a staggering achievement, but then they just stop, and we are left with the mystery of how these soundscapes came into being.

Even in their rougher bootleg format, there has often been comment on the spiritual timbre of the recordings. The soundscape itself is a background of squalid and mundane noises, but these form a degenerate substrate from which the glories of the angelic voices rise out. It has been said that there is no more accurate sonic depiction of the human condition - a mess of bodily needs and urgent lust, insults and corrupt talk, anger and relief, and then the utterly sublime sounds of the songs themselves. Perhaps this is why they were treated differently by Godfrey. Instead of the faked nostalgia of the traditional English folk songs he had spent time cataloguing, here was profound authentic beauty amongst the raw ugliness of human existence.

Researchers have spent some time trying to differentiate the various singers on the recordings, and even to track down the locations used from any clues that might be inferred from the sounds. There seem to be three main vocalists, whom the researchers have named “Ian”, “Barry” and “Keith”. “Ian” has perhaps the most ethereal voice, a high countertenor that lifts the heart with its purity. He can sometimes be heard talking about a job at a milk bottling plant before or after his songs; the content of his songs is almost always fixated on how his life went off the rails through drink. “Barry” has a darker, rougher singing voice, a careless baritone, and his songs cover a range of subjects from adventures at sea to tests of strength in a saloon bar. He can also often be heard holding forth on the state of the country and incompetence in government. “Keith” is more of a mystery. His voice often does not even hold for long before breaking into sobbing or chattering. There is an anguished music hall sentimentality to his performances. He doesn’t talk. There are other voices, of course, but analysis has so far been unable to identify and group them.

And then the recordings just stop. This probably coincided with Sandy’s discovery of Godfrey’s activities. He had begun to be absent for longer stretches of time, and one day she simply followed him to find out what he was up to. As far as we know, he never took his recording equipment back to a public convenience. For the remainder of his life, it seems he no longer had any interest in song collecting or furtive ethnography. He continued his spiritless daily commute to the insurance office, and wrote occasional cynical letters to the Daily Express about contemporary folk singers such as Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and Cadfan Conall, in which he maintained his insistence that the roots of folk music were a manufactured fraud imposed on working class culture. His and Sandy’s marriage was never blessed with children, and the bland routine of their suburban lives continued until retirement, troubled only by occasional scandals involving his brother Gabriel, by now a flamboyant, internationally renowned musician and confirmed bachelor.

It has been speculated that it was Sandy who enabled the recordings to find their way into the bootleg market in the mid 1960’s. She may have given the original tapes to Gabriel, in order to get them away from Godfrey and attain some closure over the entire episode. Gabriel’s wild lifestyle meant figures from the music and creative industries would have had many opportunities to peruse and listen to the soundscapes.

Late in his life, Godfrey revisited all of their recordings, publishing some of the folk collection. There was even a modest reappraisal of his work, and some of his theories about the cultural appropriation of folk music, following the publication of Dave Harker’s Fakesong in 1985. Godfrey refused to allow the toilet recordings to be included in any of the retrospective surveys of his folk song collecting. These recordings seemed to hold specific significance for him. Only later did he decide to release the material, but spent many years attempting to remix and remaster the original recordings to a standard that he was satisfied with.

Unfortunately, Godfrey died in a choking accident in the early 1990’s. His contribution to the collection and understanding of English folk music was noted in a brief obituary, but by then the legendary bootleg material had taken on a life of its own, inspiring the sound design of many audio visual artists and filmmakers, most notably in Barney Derval’s film Charybdis. They have found their way into mainstream music, and have been sampled by artists as diverse as Felisha Ruben and Ollie Melvyn. The new remastered recordings will no doubt inspire but perplex a new generation of artists and musicians.