John Ball and Sydney Carter: the motherlode of English folk politics

Sometimes, looking at David Cameron's gammony face, it is hard to believe that Britain has 700 years of revolutionary politics behind it. But it does.

It rustled in the William Morris undergrowth of my background. I've had three grandparents – one with us still – who were active in Labour politics and who between them had a collection of Labour movement pamphlets dating back many decades. From childhood I met words like "socialist" (which meant being nice to people, according to mum) and "Fabian" (those who believe in inflicting socialism on the working class because it's good for them, I gathered, unable to tell whether this was a joke. It was – but only a good one because of the truth buried in it). The words' competing nuances came to life around the family dinner table, especially with my grandparents after we moved to Norwich. The city was a bright red dot in a blue sea on election night, mainly as a result of the university based there, and until I moved away after school I was under the misapprehension that "Tory" was a term of abuse, not knowing that they also referred to themselves in this way. This makes me smile now.

As an undergraduate I worked for Harriet Harman as a researcher for a few months: months that I seemed to spend mainly retracing Harriet's movements, trying to find the spot where she had most recently abandoned her handbag.

One of my most treasured memories of my course at Leeds is of finding a first edition of William Morris's A Dream of John Ball in the stack under the Brotherton Library and realising that I knew it and its beautiful illustrations (see above) even though I'd never seen it before.

What I am trying to say is that Labour politics is my hinterland. And that hinterland is a dimension of this country that coexists spectrally, a misty gauze of hope and expectation that lies over the landscape, as much a part of Britain as the version of it familiar to bankers and property developers – more permanent because the need for it is greater.

And Sydney Carter's song John Ball is the motherlode of English revolutionary politics in folk music, it seems to me.

It kicks in after about eight minutes: my favourite version of the song so far, by The Old Dance School. At the Warwick folk festival in 2013 the song's harmonies rang in my ears in the beer tent for the best part of three evenings and I saw The Old Dance School play their powerfully ecstatic version of it more than once. I assumed to begin with that it was a traditional song because the lyrics seemed smoothed by time and their meaning evoked religion through the lens of ethical socialism. There were lots of versions...

It wasn't traditional though. 

What it is, is a story about John Ball, the hedgerow preacher who inspired the peasant's revolt in the 14th century, the ex-communicated priest who told his congregation that "Now is the time" in such a way that many of them laid down their lives alongside him and Wat Tyler. His revolutionary, proto-socialist ideas lived on after his death at the hands of Richard II and can be traced forward to the nonconformism of the civil war and from there to the new world. In a nutshell

"Labour and spin for the fellowship you're in. Labour and spin for the love of one another. When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?"

Work for the dignity it gives you and to support those whom you love, and never forget where we all came from – and where ultimately we're all going. When The Old Dance School plays John Ball, a part of me would like to sing it with them but another chokes and wells up with emotion, making it impossible. It makes me feel a little foolish but there you go.

But far from being a traditional piece, the song was written by Sydney Carter – who is probably best known for also having written Lord of the Dance – and John Ball was written in the 1960s and recorded for the first time, I believe, by John Kirkpatrick and Sydney Carter in 1981 on the album Lovely in the Dance.

Sydney Carter died in 2004 after a long and eventful life. But, probably because I learned my politics from my forebears, it made sense to me to ask what kind of a man he was of his only son, Mike Carter, who is a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon in Bristol these days.

When I Googled Dr Carter there was a lot about parking fines at his NHS hospital trust: it seems that the same non-conformism that led his father to write so many songs that found their way into my hymn book at school – If I needed a neighbour and One more step among them – had led the son to be the kind of person who does not mind making some waves.

"It was a very corporate-minded trust that expected us to work on two sites but made no provision for parking," he explained when I caught up with him. "Eventually Jeremy Hunt announced that they had changed their tack."

Perhaps inevitably Carter is also a part-time musician, a multi-instrumentalist with Peter Mouse's House Band, which seems to do a lot of weddings and revels in the accolade of being Bristol's second-favourite covers band. "I knew the story of John Ball as I was growing up – I heard it from dad. And then we sang a lot of dad's songs at school. Mum was a teacher at Bessemer Grange Primary in Dulwich and even though the repertoire of dad's stuff is usually to be found in schools, ours was much greater than usual.

"John Ball was a preacher who was excommunicated for his anti-church views. He felt one should be living the life of Christ and that those who had everything and did not share it were not living the life of Christ. And he felt that the church at the time was supporting the rich and not the poor. This was at a time when the discrepancy between the lives of the rich and the lives of the poor was at its greatest ever. The Hundred Years War against France was going on and it was incredibly difficult to finance. There were three poll taxes – which were regarded as a terrible injustice by many people. This was a time, you see, when many were born into servitude and had no prospect of getting out of it.

"So in a way what John Ball was preaching was a form of liberation theology, of the kind that Cardinal Romero used to espouse in Latin America and a little bit like the present pope, who gets rid of all his riches and walks around in the streets of Rome." But there was very little precedent for it back then.

Carter said that he deals with his father's estate and the royalties due to it. "John Ball seems to be coming up more frequently all the time – it's great that it's been picked up by contemporary performers." The first version Carter mentioned was Chris Wood's, though he seems to hold a candle especially for one by Wood and Karine Polwart, which I can't seem to find on the web.

He also mentioned Crow on the Cradle, which is performed by Show of Hands.

And then wondered out loud whether they had picked it up from Jackson Browne, who sang it at Madison Square Gardens in 1969, after which it appeared on his live album.

"Dad and I were incredibly close. He was extraordinarily kind, incredibly intelligent: a polymath. He knew everything about everything, it seemed to me as a child, and came from a very humble background himself: he got to Balliol through a series of scholarships. He was very influenced by Quakerism but I'm not sure he would call himself a Quaker. He didn't think you should respond to authority unless it was in the right and that established religion was too didactic... A lot of his beliefs are my beliefs. I was brought up to call things if they were wrong."

Thoughtfully, Mike also provided this family snapshot, which includes his mum, Leela: he was an only child and this was, essentially, the fellowship they were in.

* If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy this one, about folk music in Afghanistan. Or this one, which is about why the Germans have such a difficult relationship with their music.

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Karine Polwart: 'I'm more Deadwood than Disney'

Karine Polwart was between sets at the Shrewsbury festival - one on each main stage. She'd dramatically underestimated the number of people who wanted copies of her new CD signed, so she was running late, and the couple who were last in the queue were warming up for a domestic incident. The husband was telling his wife that she was useless in front of the famous singer with whom they'd both like their picture taken, and the wife, unsurprisingly, was getting upset.

She wasn't the only one. It was a bit stressful.

So Polwart was a trouper for picking up two plastic chairs and setting them down behind the signing tent, where fewer people would spot her, for a brief chat.

Her song Sorry (above) really reminds me of something from the American TV series Deadwood (below), I told her.

"That is so weird. I was obsessed with Deadwood." I suddenly had her full attention. "Being a musician I can never watch anything on a weekly basis because I'm always out working. So there's an underground trade in HBO box sets on the Scottish folk scene and that one was on my mind for months. At the moment it's Borgen and The Killing."

And we're off... So it seems that Scottish female singers are having a bit of a Disney moment, what with Julie Fowlis doing all that work on Brave, and Cara Dillon writing a song for Disney World as well as doing the narration for Tinkerbell. With a cast of mind that appreciates the operatic levels of bloodshed, betrayal and alienation in Deadwood, could Polwart ever see herself doing Disney?

"Well, I think it was a bolt from the blue for Julie. It's the kind of phone call we all dream about getting. But both Cara and Julie have bell-like voices. They have the kind of voices that, if you were to think about folk and you didn't have a notion of what was about, you might think of beautiful voices like theirs. Mine is a bit too screechy - it doesn't have the same cut-glass quality. And they come from a different tradition from me. They are both a part of the Gallic or Gaelic song tradition and use their voices in a completely different way.

"Julie Fowlis is a tremendous musician - she has a degree in cultural studies and musicology. And, let's face it, there are only so many ways that a folk singer is likely to be given an opportunity like that. It's a massive opportunity. It's every songwriter's dream to have a song of theirs used in a film or on TV because it puts you before an audience you wouldn't ordinarily have and allows you to transcend your genre.

"One of mine - Cover Your Eyes - was on a television documentary recently called You've Been Trumped, which was about Donald Trump and the golf course, and Sigur Ros were on the soundtrack as well. So that was good.

"But I've written an album of songs about child murder, so I'm probably not the right person for Disney."

Um, why did you do that?

"I have two little kids and it's my worst nightmare. And I write from a place where everything has to matter to me. So I'd probably be a rubbish person to write something to a specification for someone else. I'm not sure I could write in the abstract."

But surely writing something to a specification isn't writing in the abstract?

"I have friends who write songs for Nashville. What I mean is that I can only write music for myself. However... I worked on the Darwin Song Project a while back and the one that I kept was the one that meant the most to me, which was We're All Leaving (below). That's another one about child death."

Yes. I can see a pattern developing here.

"I'd just had one baby and I think I was pregnant again... I write about the risks that are most relevant to me at the time."

So do you ever write political songs?

"Sorry would probably be the closest to a political song that I've written. I've never explained to anyone what that's about, which was an accident to start off with. But then I really liked the responses that I got to it. People would interpret it and the interpretations were more interesting than my original idea..."

She's clearly really enjoyed seeing the song take on a life of its own, so much so that she was pretty reluctant to say where the original thought came from. 'Sorry' won't pay for this loss, the lyric runs.

"It was of a time when there was a lot of George Bush  and Tony Blair and the Iraq War in the air. That may have been what kicked it off. But I like that the song is a bit enigmatic. That's my choice when I write about political issues: I like to make other people do the work.

"I studied philosophy and for a long time I was all about community-based philosophy, which would be going on in schools and pubs. That was what I wanted to do with my life - but no one wanted to fund it. And yet I feel that is what I do with my life, oddly. There's work to be done making these things - the things we habitually talk about - meaningful.

"Don't get me wrong. It's not that I find talking about politics boring. I find it fascinating. I just don't think it's my job to deliver a lecture. I don't like preaching to people."

She's actively involved with the Green Party in Scotland, which she says is in favour of independence at the moment. "And I'm swaying to a yes on it too, though it's about having more power residing locally for me. I'm not a nationalist."

Local for her is Pathhead in Midlothian. "There are sixteen professional musicians in a village of only 900, including Martin Green from Lau. We've got folk, jazz and experimental musicians - Inga," who plays in Polwart's band, wearing the headscarf to cover alopecia, "Inga lives in Pathhead too. There is a session on a Thursday night in the Foresters' Arms on the main street and we have fiddles, box players and a pipemaker who plays in a band with some Indian musicians," which sounds as if it would be worth seeking out if one were touring Scotland by car, for instance.

So does Polwart dance?

"Oh. What a question. Dancing makes me very uncomfortable - unless it's ceilidh dancing of course, in which case it's genetic and everyone does it. But I'm not one for dancing in clubs, no."

And what's she listening to these days?

"If I'm listening and really listening, my favourite at the moment is Anais Mitchell. Her new album is mighty, just mighty. I love it. And then there's Laura Veirs, who trained to be a scientist of some kind - was it meteorology? - before turning to music, and so all of her images are science-based images and they're just absurdly beautiful.

"And, of course, I have two small children - a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter," with her sound engineer partner, "so there are lots of counting songs. And I like Gillian Welch."

This leads to a discussion about Louise Mensch, the former Conservative MP who's husband, Peter Mensch, manages Welch (as well as Metallica). "I liked Louise Mensch. I'm sorry to see her leave parliament," said Polwart. "She's articulate and she didn't mince around with her words. I was enjoying seeing a woman in public life - on the culture committee, wasn't it? - who spoke her mind even if I didn't always agree with her."

Me too. So what's next?

"I really need a project. I like being asked to do things and at the moment I really need a project for when I've finished touring with this album. I'm thinking that it might be time to focus some of my energy much closer to home musically than I have been doing. When I got into music it was through the community in my village - I was in a band as one of about eight singers. And I have a strong sense of obligation. There is a bank of young ladies in Pathhead of 11 or 12 years old who would go for it, if we set something up. It seems only right in a village full of musicians."

And with the admission that I'd come to the end of my line of questioning, Polwart sprang to her feet and, whirling a plastic chair over head, was gone in a trice leaving only a few pages of my notebook blowing in her wake.

* You can buy a copy of Karine Polwart's new album, Traces, here.

* And here are a couple of other posts from Shrewsbury. Firstly, this and this about the webstreaming, which is continuing now the festival's over, on a requests basis. And this about a young band called Blue Horyzon, who were busking there.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed - or at least stand a 15 per cent chance of doing so, according to the new algorithm that manages these things - you could *like* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley