A User's Guide to the Voice of the People

If you want to understand a country, look at its folk music. Not the new acoustic ditties, but the sounds that have been around for centuries, where the words and tunes have been worn to a fine smoothness by age. That’s where you’ll discover the customs and emotions that are the heartbeat of a nation — the way it fights, works and, of course, loves and drinks. Voice of the People is an epic look — and with 20 discs and almost 500 tracks, that’s a very epic look — at the music and people of Britain and Ireland. It’s a work of obsessive, possibly lunatic, scholarship on the part of one man, Reg Hall, in a giant feat of research, with material culled from the Topic Records archives and plenty of private collections (to give a sense of scale, the first recorded track here dates from 1908, the last from the 1970s).

Everything’s divided thematically, so you have volumes on Britain as a naval nation (from the days when Britannia really did rule the waves), songs of emigration (lots of plaintive and angry Irish content, unsurprisingly), tales of hunting and poaching, biographies of the Gypsies of England and Wales and so on. A couple of instalments definitely stand out from the pack: A Story I’m Just About to Tell covers “national and local events” (in other words, wars and conflicts), with braggadocio, fury and pride, from the cylinder crackle announcing Joseph Taylor’s big voice on the bizarre “Creeping Jane,” to the more recent vintage Margaret Berry blasting out “Bold Fenian Men” with passionate indignation. The bitterness of old Irish struggles takes up a lot of room, but there are also quite a few songs about the heroic grandeur of the Napoleonic Wars, most notably Tom Costello’s wonderfully-titled “A Grand Conversation On Napoleon,” which is essentially a history lesson with melody.

Inevitably, romance rears its eager little head on a couple of discs — Tonight I’ll Make You My Bride looks at some of its more magical elements. Along with the familiar (“The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies,” one of the great stories of love at first sight ), there are eerie songs from the night-visiting tradition involving visits from dead lovers (“Here’s A Health To All True Lovers”), or the mystical “Molly Bawn,” a version of the ballad “Polly Vaughan,” where a girl is mistaken for a swan and shot by her lover (he’s cleared when her corpse appears in court to testify on his behalf, a trick many defence lawyers would love to pull off).

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It’s not bucolic or idyllic, but filled with the same grit, joy and sorrows as our own.

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Fine performances abound, with many on O’er His Grave the Grass Grew Green, the CD of big traditional ballads. But few can rival Lizzie Higgins’ reading of “The Cruel Mother,” a tale of infanticide where the ghosts wreak supernatural revenge; her straightforward, bleak singing brings home the woman’s guilt in a chilling, immediate manner. Or there’s a sly rendering of “The Prickle-Holly Bush” by Fred Hewett — a song Zeppelin fans will recognise as the basis for “Gallows Pole” — where he sounds as if there’s a smile on his face the whole time as he knows the ending.

The other great joy is the songs themselves. Although a few are well-known, the vast majority are little gems that have spent far too long hidden away. Blowing the dust and cobwebs off a piece like the winding “The Mountain Streams Where the Moorcocks Crow” is like uncovering an ancient nugget of gold. A lot of young singers obviously think so, too — several (stand up Eliza Carthy) have plundered the collection for their own work.

At its core, Voice of the People is a doorway — 20 doorways, really — into another world. But it’s a place that’s not seen through rose-tinted lenses. It’s not bucolic or idyllic, but filled with the same grit, joy and sorrows as our own, sung about, loved and hated by ordinary people just like ourselves. They might be signing from beyond the grave, but one thing is clearly evident — the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that’s history worth remembering.