Albert
Lancaster Lloyd was born in London on 29th
February, 1908. Lloyd's father worked as a docker, draper's assistant
and poultry farmer before serving on the Western
Front during the First World War. Badly
wounded in the war he died while Lloyd was still a child. Lloyd became
an orphan when his mother died of tuberculosis
in 1923.
In
1924 Lloyd emigrated to Australia where
he worked as a farm labourer in North South Wales. While working as
seep shearer Lloyd became interested in folk music and began collecting
songs sung by fellow workers. He later wrote: "My conscious interest
in folk songs began then. I liked what my fellow station hands and
shearers sang, and I kept exercise books for copying songs in."
After
ten years in Australia he moved to
South
Africa before
returning to England in 1934. Soon after
arriving in London
he
met A. L. Morton. The two men became close
friends and both became active members of the Communist
Party.
Unable
to find work Lloyd obtained a reader's ticket for the British Museum
and spent him time researching Marxism and
the history of the British folk song. This included reading Cecil
Sharp's English Folksong and the
eight volume The Journal
of the Folksong Society (1899-1930). He was also deeply
influenced by A. L. Morton's manuscript that was eventually published
as the People's History of England.
In
1937 Lloyd moved to Liverpool and found
work as a sailor on the whaler Southern
Empress. After a seven month trip to the Antarctic he returned
to London and in 1938 had his first radio
script, The Voice of the Seamen,
accepted by the BBC.
Lloyd,
a staunch opponent of Adolf Hitler and
his government in Germany, was commissioned
in 1939 by the BBC to produce a series of programmes on the rise of
Nazism. Co-written with the Russian
historian Igor Vinogradoff, the Shadow
of the Swastika had a major impact on public opinion. Lloyd
also wrote articles on the subject for the Reynold's
News
and Picture Post.
Lloyd
continued his interest in folk music and on 21st July 1939 he produced
a radio programme for the BBC entitled Saturday
Night at the Eel's Foot that featured the
singing of Velvet Brightwell.
Despite
the success of the radio programmes, Lloyd did not have his contract
renewed. It is generally believed this was because the BBC was unhappy
with Lloyd's involvement with the Communist
Party. He was now recruited by Tom Hopkinson
to write articles for Picture Post.
These were often produced in collaboration with the photographer Bert
Hardy.
Lloyd's
first book on folk music, The Singing Englishman,
was published in 1944. His friend A. L. Morton
wrote that the book had "a sparkle and spontaneity and a boldness
of attack which make it a model for the application of Marxist ways
of thinking to cultural questions. It looks squarely at folk song
as music and poetry, the peak of the cultural achievement of the English
lower classes.
After
the Second World War Lloyd returned to the BBC
and worked on the radio series Ballads and
Blues. He also edited the Penguin
Book of English Folk Songs and published Come
All Ye Bold Miners (1952) and Folk
Song in England (1967).
Lloyd
recorded several records including The Iron
Muse (1963), First Person
(1966), Leviathan (1968), The
Great Australian Legend (1969). Albert
Lancaster Lloyd
died
in London on 29th September 1982.
(1)
Albert Lloyd, The Singing Englishman (1967)
What are now the stock figures of comic pantomime, the villainous
baron, the lecherous monk, the miserly miller, were at this time the
symbols of a bitter and threefold class oppression, and songs running
these down were sure of a good hearing in the kitchens and in the
barns and round the campfires as well if they were not sung too loud.
It was in the civil struggles of the barons' wars and in the years
following that the songs of the people really rose to the surface
and crystallised into a style. Then you got ballads like the Robin
Hood cycle which was about not only the adventurous life of the outlaw
who was almost a guerilla, but also the anger of the downtrodden at
the callous luxury of the rich. What strikes most people about English
folksongs, once they get to know them, is their deep melancholy. Their
style of tune comes from the Church modes of the Middle Ages and it
often seems to have stamped them unmistakably with the bitter sadness
of the time of the Black Death and the baronial oppression of the
14th century.
(2)
A.
L. Morton, A. L. Lloyd:
A Personal Memoir (1984)
From time to time he would drop into our house for a meal, bringing
odd records he had discovered or some new-old song that he had picked
up and would sing. He was developing his own distinctive singing style
in these years, taut and unfussy. On the whole he preferred the traditional
English style of unaccompanied song, but he was never pedantic about
that or anything else and was prepared to accept an instrumental accompaniment
if it seemed to add anything of value. Shortly before the war I took
him to the Eel's Foot at Eastbridge in Suffolk, a pub whose regulars
had long maintained an excellent song school. Out of this visit came
a historic broadcast - historic because it was, I think, the very
first in which authentic traditional singers, as distinct from collectors
and arrangers, were heard on the air.
(3)
E. David Gregory, A. L. Lloyd and the English Folk Song Revival,
1934-44, The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1967)
It is now 30 years since the publication of A. L. Lloyd's magnum opus,
Folk Song in England (1967). Although currently out of print,
the book remains the most systematic survey of English traditional
song, and the most detailed account of its evolution from the 14th
century to the 20th. Essentially, Lloyd broadened, in a legitimate
and necessary way, Cecil Sharp's conception of folk music as a product
of oral tradition. Lloyd recognized urban and rural song traditions,
and explicitly extended the study of traditional music to include
ritual songs, carols, sea songs, industrial songs and political songs.
Placing these disparate
genres in their social and economic contexts, Lloyd provided the first
comprehensive analysis of how they had emerged and developed historically.
Although he presumed an interpretation of English social history derived,
in the main, from Leslie Morton's. People's History of England
(1938), he relied on Morton more for his conceptual framework than
for specific historical details.
(4)
Albert Lloyd, Folk Song in England (1967)
In America, late in the Depression and early in the War years, traditional
song and its topical imitations were coming into vogue, particularly
among young radicals, as a consequence of the stresses of the time,
and the rumble of newly-found or newly-made 'people's songs' was rolling
towards us across the Atlantic. The Workers' Music Association, that
admirable but over-modest organization, sensed that similar enthusiasm
might spread in England, and they were eager to help in the rediscovery
of our own lower-class traditions.
(5)
Just before his death Albert Lloyd wrote about his approach to singing.
I very much doubt if I sing any of the songs exactly as I originally
learnt them. Some I've altered deliberately because I felt some phrases
of the tune, some passages of the text, to be not entirely adequate.
Others - and this has happened far more often - have become altered
involuntarily, sometimes almost out of recognition, in the course
of buzzing round in my head for thirty years or so and being sung
whenever the buzzing became too insistent. Some people believe it
a blasphemy to alter a traditional song, and think one should sing
it just as it was sung by the singer from whom it was learnt. Not
being an impersonator, I do not feel that. One day a traditional performer
sings a song, and the next week he may sing it differently. What you
hear is the performance of the moment, merely. So with me: I don't
always sing the songs the same. I like to improvise a bit. Of course,
in making your changes, voluntarily or involuntarily, you need a proper
sense of tradition and a just respect for it, or the song is violated;
we hear such violations day by day.
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