Songs that grow like trees: an appreciation of Sydney Carter (1915–2004)

The second wave of the folk song revival in the 1950s–70s reignited a popular love of traditional music, building on the first wave of folk song collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. The second folk song revival brought into the spotlight such professional folk song performers as Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick, Nic Jones, Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, The Watersons, John Renbourn, and The Albion Band. There were also some who wrote new songs in the folk idiom, among them Sydney Carter, whose songs, still performed today, stand out for their quality.

Sydney Carter straddled two worlds: he not only wrote what are now folk classics such as John Ball and Crow on the Cradle, he composed songs which became staples of church life, such as When I Needed A Neighbour, Lord of the Dance, and Every Star Shall Sing A Carol.

Sydney Carter’s approach to life and faith was based on personal conviction not imposed authority, complex not simplistic, questioning not dogmatic. He has been, through his songs, an inspiration and support to many, most of whom he never met, many of whom were not even aware of his name, some of whom do not even share his faith. And that includes me, a folk song performer and atheist who appreciates the power, the beauty and the wry humour of his songs.

This article features 12 recordings of Sydney’s songs, including performances by John Kirkpatrick, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Franciscus Henri, The Ian Campbell Folk Group, Robert Johnson, Rolling Harmony, Ian Pittaway, Judy Collins, and Sydney Carter himself.  

“The book, it will perish, the steeple will fall”: songs of faith

Sydney Carter was born in 1915, during World War I. He was baptised and buried as an Anglican, but his spiritual home was with the Quakers, a nickname for the Society of Friends which became common usage. Like the Quakers, he was a pacifist and joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit when World War II broke out, serving in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. In Greece he had his first significant encounter with traditional or folk music, which in turn led to his career as a songwriter.

His songs have a definite folk quality to them in melody, lyrics and phrasing, and one of his most well-known songs, George Fox, is set to a traditional morris dance tune, Monk’s March.

George Fox (1624–91) was one of the founders of the Quakers, a pacifist who preached “the light in the Turk and the Jew”, who opposed slavery, and who enraged the courts by refusing to swear on The Bible, stating that there is only one standard of truth. His guide was the “inner light”, nurtured by silent contemplation and a divinely-inspired conscience. The religious and civil authorities regularly put him in the stocks or in jail: he was imprisoned in Nottingham in 1649 for interrupting and contradicting a preaching minister; in Derby in 1650 on a trumped-up charge of blasphemy; and he had further jail terms in 1653, 1656, 1664–66, and 1673–75.

The verses of the song are based on Fox’s own journal, with words which sum up both Fox’s and Carter’s theology:

‘With a book and a steeple, with a bell and a key,
They would bind it forever, but they can’t,’ said he.
‘For the book, it will perish, the steeple will fall,
But the light will be shining at the end of it all.’

The chorus represents the opposition. His “old leather breeches” were hard-wearing labourer’s clothes, practical attire on his long journeys, in the stocks, and in stinking 17^th century prisons. In the reign of Charles II, all men had fashionably long hair, but Fox’s “shaggy locks” were unkempt, inviting disdainful remarks from the fashionable ladies of the day. To hear George Fox sung by John Kirkpatrick, click on the picture of George Fox on the right. 

I don’t think you have to be religious to appreciate the sentiment of a beautiful religious song. Judas and Mary is a conflation of several events in the New Testament, and is essentially a love song, not of romance, but of priorities, of appreciating and caring for those dear to us while we still have them, putting them first before time runs out. The tune is based heavily on the English traditional song, Henry Martin. I wanted to have an intro and outro, so I wrote Wash All The Sorrow Away to bookend the song, which you can hear by playing the soundfile below.

 

One of Sydney’s most-sung songs, Lord of the Dance, is based on the melody of a Shaker song, ‘Tis The Gift To Be Simple or Simple Gifts, often credited as traditional but written by Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr. (1797–1882). It isn’t so widely known among the many schoolchildren, church choirs and folk singers who have sung the song that Sydney’s inspiration for the lyric came from a confluence between Jesus and the god Shiva, Hinduism’s Nataraja or Lord of the Dance, who destroys so that the god Brahma can re-create. This source of inspiration sums up Sydney, seeking common threads, seeing all faiths as imperfect attempts to encode what is essentially mysterious about life, “by whatever name you know”, as he put it in his song, Every Star Shall Sing A Carol (which you can hear by clicking here).

Sydney Carter’s theology was anti-dogmatic, what he called his “rock of doubt” or his “dance in the dark”. He saw mystery as central to theology, and unity as central to humanity. Thus his other ‘signature tune’ was on the theme of compassion: When I Needed A Neighbour was premiered by The Ian Campbell Folk Group for the launch of Christian Aid Week in 1965, as we see in the video below.

When I Needed A Neighbour is a little unusual for Sydney, lyrically simple with a straightforward message, as you might expect from a campaign song. Most of his songs were more deliberately oblique, as he saw the true meaning of the song, not in the voice of the singer, but in the response in the mind of the listener.

Thus Friday Morning caused outrage, resulting in 2,000 letters of protest when it was first published in 1959 in The World Council of Churches’ Risk magazine. Written from the point of view of an unnamed guilty prisoner being crucified alongside the innocent Jesus, the hookline retorts:

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me
I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.

In 1960, both Enoch Powell and The Daily Mirror tried to have Friday Morning banned. What those outraged Christians failed to realise is that being angry at God for injustice is only as controversial as the Psalms, and that mainstream Christian theology is that God was crucified on the tree to pay for the sins of humanity. This isn’t stated outright in the song, of course: Sydney Carter’s songs were a subtle teasing, a catalyst, not a theological sledgehammer or a statement of dogma.

John Ball was written for the 600^th anniversary of the peasants’ revolt of 1381. The song celebrates the aspiration of John Ball (c. 1338–81), who trained as a priest in Colchester. Ball wanted a society where people are not born into privilege based on injustice, or born into undeserved servitude and slavery, and where a good day’s work means a good day’s pay. He was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury and not allowed to preach in any church, so he became a roving preacher, a ‘hedge priest’, without a parish or any link to the established church order, giving talks on the village green or wherever he could find a gathering. This being so, the Archbishop then gave instructions that all people found listening to Ball’s sermons should be punished. When this failed to work as there was mass non-compliance, John Ball was arrested and sent to Maidstone Prison for his “heretical speeches”. Still not defeated, he was rescued from Maidstone Prison by Kentish rebels led by Wat Tyler and, on 12^th June at Blackheath, he preached to the rebels in the open air with lines that inspired Sydney Carter:

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by unjust oppression.”

“Gentlemen” then meant the gentry, who owned the land and thus held the power: they were the lords of the manors, living richly off the labour of others. Sydney Carter wove this into the verse …

Who’ll be the lady, who will be the lord
When we are ruled by the love of one another, tell me
Who’ll be the lady, who will be the lord
In the light that is coming in the morning?

… followed by the glorious chorus that begins:

Sing, John Ball, and tell it to them all!

When his speech had ended and the rebels went their separate ways, John Ball was captured and put in prison in Coventry. He was sentenced to death: hanged, drawn and quartered on 15^th July 1381 in St. Albans, watched by King Richard II. His dismembered body was dispersed as a warning to would-be rebels: his head placed on a spike on London Bridge, the quarters of his body sent for public display in four towns.

“As I went out one morning”: secular songs in the folk idiom

All of Sydney’s songs were in the folk idiom. While all those described above were religious or theological, a large number were not.

The Rat Race wryly tells the story of a man who succumbs to the daily diet of adverts and steals to keep up with the demands of consumerism. After conviction and sentencing, he climbs on his prison bed to see the view beyond the bars, only to find that “a bloody great advertisement had blotted out the stars”.

Man with a Microphone is one of the cleverest songs I know. One genre of traditional song tells the cautionary tale of an unmarried woman who has sex with a man and is then abandoned, leaving her alone and unsupported with the baby that resulted from the dalliance, a source of public shame and reprobation throughout history until the second half of the 20^th century. This genre is the template for Man with a Microphone, but the subject is a matter of contention that occasionally resurfaces in discussion of folk song ethics: the fact that folk revival performers were making money from recording and performing traditional songs while the original traditional singers, the sources of the songs, received not a penny. To hear Man with a Microphone performed by Sydney Carter, accompanied by Martin Carthy on guitar, click the soundfile below. (Taken from the LP, Sydney Carter & Jeremy Taylor Eton, recorded in 1967).

 

François Villon was a 15^th century French thief, killer, barroom brawler, vagabond and poet. The words of Sydney’s Like The Snow are based on a poem of François Villon, not a translation, but Sydney’s own work based on the ideas in Villon’s The Testament. The song, like the poem, takes true stories of history to make the point that all life is fleeting. The first in the song is Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in ancient Greece, abducted then rescued by her brothers. Then Pierre Abelard, 11^th–12^th century French theologian, expected to be celibate – as all scholars had to be, in the belief that sex addled the rational male mind – but who had a child with Heloise, his pupil, niece of the canon of Notre Dame Cathedral, who then punished Abelard with castration. The lovers became monk and nun, their bodies reunited only in the grave. Lastly, Jeanne d’Arc, 15^th century Catholic visionary cross-dressing army leader, who turned the Hundred Years’ War in France’s favour, but was then burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes and claiming authority from God rather than the Catholic Church. The point of Villon’s poem is in his asking where these famous people are now, followed by his refrain, “But where are the snows of last winter?” Sydney reflects this in his refrain, “She has” or “They have vanished like the snow.”

Crow On The Cradle juxtaposes the hopes and dreams of parents for a baby with the realities of living in a war zone, from which parents cannot protect their newborn.

Good Literature teases those whose wish to be well-read is defeated by the easiness of pop culture:

Good literature
Never bother with the book
I’m waiting for the film to come.

Silver in the Stubble is one of the few songs I know about growing older, and the most telling song I know about middle age. “This song should be accompanied by an electric razor”, said Sydney on his live LP of 1967, Sydney Carter & Jeremy Taylor at Eton.

Mixed Up Old Man is written from the vantage point of an old convict who wishes he was young so he could get away with violence by using the excuses of youth, who blame their crimes on the influence of the media and being “misunderstood” by society.

Sydney and the folk scene

Performers in the folk revival recognised the significance of Sydney’s song-writing talent from the beginning. His songs – thoughtful, playful, gently provocative – have been performed and recorded by Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Julie Felix, The Ian Campbell Folk Group, John Kirkpatrick, Maddy Prior, Show of Hands, Sheila Hancock, Nadia Catthouse, Jackson Browne, Dayle Stanley, Stefan Sobell, Tania Opland and Mike Freeman, Mary Black, The Spinners, Donald Swann, Judy Collins, Dave Webber, Bob and Carole Pegg, Pete Seeger, The Melrose Quartet – to name just a few. He achieved the remarkable feat of composing three songs that have been so widely sung in churches, in choirs, in schools and at public occasions that almost anyone would recognise them, whether or not they’ve heard of Sydney Carter: When I Needed A Neighbour, Lord of the Dance and One More Step Along The World I Go. At folk clubs and festivals in the UK you can add John Ball to that list and, in the USA, Crow on the Cradle.

I have sung Sydney Carter’s songs since I was 18 – I am three times that age now – nearly always in folk clubs, which Sydney saw as the natural home of his work, and where he sometimes performed himself. My only near encounter with him personally was in 2000 when I recorded George Fox for a solo album. I wanted to send him a copy of the album, but his publisher informed me that he had Alzheimer’s and was being cared for in a nursing home. He died in 2004.

Enduring songs

Why are Sydney Carter’s songs so enduring? And why do they matter? He expressed it best himself in his book, Dance in the Dark, when he told the story of attending the lecture of a folklorist and folk song collector:

“A. L. Lloyd was talking about the way, in Romania, folk songs had been passed from one generation to another. A mother would teach her daughter how to sing a song, saying: ‘You don’t see the point or meaning of this song now, but you will need it later’, as if she were giving her a magic spell or a bottle of medicine.”

Sydney’s songs matter for the same reason that folk or traditional songs matter: they timelessly tell the stories of our lives, yours and mine, in multilayered ways that reveal more the more you live with them. They live and grow, like the progression of a folk song, changing over time, transformed through being sung in the mouths of different singers, and Sydney wanted it that way:

”There is nothing final in the songs I write, not even the words, the rhythm and the melody. This is not an oversight; I would like them to keep growing, like a tree.”

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.

 

5 collections of Sydney Carter’s songs are available in a book series called In the present tense, published by Stainer & Bell. Click the links to buy the books:

Songs of Sydney Carter. In the present tense 1.
Songs of Sydney Carter. In the present tense 2.
Songs of Sydney Carter. In the present tense 3.
Songs of Sydney Carter. In the present tense 4.
Songs of Sydney Carter. In the present tense 5.