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Radio review: Saving Traveller songs
Sunday, August 24, 2008 By Lucille Redmond
That scent of the past, of Woodbines and turf-smoke and damp clothes and hair and courage, comes up off the songs as you listen to Come All Ye Loyal Travellers.

Pat McKenzie and Jim Carroll went out around London in the 1970s, recording the songs of the Travellers who’d gone from Ireland to camp there.

They kept recording the diminishing store for the next 30 years, and in Paula Carroll’s three-part series she talks to them in west Clare and plays many of the songs they collected.

It was a different way of life from anything they’d known – trailers bristling with kids, people singing in the open around campfires under flyovers or by railway tracks.

Some of the songs were very old: Andy Cash sings Barbara Allen in a soft, pure voice with perfect diction; Mary Delaney gives a tragic version of Lord Randal, set in Ireland.

Delaney, blind from birth, hopeful of a better life for her 16 children, moved into a flat in Camden so the kids could go to school.

Her neighbours wouldn’t visit, her own people abandoned her, and she sat alone in this dismal place. The loneliness resonates in her beautiful voice.

Pat says that Delaney would be so overcome by the sadness of some of the stories that she would break down – or burst out laughing in the middle of comic songs.

The songs in the series are from everywhere: country & western, English songs, Irish songs, ‘cantifable’– song mixed with spoken stories.

Chatty, horse-loving Mikeen McCarthy describes selling ballad sheets, chimney sweeping at Christmas, selling holly, working with farmers, cutting turf, horse and donkey dealing, making furniture, pegs, tinware, selling flooring, droving horses from fair to fair.

They’d go into a printer’s, recite the ballad over the counter and the printer would write it down. They’d bring the printed ballad to a fair, and walk around the fair and the pubs, singing it and selling the sheet.

It seems another world – and perhaps it is; the 1970s are 40 years ago, as far away for us as the Great Depression for the people of the 1970s.

* In a chirpy interview with Deirdre Purcell sitting in for David Norris, geneticist David McConnell forecasts a gloomy future.

He gives a reading list for anyone interested in DNA discoveries, by the way: Genome by Matt Ridley, Rosalyn Schanzer’s What Darwin Saw and Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee.

His ideas on the future, predictably, are bound up with gene genius, stem cell research, and GM food.

‘‘Forty thousand people died today of hunger. The population is set to double over a relatively short period of time – there are enormous problems in feeding the planet,” he says.

‘‘I often think of the people in the developing world, and they might actually decide to walk to Europe, en masse,” he warns.

“[People] accepted GM insulin; they accepted GM cheese . . . they accept that bread is made with GM enzymes; wines, beers, whiskeys, gins, all involve the use of GM products.”

This news clearly startles Purcell, as it will many of her listeners. Genetic modification used in soybean farming is responsible for 30 per cent of the jobs created in Argentina over the last ten years, he says; GM has revolutionised Argentinian and Brazilian farming.

McConnell sees GM as the greatest weapon against world hunger, and the anti-GM lobby as ‘‘itself an economic lobby’’.

It would be great if science, rather than economics, were the key to ending the inequities that cause Third World starvation.

But will the giant companies developing GM seeds and holding their patents really be the ones to do it?

* ‘‘I’ve certainly got a talent for recognising talent,” says retired art teacher Wendy in Building Happiness, Daniel Jameson’s play set in Bath.

A couple of working-class youngsters are ‘buildering’– rock-climbing on the city’s buildings – when they come across an old lady snoozing on a bench.

Wendy shows the kids around the city’s architecture, then they show it to her as they know it from the other side. By the end of the unstructured and charming play, the lives of all three have been utterly changed. A warmhearted, relaxing story.

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