On the 25th November, Chris Trevena met with Merv Davey in St. Austell. This is the first article. We cover when music first happened, finding a Cornish community in London, and some Cornish music roots.
Pur dha, I’m Merv Davey I usually describe myself as an itinerant bagpiper. I’m a past Grand Bard of Gorsedh Kernow and I’ve been involved with music in Cornwall for most of my life – in one way or another.
Now, traditional folk music is interesting because it is a genre of modern popular music but there’s a sense in-which it divides into two parts. One part being informal music – where people write material that is not so driven by commercial or art music interests. The second part is folk music in the sense of being owned by the community rather than by an individual. And that’s what interests me, although drawing a line between the two is very, very difficult. I’m interested in the music that was born of and adopted by the community. Here tradition can be seen as a process, a process by which something becomes owned by and engages with a community. It may or may not have an obvious origin, often it doesn’t. It may well have been composed by somebody, or sourced outside the community but if it has, it tends to follow a trajectory of its own. The interesting thing for me about traditional music is following this direction and exploring the story behind it.
What’s interesting in Cornwall, of course, is that we are musically very multicultural and enjoy a wide variety of genres. Personally, I quite like it because as well as music and dance driven by popular media we have Samba Bands, Morris Sides, Irish dancing, Scottish Pipe bands etc alongside a healthy club and pub rock scene. All of which is fine unless indigenous Cornish music and dance is sidelined and then we have a tension. If Cornish music traditions enjoy equal recognition then we are truly multicultural but when incoming traditions are privileged then we are at risk of colonisation and loss of our own identity. What happened in the folk scene in Cornwall is a good example of where there has been a risk of this happening.
The advent of the Folk Revival, as we tend to call it, really came in two waves. The first wave was in the 1900s with activists like Cecil Sharp who saw folk music and dance introduced to the school curriculum. The second was in the 1950s with figures like Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl and saw the advent of the folk club scene as we know it today.
Cecil Sharp had a very particular worldview and was quite an English Nationalist. When he came to Cornwall in 1913 and 1914 he was very selective in what he researched and recorded and seems to have ignored Cornish traditions that did not fit with this world view. We see no mention of Guise Dancing, perhaps this was a bit too robust with its cross dressing and drinking! We know he didn’t like step dancing because of its associations with urban working class music hall. Here we have two elements of Cornish folk tradition well documented in the popular press of the time put to one side because they did not fit his image of authentic folk tradition. Sharp wasn’t that happy with women involved in Morris dancing although to be fair it was the next generation personified by Rolf Gardiner in the 1930s that created the myth of exclusively male Morris sides. It wasn’t the way it had been historically. Nevertheless it is likely that Furry Dancing in Cornwall would have been taken on-board as a form of processional Morris if women had not been involved. [ Sharp also noted a number of songs from people like Celtic Revivalists like Jim Thomas when he visited Cornwall. Thomas was a dialect singer also familiar with Cornish language expressions which were captured by other transcribers but not Cecil Sharp.]
When Cecil Sharp came to Cornwall, he had a very limited view of what folk music and dance was, and most Cornish traditions didn’t fit in. His agenda was nevertheless the one followed by the national curriculum and taught in Cornish schools. So people of my parents generation, who are now in their 80s and 90s, were all taught English folk tradition, were taught English folk songs, taught English folk dance, because that’s where the power was. A clear case of colonisation and the background to a Cornish folk scene that divides between the indigenous and the deliberately introduced.
So where do I come into it?
Musical family; my ancestors all played in an outfit called the ‘Goonhavern Banjo Band’. Not particularly Cornish in orientation…….. They played music which came back with their relatives from the States, from South Africa, from Australia, wherever. Very eclectic. There had always been banjos, and mandolins in particular, around the household. My introduction to the folk scene was Mitchell Folk Club, famous back in the late 1960s, which probably dates me quite well actually. I was quite young when I left Cornwall, first for Plymouth and then London, returned in the mid-70s and re-connected with the folk club scene again.I became involved with the Fal Folk Club at the good old “Dock and Railway” by Falmouth Docks.
In 1978 we had an opportunity to send a group to Ireland to represent Cornwall in the Pan Celtic Singing Contest. It was actually Brenda Wootton who connected us up with the festival organisers. Many people will know of Brenda, Cornwall’s lady of song and well known ambassador. Brenda encouraged a few members of the Folk Club to get together, form a fairly eclectic band, [Kemysk – mixture] and go and take part in the festival, which we did. And we actually won the traditional singing competition, which was quite a revelation. We came back with heads much bigger than they should have been – we also got some TV coverage.
The strange thing was, there was quite a strong backlash with “Oh, there’s no such thing as Cornish music.” Which, rather caught me out, because it hadn’t crossed my mind that it was an issue. Then, when you started unpick things, it seemed that actually, in order for something to be English, or Irish or Scottish etc, you needed much less provenance than for it to be Cornish. If you said something was Cornish, they [The English Folk Scene] would challenge this and demand evidence but happily accept that something was English on less weight of evidence.
I want to be very, very careful. In reality, traditional tunes and the lyrics that go with them can move around anywhere and will get adopted anywhere. They could have their origins in one place or time and then they move on to a place or context completely different. But when they’re with you – you sing them, play them in your style, your version, in your context, and for your traditions, so in Cornwall they become Cornish by context and custom but they can move around quite a lot.
One of the song tunes that moved around was called ‘The Marigold‘, it was identified as an already old Cornish tradition by the antiquarian, Davis Gilbert in 1830 (St. Erth, Cornwall). It is not the oldest version around, but even so, a good provenance as a Cornish song. When, a century later, the tune appears in Northern Ireland as ‘The Star of the County Down’, suddenly it becomes Irish. Which is, from my perspective, fine. It’s recorded in Cornwall, it goes to Ireland, it settles down there, and then it becomes presented as an Irish tune. This is mid 1920s, nearly 100 years after it was first recorded as a traditional song in Cornwall. So that’s okay. But when it’s the other way around, it doesn’t seem to work. If something comes from somewhere else and is adopted into Cornish tradition there is a resistance to accepting it as Cornish. I thought that actually can’t be right. You can not have one rule for one community, and a quite different rule for another. That is really what got me interested in the whole thing about the folk tradition in Cornwall, where it came from, and the stories behind it.
In the end, you find that measured by the same standards Cornwall actually has as much in the way of authentic tradition as anywhere else has, in relation to its size, of course. It’s just how it’s perceived and who will accept it. A good example of music coming in the other direction is “Little Eyes / Little Lize”. We can now trace that back to popular song culture in America in the late 1800s. It was initially quite racist by today’s standards but it was taken up, sung and recorded by Black singers [ the Deep River Boys ] who adapted the lyrics making it a lovely song. It was then picked up by Cornish singers [ The Joy Boys, 1955], who adapted and changed it yet again. Wonderful! People might say “it’s not Cornish, it really comes from ………”, but it doesn’t matter where it comes from. The fact is that it’s been adopted in Cornwall, used in a Cornish context and part of our culture now in much the same way as “The Marigold” moved to Ireland to become the “Star of the County Down”.
Was music taught to you in school? And was it educated that there was Cornish Music?
Not a cat’s chance in hell. No, no, no. For my sins, I went to Newquay Grammar School, where you were corrected if you had a Cornish accent. So it was pretty grim by today’s standards but a long time ago and of its time. There was no talk of Cornish Culture. It was the perfect example of Pol Hodge’s poem about having an A-Star in ignorance of your own history – Cornish history wasn’t going to be touched. There was no music at school that really engaged me but a slight connection with the folk scene in that two of the teachers were regulars at the Mitchell Folk Club. I escaped school as soon as I could with just a couple of GCSEs, and the funny thing is, in subjects taught by those two teachers. Absolute Freudian slip, they were probably the only people I was actually listening to when I was at school.
What was the catalyst for you to click with music?
Well, like most of the kids of my age as a teenager it was all rock music, I had my electric guitar, and I played in some pretty awful “beat” groups for a while. I sort of transferred my allegiance to folk blues clubs which were around at that time that’s what I became interested in. I was part of the almost automatic teenage exodus from Cornwall, first to Plymouth and then to London. When I came back a decade later my immediate family had left and I stayed with a variety of aunts and uncles. One wonderful aunt used to regale me with stories about her father, my grandfather, doing a step-dance with some tunes. The penny kind of dropped at that point that there might actually be a Cornish tradition as well as what I was experiencing in the folk clubs and blues pubs. That really kind of triggered my research and a realisation that we had our own share of musical tradition in Cornwall as much as anywhere had. The wonderful irony is that this happened in the mid 1970s but decades later, in 2003, I was talking about this to my mother and she suddenly produced a notebook from my grandfather, describing the ceilidhs that they had (the Troyll’s as they called them) with the music, the tunes, and the dances back in 1880s – 1890s.
What was your first instrument?
The mandolin. They were lying around at home. I can’t remember not playing a mandolin. I didn’t get on very well with formal teaching. It was so much quicker to learn by ear that I tended not to learn by music. Which was, well, very traditional on one hand, a bit of a nuisance on the other. I played the mandolin and the electric guitar which I managed to soup up to make it a twelve-string. Then, I played banjo for a bit. These are all fretboard instruments and changing around is not a big deal unless you are a high flying virtuoso which I am not.
In the mid 1970s, we were all getting caught by the Celtic world and Breton singer and harpist Alan Stivel was one of our heroes. So I had a go at the harp. My uncle built me a harp out of marine ply left over from his boat building hobby which worked quite well. I’ve still got it now but I actually found the harp too formal for my liking. Played formally, the harp becomes a fairly classical instrument which wasn’t really my scene if you like. Although the thing with a harp is that you can use simple chords to accompany a melody line making it very much a folk instrument with a wonderful sound. [ especially if like me you follow Alan Stivel and play mediaeval style with fingernails rather than in modern style with the pads of your fingers]..
How did you find other Cornish Exiles in London?
Well, we ended up living near each other around Crouch End in North London, my cousin and a few friends of mine and kept in close touch. There was a strong London-Cornish Association and there were Cornish classes, which I went to. So that’s how and why I started to learn Cornish. A story many people follow actually.
Did you discover a flyer, or hear about Cornish lessons by word-of-mouth?
I had to chase it down a little bit. I found somebody who was involved with MK (Mebyon Kernow). It was probably through MK in London that I found the Cornish class if you like, because I subscribed to them. When I joined , I got contacts from other people around me. It’s much more sophisticated now than it was then. Then it tended to be one person teaching two, or three, people in their home. Now they have formal classes, which, of course, is good.
Could you tell us about the journey from starting Cornish lessons, to becoming a Cornish Language Bard?
Oh, to be honest, it was as much political as anything. Not many will understand the joke when I say that in my day bilingual signage was “DIY.” because it is widely used now. This was not the case in the 70s. Myself and a few friends were the first people to put the Kernow sign on the border. We painted out the ‘Cornwall’, and painted in ‘Kernow’, and we stuck it over the road sign. So you entered Kernow and not Cornwall.
Was there much of a reaction to your DIY sign?
Yeah, it lasted for 24 hours before it was taken down. It was announced on Morning Southwest, which was the local radio programme at that time that Cornwall had declared UDI (unilateral declaration of independence). So we were pretty chuffed with that. That was exactly what we wanted to hear.
Politically, what were you thoughts about at that time?
I had joined MK as soon as I was old enough to understand what was going on and this was the political thinking I connected with. I’m not a “meetings person”, however and I’d rather be out doing something practical so in the end I got more directly involved in the culture than the politics, but the politics are always there bubbling away under the surface. Everything’s political in the end. Especially in our culture when what happens in Cornwall is defined by the people in power in Westminster. It was always going to be political. That was my background, I suppose what I would now say is that my mentors were people like Ann and Richard Jenkin.
How has Kernewek developed since you became a language bard?
I was never an expert. I suppose I’ve got colloquial Cornish – conversational Cornish not far beyond that and certainly I’ve not got particular linguistic expertise. We were a very small minority when I started learning Cornish but it was a wonderful time. Memories of sitting around in a pub somewhere muttering a few words in Cornish and plotting the revolution.
I think the point really, is that Cornish has come of age in many respects. When I started work for the Council, you would barely admit to being Cornish, let alone speaking the language. And when I finished some 30 years later, it was acceptable to put Cornish on your emails. For me that was a big deal in terms of the development of Kernewek. You can date it to 2002 when the Cornish language was formally recognised [by U.K. Government], but it was building up over quite a long period of time. The big deal these days is that Cornish has gone from being a rather delightful minority to being part of the establishment and being expected. That is a strength and the biggest change. Of course, music is a really good medium for Cornish because you haven’t got to be an expert. You do not have to be a fluent speaker just to sing something in Cornish. And that’s always been my gambit, if you like.
Could you tell us about your 2011 PHD, and subsequent nickname of Dr. Folk?
My family gave me that nickname, rather cheekily when I turned the shed into an office and started to talk about post-modernism – but it made a very good handle and filing short cut so I made good use of it. Earlier in our conversation, I talked about finding this resistance to the idea of traditional Cornish tunes and music which seemed inconsistent and entirely illogical. It was the desire to understand this as a social phenomena and the concepts behind it that drove my interest in formal research.
I did the PhD part time for over four/five years. It was an interest-journey, as opposed to a need for the qualification. Really, it was about unpicking all those layers and understanding what folk tradition was, understanding it as a process and not something static or fixed. It was an interesting piece of work to continue the revision of the model of folk tradition that grew out of the deconstruction of old ideas a decade or so before [ e.g Dave Harker’s ‘Fakesong The Manufacture of British Folk Song’ and Georgina Boyes’ ‘Imagined Village’ ] . But it also gave me a wider insight into the context of folk tradition in Cornwall.
That was the direction of my PhD: it might well be that traditional music belongs anywhere and moves everywhere but if you accept that there are Irish, Scottish or English etc traditions in music and dance then you logically need to accept that there are also Cornish ones. I expanded on this idea to show that in Cornwall in the 1970s, there were two competing sectors in traditional folk music and dance. You had the English tradition coming from over the border with Morris sides etc competing with indigenous Cornish dance as folk tradition in Cornwall. “Cornwall is part of England so Cotswold Morris and Lancashire clog dancers can represent folk tradition in Cornwall” versus “Cornwall is not part of England and has different but equally valid traditions of its own”.
Things had already begun to change a lot when I did my PhD and now I think people are much more comfortable in recognising a multicultural situation. Yeah it’s great to do Morris dancing in Cornwall, it’s fine to play in a Scottish Pipe Band and Samba Bands are cool (both of which I’ve enjoyed playing in) but it is culture in Cornwall and not Cornish culture. The line that needs to be drawn is that it is also important to value and enjoy Cornwall’s own heritage alongside the others.
Do you think the push-back to identifying Cornish tradition can be linked back to Cecil Sharp? Did Cecil have the overall power to define tradition across the U.K.?
That’s exactly what it was, his power through the education system to exclude anything that did not fit his world view of what folk tradition in Cornwall should be, echoed down the generations as received wisdom. Here we are focussed on English or Cornish, but wherever you go in the world, you will find tensions between the dominant culture and the minority culture. “Common sense” is often defined by the elites of the dominant culture whether or not it is evidentially based. “Of course Cornwall is part of England” goes the common sense of those in power but actually this is a matter of historical interpretation that is increasingly disputed and not a matter of fact.
There is a much stronger recognition of a distinct Cornish cultural heritage now and I sometimes begin to wonder whether we in Cornwall aren’t becoming that dominant culture. Perhaps not quite yet, we are still not in a position to be confident that we are sharing our Cornish culture on an equal basis in a multicultural environment rather than being colonised.