Ieuan franklin
Shared Authority and the Radio Ballads
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4.4 Shared Authority and the Radio BalladsIf we consider the oral historian or broadcaster’s responsibility to the communities from which he or she gathers their information to be paramount, then Seabrook’s authorial stamp on the Five Generations programmes represents a problematic source of bias. However, the Five Generations programmes raise another interesting issue, as programmes in which the listener is expected or induced to maintain a distance from the people who feature within the actuality. Most of the actuality features discussed within this thesis portray their ‘communities of origin’ in a sympathetic light, and attempt to induce in the listener a feeling of immersion in the community life-world. The Radio Ballads series,135 for example, often paid tribute to the heroism of working people (in Ballad of John Axon), or aimed to provoke empathy (The Body Blow) or solidarity with (Travelling People) the individuals and communities that feature within them. Yet it would certainly be a mistake to assert that actuality can only be fruitfully applied within these terms (i.e. in terms of a celebration of the vernacular culture of a working-class community or a portrait of the tragic plight of a working-class community). Even if we restrict ourselves to representations of working-class life (which is by no means the only use to which actuality is put), many of the best radio features or documentaries have avoided over-reliance on what Vaughan (in the context of filmed documentary) has termed “the major and minor keys of classical British documentary” – portraying working people as “heroes of labour or victims of circumstance” (Vaughan 1983: 41-42). The oral historian Paul Thompson has asserted that the task of the historian is not merely to celebrate the working class as it is, but to raise its consciousness (Thompson 1988: 20). We might here apply and extend this task to the consciousness-raising of all radio listeners through the redrawing of (symbolic) community boundaries to give voice to the under-represented, and to reveal existing socio-economic realities (as discussed in Chapter 1.8). As we saw in Chapter 2, Denis Mitchell, was perhaps the first radio producer to bring his microphone and tape-recorder to not just the working classes but the submerged classes (for example, vagrants and criminals) – the kind of people that many radio listeners (had) regarded as unsavoury and unworthy of any airtime whatsoever. As a result of work such as Mitchell’s, the listener’s assumption or preconceptions about the parameters of their communities may be challenged, and they may be induced to reach some kind of accommodation with - or at least acknowledge the existence of - the kind of people they had formerly never included or counted as part of their community or world. Arguably some of the most interesting modern radio features and documentaries have cast light on the ostensibly marginal, controversial or misunderstood fringes of mainstream society, side-stepping the allegations or pit-falls of voyeurism or exploitation through the principle of collaboration and shared authorship with their documentary ‘subjects’. Fraser has demonstrated the interconnection between the distribution of resources and the distribution of recognition as dimensions of (social) justice (Fraser 2000). Correcting injustices of recognition means counteracting “an institutionalized pattern of cultural value that [constitutes] some social actors as less than full members of society and prevents them from participating as peers” (Fraser 2000: 113), and in the context of broadcasting this involves a decentralized redistribution of microphone access. Some radio documentaries distribute recognition in an egalitarian way by simply refusing to differentiate between ‘celebrity’ and ‘ordinary’ speakers. For example, in Born to Live (1961), the Prix-Italia winning radio documentary by the late oral historian and radio host Studs Terkel, Terkel decided to keep the listener’s focus on the words rather than the celebrity status of many of the interviewees, leaving each speaker anonymous and acknowledging the contributors in the end credits. This meant that he gave equal weight to each contribution, conveying his belief of their equality. In this context Terkel acknowledged the direct influence of Denis Mitchell (“my great influence”) (Terkel 2001); especially Mitchell’s BBC television documentary Morning in the Streets (which had itself won the Prix Italia two years earlier, in 1959): Denis Mitchell, the dean of British TV documentaries taught me there’s no need for a narrator when you do a documentary, as he showed in his great classic Morning in the Streets…Just let the ideas flow from one to the other (Terkel 2001; Terkel 2007: 167). Born To Live demonstrated compellingly how spoken words and poetry, music, and sound effects could be infused with an immediacy and vitality that could not be duplicated on the printed page, whilst “making only very spare but effective use of musical bridges and beds, fade ins and fade outs, and other radio production techniques” (Hardy III 1999). With its tapestry of voices discussing aspects of life in the ‘nuclear age’ Born to Live encapsulated a defiant and hopeful response to the spell of silence cast by the military industrial complex, or what Terkel referred to as ‘a national Alzheimer’s disease’. Broadcast ‘texts’ are not simply “representations of the world; they are part of that world they describe and are thus shaped by the contexts in which they occur” (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 107). Aural (or broadcast oral) history is shaped by several different contexts – firstly as a structured and recorded (and hence mediated) ‘interpersonal event’ (an interview), and secondly, as a source material edited into meaningful, fluent and accessible extracts and juxtaposed with other sonic elements in a radio programme, typically without the participation of the interviewee(s) at this secondary stage. The implications of this mediation are under-theorized, and those concerned with maximising responsibility to the communities from which they gather their information often lack a clear model of best practice to guide them in achieving this: [U]ntil recently, our metaphors and epistemologies have not explicitly included the role and relationship of the interpreter, or the fact that interpretations of culture are also an extension of it – whether offered by members of traditional societies or ourselves (Spitzer 1992: 85).136 As Ryan has observed, cultural texts are inescapably part of social processes, and social processes are themselves always textualized in some form (quoted in Lipsitz 1990: 617). Arguably, the more completely we can understand the broadcast text and its social and ideological context – who produced it, for whom, and why – the better able we are to comprehend it as an interpretation of culture. Yet this is much more difficult to achieve than might at first be supposed; radio programmes are somewhat resistant to traditional methods of criticism. For example, the question of whom the broadcast ‘work’ is created for is a complex one: It is not necessarily the case that programmes are for audiences. They might be for profit. They might be for the powers that be. They might be for those that make them. They might be for those who take part in them… (Scannell 1996b: 11). . Bearing these complexities in mind, we can concur with Murray Schafer that “radio programming needs to be analyzed in as much detail as an epic poem or musical composition, for in its themes and rhythms will be found the pulse of life” (Schafer 1994: 93). For example, Street has conceptualised the Radio Ballads as “poems, full of technique, aesthetic judgements and formed decisions and selection, self-consciously developed towards an ultimate cultural and emotional effect”, and has posed the question of whether this compromises them or makes them “less honest” as oral history (Street 2004: 193-194). In grappling with this question, we can return to the subject of editing (selection), taking a historical long view by comparing the editorial ‘treatment’ of actuality by radio producers to create accessible radio programming with the ‘dressing’ of folk ballads by collectors to compile new books: It was, then [during the nineteenth century], common editorial practice to compound and amend ballad texts, and this need hardly be wondered at, as no publisher would ever have presented his customers with a book, at a guinea and a half per copy, of ballad fragments. For the collector, it was often a choice between compounding the texts and having them published, or not having them published at all (Buchan 1972: 206). We could therefore state that neither Commissioning Editors nor radio audiences are predisposed to blithely accept bewildering fragments or “undigested slabs” (Everett 1993) of actuality, and that they require the programme maker to provide some degree of editorial guidance. However, we must remember that authorship of the actuality-led radio programme cannot be attributed to the programme maker(s) alone. We might take an even longer view here, tracing what we might term the ‘intertextual gap’ between the original source (actuality) and its reformulation (in a radio programme), further back to the vernacular texts of medieval manuscript culture, which have been deemed to “structure information the way a spoken language does” (Fleischman 1990: 22). Manuscript culture was essentially local – written material could not be transported as easily or widely as today, and education was regionalized. As Stamps has noted, writers consequently worked in localized enclaves, and “like all locally developed projects, their work remained fluid and improvisational” (Stamps 2001: 125). Their work was not judged according to centralized authorities on spelling, word definition, or expressive styles. Instead the manuscript text, as it was copied and recopied, was subject to additions, deletions, revisions and errors by multiple authors: [T]he copying of medieval works [was] an adventure in supplementation rather than faithful imitation…In the act of copying a text, the scribe supplants the original poet, often changing words or narrative order, suppressing or shortening some sections, while interpolating new material in others (Nichols 1990: 8; 3). In a manuscript culture, a reader could exercise authority over a text simply by adding their written contribution to a pre-existing text, creating a culture of commentary and ‘open review’. Authorship in a manuscript culture can therefore be regarded as less clearly defined or prescribed than it is in a print culture (Farrell 1996: 123). As Farrell has observed (ibid, p. 123), it is print publication that separates writing from authorship: anyone literate can write, but in our culture only those whose writing has been deemed of sufficient artistic and commercial value to appear in printed form can be considered ‘authors’, or claim the authority that the term implies. Like many aspects of contemporary Internet culture, manuscript culture was characterized by the fluidity of discourse found in oral cultures. The strict division of labour between creating a text, reproducing it and distributing it came about only with the industrialization of the printing press (Littau 2006); instead a manuscript was an ever-changing or emergent narrative continuously altered and circulated by successive contributors. Medieval manuscript texts, with their openness to a multiplicity of sources and authors, can therefore be regarded as the precursor of the Bahktinian polyphonic text (Farrell, op. cit.). The themes we explored in Chapter 1 are very relevant here, as literacy in many societies has tended to be unevenly distributed and fractured across class lines, particularly as it is often an indispensable source of power. Literacy had become the essential key to participation in the modern world (Bourke 1999: 24) by the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, however, a high standard of literacy had become less essential for economic survival. The medium of radio has spanned an era in which voice transmission has become steadily easier and cheaper, making it easier to imagine a system of thought that does not rely on writing (Bourke, ibid). However, the ‘mechanization’ of orality has occurred ‘in the wake of’ the revolution that accompanied the mechanization of writing. We should not be blind to the way radio, like any other publishing medium, has institutional conventions and constraints built into how it is constructed, edited, produced, distributed and interpreted (Spitzer 1992: 87). Many of these restrictions have limited and curtailed opportunities for ‘lay people’ to have their voices heard on the airwaves, let alone participate in radio production. The radio documentary or feature that incorporates a variety of recorded actuality can also be regarded as a polyphonic text with multiple authors, in the sense that whoever is given voice through actuality is given a form of authorship, albeit one that is subsumed within the over-arching authorship of the programme maker. In a sense the radio producer’s reel of magnetic tape or digital memory card is the modern form of the medieval manuscript. It is arguable, for example, that what was truly radical about the Radio Ballads was their polyphonic character – the way in which the ostensible ‘givenness’ of reality or ideology (for example, contemporary attitudes towards gypsies in The Travelling People) was challenged and deconstructed through the ‘distributed authority’ of a multiplicity of ‘actuality perspectives’. As Thompson has observed, Reality is complex and many-sided; and it is a primary merit of oral history that to a much greater extent than most sources it allows the original multiplicity of standpoints to be recreated (Thompson 1988: 5). The Radio Ballads often condensed multiple events or eyewitness accounts into a single narrative, mirroring the nature of the oral history interview. The series rejected the linearity and single point-of-view approach that often characterizes the incorporation of oral history into print, in favour of a synthesis which brings history back to life (Hardy III 1999). Paget has discussed the Radio Ballads and other examples of the ‘radio montage documentary’ in a similar spirit, as a realization of the Brechtian notion of an ‘exercise in complex seeing’ (or hearing). The use of ‘collision montage’ is a dialectical means of drawing attention to issues and events whilst also drawing attention to the artistic techniques used to ‘portray’ them. Radio has thus sometimes proved itself capable of mobilizing the listener’s interpretative faculties in this manner, through “a montage clash of discourses” (Paget 1990: 47). The Radio Ballads fit Marcuse’s definition of revolutionary art, as creating a subversion of perception through a radical change in style and technique – and representing, in the exemplary fate of individuals, an indictment of the prevailing unfreedom of the established reality (Marcuse 1978). The use of actuality in radio features (as presented in the form of a montage with music, ambience and narration) and the avoidance of narration has often presented serious subjects (‘the exemplary fate of individuals’) to listeners who “had to work towards their own construction of the elements offered” (Paget 1990: 46). In other words, the resulting ‘texts’ have been sufficiently ‘open’ and sufficiently vital to compel the listener to take an active role in interpreting them. In the vast majority of radio features and documentaries, however, the editorial process involved in their construction has tended to prohibit any choice in this construction on the part of the informants (interviewees). Audience responses and audience research present the normative, if not the only means, by which radio producers can follow the example of ethnographers who have argued that a crucial test for their ‘accounts’ is to whether the actors whose beliefs and behaviour they purport to describe recognize the validity of those accounts (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 195). Radio producers have, nevertheless, often sought to correspond to and accommodate the aesthetics and sensitivities of the communities of origin. This concern can, for example, be clearly attributed to the creators of the Radio Ballads (Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger), as a series of programmes which derived both their form and content from the vernacular speech patterns of the communities within which the team recorded, and whose life experiences embodied the thematic focus of the series. MacColl and Seeger deliberately attempted to condense the ‘folk process’ (the creation of folksong through the accumulation of lived experience), through the study of tape-recorded actuality as a catalyst for the song-writing process. In this and other ways, the folk material in the Radio Ballads exemplified the continuum between folklore and popular culture, as discussed in Chapter 2, and invoked the collectivity or shared authorship of the folk process. This was highly appropriate, as the extensive use of actuality determines that authorship cannot be rightly assigned to any single individual contributor – rather it is a function of the whole because it is diffused across a montage of lived experiences.137 Several recordings made by Parker of post-production discussions between himself and MacColl and Seeger, stored within the Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham Central Library (in addition to other programme materials, such as the original interviews), make possible a study of the way in which the team sought to incorporate elements of the ‘folk process’ into their work. These recordings represent a rare opportunity for the researcher to gain privileged insights into the production process in the form of recordings of face-to-face dialogue between the production team, in addition and contradistinction to written or printed letters, notes and accounts (which can be highly selective or purposive) or in the form of memos and minutes (which are weighted towards institutional and bureaucratic forms of language and argument).138 It is beneficial if such ‘official’ evidence can be complemented, wherever possible, by ‘vernacular’ evidence of similar activity on the part of the programme-makers – the narratives that people develop and share to render their work meaningful to themselves and to those who receive it. In a post-production discussion of The Big Hewer (1961), MacColl relates in detail his attempts to condense the time-intensive ‘folk process’ into a period of mere weeks and months. As MacColl explains, this meant ‘having to steep yourself’ in the lived experiences of the interviewees (listening to the actuality for as much as twelve or fourteen hours a day) (Parker, MacColl et al. 1961). Having ‘internalised’ these recordings, it was then possible for MacColl to put their words into the right metrical form, and to find or create songs to mirror the very breathing patterns of the actuality.139 For MacColl and Parker, the ballad form possessed intrinsic dramatic properties and “required the active participation of the audience” due to its parataxis, its medley of voices, and its unexplained shifts in points of view (Harker 2009). MacColl goes on to explain how he had studied ‘pitmatic’ speech in order to write the lyrics for the songs in the programme, and consulted the actuality recordings of Jack Elliot to imitate the plosive aspects of his speech, and the actuality recordings of Tommy Armstrong to imitate his uneven rhymes and use of assonance. The lyrics were also influenced by the visual stimulus of the environments in which recording took place – for example, with the inclusion in song lyrics of slogans seen on the walls within mining communities, such as ‘always treat your lamps with care’. Charles Parker admits that, as the song-writing stage of the production process takes place in his absence, he is “not aware of any of this meticulous attention” (Parker, MacColl et al. 1961). Nevertheless, during the discussion he reveals the ethical care or caritas with which he approaches the editing process. He regards the process of editing as an empathetic and intuitive process, and is cognizant of the fact that he is “lacerating breaths and pauses” – “I may be destroying some of these things on which your music is based” (ibid). This sound document illustrates the way in which actuality was utilized collaboratively and sensitively by the Radio Ballad team as a catalyst for the folk process - authenticity was derived from close attention to the life-world of the communities of origin. Interestingly, in a gesture towards collaboration with the ‘communities of origin’, Parker, MacColl and Seeger had played back the ‘first draft’ of The Big Hewer to a group of miners and were told that it lacked humour, so they re-edited it to incorporate a humorous section (Cox 2008: 114)140
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