Radical Objects

Radical Objects: ‘Topic Songbook’

Mention ‘Topic Records’ to any music loving aficionado and you’d inevitably get a plethora of back-catalogue folk legends reeled off – from the likes of Martin Carthy, The Waterson Family, June Tabor or Anne Briggs – to maybe a reverential nod to pioneering ‘world music’ field recordings and anthologies from Greece, Bulgaria or Cuba.

Topic Songbook

Topic Sbk back

‘Topic Songbook’ Words and Melodies of old and new Favourites

Price 1s 6d

I expect that a rather less likely response would cite such double sided gramophone discs that paired the ‘May Day Greeting’ sung by the Choir of the Women-Teachers’ faculty of Cinkota, with ‘Song of the Tractor-Drivers of Deszk’ recorded by the Central Song and Music Ensemble of the Ironworkers Union of the Hungarian Peoples Republic…

In fact, the story of Soviet-inspired tunes such as that one (Topic Catalogue No. TRC 31) harks back well before the UK folk revival, and to a meeting of Labour and Co-operatives’ choirs held at The Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1936. The outcome was the creation of the Workers’ Music Association – its ethos to help promote the music of workers’ struggles and triumphs. The WMA was co-founded by the composer Alan Bush (and member of the Communist Party) with the backing of his fellow composer friends like Hanns Eisler and Benjamin Britten. Just three years short of its 80th birthday, the WMA is still active today with members belonging to socialist and street choirs, red big bands and who unite for WMA music festivals.

Topic TRC 22 Youth

The WMA had launched Topic Records in 1939 to fulfil its desire to release CP-related music on 10” double sided 78 rpm discs which were sold to WMA members as part of, or in addition to, their annual subscription. In fact the very first recorded output (TRC 1) paired the ‘The Internationale’ with ‘The Man who put the Water in the Workers’ Beer’, a rather more jovial number, sung by Paddy Ryan (of the Unity Theatre). Topic re-issued TRC 1 three times, backing ‘The Internationale’ with the ‘Soviet Fatherland Song’, and then with Alan Bush’s wife Nancy Head on the flipside, reading ‘Salute to life’ accompanied by Shostakovich! Today, Topic is easily the longest running independent record label in Britain, and from the beginning of 2013, it has been undertaking a major digitization programme, with ongoing downloadable releases of its revered back catalogue beginning with the LP era of the late ‘50s onwards…

Hence this ‘Topic Songbook’ is such a fascinating reminder of the first life of Topic Records, when the labels’ output was still very much focused on its ‘historical and social interest’ records – and its firm relationship with the WMA. By working out the last Topic 78 rpm record to be listed on the inside back cover (TRC 45 ‘Song of the Forests’ by Shostakovich), I’d say that this attractive 12 cms x 17 cms booklet dates back to about 1951.

Topic contents
A banner on the cover tells us that it was a ‘Festival Special’ edition, produced for one of the WMA’s musical festivals, and intriguingly on pages 24 and 25, there are two songs which had been “specially written for the Sheffield Festival”. Public performances of socialist songs were always a fixture in the musical lives of WMA members – from massed choirs in workers halls and municipal town halls to the times when Birthday Rallies for the ‘Daily Worker’ packed out the Royal Albert Hall – and there’s the annual WMA Summer School still held to this day at Wortley Hall in South Yorkshire.

topic int

Coincidentally, this Topic Songbook hails from 1951 – the very same year when the WMA’s President Alan Bush had entered his very first opera into the Festival of Britain Opera Competition. It won a prize, but then failed to secure a professional performance until the 1970s. Not that surprising really considering the Cold War era. The opera was called ‘Wat Tyler’, a homage to the leader of the 1381 Peasants Revolt…

The front cover art of the Topic Songbook was signed by ‘CAS’, who was, or were, the Co-operative Art Service Ltd, London. The illustration of the singing boy and girl is pretty similar to imagery on paraphernalia published by fellow travellers in the USA. Interesting to note that TRC 28 is ‘Our Song Will Go On’, written to commemorate the anti-racist rallies at Peekskill, upstate New York in 1949, and with contributions by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger among others…

Throughout the early 1950s, Topic, dubbed ‘that little red label’ by one of the major recording companies, was indeed merrily releasing hard-line Soviet-inspired pieces ‘Songs of Stalin’ and such like, but the labels’ resident artists such as Ewan MacColl were also championing the industrial folksong heritage and new folk compositions, like ‘Dirty Old Town’. These were signalling a new era – post-Stalin, after the ’56 Hungarian uprising, when the label eschewed songs of Soviet maidens and tractors, for Jack Elliot or Peggy Seeger, and the song of the American worker.

As far as Topic Records part of the story is concerned, that ended in 1960 when the label separated from the WMA, and thus began Topic’s most influential and exciting decade of legendary folk recordings.  But returning to the tunes within the 56 pages of the ‘Topic Songbook’, there are so many compelling musical glimpses into the Socialist century. Perhaps a special mention should be for ‘Jarama’, the song of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War – and that final verse. It was this conflict that triggered the WMA into existence in the first place:

We have left that dark valley for ever
But its memory we ne’er shall forget,
So, before we continue this meeting,
Let us stand to our glorious dead

8 Comments

  1. Thanks very much for this. You can often find fascinating things at Marchmont Community Centre! Is there any way of finding a score of Bush’s opera WAT TYLER? Would be interesting – perhaps a radical young opera company such as OPERA UP CLOSE could perform it….

  2. Great stuff! Just been reading the recent biography of Bert Lloyd, which is well worth a read for the history of the early folk music scene, and he may well have been largely responsible for the production of this book. A wonderful if idiosyncratic man and much more socially generous than MacColl, from my limited experience of both back in the 60s. In my own collection I have a similar such ‘radical object’ – “Songs and Hope Instead”- The Sanity Song book, put together by Dave Moran of Folk Scene, which I bought for 2s 6d, old money, back in 1967 on the CND Easter March. More recently, I have been trying to stimulate regular ‘gatherings’ in York of singers, musicians and poets of a radical bent. So the tradition lives on!

    1. Hi MB … would the Sanity Song Book be another candidate for a radical object? Are you tempted to write it up?

    2. Folk Scene did not only have Dave Moran as its editor. I was his partner producing this lively and interesting folk music magazine.
      We did publish the CND Songs and Hope Instead …..The Sanity Songbook, which was published from my own home….Ashputtel, The Street, Woodham Walter, Maldon, Essex. as part of Folk Scene Publications products .
      The magazine, Folk Scene was a monthly publication and we also produced a vinyl LP of artists popular around folk clubs at the time. The album was simply titled Folk Scene FSP001 and artists included : Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins. Owen Hand, Nigel Denver, John Pearse, Wizz Jones and Pete Stanley, Alex Campbell, John Foreman , Colin Wilkie, Malcolm Price Trio, Bill Clifton, Colin Wilkie and the Leesiders
      Regards Stuart Wallace….co-editor Folk Scene Publications Ltd

      1. Hi Stuart. We used go work together on the ilford pictorial. I remember a Folk Scene well and I still have the record and even still play it from time to time. I cane across this site whilst lazily surfing.

  3. Thanks for fascinating book and comments.

    Minna Keal (1909-99), mother of Raphael Samuel, worked for WMA, I think in the late ’40s-50s. She had been a music student at the Royal Academy in 1928-9, and much later (1975) went back to composing. A CD of her 90th birthday concert includes compositions from 1929 and 1979.

    I too am reading DaveArthur’s terrific life of Bert Lloyd, which has quite a bit on WMA and Topic

  4. I found this fascinating! I have been involved in folk song and music since my CND days; my CP family introduced me to this kind of music ( unwittingly !) via Ewan McColl singing at rallies… Alan Bush was in the same party branch as my parents; he was a v tall man; I remember him dancing at a barn dance at Watford Co op Hall. His archive and his Mss are at the British Library. Topic 78 number 1 was played a lot when I was a boy! Many of the songs in the Topic book were sung on demos and parties….then Pete Seeger sang at the Albert Hall to a full house in 1961 and the rest is history…not sure about the Stalin songs though!

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