Photo by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum
Don’t be swayed by the sound of environmental protest: these songs were first sung in the voice of the cutter, not the tree
Richard Smyth – writes features, reviews and comment pieces for publications including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman, among others. He is also a crossword setter, a cartoonist and an author whose books include The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell (2023) and the novel The Woodcock (2021). He lives in Shipley, West Yorkshire, UK.
‘Woodman, oh woodman, you must spare that tree,’ sings the folk musician Robin Grey on his album From the Ground Up (2017). ‘Touch not a single bough, for in my youth it sheltered me.’
The song is an old one. The words were written in 1830 by the American poet George Pope Morris, originally under the title ‘The Oak’, and set to music by the English pianist Henry Russell seven years later. It became a hugely popular drawing-room ballad, under its new title ‘Woodman, Spare That Tree’, and represents an early example – or perhaps a foreshadowing – of the environmental protest song. As such, it fits comfortably on Grey’s album, an environmentally minded collection from a songwriter who positions himself squarely in the radical protest tradition: From the Ground Up also includes lyrics about fossil fuels (‘leave it in the ground/I want our world to avoid being drowned’) and living off the land (‘I’ll be good to the land and the land will be good to me’).
Grey works in the folk milieu that sometimes attracts the label ‘eco-folk’, an earnest, acoustic sub-genre of protest and folksong, festivals and woodcuts; it might seem derisive or satirical to say that it’s all bare feet and nettle soup, but both are encouraged at gigs by Sam Lee, one of the leading lights of the eco-folk movement. In recent years, the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane has helped to raise the profile of eco-folk with his plaintive lyrics for musicians including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and Seckou Keita. His protest work ‘Heartwood’ – ‘Would you hew me/to the heartwood, cutter?/Would you leave me open-hearted?’ – is an obvious successor to ‘Woodman, Spare That Tree’.
Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Heartwood’ poem made into a linocut poster by Nick Hayes
This kind of environmentally conscious folk music builds on decades of enduring protest songwriting from postwar musicians such as Malvina Reynolds (‘What Have They Done to the Rain?’), Pete Seeger (God Bless the Grass) and Peter La Farge (‘As Long as the Grass Shall Grow’). In the present day, the enfolkification of rural protest – where demonstrations over climate change and land access are accompanied by folklore theatre and the music of fiddles and ukuleles – reinforces the popular image of folk as ‘green’ music. Protest music is, by its nature, uncompromising and one-eyed; no great protest song ever followed the middle eight with a verse beginning ‘But on the other hand…’ But successful art – like good history – engages with complexity and contradiction, and if the bright-green postwar trim is all we see of the relationship between folk music and the environment, we’re liable to overlook the significant fact that the voice of the folksong has as often been the voice of the cutter as it has the voice of the tree – just as it has more often spoken for the hunter than the hunted, and for the fisherman more often than the ocean.
Folk songs are workers’ songs, and if you look at human history our work has been to chop, dig, scour, subjugate, hunt, harness, seize and plunder. It’s the work of innumerable human hands and, as we’ve gone about this work, in the woods, in the hills, on the open sea, folk music has been our soundtrack.
Writing in 2021, at the height of the TikTok ‘Wellerman’ craze, the literary scholar David Farrier sought to flag up what he called ‘the dark side of the sea shanty’. ‘No one wants to be a killjoy,’ Farrier wrote in Prospect magazine, ‘but it’s worth recalling that the propulsive rhythms of these songs … measured the beat of organised plunder.’
Folksong gives a human voice to centuries of environmental despoliation
‘Wellerman’ – a whaling song from the South Seas that propelled part-time Scottish folksinger Nathan Evans to worldwide fame – is a ‘cutting-in’ song, meant to accompany the rhythmic and bloody butchery of a captured whale. Farrier rightly observed that whaling was a murderous and monstrously harmful trade: the Otago whaling station, where in 1831 the Weller brothers founded the maritime provisions business that gave ‘Wellerman’ its title, could take in as many as 100 whales a year, and, as an ‘inland’ station, disproportionately targeted pregnant females and calves. This is in a sense a ‘dark side’, but it’s one that has always been in plain sight: these are above all human songs, songs of the Anthropocene, and so, as we’ll see, they have for most of their history been songs of human labour, human joy, human suffering, human love. In vanishingly few historic folksongs does the singer pity the whale or the fox. The woodman does not spare the tree…
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https://aeon.co/essays/folksong-is-the-art-of-hard-labour-not-of-environmentalism
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