The (re)mediated melodies of Jone o’ Grinfilt

Remediation is a broad term that describes ‘the representation of one medium in another’ (Bolter and Grusin, p. 45) and provides an avenue to examine the values that each medium espouses. If, as Bolter and Grusin argue, ‘all mediation is remediation’ (p. 55), an important element of remediation is immediacy, achieved by ‘ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation’ (p. 11). As historical accounts emerged and ballads’ original contexts were gradually removed, pieces like ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’ and ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ faced remediation through their collection and preservation. However, many collections of working-class songs seem to ignore these mediators, which is to say that in being remediated for study in the present, the values and intents of those mediating the songs go unseen. Acknowledging the transfer from orally transmitted song, to a preserved, notated musical work, and finally to the text alone, published as a poem, not only permits space for recognition of the loss of context but also reveals how these acts of mediation shape interpretation and understanding today. Bolter and Grusin argue that remediation expresses, ‘the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another’, and in this way, they view remediation as reform, which in turn suggests that ‘media reform reality itself’ (pp. 59, 61). Each transfer to a new medium removes a little more context, until a seemingly autonomous piece is all that remains.

In order to understand how mediation as reform has shaped the Jone o’ Grinfilt cycle, it is helpful to examine how our current understanding of the songs is shaped by the limited historical context we can construct around these pieces. Most early collectors appear to have only preserved the text, effectively erasing any non-textual elements almost from the start, but typically, this erasure, as well as their intents and rationale, are unquestioned and unnoticed, following Bolter and Grusin’s concept of immediacy. In one instance, ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ was collected by John Higson, who had an interest in notating and preserving the Lancashire dialect, which is reflected in his version of the piece (Bintley, pp. 11–12, and Lambert, pp. 13–16). Higson’s interest in dialect is an instance of mediation, and although his version captures more of the oral elements, it still removes the performative musical elements. Additionally, Higson does not note the name of the weaver from whom he took down the songs, and his account suggests that this singer was not the composer. Harland later printed Higson’s version in his collection and attempted to add more context about the cycle, but his accounts show that tracing the provenance of ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ was difficult even in 1865. The earliest published account comes from Samuel Bamford’s Walks in South Lancashire and on its Borders (1844), although he does not reproduce the text itself. Bamford notes that the ‘common opinion’ was that ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ was written by James Butterworth, but then goes on to recount how he met Joseph Coupe, ‘a barber, tooth-drawer, blood-letter, warper, spinner, carder, twiner, slbber² [sic], and rhymester, residing at Oldham’. Coupe related to Bamford that he and weaver Joseph Lees had composed the song to sell and claimed that ‘there were thirteen “Joan’s O’ Grinfilt” produced within a short time’ but theirs was the original (Bamford, p. 171). Unfortunately, Bamford does not date this conversation, nor provide more to go on than that the song was popular during wartime (p. 169). Considering that ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ is the first in the cycle and seems to be the inspiration for subsequent works – as well as the lines, ‘Un’ aw’d ha’e a battle wi’ th’ French’ (Harland, 1865, p. 216), and ‘Oather French, Dutch, or Spanish, to me it’s o’ one’ (p. 219) – an origin dating to the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century would seem likely. The validity of Bamford’s account is drawn into question, however, by James Henry Dixon’s assertion in 1846 that it is ‘a composition of the last century’ and ‘It is the oldest Lancashire song the editor has been able to procure, as well as one of the most popular’ (p. 217). Dixon’s account would then place ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ in the eighteenth century and Robert Bell’s 1857 collection likewise confirms the earlier date (pp. 212–13). Considering the earliest surviving broadsides date from 1796 and the multiple conflicts between England and France preceding the Napoleonic era, as well as the allusion to the Dutch, a late eighteenth-century origin is likely, although unverifiable.

Provenance of ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ is likewise a murky affair. Surveying Harland’s collection reveals that Higson collected the song from ‘an old hand-loom weaver at Droylsden’ and that:

It was written just after the battle of Waterloo, when times were bad, and hand-loom weavers’ wages fell from about £3 to a guinea or 25s. a week – i.e., for three or four days’ work, for then weavers could seldom be induced to work on Monday, Tuesday, or often on Wednesday, these days being devoted to recreations procured with high wages. (1865, p. 223)

This would place the ballad circa 1815, which is corroborated by Lloyd’s claim that it had been circulating since circa 1810 (p. 324), but the extant broadsides are from the mid-century. Much is uncertain and incomplete about the history of the Jone o’ Grinfilt cycle, but what is clear is that each collector and their publications further mediate and reform modern understandings of the work.

Another common process of reforming these pieces includes separating them from the full family of songs bearing Jone’s name, which is interrelated to ignoring their status as popular songs of the working classes. More recent collections do not even recognise a relationship between these two songs or that there were others in the cycle, another clear instance of immediacy. A close reading of ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ helps explain why the song was popular enough to survive, while other songs faded from history. First, even if it were written before the Napoleonic Wars, the theme of enlisting to fight against the French would have held currency in the context of eighteenth-century wars, or indeed, any war against France. Additionally, the inclusions of figures like Nan or Madge also introduce personal relationships, allowing Jone or other labourers to be seen as individuals, and not just in terms of their work. The text of the individual song does not note which trade Jone is in, allowing it to appeal to the widest working-class audience. The text might also have remained relevant because it reveals the struggles of the working classes, which increased exponentially with the rise of industrialisation, and which are reflected in the desire of the Jone character to leave his work in Greenfield for a better life elsewhere. The song’s popularity in comparison to other ballads in the cycle is arguably a result of its transferability. For example, the very topical ‘Jone o’ Greenfeelt’s Ramble in Search of th’ Green Bag’, which references the trial of Queen Caroline, or ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Visit to Mr. Fielden’ (about petitioning John Fielden, the MP for Oldham, about the new Poor Law), would have been more difficult to repurpose beyond their original contexts (Harland, 1865, pp. 227–31). However, the subject of going to war might have also hindered the popularity of ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ in the mid-nineteenth century and onward as more workers grew disgruntled with their working conditions and sought songs that reflected their current struggles and resulted in the increased popularity of ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’.

In examining ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ there is an obvious difference from other ballads in the Jone o’ Grinfilt cycle. The closest comparison is ‘Visit to Mr. Fielden’, but despite similar content, the tone clearly sets them apart. Even compared to ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’, ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ is more personal, with its use of first person, and bitter in expression. While the latter song continues the theme of leaving the trade to pursue better fortunes, it also depicts the disparities between the speaker and others higher in social status, such as the parson, the landlord, the factory owner, and even the king. Repeatedly, the speaker directly addresses the listener with particularly aggrieved lines such as, ‘Yo’d think it wur hard, to be sent into th’ ward | To clem un’ do best ’ot yo’ con’ and ‘Aw’m tellin’ yo’ true, aw con foind foak enoo, | Thot’re livin’ no better nur me’ (Harland, 1865, p. 224). Harland’s version of the text is made even more personal with the alteration of the pronouns in the second stanza. In more recent collections, the line is ‘We should have better times if we’d hold our tongues’ (Hollingworth, p. 11), but Harland’s version is, ‘We’st see better toimes, if aw’d but howd my tung’ (Harland, 1865, p. 224). Dialect translations aside, the change from the older first-person singular, ‘aw’d/my’ to the more modern first-person plural, ‘we’d/our’, might suggest that many weavers identified with the sentiments and that not only the legendary Jone dared to speak out against their working conditions. Based on the rise of the various labour movements, the idea of solidarity certainly has historical precedence, especially considering its origins in the early 1800s, through the Lancashire Cotton Famine starting in 1861 and its impact on weavers. Additionally, the second edition of the collection adds that ‘This ballad is still a favourite in many parts of Lancashire; and the three last lines have become “house-hold words”’ (Harland, 1875, p. 172), demonstrating that the song accurately captured their experiences and sentiments. While, again, little is certain about these pieces, reconstructing the available context of these works demonstrates how the repeated processes of remediation erode fundamental features of the cycle including tone and performative significance.

Between music and media

Untangling the mediation of the musical elements of these songs is likewise challenging. In his publication of a notated musical arrangement for ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’, Kidson notes that ‘This is the most famous of old Lancashire songs’ and that, ‘Many Lancashire singers will be glad to see the song with its original tune, sent me by the late Dr. Watson’ (1926, pp. 94–5). There are no further sources that validate Kidson’s claim that this is the original melody, although Dr Henry Watson was a self-trained musician and teacher whose collection of music now forms the Henry Watson Music Library in Manchester. Kidson’s version, however, presents the melody with an arranged accompaniment by Moffatt, and alters the text to remove the dialect. His use of Western musical notation is also incapable of rendering vocal timbre and inflection, or indeed, any other interpretive elements, such as the way a performer might emphasise or change certain words, act out scenes for dramatic effect, or make alterations to better suit their vocal abilities.

Lloyd’s later conflation of melody and text taken from Kidson’s A Garland of English Folk-Songs further muddles the picture. The metre and rhyme scheme of both songs are nearly identical; meaning either could match the melody. Even assuming that Lloyd is correct and both ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ and ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ were sung to almost identical melodies, issues remain. In Lloyd’s version using text from ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’, the basic melody is the same with only rhythms slightly altered to match the text; however, of concern is the penultimate note. Lloyd writes this as an F-natural, which falls outside of the key signature, as opposed to Kidson’s F-sharp. While a seemingly minor alteration (and potentially a misprint on Lloyd’s part as there are no other alterations to the key signature), the F-natural alters how the melody is understood. As a chromatic note, its use eschews the expected Western tonal harmony of a leading tone to tonic in the cadence, and instead suggests a tradition outside of tonal harmony, such as an old folk tradition or another antiquated style.³ In combination with the text, either F-natural or F-sharp would make logical sense. The song might be a popular old tune, borrowed for the new text or, if created together with it, composed to seem older than it was. Such an alteration might also be a result of imperfect transcription practices, leaving collectors unable to accurately notate what they heard, or due to changes as the melody was orally transmitted from person to person. While it is impossible to know where the alteration originated, Kidson’s version was published in 1926 and is referenced by Lloyd as the original, so based on what is known, the penultimate note is more likely to be an F-sharp and fall within standard Western tonal harmony.

Note discrepancies aside, there is still the issue of whether the same melody was used for both texts. It is certainly possible that the melody was so popular it was re-used; however, it seems much better suited to ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ than ‘Owdham Weyver’. The 3/4 time signature is lilting and its liveliness is supported by the cheerful major key. The melodic contour gently rises and falls, the range spans just over an octave, and the climax in the penultimate line is prepared by the increased rhythmic activity of the only triplet. The effect created is one of confidence and a bit of aplomb, better matching Jone’s bold decision to leave weaving and turn soldier in ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’, rather than the bitterness and angst depicted in the text of ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’. That there were unique melodies for each text is also supported by modern recordings of ‘Four Loom Weaver’ by multiple artists, including folk revivalist Ewan MacColl. Although some sections are omitted, the remaining text is very similar to ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’, but is sung to a lamenting, minor melody that is more appropriate for the ballad. Furthermore, recent recordings of ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ maintain Kidson’s melody, for example the 2014 version by Laura Smyth and Ted Kemp. Again, unfortunately, no answer is certain, but these issues further reveal the mediation inherent in these works, through collection, transcription, and elimination of context, and how this mediation impacts how they are studied.

Kidson’s and Lloyd’s publications demonstrate that for Victorian folk song hunters, collecting was an inherently mediated practice. Without the luxury of modern recording technology, collectors transcribed the oral songs they heard into standard Western musical notation. Although this provided an approximation of the song, notation was and remains unable to capture all the subtle nuances of a fully realised performance. Collectors were influenced by their own musical expectations and models, and thus they would frequently alter what they heard so that it adhered to their idea of ‘pure’ folk song. Indeed, as Georgina Boyes argues, many collectors set out to collect songs because they believed that they represented true English culture but had ‘fallen into unreliable hands. The Folk, it was authoritatively maintained, had imperilled the existence of their own culture’ (p. 63). Due to the ideology behind the motivations of many collectors, as well as the limited technology of the times, any song collected was mediated in some way.

Songs of the industrial working classes faced even further mediation by collectors due to the prevailing belief that they were not true folk songs. Folklorist Maud Karpeles notes that only songs used to ‘directly assist in the performance of the particular work with which they are associated’ are classified as work-songs, and that of these, the shanty, ‘is practically the only work-song that has survived’ in England, although she later acknowledges that ‘there are other forms of work-songs in Scotland, for example the Gaelic waulking songs, and it is possible that there were formerly other types in England’ (pp. 62–3). Karpeles’s lack of discussion of what she, in contrast, terms ‘occupation-songs’, or the songs used by workers for entertainment and expression, speaks to the belief that only work-songs are valid for inclusion as folk songs and consequently, occupation-songs were not worth collecting (p. 61). Boyes notes a similar view: ‘Folk culture hadn’t simply proved incapable of transference into a new urban context, an irreplaceable loss had almost occurred because the Folk had been wilfully derelict in their duty towards their culture’ (p. 63). Not only are occupational songs not considered to be true folk songs but folk songs could not exist in industrialised spaces.

That is not to say that all folklorists took this approach, but to note the prevailing attitude towards the songs used and created by the working classes. Even authors supporting their inclusion, such as Lloyd, have similar reservations. Although Lloyd states that ‘industrial folk songs’ are ‘a kind of folksong that, far from being destroyed by the industrial revolution, was actually created by its conditions’, he notes in the following paragraph: ‘An anxious query arises: “This so-called industrial folksong, is it authentic?”’ (p. 317). While Lloyd includes and provides commentary on some of the songs, it is important to note that he was one of few to do so, and his work on industrial folk songs was one of his most significant contributions to the field. With the exception of Lloyd, in many cases weaver’s songs were simply not recognised as folk songs and therefore were not considered worth the effort of collecting. What has been viewed as worthy of preservation was again heavily mediated by the collectors and their views.

Additionally, as noted in the examples by Karpeles and Lloyd cited earlier, the labels associated with weavers’ songs are not consistent, making their contextualisation even more difficult. Scholars might attempt to place these pieces in a specific genre – for example, folk song, popular song, occupation-song or work-song – but all labels vary depending on who is applying them. More problematic, songs might also be labelled as ‘traditional’, suggesting authenticity, while further obscuring how our understanding has been shaped through the practices of mediation and what is actually known about the pieces. For example, in Hollingworth’s collection, both ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ and ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ are labelled as traditional, and short, summarised notes on his sources are placed separately at the back of the collection. These sources in turn took the songs from other collections, which contain more of their history than Hollingworth includes. Hollingworth’s versions are not unique in obscuring what was known of the work’s provenance, and it seems that no published version in fact contains all the known information; however, recognition of what the genre label might obscure helps bring into question the immediacy inherent in many presentations of these works.

On the one hand, European history and its scholars place a primacy on written traditions, and in many cases this primacy has remained unquestioned. The dominance of the written has resulted in the idea that first, oral forms were not worthy of study and second, that even if they were, they should be studied as if they were written forms. On the other hand, singing was frequently a group activity, fostering and reinforcing a sense of community, and songs were transmitted from person to person. As illustrated in the above anecdote about the man from Oldham, a song’s transmission might be further increased by a travelling performer, who peddled popular songs from town to town. The oral medium highlights aspects of community musicking related to ‘what people actually do and value in music, particularly in the context of performance’ (Finnegan, p. 125).

Because of their existence in between orality and literacy, one more reliable way to examine these pieces is through their intermedial qualities. According to Rajewsky, in a broad sense, ‘intermediality may serve foremost as a generic term for all those phenomena that (as indicated by the prefix inter) in some way take place between media’ and those ‘configurations which have to do with a crossing of borders’ (p. 46). While these songs originated in the oral realm, subsequent attempts at preservation in various textual mediums, and the transfer back into performed song through broadsides, place the songs in Rajewsky’s intermedial space. As Finnegan remarks, oral and written modes are not ‘two mutually exclusive and opposed processes for representing and communicating information […] they mutually interact and affect each other, and the relations between them are problematic rather than self-evident’ (p. 175). More pertinent is Rajewsky’s claim that intermediality ‘analyses individual instances in terms of their specificity, taking into account historically changing possibilities for the functionalization of intermedial practices’, as well as her subcategory of ‘medial transposition’ in which ‘the intermedial quality has to do with the way in which a media product comes into being, i.e., with the transformation of a given media product […] into another medium’ (p. 51). Working-class songs exist in this transpositional space and the ways in which they have been subjected to intermedial practices shape our modern understanding of their fundamental nature. Furthermore, within the shifting transmission methods of songs like ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’, the changes between each medium need to be situated historically because they demonstrate the values being supported by the medial transposition.

Recognising the intermediality of working-class songs means rethinking the common analysis of them as poems or texts, which ignores their musical, social and historical contexts. While songs such as ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ were also printed as broadsides for dissemination, no transcription could accurately capture the nuances of live performance. Many elements have undoubtedly been lost in written transmission, including original melodies, regional dialects, idiosyncratic singing practices, and interactions between singer and audience, although these very elements gave the creators, performers and listeners agency and opportunities to express themselves as individuals. Finally, even if disseminated in a written form, additional oral performance could introduce variations, as individuals made the piece their own through their personal interpretations or created unintentional alterations during performance. Understanding these works is not as simple as understanding their original settings, because their history as in-between objects is difficult to trace and frequently negotiated by others with their own agendas. In conjunction with acknowledging mediation, theories of intermediality help explain the liminal position of working-class songs and how their collection, classification, and subsequent removal from original contexts further manipulates how these songs are interpreted today.

Reclaiming music at the margins

Songs such as ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ and ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ become marginal in history not only by means of class and cultural exclusion but also due to their intermedial existence as song and text, placing them in a liminal space between the modern fields of literature and music. Due to their genesis as songs used by the working class, they have been mediated by folk-song hunters through their collection decisions and scholars through their classifications. Although the two songs are sometimes called ‘traditional’, this label further mediates them and obscures what is known about them. Discussing working-class songs within their contexts is vital because without the context, the original, although sometimes unknown, creators and users are deprived of their voices. Recognition of these factors, however, allows the voices of Jone and the nameless others who sang about him to begin to be heard in these mediated melodies.

Notes

1. 1.  Both also appear to have been sung to the same melody. As broadside ballads frequently set new text over existing songs, reusing a melody was not uncommon; however, there are some discrepancies with these songs, as discussed later in this chapter. Additionally, because the printed broadsides often became part of oral traditions, there are many variations on names and spellings in collections. ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’s Ramble’ is Roud 1460 and ‘Th’ Owdham Weyver’ (also called ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt Junior’) is Roud 937.

2. 2.  ‘Slbber’ is written as ‘stubber’ in Harland’s recounting of Bamford’s writing. It appears that ‘stubber’ is a less common variant of ‘slubber’, which refers to a job of preparing cotton for spinning in a textile mill. The name likely comes from slubs or imperfections in fabric whose job it was for the workers to pick out.

3. 3.  Common practice tonal harmony only came into widespread use after 1600, gradually replacing the church modes and influencing local and regional traditions. For one perspective on harmony in medieval and Renaissance music, particularly in relation to poetry, see Pattison (1970).

Works cited

• Bamford, Samuel, Walks in South Lancashire and on Its Borders (Blackley, Manchester: n. pub., 1844).
• Bell, Robert, Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (London: John W. Parker, 1857).
• Bintley, Dorothy, ‘The Higson Papers’, Bulletin of the Saddleworth Historical Society, 31, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 11–12.
• Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
• Boyes, Georgina, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (New York: Manchester University Press, 1993).
• Brooks, Joanna, Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
• Dixon, James Henry, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, Taken Down from Oral Recitation, and Transcribed from Private Manuscripts, Rare Broadsides and Scarce Publications (London: Percy Society, 1846).
• Finnegan, Ruth, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
• Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).
• Harland, John, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire, Chiefly Older than the 19th Century (London: Whittaker & Co., 1865).
• Harland, John, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire, Ancient and Modern, second edition, ed. Thomas Turner Wilkinson (London: G. Routledge and L.C. Gent, 1875).
• Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester City Council, ‘Brief History’. https://secure.manchester.gov.uk/info/447/rare_books_and_collections/7386/henry_watson_music_library.
• Hollingworth, Brian (ed.), Songs of the People: Lancashire Dialect Poetry of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).
• Karpeles, Maud, An Introduction to English Folk Song (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).
• Kidson, Frank and Alfred Moffat, A Garland of English Folk-Songs: Being a Collection of Sixty Folk-Songs (London: Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew, 1926).
• Lambert, Howard, ‘Notes on the Ancestry and Life of Charles Higson’, Bulletin of the Saddleworth Historical Society, 31, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 13–16.
• Lloyd, A.L., Folk Song in England (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
• Pattison, Bruce, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance, second edition (London: Methuen, 1970).
• Rajewsky, Irina O., ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermediality, 6 (Autumn 2005), pp. 43–64.
• Roud Indexes, Vaughn Williams Memorial Library. https://archives.vwml.org/#/search/roud.
• Smyth, Laura and Ted Kemp, ‘Joan O’Grinfield’ (Track 5), The Charcoal Black and the Bonny Grey (Broken Token Records, 2014, MP3).