I can do a very good impersonation of someone humming badly to the Internationale. Singing is a gift that never got delivered to me. I've always envied those who can conjure up rattling tunes and defiant lyrics at the drop of a whiskey. This is why people like Janey Buchan make me feel terrible. Janey is an ex-communist, former Scottish Labour MEP and a woman with more songs in her head than most of us will have thoughts. She doesn't just know Scottish and Irish political songs, but can quote freely from American folk to Italian opera. She spent a lifetime fighting and singing, singing and fighting with her husband Norman, who died 10 years ago. As her political activity waned, she decided to donate her collection of records, lyric sheets and music paraphernalia to Glasgow Caledonian University, which created the world's first Centre for Political Song. "I never planned it. Then I never planned retirement. It was never a collection, just what people gave to us or we picked up. People sent them to me. When the archivist came round first we were pulling boxes out from under beds," says Buchan.
Her parents came to Glasgow because a Catholic mother and a Protestant father couldn't live a peaceful life together in Belfast.
For much of the last century, Scotland's largest city was a centre for left-wing radicalism. The shipyards and heavy industry workshops bred workers angry at their conditions.
For Buchan this meant a childhood split between the church and the political meeting. Singing was the mainstay of both, so she fed on lyrics from an early age. "All political movements have their songs. They are a brilliant way of getting people excited and making political slogans popular."
The politics of Ireland and Scotland are littered with songs, which often last longer than the struggle, so that their sentiments slip into sentimentality. Yet few people have systematically studied political music before. Janey Buchan has a hundred instances of why this should change.
Take Johnny I Hardly Knew You, a republican song exhausted by lounge bar bands. Yet in the hands of Cambridge students it became a rallying cry for the left in the Spanish Civil War. The students slipped "to lift the ban on arms for Spain" into their version, and so out of the mouths of privileged sons came republican sentiments for a movement far removed from Ireland.
Stranger still in Portugal. The British Royal Marines Marching Band's recording of Land of Hope and Glory would hardly be anyone's idea of a revolutionary song. Yet when the state radio studio was overrun in the 1973 Portuguese anti-fascist revolution, the freedom fighters found they ran out of rousing things to say and looked for a record to play. The Royal Marines' record was first to hand. It played repeatedly while Salazar's regime was dismantled, and so became the signature tune of the Portuguese left. Then there are the anti-nuclear campaigners who picketed the submarine base at Holy Loch in Scotland. As with many good protest songs, the new lyrics w ere written to old tunes. The tunes they chose were those of the Orange marching bands, so the left-wing protesters would parade down streets taunting the largely Protestant police and members of the middleclass with familiar sounds made radical. More recently, prisoners from camps in Kosovo sang George Michael songs on their release, while Amnesty International reports that Chinese political prisoners sing as they walk to their execution.
Janey Buchan may be an old communist, but she is no Stalinist. "We want songs from left and right, from all sections of the political spectrum," she says. Nor does she just want tunes banged out on old guitars. The collection already contains Broadway musicals that slipped in anti-segregation lyrics and Verdi operas that were adopted by Italian anti-fascists in the second World War.
Inspired by an academic who has released boxed sets of records and books covering American protest songs of the 20th century, Buchan has asked Faber and Faber to issue similar sets for Britain and Ireland. She hopes Seamus Heaney might edit the collections and write about the link between the rhythms of the songs and the people.
"We have yet to start methodically on Ireland and that will surely swamp us," she says with obvious glee. She leaves with one final tantalising tale. I long ago wrote off Finian's Rainbow as a schmaltzy piece of Hollywood Oirish. It turns out this was the first musical with a mixed race chorus line and socialist lyrics.
Give Janey a call if you've a song or tale to tell. I'm off to practise the Internationale.
Further information from Caroline Cochrane, Development Officer. Tel: 00 44 (0)141 331 8453. e-mail: c.cochrane@gcal.ac.uk
