ARTIST: Dick Gaughan
TITLE: True and Bold
LABEL: Celtic Music
GENRE: Folk
SOURCE: CD
BITRATE: 176 kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 41:50
RELEASE DATE: 1986-00-00
RIP DATE: 2010-01-24
Track List
----------
1. Miner's Life Is Like A Sailor's 3:46
2. Schoolday's End 3:13
3. Farewell To 'Cotia 3:09
4. Auchengeigh Disaster 3:13
5. Pound A Week Rise 2:55
6. Collier Laddie 5:04
7. Which Side Are You On? 4:06
8. Drunk Rent Collecter 3:46
9. Blantyre Explosion 3:51
10. One Miner's Life 4:41
11. Ballad of '84 4:06
Release Notes:
"Towards the end of 1983 I was approached by Doug Harrison on behalf of the
Scottish Trades Union Congress to see if I would be interested in making a
record of songs from the Scottish Mining communities. He was concerned at the
fact that at Union congresses he would often sing songs, particularly songs
about mining, and find that the very people these songs were about had never
heard of them and he wanted to do something to help restore these songs back to
the communities they had come from. I agreed wholeheartedly and we began to plan
the recordings and list of songs to be included. Then at the beginning of 1984 I
had serious voice problems which put me out of action for 7 months.
Two months later, in March 84, the National Union of Mineworkers called a
national strike against the closure of coal mines and we were into a year of
very hard struggle. There was a massive propaganda battle going on with the
press and media lined up on the side of the Government and there were many
artists who aligned themselves on the side of the miners. I have never
subscribed to the rather silly notion that artists should be impartial and I
took a completely partisan position behind the NUM. Human beings are not robots
and I have never met a human yet who was actually impartial about anything - we
all have feelings, views and opinions and these influence what we do. Objective
reporting is not the job of artists; we describe the universe as we see it,
complete with our prejudices and opinions.
Like many other musicians and singers, I spent much of that year doing concerts
all over the country to raise money and support for the NUM. But I also believe
that singing songs is not in itself enough - if I was to effectively put the
miners' case and claim to speak on their behalf then I had to play as full a
part in their struggle as I could so that I could then fully understand their
views and represent those properly in concert. So, for most of that year, I was
Chair of the Leith Miners' Support Group which involved spending Saturdays
collecting food and money in Leith and then delivering this to the Lothian
Central Strike Committee at Dalkeith. In the process, I made many friendships
which remain precious to me.
And I saw part of the role of "folk" musicians as being to reintroduce the
mining communities we became involved with to the wealth of songs and
traditional culture which were rightly theirs. And we were able to do this, not
by taking an evangelical approach but by getting out there and fighting on their
side. They were able to clearly see that here were musicians taking an openly
combative stance in their support and singing songs which were about them and
people like them. So they listened and within a few months people who would
never have dreamed of setting foot in a Folk Club were enthusiastically joining
in with singing songs they had never known existed but which they found actually
voiced their experiences and feelings - because circumstances had restored these
songs to contemporary relevance and they were no longer merely antiquarian
relics of some bygone age.
And, paradoxically, many folksong-loving conservatives who the previous year
would have quite cheerfully sung that quaint old ditty, "Blackleg Miner", were
suddenly forced to confront the unpalatable fact that what they had always
regarded as a harmless little song about some far-off past events was in reality
a venomous attack on scab labour and that it was now impossible to sing it
without that being interpreted as a thunderous declaration of support for the
NUM."
www.dickgaughan.co.uk