Dick Gaughan’s extraordinary sense of timing offers a lesson in freedom, writes Cailean Gallagher.
Dick Gaughan at the Rätsche” in Geislingen/Steige, Germany, 2006′ Credit: Markus Großmann, WikiCommons
Dick Gaughan is a Leither who lives up to the old town’s motto: persevere. He reckons he drove a million and a half miles on the road to thousands of gigs across the world. “Making music always took priority over making a living, that’s the honest truth”, and it took its toll when a stroke put a stop to his performing. But despite his frailty and almost total blindness, he was back on stage in January for a Celtic Connections gig in his honour, and again on May 10th at ‘Rebellious Truth’ in partnership with Tradfest at the Traverse, in Edinburgh, to talk about his story and his songs.
Dick’s mother was raised in a Gaelic household in Lochaber, and his father emigrated to Scotland from an Irish household full of fiddle tunes and Fenian songs. Dick learned from them the art of changing song in the middle if a stranger came in. He picked up politics from his grandfather who drove lorries to Scotland and smuggled arms back into the war of independence. From his mother he learnt a resistance to rigid or ‘correct’ timing. When his father attempted to accompany her and keep her in time, she yelled, “the song has its own time, and it isn’t yours”. Following maternal form, Gaughan rarely sings lyrics in lockstep with his masterful accompaniments. He returned to this theme at various points as he shared memories from the first two decades of his freewheeling life as a folk singer, like his enchantment, one night in 1965 in a Cowgate pub, by a drummer who ignored the concept of bar lines but sustained a great cycle of rhythm:
There was none of the rigidity. Time was fluid. You can break it down any way you like. Conventionally you need to have a time signature, but time was flexible. When recently I’ve been asked what time a song is in, I’ve said “it’s in one”. There is no regularity to it at all. … Guitar and voice are two things that I could meld together, but not in what people regard as ‘correct timing’.
Like his music, Gaughan’s life was highly irregular. Some of his bands lasted for years and others managed just a single session. He recalled periods when life was like an endless party: “There was a lot of dope being smoked in Edinburgh at that time, not entirely unconnected with us”. Once he took a quarter ounce on stage in the Edinburgh Police Club. He avoided jail. He did not however avoid Thatcher’s ‘retraining programme’ for people on the dole, and was forced to train as a plumber in Plymouth. “I was a lousy plumber, a terrible plumber, I had absolutely no interest in being a plumber at all.” When he got a cup of molten lead down his leg, his work became music and music alone.
Everything Started with the Song
Musicianship demands irregularity and perseverance. Asked by host Lori Watson his advice for making a living from music, he said: “Preparation is the be all and end all. I would sing the song to myself endlessly, when I was wandering about. You have to know the song so well that you get beyond technique, so that you know it so well and what you’re going to do with it. The song might normally be in four four time, but if you know it well enough you can break it down to where its emphases and stresses come through.”
The theme returned again in answer to Watson’s question about how long it took to learn a ballad. “As long as it took”, he said. Whether performing or preparing, Dick Gaughan persistently refused to be tied down by time. The rejection of a rigid tempo brought to my mind E. P. Thompson’s timeless essay about the emergence of clock-based time management and discipline in the early industrial revolution, when the working class were faced with new systems of control that imposed working hours and minutes, and faced the choice that still divides the left: to make demands within the system of working hours and minutes, or to reject rigid time management to defend the freer life. Today, most unions are yet to appreciate the freedom relished by gig workers who are unconstrained by working time, even in the face of uncertain and irregular days and the need to persevere or fall into poverty. The established unions might take a lesson from Dick Gaughan and the “fierce flame of freedom that burns in our hearts”.
Two Different Kinds of Love Song
The tension between rigid and irregular time is one dilemma well-trodden by the folk whose work is song. Another is the question whether to appeal to the head or the heart. In 1979, after Gaughan released Handful of Earth, an album still revered across the folk world, he turned his musical focus from interpreting to engaging. In this part of his story, he hinted that traditional musicians had only ever interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it. In A Different Kind of Love Song Gaughan confronted the anti-communist culture of the Cold War in his own words. He articulated an ideology that saw class struggle and the fight for justice as an expression of love. He pleaded that people think again before blaming Russian folk for war. He lamented the sight of Nato’s warheads scarring the hills around Loch Long. And to those who asked why he sang about struggle and suffering, he explained that music should be no escape: “To help make the most people happy, I must make you even more sad and angry now”.
An argument can justify emotion, but it cannot generate emotion, and that is the heart of the second tension Gaughan described when he answered a question I asked him. Two great radical singers of the sixties, Pete Seegar and Phil Ochs, made two different kinds of music. Ochs was conscious of this difference and pointed to it in ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal’, his song that satirises Americans who back radical politics until revolutionaries break the law, communists join the union, or Puerto Ricans move next door:
I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the UN to be strong.
I go to all the Pete Seegar concerts;
He sure gets me singing those songs.
Gaughan himself released a song twenty years ago, ‘Whatever Happened’, that addressed something similar:
Whatever happened to those songs about getting back to the garden?
Whatever happened to ‘We shall overcome’?
Whatever happened to ‘1-2-3 what are we fighting for’?
When did you find yourself marching to the beat of the same old drum?
And so here was my question: Was the difference between Seeger’s softer, singalonga-socialism and the sharper revolutionary edge of Phil Ochs a conflict that impacted Dick at the time when both were on the folk scene? Who did he emulate more? Maybe I was hoping Dick would echo Phil Ochs’ teasing of the hippie types, who like to think of themselves as activists but would never put their lives on the line.
But Dick rejected the idea of any conflict, and instead pointed to the real problem, that revolutionaries can appeal to the intellect, but emotion carries the people. “There was not any conflict between Ochs and Seegar. Seegar thought that you needed to involve people directly.” Dick told a story, to make his point, about a gig with Pete Seegar in Denmark.
Pete started by singing ‘Michael, Row the Boat ashore’, a lively gospel all-join-in number with a kernel of a radical message, but hardly a song of the political left. (The recording on The Essential Pete Seeger will give you a sense of the happy-clappy atmosphere.) But although most of the Danish crowd didn’t understand English very well, and certainly didn’t understand the totality of it, they were all joining in by the second verse.
“If I did that people would piss themselves laughing”, Dick said. Indeed, the Traverse audience laughed at the image. It is hard to picture Gaughan strumming a guitar and leading a gospel singalong. But Dick ended with a lesson we need more than ever:
“There’s a place for singalong songs. It’s not what I do, but Pete was superb at it. Phil Ochs, on the other hand, his songs were more analytic and journalistic. That’s more like what I was doing. In his commentary, he did not go out of his way to get people to sing along. Pete was appealing to people on an emotional level. Phil was appealing to the intellect. But I didn’t think there was any conflict between them.”
Cailean Gallagher is the editor of the Scottish Left Review. He directs the Workers’ Observatory and lectures at the University of St Andrews.