MUSIC – A CULTURAL VOICE FOR MINORITIES: Travellers

Subcultures are said by Paul Willis to be identifiable in four ways: rituals, dress, language and conflict with authority. For heavy metal, this would be stadium concerts, long hair, 'Gothic' language and drug use.

Resistance A central feature of the travellers' lives is conflict with authority in the form of bailiffs, police and other local officials ('The Moving-On Song'). This conflict is not only with the law but on an ideological level – concepts of property, territory and time, for example.

Identity The dominant discourse has a clear stereotype:

My mother said/ I never should/ play with the gypsies in the wood;

If I did,/ she would say,/ 'Naughty girl to run away.'

'Gypsies are portrayed as being immoral, as thieves and sex maniacs with wagons, earrings, bonfires, black curly hair and scars around the eyes. You can even go into Safeways and buy a Gypsy mask. It's the only ethnic group whose national dress is a Halloween mask.' (Ian Hancock, Romany). By association, this stereotype is often extended to Irish travellers ('tinkers') New Age convoys and 'tribes' like the Dongas.

Music Speech and song is central to Romany culture: laws are mostly oral and a quarter of Romanies are illiterate. Travellers' children still have no enforcable rights to education in Britain or America. None of Ewan MacColl's informants could read or write (Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland, 1977). 'From a musical point of view, the [Stewart] family is matriarchal, for the men hardly sing at all' (MacColl 1986).

Performance The Western aesthetic of inherent meaning and correspondence between composer->performer->listener and communicator->mediator->recipient has clear limitations.

Themes

1. Insider songs, often in Romany or macaronic, are usually slow and sung without accompaniment ('The Bramble Briar'); the dances are accompanied only by handclapping. However, there is no clear line between Romany and gorgio (non-Romany) songs. Travellers in Scotland (Jeannie Robertson, the Stewart family) have, for example, been among the most important transmitters of the big ballads, the 'muckle sangs'.
2. Songs, dances and instrumentals for outsiders: often upbeat and flamboyant.
3. Songs by sympathizers tend to be concerned with immediate needs and concerns, such as eviction. The mass murder of perhaps half a million rassenverfolgte Zigeuner (racially undesirable Gypsies) by the Nazis has passed largely unnoticed, even by Romanies themselves (but see "The Travellers Came to Redbridge")

Task: describe a current musical subculture in terms of its distinctive elements such as dress, territory and language. In what ways does it come into conflict with the dominant culture?

Go . Back to music culture.