Salut! Live

August 22 2024 update:  Norma Waterson is the Salut! Live Facebook group Artist of the Week 

Andrew Curry writes: In among the comments on our recent piece on Anne Briggs, reader Chris Brady reminded us that Derrick Knight’s 1966 documentary about the Watersons, Travelling for a Living, is available free on the BFI Player.

Knight was an independent film-maker years before Channel 4 made that a thing, and Travelling for a Living follows the Watersons—at that time Norma, Mike, Lal, and their second cousin John Harrison—as they go about their work, performing, rehearsing, recording (with Bill Leader at Topic) and organising their schedule with their booker, Roy Guest.

Roy Guest is keen to spell out the Watersons’ credentials as singers of traditional songs whose “roots are in the working class”, and he is “suspicious of pop-folk” performers such as Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan.

By chance, the programme was shown on BBC2, at a time when the UK had three television channels, four days after Dylan’s “Judas” concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.

But although the Watersons became folk royalty, they were brought up with their grandmother’s music hall and parlour songs.

The Waterson siblings shared a house in Hull, with Norma and Lal living on the ground floor, and Mike and his wife Ann living on the first floor. John Harrison was living with his mother on the other side of Hull.

This is the line-up that had recorded Frost and Fire the previous year, and they were making enough money from it to make a living. The film makes something of the fact that Harrison has given up “a white collar job” to be in the group.

They could have earned more, but they chose to perform only one week in every two, mostly in folk clubs. This allowed them time to do other things, but might also have had something to do with the fact that Mike and Anne had a small baby.

(Lal, John, Mike, and Norma. Photo by Brian Shuel/ Topic Records).

Travelling for a Living opens and closes in the van. At the start of the film they are bickering about whether they are going to stop somewhere or drive through the rain straight back to Hull, as Norma, the eldest, hands out cigarettes. She was 26 at the time, already separated from her first husband, and clearly managing the group.

Being on the road wasn’t that much fun. One week, they have a string of dates across London’s suburbia—Potter’s Bar, Surbiton, Chesham—but with an appearance at the Albert Hall (possibly at the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s 1966 Festival). The next time out, they are closer to home, in Halifax and Sheffield, so will be able to get home after their gigs.

As Lal says,

On the road, you’re living in suspended time... you’re never sure where you’re going to stay.

In the clubs, there was a tradition that the organisers would make sure you had somewhere to stay, but it didn’t always work out, so they kept a mattress and blankets in the van.

Back in Hull, we see the Gateshead singer Louis Killen arrive at the house in his VW Beetle. Anne Briggs, seen momentarily, is already there in Mike’s front room. Killen is there to sing at the folk club the Watersons’s ran above a pub in Hull, where he was something of a regular.

The film also has some social interest—the almost complete lack of cars on the streets, for example, and the smoke-filled bars, mark it as a different age—but it stands and falls on its performances. These are uniformly excellent, from Hal-an-Tow to The North Country Maid, to The Bonny Ship The Diamond. There’s also an impromptu duet between Killen and Mike Waterson of a whaling song in the Hull Maritime Museum.

It’s also a reminder of how much of an impact the Watersons close part singing had on traditional music, sometimes with Harrison adding a bit of guitar, perhaps because they hadn’t been brought up in it.

The BFI also has some notes on the shooting style. It’s not quite D.A. Pennebaker style verité, since there is a narrator, but Derrick Knight is definitely travelling light enough to get close to the action:

This film is influenced by innovative French and American techniques: shooting on location with a lightweight easily moveable 16mm camera, avoiding artificial lighting and capturing sound in synch with picture.

You can watch it here.