Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Charles Parker, The Big Hewer, 1967

This radio ballad about British coal miners was first broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1961; the picture depicts the album cover of the first vinyl pressing by Argo Records in 1967. The Big Hewer was devised and curated by folk musicians and activists Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and by BBC radio producer Charles Parker, using oral testimony from miners of the Durham, Northumberland, Glamorgan and Nottinghamshire coalfields. Radio ballads were a new form and a milestone in radio broadcast, in which the narrative comprised the actual words of participants from many hours of field recording, constructed by splicing quarter-inch tape by hand. These were interspersed with songs written by MacColl, inspired by the miners, then orchestrated by Seeger and performed by folk and orchestral musicians. The Big Hewer was the fourth in a series of eight radio ballads made between 1958 and 1961, each about a different aspect or way of British life, which also included fishing, boxing, teenagers, and the tale of Stockport steam-locomotive driver John Axon, whose act of heroism at work had cost him his life [1]. Coal mining was natural territory for MacColl and Seeger, who had both worked as songwriters for the National Coal Board film department, although the focus became very much about the experience of men who were miners, rather than coal miningper se. In an era of Received Pronunciation at the BBC, and well before the miners ’ strike of the 1980s, it would...
Source: Occupational Medicine - Category: Respiratory Medicine Source Type: research