J Cunningham

Roy Nevitt, co-founder of The Living Archive Project and Director of nearly all the community musical documentary dramas for which J composed songs, writes:

J Cunningham is one of the most brilliant, prolific and reliable song-writers who, as a teacher at Stantonbury Campus, where the large-scale musical documentary plays originated, was in exactly the right place at the right time.  His unmistakable style, original and full of surprises and delights, readily adapted to the needs of the plays; and the structure of his songs was all the stronger because of his capacity to absorb and apply the insights about traditional folk song forms that we all gained from the master classes given us by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in the lead-up to the production of All Change!’, our story of early Wolverton.

‘All Change!’ came about following a commission given me on the strength of the success of ‘The Burston School Strike’, created at Stantonbury in 1975.  ‘Burston’ wasn’t a local story and the music was not original.  The events depicted had taken place in Norfolk and the music was either traditional folk song, church hymns or songs, like ‘The Red Flag’ or ‘England Arise’, political anthems which our primary sources told us were sung by the protagonists, as part of the actual historical events.  Most of the research material for ‘Burston’ had been given me by Bert Edwards, whose generous support of the production was a gift beyond measure.

On our own for our first local musical documentary play, ‘All Change!’, we reached out to Peter Cheeseman and learned from him about the effective collection and dramatisation of local primary source materials; and to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger who taught us how to create the kind of music they made for their famous Radio Ballads, a form of song-writing and musical composition that would exactly suit the needs dictated to us by our collected material.  The music had to be woven into the fabric of the script so that dialogue gave way to song in ways that enriched and enhanced the on-going narrative.  J’s crowning achievement in ‘All Change!’ was ‘The Wolverton Refreshment Room’, what I call an accumulation song that proved to be the perfect instrument for fusing the documentary source material captured in glorious musical form with the choreographed mis-en-scene.  The song was a joyful gift to a director wanting to round off the first half of the play and send the audience off to the interval on a high!

Whether working solo or in collaboration with the creative team of musicians whose work provided the oxygen in the life-blood that pulsed through the narrative of the documentaries, J produced songs that were always disciplined, sharp, fresh, witty and unforgettable.  His lyrics and his tunes always worked together to move the tale forward;  they arrested the audience that had been concentrating hard on spoken words and physical action, refreshed their brains by entertaining them in the different reality of music, before delivering them, re-energised, back into the daylight of the following scene.

J is still active and recently responded to a request for a new song for the ‘Homage to Geoff Cooksey’ that took place in Stantonbury Campus Theatre earlier this year.  I just sent him some documentary source material about Geoff’s life which he used to trigger all his own thoughts and feelings about that great pioneering educator.  He turned up on the night, tuned his guitar and sang a song that did full justice to the occasion and brought back floods of memories of his musical and lyrical input into a whole string of documentary plays that flourished at Stantonbury over two decades and became one of the raisons d’être of the Living Archive Project, now known simply as Living Archive.

Roy Nevitt 29^th October 2012

J’s story…

I learnt the piano up the age of fifteen, and sang in school choirs. At home I listened to easy classics, like Chopin, Mozart and Strauss waltzes, but from around the age of twelve I started to appreciate opera, having been taken to Glyndebourne by my headmaster. At the same time I took up the guitar. I heard that my parents were planning to give my brother a guitar for Christmas and begged for one too. It was the era of Joan Baez, Dylan and the Beatles. I never had the organization or drive to set up a rock group, and stuck to American folk – Kingston Trio, Rambling Jack Elliot, Leadbelly and Dylan above all. Some of Dylan’s and Baez’s songs were traditional British. Around the time I started writing my own songs, I came across Joni Mitchell, but never realised how much of her stuff was based on open tuning, so was frustrated in my efforts to cover her songs. However she gave me the confidence that I could write about my own experiences. I sang in folk clubs and became more interested in British traditional music, especially ballads. However I disliked the purist attitude in some of the clubs, where diminished chords or changes of key were looked down as being ‘untraditional’. After university, I was travelling in North and Central America and Japan. During this time, I wrote about seventy songs, most of them pretty unmemorable but some of them all right enough to continue singing. I arrived in Milton Keynes in 1976 to teach at Stantonbury Campus.

It was exciting to come across Roy Nevitt who wanted people to write songs for ‘All Change!’ the first major community drama production. In the first workshop I met Paul Clark, and we struck up a song-writing and a broader friendship that has lasted to today. Roy organised a song-writing workshop led by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who taught us a number of folk forms which would have the effect of taking the drama action forward, or commenting on it. They told us that this is the distinction between a Brechtian approach and a typical American musical, where the dialogue stops, and there is an awkward pause before the cast break into song.  I related this to the best opera, where the music is inseparable from the drama.

MacColl and Seeger were the architects of the purist folk school that I had disliked when younger: folk music was an expression of class consciousness. I remember how Paul brought to the workshop a very lyrical song about McConnell, the notable railway engineer who designed the Bloomer engine. MacColl slated it as an effete ‘cowboy song’, and made Paul re-write it in a more solidly proletarian style. I sang it on the original recording. Nevertheless, MacColl and Seeger taught me a lot. One technique I learnt was the ‘building song’ which gets longer as you go through, like The Twelve Days of Christmas. I used this for the first song I wrote for All Change! – The Wolverton Refreshment Room. The refrain for each verse builds on the previous one, to give the impression of the full range of servants in the nation’s first railway buffet. I nicked the opening section of the tune from a comic folk song called ‘Sixteen Marrow Bones‘.  I also used this building technique for The Khaki Train Song in Days of Pride – about the ambulance train built in Wolverton in the First World War.

Looking back at these and other songs I wrote for the community dramas, I can detect a music hall tone. As I had no music hall records, I guess this might have come from listening to Sunday afternoon radio programmes like The Billy Cotton Band Show or watching Norman Wisdom films. The patter song Honourable Frauds in All Change! and Eastbourne in The Jovial Priest seem to belong in this tradition.

After five years of rather introverted song-writing, it was liberating to be given some documents and told to turn them into a song. I have some of these documents and a letter from Roy asking me for a song about the sewing room in the Wolverton Works to be completed in about two days. He specifies what needs to be in each verse.

I have never had one approach to writing songs: sometimes the words come before the tune and sometimes the other way round; more often it is a mixture, a back-and-forwards process –  a snatch of tune which summons up a phrase, then a matching or contrasting phrase that leads to a bit of tune. It is obvious when I listen to the songs again that I liked the challenge of putting in a lot of syllables: for example ‘Seven very young ladies to wait upon you all’ sounds funnier and more prim to me than ‘seven fair young ladies’, which is what it was later altered to, to make it easier to sing. ‘This interfering gentleman by the name of Robert Stephenson’ is a mouthful even when speaking slowly. I greatly admire Paul Clark’s ability to find a wonderful tune and then craft the perfect lyrics to match it: songs like The Valley of the Shadow from Days of Pride and Letters Home from Sheltered Lives.

Although I left the Milton Keynes area in 1983, eventually settling in Oxford and working as a head teacher, it has been a pleasure to hear some of my songs in revived productions and interpreted by the Living Archive Band, with far better voices and accompaniments than I could manage. One proud moment was when The Wolverton Refreshment Room was performed for the opening of Milton Keynes Central station[1]. I have continued to write songs mostly in the singer/songwriter tradition and I have recorded CDs for family and friends.  In my forties I took up the cello and play chamber and orchestral music. However I have never had quite as much as fun with music as I did in Stantonbury days.