Working Songs – Roy Palmer

'Working Songs', the first book on folk music from Roy Palmer for some time, is a history of industrial folk song from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution through to the end of the Miners' Strike, 1984. As with all of Roy's writing, his new book weaves together both first hand testimony and original song, and lifts his work above mere historical facts to bring the past to life.

For over two hundred years, strikers, Luddites, Chartists, and Unionists fought to champion better pay and conditions and their songs were often their only legacy. In songs that were both bitter and powerful, to the sound of the strike of the hammer, the rattle of the looms, and the roar of the furnace, they provided a glimpse of life on the factory floor, in the weaving shed, or down the mine.

'The noise of the machinery of weaving is a monotonous roar so loud that you can’t hear your own voice even if you shout. Sometimes all the weavers sang in unison. It was just possible to hear the high notes above the roar of the machinery'.

William Holt of Todmorden, a weaver in 1910 at the age of thirteen.

Herron Publishing 2010