The Manchester Rambler

In his biographer Ben Harker's view, "It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which MacColl was shaped by the 1930s."^[5] MacColl was a keen rambler, travelling out of Manchester by bus into the Peak District, like thousands of other young unemployed people with time on their hands. For MacColl, rambling was integral to his politics; he did not simply find nature beautiful and the urban world ugly: instead, it was an objective of the hoped-for revolution:^[5]

to create a world that would harmonize with that other one that you enjoyed so much... If the bourgeoisie had had any sense at all they would never have allowed the working class into that kind of countryside. Because it bred a spirit of revolt.^[5]

Groups of ramblers often sang songs such as "I'm Happy When I'm Hiking", as well as bawdy songs, ballads and radical American protest songs at their camps. MacColl published the "Manchester Youth Song" in 1933, singing of "Workers in Cheetham, who slave every day / In waterproof factories at starvation pay".^[5] He also wrote the song "Mass Trespass 1932", setting words like "For the mass trespass is the only way there is / To gain access to the mountains once again" to the old Scottish tune of "The Road to the Isles". His friends used to sing it as they rambled in the hills.^[5]

Folk song

"The Manchester Rambler", written in 1932 not long after the Kinder trespass and inspired by that event, was MacColl's first important song, according to Harker,^[3] who argues that it "marks a departure from the [singer's] leaden-footed and slogan-heavy juvenilia".^[5] It is also the first song that still survives for which he wrote the melody as well as the lyrics. Its swinging, jaunty melody demonstrates MacColl's ability to combine musical forms and popular rhythms to create a song which is at once familiar and unique. Like the melody, the lyrics are witty and playful. They put out a defiant political message with "I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday". MacColl plays with and updates traditional English folksong phraseology with "I once loved a maid, a spot-welder by trade / She was fair as the Rowan in bloom". The lyrics are suitably comical on the confrontation between the ramblers and the gamekeepers in the style of musical theatre, argues Harker, with lines such as "He called me a louse and said 'Think of the grouse'".^[5][6] The song has 5 verses, each of 8 lines, and a 4-line chorus.^[6]

The song names the following places:

"The Manchester Rambler" is published by Green Linnet on MacColl's 1986 CD Black and White: The Definitive Collection, also released by Cooking Vinyl; the recording lasts 4 minutes 42 seconds, and MacColl is assisted on vocals by his wife, the folk singer Peggy Seeger.^[7]

Reception and influence

Ben Harker said of "The Manchester Rambler" that:

Rambler is the song where it all comes together. He'd written these rather earnest agitprop pieces prior to that, but in Rambler, he manages to pull together a political perspective with a more lyrical style... It crystallises his songwriting and that's the first time it happens.^[3]

MacColl performed the song as a standard all his life.^[5] Cover versions were performed and recorded by dozens of folk musicians from the 1950s onwards,^[5] including by The Dubliners on Alive Alive-O^[8] and 30 Years A-Greying.^[9] Kirsty MacColl (daughter of Ewan) covered the song on her 1991 album The One And Only,^[10] while Casey Neill covered it on his eponymous album in 1999.^[11] The Houghton Weavers covered it on their 1978 album Sit Thi Deawn,^[12] and in 2005 Mick Groves of The Spinners performed it on his album Fellow Journeyman.^[13] Patterson Jordan Dipper covered it on their album Flat Earth in 2010,^[14] and Danny and Mary O'Leary covered it in 2014.^[15]

The

The comedian and folk singer Mike Harding, in The Guardian, wrote that:

When I was a young lad walking in the hills for the first time, camping out on the Pots and Pans stone on Saddleworth Moor, getting the last bus back from Hayfield, crawling up Jack's Rake, in Langdale, we sang that song and meant every word of it.^[18]

Harding, who was running a Manchester folk club on Sunday nights at that time,^[18] said:

on those nights the lobby would be choked with the rucksacks of the people who had just come off the hill and were looking forward to a night of beer and songs... Most nights in the pub we would sing the Manchester Rambler, only too aware that it was people like Rothman and Stephenson who had fought to get the hills opened up for us. We knew that Rothman had gone to jail for walking on Kinder Scout during the mass trespass in 1932.^[18]

The song was sung at

• List of socialist songs
• The Happy Wanderer
• Wandervogel

References