I took another small step towards sorting my things today, in preparation for the possibility of our moving house. My wife had asked the unsurprising question of whether I really still need the four drawers of cassette tapes which have sat under our hi-fi set for several years. I took her point!
Clearly in several instances she was absolutely right. I decided, however, that several items there still merited a place, largely for sentimental reasons. I make no apology for keeping a record of interviews I did for the BBC during the Yugoslav crisis. I am not yet ready to chuck the tapes of Yugoslav folk music which sustained me in my bed-sit in Belgrade in 1969. One cassette, however, really grabbed my attention.
In my undergraduate years at Leicester, in the early 60s, the mixture of students was interesting one. Several of the intake were returnees from National Service. (I was in the first cohort to escape this burden.) Two of my colleagues stood out for their extra maturity and poise …. Terry Johnson and Roy Bailey. They both, like me, went on to academic careers in sociology.* Roy’s trajectory, however, was quite unique, in that he doubled his academic persona with that of a folk-singer, in which he achieved greater eminence than he did as a sociologist. One of my newly-discovered tapes was of Roy’s singing.
I have to admit that I had not appreciated until today the quality of his work. He had a voice of enormous character which absolutely commanded attention. In addition to this I understand that he wrote his own material, which had great emotional depth. Clearly Roy stood firmly on there political left, but he managed to reach beyond the images and language which came to characterise “protest music”.
Roy’s tape is for sure one of the collection I will not be throwing away. The songs of Zvonko Bogdan also will stay in my collection, although for rather different reasons!
*In Terry’s case he made a distinguished career as a writer on the professions and professionalisation.