Andrew Curry writes: It is May Day today, international workers’ day, and what better way to mark it here than with Ed Pickford’s song The Workers’ Song.
Pickford lives in County Durham, which is Salut! Folk’s favourite county in England, and as the son of a miner he has also written classic—and well-covered songs about the miners, such as Johnny Miner and The Pound A Week Rise. Unusually, Pickford is a songwriter who records his own material infrequently—he tends to wait for others to come along and play it. Fortunately over the years he has written plenty of songs that others want to sing.
According to that mine of fabulous folk music information Mainly Norfolk Tom Gilfellon—like Pickford, from the north-east of England—was the first person to release The Workers’ Song, on his 1976 LP In the middle of the tune. Liz Sobell adds harmonium. Appropriately the record was released on Topic Records, having been recorded in Tom’s kitchen by Topic’s Tony Engle.
All the same, the best-known version of the song is by the Scots singer Dick Gaughan, who recorded it on his fine album Handful of Earth in 1981. Gaughan wrote in the sleeve notes,
Ed Pickford always says what I want to say, but better then I could.
And the title of that LP is a phrase from the lyric of The Workers’ Song.
The Scots singer Jim Malcolm also recorded it, and there’s a connection here. I was reminded of The Workers’ Song because I was listening to Beth Malcolm’s record Folkmosis, which is her autobiographical story about finding herself coming home to the folk music she grew up with. She’s Jim’s daughter, and on Folkmosis there’s a short a capella version of The Workers Song. The story she tells on Folkmosis is that the pair of them were driving across Orkney in the dreich-est of dreich weather, with the cloud more or less sitting on the roof of the car, and Jim sang the song to her.
The list goes on: the young Scots singer Memphis Gerald has released it as a single recently—and maybe it also says something about our times that younger musicians such as Beth Malcolm and Memphis Gerald are recording the song. Rachel MacShane and the Cartographers have a good version on Topic’s 80th anniversary anthology. The Dropkick Murphys do a punk version.
The Workers’ Song at the Albert Hall
Pickford himself sings The Workers’ Song on The Hooky-Mat Project, in which a host of north-eastern musicians gathered to celebrate Pickford’s songs, and also sang it at the Albert Hall, prefaced with a joke about worklessness. The Pitman Poets—also from the north-east—do it as part of their set. Salut! Folk’s editor Colin Randall has written about the Pitmen Poets’ version here before, nominating it as his Song of the Year in 2022. He also seems to have had something to do with the band posting their version of the song on YouTube. There are many more cover versions, only some of which are online.
And when you read the lyrics of the chorus, you can see why the song attracts attention:
We’re the first ones to starve, we’re the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie in the sky
And we’re always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat’s about.
I don’t want to finish this piece without mentioning The Longest Johns, who have recorded the song in recent years and also used it for one of their Community Projects. The video of that project, in particular, seems like a good way to mark May Day.
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To read more about Ed Pickford on Salut! Folk see Colin’s two-part interview with him in our archive:
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