CULTURE has been a vital element of all classes and cultures throughout humanity. With the development of the working class or proletariat came into being a musical and artistic expression which reflected the character of their existence and was able to express their concerns, highlight injustices against them, as well as find ways to bring their kin closer together through art, culture, or music and song.

Within the 19th century cultural voices and institutions began to emerge, in the form of choirs like Clarion, brass bands, and other groups. Many of these were born out of employers finding a creative outlet for their workers – particularly common among the collieries. Others were born out of cultural outreach from religious institutions like the Methodist church or the Salvation Army. Though this had a creative and cultural benefit, but because of its connection to employers or the church, anti-establishment or general radicalism was likely squashed.

With the birth of the Labour Party, discussions of how culture could be used by the workers began to become more popularised. William Morris’s discussions are quite fascinating as you can see where the concerns and worries were – that working people should have nice things at home, that culture and art are ways to enrich our lives, that bourgeois appreciation of art as art will push art into something only enjoyed by collectors and not by humans.

With the turn of the 20th century there was a push by numerous individuals and groups to find ways to take the creative tools that working-class people had developed and use them as an avenue to galvanise the working class to be more militant.

This quite a particularly curious period as figures like Edward Carpenter, Hanns Eisler, Ethel Smyth, Alan Bush, Rutland Boughton and numerous others began to come to the foreground. This was also accompanied by the formation of groups like the London Labour Choral Union, Workers’ Music Association and Clarion Singers to name a few.

From the ’50s onwards, workers’ songs fell by the wayside as pop music and all its sub-genres from R’n’B to Death Metal and Dubstep fell into the hands of capitalism despite many groups continuing to come from working-class backgrounds.

Today, workers’ music is a bit of a niche, which I feel is a real shame – as there are so many things we could learn. Throughout November, once a week I will focus on a figure or two and discuss their life, and show off a song that deserves particular mention.

I will look at arguably the most famous workers’ songs – Jim Connell’s Red Flag and Eugene Pottier’s Internationale. Pierre de Geyter who turned the Interationale into song, and The White Cockade, the originally intended melody for the Red Flag, was a pub song then put to use to improve workers’ lives.

Ethel Smyth was a militant suffragist, imprisoned for her militancy, and much like  Carpenter or Morris was born into a middle-class life but committed her life to fighting for the advancement of women in society.

The “Karl Marx of music,” Hanns Eisler, was a composer who utilised numerous idioms to help fight for the working class in Germany and internationally by writing propaganda songs with Bertolt Brecht.

A personal favourite of mine is the Pitman Poet, Tommy Armstrong. A man who wrote poems and songs expressing life in the coalfields – discussing things from the silly like Hedgehog Pie, mourning the loss in a mining accident like Trimdon Grange, or singing about the noble efforts of striking pitmen across north-east England.

Then there is Paul Robeson, a man who promoted workers’ songs in numerous languages and from numerous cultures including the Yiddish partisan song Zog nit Keynmol, the Chinese March of the Volunteers, the Polish Warszawianka, Joe Hill, and the Peatbog Soldiers.

The hope is these sessions could help rejuvenate interest in this tradition, but there is also a hope a to create a workers’ choir in the west of Scotland. These sessions are open to everyone and so I really hope you can come join us – hope to see you there!

For more information visit: facebook.com/UniteCommunityScotland