Local Anthems: How to Discover and Document Your Town's Unofficial Song
Every town has its own anthem. Not the one on the radio, but the one that gets sung at the back of the pub on a Friday, belted out from the terraces, or half-remembered at a wedding by three generations at once. These songs rarely appear in print. They survive in people's heads, on a scratched cassette in someone's loft, or in a chorus that only surfaces when the right crowd is in the room. Finding them takes patience, a decent recorder and a willingness to knock on doors. Here is how to go about it — and how to make sure the version you capture outlives the people who sang it.
What counts as a local anthem
Local anthems come in more shapes than most people expect. Yorkshire has "On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at"; Tyneside has "The Blaydon Races"; Salford claims Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town". Those are the famous ones. The songs you are looking for are the ones a few streets away from you, known to perhaps two hundred people and nobody else.
They tend to fall into a handful of groups:
- Terrace chants and football songs, including the ones with verses nobody outside the ground knows
- Industrial and trade union songs: mining, milling, shipbuilding, fishing, the last shift
- Songs written for a one-off event — a centenary, a cup run, a pit closure, a flood
- School, church and club songs, often with a comic second verse invented by pupils
- Comic songs about local characters, bus routes, landmarks, weather and rival towns
- Pub-band recordings and charity singles that sold a few hundred copies and vanished
Most of these were never commercially released. That means the only archive is memory, which is exactly why the job matters.
Start where the songs are still sung
Forget the internet for the first week. Go where people open their mouths: pubs with a singing tradition, working men's clubs, folk clubs, sea shanty nights, match-day pubs, church halls, care homes, allotment sheds, wedding receptions and wakes. The person you want is usually obvious once you are in the room — they are the one who starts a song without being asked, and everyone else joins in on the chorus.
Ask the publican, the club secretary, the band, the retired teacher, the local history society and the letters page of the local paper. One introduction usually leads to three more. Take notes even when the conversation drifts, because the drift is often where the song lives.
Questions that open people up
- "What did your dad sing when he'd had a couple?"
- "Was there a song about this street, this works, this team?"
- "Who always started the singing in here?"
- "What got sung at the Christmas do, or on the last day, or in assembly?"
- "Have you got anything on tape, in a drawer, on a cassette, in a photo album?"
Follow the paper trail
Once you have a title or a chorus line, the written record can be surprisingly rich. Your library's local studies section, the county record office and the newspaper archive on microfilm are the obvious starting points. A printed lyric in a local paper from 1911 often comes with the writer's name, which is a genuine find.
Folk song collections are worth checking too. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, run by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, holds manuscript collections from the great collectors, and many county archives hold similar material. Local history society journals, school log books, church magazines and old concert programmes all occasionally carry a set of words.
Do not ignore physical media. Second-hand record shops, charity shops and car boot sales turn up pub-band singles, cassette compilations and demo tapes that were never catalogued anywhere. Buy them when you see them.
Write the words down as they are sung, not as you think they ought to be sung.
Dialect, dropped letters and local pronunciation are the whole point. Tidying them up destroys the evidence.
Record it so it survives
A modern phone will do a perfectly good job if you treat it properly. Sit the singer in a carpeted room with curtains and soft furniture rather than a kitchen or a hall. Put the phone within a metre or so, slightly off to one side so you avoid plosives, and switch off the fridge, the boiler and the fan. Outside, shelter from wind, which ruins more recordings than distance does.
Record the spoken introduction first: date, place, the singer's full name, the name of the song, and where they learned it. That thirty seconds is worth more than any filename. Ask for the story behind the song afterwards, while the recorder is still running — why it was written, who sang it first, what changed in the words over the years.
Label everything sensibly, keep a written note of who gave permission, and back the files up in three separate places. One copy on a laptop is not an archive; it is a countdown. Save the original uncompressed file if you can, and only share compressed copies.
Get permission and give credit
Ask the performer before you record, and ask again before you publish or pass it on. Copyright in the words and music may belong to a writer or their estate, and a recording carries its own separate rights belonging to the performers. Traditional songs are usually free of copyright, but a particular arrangement may not be.
Name everyone involved, credit the source of every version, and note where you got it. If money, a commercial release or a paid public performance is involved, take proper advice from a solicitor or the relevant collecting society before you do anything.
Share it before it goes back in the drawer
A recording nobody can find is not much better than no recording at all. Donate a copy to the local library, museum or record office, with the paperwork. Put it online with a description that includes the town, the street and the names, because that is how people search. Offer it to local radio and to the local history society newsletter.
Then get it sung. Teach it to a community choir or a school. Print the words on a beer mat, a lyric sheet or a plaque with a code that leads to the recording. The surest form of preservation is a room full of people who know the chorus without needing the words.
Your first weekend: a simple plan
- Pick one song, not a whole repertoire. Something you have heard twice from different people.
- Ask three people who might know it, and record the conversations with their permission.
- Book a quiet hour in a soft-furnished room with the person who sings it best.
- Record it, capture the story, label the file and back it up three ways.
- Send a copy to the library or record office within the month, while you still remember the details.
- Sing it somewhere public before the year is out.
Do that with one song and you have already done more for your town's musical history than most people manage in a lifetime. Do it again next month and you have a collection. The songs were never written down because nobody thought they needed to be. That is precisely why somebody local has to start.
Photo: K / Pexels
