John Brun, 1926–2001
Anatol Johannes Brun was born into a Jewish family in Austria, and came to Britain as a teenage refugee shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He became a naturalised British citizen on 19th July 1948, at which point he was recorded as a student of Forestry living at Dartington in Devon. Advertisements in The Bookseller show John’s father Theodore Brun based in Museum Street, London WC1 (24th September 1949) and in Fulwood Place, London WC1 (10th July 1954), putting out “limited de luxe editions” of specialist books; and later (9th February 1957) offering litho printing services from Eyre Street Hill, London EC1. A contributor to the Mudcat forum in 2012 recalled that “John and his father ran a printshop some where near Holborn, the place stank of the Old Holborn Tobacco factory nearby. It was above the Chiappa fairground organ repairers which would occasionally start playing to brighten our day. I met John at a club some where, probably the York and Albion and I started working in his printshop”1.
According to Reg Hall, Brun discovered folk music when he was working on the land2. He performed at London folk clubs (according to Sing magazine in 1962, he was one of the residents at the Topical and Traditional Folk Club which met in Camden on a Sunday night), and he wrote his own songs. In terms of traditional singers he took a particular interest in gypsy and traveller musicians. Reg Hall recalls that “He was on close personal terms with Davy Stewart and his family when they were living in south London, and it was he who introduced the Stewarts of Blairgowrie to Ewan MacColl”, and he spent time with Minty, Levi and Jasper Smith. In around 1965 he recorded Jasper talking about the gypsy way of life, as well as singing and playing dance tunes on the mouth organ. Brun’s recordings of Jasper Smith can be accessed through the VWML Archive catalogue, as part of the Ken Stubbs collection, at https://archives.vwml.org/records/KS/20. Songs recorded by Brune – in Kent, but also in Shropshire and Perthshire – were included in the “Songs of the Travelling People” chapter of Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (Cassell, 1975). Although he is not credited directly, Brune was probably also responsible for writing the introduction to that chapter.
John Brune was the author of several books, either self-published or put out by small publishers. These included: the autobiographical Years of the wingless Pegasus; Heaven’s Breath is Good: How Language was Sculpted, billed as Part One in a Series on Comparative Linguistics; Shoestrings & the bottom drawer, another book on comparative linguistics, co-written with his father Theodore; The rocks of Baun, 1889-1989, described as “an epic novel”; and Resonant rubbish, published by the English Folk Dance & Song Society in 1975. He also edited In the life of a Romany gypsy, written by Kent-born Romany Gypsy Manfri Frederick Wood (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
While Wood was grateful for his help in bringing his book to publication, and Brune would no doubt have seen himself as a champion of Romany culture, his writings have not escaped scholarly criticism. In her PhD theses on English Gypsy singing, Denise Savage writes
John Brune’s contribution [to Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland] entitled ‘Songs of the Travelling People’ provides the opportunity to observe the ethnocentric collector at work. The philosophy that collectors should develop cultural awareness and empathy with informants to enable the observer, with certain limitations, to discern and distinguish within the boundaries of a particular culture, was evidently not shared by Brune. The commentary which accompanies the song transcriptions indicates that Brune is both uninformed and unsympathetic to the culture he has undertaken to study. He provides the reader with stereotypical and evaluative accounts which are both fruitless and a discredit to folksong collectors:
“whereas a traditional hand-carved, brightly painted wooden gipsy caravan with some well groomed horses and a group of handsome, brightly dressed gipsies doing a traditional Job rarely offended anyone, a group of dirty people pulled on to a field with their ramshackle vehicles and trailer caravans surrounded by an assortment of rusty old bicycle frames, car bodies, prams, bedsprings and other garbage is a different matter”
Paragraphs such as this lead the reader to conclude that Brune is unaware that scrap-dealing is, indeed, a traditional Gypsy occupation and conforms to the typically Gypsy tendency to fill in gaps that appear in the economy of the sedentary population. Further, that Brune is also unaware that Gypsies are most likely to have pulled on to a field because, at the time of publication, over one-third of the Gypsy population had no legal stopping place or camp-site. due to the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. This apparent lack: of empathy and cultural awareness is, unfortunately, carried over to the descriptive accounts of both singer and song:
“the voice of the singer is modified by acute bronchitis which has undoubtedly been brought on by Travellers living in over-heated caravans which they will come into and go out of in their shirt-sleeves in all weathers”
The first ten words may be accurate but the reader is subjected to his irrelevant qualifying statement. The songs are equally qualified with Brune’s own personal reference points. His observations are coloured by his value judgement. He is selective, contradictory and dismissive. Useful information is discarded because it does not conform to his preconceived models:
“Many singers tend to add simple decoration to insipid tunes… some of the best known travelling singers deviate from the general gipsy style of singing in one or more details”. Brune offers the reader no definition or detail, nor who are regarded as the best known singers, nor who regard them as such.3
Steve Roud corresponded with Brune towards the end of his life, regarding the existence of a second volume of a publication titled The Roving Songster (Brune had put out two song collections with this title, the second of which was labelled as Volume 1; criticism of that book by Hamish Henderson meant that Volume 2 was never produced). Roud wrote
As with several others that I have met from his generation, John was quite bitter about what he saw as other people getting credit for his work. Much of our phone conversation was devoted to this topic. It was he, he claimed, who discovered the ‘Stewarts of Blair’ and told Maurice Fleming, Henderson, MacColl, etc. about them, but they froze him out. It was he who wrote the introduction to the chapter on ‘The Travelling People’ in Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland, and so on.
With regard to Brune’s collecting work
Sometime after he died, his widow contacted Reg Hall and me to ask if we wanted his ‘folk’ materials, and we went to see her. There were a few books and LPs, which I bought, and a shoebox with six C90 cassettes. I asked her about his original tapes, but she knew nothing of them, and there was no written documentation, photographs, etc.
The cassettes turn out to be copies of his originals, as is shown by a voice (not John’s) which declares things like ‘here is the end of spool 3’. So unless the original tapes turn up somewhere, these cassettes seem to constitute what remains of the ‘John Brune collection’. They will eventually be donated to a public repository.
As with many ‘collectors’ of his generation, these tapes are not a well-organised sequential record of recording sessions, but seemingly random bits and pieces, often dubbed from other tapes, starting and stopping abruptly. There’s John’s father singing in Yiddish(?). a family child singing nursery rhymes, various tracks of revival singers (not, I think, dubbed from records), but amongst it all is a fair amount of traditional singing and talking – mainly from Scots Travellers, but some English as well.
As I say, there is no documentation beyond a few scraps of paper slipped into the tape boxes, but a fair amount comes from Davy Stewart and other members of the Stewart Family. They are clearly at ease with him, and are friendly and co-operative. Indeed, there is a song sung by one of the Stewart women which mentions him coming to record them, as well as Ewan and Peggy. There is also the well-known interview with Jasper Smith from which Reg used some tracks for Voice of the People (another copy of which is in the Ken Stubbs collection).4
Reporting Brune’s death, in April 2001, Reg Hall noted
He had recently published a volume of his memoirs for private circulation, containing accounts of his political work on behalf of the Traveller community, with various song texts and references to people like Joe Heaney.5
A copy of this memoir does not appear to have made its way into the holdings of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
- Contribution by “Guest WOCKO” to the thread “John Brune FolkSong collector”, 18 February 2012, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=103839 ↩︎
- Reg Hall, Musical Traditions website, 18 April 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/news22.htm ↩︎
- Denis Savage, English Gypsy Singing ((Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London, 1989), pp18-21. Available from https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/7672/1/English_Gypsy_singing.pdf ↩︎
- Letter from Steve Roud, reproduced on the Mudcat forum, 18 November 2018, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=103839#3962222 ↩︎
- Reg Hall, Musical Traditions website, 18 April 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/news22.htm ↩︎
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