Sam Larner - Biography
By J Poet
Sam Larner only made one recording in his life, but his presentation of traditional a cappella ballads and sea chanties - virile, humorous, bawdy and larger than life - made him a major influence on Britain’s folk revival of the late 50s and early 60s. His one recording, Now Is the Time for Fishing: Songs and Speech by Sam Larner of Winterton, England (1961 Folkways, 1999 Topic UK) encapsulated the life of a working fisherman who was at sea before fishing ships had engines. Many of the songs he remembered became staples of the folk repertoire both in England and the United States. He’s a true folk singer, and from the reports of those who saw him live during the folk revival years, including Martin Carthy, he was a natural performer who could move a crowd to tears and laughter.
Larner was born in 1878 in Winterton, Norfolk and went to sea when he was eight. At 12 he was a cabin boy, learning songs from his father and other fishermen. From the age of 9 he was singing on the streets and as a young man at fishermen’s concerts along the west coast of England during fishing season. Although performing was a regular part of his life and he was well known in fishing towns, the rest of the world didn’t catch up with him until Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl recorded him in 1959, when Sam was 81.
Seeger and MacColl were documenting tradition songs as sung by working class Britons. Over the course of three weeks they recorded 30 hours of Larner talking about his live, love, work, politics, religion, old age, death and his life at sea. They also got three hours of folk songs, many of them bout the sea and fishing. MacColl used Larner’s singing as the basis for his own song “Shoals of Herring” and the radio-ballad Singing the Fishing (1966 Topic), which included Larner singing and talking about his life as a fisherman. Larner became a popular folk performer in the last years of his life, weaving together tall tales, stories of his life and the traditional song he knew. He died in 1965. Now Is the Time for Fishing (1961 Folkways, 1999 Topic UK) has been frequently reissued, but sadly without and of the additional material MacColl and Seeger recorded.
