BOB FOX spent almost three years working as Song Man on the National Theatre’s production of War Horse, singing excerpts from a variety of old and new music created in the English folk tradition.
The production was a culmination of all Fox had worked on over the past 40 years as a folk singer working the folk club circuit (originally in England since the ’70s, but eventually all around the world) and he was instantly attracted to the storytelling theme of War Horse.
“I’ve spent all of my time singing songs that tell stories and all of a sudden I had the opportunity to almost be in one of the songs that I sing.Song Man ( in War Horse) is used in two main ways: in order to show how time passes and he’s also used to make impossible things happen. So when things are being expected of the horse, for example, that are impossible, then the power of the songs and the community coming together to sing the song are the things that make the impossible happen,” explained Fox in a Skype interview from the North of England.
His latest show – An Evening with the War Horse Song Man, Bob Fox– is a production that draws on the same kind of music, just more of it: “Because my real work is as a folk singer, I thought it was a very worthwhile project to sing a series of concerts where I sang all of the songs in their full versions, with all of the verses, and give a bit of background to the songs and why and how they were used in the play,” said Fox.
Since War Horse used only nine songs, that wasn’t enough for a full concert, so Fox added other traditional songs from his native North East England “where there was a lot of coal mining”, drawing on the various projects he has worked on over the years like the BBC’s Radio Ballads project and The Pitmen Poets.
While Fox is the first generation of his family not to go underground and work in a coal mine, he still sings about his family experiences, and also collects contemporary folk songs: “I’m not a writer, I’m an interpreter of songs. I collect songs that have been written now about the same kinds of things.”
Whereas his parents’ generation sang about localised events and experiences, today’s folk songs that he collects often reflect the complete breakdown of local industries and also what happens in the rest of the world: “Because communication is so much better now, we know about things that are happening in other parts of the world and songwriters are influenced by that.
“Originally, the folk-singing idea was the way that you gave out the news. People would write a song about something that had happened, someone who travelled around would sing the song somewhere else and that’s how people from other areas would find out what was happening. It was the newspaper of the day.”
For An Evening with the War Horse Song Man, Bob Fox, he accompanies himself on stage with his guitar, but will also bring out the squeeze box he learnt to play for War Horse as well as a newly recorded cd that reflects the songs of the show.
l An Evening with the War Horse Song Man, Bob Fox is on at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre from tomorrow to Sept 6 and then moves to Cape Town at Theatre on the Bay from Sep 8 to 12.