Sydney Carter

The composer of Lord Of The Dance, his life was a musical journey in search of an unconventional God

Paul Oestreicher

The Guardian, Wednesday 17 March 2004

The songwriter Sydney Carter, who has died aged 88, achieved the remarkable feat of composing two of the five most popular songs sung in assemblies in British schools. In 1996, a survey of the copyright work most commonly requested for use in collective worship put his One More Step in first place, with his possibly more famous Lord Of The Dance at number five.
Sydney wrote Lord Of The Dance in 1963, as an adaptation of the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, which features in Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring. Later, he said that he saw Christ as “the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ, I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other lords of the dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.”

Lord Of The Dance will continue to be sung worldwide long after its author is forgotten. To live on through his songs will indeed fulfil Sydney’s dreams.

Sydney was a folk poet, a holy sceptic and an iconoclastic theologian – that last description would both bemuse and please him – in the amateur tradition of the folk movement, deconstructing the theology of the academic establishment and bringing it to life. He played a leading role in the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, and it was then that he wrote most of his songs, composed both to please and to shock. Life, as he embraced it, was for dancing.

From start to finish, he was a Londoner. He was born in Camden Town, and imbibed old English songs at Montem Street school in Islington. He loved community singing and later, as a bluecoat boy at Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, West Sussex, he enjoyed the hymns in chapel – every day, and twice on Sunday. But he loved visits with his father to the Finsbury Park Empire just as much.

In the mid-1930s, Sydney read history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he also started to write poetry and dreamt of becoming a painter or film producer. After graduation, however, he ended up teaching at Frensham Heights school, in Farnham, Surrey – along with the novelist Rex Warner – until 1940.

With the second world war, his critical spirit and abhorrence of violence led him into the Friends Ambulance Unit, with which he served in the Middle East, and, in 1944, in Greece, along with a stim ulating group of pacifists, including Donald Swann (obituary, March 25 1994). If any church could come to holding Sydney’s allegiance, it was the Society of Friends, with its rejection of dogma, and its reliance on personal experience and social activ-ism, and its affirmation of God’s presence in every human being.

After the war, folk music, both sacred and secular, took Sydney over. Much influenced by what he had heard in Greece, he studied its many forms; then, in 1952, he started writing lyrics for Swann, who needed revue material. “I found out that I could do that,” Sydney said, “and get paid for it.”

He launched what proved to be a long collaboration by providing lyrics for Swann’s composition The Youth Of The Heart, which featured in the Globe Revue in London’s West End. In the mid-1950s, he was the lyricist on Swann’s children’s musical, Lucy And The Hunter.

I was a BBC producer when, in 1960, Sydney wrote his most controversial song, Friday Morning. I believe it was also one of the most profound. In it, the robber, crucified with Jesus, cries out:

It was on a Friday morning that they took me from my cell
And I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate, you can blame it on the Jews,
You can blame it on the Devil, it’s God I accuse.
It’s God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me,
I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.

Classic theology says that it was God, but Sydney lets the irony stand. In this, as in the following stanzas, he piles on the guilt, piles it on to God. It leads to the deepest of all questions: is God in Auschwitz or the Twin Towers, the killer or the victim? If there is a God? I had to fight the BBC management to get that song on the air. A brave, liberal head of religious broadcasting was my ally. Today, the fear of a backlash would be far greater.

In 1962, Carter teamed up with Sheila Hancock for the album Putting Out The Dustbin, one track of which, Last Cigarette, on failing to give up smoking, became a minor hit. The songs on the LP were closer to cabaret than to folk, but the pacifist, political singer was there even then. In 1964, the Donald Swann EP, Songs Of Faith And Doubt, comprised six songs by Carter. In the 1960s too, he worked as a critic for Gramophone magazine.

But it was in 1965 that Sydney recorded his greatest success, the six-song EP, Lord Of The Dance, with Martin Carthy on guitar, the Johnny Scott Trio and the Mike Sammes singers. In the sleeve note, he cautions purchasers about the religious content, in case they should be misled by such earlier songs as Down Below and My Last Cigarette.

Sydney treasured those who brought his texts to life, the whole folk scene, Carthy perhaps most of all, and singers like Nadia Cattouse. And they loved him. Across the years, many other musicians recorded his work, among them the Swingle Singers, Bob and Carole Pegg, Maddy Prior and Sarah-Jane Morris. His anti-war lullaby, Crow On The Cradle, was recorded in 1962 by Judy Collins, and, 17 years later, performed by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Lindley at a No Nukes concert. It turned out to be an unexpected success; Warner Brothers bought the US rights and, many years later, Sydney was amazed to receive £9,000 in royalties.

With irony – though never with bitterness – Sydney satirised every form of self-righteous faith; to be without doubt was, to him, the ultimate in godless pride. In two books, The Rock Of Doubt (1978) and Dance In The Dark (1980), he set out the signposts of his journey in aphorisms, a journey through the holiness of humanity.

“Bibles, legends, history are signposts: they are pointing to the future, not the past. Do not embrace the past or it will turn into an idol.” Jesus was central to his experience, but not, in his words, “the official Jesus – but the Jesus who is calling you to liberty, to the breaking of all idols including the idol which he himself has become.”

Your holy hearsay is not evidence
Give me the good news in the present tense …
So shut the Bible up and show me how
The Christ you talk about is living now.

Tall as he was, his head in the clouds and his feet firmly on the ground, there was a lot of dance left in Sydney when he came to my 60th birthday party in 1991 with Donald Swann. They sang their hearts out with The Bird Of Heaven: “Follow where the bird has gone./ If you want to find him, keep on travelling on.”

When, in 1999 the mists of Alzheimer’s disease began to close in, Sydney’s second wife, Leela, lovingly cared for him and interpreted him to others. The past gradually receded into the strange land of lost memory. His friend Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote that now “our only contact is a thin thread of memory and his songs. I start singing them, and he joyfully joins in – and I leave him as he continues singing.”

More than 30 years ago, Sydney had written his own epitaph:

Coming and going by the dance, I see
That what I am not is a part of me.
Dancing is all that I can ever trust,
The dance is all I am, the rest is dust.
I will believe my bones and live by what
Will go on dancing when my bones are not.

Leela survives him, as does their son Michael, a neurosurgeon.

· Sydney Bertram Carter, poet, songwriter and folk musician, born May 6 1915; died March 13 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/mar/17/guardianobituaries.religion