Chants for Socialists

Nineteenth-century England was a highly musical culture, with folk music, street ballads, music hall songs, orchestral music, operas, art songs, and of course religious music: oratorios, choral compositions, chants, and hymns. Secular groups such as the Positivists and socialists similarly attempted to draw on the emotive and communal aspects of music, seeking to evoke feelings of solidarity, confidence, and commitment within these new traditions. Although socialists could rely to some extent on songs from prior Romantic and Chartist antecedents, many more were needed for communal and celebratory events, and these also required updated messages.

Although chiefly viewed as a visual artist, throughout his life Morris maintained an interest in older musical forms, and his narrative poems incorporate inset songs, ballads, and overtly musical passages. It is thus fitting that, in later life, as a political activist Morris composed several lyrics designed explicitly for the nascent socialist movement of the 1880’s. These Chants for Socialists (1885, 1887) aim to create for a contemporary secular audience some of the effects of religious and traditional music—a sense of belonging, the evocation of past ideals, and a vision of future redress for grievances.

In his study of socialist and Labourite songbooks from 1888 to 1914, Chris Waters has found that of the fourteen most common titles, no fewer than four were by Morris, with two by Fabian Edith Nesbit and eight other authors contributing one apiece.[1] Of the Morris selections, the most frequently reprinted was “The March of the Workers,” which Morris had written for the second issue of the Socialist League Commonweal, followed by “The Voice of Toil,” “All for the Cause,” and “Come, Comrades, Come” (printed in Chants as “Down Among the Dead Men”).[2] And among socialists “No Master” was a clear favorite, with labor historian Stephen Williams finding 24 notices in Justice of occasions on which this had been sung at SDF meetings between 1885 and 1899 alone.[3]

 Elizabeth C. Miller reports that during its ten-year existence from 1885 to 1894, Commonweal published 309 poems, most of these during the period of Morris’s editorship from 1885-1890. Of these nearly a quarter were songs,[4] which she notes were used to open Socialist League meetings, sung during collections, and used at League concerts and entertainments.[5] According to Andrew Haywood, large political meetings commonly included a solo performance by a talented member as well as mass singing; “[m]usic did not just play a role as entertainment, in the early socialist movement; it provided the opportunity for an exercise in comradeship in performance and could be directly inspirational.”[6] Furthermore, the Socialist League and its Hammersmith Branch each sponsored their own choirs, and later in the 1890s, when the Hammersmith Branch left the Socialist League to form the Hammersmith Socialist Society, the latter continued an active choir, at first organized by Morris’s daughter May. This choir was then later conducted by the then-youthful Gustav Holst (afterwards the distinguished composer of The Planets and many other works), who would set five of Morris’s poems to music and dedicate the first movement of his “Cotswold Symphony” to the latter’s memory.[7]

An important issue in selecting songs was that of obtaining suitable accompaniments. Socialist songs were often sung to familiar tunes, but fitting lyrics to appropriate melodies was difficult, and in some cases, meanings associated with the original lyrics could compete with the new version. Morris designed “The March of the Workers” to be sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” (“The Battle Song of the Republic”), an appropriate choice for its associations with a martyred abolitionist. The musical accompaniments for several other Morris socialist lyrics are also known: “No Master,” first sung to “The Hardy Norseman’s Home of Yore,” was later arranged for a tune by the noted German composer Ludwig Spohr, and “Alfred Linnell: A Death Song” was set to music by contemporary song-writer Malcolm Lawson (1849-1918), remembered for his arrangements of “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond” and other popular melodies. “The Voice of Toil” was fitted to Robert Burns’s “Ye Banks and Braes,” “All for the Cause” to an unnamed “English air,” and “Come, Comrades, Come” comically reworked a familiar drinking song, “Down Among the Dead Men.”[8]

Socialist songs resemble hymns in their appeal to a shared eschatology, metaphysics, and interpretation of history, as well as their call for dedication to an ethical ideal. Morris may have chosen the term “chants” rather than “songs” to reflect the collective, public nature of these works; like the choral plain-song and chants of his High Church youth, such music was intended to express an organized, shared, and long-term commitment. Elizabeth Helsinger has noted a paradoxical feature of the songs’ prominent and propulsive rhythms—their use of meter to embody the order and control necessary for a successful and non-violent workers’ movement: “The chants attempt to negotiate a delicate balance, a meta-rhythm, their tone and semantic messages encouraging a certain detachment even as their rhythms urge immediate participation.”[9] This detachment enables Morris’s narrator to project a double and blended voice: that of a commentator (perhaps of the middle-classes) and of an immiserated  revolutionary worker-craftsman.

This broader voice also reflects Morris’s own complex identifications, both as a humanitarian desiring the social well-being of the less fortunate, and as a craftsman-designer who bonded across class boundaries with his fellow laborers. Despite their disparate occupations, nationalities, ideologies, and respective positions in a capitalist hierarchy, Morris’s socialist songs enjoin his audience to identify as workers in a two-tiered system in which some labor and others benefit, and more positively, to affirm their own place within this class system as a vantage point for renewal and resistance.

In 1926, socialist George Lansbury commissioned baritone John Goss (1894-1953), alias “Rufus (`Red’) John,” to record three of the “Chants,” and the lyrics were reprinted in the Labour Weekly and gathered in Lansbury’s Sixteen Songs for Sixpence (c. 1926). In 2015, British songwriter/alternative composer Darren Hayman performed his adaptations of ten of Morris’s “Chants” (including “May Day 1894,” included in the 1915 edition of Chants bound with The Pilgrims of Hope). These were preserved on vinyl records as well as CDs, with the latter available for free download (see https://chantsforsocialists.blogspot.com/ ). More recently, the London-based Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir, led by director John Hamilton, gave a concert at the William Morris House in London on May 31st, 2025, at which Darren Hayman sang his haunting adaptation of “No Master,” I offered background remarks, and the choir sang the “Chants.” A video of the occasion, filmed and edited by Martin Smith, has been posted on the You Tube site of the Strawberry Thieves Choir, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBlIFJs7LM&t=1049s.

[1] Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914, Stanford U P, 1990, 109.

[2] Waters, 110.

[3] Other instances of the singing of “No Master” were reported in Commonweal (July 1885; August 1885; 1 December 1888; 8 December 1888) and the West London Observer (15 April 1894).

[4] Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, Stanford UP, 2013.

[5] Miller, Slow Print, 197.

[6] Andrew Haywood, “Gustav Holst, William Morris and the Socialist Movement,” Journal of the William Morris Society 11.4 (1986), 43.

[7] Haywood, “Holst,” 42, 46.

[8] Charles H. Kerr, Socialist Songs with Music, Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1903. Kerr includes lyrics for five of the original six chants, omitting only “The Day is Coming.” 

[9] Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song, 153.