Hamish Henderson (1919-2002) was a Scottish poet, songwriter, communist and public intellectual. He studied Gramsci’s ideas on culture in the mid-1940s whilst a soldier in Italy, and after the war became one of the pioneers of cultural democracy for the British left, applying a socialist perspective to cultural experiences in theory and in practice.
Henderson promoted cultural democracy in many different ways, through essays, poems, songs and activist campaigning. He focused in particular on folk culture, which he recognised as (in Gramscian terms) ‘counter-hegemonic’:
‘Folk art is an implicit — and in many aspects an explicit — challenge to the ruling class way of looking at the world.’
Nowhere is this democratic and communist approach to culture better expressed than in his song ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’. Below you can download a fine essay by David Betteridge about the song and its relevance to the cultural democracy that we try to promote on Culture Matters. You can also watch videos of the song, on the links provided by David on page 2.
