Whenever anything colossally stupid - such as the invasion of Iraq - happens, I hear voices in my head. They are not the conventional, cinematic disembodied voices, they are the voices of “ordinary” people who lived out “ordinary” lives in England and their message comes in the form of song.

Last week was the third anniversary of the death of the Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot with seven hollow-point bullets by police officers on Stockwell Tube station. The other day I tried reading the report of the Independent Police Complaints Commission into events surrounding the surveillance and shooting of Mr de Menezes. I could not take it all in one sitting. What was so harrowing was the realisation that the police officers were “'ordinary” people trying to do their best, but that events had overtaken them and that they and Mr de Menezes' family would have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

In the weeks before the Iraq invasion, I distinctly remember commentators predicting such “collateral” events but their vision was not strident enough to be heard above the bellicose hawks of the White House and Westminster. As we were signed up to a “coalition of the willing” the sting of impotence brought sharply into focus the lyric of a traditional song from the Napoleonic wars. Our Captain Calls All Hands was collected from Pop Maynard at The Cherry Tree in Copthorne, West Sussex, in 1956 and takes the form of a conversation between two lovers.

He: Our Captain calls all hands tomorrow

To leave my true love behind in grief and sorrow

Dry up those briny tears and leave off weeping

How happy we shall be love at our next meeting.

She: How can you go abroad fighting for strangers

Why don't you stay at home free from all dangers

I will roll you in my arms, my own dear jewel

So stay at home with me, love, and

don't be cruel.

It is her surgical use of the word for that exposes her grasp of the situation. She understands perfectly that she and her lover have no influence over events. I can't help but feel that the chilling distinction between fighting strangers and fighting for strangers touches on something at the heart of what it means to be “English”. Generations later, were the police officers in the de Menezes case fighting strangers or fighting for strangers?

I am not suggesting that we all have to like our own folk music any more than we all have to like opera or jazz. Indeed, for many years the Establishment has made it its business to ridicule our vernacular music. Nor am I suggesting that just because we are English we ought even to understand our folk music, for it is as rich, as complex and as layered as any other people's music.

What I do believe is that, like it or not, the folk song of England is a living repository of our unofficial history and is possibly the single richest cultural resource we have. It is nothing less than the collective “common sense” of our ancestors and it grants us a perspective on how we have become the people we are in a way that no other “document” can.

If that is too much of an imaginative leap, try looking across the ocean. English folk song is at the heart of the music of white America, from where it evolved to tell a large part of that nation's story. For all that time back home in England it has been ceaselessly churning, growing and evolving.

In a media-dominated culture, where style is placed over substance, it is understandable that people just don't get it, but as the indigenous population of this country is increasingly called upon to lay its cultural cards on the table most of us agree that “Land of Hope and Glory” and “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” don't quite tell the whole story.

As the cultural minorities who so lovingly cherish their own ancestral wisdom, their culture, their cuisine, their stories, song, dance, high days and holidays increasingly turn to “us” and ask “what is your story”, we find that the Churchillian version does not actually answer the question in the spirit in which it is asked. It is the “ordinary” voice that gives us many of the missing pieces of the jigsaw. For instance the 19th-century poet John Clare's chronicling of England's parliamentary enclosure, when 21 per cent of the land was fenced in by private landlords (think of it as our very own version of the Highland Clearances), such a long way to explaining why, seven generations later, the debate over foxhunting was so vehemently fought As I wrote in my own song, Mad John:

From the Bowman's arm at Agincourt

To the sabre slice at Peterloo

Through the old trapdoor of English law

They made a trespasser of you.

Standing behind the singer is the ghost of the singer they learnt the song from. Standing behind that ghost is another ghost, back to the beginning of music. For a short time this “common sense” is ours to learn from, to add to and then to hand on.

The greatest composer who lived was Anon, but for those for whom the anonymous voice is still too faint how about another great Englishman, Alan Bennett, who put it like this in The History Boys: “Pass it on boys. That's the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on.”

Chris Wood is a composer and songwriter. On Tuesday he takes part in the Institute of Ideas debate, Who Gives a Folk?, at the Vibe Bar, 91-95 Brick Lane, London E1. For tickets go to battleofideas.org.uk or phone 020-7269 9220. For more information visit

EnglishAcousticCollective.org.uk

An acoustic playlist

A folk song isn't 500 years old, it has been evolving for 500 years. Try these songs in their traditional form and as they have been reinterpreted by the present generation.

Our Captain Calls All Hands (Anon) by Pop Maynard from The Voice of the People Vol l (Topic Records)

Our Captain Calls by Chris Wood from The Lark Descending (R.U.F Records).

Two lovers are caught up in a crusade from another part of England's history

Georgie (Anon) by Levi Smith from The Voice of the People Vol II (Topic Records)

Georgie by Martin Carthy from Signs of Life (Topic). A poaching song told through the eyes of the perpetrator's lover

Spencer the Rover (Anon) by the Copper Family from Coppersongs 3 (Coppersongs)

Spencer the Rover by Chris Wood & Andy Cutting from Knock John (R.U.F). A man who can no longer support his wife and family has a breakdown, walks out, gets his head together and comes home to try again

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