Good question about the chair Eric. I wasn't there to witness the event myself. The organiser insisted on on telling the entire club about it after the event. Perhaps there wasn't a chair available and she (the organiser) had to hold Mike up to the sink, which is why she was so narked about it.


I'm afraid I belong to those who tend towards the opinion that 'market or 'celebrity' led folk music broadcast by the mass media is likely to lead it to become something else entirely.

Singarounds were mentioned earlier. My first exposure to folk music was at the "Sing and Play' at the New Inn in Hurstpierpoint in the late sixties. (The New Inn which must have been a pub for at least 400 years old, was an Indonesian restaurant the last time I passed it). Scan Tester used to come occasionally, and impromtu interludes of dancing by (mainly) the Chanctonbury Ring side, I recall as being more like semi choreographed punch-ups, during which furniture and limbs were broken. Scan had died by the time I finished College.

My instinct is that Folk Music is at its best when a group of people get together on occasions like a 'Sing & Play for largely informal music making. I'd almost say a pre-requisite was that everyone contributes in one way or another, and nobody, including the organiser, knows what the final result of the evening is going to be.

Perhaps the formalities and rituals of some clubs, the concert format, and maybe even festivals, do act against the spirit of the music.

I did recently hear a programme by M.H. which was about some recently re-discovered field recordings from the 50s. There were all these old boys having a lark, bantering and a singing some great old songs. It was most definitely folk music when it was being sung. Somehow the intrusion of the microphone, and the turning of a convivial evening from long ago into a radio programme for Radio 4 with its inevitable 'informed comments' for me, turned it into something else.


Bill