The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162917   Message #3884740
Posted By: TheSnail
26-Oct-17 - 05:57 AM
Thread Name: What is Happening to our Folk Clubs
Subject: RE: What is Happening to our Folk Clubs
Is there any point? No, but what the hell.

"Have you been following my recent postings about what's going on at the Lewes Saturday Folk Club?"
I saw it and consider it irrelevant Bryan - the world does not start and end in Sussex


You had previously said -
No club needs a workable definition - it needs a committee theat lives up to its promise of folk songs -- not at the exclusion of anything else but as a rule of thumb - if you are anything to go by, obviously not yours
To which I replied -
Have you been following my recent postings about what's going on at the Lewes Saturday Folk Club? What is there that you consider inappropriate for a folk club? In a couple of weeks we've got Niamh Parsons & Graham Dunne. If they're good enough for the Frank Harte Festival, they are good enough for us. A little later we've got Brian Peters who will be doing us a melodeon workshop and a ballad forum as well as his evening performance. Not folky enough for you?
You replied that you didn't know Graham Dunne but did know Niamh which doesn't really answer the question.

I'l try again. The list of recent and coming performers I gave was -

Jackie Oates and Tristan Seume
The Askew Sisters
The Dovetail Trio
Niamh Parsons & Graham Dunne
Brian Peters

We also have Jody Kruskal and we are having a carol concert of traditional Sussex Carols supplemented by tunes from Sussex village band manuscripts. This is reviving an idea started by Vic Gammon some decades ago. We are taking it around a number of other venues as we have for a few years now.
You have directly attacked our club as being part of the problem. Which of the above do you feel constitute "the crap some of you appear to have replaced folk song with."?

You once suggested that if we wanted to hear good folk song we should come to your club
It is one of the many places.
the world does not start and end in Sussex
No it doesn't. These performers get quite a lot of bookings as Dave Sutherland has pointed out. Some of them (whisper it not) make a decent living at it. You would have us believe they don't exist.

My unpleasant comments were made in anger
Some of us get quite angry with you Jim.

Previously you said "You need to know what folk song sounds like, which probably excludes you".
Perhaps you would like to have a look down this webpage, Jim, and then have a browse round the rest of the site and then stop patronising me about what constitutes folk song.
Sussex Traditions

If we're into Shakespearian quotes, how about -

Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles