'Occupy English Folk Music!'

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 07:28 AM

Lizzie's last post was somewhat disingenuous, it is the title of the thread which has resulted in the arguments, not her initial comment.
As for the 1954 definition it may be more productive to consider an up to date view as expressed by the ICTM in its aims
"International Council for Traditional Music
The aims of the ICTM are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music, including folk, popular, classical and urban music, and dance of all countries."

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: theleveller
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 07:47 AM

"Oh dear, Leveller... "

I accept your apology.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 07:47 AM

you'll see that what I have complained about is those people who seek to define and segregate the different strands of folk music instead of welcoming and celebrating its diversity. A "do what thou wilt" attitude would be much more beneficial to folk music.

Anyway

I agree with a "do what thou wilt" attitude and believe that there is health in diversity but:

Do what thou wilt to me means

If you wish to use the 1954 definition for discussion or other purposes, feel free to do so. Similarly if you wish to use say a "meaningful words" definition" feel free to do so. In both cases though, be prepared to accept that not everyone will agree with your choice.

It also means to me. If you wish to run your event with a narrower definition or focus feel free to do so or enjoy it. Similarly if you wish to include everything that anyone could possibly consider to be folk, feel free to do so but in both cases be prepared to accept that not everything will be for everyone.

Do what thou wilt to me does not mean enforce "free for" all definitions and policies on everyone any more that it means enforce "1954 rules" on everyone.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 07:48 AM

Missed name above.

And no Leveller, I disagree with you.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 08:01 AM

I enjoyed that, Suibhne O'Piobaireachd (How DO you pronounce it?). I struggled a bit but persisted and I think I have got the gist of some of it at least.

The 'tradition' is what was collected and is now fixed at a point in time. Revivals have used the tradition as a reference point but not actually added to, or detracted from, that fixed point. The culture from which the tradition was born no longer exists. Using the tradition to define cultural constructs is not, therefore, possible.

Is that OK so far? - I would honestly rather you correct me that let me go on with false assumptions.

If so, could we say that, at some as yet undetermined point in the future, what is termed the tradition will change as the songs reflecting the culture of a particular revival will be collected? At that point do we then have two traditions, the old and new, or do we call the old tradition something else? Do we then end up with arguments that the very songs that people wish to 'occupy' English folk music with become the tradition? Someone in Mudcat v 11.7 (the revenge) will announce that songs of Seth Lakeman, The Oyster Band and Mumford and Sons are for old hoary gits and should give way to the younger generation?

It all gets far too complicated for me after that point, which is why I do not, personally, use any definition but my own. And my own is so subjective that I would not even dream of discussing it in public, let alone trying yo inflict it on anyone!

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 08:20 AM

I don't think I have seen so much rubbish in a long time.

I am also baffled why people want to call what they do "folk music" when clearly, they don't really want there to be any folk music. Every time I re-read the 1954 definition I feel how obviously sensible it is - and as for the sneers about academics and teachers taking over, I have never ever read so much pretentious twaddle as those here who spend usually about an A4 page replete with polysyllabics, pushing the boundaries of where piles of words slump into meaninglessness, trying to rubbish the eminently sensible definition.

It is also obvious upon a simple reading that the definition of "Folk music" is nation and style free. So the traditional chants of Qwertyuiop (as cited above) would be, if existing, folk music.

Certainly, I have never used the 1954 definition to discredit singer/songwriters. It's not about dismissing what they do. They can do it if they want to, and people can listen to it if they want to. It's about explaining the difference (to, I may add, apparently the ignorant).

There is, in fact, largely, a "do what you wilt" attitude (although I'm not quite clear where the Hell Fire Club comes into it) which is why Lizzie's original point is senseless.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 08:37 AM

Your post is contradictory Richard. It seems you're promoting 'do as thou wilt so long as you don't call it folk music'. I'd like to know once again, what new material has entered the tradition, to the satisfaction of 1954 taxonomists and traditional singers, that fits all the criteria of the definition. Because so far as I can tell there isn't any. There's stuff that sounds traditional but and there's material that meets the criterion (footie chants, playground songs, comedy settings, etc) but I see no evidence of the continued transmission of song 1954 suggests.

I appreciate I sound like a stuck record but it's important that definitions represent what they seem to, especially when they're wielded with such confidence. And if they don't, and 1954 can show no reasonably modern songs to set against the mass of antique material, one can only conclude that the definition in this aspect at least, is thoroughly flawed.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: theleveller
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 08:57 AM

"And no Leveller, I disagree with you. "

Fair enough. But, then, you've already called this entire thread "bullshit", so I think you need to be a bit more specific. Sorry, but I couldn't make head nor tail of your last post.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:07 AM

Suibhne O'Piobaireachd (How DO you pronounce it?)

Sweeney O'Pibrock (i.e. Suibhne as in the mad bird king of ancient Irish poetic literature and Piobaireachd as in the classical music of the highland bagpipes; both have obsessed me since childhood and continue to do do today...)

I struggled a bit but persisted and I think I have got the gist of some of it at least.

Essentially, I strive to be fair, inclusive and open minded in the belief that we all have the right to feel these things the way we do, and we're each going to be feeling them differently anyway. It's damn near impossible to be truly objective, but if we can be subjectively inclusive, and appreciative of other's passions, then things is cool.

The Revival has given us some truly creative wonders, and continues to do so today, be it in session, singaround, concert hall or wherever, much as (say) Medieval Music has given us some truly modern classics. This might seem contradictory, but all music is of its time & era and thus is the cultural Zeitgeist determined, however we come into it. For me it was around 1967 when as a curious 6-year-old I flipped over my mother's copy of All You Need Is Love and listened to John Lennon's weird modal clavioline playing on Baby You're A Rich Man and heard in there something significant to all sorts of things. Essentially what I heard was Folk's idiomatic passage into Pop, however so exotically couched, but then Popular Music is synonymous with folk anyway; an unbroken tradition these past 50,000 years & quite possibly more.

Folk, of course, is a more conscious selection, which is ironic given the precepts: one is reminded of Maud Karpele's comment that Jean Ritchie wasn't a real Folk Singer on account of her education. It was Maud, of course, who gave us the 1954 Definition in the first place (thanks, Maud!) as part of the Orwellian-sounding International Folk Music Council, which is now, as johncharles reminds us below, the more ethnomusicologically sensitive International Council for Traditional Music, whose remit is very wide indeed. I've known ethnomusicologists study everything from Elvis Impersonators in Blackpool to Barbershop Quartets on Teeside; and I've seen ethnomusicological methodology applied to The Folk Scene in an early Channel 4 documentary by David Toop which really wasn't what Folkies wanted to see or hear at all.

The Revival will change; it's changing all the time & there's no second guessing how it'll turn out. The Tradition, on the other hand, is fixed, unchanging, and sacrosanct on various levels. We may draw from it, use it, bask in it, interpret it, squabble over it, study it, but even though I doubt we'll ever truly get the measure of it, it'll never change. The Tradition of English Speaking Folk Song & Ballad is finite, and it is cherished, but it is dead as a process, and that we have any sort of understanding of it all is a bit of a fluke really, but there it is, like fossils. In that sense The Folk Revival is a bit like Jurrassic Park, or those CGI interpretations of extinct life you see on TV - some masquerade as scholarly studies, others turn it into a more blatent form of entertainment. Like The Tradition, the fossil record remains finite, but subject to a myriad possible levels of reconstruction and interpretation; but no CGI recreation will ever make it into the fossil record no matter how instructive it might prove in our understanding of dinosaurs. This in no diminishes paleontolgy, because without it, we'd have no understanding of dinosaurs at all...

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:13 AM

But, then, you've already called this entire thread "bullshit", so I think you need to be a bit more specific.

No I found the basic premise (Lizzie's opening point) bullshit.

Sorry, but I couldn't make head nor tail of your last post.

Oh dear...

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:15 AM

glueman, I see, is still trying to foist his rather dubious opinion off, on this thread, as if it were stated fact...it's not

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:20 AM

Somebody earlier asked about songs written since my birthday (1954) are considered traditional nowadays...
Well, virtually everything written by Cyril Tawney for start. Various songs from the writings of John Tams, Brian Peters, Pete Morton, Bill Caddick, Peter Bond, and myriad others. Many of which I have heard performed by other people (and very nicely) All of the performers thought that they were traditional, having learnt them 3rd or 4th hand from other singers. Or in a singaround. That sort of blurs the boundaries anyway. It's even more blurry when it comes to tunes.
A lot of tunes played in sessions and known and loved by many, appeared in the last 10 years!
It's always nice to know the name of the writer of a song or the provenance of a tune. I really enjoy threads about such subjects both here and other places.
But it doesn't prevent my enjoyment of a great performance even if the performer hasn't a clue as to where it came from.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Vic Smith
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:21 AM

I wonder if those at the conference in 1954 realised what a lovely bit of fun they were going to make with their definition just 57 years later. I am totally immersed in this music - but I find that the last 150 or so posts in this thread err on the side of being rather weird and obsessive.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Ralphie
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:29 AM

Actually If you consider it sensibly, 1954 is a meaningless date in lots of ways. The revival actually started with the invention of the phonograph. That was when performances could be recorded, and allows people today to listen to songs/tunes how they were played then. Before that, It was either aurally transmitted (and changed) or just written down in some form or other.
So the Tradition died with Edison.
Everything after that is the Revival.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:40 AM

if you say so, Ralphie boy, if you say so

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:48 AM

"A "do what thou wilt" attitude would be much more beneficial to folk music."

Reminds me a bit of the 'trickle down theory' of economics - which, as we all now know, turns out to be nothing more than self-interested wishful thinking. I predict that "do what thou wilt" would, in practice, mean hundreds of inept cover versions of the latest pop hits.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 09:57 AM

The Revival will change; it's changing all the time & there's no second guessing how it'll turn out. The Tradition, on the other hand, is fixed, unchanging, and sacrosanct on various levels.

But, as I asked earlier, when someone begins to collect and categorise revival folk music will that then become the tradition for later revivals to be based on? Or, as Ralph says, can there no longer be a tradition? I would certainly concur that there can be no tradition based on Aural collection but could it not be based, if the future, on some other Media?

EG - this is from the tradition when people used to record things on Philips hand-held cassette recorders (snigger, snigger). Or this is from the odd traditions of the Mudcat dwellers who based most of their songs on the ramblings of a few insane seers.

In Moorcock's 'Dancers at the end of time' series he mentions that Billy the Kid was the famous astronaut and entrepreneur of the twentieth century who had the hind quarters of a goat. In another (Count Brass possibly) The four ancient horsemen of the Apocalypse were Jon, Pawl, Jorg and Rhungu.Who knows what will happen :-)

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: John P
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 10:07 AM

glueman, you just officially became a waste of time. Your dismissive attitude toward everyone else is tiring. People spend a lot of time and care writing things in response to your concerns and you dismiss the whole thing with a snide comment. You pretend to be asking serious questions, but it becomes obvious that you only ask the questions so you can say your same piece over and over. You obviously don't know how to carry on a conversation. Please go bother some other thread. Maybe we should start a "beat the dead horse" thread where you can say traditional music is dead, Big Al can say there's a conspiracy against him, Little Hawk can say everyone else is unconscious, and Ron Davies can say that atheists kill people. Over and over and over again.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 10:14 AM

I see someone else finally caught on as regards glueman

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 10:35 AM

Insults aside John P and BTNG, on Ralphie's list of Cyril Tawney, John Tams, Brian Peters, Pete Morton, Bill Caddick, Peter Bond, etc, while I'm confident in saying they've become folk club standards, I'm fairly sure they're not what Maud K was referring to in her definition. They operate on a different level, that of the popular revival song which is, as I think Suibhne circumnavigated, a different beast to the one Ms Karpele intended. I also doubt whether the more single-minded inhabitants of this forum would consider them traditional at all, no matter how loved by club-goer's.

That aside, I'm pressed to disagree with anything Sweeney has said on the matter and from the 300 post mark the thread has become as tiresome to upload as it is to read.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 10:43 AM

That aside, I'm pressed to disagree with anything Sweeney has said on the matter and from the 300 post mark the thread has become as tiresome to upload as it is to read.

Tiresome because some people won't agree with you, and you're going to take your football and go home!


Insults...insults in pointing that you just might be wrong...oh come on! I caught onto you along time ago, and now someone else has...you're a waste of time...oh and if her name, must be uttered by you.. it's Maud Karpeles.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 10:46 AM

BTNG, your style is too well know frpm your other board name to take seriously. Different web identities do not denote separate opinions.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 11:18 AM

What is the gluemamn bashing about? Kindly desist forthwith in the name of common decency; it's people like you who give folk a bad name, resorting to ridicule when they feel under threat; not good, man; not good at all.

*

when someone begins to collect and categorise revival folk music will that then become the tradition for later revivals to be based on?

I'm of the opinion that true Folk is essentially obvious of its own existence; it can't readily define its own tradition, or even insist that there is one, whatever the model of that tradition might be. If there is a New Tradition, then that's for others to say, not us, although, like all musician we partake of traditional process, but to call that The Tradition, or liken it to The Tradition is, I feel, a tad conceited. What happens in sessions & singarounds in a rare old melting pot of all sorts of ideas and idioms and songs and tunes and quite frankly after the second pint I've lost track entirely. I regularly participate with master musicians who can take songs by other song writers and make them into something else entirely; wonderful things, pristine, sparkling. Some may even feel they're continuing in The Tradition by so doing, and certainly that's in the nature of Traditional Music, which according to both Ethnomusicological Method and the ICTM pretty much includes everything anyway.

This is the beauty of the 1954 Definition. When it says The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community that no such community ever existed in the entire history of humanity. But when it says The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character you just know the most perfect example of this is an Elvis Presley impersonator doing his best to sing Suspicious Minds after ten pints of Stella.

When Patrick Street picked up Simon Jeffes' Music for a Found Harmonium it instantly became a session classic, and I've heard it describes as a Traditional Irish Tune on more than the one occasion. Similarly, I've heard one of Purcell's Abdelazer Hornpipes described as being 'Folk Processed' and 'Traditional' because it was published by Playford as The Hole in the Wall, and you regularly hear William Byrd's Earl of Salisbury Pavan played by Folk musicians. Such things are the Folk Standards, much as Monk's Goodbye Porkpie Hat is a Jazz Standard. How they get to be that way is all part of a musical process but there's nothing unique or mysterious about it. Like the songs you hear in singarounds, their provenance can be as convoluted as you like involving serious academic research and painstaking reconstruction, or it can be as basic as copying it off a record, or another singer, without paying too much regard or respect for their own relationship to it. Generally, I think we ought to be careful about treading on toes, but I carry a lot of songs I've acquired off other singers and musicians I've worked & performed with, just as I'll do my best to re-source these as acurately as possible. Then again, I've got three songs in my ready repertoir that I sing pretty much as they appear on The Albion Country Band's Battle of the Field album even though I've sourced them back to quite different originals; fact is they appear to be stuck the way they are! Where possible, I like to trace a song to a Traditional source, be it sung or written. I won't do too much to consciously change it, if at all, apart from losing the occasional ballad verse here and there, but the setting will be very much my own, and I think we owe that to both ourselves and the songs. Like I say - letting them revivify the singer rather than the other way round.

Each new revival must address itself to the same original Tradition, as each singer must; the old chestnuts will nourish us afresh, and forever after, and if Folk Revivals do have a habit skipping a generation now and then I hope that someone born today will one day go on to sing Butter and Cheese and All in such a way that is every bit as invigorating as Peter Bellamy, or MtheGM, or Jon Boden, or the young Australan chap from the Folk Degree Cource I heard sing it at the Cumberland Arms in Byker five years back who brought the house down. Revivify! But you can be sure they'll be taking taking it back to the source of the thing and drink of it afresh - to the mastery of Cox and Larner, which - for me at least - is the sacred earth on which we dare tread.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 11:31 AM

<<<< As for the 1954 definition it may be more productive to consider an up to date view as expressed by the ICTM in its aims
"International Council for Traditional Music
The aims of the ICTM are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music, including folk, popular, classical and urban music, and dance of all countries." >>>>



Nowt wrong with my title, thank you. It's a very 'up to date' one too.

Oh, so the ICTM are into Hip Hop? WOW!!

Cecil HipHop Sharpe House...It has a nice ringyzingzing about it. I think it could catch on.

Maudie Karpeles..now THERE was a woman! I think Ol' Cecil had a twinkle in his eye for Maudie, if you ask me. ;0)

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 11:33 AM

glueman take me seriously or not, I could care less...but your spouting the rubbish you are spouting is beyond the pale as

GUEST,Suibhne Astray has stated

"Kindly desist forthwith in the name of common decency; it's people like you who give folk a bad name, resorting to ridicule when they feel under threat; not good, man; not good at all"

you have no argument, and all the ridiculing in the world isn't going to change that.

You simply want everyone to agree with you and when you can't you stamp your little foot and pout...and now I know who you remind me of...thank you..... :-)

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 11:48 AM

GUEST,Suibhne Astray has stated

"Kindly desist forthwith in the name of common decency; it's people like you who give folk a bad name, resorting to ridicule when they feel under threat; not good, man; not good at all"


If you'd taken care to read the relevant post GUEST / BTNG or whoever the feck you are, I was speaking in support of glueman. Don't use my name in support your irksome Trolling and abuses, conveniently delivered from behind your non-ID. I thought the Mods were supposed to delete posts like that anyway?

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 11:57 AM

GUEST no name, I'm neither stamping nor pouting and anyone who knows me will tell you I take my folk music seriously, which is to say always with a smile. The software is the main reason I stay away for months at a time, it doesn't allow editing and gives no indication of intervening posts, hence the end of Maud Karpeles name going missing in an adjoining word change. The board is virtually unmoderated, meaning posters can be serially misrepresented without any accountability from those making the mischief. It's mob rule, take posts seriously and you're told to lighten up, engage lightly and someone will accuse you of taking the p***. Truth by consensus has never floated my boat.

The 'vituperative intolerance' Peter Bellamy's obituarist referred to is alive and well in the folk community which is the reason why I consume the English scene at least, at (turntable) arm's length. Nonetheless I was musing at the time this thread came up why it is other folk communities accommodate new material alongside the old without diminishing either and why the general paranoia about definitions, which is why I was moved to chip in.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 12:08 PM

my cookie went amiss, I had no idea I wasn't logged in, for that I apologise, and for nothing else.

refresh my memory will you...Peter Bellamy's obituarist was whom?

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 12:53 PM

If only we were all like Lizzie - PERFECT!

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 01:08 PM

Oops! Should have read:

When it says The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community you can be sure that no such community ever existed in the entire history of humanity.

I might add that it's thuis sort of bizarre fantasising that underwrites a lot of the more wonky notions of the early revival; the assumption that things can exist in isolated pockets of perfect purity unsullied by contamination by contact with the real world I find hard to understand. Likewise the insistence that only unwritten music can be a living tradition is patronising in the extreme. That means so much of the Northumbrian Bagpipe Tradition wasn't actually Folk Music, where individual composition was highly prized and little changed to this day.

Still if Richard insists it all makes perfect sense, then...

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 01:33 PM

The idea of classification of music seems to be an important aspect of this thread. I know followers of Northern Soul who have such a restricted view of what it is, it is a wonder they have any music left to listen to. This is their right. Similarly many other genres; heavy metal, country and western, bluegrass etc. etc. are fiercely protective of what they perceive as their music.
Live and let live is my view. Intolerance is attempting to pressure others into accepting your views.
john

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 01:47 PM

well johncharles you're not, so please learn to live with it.......

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 01:53 PM

In summing up Your Honour:

Play the bloody music and screw classifications and those that try to place them on the music and the musicians

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:18 PM

Dear BTNG, non of us are...

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:21 PM

that's none

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:28 PM

correct

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:35 PM

off to the pub guitar in hand. Playing traditional, modern, self-penned,
blues, and tunes old and new.
Good music, beer and good friends what could be better.
john

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:38 PM

Guitar? GUITAR?? Instrument of the Devil!

:D

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 02:44 PM

well good for you johncharles

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 05:45 PM

Can I refer y'all back to my post of 08 Nov 11, 10:42 AM? I find it works. It may for you, too.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 05:48 PM

god you're getting boring Cringe..and you bang on about me

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: BTNG
Date: 09 Nov 11 - 05:52 PM

there never really was any discussion here, had there been I would gladly add something. it's either glueman banging on about god knows what or several of the usual suspects insulting LizzieCornish...which topic would you care to discuss...your choice, Cringe...go ahead

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: theleveller
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 03:41 AM

Just to go back to basics for a moment, I'm totally confused as to what 'The Tradition' is. I've studied history, folklore and legends for most of my life and have never come across one great, overarching 'Tradition'. A huge range of more or less local traditions, certainly, but nothing that encompasses them all. So, I can only assume that 'The Tradition' is, in fact, an artificial construct of 'The Traditionalists', whoever they are (a lost race of intellectual giants, perhaps?).

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 03:42 AM

Playing traditional, modern, self-penned, blues, and tunes old and new. Good music, beer and good friends what could be better.

I'm sure that's as good definition of FOLK as any of us could come up with, much less abide by. It's true that whilst I've sessioned & soireed with jazzers, opera singers, brassers, classical players, neo-medievalists, violists and free improvisers, it's only in the collective Come-All-Ye Folk Session & Sing that a particular sort of magic sparks forth and all ones sorrows fall away. 35 years on and it seldom fails. Of course it's going to be different for everyone, but in my Folk Life I'm never happier than when it kicks off & roars and the pure JOY of the thing is all that matters.

*

Otherwise, a very nice thread were it not for this BTNG who seems to get pleasure from lurking under the bridge abusing neighbourly passers-by. Hitherto I've always had my doubts as whether Trolls actually existed, but BTNG is 100% proof. Still, let's not let it spoil things, eh?

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 04:03 AM

I'm totally confused as to what 'The Tradition' is.

Aren't we all? It's going to different for everyone, but for me its something to do with a body of finite material what has come down us from collectors that indicates that once upon a time things happened differently than they do today. I think of it as The Fossil Record. To me The Tradition exists as the Folk Song, Folk Music, Folk Tale, Folklore and Folk Custom of the oft rumoured Simpler Times and Cultures, the collected evidences of which indicate common morphology and fluidity across oceans, rivers, language barriers and other cultural boundaries. It is there in the Brothers Grimm, Absjorsen and Moe, Max Hunter, Cecil Sharp, the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, the Faber Book of Popular Verse and the note books of Annie Gilchrist. It is vast and diverse and quite possibly a figment of our imaginations, but at times it feels close enough to reach out and touch it (see my last post). Although long dead, it still feels weirdly alive to those who are that way inclined. I don't think of it as being merely Old Fashioned; we relate to far older things in everyday life - our number systems and our star signs for example, both of which predate anything in The Tradition by several thousand years - but The Tradition is such that it remains essentially timeless, however so remote, glimpsed on rare occasions as though through a glass darkly...

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 04:47 AM

"Although long dead, it still feels weirdly alive to those who are that way inclined."

Indeed. When we were kids our local joke shop sold things called 'magic worms' which fascinated me to the point of distraction. Basically it was a small paper sachet containing a dozen pellets that looked like Rice Crispies. When these objects were placed in a glass of water they immediately began to expand into serpentine shapes and continued to do so until they filled the glass. It was the nearest thing I'd come to the idea of something from nothing and although I'm sure there's a plausible scientific name for these dessicated cells, the 'magic' of first seeing them has stayed with me.

I made the magic worm connection when hearing about the revival in Georgian folk music. In short, Georgia had been under the yolk of various invading forces for so long - not least the Soviet union - that there were no recordings of its traditional song or music. Nobody in living memory knew what it sounded like. None that is, save for a few made by pioneering British song collectors in the early days of mobile sound recording. From this capsule, this pellet of tradition, a whole culture has grown which is spreading throughout the country and overseas. Folk music is like that. If it's allowed to it will expand to fill all the gaps so long as the ground is fertile. You could argue that such a limited repertoire of sound is unrepresentative of the diversity of Georgian national music but it seems there was just enough to aural seed for the entire cultural greenhouse.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: theleveller
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 05:12 AM

Well, Suibhne, I'd agree with that although I've never really thought of it as The Tradition - in my experience it doesn't have a name, it just IS. In fact, it's what the novel I'm currently writing, called The Wisdom of Stones, is all about. It's also what I write many of my songs about.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: johncharles
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 05:48 AM

Suibhne "Playing traditional, modern, self-penned, blues, and tunes old and new. Good music, beer and good friends what could be better."
We did all of the above plus singing Happy Birthday and Whisky in the Jar requested by a group of people celebrating their friend's birthday.
Your comment proved to be right "the pure JOY of the thing is all that matters."
john

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: glueman
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 05:52 AM

Yolk above should have read 'yoke'.

Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
From: Brian Peters
Date: 10 Nov 11 - 05:53 AM

"I have never come across one great, overarching 'Tradition'. A huge range of more or less local traditions, certainly, but nothing that encompasses them all."

A fair point, but if the same kind of thing was going on at local level in thousands of different places - for example the old 'Scarborough Fair' / 'Cambric Shirt' song being passed on orally through the generations in North Yorkshire, New England and the Ozark Mountains, then I think it's valid to see an overarching process there. The term 'The Tradition' is sometimes used a bit carelessly, usually as shorthand for "the kind of thing that used to happen", as SOP has been explaining.

[In your last post, Suibhne, you seemed to get perilously close to endorsing the concepts of Folk Song and Folk Lore. Surely not! Several nice posts from you, though - and overall a more civilised discussion than some I've seen here]