Steamfolk

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Ian Fyvie
Date: 10 Jul 11 - 06:41 PM

Lots of angles to go on in this thread!

I've skimmed virtually every posting and would highlight Brian Peters as taking some sensibles lines. I'll pick up on the class angle.

If the 'Folk' we participate in is a middle class construct, then that helps explain some other features of folk, clubs; and many people who run them - they carry baggage!

That baggage is the relationship between themselves at leisure, and the working classes. They don't really want the working classes there!

Most horrific of all for these middle classes is when a working class person wannts a floor spot!. You can almost read their minds; "Gosh - what an uncouth accent" "Will he swear on stage?" "Will she make lewd references?""Will they fart between verses?"

The idyllic construct of course would have no place for such things, but they have this percieved fear of workng class behavior. The Subjects of their songs may be fresh off the trawler, the farm or the factory floor; but they can only trust their own middle class kind to portray 'The Workies' on stage.

Yes I know there are tangents here I should have rounded, but if anyone reading this comes along to one of our singarounds, I'll sing them a song called "Guy with the Golden Finger in his Ear" which makes the main point better than here where I'm trying to be brief..

Ian Fyvie.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Edthefolkie
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 08:14 AM

Oh blimey Ian. How precisely do I identify a "working class person"? Burberry baseball cap? Battered Vauxhall Corsa? Reads the News of the World? And where, these days, are these working class types, gagging for a floor spot? In the downstairs bar drinking Stella and watching Ingerland lose again. There you go, another few arbitrary labels. I enjoyed that.

The problem isn't "middle class folkies" worrying about some horny handed son or daughter of toil hawking coaldust and mucus onto the front row. It's folkies, full stop. Heaven knows how younger people ever become interested in their own music, given some of the attitudes they meet from the old farts. Thank God for those who do get past the Folk Police though. Lucy Ward, anyone?

As for the middle class portraying the working class, I thought all that went out with Terence Rattigan. Ladeez'n'gennelmen, I give you Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton. Bookie's son portrays lathe operator...

Sorry Suibhne, thread creep alert.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 08:33 AM

Creep away (threadwise that is) the remit of Steamfolk is as broad as Folk itself. Funny, in Lancashire, Folk Clubs are predominately working class and very contemporary in their tastes. I must admit I haven't met many working-class Traddies in my time...

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: theleveller
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 08:55 AM

I find class definitions even more difficult and imprecise than folk definitions. I know a former steel-worker with a Masters in English and someone with an engineering degree who is a very successful plumber. Many people who might be considered middle class themselves have distinct working class antecendents just one or two generations back. It's all about roots, innit?

On a totally different tack - I was watching a Harry Potter DVD yesterday with my kids, in a rare moment of repose after a hectic festival weekend, when it occured to me that here is a bastion of Steamfolk and Steampunk. Some wonderful outfits!

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Tootler
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 09:08 AM

Folk's as much a label as anything; but Tootler's train's a beauty.

Yes. Those 2-10-2 tank engines were superb. Beautifully maintained, immaculately turned out and well up to the job. The route up the Brocken, the highest mountain in the region is a star. 1100 metres at the summit and all adhesion - no use of rack at all. Pity about the weather on the day we went up, though :-(

Definitely steamfolk heaven :-)

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 09:53 AM

The steaming landscapes of my childhood I still might visit in my dreams:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odEByoOnhBY

*

I don't think having academic qualifications has anything to do with class; I know plenty of working-class people with all manner of MAs and PhDs, and I know plenty of middle-class people with none. It's cultural, and residual, and probably more obvious in my native Northumberland / Durham than it is over here where I'm often (mis)taken for being middle-class on account of my noble bearing, my airs and graces, my love of Traditional (as oppose to contemporary) Folk Song, and my general disregard for authority, convention and political laziness. My rabid anti-racism and opposition to all forms of Homophobia often upsets the local folkies too, where such things are entenched by way of their non-PC view of their very small universe - ideas with are complete anathema in every other area of folk I've ever been part of, though last year in Durham they allowed a side of so-called Morris Dancers to dance with black faces, no doubt by way of so-called Tradition.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: theleveller
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 10:05 AM

In the village where I live I'm considred a peasant because I don't own a castle. As only one person does, we're all peasants of one sort or an other.

Oh, and I'm well down the list because my 4x4 is 9 years old.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 10:52 AM

my noble bearing...

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 11 Jul 11 - 11:14 AM

To which I might add my all consuming sense of high-born dignity and composure is any crisis, great or small; my cheerful disposition and my detachment in all matters emotional is legendary; likewise my stiff upper lip. I'm also noted for my open indulgence in such traditional blood-sports as huntin', shootin' and fishin', and my fondness for all the little Hobdens of this world. You may add to this my professed enthusiasm for the Indeterminable Beige Thing worn by the very lovely Princess Beatrice at the recent Royal Wedding which I now see has fetched - How much on ebay???? I trust it's all going to a good cause.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Ian Fyvie
Date: 17 Jul 11 - 08:17 PM

second try.... think I pressed the wrong button.....

There's much confusion over Class.

Folk context? Definitions are dictated by the middle class types who often control folk clubs.

Over simplified I know, but I suggest they judge a singer on which way they associate the person sitting in the classroom!

Ian Fyvie BA(hons), and still working class.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 05:11 AM

Steamfolk is predicated on the notion that Folk is essentially a bourgeois / middle-class fantasy based on various selected high-lights of working-class culture that have been dismanted and reconstructed / reinvented elsewhere for ease of consumption, though seldom by the lumpen proletariat themselves for whom the whole Trad/Folk thing tends to be pretty much anathema. I love it myself, but then again I love libraries, galleries, museums, antique shops and hoary academic contexts as much as I love hedges, ditches, and the filthy old public houses which are now vanishing fast before a wave of creeping cultural blandness. Real Working Class Folk culture these days (i.e. Blackpool) is of little interest to the middle-classes except in terms of patronising irony. Plus ca change!

Here's a thing, in the freezing sleeting rain of Blackpool yesterday we passed a side of rudely liveried hens arm in arm in sisterly unity as they kicked through the puddles singing Didn't we have a lovely time the day we went to Blackpool in perfect approximation of the Macrame Beat classic which was a hit for Fiddler's Dram in 1979 (same year as THIS, BTW, just to give it further contextual consideration). Didn't catch much more of it, but it struck me as oddly relevant to the various conundrums going down here (& elsewhere) as cultures clash and such elements are adopted / discarded / debased along the way.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 05:31 AM

PS - Interesting therefore that Fiddler's Dram later went on to become the Oyster Band who would folk process New Order's Love Vigilantes - which I once heard sung by a floorsinger who'd never heard the original. Here they are doing it live in '85:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vPt8LnkQ3g

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,guest Jim Younger
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 07:55 AM

Coming rather late to this entertaining and provocative thread I note references to Harker's Fakesong. Brian Peters wrote on 5 July: "Just because one academic with an agenda a mile wide chose to call his book Fakesong doesn't actually make it all a fake." You can say that again! One memory of that book that I cherish is Harker's seeming delight in Alfred Williams's sad latter days:if only Mr Williams had been a member of the Socialist Workers' party ... (Ironic smiley face, winking.)

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 08:46 AM

Still haven't got into Harker's Fakesong yet, but from what I've read so far the most provocative thing about it is the title. I would say the whole notion of Folk is Fake by default - from the aloof academic gloss, the imperfect science, the taxonomy, the taxidermy, the deference, the reverance, the pure blood-lines - all of which are a million miles away from whatever their natural habitats might have been. What remains, however is an astonishing canon of songs and latter day saintly singers of same that have created something very wonderful as a result. I choose to see this as Steamfolk because it remains a fantasy construct arising from the ghosts of an earlier romance, itself operating at a significant remove from the source of the thing. Not sure how any of that relates to Harker's thesis at all, but then again I'm an artist, and not an academic.

As I said on another thread, the only way Folksong Study can ever become a science is when the technology exists to send a team of crack invisible musicologist back in time to record every single utterance of of every single song and every single singer and subject the results to intense metaanalysis so we might understand just how these things existed in the wild and with respect of their wider cultural context. As it is, the very best we can do is taxonomise the taxidermy of long extinct species and speculate on why one version of any given song type is different for another.

Like Race, there is only one sort of Music; like Race, that Music exists in a myriad of near infinite possibilities. To call some of these musics Folk is an afterthought from on high born of a theory, or a theology, all of which is natural enough in the way human impulse to contain and theorise and believe in stuff real or imagined. I keep coming back to the remit of The International Society for Traditional Music which includes popular, classical and folk forms. There are many musics called Classical - from Ragas to Piobaireachds - and Popular Music lives and thrives on its traditional idioms from R&B to - er R&B. Folk, in this context, becomes the more purposeful visions of those individuals moved to seek amongst their cultural roots, be it of the Old Songs or the vestiges of an older music altogether in drones, modes and monophonies, or else the pure aesthetic of the arcane and archaic which then becomes the creative springboard to something else altogether. Bellamy did this with Kipling Songs; The Unthanks do it with songs Old & New; Brian Peters does it with the Child Ballads. People do it as a matter of course. As individuals though, and always without concensus...

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 05 Sep 11 - 02:10 PM

With reference to the other thread (ominously closed without explanation; what a crock of shit Mudcat can be at times!) all of the Stirrings article can be found in my above posts. The complete selection of collected musings & responses on Steamfolk will be hosted by Evening of Light at a future date. I'll post here when that happens in case anyone wishes to have a look - unless this thread is closed too of course. Meanwhile for an interview with the author on Evening of Light from 2008 see:

Interview: Sean Breadin (Sedayne)

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: mikesamwild
Date: 07 Sep 11 - 08:11 AM

I think a musician or singer with an open mind will pillage all sorts of sources to express themselves. Fusions have alwys moved the music onwards and sometimes new genres have emerged.

I choose mainly 'folk' idioms and work within them.. It is not a constrictive form and gives a disciplibe within which to learn how to sing and play but once adopted you have the freedom to move in your own way. I recon most artists go through a period of imitation and assimilation and , if lucky, learn from experienced musicians and others in their community to express the aspirations of that community.

All song and music expresses a world of imagination and we all dwell within an imagined mental world. It's when it becomes forced on people as a norm that it can become a vehicle for social control.

You are as free to become a Steamfolky as much as a Goth a Jazzer or a Rocker and your lifestyle may reflect that strongly and the genre will be as phony as Fakemusic but probably as valid..

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 07 Sep 11 - 03:51 PM

We are free to dream; we have the Means, Motive and Opportunity...

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: mikesamwild
Date: 13 Sep 11 - 11:09 AM

So is traditional 'folk' muisci strongest where people are constrained by various forces and limited in mobility or opportunity. Traveller culture is pretty strong it appears.
We can pick and choose and live in our own little worlds and live in our own little enclaves in upstairs rooms in pubs.

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Sep 11 - 04:35 AM

I think 'traditional folk' is best expressed in a recent post from Jim Causely on Facebook where he speaks of a tendancy for folkies to refer to non-folkies as 'Muggles'. I suggested that in such a context hard-line Traddy Purists might be considered Death Eaters, with the much feared 'folk police' (not the label!) as Dementors. We see (very occasional) instances of that here on Mudcat with persons being readily (and religiously) equipped to denounce this-or-that music as Not Being Folk because they have elected to abide by a very orthodox reading of something as archaic (and irrelevant*) as the 1954 Definition. The psychology of salvation is a strange one - but hardly a matter of social or economic constraint; on the contrary, the only limits on the mobility of the Folk Class are the creaking limbs of Generation One.

* Irrelevant? For sure most Folkies I know have never even heard of it and refuse to be drawn on the issue of 'What Is Folk?'. They just get on and do it. From hard-line Traddies to experimental Neofolkers - they follow their instincts with respect of their particular calling, as we all must... Like me the other day when I found a very fine first edition paperback copy of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs in an antiquarian bookshop in Southport for £6. My heart leaped with pure joy; the same joy with which I persue my folkish passions...

When we did our Kipling:Bellamy show at Fylde this year for the poster I used the stap line: The Folk Songs of Rudyard Kipling and Peter Bellamy: from Oak, Ash & Thorn to the Road to Mandalay. One person quizzed me on how such songs could be considered Folk Songs; needless to say I gave them a full and unabridged answer thus outing Rudyard Kipling as the Godfather of Steamfolk, and Bellamy's settings as icons of the revival now every bit as Traditional (with respect of both faith & process) as anything else co-opted by both cause and community.

http://soundcloud.com/earthboundkiplingbellamy

Subject: RE: Steamfolk
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 16 Sep 11 - 09:27 AM

Talking of steam, I passed by Coulsdon South station yesterday morning at about the same time that "Tornado" went through pulling The Cathedrals Express, wish that I had looked at the steam tours website this week - would have been a good test of my new Raynox teleconverter lens. It was dark for the return journey unfortunately.