What is a bush band?

Subject: What is a bush band?
From: The Shambles
Date: 07 Dec 99 - 08:53 PM

What makes a bush band a bush band and what sort of folk would play in one?

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Midchuck
Date: 07 Dec 99 - 09:05 PM

In Australia, it would presumeably be a music group of some sort.

In the US, it sounds more like an article of intimate jewelry.

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: alison
Date: 07 Dec 99 - 09:29 PM

Me, I play in a couple, as does Alan of Oz and Bob Bolton.

We play for bush dances, probably what you would call barn dances in the US and UK.

I'm sure we've had a thread on this before. Many bush bands are very traditional, one of mine tends more towards the electrified and introduces rock themes...

we play Aussie, and Irish folk songs and jigs, reels etc to dance to......

I'm off to see if I can find the other thread.. because I'm sure it went into details of instruments like lagerphones, and bush bass.

slainte

alison

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: alison
Date: 07 Dec 99 - 09:33 PM

Here is the earlier thread.. goes into intsrumentation

Australian bush bands

slainte

alison

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 07 Dec 99 - 10:24 PM

G'day Shambles,

The real problem with the name Bush Band is that the special use of the term means nothing much outside Australia - and precious little to the average Aussie. It all arises from the fact that the first stirrings of the folk revival in Australia (especially as a performance event) were when the original 1952 - 1956 Bushwhackers Band ... not the 1970s to present Folk/Rock group ... provided traditional music and songs in a folk musical play Reedy River in 1953.

So many people became interested and wanted to play and sing this music that the band members founded a club - The Bush Music Club. They used the term "Bush" because they felt they were in a tradition that was alive in the bush ... the country areas and extinguished in the cities by recorded music, film, plays and professional music of other cultures.

These days this is not obvious, since the "bush" people all listen to C & W or Rock - while "Bush" traditions are kept alive in the city ... the only place where you can get enough people together to form a club. Not entirely true, since a lot of good festivals happen in the bush. However, these are often driven by newcomers who realise how much there is to be lost - particularly in a push to have folk music become synonymous with a "World Music" that will not allow our own traditions to be heard on the same stage as all the other rich traditions that have made Australia the cosmopolitan place it has always been ... no matter how the past is selectively remembered by people who want to turn the clock (and calendar) back.

Anyway, I guess "Bush Music" could be seen as the music that consciously avoids commercial trappings, but it is very hard to pin it down.

Of course, lately there has been a great interest in the Bush Dancing side - so much so that there are 20 dancers at least for every musician. This leads to some splits - particularly between those that filch everything out of Irish and Scottish tune books and those that play from collected tunes and therefore have much more European music - the music of the European political /religious /economic refugees of the 19th century who flowed to Australia as they did to USA.

A great amount of this material has been slipped under the carpet after two World Wars and much is only recently being recognised ... or admitted to. This is an area where an interesting Australian blend of disparate sources produce our own distinctive sound.

Regards,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Chris/Darwin
Date: 08 Dec 99 - 08:46 AM

Shambles

I have played in a couple of bush bands, including 15 years in one based in Tamworth in country NSW.

We played mostly in village halls, church halls,etc., but occasionally in clubs and pubs. Away from the main centres our audience consisted of farming families. Most of these people knew little of "bush music" as an art form, but loved the experience of meeting their district neighbours in a social setting, and dancing the night away.

In the smaller towns we found sometimes that people had driven two hours or more from "out bush" to get to the dance. To these people it would not have made much difference if we were a C&W band, and so we tended to play some waltzy C&W songs - although not "Achy Breaky!"

We often drove for hours across flat farming country to get to a venue (dodging kangaroos), and were very glad to see the small glow on the horizon 15 minutes before we got there.

Most of the band members came from an urban environment, and it was easy to romanticise about life in the "bush". But the fact is that most rural families are barely surviving, and working harder as farms get bigger and margins decline.

We played the usual mixture of mainly Irish and Scottish tunes, and mostly Australian folk songs. Many of these were modern songs, and not always about the bush, but you quickly learn what works and what doesn't.

I come from an urban background, and fell in love with folk music at an early age. Learning music and playing melody instruments was part of a natural progression. I fell into a bush band by accident, but stayed because I enjoyed performing, and the discipline of having to learn to play things properly (I am pretty lazy!)

Having said all that I am not sure that there is a definition of what makes a bush band. I have been a judge at the annual Battle of the Bush Bands in Tamworth, and I have seen good and bad, traditional and modern, C&W and/or country rock influenced and not, and so on. Many bands that were not traditional folk bands I loved for their enthusiasm and entertainment value. At least one "traditional" band was so boring that no-one went to their concerts. I have seen city-based bands of all sorts that have been very good.

Consequently, I guess any band that plays a predominance of Australian "folk" material could be classified as "bush". We had the usual fiddles, mandolins, whistles, both tea-chest ("bush") and electric bass, percussion, keyboards, etc., even clawhammer and bluegrass banjo. Other bands use accordians and squeeze boxes of every description, and everything from hammered dulcimers to jaws harps. Deep down I remain a folkie, and since moving to Darwin have concentrated on learning new songs. I still think of myself as a bush musician, and I do live out of town in the bush!

Hope I didn't confuse things too much.

Chris

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Alan of Australia
Date: 08 Dec 99 - 09:33 AM

G'day,
I sometimes wonder how much of our bush band culture existed in the bush in earlier times & how much is simply an invention of the latter half of the 20th century.

My mother grew up in Grenfell in the 20s & 30s. As a gold rush town & the birth place of Henry Lawson can you find a better example of an Aussie bush town? Yet she had never heard of bush dancing until I introduced her to it from Sydney in the 1990s. OK, one person from one town is a very small sample, but it would be hard to grow up in a small town & not know of any bush dances being held anywhere for miles around.

Cheers,
Alan

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Chris/Darwin
Date: 08 Dec 99 - 08:23 PM

Hi Alan

Many of the village halls we played in had a long history of dances going back 100 years of more. In the days of no PA systems you needed loud instruments - hence pianos found in so many halls. Just about every small village in Australia still has examples of old banjo mandolins from the mandolin craze of the 20's, when many villages had a mandolin orchestra. Dancing to 20 banjo mandolins must have been a hoot!

We wouldn't call such bands a bush band, just as a pianist with a couple of fiddle players isn't. The modern bush band is influenced by the Irish tradition as much as Australian bush songs. They didn't play guitars, whistles, etc., 100 years ago because they wouldn't be heard. The bush band as we know it(and the modern bush dance) is peculiar to modern times.

I remember the first gig I went to after I moved to Tamworth. We were playing in a small village hall, and I fondly thought my banjo was so loud that it didn't need to be amplified. In the event, even I couldn't hear it, let alone the audience! Amplification has meant that you can play many small instruments that add to the richness and complexity of the overall sound, something that you couldn't have done pre PA.

Regards
Chris

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 01:17 AM

G'day all,

A sI tried to suggest in my last posting, the terms Bush Music and Bush Dancing are old terms. They arise from people in the city, whether from the bush or not, looking for something that does survive in the bush ... but isn't seen, because it is just part of the self-sufficient, supporting culture that is the only thing that keeps you alive in the bush.

The sort of self-run, social dance that is attempted in the modern Bush Dance was already vanishing in the 1920s. I did a long interview about 10 years back with a bloke whose familiy ran a regular cricket match against the people of the next little town (Barrallier vs Boulia, back of Mittagong) then ended the night with a dance for which the family members all played ... except John, who I interviewed.

John said that all this vanished almost with the echoes of the last hammer stroke on the new movie theatre in Mittagong. As soon as there were movies and professional dances, the young people were off to town like a flash!

The heyday of this style was probably the 1880s and '90s and this is true of much of the song as well, which is why a lot of people prefer to call it Colonial ... that is dating before Federation of the states and the advent of self government on the first day of this century: 1 January, 1901.

From this also proceeds a desire to keep writing and singing songs that use traditional styles - especially the freedom to sing your own song, instead of paying some superstar to 'entertain' you. Is this "Folk Music" ... ask me in 100 years time.

Regards,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Blue Moon Wilson
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 01:40 AM

It's Austrialian Aboriginal music.

Check out This Site for more information.

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: alison
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 01:57 AM

link doesn't appear to work...

slainte

alison

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Benjamin
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 02:04 AM

Sorry about that! This one should work>

BMW

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 08:16 AM

This is am interesting topic for me having been part of the "bush band' scene in the 70's. There were two important things missing from all the bands of my acquaintance in the very early 70's, which are taken for granted today.

The first was the relative absence of vocal harmonies, plus tunes and songs were largely treated as discrete items. By that I mean that that songs were sung with little or any musical bridges to tunes. The tunes themselves were mostly played to support dancing.

I remember receiving some stick when I first joined a full time band that specialised in harmony singing and Irish / Scots tunes. "Harmonies were not part of Australian bush tradition - in unison and with gusto" was quoted from some noted source.

My memory is that the Dubliners were probably a significant influence in providing musical bridges between songs and trad tunes and in Melbourne it was the Bushwackers (and Bullockies Booze Band) that first made this common practice.

While I readily admit to loving trad music, I've always preferred to be an entertainer first and a musician second. Whatever a bush band ever was it is certainly a different beast today. Having written this I must check out the Bushwackers at Woodford in three weeks time.

Regards, John

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: Chris/Darwin
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 10:36 PM

Hi everybody

From my experience in NSW I agree with Bob that there is little evidence of "Colonial" type dancing since the 20's. Even people I met in their 70's had little knowledge of that type of dance. In the last 50 years it was more likely to be a "White Rose Orchestra", since the 50's a jazz band, and more recently a country rock band.

I think the bush band to Australia is akin to what say, Planxty is to Irish Folk music. I grew up with the "Jimmy Shand" model of Irish folk music, and accordian-based folk bands are still popular in Ireland, so what is "true" traditional Irish music?. The Bushwackers I guess were our Planxty!

Hope to see you at Woodford John; I am 193cm, balding/grey beard, probably dragging around one of my grandkids. (That should keep you busy for 6 days!)

Regards

Chris

Subject: RE: What is a bush band?
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 09 Dec 99 - 11:58 PM

Chris, I'll give you some more details in a couple of days, but I try to have some involvement in the Great Band Competition. Don't quite know what's happening there as Gordon McIntyre passed on a few months ago - I was fortunate enough to be involved in the judging last year. My favourite venue is The Troubadour - if you stay there long enough all of the best performers will end up playing there in a very intimate environment. I'll be in touch. Regards, John