Black people at folk clubs

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Azizi
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 06:40 PM

Guest, you wrote that you've seen "an awful lot [of Black performers]on stage, particularly at festivals in recent years".

I suppose you're talking about England, right? I'm curious, what types of songs did these Black performers sing or what types of music did they play?

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 06:31 PM

Right McGrath, but we are supposed to be multi-cultural. Surely this means sharing in each others cultures. I don't see it happening in folk music audiences. In many years of attending I have seen only a handful of black faces. Seen an awful lot on stage, particularly at festivals in recent years.I have no problem with that, I just would love to see it being reciprocal as far as audiences go.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 05:33 PM

I rather suspect that the relative absence of black faces from out-of-town in England, including folk festivals, is largely something that is also characteristic of quite a lot of other immigrant communities, including second and third generation, but their absence doesn't show up in the same way.

I mean you can run your eye over a crowd and notice that there aren't many black faces, but you can't do the same for, say, Poles or Greeks.

My impression is that there is an analagous situation with British expats in places like Spain clustering together.

NB I'm talking here about England and probably its neighbouring countries.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Charley Noble
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 04:56 PM

I'm musing over whether there is a similar absence of Black singers in the nautical sea music community. It's true that at festivals like the one at the Mystic Sea Music Museum, traditional Black performers have been featured when they led West Indies whaling songs, railroad construction songs, and religious revival songs from the Georgia Sea Barrier Islands. But it's rare that aspiring sea music singers in the States are Black.

That is ironic given that a large portion of the traditional sea shanties were composed and led by Black sailors in the grand days of sail.

The young Black sailors I recently encountered aboard the replica schooner Amistad were at least interested in such songs, and give me some cause for hope.

Of course there aren't a whole lot of contemporary White folks interested in this music either, unless they're confronted with it by accident!

Another Black national folk music performer that should be mentioned is Sparky Ruckers.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 04:41 PM

Cliff Hall

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 04:39 PM

True

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: The Sandman
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 04:36 PM

Dear richard bridge, the Hughie jones i know ,the one who was in the spinners was pink,I think you mean another ex spinner, Cliff.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 04:17 PM

Sorry, but where is the problem? I run a folk club. It is advertised all over Manchester. If any black people came they would be, and have been, made more than welcome. Surely the fact that they chose not to come is more their problem than mine. What am I supposed to do? Turn it into a blues, reggae or rap club to attract more black people? Sorry, but it is a club that leans heavily of English folk music. If someone wants to come and give us some Bangra music, no problem, but at the end of the day we are still a Folk club.

This whole premise is load of nonsense. Folk clubs are for folk - regardless of creed, colour or culture. If they don't appeal to everyone how is that an issue? Not everyone likes folk or rock or sci-fi or cabbage. What the hell does it matter?

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 03:37 PM

"they might come to espouse the tradition" - but of course there are many traditions. I'd hate to think that people from any of the many immigrant and immigrant descended communities in England would be expected to reject their own traditions and adopt ethnic-English traditions.

African, Indian or Eastern European musical traditions, for example, and people who recognise these as their particular traditions, should feel at much at home in the English folk scene as Irish music already does. (And American traditional music too, of course.)

And in no way that that mean ceasing to recognise and celebrate the ethnic-English traditions, with its own special qualities.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:54 PM

As always, I can only speak of the clubs in which I have been involved, but from that perspective I can unequivocally state that any black person who dropped in has been welcomed with open arms.

Unfortunately there have been all too few of them over the years, and I have no idea why that is so.

The few that I have seen have been either very good listeners, or very good performers, usually both, and I think the club scene is the poorer for their absence.

I would hope that, in time to come, when more enlightened attitudes (mainly, but not exclusively the attitudes of the white population) allow young black people to feel more comfortable living within UK culture, they might come to espouse the tradition, but this is unlikely to happen until they truly feel that they "belong", and there is yet some way to go in achieving that.

UK folkies, notwithstanding some of the comments about cliques and diehard traditionalists, are generally the warmest and most open to strangers people you can finds, so perhaps visiting folk clubs might help to achieve the above. I don't personally know one racist folkie, and after forty seven years that's one hell of a lot of non racists.

Don T.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Janie
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:49 PM

Azizi,

       I strongly agree with your observations about music and dance. There is little, if any, music that arose in the Americas in which the influence of Blacks in America can not be clearly discerned. And all of it is music to be moved to. Jazz, blues, spirituals, rock'n roll, and old time and bluegrass (banjo and clogging), sambas, rumbas, etc. etc. These are all forms of music that call the body to dance, to participate in the making of the music. The drummers and the dancers in African music are parts of a whole, and that tradition has clearly been carried on into those forms of music now generally considered to have arisen in the Americas.

    I wonder, also, if part of the reason those songs of the 60's seem slow to you now is a reflection of how the reintroduction of African music-dance to American audiences is again influencing our music.

    And I ain't sure how this post may relate to Blacks and Folk Clubs.

Janie

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:38 PM

Cy Grant
David Campbell

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Maryrrf
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:33 PM

My friend Maria is black and that does not stop her from enjoying any and all forms of traditional music. Together, we founded Richmond Folk Music and we host a wide variety of traditional music at our monthly concerts. (I'm speaking of the US, here). She was deeply involved in the California Folk Music Society before moving to Richmond, and regularly attends folk concerts and festivals (speaking of the US here) and has always, to my knowledge, been made welcome. But, very often she is the only black person in attendance. She attended the Getaway last year snd had a blast, although Mudcatters kept asking her if she was Azizi.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:27 PM

Hughie Jones
Johnny Silvo.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: fat B****rd
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:15 PM

Maybe they(black people)just don't like Folk Music in whatever form. I would hate to think that a black visitor to a folk club in the UK would be made unwelcome. As far as I can tell black people in England don't like jazz or blues much either. And why should they ?.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 01:09 PM

Different cultures have different musics, and they use them in different ways, but I doubt if there's any link between the kind of music people like and make and their genetic makeup.

The people of all continents have produced a staggering range of traditional music and song. Humans are like that. When we find ourselves making generalisations about the music of the people across a continent we need to remind ourselves of the range of variety that exists and has existed.
..........................
Devalued to me is nothing to do with being less valuable, it is to do with not having one's true value appreciated. To quote a line from the Ballad of Amadou Diallo by Larry Otway (InOBU of Mudcat) when he is referritg to Amadou's homeland, Guinea "Ancient wisdom despised, history buried beneath lies".

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 12:27 PM

It's certainly true that the ethnic backgrounds of most of the people at the Folk Clubs that I attend tend to be (or have tended to be in the past), white English/Irish/Scots/Welsh with the occasional American guest. I suppose that that is mainly because these clubs usually celebrate white English/Irish etc. culture and not because people of other ethnic backgrounds are not welcome. Nevertheless, I can recall Indian, Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Latvian and Greek singers being received with great enthusiasm. I for one love to hear musics from other cultures.
Perhaps people from Britain's various ethnic minorities don't attend Folk Clubs either because they don't know about them or, more likely, they, - like vast swathes of the British population, assume that British Folk Music is not 'cool'.
Most of the folkies that I know are committed lefties and any hint of racism wouldn't be tolerated!

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST,sorefingers
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 12:07 PM

Folk is alive and well in America! There are thousands of little joints all over where you can see 'black' folks playing all kinds of music, as well as places where all races meet and play.

Maybe the UK doesn't have its own tradtion? or is Reggae just a Jamaican thing?

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Azizi
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 11:54 AM

"...In England at any rate I would guess that the relatively absence of black faces in folk clubs or festivals arises largely from the same factors that mean that most places in England outside largish towns and cities tend not to see that many black people or Asians"

McGrath of Harlow,what are those factors? Are you referring to lack of affordable transportation or racism?

Also, McGrath, I'm sorry that you are uneasy with the statement that I made that there appears to be a strong preferance among Black people for music that we can dance to or otherwise move to. In my opinion, that has nothing at all to do with the racist beliefs that all Black people have "a natural sense of rhythym", and that Black people are "a simple childlike people". Racists are gonna say what they are gonna say and they're gonna believe what they're gonna believe. From what I know of you from this discussion forum, I'm very certain that you don't believe those stereotypical beliefs.

But I also have to say that I absolutely reject the notion that African Americans {or other Black people} are a devalued people. Devalued according to whom? As a matter of fact, I reject the notion that any group of people are devalued.

With regards to my point about the strong connection between music & dance in traditional & modern African cultures and in the African Diaspora, see this excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Africa:

"The treatment of "music" and "dance" as seperate artforms is an European idea. In many African languages there is no concept corresponding exactly to these terms. For example, in many Bantu languages, there is one concept that might be translated as "song" and another that covers both the semantic fields of the European concepts of "music" and "dance". So there is one word for both music and dance (the exact meaning of the concepts may differ from culture to culture).

For example, in Kiswahili, the word "ngoma" may be translated as "drum", "dance", "dance event", "dance celebration" or "music", depending on the context. Each of these translations is incomplete.

Therefore, from an intracultural point of view, African music and African dance must be viewd in very close connection. The classification of the phenomena of this area of culture into "music" and "dance" is forreign to many African cultures.

There is a close connection between the polyrhythmic structure of African music and the polycentric structure of many African dances, in which different parts of the body are moved according to different rhythmical components."

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Azizi
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 11:21 AM

That's an interesting article, Russ. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Here's a couple of excerpts from The White Top Folk Festival: What We (Have Not) Learned:

"Ultimately, however,[John]Blakemore was not the worst of the festival's problems. John Powell was. When Charles Seeger said that the political-cultural ideas that undergirded the festival were sinister and "reactionary to the core," he was referring principally to Powell. For all his cultivated elegance as a classical composer and pianist and champion of the folk, Powell was a thoroughgoing racist who had worked for years to maintain and strengthen the racist social and political structure of Virginia. As early as 1922 he had organized the Anglo-Saxon Club of America in Richmond, which was dedicated to "the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ideals." It was open only to white males. The Club proposed, promoted, and gained passage of Virginia's Racial Integrity (that is to say, anti-miscegenation) Law of 1923. In articles written for newspapers, Powell warned darkly of the "dangers of injecting into a white population a mass of primitive savages."[240f]

It turned out that Powell's racist ideas meshed neatly with his folk-based compositions and the cultural promotion work he did at White Top. The underlying aim in each case was to develop a national culture expressive of the values and esthetics of a lily white America. [242] Powell read musical and cultural history in strictly racial terms: "Negro music," he said, was "meagre and monotonous," but the "beauty of Anglo-Saxon folk music surpasses any other in the whole world . . . [and] promises a solution to our [national] problem." [243] Thus C. B. Wohlford's picking of "Cluck Old Hen" on his banjo or Council Cruise's singing of "Pretty Polly" on the mountaintop seemed to Powell a welcome "prophecy of the cultural future of Virginia."

With Powell's ideas as central as they were to the festival, it is not surprising that none of the more than three thousand blacks who lived in the three adjacent counties from southwest Virginia were allowed up John Blakemore's newmade road to the top of the mountain as spectators or performers. Black musicians had been documented in the area as early as the 1890s, and there was an especially vital group of black banjo players. Even some spiritual-singing black youngsters from a nearby CCC camp were refused admission to the festival. The only blacks Blakemore ever allowed on the mountain during the festival were the aged John Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt's father's servant, who came to present a gift to her in 1933 [slide #9: John Smith], and the two black men who cooked her meals.[slide #10: black cooks]"

-snip-

I consider it as one of life's little ironies that I share the same surname as the person who was considered the worse of the bad guys in that folk festival's history.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 11:13 AM

I think all folk instrumental music suffers when it gets divorced from its roots as music for dancing or parading to, and it sheds a lot of its appeal to most people. In fact I think that also applies to other types of instrumental music.

But I get a bit uneasy at the suggestion that this in itself is a major reason why there are relatively few black faces in most "folk" settings; that can come perilously close to colluding with the kind of stereotypes about "a natural sense of rhythym", and "a simple childlike people" and so forth - the same kind of stereotypes that have often been applied to other devalued groups, such as the Irish. It's the flip side of the stereotype that sees the same groups as potentially dangerous and brutal.

In England at any rate I would guess that the relatively absence of black faces in folk clubs or festivals arises largely from the same factors that mean that most places in England outside largish towns and cities tend not to see that many black people or Asians - and noone would suggest that that is because black people or Asians are natural city-dwellers in a way white people are not.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Azizi
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 11:04 AM

This archived Mudcat thread may be interest to folks posting here:

Black Britons & Folk Music?

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST,Russ
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 11:02 AM

For what it is worth,

Although the question is about current English folk clubs, it might be useful to remember that in the states the "folk" presentation/preservation/revival movement(s) have a long and complex history.

Ethnic diversity was not always a goal, much less perceived as desirable.

In the states, if you look at the "folk" phenomenon as a whole, "folk" has often been used in an exclusive rather than an inclusive sense. Often it has meant the traditional music of those of anglo/irish/scots descent.

A fascinating discussion of the political side of the folk movement in the states is "The White Top Folk Festival: What We (Have Not) Learned" by David E. Whisnant
http://www.h-net.org/~appalach/Whitetop3.html

IMHO If you want to understand why things are they way they are it is often useful to know how they used to be.

Russ (Semper GUEST)

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: woodsie
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 09:40 AM

Yes Terry Callier, Ritchie havens, Taj Mahal, Lina Lewis, Labi Siffri etc. We had one black bloke turn up at the tudor barn once. He sang great self-penned stuff and went down really well - never came back. I don't know why they stay away. But it would add a bit of diversity to the usual crowd and performances.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 09:38 AM

I remember seeing Johnny Silvo at the Krumlin Festival, [ a lomg time ago ] he came on wearing a kilt, and introduced himself as the only genuine member of the Black Watch Regiment. A womderful singer and performer, especially with his old mate Dave Moses.

eric

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Dickmac
Date: 20 Aug 06 - 08:26 AM

I've been a regular at folk clubs over the years and cannot recall many balck people in the audience and the only singer I can remember is Johnny Silvo.

Johnny has a wide range of styles in his repetoire and with a voice that is comfortable over a two octave range is a wonderful performer.
He must now be nearer to 70 than 60 but is still producing top class performances and is a resident at the Marymass folk festival from 22nd to 29th August. (see other thread for Marymass Folk Festival)

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Azizi
Date: 19 Aug 06 - 09:26 PM

What in the world is folk music? And where are these folk clubs anyway?

And how "warmly" would Black people who came to these "clubs" be accepted?

Hmmm.

You're right. It depends on where these clubs are.

I think that if Black folks think about folk music at all, they {we}consider this music as something foreign to us. "Foreign" here means not a part of their {our} experiences.

If you consider Blues and early Jazz as part of folk music, as I do-I thinkk that most Black Americans consider this music to be old timey. And while we like some "oldies but goodies", we think that this 'roots' music is too slow, too lacking in bass and percussion, too sad, and/or too filled with minstrel lyrics that harken back to slavery times {we got it bad and that aint good}.

A lot of church going Black people didn't grow up hearing this music. And since early blues and early jazz isn't on the radio and Black Entertainment Television has sold its soul to ...whomever..and since even before that was more into programming that was made eith the view that "a mind is a terrible thing-so let's waste it", there is not now nor has there ever been any mainstream programming that showcases this music. So how are we supposed to know it? We have to work to find it, and it's soo much easier to just go with the latest flow...

And that's another thing-when Black folks' folk music-blues and early jazz-become divorced from its dance traditions, those musical genres began to lose their Black audiences. When these musical genres became "for listeners only", we {Black people} moved on to music that we could move to.

In my opinion, we African Americans are very culturally innovative people. But once we have created something, we drop the old form and move on to the new one. This happens in music, and dance, and slang, and other cultural indices. Being innovative is good, but we care too little about the past.

That said, the world seems to be turning faster or something 'cause when I listen to uptempo music from the 1960s some of it seems too slow. Something's missing...Maybe I've gotten use to the steady bass percussive sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. I don't know what it is. But if even the fast 1960s music sounds too slow to my past middle age ears, then you know that the music of the 1950s and 1940s is gonna be too dry for me. And if this is the case for me, what about the young folks who grew up on hip-hop music?

None of this may be germane to the question at hand, since in my opinion, I think most Black people have bought the mainstream meme that "folk music" is the Peter, Paul, and Mary type songs. And besides White folks singing these songs during the 1960s Civil Rights protest era, I think its the dominant view of Black Americans} that that music don't have nothin to do with us Black folks.

So, all this to say, Guest Huey, I don't know what the answer is to your question. There're probably are alot of answers. I'll be interested in 'hearing' what other folks think about this.

Subject: RE: Black people at folk clubs
From: Bill D
Date: 19 Aug 06 - 07:56 PM

they usually have specific interests....

and where are YOU? It makes a difference.

Subject: Black people at folk clubs
From: GUEST,Huey
Date: 19 Aug 06 - 07:42 PM

Why is it that there are hardly any black people at folk clubs? Strange when you look at the major contrbution that they have made to folk song & music down the years.