George/Capt S.

I don't share the views of either of you ... it's a mistake to think that folk music (or whatever you want to call it) is just what can be seen. Nowadays, all people seem to see is high profile "performers" like Kate Ruby and Eliza Carthy. Previously, people didn't see anything at all, perhaps, so maybe it's better now. All I can say is I haven't seen Kate Rusby round at the Rose & Crown recently (though no doubt she'd be more than welcome if she did appear).

"Folk" song and music, though, was going on in pubs and other places up and down the country ... not just in pubs (like The Ship at Blaxhall) where the music making got recorded or by people like Sam Larner, Cyril Poacher and Harry Cox who people "discovered". There were "singsongs" every week during the 1950s and 1960s in the pub in my little village in Cambridgeshire. The people there knew nothing about "folk clubs" or "revivalists" and never had. Neither would they have ever thought of going to a folk club if anyone suggested it.

Thankfully, such events continue or restart, often unnoticed (thank God perhaps) by the "folkies". The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Animals, Troggs etc. are sung and played in them just as the "classic" English pub music of the 1920s and 30s (and the 1950s) included pop music from less than 20 years before (seems like we're a bit historically conservative at the moment). This hasn't changed any ... Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp were busy ignoring the more modern pieces as being "of little value" when they "revived" traditional music and song in the 1890s and 1900s.

Actually, all the "revivals" there ever have been are sitting on the back of traditional (in the sense of traditional practices) singers and musicians. The idea that the "revivalists" in some way kept the tradition going is, to me, somehow laughable. I'm inclined to agree with James Hogg's mother who told Walter Scott, after she found out he'd written her songs down and published them, that he had fairly ruined the lot of them.

10 years ago, I started a "Folk Session" in a pub in our village. It's village-based, though we welcome anybody who comes (so long as we don't fail to notice them). Hardly anyone who goes there has ever been to a folk club and none of them regularly attend one. Most of us don't go to any other session (though I admit that I attend one other fairly regularly). Our repertoire is varied (and sometimes we forget it altogether), including a fair bit of traditional material and the (very occasional) self-penned number which we all know and join in with. I regret having described the session as "folk" really, but there it is.

:-)