lamarca - what you say may have a grain of truth.

I've lived in a village at the bottom end of the Vale of York for the last 12 years or so. (Sounds picturesque, but it's a river valley and as "flat as a f*rt" for miles). It has a long tradition of arable farming and is home to what were once small farming communities. In the "good old days" here, as in I suspect every other community wherever you choose, people made their own entertainment. Quite probably they gathered together to make music and to mark the seasons. Up until the end of the 1920s, Plough Stots used to do a circuit of the local villages from nearby Snaith at New Year, and it was something that was anticipated eagerly. In my village until perhaps 30 or so years ago there was an annual barn dance at the main farm in the village to celebrate the harvest. The guy who told me of this also said that they used to gather at his or one or two other houses for "musical evenings" round the piano and I think I remember him saying that guests used to bring their instruments along too. Now the demise of all this started long before as transport became easier, and people moved out of the villages for better jobs in the industrial centres just to the west, at Pontefract, and beyond, where they married and settled. (The old church registers show the main occupation in the last century as being "labourer" = farm worker and general workhorse). Families became fragmented and the young ones left as soon as they were old enough. (They still do). Nowadays the village is growing again, but it is the influx of people from the towns coming back looking for somewhere rural to live when they leave their office in Leeds or wherever. Unfortunately they still look to the towns (or a pool table) for their entertainment and have no desire to have anything to do with traditional music - until they experience it!

Back to the original point of the thread: I am half Irish, but my Irish born dad was raised in Scotland, and I think he considered himself more Scots. I eased into folk music via the mainstream commercial Scots stuff around in the late 60s and then the love of English music developed as I got to hear more. I got involved in Morris when my husband started dancing just before we emigrated, and my first side was in South Africa for the 2 years we were there! I remember being fanatically English in those days. I've been involved with Morris ever since and am on my third side. These days it's mainly wielding a badly played melodeon, I'm afraid to say. The thing that distresses me most about the English is not what is played in sessions so much: at the Jug we all have different tastes and the music is fairly mixed. It tends to vary according to who is there. But it's when you have a session in a pub with a fair number of "Joe Public" in too, and they only want you to play Irish music. Not Scots, Welsh or English, but Irish. They don't have any preference (apart from the "Wild Rover") as long as it's Irish. Bill Sables will tell you that they've only got to take one look at his banjo and register that there's a guitar player around too, and they only want one thing...and that's American! With regard to the Morris: I have people stop me and ask when and where the dancing will be as I walk around in kit, but when you talk to them about it, they say, "Oh I love to watch it, but I couldn't do it!"

Within the folk fraternity I think we are all aware of the various traditions, and as can be seen by the postings here, we are all aware that there is an uphill struggle in England. The general public is not exposed to English music en masse, (most only touch on it in music lessons at school, and probably think it is all "Lass of Richmond Hill") and really the majority of them seem to think that Irish music stops at Foster and Allen or Riverdance, when that could be the start of their journey. Mine started through Scottish music as I have already said (actually via Scottish dancing classes, a mad urge I went with once) - and continued. I like most traditions, but English has become my favourite.

In the hope that all the above garbled ramblings actually make sense, I will just add one more comment - Quite often in the Jug we have Dutch and French people who work locally on a couple of industrial developments. They love to sit in and listen. We often invite them to contribute one of their songs, but the usual reply is that they don't know any. The one time we got one of the young French girls to sing, she gave us Simon and Garfunkel! An Italian guy who used to regularly come in did sing occasionally, but the one thing he would insist on every time was "Bring Us A Barrel", the Cockersdale song. One night we ended up doing it about 5 times!

mouldy