The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146562 Message #3394462
Posted By: GUEST,Blandiver
24-Aug-12 - 09:30 AM
Thread Name: Is it Really Folk Music???
Subject: RE: Is it Really Folk Music???
If that was aimed at me
Oops! No it wasn't, but thanks for pointing it out.
Your stance, on the other had has varied from, 'the tradition is a figment of the imagination of Victorian gentleman antiquarians' to 'we are all traditional singers'.
At my most magnanimous I am overcome by the feeling that The Folk Revival is this all-inclusive warm loving mothering Great Spirit of Belonging that nurtures each and every one of her children with equal & unconditional adoration. In such a state of mind I might allow that the very act of singing a Traditional Song is a sort of mediumistic trance possession which can result in some very fine ectoplasm indeed. At the very least it is Holy Communion in which I can well believe in the literal truth of Transubstantiation.
Nursing the hangover the following morning I might be less optimistic. It is then I line up my complete collection of Busts of Famous Folk Song Collectors that came free with packets of Sugar Puffs back in 1971 and shoot them with plastic bullets fired from my Multi Pistol 09 (the poorman's Johnny Seven I know; I also know my place).
Mostly though-but, you'll find me haunting the hinterlands in between, kicking over the fields in search of the odd clay-pipe bowl or piece of ancient bottle-glass that provides a more tangible sort of archaeology than even the disembodied voice of Joseph Taylor singing Brigg Fair on Percy Grainger's wax cylinder.
I suppose it's always been That Voice which has called me folkwards. But that it exists at all is due to the complexities of a hierachical social apartheid which we Brits are supposed to accept with passive deferential gratitude as our birthright. As I said earlier, my enthusiams are fed by such dialectics. I thrive on the contradictions, and even, at times, might contradict myself as I catch something in a different light. There are no absolutes here, just a merry stroll along the long vanished lanes where, as an 11-year-old boy, at some point in Easter 1973, my heart was opened to the notion that Traditional Folk Song was something very different from what you might hear on (the still utterly compelling) Hearken to the Witches Rune. I think I've been dealing with that ever since...