The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #166789 Message #4013562
Posted By: Jim Carroll
14-Oct-19 - 05:22 AM
Thread Name: The current state of folk music in UK
Subject: RE: The current state of folk music in UK
"Jim that it leaves folk music in the archives and the libraries."
My point exactly Al
Those libraries were't set up to preserve the songs in aspic - they were there to allow them to be accesses and learned from
The archives had a double purpose as far as I was concerned - to preserve the songs fist certainly, but where possible, to make them accessible to be learned from
Books and Archives are tools, not an end in themselves
Your Chinese guitars and also tools - it's what you make with those tools that's important
It is ironic that now it is possible to make them available world-wide via the Net there is no longer sufficient interest to make use of them widely
The clubs were set up in the first place from the songs released from the BBC collecting project and later from a small handful of books
We took them snad learned the songs
The folk boom drew in more people, yet later became a diversion and, like the similar jazz boom, crashed when the industry decided there was not enough money to be made from it, leaving behind the die-hards
The best of the clubs came later - many survived and prospered
The Singers Club died shortly after MaccColl died because Peggy moved back to America (for a time) - so the club MacColl started in the sixties carried on to the end of his life - not a bad thing to take to your grave, I think
My start wan't really The Spinners - they were the first live music I heard, but it was the songs themselves that kept me here and still keep me active
Groups like Oasis have been around forever - they have nothing to do with folk music - or this discussion
When we first started coming to Ireland the kids were listening to Boomtown Rats, Thin Lizzie, Gilbert O'Sullivan and the like and it was widely believed that the rich traditional stuff had seen its last generation
Dedication and buckets of blood, sweat and tears shed by a few people have introduced Irish kids to their traditional inheritance and they've taken to it big-time
One of the strange contradictions I've seen is the changing roles of the generations
When I was an avid pop listener my father would deride my music and say I should "listen to something decent instead of that rubbish"
He and my mother bought me my first MacColl album for my 21st, which started the rot
Both were somewhat sceptical when I started to sing (my mother once said "If you were singing for shit you wouldn't get the smell of it" - I cherish that as a classic piece of Liverpool humour)
Both came around to it and began to like the songs, my dad even started to sing his father's sea shanties and some Dominic Behan songs.
Unfortunately, neither lived long enough to see my interest develop from a pastime to an obsession - they died within 18 months of one another when I was in my mid twenties) but I think that would have been happy to see how things turned out.
What seems to be happening today is, while The Irish youngsters have leapt the wall and joined tha band of traddies, back in the UK, the oldies still left in the revival have turned to the pop music my dad despised and aredoing their best to ascertain the the British kids won't follow their Irish counterparts and take an interest in their traditions
Strange or what !!!
Jim