The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #166789 Message #4014952
Posted By: Jim Carroll
23-Oct-19 - 04:18 AM
Thread Name: The current state of folk music in UK
Subject: RE: The current state of folk music in UK
"Do clubs still matter to that extent any more these days..??"
Thye don't if you reduce the Songs of the Peiople to "hobbyist' and place it next to "pets" and "stamp collecting" PFR
I've never ever come across it placed in that category
I came onto the scene looking for alternative entertainment too Max Bygraves and Ricky Nelson - I was immediatly swept up in the tidal wave of what folk song was really about
The first concert I ever attended was a benefit raiser in a posh Liverpool Hall, by Rambling Jack Elliot for the then dying Woodie Guthrie, who carried his guitar into war against Hitler bearing the slogan "This machine kills fascists"
I picked up a leaflet for a Pete Seeger Benefit Concert - he had been sntenced to ten one year sentences by the House Un-American Activities Committee
I joined The Spinnrs Club - somewhat bland and over-friendly in the view of an apprentice electrician working on the docks, but the experience, but their singing of anti Apartheid and Ban the Bomb songs immediately got me to realise that, while these songs were very entertaining, they were much much more than that
Topic Records were pouring out records about people just like me - seamen, soldiers and factory workers and when I met Ewan and Peggy I realised that songs such as these went back centuries and operated as a voice for people on the same social level
I listened to and saw Dominic Behan sing songs about a week-long event in Dublin that sent the many-centuries old British Empire crashing about its ears
All this happened in the "hobbyist" clubs that were set up to give youngsters like me a voice of our own, to listen to songs about our forefathers, and and to encourage us to song them ourselves
I wouldn't have got that in the West Liverpool Goldfish Association in Speke
Later I met Lomax, who had toured the Texas prisons taking songs from black Convicts and Charles Seeger who, with his wife Ruth, helped introduce American youth to their heritage duruing Roosevelt's 'New Deal' project
I met Pat and we plunged into recording singers from the lower echelons of society - the despised Tinkers - we took them to folk clubs so others could meet them - we even to three singers, storytellers and musicians to the somewhat starchy Cecil Sharp house and sat them in front of an audience of young people to hear them sing play and tell stories and - most important of all - to swap their knowledge, skills and personal experiences with each other and the listeners - all carried out under folk-club conditions
Those clubs lasted for decades and allowed us to explore our songs and via them, our backgrounds (mine Liverpool post famine Irish, Pat's Anglo Scots) though the songs we listened to and weer able to sing - at the "hobbyist" folk clubs
None of this would have been possible without a club scene and it would be a crying shame to see the generations that come after us deprived of this by being condemned to life sentences of staring at little screens - not if I can help prevent it by making myself a pain in the arse to those who advocate on behalf of shuch inhuman life-sentences
I've got a clear enough view if the state of folk music in the UK, if the opinions of a small handful of people who post here are anything to go by - it's been betrayed and sold back to to the predatory Music Industry we managed to escape from all those years ago
The history of the British Folk Scene is beginning to read like THIS HISTORIC SERIES
Hobbyist - really ???
Jim