Nowt so queer as folk musicians?

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 07:22 PM

I've never come across anyone in the last half century or so objecting to Music Hall songs as not being "folk". I think that died out when Cecil Sharp and co passed away. And the singers from whom they collected didn't generally recognise any such distinction.

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 07:21 PM

I've never come across anyone in the last half century or so objecting to Music Hall songs as not being "folk". I think that died out when Cecil Sharp and co passed away.

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: Leadfingers
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 11:07 AM

It seems to me that the 'Purists' in ANY art forms are the people who havent really studied the art form to any depth ! How many of the 'Traditional Folk music is a Semi Religious Art Form' School ever met Bob Copper and actually talked to him ? Or Most of the other old 'source'singers ? If you are only prepared to listen to one small part of as wide a field as 'Folk' you are going to miss out on a HELL of a lot of good stuff !

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: GUEST,Steve
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 10:54 AM

I'm preparing a talk on American folk songs. I'd be grateful if anyone could offer any information about John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane". I heard a rumour that his copyrighted song is based on one by a folksinger from Nottingham, England. I know for certain that many people have copyrighted "new words and music by...." versions of trad songs, but I doubt that Denver would do that to some other guy's song. Anybody have any details?

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: Flash Company
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 10:37 AM

Saw this article and thought, 'Where the hell is he coming from?'
In the era of Lonnie I was probably more committed jazz fan than folkie, that came later. However, then and now I see nothing wrong with excursions into Music Hall, Revue or whatever.
If people don't listen to the music, it dies. I'll put up with the odd excursion into Music Hall if it grabs someone's attention for long enough to get them to hear Grand Coulee Dam.

FC

Subject: RE: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 09:26 AM

Don't you call me queer.

eric

Subject: Nowt so queer as folk musicians?
From: Skipjack K8
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 09:11 AM

From yesterday's UK Daily Torygraph


We all have our foibles, but there's nowt so queer as folk musicians
By Christopher Howse
(Filed: 07/01/2006)

In this crapulous season, I shan't mention Christmas pudding again, if you'd rather not, but I am rather fond of it myself, and would still welcome another slice. Perhaps the analogy I am looking for instead is Dickens - another slice of Dickens.



You know how it is when reading David Copperfield, and things are getting a bit slow and moody, you wouldn't mind another entry by Mr Micawber. Well, in just the same way, another slice of life, of characters as extraordinary as Mr Micawber, is always welcome to us fans of obituaries.

Obituaries are about lives, not deaths, and they never cease to amaze. The big brother to the entertaining collections of obituaries that The Daily Telegraph publishes from time to time is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and this week it published online 200 lives of people who died in 2002.

About some we know quite enough to be going on with - the sad Princess Margaret - recently traduced on telly, but here ably potted by Sarah Bradford - and the hateful Myra Hindley.

The latter does belong in such a book, for neither obituaries nor biographies are tributes; they are little histories. The original Dictionary of National Biography, begun in the 1880s, included murderers, madmen, traitors and impostors.

Among the latest 200 additions, it is also intriguing to find how some stones from the untidy mason's yard of the Daily Telegraph obituaries department have been built into this new transept of the Chartres Cathedral that is the ODNB.

Take Bartley Gorman, the King of the Gipsies (1944-2002). He was a bare knuckle fighter who defended his title in hundreds of bouts over 25 years. A devout man, he worked for gipsy welfare and the repeal of the iniquitous abortion laws.

Since the sport that was in his blood, as the grandson of the great Bulldog Bartley, happened to be illegal, his bouts were fought down mineshafts, in quarries, at horse fairs, in bars and aship in the Atlantic.

A detail from his Telegraph obituary that found its way into his ODNB entry is that, following his victory over a challenger for his title in Doncaster, after the St Leger in 1975, he was set upon by a mob which first attacked him with iron bars, and then attempted to saw his legs off.

Bartley Gorman's name just suited him. I wonder about that of Sir Hrothgar Habakkuk

(1915-2002). His surname came from his Welsh family and his Christian name from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which his autodidact father happened to be reading when he was born. Perhaps he was lucky not to be Grendel.

Lonnie Donegan (1931-2002) got his first name even more by chance. His real name was Tony. But, filling a spot at the Festival Hall vacated, because of a union dispute, by the American blues singer Lonnie Johnson, Tony Donegan heard a stumbling compère introducing him as Lonnie Donegan. It stuck.

Lonnie Donegan was the Bob Dylan of skiffle. If he had not brought to British youth (soon busy making themselves basses out of tea-chests and strumming washboards with thimbles) rare folk-blues material recorded by Alan Lomax (of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, or Mississippi Fred McDowell), then the Stones wouldn't have been the Stones.

As a parenthesis, one of Donegan's early heroes was Woody Guthrie. Another British popular musician who died in the same year as Donegan actually insisted, when studying at the Central School of Art, in London, that his friends call him Woody, and started speaking with an American accent.

This was the lead singer of The Clash, Joe Strummer (1952-2002), or rather John Mellor, his real name. The shame he had to live down was being brought up in a bungalow in Warlingham, Surrey, the son of a respectable clerk in the Diplomatic Service. In later reinventions, Strummer adopted a slurred cockney accent (1976) and in 1982, after seeing Taxi Driver, got himself a Mohawk haircut.

But, to return to Lonnie Donegan, his big break came with a Leadbelly song Rock Island Line, which made the British charts in 1956, a few weeks before Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel. Four years later, Donegan made history with the first British record to enter the charts at Number 1. This was My Old Man's a Dustman. Its first four lines have always seemed to me to possess great lyrical power:

Oh, my old man's a dustman,

He wears a dustman's hat,

He wears cor-blimey trousers,

And he lives in a council flat.

But to some folk purists, Donegan had committed a sin as grave as Dylan embracing the electric guitar at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on May 17, 1966. ("Judas!" cried a voice from the audience. Later, one John Cordwell, 1944-2001, claimed to have been that voice.)

Donegan's offence was to admire music hall. Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight? was a hit for him in 1958, but had once been a radio hit for the Happiness Boys in 1924.

I can't see why, just because it was comic not bluesy, this should put Donegan outside the "community of the saved" in the religion of folk. But a clue to the dangerous dogmatism of folk is to be found in the new ODNB entry for Alan Lomax (1915-2002).

Lomax lived in America till he was 35, but he makes it to the ODNB because of his influence once he arrived in Britain. He brought together the two great men of English folk, Ewan MacColl (whose name was James Miller until 1945) and A. L. Lloyd, both communists.

Lomax's own political vision was laughably, or endearingly, optimistic. He looked forward to "a new kind of human being, a new folk community composed of progressives and anti-fascists and union members.

These folk, heritors of the democratic tradition of folklore, were creating for themselves a folk-culture of high moral and political content."

It was an unrealised vision that Joe Strummer pondered as he rocked against racism and denounced (in White Man in Hammersmith Palais, 1978) the vice of "turning rebellion into money".

This remained among the unsolved contradictions of life that he was still trying to work out when, in 2002, at Broomfield, Somerset, after taking his dogs for a walk, he suddenly collapsed and died, three days before Christmas.