What got you hooked on folk music?

Subject: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Ythanside
Date: 09 May 07 - 08:47 PM

I know, I know, you're not really hooked because you can give it up any time you want to, yeah, yeah, yeah. Face it, if you're reading this then you've got a habit, and may even be a performer. I'm just curious to discover who or what led you astray.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: AWG
Date: 09 May 07 - 08:53 PM

Im just got lured in by the snappy subject line. I'm only hooked on Celtic Woman. However, folk music has it's place in the music world, no need for a total ban...yet.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 09 May 07 - 09:08 PM

dunno, all I know is that I've been hooked for about 30 years.

sandra (hopeless case)

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 09 May 07 - 09:08 PM

It wasn't called "Folk" music where I was raised.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 09 May 07 - 09:47 PM

I began college in 1958, nearly coinciding with the Kingston Trio, and having earlier heard the Weavers and Gateway Singers. At Santa Monica City College and met, and became friendly with folks who actually played the music. They introduced me to old-timey music and 'ethnic' music, etc. I still have some albums, in various states of playability which I obtained way back then. My very first 'folk' album purchase was "Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites," by Harry Belafonte; I still play it nigh on 50 years since.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Ythanside
Date: 09 May 07 - 09:50 PM

Jim Lad, it wasn't called 'folk' music where/when I was growing up, either. No-one I knew at that time had any concept of its classification, but that didn't diminish its undeniable and seemingly universal appeal one whit.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Scoville at Dad's
Date: 09 May 07 - 10:03 PM

Blame the Red Clay Ramblers.

My parents were folk-fan holdovers from the 1960's and 1970's. I went off to college and fell in with the wrong crowd; in this case, it was a string band. I probably learned more about music than anything else and I never got anywhere near the music department. None of us ever looked back.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Deckman
Date: 09 May 07 - 10:13 PM

Her name was "SUE"! My lips are sealed. Bob

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Bugsy
Date: 09 May 07 - 10:15 PM

I stumbled onto a folk club at my local youth club when I was 15 (1963) then saw Jesse Fuller on "Ready Steady Go!" one Friday night on the TV, but it was Derek Brimstone who got me hooked. I thought he was the greatest! (still do in fact.) I remember him coming into the shop where I worked and being all excited 'cos he'd just been booked for the Stevenage Folk Festival. I believe it was his first.

Luv ya Del!


Cheers

Bugsy

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: cshurtz
Date: 09 May 07 - 10:16 PM

For me....Dylan when I was 17 (which was 1997). I went backwards from there and discovered Guthrie and the crew...and then slowly it consumed my whole life

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Bill D
Date: 09 May 07 - 10:37 PM

Pete Seeger, The Beers Family, The New Lost City Ramblers all came to town in one year (1961) and made clear to me what Burl Ives had been singing on Jack Paar...plus one guy in town knew Child Ballads and had a subscription to "Sing Out"...so we started having Hootenannies and ignoring PP&M. Then there were the Jean Redpath records in the public library...there was no turing back.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 09 May 07 - 11:04 PM

WFMT's Midnight Special. When I was a child my folks let us stay up late Saturday night to hear it. I went in wanting to hear the Bill Cosby routines and left hooked on Folk Music.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 09 May 07 - 11:30 PM

Let me clarify, then. Folk music is what we sang at home. What we were taught at school, heard on the radio, listened to for entertainment, used to record local events (Efsee, I think mentioned The Ibrox Disaster Song recently, although there are others) and what we shared with our friends and visitors over the coal fire.
There was no need to call it Folk Music. We were the Folk who were singing the songs about our own lives and fantasies.
No disrespect to our North American neighbours but if The Kingston Trio was your family's introduction to Folk Music then you would be considered "Converts". That in no way implies that groups such as The Kingston Trio & The Spinners did little to increase interest in this form of music. Quite the opposite.
I remember the gradual change over from the John McCormick & Fr. Sidney McEwan types to the Clancy's & Dubliners and I am probably relatively young compared to many of the UK Mudcatters. I'm 52.
So: I wasn't being flippant. Folk Music is just music to me. It is the other genres which require a heading in my books.
I get so perplexed when the inevitable "What is Folk or Traditional" thread comes around. It is what it is! It's the other stuff which needs explaining and I can never find the words to explain that when it matters.
Cheers!
Jim

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Padre
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:23 AM

In 1955, I checked an album by Richard Dyer-Bennett from the local library - then I found the Smithsonian album of Anglo-American Ballads, and one of the Lomax recordings from Angola prison... from there it was all downhill! But even before that, I would listen to WSM late at night.

Padre

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:45 AM

I think the realization that the music I liked was what people were calling folk came from reading the liner notes to my sister's Peter, Paul and Mary and Chad Mitchell Trio albums. Before that, it was just the songs us kids sang in the bus on the way to day camp. But once I knew it had a name, I knew where to look for it in the record shops.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:57 AM

I think it was because Mary Travers was gorgeous. I didn't graduate out of Peter, Paul and Mary until about 15 years ago.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Barry Finn
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:23 AM

Hee, Hee, I'm glad you got beyond that Joe.

Barry

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: TRUBRIT
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:52 AM

Can't really remember but loved going to 'folk clubs' when I was in my late teens -although I loved pop music too. Discovered Martin Carthy (NOT the Watersons) when I was about 15 and teaching Sunday School ( I know - it was many years ago) -- the priest used to invite the Sunday School teachers over for dinner and he played me Martin Cathy -- To the Beggng I will go.....' - it was all downhill from there -- while still LIKING 'other ' music. I have a really hard time liking 'other' music today although my son occassionally leaves a CD in my car that I find really interesting.......

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: mrdux
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:09 AM

Like Phil, I'm another one who got hooked on folk music by the "Midnight Special" (WFMT-FM, Chicago), around 1960 or so. Similar story -- I had to get into bed but my parents let me stay up late on Saturday night listening to it on the the radio.

In case anyone is wondering, "'The Midnight Special' is WFMT's (Chicago's Fine Arts Station) weekly aberration of folk music and farce, show tunes and satire, odds and ends, madness and escape." It was started by Mike Nichols in 1953 and is still broadcasting every Saturday evening, now hosted by Rich Warren.

michael

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Ian Burdon
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:17 AM

The music has always been there as part of the background of my life and a number of artists consigned to the "folk" bucket were well known to me, but the first piece of performed 'folk music' which really caught my attention and didn't let go was Dave Burland singing "The Shooting of his Dear" (introduced as a Newfoundland variant on Polly Vaughn")on the radio.

Ian

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Sooz
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:32 AM

Donovan

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Barry Finn
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:52 AM

Dave Van Ronk, in a little dive on Boylston St in Boston, must've been mid to later 60's. Sayed with folk until maybe around 1970 then fell forever back with it arond the mid 70's, been happy ever since.

Barry

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Rowan
Date: 10 May 07 - 03:59 AM

Like JimLad I grew up with the music around me, not realising it would be later called folk music. In my case it was in Victoria during the 40s and it wasn't until the late 50s that I heard the genre named as such. Welcomed participation kept it and me going.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Essex Girl
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:03 AM

The Essex Skipper in Harlow with the likes of The Ian Campbell Folk Group. Lorna Campbells voice set me on the road that I'm still on over 40 years later.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: greg stephens
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:06 AM

I was vaguely aware of folk music from an early age as we all were, but it waas Lonnie Donegan singing "Rock Island Line" in 1956 that got me hooked. An addiction that has deepened with the years, and I believe it is incurable.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:13 AM

Which Victoria?

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:18 AM

Where have all the Flowers Gone - just that song, on the radio about 1963. Mind you the Cuban Missile Crisis on the tv news was a decent sort of way of focusing your mind on the issues dealt with in the song.

Luckily Richard Bridge wasn't around to tell me that it wasn't folk music.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Bugsy
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:24 AM

You're right there Greg, Lonnie Donegan did have a lot to do with me getting hooked too.

CHeers

Bugsy

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: MG John
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:37 AM

My first visit to a folk club occured after being invited by some students with whom I worked.They had just joined a new club in Leeds.The club didn't last longer than a few weeks, but by then I had visited other clubs in the area, and appart from folk songs, I also discovered Irish music was regularly being played live at The Regent public house in the city centre.
Nearby was another pub which hosted a well known folk club, (The Brig), at which, names such as Tony Capstick, Mike Harding, Barbara Dixon, plus many other names which later became famous. It was in 1973 when Barbara Dixon sung a song which she intoduced to the geography experts amongst us as being based at Ythanside, and on seeing this thread it prompted me to make an addition to it.
I found most of the people very friendly,(some I am still in touch with) and it was n't long before I was given the 'nick name' of which many years later I chose to use on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Megan L
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:39 AM

When i wis a bairn ma maw sang like a linty whitever she wis daen. "The Rowan tree, star o rabbie burns, grannies hielan hame and mony ithers heck i could probably sing the first verse or chorus o a hundered or mair Scot's sangs - she never bothered singing wan right through :)

ootside ma mither weel there wis Matt Maginn, the corries, robin hall and jimmy magregor, moira anderson, bill macue,andy stewart and others for the singing then there wis peter and danny wiper (Melodeon players)ma paw learned the melodeon listenin tae aul 78's o them and of course jimmy shand.

these days some fowk mak fun o them or critisise them but they kept things going till a new genteration could tak up the baton.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Terry McDonald
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:41 AM

Even earlier than Lonnie, there was Elton Hayes and the Americans Josh White, Burl Ives, and Big Bill Broonzy who would occasionally feature on radio programmes. For some reason singer/guitarists appealed to me. Then there were also the Sunday morning Big Bill Campbell radio programme, mainly 'cowboy' songs, but I liked the ones that had some sort of historical dimension (usually the civil war ones) or ones like the Streets of Laredo. It just seemed to me that there was a body of music out there which linked the present to the past. Later, of course, came skiffle, which led me into trad jazz (again, I liked the links with early American history) and then into English music through the folk clubs of the mid sixties. Like everyone else,it seems, I'm still singing and playing.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Terry McDonald
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:45 AM

For 'then there were' please read 'then there was'!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: redsnapper
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:47 AM

McPeake family back when I was about 12.

RS

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:57 AM

Hello,

My Mum introduced me to what we now call folk music...she had wonderful songs from her youth and uncles who trod the boards at Music Halls.

Then there were the "Singing Together" Schools Broadcasts which were a great feature of the week in the UK at that time...although how we got away with all singing about large masculine members of a valuable ethnic grouping wearing boots primarily used for seafaring...I can't imagine!

Learning ukelele chords from a very old community song book and enjoying the songs when I was about 11....then my sister took me to a folk club!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:59 AM

I think I was born liking folk music, I was 60 years old last December and I seem to have known one particular song all my life, I must have heard it on the radio when I was very young, and it was probably sung by The Weavers, ' So Long It's Been Good To Know You. ' It was many years later before I knew who wrote it, and I'm still a big fan.

eric

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 10 May 07 - 05:18 AM

I first heard folk songs sung at my junior school in the late 50s. I now know that the songs we heard, and were required to learn, had been collected by Cecil Sharp, mainly in Somerset, in the early part of the 20th century. I loved those old songs but I hated the music lessons and the rather fierce martinet of a music teacher.

A few years later I started going to my local folk club and heard some of those songs, and similar ones, sung in a style that was closer to that in which Sharp must have heard them (ie. unaccompanied and with a regional accent). The fact that these songs were being sung in the relaxed atmosphere of the back room of a smoky pub, and not in a rather intimidating classroom, helped as well. I was hooked then and have been ever since.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: guitar
Date: 10 May 07 - 05:23 AM

My sister Margaret gave me a record by the corries, and that was it, Punk rock oot the windae, now I sing anything within reason including some punk rock songs at the folk club.

tom

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Shaneo
Date: 10 May 07 - 06:49 AM

From school , back in the 60s Irish songs were thought in schools.
Not any more .
I didn't really get the ballad bug 'till I heard Tommy Byrne sing
'For Ireland I'd Not Tell Her Name'
That was thirty years ago and it has never left me.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: mrmoe
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:03 AM

Eric Andersen, Patrick Sky, David Blue, etc.....in the mid-60's I discovered that chicks dig singer/songwriters.....I don't suppose that this is what got me hooked, but I must confess it got the love affair started......and I've had a guitar in my hands ever since....

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Jim Martin
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:07 AM

'Eric the Red' - 'So Long It's Been Good To Know You', wasn't that the theme they used to use on a Radio Luxembourg programme where they used to smash records if they didn't like them, I think it was called 'Smash Hits'?

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Crane Driver
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:14 AM

Folk music did.

Andrew

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:21 AM

My babysitter Althea Grass, around 1942-4 -- she sang me "Billy Boy," "Lavender's Blue," "Polly Wolly Doodle," and a few other things I'd no previous idea of.

A man who visited my grandfather when I was about seven and to my startlement sang me "The Cork Leg."

My grandfather also had a few Carl Sandburg Musicraft 78s: "I Don't Want to Be Buried in the Storm," "I'm Goin' Away," "I Ride an Old Paint," and especially "Jesus Won't You Come By'm By." The religious message missed me entirely but the strange horse Macedoni and Sandburg's brooding way of singing became part of my imagination.

My parents, who had a fund of silly pop and not-quite-folk songs, usually in bits and pieces sung around the house, like "Where Do Mosquitoes Go," "Mairsy Doats," "Yes, We Have No Bananas," ""Where Do You Work-a John," "Quartermaster's Store" (sic) and the "In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia" cow parody.

Then, about 1949, a skiing/partying friend of my parents', Harrison Taylor. She was from the New York area and sang quite a lot of Burl Ives-type songs. "Blue Tail Fly," "Barbara Allen," "The Fox," "The Foggy, Foggy Dew," "Molly Malone," above all "Buckeye Jim," which (along with a few John Jacob Niles songs like "Venezuela") opened up to me the mystery that makes folk songs infinite.

This led me to a few of Burl Ives' early recordings. I was hooked. I started on my father's old college ukulele and mother's college mandolin, and after a year pestered for a guitar.

Bill Bonyun, mentor and friend, about 1950 sang a concert in the neighborhood and later one at my school. He was kind enough to visit my house, taught me chords, told me about his mentor Dick Dyer-Bennett and taught me some of his songs, sang "Three Craws" and a lot of other things.

That, and the Weavers' "Tzena Tzena Tzena" and Pete Seeger's debut LP "Darling Corey" that same year, finished the job. I was no longer fit for normal civilized suburban music forever. Before long I was scarfing up ballads and songs from books and listening to Library of Congress field recordings and finding people who knew obscure ditties, and ... The rest is definitely not history.

Bob

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Grab
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:45 AM

Initially my folks, although I never knew what they sang was folk music. Then learning guitar at uni using the Russ Shipton books, and buying some of the CDs to find how the songs went - that got me into Tom Paxton, Leonard Cohen, Don Maclean and Dylan. And then moving to Cambridge and the warm welcome from people in the folk clubs there.

Graham.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: kendall
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:58 AM

Buryl Ives, Pete Seeger, Wilf Carter

Bob Coltman, I'm trying to get in touch with you but had no success, can you contact me via e mail? [e-mail] ?

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:12 AM

Hi Jim Martin, I can remember ' Smash It ' but not the theme tune, I do remember they had various ways of smashing records though.

It also comes to mind that we had traditional singers in the family, albeit by marriage, my Uncle Donald was a mandolin virtuoso who set me on the way to playing it, but his sister in law Isabel was a genuine traditional Scots singer, I always loved her singing, much to the derision of my elder brother, she also had two very beautiful daughters.

eric

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: muppitz
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:14 AM

Folk music was injected into my system while still in the womb, my mother has had the habit for many years and we regularly have to go to focus groups (Folk Clubs) and share our methadone (Beer!) to get us through it.
I swear I came into this world singing "Smuggler" by the McCalmans!

muppitz
x

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: jacqui.c
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:26 AM

Folk songs in school and then the Spinners and Steeleye Span.

I got away for quite a few years but finally got pulled back in in 1999 after taking guitar lessons and finding that I could sing a bit. A recommendation to try the local folk club finished the process.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Bruce Michael Baillie
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:55 AM

...The Dubliners

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Howard Jones
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:55 AM

I'd just got the hang of three chords on the guitar at a time when pop music got really weird and phsychadelic, and I couldn't play any of it. So I was looking around for something I could play with my three chords, and discovered "The Burl Ives Book of Australian Folk Songs" inmy local music shop. That led me to the Spinners' TV show, Radio 2's Folk on Friday, and eventually (when I was old enough to go to pubs) the local folk club run by Geoff and Pennie Harris.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Russ
Date: 10 May 07 - 09:02 AM

Kingston Trio, Limeliters, Pete Seeger, et. al.

Russ (Permanent GUEST)

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 10 May 07 - 09:21 AM

Hearing The Weavers' "Goodnight Irene" on the radio when I was a wee tyke, then making the connection between that and The Kingston Trio later on (and there is a connection), hearing Bob Gibson and then hearing echoes of Guthrie, Seeger, and Gibson all over the Great Scare. Chad Mitchell Trio hooked me good & proper. Dropped out of it during 70s, back into it mid-70s with Bill Staines, Prine & Goodman, etc.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST
Date: 10 May 07 - 09:33 AM

In the tradition of Joe Offer, who's given us lists of the Silver Burdett school-age songbooks that taught folk and near-folk songs to so many people as kids, some of them for the first time in their lives ...

A word should be said for the Robbins Pocket-Size school songbooks of the 1930s and 1940s. They included an amazing amount of folksongs, which were re-becoming part of America's heritage due largely to a vigorous movement in and around New York spurred by Alan Lomax and others during that period.

I'll start a separate thread on these, as they deserve one.

Bob.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: skipy
Date: 10 May 07 - 09:51 AM

Wandered into the "Folk tent" at Bardney rock fest. 1971.
Harvey Andrews was on!
That was a Sat. night, sold ALL my Hendrix, Led Zepplin. Humble Pie, Grand Funk Railroad etc on Sun.
Had a meeting with NAAFI managersee on Mon. RAF Coningsby Folk Club opened on Thursday! The rest is history.
Going to see HA on Sat 19 May in witney.
Skipy

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Flash Company
Date: 10 May 07 - 10:28 AM

Lonnie Donegan, Rock Island Line and Grand Coulee Dam led me to Lead and Woody and Pete Seeger. From Pete I learned the important lesson that anyone can sing. Sort of found my way to English song by a very circuitous route.
Sang in clubs for about 25 years until one of my lungs gave up on me, otherwise I would probably still be doing it.
Now spend my time thinking of parodies for Song Challenges.
Still Hooked!

FC

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: synbyn
Date: 10 May 07 - 10:48 AM

Bob Dylan started me singing, with three chords and a coathanger harmonica holder. But folk music...
With a pal Andy Finch, unaccompanied singer from the Isle of Wight, in a battered green Bedford van, Friday nights to Chichester in West Sussex. There, at a singaround in the New Inn, Whyke Road, I unfurled my guitsr and plunged into 'Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall'. The reception was polite and encouraging.

Throughout the evening, however, I heard a voice which I recognised as having far greater resonance to me than the urban Americans (or the urban British for that matter): Bob Lewis, George Belton, Jimbo, Chalky, and I think a Marion- singing traditional songs with the characteristic refrain lines- later I came to know them as Copper songs.

I felt I had come home. I'd grown up in a Kentish village in the 1950s, not in the streets of a dirty old town, nor in the docks of Liverpool. These songs spoke to me. Twankydillo- Just As The Tide Was Flowing- Sportsmen Arise- Sorrows Away. It was the rich harmony of strong voices.

Martin Wyndham-Reed I remember as one of the first guests I saw- and he's still at it. It's the lyric, the deep-down resonance, the heart of being, beyond analysis. Hooked? Found the right pool, I think.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Scoville at scanner
Date: 10 May 07 - 10:49 AM

Seeing the Weavers in concert was what reeled my mother in. I don't know how Dad got into it--his family seemed to consider themselves too upwardly-mobile for that kind of thing--but he's been a total convert for years.

My brother went through a Metallica/Rammstein phase in high school but we got him back once he got to college and outgrew that.


*I differentiate "folk" from other genres since we also listened to a lot of ragtime and blues. At the time, it was "studio" blues--Bessie Smith, mostly--as opposed to Delta or East Texas, which are more "folky". Ragtime is pretty formal. Still folk relatives, I suppose, but not necessarily what one thinks of immediately.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Midchuck
Date: 10 May 07 - 11:00 AM

I got interested in commercial country music when I was 11 or 12 (early '50s), and we lived in the Boston area for a couple years. There was an all-country radio station that had more interesting music than the pop stuff of the time.

My parents wanted me to study an instrument, and I said guitar, and they said no, a "real" instrument. That was the only grudge I continued to hold against them until their deaths. I coulda been a contenda! I tried piano and drums but they never took.

When I got to college in '59, just as the folk boom started, I fell in with some guitar players who were in the process of converting from electric to Kingston Trio stuff, and my parents gave up and got me a $15 Stella and I learned some chords.

Then Joan Baez's first Vanguard album came out, and I was hopelessly in love until sometime in the middle of Vietnam...It's been downhill ever since.

Peter.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Ythanside
Date: 10 May 07 - 11:06 AM

Time; Early 1950s.
Location; (Non-)working class slum in Dundee, Scotland(difficult to imagine, I know, but it really did exist).
Event; Waking to the sound of an angelic voice, and dashing outside to find that its unlikely source was a middle-aged street singer.
The Singer; Mary Brooksbank.
The Song; Joe Hill.
The Effect; Instant intoxification, a 'high' that just blew me away, that turned me into a music junkie at eight years old.

The combination of voice, melody and lyric still presses all the right buttons for me, Mal Waite singing 'Wild Geese', Bill Alldrick's 'Franklin', Luke Kelly's 'Raglan Road' or 'Night Visiting Song' being prime examples.
'Super-fixes' are more rare these days(well I AM getting old, as my wife insists upon reminding me), but they do still happen from time to time. My latest find is Jean Redpath's rendition of 'Before They Close The Minstrel Show', and it's absolutely sublime. I'm thoroughly ashamed to admit that I heard it for the first time only about two months ago, but am delighted with the discovery and haven't stopped singing it since then.      
Most folkies I've encountered over the last half century or so are unable(or unwilling?) to pinpont what got them started, hence this thread.

BTW, is the Bob Coltman who posted here a short while ago the same Bob Coltman who wrote 'Before They Close The Minstrel Show'?
If so, I must say I'm in awe of your songwriting and would like to know where I might buy your CDs. I've been looking and asking around for weeks and can't find a source. Perhaps serendipity DOES exist, after all.
Cheers,
Ythanside

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 10 May 07 - 11:47 AM

Hi to Ythanside.

Yep, there's only one of me last time I looked.

Excuse this shameless self-promotion. I probably should have used restraint and asked you to e-mail me. But hoping for others' forbearance, and with a caveat -- please, no further thread creep about my records! OK? -- here's sketchy info:

Minstrel Records has a website if you google. They will, I believe, still burn custom CDs of my three 1970s LPs for them. They are

Lonesome Robin
Before They Close the Minstrel Show
Son of Child

My other 2 LPs, for Piedmont and Biograph in the 1960s, are long out of print and unobtainable even for me.

The singles I did as solos for Joe Bussard's Fonotone label in the 1960s, though, along with the numerous band numbers we did as by Jolly Joe's Jug Band, the Georgia Jokers, the West Maryland Highballers and quite a few other band names, from which the Piedmont and Biograph LPs were compiled, are as far as I know still available in cassette form from:

Joe Bussard
6610 Cherry Hill Rd.
Frederick MD 21702

By the way, quite a few of my/our Fonotones were included in the recent 5-CD Fonotone box, Dust-Tp-Digital DTD-03. If not available from your friendly neighborhood record behemoth, write to:

Dust-to-Digital
P.O. Box 54743
Atlanta GA 30308

Heck, they might even have a website, not sure.

Have fun, and once again, my apologies to uninterested others for taking up a message with this -- just answering the question in the least possible space. Joe, you are free to delete it if you think it unsuitable.

Bob

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Cats
Date: 10 May 07 - 11:56 AM

My family all played and sang and my 'aunt' who used to look after me in holiday and weekends and who was great friend of my sisters was a singer. It was normal for people to come to the house or the local pub to sing and play and I just learned by osmosis. What made me even more determined that I was going to continue was when I went to Grammar school and my music teacher told me that playing concertina's and whistles was not playing an instrument and singing with the family was not singing.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 10 May 07 - 11:57 AM

I grew up hearing western swing and country music in my rural area of central California. In the late '40's-early '50's, I remember The Weavers and Burl Ives. When Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders came out with "Marianne," in the early '50's, I was hooked. My dad found me an old Stella guitar from a pawn shop. It sounded like a cracker box with strings, but it was functional. Summer campfire singing and, later, The Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley" stoked the fire. After that it was open stage time in local coffee houses, the camaraderie and exchange of music and technique, etc. That eventually led to solo and trio performing during the early '60's. I still play only by ear, and only occasionally. My son has taken the ball now and moved forward with his own group. He plays rock, but admits being influenced by both folk and classical music. The gift that keeps on giving?

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Folk Form # 1
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:03 PM

Steeleye Span and the Chieftains being on tv in the mid-70s. I also was an avid reader of Melody Maker and that had a regular folk section in the back written, mostly, by Colin Irwin. A good introduction.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Ythanside
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:04 PM

Yup, serendipity really DOES exist. Thanks, Bob, and I promise not to breath a word to anyone.
Cheers,
Ythanside

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:15 PM

And, of course, Harry Smith's phenomenal and, in its time c. 1951, utterly unlikely AAFS -- the famous Folkways Anthology. It's a often-told tale, I know, but thousands could tell it, and I'm one.

Nobody can quite appreciate nowadays, in this world of abundant folk source recordings, just how all that down-home music by half a hundred rural artists changed our lives. It was a revelation of style and approach to just-starting neophytes who suddenly found that Burl Ives and Dyer-Bennett and JJ Niles styles weren't all there was to folksong.

Among other things (like oldtime music by the likes of the Carter Family, Kelly Harrell, the Carolina Tar Heels, Uncle Dave Macon -- you know the list), this was where a lot of us first heard ...

Authentic blues! -- more authentic, that is, than the cafe-style Josh White who was all we'd heard till then, and utterly different from the Stinson and Folkways Leadbelly records. The AAFS broke open white kids' ears to a torrent of 30-year-old African American blues music as the 50s began. Blind Lemon Jefferson and a cohort of others turned me and a lot more people into bicultural, biracial singers, or at least imitators -- breaking forever the folk-musical color bar that had already been smashed by jazzmen and -women for their kind of music.

That was, in its own way, a complete remaking of me as a still green musician of a year or two's standing -- comparable to getting acquainted with folk music in the first place. This plus Library of Congress records put me forever nose-to-nose with folk music where it lives, not as it's interpreted by city singers. From then on I was learning the real stuff, along with a whole bunch of other people scattered everywhere within reach of Folkways Records. Dynamite! Thanks, Moe Asch and Harry Smith, for making it happen.

Bob

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: open mike
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:20 PM

what an interesting thread.
i happen to know "sang like a linty"
regers to a bird...since i was stage
manager when a duo named linty sang
at the san francisco sea music fest.

who DID write "so long it's been good to know you"?

in elementary, junior high and high school I played violin
in the orchestra. if i had been playing fiddle i may have
continued, but i considered the orchestral music symbolic
of a culture i was rebelling against, and lost interest.
as they used to say on that t.v. show (dick clark's american
band stand) i would give it a 5-you can't dance to it.

i do remember going to a fiddle festival or contest with a
car full of high school friends and we were not really into
that type of music...we sang every simon and garfunkel song
we could think of in the car on the way there.

i was active in scouts and church and we established a folk club
(or "coffee house"--though few of us had any interest in coffee)
in a church basement next door to the school. I would often
sing at church services, and our youth group would travel to
other towns to sing...we incorporated folk music--such as
Dylan, and PPM into our repertoire.

in college i had a philosophy professor who conducted a singing
and playing session in the student lounge/snack bar after hours.
he introduced me to old timey music and blue grass style. I have
a recording he did just recently..after retiring from over 30 years
of teaching. In fact he and i jammed a few years back when i was
experiencing the death of both of my parents and searching for
music to perform at their memorial service. This was very comforting
and helpful for me to find some music therapy in the midst of
all the other tasks I was involved with.

I recently received an invite to my 35th high school class reunion
and was reminded of a girl i used to play with in 1970. She knew
400 songs back then...i wonder how many more she has added to
her repertoire now?! I hope she comes to the reunion so we can
compare musical "notes" . the reunion committee always books
a rock and roll band for this event. there were over 1,000 students
in my high school class. i requested being able to play when the band takes a break. and have been scheduled in, so there will be folk music
there now too.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:23 PM

The Corries...Donovan....and Steeleye Span who I followed all over in their early days.
Mupptiz talking about the McCalmans brought back memories too.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:30 PM

GUEST,Bob Coltman: Will try and do the blue clicky thing for you later, while the wean's having her nap. (Unless somebody has the time and beats me to it. hint, hint!) Excellent contribution.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: ossonflags
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:53 PM

Got it from me Dad in the early fifties i suppose;he was always singing the "wild Colonial Boy" and "Maggie May"- both I sing to this day.

I first saw The Watersons playing a coffee club down Grimston street in Hull called the "Jacoranda" in 1960 and that was that - well hooked !!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 10 May 07 - 12:58 PM

open mike - "So long..." is Woody Guthire's. From the 30s, I believe; it was another of The Weavers' hits just before Tailgunner Joe and Co. got going.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: JedMarum
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:04 PM

I liked rock-n-roll, I loved the folky stuff. I watched Hootenany on TV. I loved Theodore Bickel, Pete Seeger, Chad Mitchell Trio ... Johnny Cash - just a few that really hit me from the TV show ... I played rock, blues and some country ... but never really liked playing electric. I'm an acoustic biggot.

I firmly believe that mankind has invented some wonderful acoustic instruments, but God gave us the mandolin!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: concertina ceol
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:24 PM

Mum sang all the time at home, Dad was a great player of LPs: Morris On, Lark Rise to Candleford, Mysteries (!), Watersons, Blue Murder etc. and a great photographer of Castleton Garland, Haxey Hood, Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance, Bacup Brittania Nutters, Scarborough Skipping, Whitby Penny Hedge, Ashbourne Football, Hare Pie Scrambles and loads of other fantastic stuff... I carried the camera bag, tripod or sound recording equipment.

Kiveton Park Folk Club (at the Lord Conyers back then), Lord Conyers Morris Men, Yorkshire Chanderlier, Father Ken, Handsworth Sword Dancers, Whitby Folk Week ........

I've been so fortunate when I think back to experience all these things....

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: SouthernCelt
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:35 PM

Well, I'm another one of the older heads here that didn't call it "folk music" when I was growing up. It was just the stuff the locals sang when they had get-togethers. I'm talking the 50s to mid-60s period. I had an uncle that teamed with a DJ at the local AM station and did live and recorded shows (came to our house and recorded one in the early 50s). My uncle tended toward what was considered the country music of the day for most of his stuff. He also wrote a lot of stuff and 20 years later he met an early death in a vehicle wreck near Nashville while he was trying to sell himself as a singer/songwriter. When I went off to college in '66, I fell for a girl big time that was into the whole folk scene, PPM, Ian & Sylvia, etc., so I got indoctrinated on "true" folk music. I also was talked into trying to learn guitar and got a cheap nylon strung classical that was my learning instrument. In '77 I went all the way to a Martin D-35 which has been my main instrument ever since. Out of all my favorites from the early days, the only ones I still listen to much are Ian & Sylvia and Pat Sky. But folk in it's most general terms, that is, not just trad., is what I mostly do and listen to. (Oh, if anyone cares, my first love didn't endure and we went our separate ways after 3 years.)

SC

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Mr Red
Date: 10 May 07 - 01:58 PM

Kathleen Ferrier "Blow the Winds Sutherly" - earliest influence.
Girlfriend #3 took me to an FC
Divorce sealed the habit good and proper.

I must be a five a week man now. Folk sessions, that is, not girlfriends.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GRex
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:06 PM

I knew nothing of folk music until in the late fifties, I spent most of my spare time renovating an old wreck of a house I had bought, with only a "tranny" for company. After a few days I realised that the singers I was hoping to hear on radio were folk singers. Started visiting a local folk club and have enjoyed life since.
            GRex

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Mark Ross
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:27 PM

My parents had the WEAVERS AT CARNEGIE HALL when I was 7 or 8. I wanted to learn to play the guitar but the teacher they took me to said my hands were too small. When I was 14 in High School everybody it seemed was playing(that being the heyday of the Great Folk Music Scare)I took up the guitar shortly after going to a concert at Hunter College. Brownie & Sonny, Rev Gary Dvis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mississippi John Hurt, all for 2 bucks. When I was 17 ended up in the Village playing the basket houses, trying to be a singer-songwhiner(that was what was big then), gave it up and started learning the music off the true vine.


Mark Ross

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Greycap
Date: 10 May 07 - 02:29 PM

Got taken to see the Weavers,Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee and Rambling Jack Elliott at leeds town hall about 1958/9. That did it!!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Peace
Date: 10 May 07 - 03:26 PM

I disagree with Mark. He was never a whiner. And he always did have a place in his sets for traditional materials. I'm old, but my memory still comes back in lucid flashes--or maybe Lucid in the Rye with Almonds.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Fidjit
Date: 10 May 07 - 03:39 PM

Via Mick Muligans Magnolia Jazz band with George Melly singing Frankie and Johnny (With actions) in the late 50's.

Then of course it was Skiffle and Lonnie Donegan. The Troubadour in London. Martin Winsor & Red Sullivan. Then, the Radio Ballads.

Then I discovered we (England) had our own songs and heard Shirley Collins. All down hill after that.

Bought books like Marrowbones, Constant Lovers (Only just got hold of Wanton Seed)and Alfred Wiliams Song from the upper Thames.
A.A.Lloyd's, Folk Songs of England

LP's of Dave & Toni Arthur, cassettes and LP's of Tim Hart & Maddy Prior (All pre Steeleye stuff) Leader and Topic records of you name them.

Listened to Jim Lloyd on Folk on two (On the old Long wave radio)
And Wally Whyton too!

Been round the block twice.

Chas

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: danensis
Date: 10 May 07 - 03:42 PM

Whenever there was a rainy day when I was at Infant School we would sit crossed legged on the floor in the school hall and sing songs from the News Chronicle Song Book - Men of Harlech, The Lincolnshire Poacher, Hearts of Oak, The Hermit, and something about a cook with one eye on the pot and the other up the chimney.

At church socials we sang "choruses" at the scouts we sang other songs I later found out were "folk".

Then in 1967, I was working on an International Work Camp in Birmingham, and one of the chaps there said "I usually go down to a folk club on a Thursday night", and we got on a bus and went down to Digbeth Civic Hall.

The rest, as they say, is history,

John

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: kendall
Date: 10 May 07 - 03:57 PM

Minstrel Show, Lonesome Robin and Patrick Spencer will be on my new CD.
They are three of my alltime favorite. Bob C. I need your address to send you royalties

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Arkie
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:11 PM

Since I can remember I have had a preference for songs that told stories and was drawn to Burl Ives when he was on the radio. I was 12 when REA reached our farm and it was several years later when we had television and I began to hear Harry Belefonte on occasion plus a dulcimer player named Dierdre (or something like that). I saw her only once and never heard of her again. Though my mother knew several old songs I did not have any contact with traditional musicians as I was growing up. There were several guitars in the family and I took possession of one however it was not playable.
Though I still enjoy a variety of music folk music is still the most important.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,chinmusic
Date: 10 May 07 - 04:15 PM

Dylan and Lightfoot back in the 60s. I've been in recovery mode ever since.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Beer
Date: 10 May 07 - 05:16 PM

Was and still am in the Irish Folk. Did all the hang outs in Montreal. Then I heard "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot". Blew me away. From then I've always kept searching and every once in awhile some great folk writer will pop up. Like John Prine/ Kris Kristofferson and others.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Bill D
Date: 10 May 07 - 05:43 PM

Bob Coltman...Kendall Morse is looking for you! (His email is way back up there ^

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: HouseCat
Date: 10 May 07 - 05:57 PM

We didn't call it folk music either. It was just the songs my mother taught us, old mountain songs from her childhood like "The Brown Girl" and "In the Pines". My father built Appalachian dulcimers and when he decided that the only thing you could do with four daughters was form a band, we started going to festivals. That's when I was told I was a folksinger. My passion for Irish and Scots music began as a teen with the realization that alot of the songs we were singing sprang from those traditions.
So I guess folk music was just always there, don't remember when it wasn't a huge part of my life.
HC

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Peace
Date: 10 May 07 - 06:27 PM

The first songs I recall loving were many that I sang while being part of a church choir in the 1950s. Then along came "On Top of Old Smoky" and "Goodnight, Irene." Many of the trios from the 1950s did pop music that involved dynamite harmonies, and I have always loved harmony work. My grandfather played piano, harmonica and sang. He had what I thought at the time was a beautiful voice, and he passed his love of church music on to me. Folk music to me is not something that has to be two hundred years old. Grampy knew some folks songs like "Red River Valley" and he did a rendition of "Shenandoah" that I can still remember from fifty years ago. It was beyond beautiful.

What got me 'hooked' on folk musi was the ease with which they told stories and allowed for many people to sing together. And the melodies were of a kind also: pretty, facile and touching. Even to this day my 'definition' of folk music means the songs have to incorporate those qualities and attributes.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Wayne Monroe
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:14 PM

The Kingston Trio, 1958. Of course, I'd heard The Weavers, Harry Belafonte and others on the radio prior.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Joe_F
Date: 10 May 07 - 09:55 PM

My mother sang to me from the day I was born (28 Oct. 1937). By age 3 I knew a lot of songs I had learned from her.

When I was a kid there was a radio program _Wayfaring Stranger_ by Burl Ives that we listened to. We also had phonograph records by him & other folksingers.

My high school (Putney, a boarding school in Vermont) had a vigorous folksinging tradition when I was there (1950-1954). Students taught other students to play the guitar & banjo and handed down versions of songs.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Dulcimer
Date: 10 May 07 - 10:56 PM

I didn't realize it at the time, but it was those school music books back in the early 50's. I loved singing, and music class. WE had a music teacher who came to our class once a week... pitch pipe and books in tow. Many of the songs I learned to love back then, became a part of the "folk music" era....   and those old school books, if you can come across them now, are a valuable resource.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: iancarterb
Date: 11 May 07 - 12:34 AM

Born into a house near NY that was full of Brit and Australian and New Zealand Royal Navy ratings til the end of WWII. I think I must have known Waltzing Matilda from the age of two, plus a number of interesting and colorful songs already familiar when I first heard Oscar Brand's Bawdy Song series 15 years later. Burl Ives records in the house as soon as there were 10" 78s, and done for after my first Newport Festival in 1960. The Warner family led me into things I had not heard before and haven't shaken since, even 40 years after my last Pinewoods!    Carter

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: the one
Date: 11 May 07 - 07:23 AM

jazz

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 11 May 07 - 07:37 AM

Sex.

I did a little folk some time after university, but I didn't really inhale. The real skunk was so hard to find - apart (somewhat later) from the late Carey Roberts who used to sing at the Wish it Was a Brewery.

Then eventually I settled down with Jacqui, and her Hagstrom was allowed indoors (albeit on top of a wardrobe in the case), while my Futurama and amp got banished to the garage.

After a long time, it might have been as recently as 1990, she eventually produced an acoustic guitar for my birthday, and told me that she was fed up watching the telly doing nothing in the evenings, and I was going to learn to play guitar properly and stop all that rock and roll rubbish. Well, we all know the penalty for displeasing the trouble and strife. I never really got any good on the guitar, but that was the start of the slippery slope. Sex!

Grin.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 11 May 07 - 07:39 AM

Interesting Mr. Red mentioned Kathleen Ferrier. Hers (on the London label) was one of the earliest LPs I heard when I was first learning.

Style apart, I will always be grateful to her for the song "Weel May the Keel Row." The first Tyneside song I ever heard, and loved, and still sing -- surprising it's not heard more often on our Yank side of the water. A beauty.

Bob

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Don Firth
Date: 11 May 07 - 02:33 PM

When I was a little sprat, I must have heard Alan Lomax's folk music program on the "American School of the Air," because I listened to the whole run of programs they offered, but I probably had no idea who or what I was hearing. In the mid-Forties, I remember hearing Burl Ives doing a program on the Erie Canal, giving its history, telling stories about the people, and singing a bunch of songs. I learned more about the Erie Canal in one hour than I did in a whole batch of history classes. Then along came the Weavers in the late Forties. So I had a vague idea of what folk music is.

Then, when I was at the University of Washington, I began going with a lovely young woman who was very much interested in folk songs, had just inherited a really nice old parlor guitar from her grandmother, and was busily teaching herself how to play it. She showed me a few chords on the guitar, and I figured, "I think I can do this." I had taken some voice lessons a few years before and enjoyed singing, but I had never zeroed in on any particular genre of songs. Naught would have it but I bought myself an "El Cheapo" guitar ($9.95, and amazingly enough it's intonation was on and the action was fairly soft, even if it did have a tone like an apple-crate).

During the course of my learning to play (Claire was way ahead of me), we went to a concert given by local folk singer Walt Robertson. After about two and a half hours I was completely hooked. I met Walt subsequently and hit him up for guitar lessons. He also taught me a lot of songs and clued me in on books and records to get. I also saved my nickels and got myself a much better guitar.

I kept plugging away, practicing and learning songs, and singing at songfests and hoots and occasional gigs, when, in 1959, a friend who did programming for KCTS Channel 9 (local educational station) drafted me to do a series of TV shows called "Ballads and Books," funded by the Seattle Public Library. As a result of the TV series, I was a bit of a local celebrity and suddenly very much in demand for gigs. Concurrently, coffeehouses had begun opening around Seattle, and I pretty well had my pick of jobs. Later on, concerts, hootenannies, more television. . . .

Been at it ever since.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Tinker in Chicago
Date: 11 May 07 - 04:59 PM

As a freshman in high school, I attended a show where four seniors sang the Kingston Trio's "Bad Man's Blunder" while playing guitars and such. I was really impressed. Remember, in the early Sixties the idea that ordinary people could sing and play instruments was rather novel; our popular music was crooners (Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, et al.) and choirs (Ray Conniff Singers, Percy Faith, Mitch Miller and the Gang, et al.) I looked at those guys and thought, "Heck, I could do that!" So I started buying Kingston Trio records and imitating the seniors who were imitating the Trio.

I've often wondered what would have happened if the USA had not had the folk music boom of the early Sixties. Thanks to the Trio and their kind, we had a whole generation of young people who could play three chords on a guitar...and then the Beatles showed up playing three-chords rock songs. The folkies had prepared the soil, so to speak, and the British Invasion rockers planted the seeds.

The immediate results were the Beach Boys, who rocked some songs that the Trio sang and freely admitted they stole the vertical-striped-shirts idea from the Trio. And then the rock industry exploded.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: oldhippie
Date: 12 May 07 - 01:02 PM

Hearing recordings by Carolyn Hester and Oscar Brand.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Joules
Date: 12 May 07 - 03:26 PM

The People

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Mooh
Date: 12 May 07 - 04:07 PM

Must have been genetics. My father dabbled in folk music (aside from choral and church music), and my mother was raised in a very traditional (music wise) Scottish household, so something rubbed off on me.

As a child I was strangely drawn to church hymns based on old folk song melodies, without even knowing at first that they were folk melodies. That led to an appreciation for the songs from my parent's books of folk songs which they shared and we sang at choir camps, campfires, scouts, and elsewhere. Even after I got rebellious and discovered rock and roll I loved Jethro Tull and the folkier Led Zeppelin songs. Even went through a bluegrass phase. That carried me a long time until I started getting interested in acoustic groups and their propensity for playing folk music. By that time I was getting stuck in my ways.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 12 May 07 - 04:09 PM

Who wants it. 99 ....

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 12 May 07 - 04:54 PM

aw...go on then!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: mg
Date: 12 May 07 - 05:27 PM

We sang the old songs at home and at school. My mother was quite musical and my father's father was a great singer I heard (I just put him in a song). I was taught by Irish nuns and would turn on the Scandinavian hour when my mother was at church..that was the only time we could listen to the radio..I have the Scandinavian hour on right now..I can't imagine a world without Scandinavian music...so pretty and bouncy...they taught us all to Schottisch up and down the gym floor in school...in case we ever needed to know that social skill...we had a couple of German oompah bands that would play on the fourth of July..that was about the only live music I heard except for piano..probably never saw a fiddle in my life till I was adult..I never went through a musical rebellious phase except fighting with my father to watch Lawrence Welk..I was the one who wanted to watch it not him except when Norma Zimmer came on...I repeat myself but my favorite quote from him is "how can you like that music...it only has one beat and one note and only a Norski could like it.." He also told me in no uncertain terms to never bring home an Irish tenor. mg

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Mothy
Date: 12 May 07 - 05:30 PM

i probably got started by running the radio at a local country dance club.
then saw kate rusby in concert and never looked back.
now i even play in a folk duet

Moth

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 12 May 07 - 06:33 PM

In 1948, as a seven year old primary school pupil, I was taught songs (not described as folk) like "The Ash Grove", "Waley Waley", "Linden Lea", and many others.

In spite of several years flirtation with skiffle, playing tea chest base, washboard, and finally guitar, it never really satisfied, and I returned to folk about 1956, and never left.

The music is so much a part of me that to be unable to continue would be worse than an amputation. "Waley Waley" is still a part of my repertoire.

Don T.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Folk lover
Date: 12 May 07 - 09:26 PM

Like Don, hearing songs when young such as the Ash Grove and Linden Lea, then discovering Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention in my late teens, then I really was hooked.

It's whatever turns you on I suppose - some like the raw gutsiness of soul, I like the purity of folk and the themes behind the songs which are often timeless and universal.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 13 May 07 - 06:46 PM

The Herga folk club, when I was 15, and John Heydon (aged 24) was running it. And the people who introduced me to the club lent me recordings of the Watersons and the Young Tradition and Davey Graham and John Renbourne...

Kitty

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Gulliver
Date: 14 May 07 - 05:47 PM

The Johnstons (Adrienne Johnston, her sister Luci, and brother Michael, Mick Moloney and Paul Brady) were the first folk group I really liked, due to the vocals and harmonies and I bought some of their records. Then Horslips came on the scene and had a cult following, which led to Fairport (Liege and Lief), Jethro Tull, John Martyn, Sweeney's Men along with the likes of British Blues, West Coast Bands, etc.

Then came Planxty, which got me hooked on trad, and I started going to the Dublin sessions--Donaghue's, McDaid's, O'Connell's, the Pembroke, Kennedy's, Brazen Head, Club Uí Cadhain, to mention but a few. There were British, American, Breton, musicians busking and playing the sessions also, and bringing their own music and styles, so got to hear and enjoy old-timey, bluegrass, skiffle, jazz/folk, political, etc.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Kajikit
Date: 14 May 07 - 09:24 PM

I've ALWAYS loved music that you can really SING (or dance to.) Whenever they made us do folkdancing at primaryschool I was thrilled because it meant an hour of enjoying that wonderful toe-tapping music... I lapped up every folk/traditional song that we sang during music lessons. I begged my mother to play her Seekers and 'Peter, Paul and Mary' albums for me at least once a week. I was absolutely thrilled when my parents gave me a real Irish folksongs record for my thirteenth birthday, and devastated when the other kids at school didn't share my excitement when I told them 'what I got!' (but it didn't stop me from playing it, and playing it, and playing it - I just quit being so public about my enthusiasm!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Kajikit
Date: 14 May 07 - 09:38 PM

Just remembering - Roger Whittaker, Burl Ives, A Prairie Home Companion on the radio, The Seekers, Peter Paul and Mary, later The Kingston Trio and The Smothers Brothers [when I was a teenager my Dad liked to listen to a radio show that played really old folk stuff (okay, to me the sixties is Really Old!), and the funny bits really caught my attention... I'd never heard of those two groups before then.] Every christmas carol I could lay my hands on... etc etc etc...

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Darowyn
Date: 15 May 07 - 12:51 PM

I object!
I'm not hooked on Folk music. I could give it up any time I want.
It's just that I don't want to .
I'll carry on listening and singing and playing it, just to prove that I could stop any time.
Cheers
Dave

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 May 07 - 03:12 PM

The Kingston Trio, then PPM on the radio

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 May 07 - 07:04 PM

What got me hooked? I wanted to be different from a lot of the people
I knew, so I got into folk music; and once I started into it, I
couldn't stop.
Then, a couple of really cute girls I went to high school with made
it even more appealling, for playing folk, also.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Cookieless Bert
Date: 26 May 07 - 12:39 AM

Well it's a bloody long story with not one specific thing.

Like Jim Lad our family always sang. Even though Dad couldn't carry a tune in a bucket it didn't stop him. Mum would play the piano whenever we went to a pub.

Then there was this music teacher at school, can't remember what his name was, but he just gave up on trying to teach music to a bunch of rowdy boys, and he'd sit at the piano and we'd go through the song book. Most of which was folk songs 'cos they were out of copyright.

I didn't find out until later that most of them had been Bowdlerised.

It took a few Rugby songs for me to discover that. It's surprising what you can learn as second rank scrum!!!

Then there was Lonnie Donnegan which sparked further interest which led to other discoveries such as Bernard Miles and Bernard Cribbins and Paddy Roberts.

Then when I was on a contract in Bahrain, after reading just about every paperback of junk fiction, I happened across a book of folk music by Tom Glazer which had a chapter in the back on guitar playing.

Having a few Dinars to spare at the time I went and bought a guitar.

Three chords later, here I am.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Woods
Date: 26 May 07 - 04:05 AM

Two things got me hooked on what we now call Folk Music:

Records. When we were itty bitty kids in the 1960s we had a record player in the side room where we played with our toys. We knew how to put records on the thing and play 'em. I still remember hearing Red River Valley and others from that old player. I even remember two 10" records that weren't black, one was red and the other blue, both opaque. (We also had some red translucent records.)

Singing at school from those old song books. I even collect 'em now. Lots of times we just sang acapello. It was wonderful when you had a teacher that could pound out the tunes on the piano. Our 5th grade math and home-room teacher, Mr. Ahner, was great on the piano. We loved to sing with him playing. I'd love to get my hands on some of those books from the 1960s or earlier.

Woods
Southwest Missouri Ozarks

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Raggytash
Date: 26 May 07 - 04:58 AM

One of my first memories is my maternal Grandmother sitting me on her knee and singing to me "he comes to our window and whistles me out, his hands in his pockets his shirt hanging out, but still I love I'll forgive him, I'll go with him wherever he goes" I must have been about 3 at the time and she probably always sang to me. My Father then encourage me to sing in the back on the car especially on long journeys (all of 30 miles to visits Grandparents)I had to sit diddle for middle between my sister and brother.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Surreysinger
Date: 26 May 07 - 06:19 AM

I wish I knew what hooked me in --- but I don't. I was only about 8 or 9 when I bought the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs - so it must have started somewhere around there.... but "why" or "what" is lost in the mists of time and my unconscious....

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 26 May 07 - 07:44 AM

When I realized I could actually play the stuff, which I never could do with rock music.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Warwick Slade
Date: 26 May 07 - 11:06 AM

I saw 'Hootenanny' on TV in early 60s with Cyril Tawney and then to a local club where he was singing. Went next week and saw Steve Benbow. The rest is history
Sadly they have recently appeard in that big folk club in the skys.
Sadly missed.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: LadyJean
Date: 26 May 07 - 04:22 PM

One of the innumerable contradictions with regards to my parents. They were upper middle class Republicans and folkies. So, I heard it from my earliest youth. Dad's older brother had spent a summer collecting with Allan Lomax, so we had a good collection.
Four summers at School For Scottish Arts a two week camp for bagpipers and dancers when I was a teenager got me seriously interested. I went to camp with Jennifer Armstrong, who played a pretty fair fiddle at the tender age of 13.
I also listened to top 40 rock back then, until I got into an argument with a sexist DJ named Jeff Christie, who was broadcasting then on 14KQV, Groovie QV.   And went cold turkey on all the hits all the time.
The bastard is still in radio, and still a sexist pig. But now he uses his real name, Rush Limbaugh. So the man was good for something.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 26 May 07 - 07:33 PM

"he comes to our window and whistles me out, his hands in his pockets his shirt hanging out, but still I love I'll forgive him, I'll go with him wherever he goes"

I'd forgotten that one Raggytash. My mother used to sing that when I was......oh.....about five or six, and another I've just remembered, "I know where I'm goin', and I know who's goin' with me, I know who I love, but the dear knows who I'll marry"

Must have started even younger than I'd thought.

Don T.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Uncle Phil
Date: 26 May 07 - 11:10 PM

Camp. That's where I discovered the kind of music you participate in -- swapping songs, clapping along, joining in on the chorus, and passing around whatever instrument was at hand – as opposed the kind of music you enjoy as spectator sport. I've been hooked ever since.
- Phil

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: LadyJean
Date: 26 May 07 - 11:15 PM

My sister is gay. I'm a flaming heterosexual. She loves dogs. I love cats. She has a buzz cut. I never cut my hair. I don't curse. She does. I don't smoke. She does. People laugh if I have more than one glass of wine. They're surprised if she has more than one bottle.
But our idea of heaven is a good folk festival.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 26 May 07 - 11:35 PM

I punkfolkrock

therefore.

I.. am a cider drinker !!!


I thinks it all of the day..

ooarr ooarr Decartes..??!!



What got you hooked on folk music?


julie felix and the wurzels
and all the rest of mid 1960's BBC
and local west country childrens TV folk music entertainers..

and my boring party spoiling uncle with a guitar
who ruined really good family parties
with froggie went a couting
and the old woman who swalloed that f***in fly..!!!

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,'Ray Bucknell
Date: 27 May 07 - 10:01 AM

The first song I went nuts about was Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons."   I couldn't have been older than three, but I recall being mesmerized by the finger snapping and that great vocal.   Several years later, I saw the Chad Mitchell Trio on television for the first time.   That did it; there was no turning back.   I'm proud to say that two summers ago I took my then-12-year-old son to meet the Chad Mitchell Trio at one of their rare reunion gigs.   Will the folk addiction be passed to the next generation?   He's 14 now and the jury's still out, but I am still and shall remain hooked.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Cool Beans
Date: 27 May 07 - 11:51 AM

I'm not hooked. I can quit any time.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Ian cookieless
Date: 27 May 07 - 05:12 PM

Aged 18, going to a folk club for somewhere to sing my own acoustic songs. Once there, found there was a guest on I'd never heard of (which would have been true for me of any folk artist at the time). His performance made me feel I knew nothing and needed to start again from scratch, which is what I did. The energy, skill and humour of the artist blew my socks off and changed my world. It seemed to me he looked and sang like an invigorated Wurzel Gummage! This very exciting man was Vin Garbutt. I now started investigating and singing traditional songs.

Soon after my world was rocked again by a man who played a guitar style where the voice and the story led the song, rather than the constraints of a never-changing guitar rhythm. He had an awesome knowledge and insight into the humanity within the songs, singing with an intensity and focus I had rarely seen (as did Vin): Martin Carthy. I now stopped writing altogether and focussed entirely on traditional material.

I owe these two great men a huge debt for the all the years of enjoyment and understanding of both music and life they have given me.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Claire M (Permanant GUEST!)
Date: 18 Jul 12 - 04:54 PM

Hiya,

Steeleye Span. Loved their nasty songs the best. Got silly ideas in my head, that because none of the young people I knew liked them I must be a bit strange, forgetting I lived a quite old-fashioned country life where their songs made sense – - so I got into Eminem, then ditched him for Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, then went back to him and finally back to my beloved Steeleye – and now I like all of it at once.

I've heard this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqQGnJWHPvw

and loved it.
> "......sold ALL my Hendrix, Led Zepplin. Humble Pie, Grand Funk Railroad etc"

Why would you sell all that ??

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,C. Ham
Date: 19 Jul 12 - 03:29 PM

When I was growing up in the 1960s we had some Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Odetta albums in the house that I quite liked alongside the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, Lovin' Spoonful, etc.

When I got to McGill University in 1974 there was one folk coffee house, the Yellow Door, just east of the campus, and another, the Golem, just west of the campus. The Golem, in particular, had one great act after another: Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Jesse Winchester, Bruce Murdoch, Utah Phillips, Rosalie Sorrels, Tom Paxton, Dave Van Ronk, Erik Frandsen, Mary McCaslin & Jim Ringer, Bodie Wagner, Jay Ungar & Lyn Hardy, Ronney Abramson, Tex Konig, Sneezy Waters, and so many more.

Seeing all those people live, week after week, is what got me hooked on folk music.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: ollaimh
Date: 20 Jul 12 - 12:23 PM

i grew up in rural north east nova scotia. we were sirrounded with people who sand traditional songs in english french and gaelic. no one called it folk. if anyhting it was called scottish or acadien music. we had no concept there were lowland scotts, it was quite a shoc
k to me when i wnet to scotland, particularily because of the hatred there of highlanders(again their term--we never used it except for the games) we called ourselves celts or scotts, or acadien as you have it.

my first songs were galic lullabys and my first three albums were omar blondin sings the songs od newfoundland, doc watson and the cat came back, and the clancy brothers songs of rebellion and revolution(being eythniclly cleansed scotts we had a lot of sympathy with the ethnic cleaning in ireland--although again we didn't call it that then, we mosdtly called it transportation--but every one knew of the terrible conditions and the low survival rate for the early transportees)

i discovered later that we were not considered folk by the sixties and seventies folk people in london england and vancouver. the world is wierd and "folk' is full of wierd people building empires in their minds. so i oprefer to call whast i do celtic or traditional music(i do play some acadien music)

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: Stringsinger
Date: 20 Jul 12 - 12:53 PM

My father died before I was born but bequeathed to me an original 1929 copy of Carl Sandburg's "American Songbag". I poured over it and I still have it.

When I was a kid, I sang "Streets of Laredo" at a YMCA summer campfire.

I was introduced to many of the people who I was fortunate enough to hear live.
Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta and more.

In 1949 or 50, I was invited to the home of Will Geer in Santa Monica, California, and on that evening I heard for the first time Pete Seeger in the living room and sparks were coming out of his fingers. I met Cisco, Fred Hellerman, I think Ronnie was there.

I met Bess Lomax Hawes, Matty and Mickey Miller, Guy Carawan, Rich Dehr and Frank Miller, all these folks at one time. Later, Odetta, a friend, Derroll Adams, another friend..................well environment plays an important part in the folk music.........just being around the tremendously talented people who do it in person.

I saw the movie "Smoky" with Burl Ives and became a fan.

I think the very first thing was when my step-father sang me a song he learned while he was hopping freight cars in the Depression called "The Tennessee Blues"
which I have never heard anyone sing before or since.

Subject: RE: What got you hooked on folk music?
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 20 Jul 12 - 01:20 PM

Pop music.