What got you hooked on folk music?

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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,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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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,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: 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,Bruce Michael Baillie
Date: 10 May 07 - 08:55 AM

...The Dubliners

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Crane Driver
Date: 10 May 07 - 07:14 AM

Folk music did.

Andrew

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.