Do purists really exist?

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 06:08 PM

Just as there were plenty of people doing non-trad folk back in the day, so there are now. Its just that they don't play in folk clubs and they don't tend to feel the need to tell jokes or present as all-round light entertainers. The modern day equivalent of those folk-lite groups who appeared on Pebble Mill at One and TV Variety shows don't exist anymore, at least not unless they are over 50 and still doing the rounds. But there are plenty of people outside of the folk club scene putting on live music events where the music has a very folkish vibe. You won't hear many covers, sixties or otherwise (though you may here the odd traditional song) and the bands and artists won't be trying to please all of the people all of the time (still less someone's mother-in-law who got dragged along) but you will hear some excellent new music.

Lots of things have changed. Less folk clubs, less working men's clubs, no Sunday Night at the London Palladium or Wheeltappers and Shunters. As a kid I always thought that sort of stuff was aimed at my mum and dad's generation anyway - and a lot of this stuff is generational. Nowadays, if you want to do covers, you'll go to an open mic night or find that kind of folk club - or you'll get serious and form a tribute band. If you want to do your own songs, you do what people have always done - get out there and play and hope you find your audience. It you want to do trad, you go to your local singaround and do it for fun or you take your chances with everyone else. The art centre gigs and festival spots don't come on a plate and there are increasing numbers of people who include trad material in their sets who rarely set foot in a folk club.

Back on topic, I reckon The Snail hit the nail on the head earlier. Things move on. Things change.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: John P
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 05:49 PM

Steamin' Willie, my point, which I made very clear, is that you were complaining about being told that you shouldn't enjoy the music you enjoy. Here's your quote again, for you to contemplate: . . .wondering if I am allowed to enjoy it because some prat keeps saying folk is about . . .

I'm not saying that purists don't exist. I'm saying that the idea that anyone gives a damn about what you enjoy listening to exists only in your head. I'm saying that making that kind of comment indicates that you don't get what we're talking about and that you are setting up a straw man so you can have something to bitch about. Also, calling someone a prat because they define the word "folk" differently than you do is uncalled for.

I'm also not trying to get you to shut up (another conversation that's only taking place in your head?). I'm trying to get you to talk about what's actually being talked about. The fact that someone disagrees with you about the definition of folk music doesn't mean anything except that someone disagrees with you about the definition of folk music. One of the big reasons that discussions about the nature of folk music often turn nasty is that people like you apparently believe that people who disagree with you are trying to control you in some way.

While not a purist in any pure sense of the word, I regret that singer-songwriters refer to their music as folk. I understand, however, that the world has moved on and that "folk" now refers to multiple genres of music and is therefore less useful as a descriptor than it used to be. I switched to "traditional folk" for a long time, but found that this caused people to think I'm a traditionalist, which I'm not. Also, I've heard young songwriters talk about enjoying "traditional folk, like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell" (!!). I've started using "ethnic folk" when I have to give a description of what I do because it separates it adequately from the generalized folk label but doesn't carry as much connotation of me being some kind of hide-bound traditionalist.

Please continue to enjoy whatever music you enjoy!

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 05:35 PM

imagine anyone liking Jasper Carrot's MOR comedic fluff to dig the chthonic depths of Peter Bellamy

Well, yes and no. Imagine anyone who liked Tony Capstick's gags about strippers and Irishmen, and also liked Tony Capstick's precise and pitiless readings of "The Scarecrow" and "Red Wine Promises". Personally I go very much for one and not the other, but there was an audience for both on the same night, for a while back there - you can hear the applause. (I don't think Does a turn is available anywhere anyhow, but it should and could be.)

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: The Sandman
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 05:26 PM

When you're left to draw both audiences and performers from a much-diminished pool it is more likely that the format with the widest appeal will win out, leaving the specialists/purists with nowhere to go.
incorrect, it will be clubs, where clubs are clubs and people socialise and where people make their own entertainment, where guests are not booked every week, where singers are so plentiful,
That guests are not wanted, in some ways this is good, in one way it is not, GUEST SINGERS HELP TO RAISE STANDARDS, yet before the revival, this was how it was, people made their own entertainment

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 04:03 PM

At this point we come to a parting of the ways; take your pick, otherwise the two appoahes don't seem to be able to co-exist. This results in partition, which has already happened, long ago (imagine anyone liking Jasper Carrot's MOR comedic fluff to dig the chthonic depths of Peter Bellamy; it's rather like expecting people who like Mrs Mills to listen to Cecil Taylor) hence these occasional ceremonial border skirmishes on Mudcat. Weird thing is that all this might co-exists at all, but it does, respectfully on my part too; I've got lots of musical pals who do all shades of Folk from Wacky Folk 'n' Fluff MOR to Deep Macrame Owl Demonic Drones. But then I've got lots of other musical pals too, from Early Music Professionals, to Free Jazzers, to Modern Classical Musos, to ageing Metal Heads, to DJs, Drum and Bass crews, and Psychedelic Stoners, to Japanese sound artists and Circus drummers. Crucially, we dig; with much joy and much respect.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Steamin' Willie
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 02:29 PM

Sorry John P I fail to see your point.

If you care to read the many entries on this thread you might notice that people are defining folk in order to define purist. I assume there must be purists amongst stamp collectors and bridge club members but the usual subjects keep slogging away with their definitions of folk yet again. The 1954 nonsense is cited on the basis that there are precious few others, or I suspect because if is about working people having chips on their collective shoulder.

That's why I mentioned listening to an abstract music form whilst not exactly fitting the stereotype. I find it somewhat pathetic that when I write and perform a song about having a hard on for somebody (or love song as it is referred to) those folk club organisers who know me introduce me as an ex miner in order to give some weird credentials to my ability to sing, play guitar and get lovers balls over an imaginary woman.

You see in my mind purists do exist. Their linking music to situation in order to make if pure shows them for what they are. Hence the demise of clubs.

I have played in, got pissed in and enjoyed being in upstairs rooms of pubs and under canvas at festivals with good mates and had the time of my life for many years. Then somebody tells me this 'folk' I have been participating in isn't really folk at all.

Yes it is.

Ruddy purists.

Middle of the night here, just got my 3 dongle roaming so if I can't get to blessed sleep your attempts to get me to shut up may be in vain. I know the point Joe Offer shakes his head at and I for one haven't reached it yet. At least I try to address the thread.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Howard Jones
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 02:27 PM

I think Big Al has put his finger on a crucial point. Was the role of folk clubs simply to be an aspect of light entertainment, a middle-class version of working men's club, or should it be a place for people who want to get into the music at a deeper level?

There's no reason why the latter shouldn't also be entertaining, but it's inevitably going to be more challenging and difficult. It's the same in any genre of music, and probabaly in most activities. Someone whose idea of jazz is Kenny Ball is going to struggle when taken to a jazz club playing modern jazz, just as someone whose idea of classical music is Classical FM will be challenged by John Cage.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for people with a deep interest in something, whether its folk music or model railways, to want somewhere they can pursue that interst. However its inevitable that a version which is more accessible will have a wider appeal, which can very easily crowd out the minority specialists - the purists if you like.

Whether that was responsible for the initial decline is debateable. As Brian pointed out, once the rot set in the decline affected both types of club. I suspect it was largely due to the ageing folk club population having less time and money to spare due to family and professional commitments (I know that's what reduced my folk club attendance). When you're left to draw both audiences and performers from a much-diminished pool it is more likely that the format with the widest appeal will win out, leaving the specialists/purists with nowhere to go.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 01:52 PM

What the hell - it was a long time ago.

The point was, you couldn't trust a traddie with a three song spot - not to demolish your audience to a place where they would never return.

I went tofolkclubs from the 60's . then i got married in 71 and I started taking my in laws round to folk clubs. An ordinary guy who'd worked as a miner and in the hosiery factories of the midlands plus his wife. Just guys who could entertain them - Murf, Brimstone, Lockran, pete Quinn, Jasper, Alex Campbell, ian Campbell's group.

They went explorong on their own and encountered Bellamy and Carthy, Bob Davernport and never darkened the door of a folk club again.

That's okay. these guys were challenging and confrontational in their style of presenting folk music.

But without a significant interface with humankind - whatever the 1954 committee says - in my book, it ain't folkmusic.

Now that makes me a purist of one sort. There are purists of the other sort - who say what is writ large on the temple wall is folkmusic, because it is - lots of terrific reasons. None of them good enough for me. But they satisfy some folk.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 01:18 PM

One other thing. I'm only dipping in and out of this thread - it's too long to catch up with properly - but I wanted to give a M3 T00 to Suibhne's comparison of POW with TBPWM. My first exposure to TBPWM was when I saw the lyrics written down; I was looking at it with my sister, and when she got to

"And as the ship drew into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where my legs used to be"

she read it out and we both burst out laughing. After that I heard it sung - poorly, well and by June Tabor - but I never lost that first reaction. Faced with songs like that, part of me is still the snotty kid at the back of the class thinking You're trying to impress me, and it's not working!.* (As opposed to my reaction to, say, June Tabor singing POW or Waly Waly, which is what the f___ was that and how the f___ did you do it?)

To this day there's a whole class of songs which I sit through with a frozen smile of polite appreciation for somebody taking the trouble to make a mildly pleasant noise - and then there are songs that stop me in my tracks even when they're done badly, and pin me to the wall when they're done well. What baffles me isn't so much that you can hear them both in one evening as that they're both called 'folk'. But there you go, it is what it is.

*This is what's wrong with the 'legs' line, IMO - it's not a million miles away from 'My Son John', but the understatement seems sleeve-tugging & sentimental where MSJ's is grimly comic.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 12:41 PM

I stopped listening to folk in 1976-7 and got into it again 25 years later, so I basically slept through the Great Decline that people are talking about. But what's struck me recently, particularly from browsing the vinyl at the Oxfam shop in Manchester city centre, is how huge the scene was in the 70s, at least relative to what it's like now. An album by a local band called the Wassailers had a sleevenote describing them as "one of the hardest-working bands in the County Palatinate". I don't think there are enough active folk groups in Lancashire now to make that kind of comparison - it'd be like saying that silver is one of the best Olympic medals.

On balance I think I suspect Snail is closer to the truth of it than either Jim or Al, for two reasons. Firstly, I don't think that you can judge if a club is likely to get cliquey and stale, or that it won't be able to counter the appeal of the telly, from the style of music it offers. Where I live there's an anything-goes FC where standards are very variable indeed & self-composed stuff is the norm, and (as Jim would predict) it's pretty much driven the traddies out. However, it's still packed out week after week - and the traddies are fine, as we meet somewhere else on a different night. Which is my second reason for thinking that Snail is closer to the mark: in my experience things just aren't as bad as both Jim and Al are making out.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 12:35 PM

No, Jim, I'm not Sweeney.

Objection!

My earlier stance regarding the issue was based on the empirical evidence at hand; the fact in most Folk Clubs these days you will indeed hear a surfiet of - er - other idioms shall we say, all of which are regarded as being Folk in common usage of the term. From this I deduced that in modern parlance Folk Music meant any music regardless of idion, fetched up in a Folk Club and performed by hearty amateurs, inclusive of all others. I believe, M'Lud, that I produced a list of different idioms in support of this claim, all of them experienced being performed (perhaps approximated would be a better word) over maybe three nights at my then local Folk Club. I tried to accomodate this general unpleasantness for the sake of my own sanity as much as anything else, but in the end stumbled upon our present Holy of Holies Folk Club where things are (to say the least) rather better all around. So - whilst I would still recommend a more pragmatic and indeed empirical approach to both the phenomenon of Ye Folk Club and the very vexed issue of What You Might Expect To Hear Therein (and, indeed, How That Impacts on One's Own Repertoire) (as much for the sake ones sanity as anything else) I can say (heart on sleeve) that if it doesn't meet with my exacting requirements based on long years of bitter/sweet Folk Experience then I won't be darkening its doors again.

I trust this clears up my feelings in the matter. To sum up: 1) Yes I accept that Folk Clubs these days aren't places where one is likely to enjoy a heart night of (shall we say) Traditional Song and Ballad, much less be welcoming of those who wish to perform such material. And 2) My idea of the perfect Folk Club is one which is 100% Proof on the Trad Songs, Music Ballads and derivations / familiars thereof, the heartier the better, as, by Jove, such music is apt to facilitate.

S O'P (still not a purist, honest...)

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: TheSnail
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 11:39 AM

Jim Carroll

Sorry Bryan - what don't you get?
Are you saying what you describe didn't happen, that the clubs didn't become a dumping ground for any type of music, and the audiences could no longer find what they were looking for (not an "unexplained reason")

My experience is that, in the seventies, I was going to clubs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights which varied from trad through tradish to electic/contemporary. the latter had acts that you might well call stand up comedians but I also some excellent traditional performers there as well. They were all prospering. None of them changed their format, but as time passed, the audiences began to decline in all of them.

There seem to be three versions of events going round. According to Big Al, real folk music was doing fine until the traddies drove it out; according to you, real folk music was doing fine until the anything-goes crowd drove it out; according to me, all styles were doing fine and went into decline together. Who is right? Will we ever know? Unfortunately, I have never seen Fred Woods' 'Crap Begets Crap' article. Is it available anywhere?

My problem with your description is that I just can't see how unpopular acts could drive out popular ones. Did the organisers of the day (of which you were one) deliberately choose performers that drove their audiences away?

or are you claiming that everything that that was performed at a folk club became folk because it was it was performed at a folk club - as has been claimed?

No, Jim, I'm not Sweeney.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: John P
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 10:44 AM

Steamin' Willie says: . . . listening to some folk music via the iPad and wondering if I am allowed to enjoy it because some prat keeps saying folk is about the trials and tribulations of the working class . . .

This is one of the biggest things that bug me about these discussions. No one has ever had anything to say on the subject of what you should listen to and enjoy. In fact, the exact opposite has been said many, many times. When you say things like this it indicates that you don't get what's being talked about, and that you are having a conversation with some imaginary "purists" in your head. It sounds like you are so pissed off about being told that many people don't consider singer-songwriter to be folk music that you are willing to tell lies about them.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: theleveller
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 09:48 AM

When I fetched up in London in 1967 from Yorkshire, where, from the age of 16, I had been playing in between 3 and 5 folk clubs a week (to the detriment of my education), I went to a few clubs and found them generally pretty dour and unwelcoming (with the notable exception of the Cousins) - with the result that I confined my playing to busking and pretty soon fell out of the folk scene altogether in favour of underground rock. I didn't return to folk until the early 90s, by which time I was back living in Yorkshire. There I found quite a few of the old faces plus a great many new ones - and a folk scene that, although different, was and is vibrant and exciting.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,livelylass
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 09:44 AM

"they felt they had a secure living. they thought folk clubs and folk music was going to be constant feature of the post war music scene."

Perhaps their mistake was in believing in notions that the revival would be as enduring as the very tradition of folk song that it sought to emulate and revive?

As for the evolving or otherwise of "folk" into non-traditional acoustic 60's pop, unlike traditional folk music itself (which came from and belongs to another world in time altogether) what "folk music" became during the 60's, was inevitably forever destined to be "60's acoustic folk"

Most modern styles of music become dated very fast and while 60's acoustic folk was "modern folk music" in it's day, it's now simply dated 60's folk music. A thing of either cringing embarrassment or misty eyed nostalgia for those who were there depending on their perspective, but of little interest to anyone who came after bar music nerds who enjoy trawling through back catalogues. Same deal with 50's rock'n'roll or 70's prog rock or 80's new wave..

So overall, as for what folk music has "evolved" into and those various "folk" activies I've been to If I had a hammer, someone else would be leaving with a fucking head injury...

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 08:41 AM

"The picture i painted jim was was told to me by folksingers"
And the picture I painted was watching the clubs in the greater London area dwindle from around 100 to its present (maybe) dozen.
Given the choice of viewing the situation deteriorate gradually - as we did as regular vistors to clubs - or taling the word of booked guests who might turn up - what once a year......
But as I say, the situation that arose was well documented; whatever you might think of any particular magazine they did provide an overall view.
In the long run - a bit of a applied logic should serve to persuade that if regular punters were not given what they paid their pennies to listen to, they were bound to go away - wouldn't you? There was no argument that this was happening.
We were organising bookings for traditional singer Walter Pardon and being told "no we don't do anything like that - we're a folk club".
None of this alters the fact that the music, as far as the clubs were concerned, was being de-defined to the extent that there no longer exists a concensus, even within the present club scene, as to what you would find if you turned up at a folk club - Magicical Mystery Tour rules OK, so to speak.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 08:19 AM

I took folk Review for several years. the trouble was - you had to be either Jasper Carrott or martin Carthy - nothing much in the middle - a less simplistic view of folk music, was tolerated.

The picture i painted jim was was told to me by folksingers who had been making their living on the folk club circuit since the 1960's. In the 60's - they felt they had a secure living. they thought folk clubs and folk music was going to be constant feature of the post war music scene. these were pe0ple travelling the length and breadth of Britain. Not just in isolated places.

the doctrinaire view of the traddies was not the view of folk music that ordinary tv watching English people had. I don't why you're bitching. you won. you had the only two folk journalists in England batting for your side. There was a civil war, you won it.

'the taste was not as sweet' i imagine.   all that shouting the odds and being rude to everyone didn't win very much. I suspect.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 08:11 AM

So its hard not to take personally some of the 'the Tradition of Tired Acoustic Covers of Sixties Pop/Rock" comments.

It's never either / or in folk; it's always all, and there'll invariably be dialogue arising from it born ultimately of human respect. We all have our own take on such things after all, our various burdens and crosses to bear, but one would hope it never gets hostile. In the context of this discussion we can be frank about such matters, but at the end of the day it's only music no matter how seriously we might take it.

If every Folky dreams of getting on the cover of fRoots then that's cool by me; it's like everyone who does the lottery dreaming of actually winning it. It's a community thang all the way down the line really; celebrity comes, celebrity goes, but the music keeps on going. We mutter, we complain, we rejoice; hell, all human life is here if you look hard enough.

One of my Editors recently urged me to be more controversial in my writing - like I am on Mudcat. Thing is, on Mudcat people have an instant right of reply to anything anyone says, which isn't the case once something is published. To me dialogue is all; the crack and blether of the thing, and even though I'm given to polemicising from time to time, I'm not wanting a fight as such, just a natter, a discussion, a bit crack, which is what we have here. And that's something to cherish I think...

*

My problem is, I never got Dylan, and was always moved more by music than I was by words. Still the same today really, I'd rather listen to instrumental music or stuff in a foreign language, or a lot of other Popular English Language Idioms where you can make out the words anyway. I suffer from ADD; have done all my life: it's embarassing but even when I listen to an unaccompanied ballad I'm hearing the music of the thing first, then maybe one or two images, with the story hardly a consideration at all. Am I unique in this? Maybe I am, but in terms of Human Music I'd say that was hardly uncommon at all. I love listening to Gaelic stuff, or raw Scots where you just pick up the odd phrase; and counsel strongly the Folk Myth that Song Accompaniment is there to support a song and not drown the bloody thing out entirely. Indeed, I recently did a version of Over the Hills and Far Away for an aborted project. It was only after removing the vocal track entirely that it made any musical sense to me. Listen here:

HEADLAND (OVER THE HILLS) (21st April 2011)

Music to me exists in terms of landscape or else just pure sound; I like folk for its modes, rhythms, histories, drones, inner aesthetics and cultural possibilities. When working with my wife my extremes are tempered, my enthusiasms curbed, but it was always Folk and it remains Folk, in my heart at least, telling it's own story as all music does... Do it in a Folk Club? No way; this is where the internet comes into its own.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 07:56 AM

"The general consensus amongst people ...."
Nope - 'twasn't the way it happened - the decline was pretty well documented at the time, particulary with the correspondance following Fred Woods' article 'Crap Begets Crap' in Folk review - it was the core audiences that left; we never really managed to attract enough curious outsiders in - when your lot moved in big-time, the regulars left.
Quality certainly came into; Alex Campbell's "near enough for folk song opening line ceased to be a joke and became a reality, and now, to some clubs, seems to be an essantial part of their make-up, "so as not to frighten away the laess talented".
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 07:25 AM

'Very few people 'got' Blake at the time, but how things have changed.'

reminds me a little bit of the Max Beerbohm short story Enoch Soames - about an unsuccessful poet who sold his soul to the devil to visit the British museum in fifty years time and see if people 'got' him yet. When he looked hismself up, it just said Enoch Soames - character in a Max Beerbohm short story.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: theleveller
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 06:34 AM

"If only they'd stay in the graveyards, leave the arts centres and folk clubs and BBC2 for sentient human beings."

This seems to highlight the difference of how we perceive folk music. For me, the context is crucial. I'd much rather sing for my own amusement in a place that has a resonance to the music, or with a couple of like-minded people, than perform it to an audience from a stage. Nowadays, it seems, the emphasis is all too often on performance rather than context, with performers looking more for quantity of audience than quality of individual experience. The music can change perceptibly when it is taken out of, say, a singaround in a local pub or what Suibhne calls 'feral' performances (and I call ruffian music), and is honed and perfected to provide a slick, uniform presentation for mass consumption. Now, all too often, the goal seems not to be the integrity of the music but getting your photo on the cover of fRoots. That's fine, but it doesn't mean that the grassroots 'artisan' side of the music has lost its relevance.

Don't get me wrong – I love watching professional performers, but prefer smaller, more intimate venues where there is a rapport with the audience (last weekend's Moonbeams Festival was a perfect balance, with artists like John Jones of Oysterband jumping off the stage to mingle with the audience and later joining in the late-night singaround).

So don't knock the solitary singer in his/her own little world. I'm just reading Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake and am surprised to find that the works which now have worldwide acclaim were often produced in editions of single figures – individually printed, hand-coloured and bound. Very few people 'got' Blake at the time, but how things have changed.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 05:52 AM

'People stopped going to the clubs because the term "folk" ceased being a guide to what they would find there; the term never evolved, was never re-defined; it became meaningless (to most of the clubs); it retained its meaning in its literature, documentation and research; that remains the same - it is basically a club phenomenon.'

The general consensus amongst people I knew was this series of events:-

1) the folk clubs were packed
2) mr and Mrs Joe Average read Karl dallas's accounts of how wonderful Carthy, Bellamy etc were
3) Mr and Mrs Average turned up at the folk club expecting a sort of superior Anglicised version of peter paul and mary and John Denver and the Spinners and the Corries and 70's TV folk stars.
4) Next week the club was empty.

There are still plenty of folk clubs doing the trad thing. More than enough to cater for what is a very minority taste. Also they get huge chunks of media exposure - they've got that tied up very nicely. Most weeks they piss away more creative opportunities than come the way of ordinary English musos in a lifetime.

Nah Will! Never bitten. But i tick all the boxes that traddies hate. I was a pro musician, used variable accents when I sang (probably none very convincing!), used synths, synthetic handclaps, anything i wanted,knew the words of the songs and generally went down quite well - this last one really pissed them off . (Oh well anybody can write silly songs and do gutter entertainment! - i have been informed occasionally)

So its hard not to take personally some of the 'the Tradition of Tired Acoustic Covers of Sixties Pop/Rock" comments.

Stll a space man from mars couldn't tell the difference between me and Bob Dylan or Martin carthy. Take the larger view - we're all in it up the neck.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,livelylass
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 04:41 AM

"Or music in the Tradition of Tired Acoustic Covers of Sixties Pop/Rock,"

Titter..

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 04:37 AM

"Sorry, don't get it. "
Sorry Bryan - what don't you get?
Are you saying what you describe didn't happen, that the clubs didn't become a dumping ground for any type of music, and the audiences could no longer find what they were looking for (not an "unexplained reason"), or are you claiming that everything that that was performed at a folk club became folk because it was it was performed at a folk club - as has been claimed?
None of this has anything whatever to do with dictionary definitions; it would be "purism" if anyone were to insist that only songs conforming to a definition were performed - never happened in my experience.
People stopped going to the clubs because the term "folk" ceased being a guide to what they would find there; the term never evolved, was never re-defined; it became meaningless (to most of the clubs); it retained its meaning in its literature, documentation and research; that remains the same - it is basically a club phenomenon.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Will Fly
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 04:33 AM

Al - you sound like I was when I was aged 9. I was bitten on the hand by a mongrel dog - which so enraged me that, for years afterwards, any dog that growled at me got kicked to Kingdom Come. (I managed to contain my temper after that).

Were you, by any chance, bitten by a folksinger at an early age? :-)

Well, I'm off to the Bradfield Traditional Music Weekend today. 4 days of wall-to-wall sessions. Will I emerge unscathed, or will I get back to sunny Sussex with an uncontrollable urge for a free reed?

Only time will tell...

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,livelylass
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 04:26 AM

I'd go to a gig in a graveyard! Supernatural ballads and gory songs for All Hallows Eve please. Bring your own blanket and white cider..

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 03:46 AM

If only they'd stay in the graveyards, leave the arts centres and folk clubs and BBC2 for sentient human beings.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: theleveller
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 03:40 AM

"... would rather be singing to the dead in graveyards or else to the ghosts in ancient ruins, or keening our plaintive minstrelsy midst the shrill cry of fox and hawk 'pon some bleak & blasted heath..."

Ha! Best thing I've read in this thread. Thank f**k I'm not the only one! Can't think of anything better than sitting in Rudston churchyard with my back against the monolith singing songs about the surrounding landscape and its people. My folk amongst my folk - sense of place par excellence.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Jul 11 - 03:19 AM

The trick in the Newcastle club would have been to put yourself at the back of the raised dais and perform from there.

That would have been from behind the wall then, thus out in the old Castle Garth somewhere with the ghost of my Great-Grandfather - an Irish Tailor fetched up in Newcastle & running a tailors shop on the old stairs, as mentioned in the old Tyneside Folk Song which simply states: The quayside for sailors / The castle Garth for tailors.

namely tired acoustic covers of sixties pop/rock..

Or music in the Tradition of Tired Acoustic Covers of Sixties Pop/Rock, which is what most people seem to think of as being Folk these days - Easy Listening Singer-Songwriter Style sung by some fat old bloke with a guitar who insists on entertaining the audience with a mix of 90% comedy to 10% music. I'm not thinking of any one person here, just a General Averagee of the 60-something folk-style troubadour who does folk clubs (never without a PA) because a real WMC would eat him up bones and all. At least we holographic traddie purists know our place & would rather be singing to the dead in graveyards or else to the ghosts in ancient ruins, or keening our plaintive minstrelsy midst the shrill cry of fox and hawk 'pon some bleak & blasted heath...

a myth put about by musicians who use these things & want to look like rebels?

Rebel folkies? Help ma kilt! Just the thoughts, although I have met a few of these too in my time - and a merciful few at that. The one thing they have in common is their lack of staying power. During their brief flirtation with folk the Purist is a Strawman based on a handful of accumulated in-cliches and hardly backed up by reality, though a few of the posts here run perilously close to confirming the stereotype. Whilst the Young Folk Rebel is similarly elusive, a fight between these Twa Strawmen would make for a good scene in a Mummers Play, maybe in a few hundred years or so when the technology exists to project these things hologramatically with dazzling CGI special FX so we might watch them, interactively and in life-size hard-light 3D, in the comforts of our own homes.

(for unexplained reasons)

Ceaselesy debated maybe, but hardly unexplained, or even unaccepted...

*

Maybe the bottom line here is that all Folk is boring anyway, year in, year out; hardly the wonder there's always some vampirish thread on Mudcat calling out for young blood. But tedium is Folk's very essence; repetition, nostalgia and (yes) Tradition; those self-same festival spots in the self-same venues to the self-same audiences listening to the self-same songs & laughing at the self-same jokes, year in, year out; even these wee natters on Mudcat have an almost scripted feel about them, like Mummers Plays with hearty announcements of in comes I.... To some it will be This Year's Exciting New Fashion, they'll stop by, have look around, and, if they have any sense, they'll move on; but to others they'll be wearing it for the rest of their lives. And how soon that happens... Think of them as The Permafolk.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 07:29 PM

Stick around, you will get it!

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: TheSnail
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 07:10 PM

I know I'll regret this but...

Jim Carroll

I was part of the English scene for thirty five years; I cut down on my folk-club intake when it became all but impossible to go to a folk club and hear a folk song and when the standards plummeted - the right for me to liten to the music I wanted to listen to played half decently was taken from me (thousands of others felt the same and pissed off with me around the same time).

The logic of this has always escaped me. Hundreds of folk clubs were attended by thousands of enthusiasts for real (i.e. 1954 definition) folk music until they were overwhekmed by a deluge of stand up comedians, do-as-you-please singarounds, and people singing Music Hall, Beatles, Dylan, pop and their own songs that (for unexplained reasons) didn't fit the "written in the tradition" style. The clubs were left empty or not playing any actual folk music.

Sorry, don't get it.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 07:08 PM

you'd be tired if you'd been listening to traditional music.

I really wouldn't. I've left folk clubs tired, bored and thoroughly depressed, but never after an evening of traditional music.

I've just looked back at Folknacious's original question, and I think it's a good one. The question is, does anyone actually complain about accompaniment / guitars / electric guitars / drum machines / etc because they're different, or is this a myth put about by musicians who use these things & want to look like rebels?

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 06:56 PM

'tired acoustic covers of sixties pop/rock'

you'd be tired if you'd been listening to traditional music. Of course its allright fou holograms of purists. You don't exist and don't have to listen to all those cyber ballads and all the jigs and reels on your internal hard drive.

Real folksingers like us , who are part of a living tradition and come from singing families that pass on their Beatles cds from generation to generation - we have to put up with all this cybernetic folksong from holograms of purists that don't really exist. Its when the traddies get up to sing and ruin the evening for everybody in decent folk clubs - that's when most people go for a wee - in my experience.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Spleen Cringe
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 06:52 PM

"Or it devolved into something that younger generations couldn't give a shit about, namely tired acoustic covers of sixties pop/rock"

I like it!

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,livelylass
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 06:38 PM

"Ah but is that because the music was no longer folk or that folk music had evolved into something they didn't get?"

Or it devolved into something that younger generations couldn't give a shit about, namely tired acoustic covers of sixties pop/rock..

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: glueman
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 06:34 PM

The trick in the Newcastle club would have been to put yourself at the back of the raised dais and perform from there. Singing to the backs of the heads of the great and good who were in turn observing the hoi polloi below them would have been a delight. Of course these things tend only to occur to you in later life when you realise our elders and better not only have feet of clay but brains of the same material.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 01:45 PM

Any ideas? "
Yeah - define the music you think I will find if i ever drag my arse to a folk club again.
As I said, I've been long enough at it to think I know what folk music is, and if I'm in any doubt, I can always buy the book or watch the movie - now tell me what you think it is - have asked before, but you scurried off before you could answer.
Enlighten me.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 01:40 PM

Perhaps purists don't really exist.

Perhaps they are a fiendishly clever hologram.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Steamin' Willie
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 01:29 PM

Ah but is that because the music was no longer folk or that folk music had evolved into something they didn't get?

They wouldn't perchance be purists would they / you?

You see, we are trying to see if purists exist if the thread was ever worth the effort you and others put into it. You describe people who saw folk and decided it wasnt folk. All we have to do is think of a word to describe these poor frustrated people. Any ideas?

I've got one.

But there again, I would have to qualify it and I can only do that by reading your threads Jim. Actually, I have no intention to qualify simple objective observations. If you disagree, fine, but asking me to qualify them can only be in order to disagree even more strongly. That seems a bit indulgent if you don't mind me saying so.

There we have it folks, (or folk?) a purist can now be defined through Jim's assertion that many people said "That's not folk" when faced with evolving folk.

All we need now is M'Unlearned Friend to give us some big words to use for the official 2011 definition and we are laughing.

Or at least I am, I'm about to board a plane to Singapore, and shortly be quaffing my champagne in Raffles class, listening to some folk music via the iPad and wondering if I am allowed to enjoy it because some prat keeps saying folk is about the trials and tribulations of the working class. Not fitting your stereotype doesn't alter my enjoyment of the abstract entertainment I call folk.

At the risk of repeating myself, I reckon Sir Thomas Beecham got it in one when he said "The English don't understand music but they love the noise it makes.".

Quite.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 01:05 PM

"Who are the "our"? "
The several thousand folk fans who drifted away in the eighties because they couldn't find the music they had been listening to at folk clubs any more - along with the radio programmes, magazines, specialist labels and shops...... who else?
Thought fora minute you were coming back to qualify some of your pronouncements - nah - perish the thought - far easier to pin on labels.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Steamin' Willie
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 12:15 PM

Jim Carroll wrote,

... The do-as-you-please singaround type venue would have been a rare enough bird to have a conservation order put on it in those days, and its proliferation in later years has contributed much to the present situation of our no longer being able to choose our 'folk' music, hence the disappearence of our clubs etc IMO.
Jim Carroll

Available from K-Tel records, "Now that's what I call purist!"

Thanks Jim, knew you would get there in the end. Who are the "our"?

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 10:05 AM

Now i remember the old days when if you sang about anything that happened more than 10 yards away, Ewan macColl would come and sort you out with a set of knuckle dusters, and then Peggy Seeger would come round with a rubber truncheon.

And you know what we loved them for it!

Mind you we had it tough. When people talk about being traumatised by the seating arrangements at a folk club. I think this feng shui bollocks has gone too far.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 08:42 AM

Empowering, eh? Maybe it was, up to a point anyway. It wasn't everyone who got to sing though & I recall the club was certainly friendly enough, for the most part anyway, though certain residents often refused my requests for a spot. Back then though one never felt in any way encouraged, so much as tolerated, be it by policy, or because you must have been doing something right, however so - unwittingly. The current gaffer of The Bridge Folk Club tells a tale of me getting up in an Afghan to accompany a 40-verse ballad on a one-string fiddle to the choreographed jaw-dropped horror of the residents behind me, but as I never owned an Afghan I think he must be confusing me with someone else. Also one of my regular employers remembers me from those days too - and yet has consistently employed me these last five years or so.

One thing I do remember is leaving the Bridge Folk Club with my batiked viola to go up to the Anglo-Asian Club (nothing to do with concertinas) on the West Road to do a gig with Rhombus of Dooom, Newcastle's premier Space-Punk band at the time. I've recently received copies of a CD of the gig featuring photos of the band at that time, two of whom are sadly no longer with us.
Here's one: Rhombus AA - 1986 it says. That's me beind the girl on the floor, the late Sue Sayles, reciting her poetry, and the chap standing at the back in the stripey jumper is our bass player Pete who now plays for The Baghdaddies. Och, whit a necht thet wiz!

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,raymond greenoaken
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 07:51 AM

Suibhne's description of the Bridge at Newcastle in the 70s-80s chimes closely with my own memories of the club. As a performer, having the residents arrayed behind you could be quite intimidating (you half felt they might hold up score cards at the end of your performance...). On the other hand, there was also a feeling that, while you were up there, you were somehow part of this glittering company yourself. You might even call it empowering!

On guest nights, the booked performers would sit among the residents too, and then step forward when their time came. When Ewan MacColl was booked guest, he naturally enough brought his chair with him the to the front and swung it round so he could lean his elbows on the backrest. There was some merriment at this, for some wag had earlier chalked the word "God" on the backrest. Apologies if you've heard this yarn before. I wasn't present on that occasion, so it may be as apocryphal as King Cnut and his wet sandals.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 07:49 AM

My principle of being is that for every person who says something, there'll be another saying the opposite; they can't both be right, but they can both be wrong. Opinions are all very well, but seeking for the provenance of those opinions is even better. That said, for every kid who goes to drifts into innocent slumber on Xmas Eve with comforting thoughts of Jovial Santa Clause leaving gifts of Subbuteo and Action Man beneath the Xmas Tree, there'll be a Folklorist feverishly tossing in his wanking pit about bloodsoaked Siberian Shamans and how Xmas Tree tinsel, baubels &c. are the vestiges of the still warm viscera of sacrificial reindeer (hence the old song Run, Run, Rudolph presumably). I live in avoidance of overly Prescriptive Pagans eager to tell me what things Really Mean, from the Phallic Maypole to the Green Man to Hares to Blacked-Up prattish Morris Dancers.

However - when after many years of genuine blissful Ignorance I discover the real reason that Peter Alolph called his innovative table-top football game Subbuteo (probably on QI) I rejoice at the pure genius of it. But that is different. Unlike Folklore, that is both real and relevant, to my culture, my life, and my times; my community, my folklore, my past and in many ways my future too; it stands as Very Essential Ethnography.

*

The Folk Process is the water that makes my Indian coffee grounds drinkable; it is the rain on my window; it is the stinking stagnant water in my washing up bowl; it is The Tees (the chilly slow brown Tees); it is the Tyne; it is The Wyre; it is The Thames; it is the ice in my whisky; the water on my knee; it is both the clouds and the face of Harpo Marx I once saw therein as a child; it is the bottles of Sparkling Spring Water we buy from Aldi; it is the surging floods now so typical of a British Summer; it is the melt water of the Polar Icecaps that will dilute the Gulf Stream; it is the blizzards of another ice-age; it is the erstwhile permafrost of a million mammoth graves; it is the Holy Water from Lourdes in a plastic bottle shaped like the BVM; it is the leavings in the Baptismal Font; it is the noctural dripping of a distant tap; it is the water off a duck's back...

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: theleveller
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 06:00 AM

"Tides are a good thing."

Indeed they are! They wash away the dross and deposit new and wonderful treasures on the shoreline. The "folk process", as I understand it (probably imperfectly), is a not a tide but a slow-moving stream or, at times, a man-made canal.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 05:56 AM

Agree re Ring-o-Roses ~~ one of those pieces of Folklore About Folklore, as the great Peter Opie said in an interview I did with the Opies for Folk Review.

BUT one who feels that cannot, with consistency, go along with that vulgar Canute concept.

Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, you will remember, based his life on the important precept that nice things are nicer than nasty ones. My principle-of-being is that right things are righter than wrong ones.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 05:48 AM

I cherish common usage. I first encountered King Canute (if you insist) in the wilds of collective commonality long before he made his ceremonial entrance into the hallowed halls Educational Correctness. It went something like this:
Pedagogue: "Can anyone tell me who King Canutes was?"
30 eager kids with hands raised: "I can! I can! Me! Me!"
Pedagogue: "Okay then - Suibhne - enlighten us."
S O'P (aged 6): "He was a king who thought he was so powerful that he tried to command the very tides but only got wet feet for his troubles."
Pedagague: "Wrong, you malnourished oik!" (lobs blackboard rubber at hapless pupil knocking him to the floor on which he lies, bloodied, but still conscious) "King Canute was not trying to turn back the tide ~ he was demonstrating that it couldn't be done, in order to deflate his flattering courtiers' fulsome assessments of his powers."
And so the nourishing maternal warmth of common usage was betrayed by the dictates of cold hard fact.   

Similarly Ring-a-Roses was a game we played in all innocence before being told (no doubt by the same teacher) that we were, in point of fact, re-enacting the symptoms of the Black Death. Now, whilst I'm pepared to accept the Canute Disparity as being a genuine instance of folklore simplifying history if only to make a more compact analogue, the Ring-o-Roses IPOF I regard as the worst possible sort of myth-making. Indeed, such mythconceptions take hold like Grey Squirrels, choking the life out of our more delicate native Reds, hence the need for a more rigorous approach to the management of the ecology of our cherished Folklore before it too is pushed to the brink of extinction by facts both real and imagined. This is why I continue to draw King Cnut in the sand, to keep common usage alive, at least until the tide comes in.

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 05:46 AM

"You've got to admit there's some odd coves and wild cards in the pack."
There are indeed - but when such a club, with such a (real or imagined) agenda is presented in a thread discussing a genre of (also real or imagined) folkies it needs to be qualified, especially when it accompanied by a preference for a type of club that would have been as far away as you could get from the norm 20-odd years ago. The do-as-you-please singaround type venue would have been a rare enough bird to have a conservation order put on it in those days, and its proliferation in later years has contributed much to the present situation of our no longer being able to choose our 'folk' music, hence the disappearence of our clubs etc IMO.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Do purists really exist?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jul 11 - 05:42 AM

You see Jim, he was irked by a common usage at an early age - no getting over that....

sounds bloody painful!