Where Have all the Folkies Gone

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jack Campin
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 07:51 PM

Someone's got one fuck of a chip on their shoulder.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 04:24 PM

you don't see many academics down the folk club. on mudcat, they tend to be a bit hoity toity.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jack Campin
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 03:12 PM

I don't see "academic elitism" as a problem - every academic involved in folk music I've ever met has been uncondescendingly enthusiastic about passing on what they know to all comers. Passing knowledge on is their day job, so they think about how to do it and retain their sensitivity to younger people's situations and interests.

The real dead weight is amateurs who learned everything they know decades ago and have no memory of or interest in what it's like to be new to traditional music.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Stringsinger
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 02:55 PM

Jim, if you want English Trad music to survive you're going to have to teach people how to do it.

Frank

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Stringsinger
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 02:51 PM

Hi Jim,

Big Al has hit upon the answer. A folk tradition can't just be an audience and a performer. There has to be an active involvement in it to justify its importance.
By this I mean that people have to be educated to appreciate traditional music and
that kind of education has to contain the ability of young people to participate not just in listening but active performance of this music. There must be classes or instruction that teach people to sing and play this music for it to survive. I am involved in a Folk School that does just that. There are many folk song and music schools throughout the world. Some examples come to mind such as the Scoil Eigse in Drogheda county Louth put on by the CCE. Folk Festivals will sometimes offer classes.

In short, if people can own the music by participation in the performance, it will survive

The danger lies in academic elitism that weeds out participation..

Frank

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 02:43 PM

If a folk club community cannot subject a song to the folk process but a football crowd or children can
Not important to argue about tonight

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 02:36 PM

Not sure what you mean by "been subjected to the folk process" then Jim. If a folk club community cannot subject a song to the folk process but a football crowd or children can, I am stumped :-( Still, we have at least a partial agreement so I am happy to leave it at that.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 01:20 PM

If you stretch these things you could make them folk, but they're pale shadows of the main corpus
Change is no more traditional creation than is forgetting the words
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 01:14 PM

Bit different with "Blue Moon". It had already undergone changes via Man City football supporters. Our club residents also inserted the tube into "Nancy Whisky" as a middle right (ish). When one of our club members, a staunch Man City supporter, passed away, her husband asked the residents to do a fuller version of "Blue Moon" at her wake and the rest is, as they say, the folk process :-)

There are many other such stories at our club and I am sure it is the same elsewhere.

These are the type of things that make sure it is never as straight forward as "this song is folk, that one isn't". Provides hours of fun in these debates but does not help to define anything!

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 12:10 PM

We've got a working black phone in our lobby - always hated lava lamps
If you are suggesting that fopl song is no longer relevant then perhaps you are on the wrong thread
Mustt go - got a load of Shakespeare, Dickens and Hardy to burn before it goes dark
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Little Hawk
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 12:02 PM

Gentlemen? Just a little aside here, a momentary departure from the ongoing deep discussion...

One doesn't see all that many rotary telephones these days either for some reason, specially the old black ones, and lava lamps have also become rather rare. Disturbing, isn't it?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 11:51 AM

"you need to draw lines and I really cannot see why!"
You don't need to draw lines, the lines are already there
Different types of songs rattle different boxes
You have no more right to tell me I shouldn't think about my songs any more than I have to tell you you should
As far as I'm concerned, our folk songs are inseparable from the social history and information they carry
If I wanted to know the details of The Battle of Trafalgar I would go to the Naval Records or the detailed research
If I wanted to know how it felt for a farmworker to be torn up from his roots, pressed into the Navy and stuck into the middle of a lethal battle I would go to the folk songs - that's why they were made
Same with the Transportation songs - a transportation ballad can tell me far more in a few minutes than a learned book on the enclosure can tell me in 300 pages
Our songs are full of this sort of information - from social misalliance to enforced marriages arranged to further the aims of families rather than the feelings of the people effected   
These are interesting songs if you're interested in that sort of thing
If you're not then I suggest you're looking in the wrong place
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,patriot
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 11:30 AM

Yes but if you say your folk/traditional songs are different, you need to draw lines and I really cannot see why!
Any sensible singer in any genre makes a subjective decision about whether a song is 'good' for his or herself & I agree that it 's 'good' only if it means something/strikes a chord, however you define it.

Whether it's folk, traditional, blues, jazz, hiphop or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 10:11 AM

"But why would a 'folk' singer bother to differentiate these categories in the first place"
Because they are different - why wouldn't they ?
The old crowd actually had their own categories for their songs - Walter Pardon called his folk songs "folk songs", Tom Lenihan called them "the old tradition"
Blind Traveller, Mary Delaney referred to hers as "my daddies songs" - she knew around a hundred, when we recorded her father he knew about six.
Mary used her title as a description of the type of song she sang, not where she'd got them from
Another Traveller, Mikeen McCarthy went further and described different ways of singing his songs - one way to sell his ballad sheets on the streets and in the fairs, another way to sing them in the pub and, most important to him, the "fireside songs" which were sung on the sites among friends and family

A good song is only a good song if you like it and it does
something for you
Nothing to do with ethnomusicology - it's my experience that, even if well past their prime the older singer brought something into their songs which most younger ones never managed - conviction - they sang their songs with a lifetime of familiarity behind them
If you can't learn from that you really are missing out
The success of the present Irish scene was built on the fact that there were enough of the older generation still around to learn from and enough sensible youngsters to realise that fact and sit down with them to listen to what they said and did
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,patriot
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 08:56 AM

But why would a 'folk' singer bother to differentiate these categories in the first place and worse still, be guided by these arbitrary divisions, which are obviously an objective judgement anyway, or so this discussion seems to indicate?
n interesting discussion, yes, but a good song is surely a good song so why not just get on with the singing and let the ethnomusicologists worry about it?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 07:30 AM

"I assume from your last line that it does include "pop songs, music hall songs, stage songs.." that have "been subjected to the folk process.""
That goes without saying Dave - ad children's adaptations of modern pop songs and tele adverts
What happens in folk clubs is irrelevant though - change for change's sake is as irrelevant as simple repetition and folk clubs don't count as communities any more than do concert halls that put on adaptations of folk songs by Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth or Percy Grainger
Now if a bunch of kids got hold of Bue Moon.... different kettle of dingbats
One of the fature of songs in print or performed on stage is that they tend not to change or be adapted - they tend to remain as first heard.
Print had the same effect - we spoke at length to singers who had learned from ballad sheets (the later form of broadside) who told us that they regarded the version in print as the right one and unalterable
On e other hand, they had no problem with filling out songs they already knew with verses from print
I's not really complicated, just a bit detailed, but once ou get the hang of it it makes sense and it really is agreat fun sorting out one from the other
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 07:13 AM

Ok, got it, Jim. I am happy with that and I assume from your last line that it does include "pop songs, music hall songs, stage songs.." that have "been subjected to the folk process."

If that is the case then there are many such songs that have been given the folk treatment by different communities and clubs while in other communities they have not been given the same treatment. That is where it gets complicated and contentious. In my old club, for instance, the song "Blue Moon" was given the treatment and over the course of 20 or 30 years it has become, as far as Swinton is concerned, a folk song. IE a song of the Swinton Folk community. I have now moved to Skipton where the song is not a folk song, but others like it may be.

Complicated init! Little wonder the discussions are seemingly endless :-)

PMd you about another matter BTW.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 05:20 AM

There y'go again
"54 has always been a red-herring,nobody has ever argued that it doesn't need updating - I seldom refer to it, if ever
As far as I am concerned, traditional and folk are two inseparable terms - two sides of the same coin
'Folk refers to the people who almost certainly made, took ownership, adapted, re-adapted and distributed the songs, stories and music; tradition refers to the process the songs underwent to become 'folk'
The term folk was taken up by Sharp and Co at the beginning of the 20th century and has continued to be used in the way it was first coined up to the present day, the last major use of it being the release of 'The J M Carpenter Folk song Collection', recently made available on line
The use has never included pop songs, music hall songs, stage songs... etc., unless they have been subjected to the folk process
"
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 04:47 AM

"So, to save any further argument, what is your definition of folk song then, Jim?"
I've given it several times Dace - the lat time half a dozen postings up
If you cant be bothered reading it I really can't help - sorry
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 04:34 AM

So, to save any further argument, what is your definition of folk song then, Jim?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 03:31 AM

"Of course music hall, pop songs and modern amplified non narrative music are all literally part of the people's culture."
Folk songs have always been regarded as those made, remade and adapted and passed on from community to community
Our oral traditions died with the advent of manufactured entertainment, the radio and eventually television - we became recipients of our culture rather than participants in it
Spend any time in a community that still has emnents of a folk tradition and you will find that the people who were around when it was active regarded the songs and tunes as "ours" - Norfolk, West of Ireland, Travellers
Walter Pardon, the last of the large repertoire singers, recorded hours for us, carefully explaining the difference between hisw "old folk songs" and "the modern stuff" (early twentieth century pop and Victorian Parlour Ballads mainly)
Mary Delaney, a blind Travelling woman with a large repertoire of traditional songs and ballads, also had a repertoire of Country and Western songs which she refused to sing to us "they're not Travellers songs" she told us
Tom Lenihan, West Clare small farmer, went on at length explaining not only what the "old traditional stuff" was but how he felt it needed to be sung
The greatest myth in folk song research is the claim that traditional singers didn't think about their songs and didn't discriminate between the traditional songs and anything else they might have picked up
The sad fact is that too many researchers were more interested in the songs as artifacts that they were of how the songs fitted into people's lives - they collected the songs without the information that came with them and assumed there was none to be got
If everything is folk song then there is no need to discriminate between the songs people sing - we may as well give 'The Birdie song' or Abba's 'Waterloo' Roud numbers - that's what 'the folk' are singing nowadays
Sorry - no cigar
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Feb 19 - 03:13 AM

Thanks Jim but I am still confused. At 09 Feb 19 - 03:56 AM you say "there is a nearly two centuries old definition of "folk" which I believe still works" then at 09 Feb 19 - 02:48 PM, referring to what William Thom said in 1846, you say "It wasn't a definition - it was an acknowledgement that 'ordinary' people had a separate culture worth identifying..." going on to comment "'54 has always been a red-herring,nobody has ever argued that it doesn't need updating - I seldom refer to it, if ever".

Sorry to Labour the point but this is important if we want to stop the hours of endless arguing. You often say you can no longer go to a folk club and hear folk song. I, amongst many, disagree with that and say we can go to many folk clubs and always hear folk music. Is it just that your definition of folk is as you state at 08 Feb 19 - 03:07 PM "even if you don't know how to define a folk song you know one when you hear it" and is different from that of some others?

If you think 1954 is a red herring and 1846 is not even a definition, then how do you, personally, define a folk song other than you know one when you hear it?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 05:51 PM

you must send me the chords

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: The Sandman
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 05:34 PM

have been helping a few people in my neighbourhood to learn instruments and learn trad tunes and songs[ on a n unpaid basis] and have been cheered up by the fact that there are people that are interested.
THE 1954 DEFINITION IS FLAWED, to include football chants and such that no one in their right mind would want to listen to outside of the context of a foofball match. example the song sung by Notts county foolball fans[ i understand there might be more than one] to the tune of old smokey.For those who haven’t heard it, to the tune of ‘Old Smoky’, it is simply;

“I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off, I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off, County, County, County”

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 03:11 PM

Ha! I am actually laughing. That very broad definition includes everything you claim it doesn't. Of course music hall, pop songs and modern amplified non narrative music are all literally part of the people's culture. Of course they are. That is exactly what they are. What they are separate from is classical music and church music (often the only kind of music you see discussed my so-called music historians). Where they fall into the picture is: music that you arbitrarily don't like and so exclude from your personal definition.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 02:48 PM

"What definition was in existence in the early 1800s?"
The term 'folk' was first used in 1846 by William Thom, antiquarian to identify people's culture - folklore in particular.
It wasn't a definition - it was an acknowledgement that 'ordinary' people had a separate culture worth identifying and was later applied to song and music
'54 has always been a red-herring,nobody has ever argued that it doesn't need updating - I seldom refer to it, if ever
As far as I am concerned, traditional and folk are two inseparable terms - two sides of the same coin
'Folk refers to the people who almost certainly made, took ownership, adapted, re-adapted and distributed the songs, stories and music; tradition refers to the process the songs underwent to become 'folk'
The term folk was taken up by Sharp and Co at the beginning of the 20th century and has continued to be used in the way it was first coined up to the present day, the last major use of it being the release of 'The J M Carpenter Folk song Collection', recently made available on line
The use has never included pop songs, music hall songs, stage songs... etc., unless they have been subjected to the folk process
God alone knows where loud, amplified, non narrative modern music fits into the picture and untl somone produces a fully accepted alternative definition, that is the one we are stuck with
'54 was never more than an attept to clarify the earlier one
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 01:37 PM

I don't have a personal definition of folk song - there is a nearly two centuries old definition of "folk" which I believe still works

I am genuinely intrigued, Jim. I am well aware of the 1954 definition, which I agree with apart from a couple of minor things. What definition was in existence in the early 1800s?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 12:19 PM

Stop denigrating the Travellers Al - that is my friends you are talking about !
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 12:12 PM

i know...i'm a little tinker when i get going...

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 11:19 AM

I've never pronounced folk song "dead" - I have said the present scene has abandoned it
I believe there are still enough dedicated people around to reboot the scene, if I didn't I wouldn't waste my time talking to people who neither know or care about folk song
Why do you distort and misrepresent what I say Al - it really is beneath you
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 11:04 AM

make your mind up...you just pronounced it dead...defunct..subject of an unfriendly takeover by alien beings....no longer extant....thing of beauty gone forever...... attacked by sinister fifth columnists, working for the enemy.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 10:03 AM

"folk perchance...."
There should be no 'perchance' about it - not if the club scene is to survive
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 08:22 AM

I was referring to folk, the species....

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,Peter
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 08:03 AM



'Can you tell be what I will find relating to folk when go to a folk club now?'

folk perchance....

Depends on the club, you won't know until you get there. I know "folk" clubs where you would be lucky to hear one traditional song in a night and others where contemporary material will be unusual. Its a bit like kissing frogs to find a prince.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 07:40 AM

'Can you tell be what I will find relating to folk when go to a folk club now?'

folk perchance....

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 09 Feb 19 - 03:56 AM

"Where would we have been without you Jim?"
Don't twist what I say Hoot - I said "we" and in doing so I was referring to those who found folk song, decided it was important and worked at it, not those who came along later and decided they would rather do something else with the folk clubs that the first lot had worked so hard to set up
Why personalise it?

"Who do you mean by the 'you' in "you know one when you hear it", Jim? "
You too Andy?
I believe folk song has a recognisable uniqueness - the example I gave was a Sean Nós singer from the est of Ireland who shows himself capable of picking out traditional songs other languages
Anybody who has listened to MacColl's 'Song Carrier' programmes knows that he begins with two examples - an Azerbajani (I think a muezzin) singing an elaborate piece, which he then links to Irish singer, Paddy Tunney
Then he plays a Spaniard singing Canto Hondo and links it to Margaret Barry, an Irish street singer - the cultures are different but all have recognisable similarities, MacColl argues that it is the fact they are from traditional cultures that cause those - it's always worked for me

The sound of folk song is, of course, not the only thing that goes into the making of a tradition - there are many hundreds of works by people who have been researching the subject over the centuries to more than establish the fact - folk song is unique, it is different from any other art form
The "we" are those who believe that uniqueness is important and still relevant
Personalising things has become a way of avoiding argument, the favourite being "Jim's (or whosever's) definition"
I don't have a personal definition of folk song - there is a nearly two centuries old definition of "folk" which I believe still works
That's the one that identified the songs that established the folk revival and continued to do so till a few decades ago - we chose the clubs we went to because we knew more or less what music we would find there
That no longer applies and the term folk has become meaningless when applied to folk clubs
Can you tell be what I will find relating to folk when go to a folk club now? - I doubt it
Can you give me a workable alternative definition that will allow me to choose what I am seeking at a folk club? - if you can you will be the first

The folk scene has been subjected to a hostile takeover and an important art form has been put at risk
There was a danger of that happening in Ireland a few decades ago - hard work on the part of groups of dedicated people have turned that around and guaranteed an at least two generation survival of Irish traditional music and youngsters are now streaming into the music for the love of it
Can any of you say the same?

What is your definition of the music you are offering as "folk"
Once more - can we please stop personalising this and cut out the insulting ?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 07:10 PM

well i don't want to belittle or question Jim's achievements

but I do know, I've tried as hard as I could running folk clubs , trying to perform and write music. And by and large - people have thought of what I do as folk music. Even when I haven't been performing 'folk' - people have thought they discerned elements of folk music in what I did.

I'm sure it makes no difference in the history of mankind. however having the artistic validity of what one has spent ones life doing is just rubbing it in that the middle and upper classes really do call the shots, and tell us what our own culture consists of.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 06:36 PM

"We really were here first and we put the years in to get the music to where it got"

That's quite a claim. Where would we have been without you Jim?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Andy7
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 06:23 PM

"I agree totally with Rigby - even if you don't know how to define a folk song you know one when you hear it"

Who do you mean by the 'you' in "you know one when you hear it", Jim?

I strongly suspect that you mean yourself, and not me! :-)

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 05:46 PM

we have this sodding stupid argument at every juncture.

i can remember someone saying there was no connection between George Formby and Blind Blakes stuff - even though the chord sequences are identical.

Oasis's music, I admit I don't know very well.

But from the tradition.
I should say it takes:-

modal approach to singing (the Manchester accent somehow seems to contain a drone string), the anthemic type choruses, the lyricism, the metrical putty approach that is there in every ballad,
its there in the accompaniments - those haunting open strings...

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Stanron
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 05:46 PM

I like the distinction between folk music and traditional music. I have most difficulty with the idea of traditional music. I tend to go with the idea that traditional music is, or was, a construct of middle class insecurity. Perhaps even labeling music as traditional stops it being folk music. It is possible to maintain the distinction and also recognise commercial music as something else again.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,akenaton
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 05:13 PM

In think Al is right, Oasis and some other "pop" groups and singers have a gritty emotional edge to their writing and singing which compares to a lot of contemporary folk and even some traditional.
I remember watching Arcade Fire putting a torch to the Glastonbury crowd, and thinking, this is folk music.
The tradition is a different genre and In feel the only hope is to put it to sleep for a few decades, to be rediscovered when we are in the mood for social history.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 05:06 PM

well all artistic experience is subjective in nature.

Oasis is not my favourite music, but I think maybe you need to listen to some more varieties of folk music. the connections are there.

I can see songwriters using the elements they have learned from Oasis to write songs about their lives sometime in the future - if it hasn't happened already.

You simply cannot speak for what may inspire an artist at some future time.

being prescriptive in the way you are, earns you nothing but an empty folk club - and sad little threads saying where have all the folkies gone.

they've voted with their feet.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,Rigby
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 04:54 PM

"You are imposing a formality on the nature of folk music which is utterly counter productive - and really is based on some desire to give it middle class respectability and status."

No!... this is completely arse backwards.

No-one's imposing anything on folk music. It's the other way around. People hear that folk music strikes the ear in a distinctive way and analyse it in a bid to understand what gives it that character.

What you find is that there is a loose set of traits that is characteristic of a folk tradition. No one song within that tradition will have all of those traits. Some might have very few. It's a set with fuzzy boundaries. But it's still a real set and it maps onto our immediate reaction to hearing folk songs.

The music of Oasis doesn't trigger the same experience, because it doesn't have those same characteristics.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 04:46 PM

Well I think there are many elements of traditional music in what the Dubliners do. I admire them.

Joe Heaney - Pete Coe flogged me the double cd. About ten years back at one of Alan Bell's Folkus Weekends> I couldn't make much of it, but I liked the idea of it I spent a week or two putting the Ballad of Una Bhan into a song.

We are what we are. And I thought one at least of Joe's stories was worth retelling. But I could only do it in my own way. I need to sing in the world I inhabit - just like Joe did.. From what I've read about his career -tours of America etc - he probably made a damn sight more out of music than most of the poor bastards 'chasing the pennies'.

You are imposing a formality on the nature of folk music which is utterly counter productive - and really is based on some desire to give it middle class respectability and status.

As Bob Dylan said in one of his songs, The cops don't need you...No government, Irish, English, Chinese has anything to contribute to folk music, which is basically anarchic in nature.

I suppose a cynic would point out Woody Guthrie's songs that the government commissioned. But in my book, music created chasing pennies doesn't preclude it from being folk music.

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 03:07 PM

"The Gallagher brothers of Oasis fame have always named the Dubliners as one of their main influences. "
Neither of which are traditional by nature of course
Luke was a fine solo singer back in the day, but he sacrificed his talent (and eventually his voice) by following the pennies
I was in the Singers Club one night when it was just paing up when the Dubliners waked in
Ewan and Luke threw their arms around each other like long lost brothers and they sat and talked for a couple of hours with pat and I sitting in
Luke admitted what I have just said
I agree totally with Rigby - even if you don't know how to define a folk song you know one when you hear it
Ewan and Peggy gave Joe Heaney a bed for a few days in 1964 and spent hours interviewing him - 'some of the results can be heard on Topic's 'Road from Conemara'
Part of the interview was to play Joe recordings from all over the world, some traditional, some not
When Joe was asked to identify which was which he scored nine out of ten - not bad for a rural dweller from the arsehole of the West of Ireland
Jowe was so steeped in the sound of hist traditional music that he could identify it in other cultures - I doubt if the Gallaghers could claim that and even if they could it didn't show in their singing - folk singing should be like wearing an old coat - once you've worn it a few times it becomes part of you
I never get 'woebegone' Al - I've got my folk to keep me warm
Jim

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 02:39 PM

despite having attended folk clubs - many of them claiming to specialise in English folksong since 1964 - I have no idea of what you speak.

Well done you have found a basis on which to exclude me from this discussion.

This is the spirit of exclusivity which leads to Jim looking woebegone and saying - not my fault guv',

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 02:39 PM

despite having attended folk clubs - many of them claiming to specialise in English folksong since 1964 - I have no idea of what you speak.

Well done you have found a basis on which to exclude me from this discussion.

This is the spirit of exclusivity which leads to Jim looking woebegone and saying - not my fault guv',

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: GUEST,Rigby
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 02:08 PM

Maybe you have a more sensitive ability to detect traditional influences, then, because I don't hear them in the music of Oasis.

There are distinctive melodic and lyrical features that are characteristic of English, Scottish and Irish traditional songs, and these just aren't present in the pop covers and so on that I hear. What Oasis song has a burden rather than a chorus, for example?

Subject: RE: Where Have all the Folkies Gone
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Feb 19 - 01:58 PM

well we're not going to sort this out. however you've heard my solution to your problem often enough.

The Gallagher brothers of Oasis fame have always named the Dubliners as one of their main influences. That's one of the directions folk music has gone. And when a kid turns up at your folk club singing the theme song to the Royle family - he's really only a spit and a fart away from roots singers.

The whole point about the purity of folk music - it never was pure.   The ploughman took his memory of a song and reworked it. how many hands did Henry martin pass through before it became the Lofty tall ship, or vice versa...who knows?