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Paper presented at Folk Singing Symposium, University of Sheffield, February 2023
The debate, at various times over more than 100 years, about the nature, definition, origins and status of that music which has been perceived as ‘folk music’ has been wide-ranging (Sharp, 1907; Lloyd, 1967; Harker, 1985; Boyes,2010; Roud, 2017. Full references appear at the end of this post). Ideas about folk song range from describing it as a form that has evolved through oral transmission, variation and selection through to its being seen as a bourgeois construction which simultaneously exploits and disdains the culture of the working classes. That debate is fascinating, and will continue. This paper takes a different and more simple-minded approach. It considers the nature of the music which is actually being performed in a section of the British folk music movement. I am influenced by Lucy Wright’s (2019) description of folk processes:
[Folk] is what can happen when people, alone, or together, and regardless of anything, engage in cultural practices they create for themselves. p1
Wright gives examples including girls’ marching jazz bands and sewing circles. It seemed to me that singaround-style folk clubs and tune sessions fitted this description. If these activities are examples of folk processes, then the music that is performed as part of these activities can be regarded as folk music. I would argue that folk clubs are more of a ‘folk activity’ in Wright’s sense than CD-making and streaming, professional concerts, or festivals, the other main elements of the UK folk scene. This is the justification for this study, which intends to describe folk song behaviourally as those songs which people sing in folk clubs, and to examine the nature of those songs. This is a simple approach, compared with the theoretical and historical approaches in the debates referenced above, but has the advantage of being grounded in contemporary lived experience. So I decided to investigate those songs sung in two local folk clubs.
A Practical Definition of Folk Songs: Folk songs are the songs that people sing in folk clubs
The by now traditional folk club (Mackinnon,1993 and Hield, 2010 give definitions and descriptions) is a minor part, and probably a terminally declining part, of the whole folk music scene in the United Kingdom. It has been seen as a support mechanism for retired teachers and social workers, rather than having musical significance. However, it is an important activity to those taking part, and one in which most participants are active music-makers.
The songs performed by the floor singers in two East Midlands folk clubs in a number of sessions between 2017 and 2023 were noted. They were then identified and roughly categorised as to source and date to give a picture of what actively-produced folk music consists of in the lives of various practitioners in the early 21st century.
A complaint about the Victorian and Edwardian collectors in particular is that their accounts of singers’ repertoires were heavily edited, and that they deliberately and explicitly rejected material which they did not see as proper folk material. Anything that they regarded as popular song was not fit to be recorded. Yates and Stradling (2020) quote Sharp as saying in a 1903 lecture:
“For the first week or so, our captures were few and of small account. I could easily have filled my notebook with Music Hall songs, […] songs of the Christy Minstrel type, or with the popular songs of fifty years ago and less, such as ‘Grandfather’s Clock’, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’, ‘Woodman Spare That Tree’, ‘Wait Till the Clouds Roll By’ and sentimental balderdash of that sort. Gradually however we worked through that stratum and eventually struck a rich vein of Real Folk Song, of the kind we were searching for…”
This rejection of recently-composed and commercial material continued with important figures in the post-World War 2 revival. Lloyd (1975) says “show business corporations add their bit of confusion by annexing the term folk song to describe certain professionally made cabaret style products that have nothing to do with musical folklore either in the way they are created and spread nor in formal style, psychological climate or function”. He claims that the compositions of a Dylan or a Donovan are “not folk songs by any workable definition”. p385
However, there are a few cases, from Henry Burstow in 1911 to Walter Pardon in the 1980s, where singers who were sources for admired and ‘proper’ folk songs noted their full repertoires, uncensored by the collectors, or where collectors were careful not to exclude ‘non-folk’ material. I believe these repertoires are an interesting comparison with the current folk club repertoire, and I will discuss some of them in the last part of this paper.
The settings and the methods
All the songs sung by non-professional performers in a number of club sessions between 2017 and 2023 were noted. This was not done in a very systematic or well-ordered way. The study originally started with my idle curiosity to try to quantify how much of the material being performed could be described as ‘folk song’ in the sense that important revival figures of the past, like Cecil Sharp or AL Lloyd, would recognise it. I noted all the songs from six sessions of my most local club (Club B) in early 2020. The results from that were interesting, so I decided to extend the study. I knew there were records from another local club (Club A), where Paul Mansfield (2018) had made thorough observations in 2017, and where one of the club organisers had routinely noted singers and song titles for all the sessions that he attended for some years. Paul and the club generously gave me access to those records (for four years, from 2018 to 2022, interrupted by the pandemic, in the case of the club records), and I supplemented those by noting a further seven sessions from Club A in late 2022 and early 2023. This gave me a total of nearly 1650 performances.
Both clubs meet weekly for singarounds, with a guest night usually once a month. The number of attendees at both clubs is variable, but generally between 10 and 30. Both have a high proportion of performers among the attendees, often more than 80% at Club A. Club B usually has more attendees than Club A, but a slightly smaller proportion of performers, so the number of performers per session is similar between the two clubs – 10-15 or so, with most people having two songs during the evening. So the number of songs noted for each session is 20-30. About 20-25% of the performers are women in each club. The format in the sessions recorded was usually a singaround. Floor singers’ songs on guest nights were also noted. The repertoires of the guests are not considered here. They are operating to a different agenda from that of the local singers, with some requirement to provide novelty and distinctiveness, which can lead to quite different repertoires from those of the floor singers. My hope was to capture a picture of those songs that floor singers wanted to sing for their own pleasure and satisfaction, and for the pleasure and satisfaction of the small local community of the club. Of course, as Hield and Mansfield (2019) have pointed out, it is not the case that ‘anything goes’ on the folk club scene, but both these clubs do have a relaxed attitude to repertoire, and a wide range of music is performed, as will be seen below.
The strength of the data is that it has some natural validity. I don’t believe that people cared, or even noticed much, that the names of what was being sung were being noted, nor that they varied their performances accordingly. That’s not to say that some of these performers didn’t monitor their own repertoires, with spreadsheets or other records of what they’d sung when, and how often. The clubs had theme nights from time to time – like Burns’ Night, or an Irish Night, or the Christmas Party, or an awareness of Samhain or Hallowe’en – which influenced singers’ choices. But these choices were made for the occasion, not for the record.
Most of the performers are old. Anyone under 30 is viewed with surprise and given a possibly intimidating level of welcome and support. Most (but by no means all) attendees are retired from white-collar occupations. The level of experience and competence is vary varied. Some performers have been doing this kind of thing since the folk club boom of the 60s and 70s (and some are skilled and captivating musicians), some have only just started. In both clubs, all performances, even those which are technically poor or break down midway, are listened to with respect and given applause.
I am clear that this is not a representative sample of all clubs in the country. Although the two clubs are close to each other and there is some overlap of members and performers between the clubs, the clubs’ repertoires and atmospheres are different from each other. Other clubs throughout the country will differ again. I do think, though, that it is worth looking at this snapshot of the material that a large number of amateur musicians choose to perform in these settings.
There were three sessions at Club A where song names were noted by Mansfield in 2017, and 52 sessions from the same club noted in whole or part by the organiser between 2018 and 2022. There was a large gap in the club’s face-to-face sessions over the pandemic. There were online sessions during the lockdown, but these weren’t noted. I noted songs from 6 sessions at Club B in 2018, and from 7 sessions in late 2022-early 2023. This gave a total of 67 sessions, with the majority of records, 1252 performances, at Club A and 397 at Club B, a total of 1649.
There were some problems in identifying and categorising songs from the records available. The organiser at Club A did not attend every session, and even then not every song was noted because of fatigue, or toilet or bar breaks. Of those songs noted, not all were identifiable. Some performers give the names of their songs, some don’t, and those recording song names didn’t always know the songs themselves, so there were quite a few records which were distinctive lines from the song, rather than the official song title. It was usually possible to trace the title from these clues, but not always. Sometimes, also, the title noted is ambiguous: several songs, of different styles and eras, may share the same title. Eighty-one, just under 5%, of the originally noted songs were unclassified. These songs don’t appear in the following analysis, which is based on the remaining 1568 performances.
For my analysis, I wanted to categorise songs by date and source of origin. This is where things can get difficult. By careful scholastic research (i.e. Wikipedia, Mudcat, Folk Song and Music Hall, and Mainly Norfolk websites, with a bit of YouTube and general Google searching) it is possible to get dates and origins for most songs. But some of those will be wrong: in particular, people make very definite statements on sleeve notes (which are the main source for Mainly Norfolk) without necessarily having any evidence, and even the most scholarly-respectable sources aren’t always reliable, though Folk Song and Music Hall seems rigorous.
I categorised those songs which are known to have been collected from source singers, either in the first folk song collecting boom or more recently, as ‘traditional’ – even though I know that much of that material came via revival singers and may not have been performed quite as collected from source singers. I’ve also included as traditional some source-singer material which comes from well-known nineteenth or early twentieth century commercial sources, but have passed into general usage – Take the News to Mother, Grandfather’s Clock, etc.
I categorised songs with identifiable authorship from 1900 as modern, commercial songs. This includes ‘folk’ composers of the later twentieth century – Guthrie, MacColl, Paxton, Thompson. I dated songs from when they were first published, or appeared on record (or film in some cases). I know that many of the nineteenth century ‘traditional’ songs also have commercial or literary origins, and may not be fundamentally different from modern compositions, but I think it’s reasonable to make a distinction which would be meaningful to most of the club performers, and is made in many song books and record sleeve notes.
What came out of the data?
There were a small number of songs which dated from the nineteenth century or earlier, but had distinct non-folk originals: madrigals, or songs from sources like Pills To Purge Melancholy or Shakespeare. I classed these as ‘Old Composed’.
As discussed, I categorised classic folk songs as ‘traditional’.
All songs from non-traditional sources which could be dated to 1900 or later I grouped in 20-year categories: 1900-1919, 1920-1939, etc. Self-written songs, of which there were quite a few, I arbitrarily classed as being from 2010.
This gave the distribution:
Unclassified: 4.9%
Of the rest (excluding Unclassified form the percentage calculation):
Old composed: 2.7%
Traditional: 31.5%
1900-1919: 1.9%
1920-1939: 6.8%
1940-1959: 5.8%
1960-1979: 29.8%
1980-1999: 10.1%
2000-2023: 11.5%
As a bar chart, this is:
As a pie chart:
This shows that these are folk clubs: the largest single category is ‘Traditional’. But composed songs from the whole of the twentieth century are more common still, and songs from the 1960s and 1970s are the second largest category. The majority of those, but not all, are singer-songwriter ‘folk’ songs in the now-accepted non-traditional sense. However, the overall impression is that what people choose to sing in those folk clubs is a wide variety of kinds of music from a very wide range of periods. The songs are almost all anglophone, but not necessarily English. There are songs from many American sources, as well as Scottish, Irish and Australian.
A general judgement could be that these, mostly elderly, performers are mainly performing material which was popular in their youth – which explains the peak from the 60s and 70s. The ‘reminiscence bump’ effect, that older people remember more of their lives between age 10 and 30 than other periods (Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, 1986), is well known in the psychology of memory, and most people have an affinity with the music of their youth. But these performers are also willing to pick up on, and adapt, some more recent material – and to write their own songs.
Specific examples may make this clearer. The most popular composers or sources were:
Self-Written (several authors) 72 performances
Bob Dylan 37
Tom Paxton 35
Beatles 29
Ralph McTell 21
Richard Thompson 20
Paul Simon/Simon&Garfunkel 17
At 10-14 performances: John Denver; Carter Family; John Tams; Bert Jansch; Linda Thompson; Pete Seeger; Stan Rogers
The high proportion of self-written songs is different from that noted by Hield (2010) in Sheffield clubs, confirming that these two Nottingham clubs are not representative of any overall ‘folk scene’.
The most popular songs from 1500 performances (7-8 times each)
Traditional: Midnight Special
Traditional: Rose of Allendale
Paxton: Last Thing on My Mind
Tams: Rolling Home
Traditional: Leaving of Liverpool
Trad/Brumley: I’ll Fly Away
(All the ‘traditional’ songs here are really ‘traditional-ish’)
Most of these are here because they’re chosen as good rousing chorus songs to round the evening off. Last Thing on My Mind is a gently rueful song about a failed love affair – something that old men think about a fair deal (Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright was just outside the top 6). It’s worth noting that even songs and sources which might seem subjectively to crop up endlessly are a very small proportion of this very large body of performances. Indeed, the most striking thing about the records, after the fairly predictable preponderance of the 60s and 70s, is the great variety of songs and sources that people chose. A selection of ‘non-folk’ songs and modern(ish) ‘non-folk’ sources:
Everything Stops For Tea; Paloma Blanca; I’m Henry the Eighth; Tiptoe Through The Tulips; Paperback Writer; Bring Your Sweet Loving; It Was a Very Good Year; When a Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
Non-folk composers and authors: The Beatles; The Kinks; Sondheim; Coldplay; Fleetwood Mac; Leo Sayer; Alison Moyet; Jimi Hendrix; Bobby McFerrin; Mandolin Orange; Barenaked Ladies; Dropkick Murphys; Elgar; Sting; Bono/U2; Half Man Half Biscuit; Rice/Andersson/Ulvaeus; Webber/Rice; Mungo Jerry; George & Ira Gershwin; Irving Berlin
Here is a word cloud of sources:
The size of text is roughly proportional to the popularity of the source. (Wordcloud from jasondavies.com/wordcloud)
Note that round the edge, and perhaps difficult to read, are lots of composer/writer songwriter teams: Arlen/Harburg (composers of Over the Rainbow), Ager/Yellen, Ain’t She Sweet, Dubin/Warren, Keep Young And Beautiful, Rogers and Hart, Blue Moon, Leiber and Stoller: lots of Presley songs, and Goffin and King, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. These represent Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building-style material, and songs from shows like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Overall, the impression I have is that although there is a canon of traditional sources, and also one of late 20C folk revival performer material, that people draw on, they are prepared to sing a much wider range of material than that. The music performed in these clubs is drawn from much more general sources than the folk tradition as defined by the Victorian and Edwardian collectors, or by the late twentieth-century revival.
Any song which has:
interesting and meaningful words;
a tune the performer likes;
and which is capable of being performed with a simple accompaniment or no accompaniment
by someone without extreme professional skills,
is a candidate for becoming folk music in this sense.
It also necessary that the performer thinks it might be acceptable to the audience. Hield and Mansfield (2019) point out that that there are non-explicit restrictions in the clubs and it is not really true that ‘anything goes’. They say that in Club A a Max Bygraves song was (perhaps jokingly) seen as borderline acceptable. Singers sometimes do say ‘I’m not sure if this is the right kind of thing…’ but then bash on and do it anyway, and it should be clear by now that there is quite a large latitude of acceptability, in these two clubs at least. I get the impression that ‘folk-ish’ versions of unlikely material are welcomed in both clubs, on the basis of the creativity they show and the novelty they provide.
I think it would be better to call this vernacular music rather than folk music. Those people who enjoy music and want to perform in these settings are prepared to appropriate and adapt a very wide range of music for their own purposes. It turns out (perhaps unfortunately) that most things can be arranged for a simple strummed ukelele accompaniment.
Other repertoires
It is interesting to compare these findings with the repertoires of earlier source singers. The early collectors have rightly been criticised for not paying attention to the full repertoires of the singers they were collecting from, but we do have some complete records. I will consider the repertoires of Henry Burstow in 1911, Jim Copper in 1936, and singers around Blaxhall in the mid 70s. Yates and Stradling (2020) also give a range of examples of non-folk material in source singers’ repertoires, concentrating on material from the USA in British singers’ repertoires.
Henry Burstow, 1911
Burstow, the ‘celebrated bellringer and songsinger of Horsham’, listed 420 songs that he knew in his 1911 autobiography. Of these, he identified 82 as ‘learned from his father’, so those could be counted as traditional to some extent. There are many other well-known traditional songs: Our Captain Cried all Hands, Creeping Jane, etc. Both Lucy Broadwood and Vaughan Williams collected songs from him. I am not competent to evaluate the whole repertoire in detail, but it seemed to me that there are no more than 200 songs which would be recognised as ‘folk songs’. This leaves 200+ other songs – and they are of a very wide variety: patriotic songs from Dibdin, minstrel songs from Christy’s Minstrels, early and mid-nineteenth century broadsides, and commercial songs which were published as sheet music: Darling Nelly Gray (an anti-slavery song from 1856); My Helen Is the Sweetest Flower; Jeannette and Jeannot; Silver Threads Amongst the Gold, as some examples. Just the kind of songs that Cecil Sharp complained about. Burstow writes that he was an enthusiastic learner of songs wherever he could hear them, and names many neighbours as sources, but he also learned from “ballad sheets I bought as they were hawked around at fairs, and at other times from other printed matter” (Burstow, 1911 p108). It also looks as though Burstow had parodies, either by him or others, of commercial songs. Woodman Spare That Tree appears, but also Butcher, Spare That Lamb and Broker, Spare That Bed (no, I can’t imagine what that’s about). There were local singer-songwriters, too. He says that “Jim Manwell, bricklayer, Queen Street […] could compose songs on any subject” in “20 minutes or half an hour” (p108).
Jim Copper, 1936
The Copper Family has various songbooks compiled within the family over the years. Some were compiled with outside audiences in mind, but the one made by Jim Copper in 1936 seems to be a complete account of his songs. I was able to copy the index in the mid-1970s (Miller, 1976). The first page of the index also appears inside the back cover in Coppersongs (1995). He lists all the Copper Family favourites, like Cloddy Banks, Shepherd of the Downs, Spencer the Rover – thirty or forty classic folk songs in a list of 109 titles. There are comic songs: The Horse the Missus Dries Her Clothes On, You Don’t Get Many Pimples on a Pound of Pickled Pork. But there are also quite recent commercial songs:
1892 The Old Dun Cow; 1897 Asleep in the Deep; 1903 Are We to Part Like This, Bill?; 1905 Nelly Dean; 1910 Mother Machree; 1919 Old Fashioned Mother of Mine; 1932 Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
In my modern sample, there are very many songs from around 1970. For Jim Copper in 1936, all the songs above would have been more recent than Tom Paxton songs are for the modern singers. In particular, Brother, Can you Spare a Dime? first appeared in a theatre production in 1932, and Bing Crosby released it as a record in the USA in 1932. It was a contemporary song of social criticism, and in four years, it was in Jim Copper’s repertoire. Copper was more up-to-date then than people singing most of Billy Bragg’s songs are today.
Blaxhall repertoire, mid-70s
In 1980, Ginette Dunn published lists of all the songs known by the singers she knew of around Blaxhall as an appendix to her book The Fellowship of Song (Dunn, 1980). Blaxhall is the village of the Ship Inn, where several important recordings of traditional singers have been made. There are over 400 items overall, many of them songs that were known by several singers, so fewer than 400 individual titles. As with Burstow and Copper, the list is a rich mix of classic folk material with all kinds of other songs. As with Jim Copper, there were some quite recent additions to the repertoires. Three songs that were released in 1966 and were in the repertoire of Percy Webb were Old Shep (this is an older song, but it’s likely that it was learned from Elvis Presley’s 1966 version. It was also listed by Bob Hart and Geoff Ling), Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? with which Allan Smethurs won the 1966 Ivor Novello Novelty Song Award, and the already-by-then folk club favourite Fiddler’s Green. So the revival folk club culture was entering the repertoires of source singers, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t. If it was a good song, people would choose to sing it.
I feel that allowing for changes in the musical environment over a hundred years the repertoires of Burstow, Copper and the Blaxhall singers were not that different from those of the two clubs I’ve studied.
While source singers’ repertoires might be analogous to modern folk club repertoires, I think it’s conversely possible to see signs of the classic folk processes influencing modern repertoire and performance. Oral transmission, anonymisation, variation and selection are visible in the modern folk club material. (I discuss this evolutionary model here: https://millerpsych.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/how-does-music-evolve/)
I believe that many people (like me) learned their melodies by oral transmission by listening to performance on disc (or maybe via YouTube or streaming nowadays) though they might rely on printed sets of words and chord sequences.
Many popular songs have become anonymous: I had to search for the sources of many songs I know very well myself (like January Man), and misattribution is quite common: I’ve heard Take the News to Mother presented as a WW1 song, and Pete Seeger is sometimes said to have written Little Boxes, Roberta Flack The First Time Ever and some know Adele as the source of To Make You Feel My Love.
Variation of tune and words from the original composed or performed version is quite common. Sometimes this is musical error or poor memory, but some is quite deliberate. People have no hesitation in bending material to their own purposes or capability.
There is also a high level of selectivity. Although Bob Dylan is a very popular source, it’s almost always early Dylan which is used, and most of the old pop songs and show tunes which are used are the best of the bunch of their period – of course. Also, though it’s not visible in this fairly short-term sample, I believe that there is evolutionary selectivity. People pick up and develop selected songs, styles, and performance versions from their fellow floor singers – sometimes to the irritation of the source. Issues about ‘ownership’ of material have been discussed by Dunn among source singers (1980), and Mackinnon (1993) and Hield (2010) among others, in folk clubs, but just the fact that this is an issue where singers can readily identify rules and problems shows that borrowing and transmission are common. Among professional folk performers, oral transmission, variation, and selection can be quite explicit, as revealed in many of the sleeve notes quote on the Mainly Norfolk (2023) website. For instance, Shirley Collins (2021) says of her version of Barbara Allen (The Rose and the Briar) in the sleeve notes to her Domino EP Crowlink. “Of all the many versions I have heard, this one, with its sad two-part tune, haunts me most and best seems to evoke Barbara Allen herself.” The Mainly Norfolk page for Tam Lin (https://mainlynorfolk.info/sandy.denny/songs/tamlin.html ) gives lots of sleeve notes by various artists discussing different versions, borrowings, blendings, and modifications. My own version is more or less the AL Lloyd/Mike Waterson one (and we don’t really know where that came from), but I’ve changed bits (of course) and have recently found some extra verses I’d like to add in. That’s how it goes.
That all leads to a grand claim. That is that there really isn’t very much difference, allowing for historical musical and technological changes, between the repertoires, and transmission and development processes, of contemporary folk clubs and traditional source singers from the last two centuries. That is a grand claim, and needs some hedging. One criticism is that ‘allowing for historical musical and technological changes’ is such a big allowance that it devalues the main point. However, given how big those changes have been, being able to see any similarities between then and now seems significant to me. The other criticism is the tiny universe being examined: a couple of old-fashioned singaround clubs, frequented by a very narrow class and age demographic. Strange things can happen in groups like this, and there’s little justification for extrapolating that to any wider society. Fair enough, though I think a similar case could be made for parts of the professional folk world (still a small universe), as discussed above for variation and selection. Also, returning to Wright’s (2019) idea of self-organised culture as folk activity, some similar things maybe be happening elsewhere in non-musical areas. One of my non-folk friends asked me shyly (because they thought I might be offended) ‘Do you have any people in the folk world who are a bit like The Detectorists?’ I wasn’t offended. I told her that most of us were like that – and it’s good.
I’ve come across two supporting arguments elsewhere, one in folk-related literature, one more general.
Ivan Illich’s (1973) book Tools For Conviviality discusses technologies and ways of organising society (tools, in his terms) to promote individual autonomy, resist technological control, and secure justice and access to self-defined work for all. Big political aims, but his approach also makes sense for mutually satisfying group artistic activity. He gives a list of characteristics of such tools (p35 in the 1975 Fontana printing):
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired
The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally
They do not require previous certification of the user
The tools’ existence does not impose any obligation to perform them
Tools allow the user to express their meaning in action
The list makes sense if one substitutes ‘songs’ for ‘tools’:
Songs foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily sung by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired
The singing of such songs by one person does not restrain another from using them equally
They do not require previous certification of the singer
The songs’ existence does not impose any obligation to perform them
Songs allow the user to express their meaning in action
This seems a good description of how many clubs work. Perhaps the second ‘restraining’ condition does not apply if songs are jealously ‘owned’, and the third requires a ‘no auditions’ policy (I have heard of clubs requiring a couple of test verses in the gents’ before allowing newcomers to sing, but it never happened to me. Maybe it’s an urban legend).
The other supporting example I found was in Niall Mackinnon’s (1993) book The British Folk Scene. Thirty years before I had any ideas about folk song as vernacular or convivial music, his study of the British folk scene in the 1980s led him to say:
But artistic accessibility remains at the core – the fact that the music can be performed by anyone and not only by highly trained individuals. Conviviality and accessibility remain centre stage. pp66-67
The insertion of certain vernacular values into the modern British folk revival is as important as the content of the song texts and melodies. It is the mode of their production we that we should look at and is the reason why I have deliberately moved away from a concentration on textual analysis which bedevils so much literary and musical analysis. p68
(emphasis added in both extracts)
So Mackinnon is way ahead of me, and many of my ideas here are not original, but it is encouraging that Mackinnon concentrated on the structure and organisation of the scene in coming to his conclusions, while I started, 30 years later, at the other end, with the outputs of a limited part of the system, and we converged on similar judgements.
The most banal and clichéd summing up of what I’ve said above is the good old ‘folk music is whatever folk sing’, but clichés get to be clichés because they originally had some power, and may still do so. I would say that the music of the modern singaround folk club is produced, selected and developed in much the same way as the music produced by other non-professional groups, performing informally for themselves and each other, in the last century and before. As Lucy Wright (2019, p1) suggests, it is “what can happen when people, alone, or together, and regardless of anything, engage in cultural practices they create for themselves”.
Hugh Miller
Thanks to Paul Mansfield and to the organisers of both clubs for their help – and to all the performers of those hundreds of songs.
Some of my own repertoire: https://www.youtube.com/@HughMillerSongsStories
All photos here by me. If you want to see more of my stuff (I’ve done quite a bit of photography of folk performers) it’s at: www.hughmillerphoto.com
References
Boyes, Georgina (2010) The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival Leeds: No Masters Co-operative
Burstow, Henry (1911) Reminiscences of Horsham: being recollections of Henry Burstow, the celebrated bellringer and songsinger Horsham: Free Christian Book Society (facsimile from Gale, Cengage Learning and The British Library)
Collins, Shirley (2021) Sleeve notes to The Rose and the Briar Crowlink EP London: Domino Records
Coppersongs (1995) The Copper Family Song Book – A Living Tradition Peacehaven: Coppersongs
Dunn, Ginette (1980) The Fellowship of Song: Popular Singing Traditions in East Suffolk London: Croom Helm
Harker, Dave. (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hield, Fay (2010) English Folk Singing And The Construction Of Community PhD Thesis University of Sheffield
Hield, Fay & Mansfield, Paul (2019) Anything goes? Recognising norms, leadership and moderating behaviours at folk clubs in England, Ethnomusicology Forum, 28:3, 338-361
Illich, Ivan (1973) Tools For Conviviality New York: Harper & Row
Lloyd, Bert (1975) Folk Song in England Paperback edition, London: Paladin
Mackinnon, Niall (1993) The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity Buckingham: Open University Press
Mainly Norfolk (2023) English Folk and Other Good Music https://www.mainlynorfolk.info/folk/ accessed 20 February 2023
Miller, Hugh (1976) Index to the Coppers’ Songs Traditional Music No 3, Early 1976, p38
Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, (1986). Autobiographical memory across the lifespan. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical Memory Cambridge University Press
Sharp Cecil (1907) English Folk-song: Some Conclusions London: Simpkin
Wright, Lucy (2019) 21st-Century Folk Art
Yates, Mike & Stradling, Rod (2020) American Songs in the British Folk Repertoire Musical Traditions Website, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/old-new.htm accessed 21 February 202325.8.20
millerpsych 