Reading about that delightful old character Seamus Tansey’s latest antics, I was struck by a thought.
In England, having allowed our traditional music to pretty much die out by the 50s, in the 60s and 70s people resorted to traditional tunes, but played in a non-traditional manner (seeing as we didn’t really have one anymore). This I would label as Folk Music.
Folk styles might blend into Traditional and be absorbed, or might be rejected and have little long term effect. Some of the stuff played by Dave Swarbrick is definitely not to my taste, and nobody seems to be playing that way now.
I would suggest that there is a difference beween Folk and Traditional styles of playing. Folk is, if you like, more experimental, and of course by natural processes much of it will not carry over and be absorbed into Traditional playing styles. Traditional styles do develop and change, but much more slowly.
It’s just not true that English traditional music has died out although it’s not hard to see why you might think that it has. The Northumbrian tradition remains healthy. There are lots of geezer recordings available on labels like Topic. The piper Kathryn Tickell keeps the tradition going and is quite popular. Instrumental dance music from across the north of England is available. Vocal groups like the Copper family and the Watersons keep the tradition of unaccompanied song going. The band Mr.Fox played in a traditional Yorkshire style although they wrote their own material. John Kirkpatrick and others have kept alive the instrumental music of the Cotswolds. Anne Briggs sang unaccompanied in a traditional style in the 60s and Maddie Pryor and June Tabor occasionally make rather traditional records.
Part of the problem distinguishing what I would call traditional music from modern folk-styled music in one direction (Bert Jansch, Fairport Convention, Kate Rusby) and tradtional instruments meet prog rock (early Gryphon) in the other is the sheer fraudulence of the 60s folk scene. Ewan McColl, a fine songwriter, dominated the scene and seems to me to have been a little bit mad. In his folk club, singers were not permitted to sing songs from any tradtion but their own. But McColl himself was only a pretend Scot: he was born in Salford. Go figure. Also there was a tendency to insist that ‘real’ folk music must be unaccompanied song. That isn’t going to do much for instrumental traditions.
It’s there if you want to search it out though. My own feeling is that, with urbanisation, traditional dance music was replaced by the music hall as the focus of popular entertainment but that the traditions survived well into the 20th century in rural areas and in the north. There is also a fine brass band tradition associated with mining.
Breathnach tried to quantify/qualify this one, as well. Personally, I look at folk music as being what folks are playing now, in their own homes, for their own entertainment as non-professional musicians. There’s precious little of that going on because of people trying to ape professional musicians instead of trying to keep any local custom or style going for its own sake.
Traditional music to me is what folks used to play regularly. That kind of petrifies the definition of traditional music, I know, but let’s face it, we don’t sit around the fire playing music to ourselves for ourselves anymore. We park our butts in front of the tv instead.
Not only do those playing music try to emulate professional musicians, but we judge playing by the same standards. We may indulge a child who is learning an instrument (for ten minutes), but we don’t all jump at the chance to go down the street to Bob’s house to hear him play instrument x, because we know he can’t play it to a professional standard. We know what the standard is - we have the CDs from all over the world to prove it.
It is not our definitions that will fossilize folk/traditional music, but our lifestyles and attitudes, and how we interpret music’s role in our lives. A few families/groups resurrecting old music styles is a bit of freakish entertainment, not something we seek out everyday, or perform ourselves in our own homes. If we were to actually incorporate playing our own music in our own homes for our own entertainment, why, it would become folk music.
Most of the people I mentioned weren’t resurrecting anything. The Copper family have sung tradtional songs for as long as anyone can remember. It’s continuous. Kathryn Tickell learnt from geezers in her area. As with Scottish and Irish music, it takes a bit of digging out but a continuous English tradition does exist.
I think I’m more or less with Wombat here. In my mind, folk music is a mostly misguided attempt, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, to reproduce, update, and commericalize what is great about traditional music. It produced some great music (and lots of utter dreck) but seems to really miss the point of traditional music.
And yes, big hunks of tradition are still quite alive. Going to a slightly different tradition, I know I’ve learned tunes from Christina Smith, who learned them from Rufus Guinchard, who learned them from 19th century fiddlers in his corner of Newfoundland. (And now I’ve got several great recordings of Rufus, so I can hear how he played the tunes.) There definitely was a bit of a traditional revival in Newfoundland in the 1970s, but it focused on living examples of musicians who learned their material in the traditional matter at the beginning of the 20th century. They’re gone now, but lots of people who learned from them and played with them for years are still around and active.
Both Newfoundland and Cape Breton styles are interesting examples of trad/folk music because for them, maintaining the tradition is part of a larger effort to maintain some form of unique cultural identity (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
But I would call groups like the Watersons revivalists. They captured the last few living memories of English folk singing in their area, but also did a lot of historical research to create/recreate the sound they have today. And they also make my point for me - they are probably the only household in their area that does this kind of singing at home.
What about their neighbours? Are the kids all learning to sing like the Watersons, or are they all practising guitar to become the latest pop stars? And their parents - are they singing these centuries old tunes at home, or Elvis songs and C&W hits? That’s the difference between folk and tradition in my tiny mind.
Do you mean the Watersons (60s and early 70s vintage) or Waterson/Carthy? The latter are certainly playing traditional music in a style I’d call folk but I strongly suspect that their learning process was in part traditional and this was reflected in their earliest recordings. I don’t think that doing a bit of research debars you. The Northumbrian tradition still seems vibrantly alive to me. As for how much singing at home goes on in Yorkshire, I really don’t know. Perhaps some English folk are better placed. (When I was in England in the late 70s/early 80s I attended clubs where people sang unaccompanied. It was the usual folk club scene and the songs were traditional.)
Yes, I’m referring to the Waterson Family singers.
But the point of this thread is the difference between folk music versus traditional music. I have no intention to question anyone’s motives or their authenticity. My point is that you can’t really call it folk music anymore if the folk don’t daily regularly make it part of their lives. If its something preserved by specialists, archivists or professional musicians only, then its not really “folk” anymore.
I see your point and tend to agree with it. Chuck Berry and the Beatles were folk. Gangster rappers and current top ten acts are folk.
That’s OK but misleading because folk music now is more of a marketing category and a style than a celebration of authenticity. You can call Kate Rusby anything you like so long as you understand that she recreates a tradition which, if it survives at all, isn’t popular in the do-it-yourself sense.
pete seeger once said that the music that he played i.e."folk music " came from many different traditions. they would pick and choose whatever suited the mood for better and mostly worst without making any attempt to learn it much less perform it in a traditional way.
Pete Seeger was a professional entertainer. He dipped into the traditional music and folk music of several cultures to create an entertaining show. He popularized lots of music styles, but I don’t ever think he claimed any as his own.
One major difference between folk and trad: in trad music, you play something that’s already been composed.
In folk, rock, and any other modern genre, the performers are also the writers of a lot of what they perform. Every new band also means a few dozen new songs. When these people perform something that is already written, it is called a “cover.”
There are also new compositions in trad music, of course, but by a very large margin you play existing stuff. New compositions are a trickle in comparison. Ditto for classical and old-timey music.
The problem with this (other than the massive conflict with the more common usage of the term “folk music”) is how do you define the folk?
To take the Newfoundland example again – Rufus Guinchard lived in the backwaters of Newfoundland. Not exactly a high population area. I’d be surprised if in the old days, there were ever more than ten musicians who knew that music alive at one time. Today, though, there are dozens if not hundreds. We’re just not all crammed into one series of villages you can reach on foot. The roll of the music is different – it is less attached to dancing – but the dancing still goes on, too. (Man, is it fun!)
I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is true of Irish traditional music – more good active musicians today than ever before, by a fairly large factor.
I have always understood “folk music” in a more “ethnomusical” sense (I hope I don’t get banned for using that word) as the natural, “organic” or hearth music of a culture, sung and played by its people reather than specialist musicians.
So when I go to a Hindu wedding and there is a huddle of wizened women sitting in a circle with a dholak ( a 2 sided barrel shaped hand drum) chanting wedding songs handed down from generation to generation. That is folk music. It may not have the precision and finesse of art music or performance music yet still the heart throbs to a higher beat when one hears it.
When my cousin died prematurely after falling off a horse at the age of 16 and my aunt was wailing at the funeral pyre and the wail reached an Air and the other women choralled with her sponntaneously - that I call folk music.
When I was a baby my dad would play a tin tin whistle to me. They were village melodies of North India, part of the lullaby repertoire one can hear in any untutored village. He can still play those pieces and make me feel the child in me. He would never perform on stage. This I call folk music.
So, you see, folk music can be classed as traditional music but not all traditional music is folk music.
If the term “folk music” merely conjured up images in the mind’s eye of the noble savage of whatever area/culture you choose spontaneously engaging in appropriate ritual song and dance for the occasion, then that would be fine. But the term, at least in the English tradition (the Irish tend to avoid it), carries too much other baggage for my liking. Finger in ear. Ewan MacColl and his silly, strict, precious rules. Affected down-the-nose singing. Depressing 35-verse ballads often with pseudo-mystical names and themes (dead babies coming back to wreak vengeance on the feckless mother who should never have borne them type of thing). Dingy, cold back room in pub with guy “playing” out-of-tune guitar, forgetting verses as he goes (de rigeur) to two or three ageing ex-hippies/earth mothers. BLOODY SEA SHANTIES (sorry about that!). The putting-on-pedestals of folkie superstars (now there’s a conundrum). Those Watersons and Carthys. Big-noise so-called folk-rock. Bloody Fairport etc. Whining five-generation singing families who’ve been at it for centuries they tell us (and oh, don’t they love to tell us!), one member of whom might just have actually been vaguely able to sing in Queen Victoria’s reign but who died in 1902. (he was usually called “Bob” for some reason - funny, I thought it would at least have been “Robt” back then). Grown men with short pants and jingles hitting each other’s sticks. Oh, and English melodeon players. It’s no surprise that when non-folkies refer to folk music they usually do it with prejudice, faint amusement and a patronising air. I don’t want to criticise these things (after all, one man’s fish is another man’s poisson), just to kind of play devil’s advocate in pointing out all this baggage. And I acknowledge that the folk music of cultures of which I know nothing may be free of these perceived encumbrances, but I can only speak for my own.
I don’t wanna be a folkie. So let’s ditch the term “folk music” and call it traditional music (not “trad” please!). I know it won’t do much good. But we can then start another argument as to whatever music we’re discussing at the time is “it” or not. Makes life worth living!
Dear Mr Shaw,
You appear to have talent in rhetoric but I have missed your logic. Are you suggesting that your calling the thing “traditional” instead of “folk” will change the thing?
Do you not have a “folk tradition” in the Cornish corner where you live? No? How “unprimitive” of you!
Savagely yours,
Talasiga
I went out of my way to confine my invective to the English folk tradition, which I think has not helped itself to say the least in attracting stereotypical images to itself. I actually love a lot of the stuff I was ranting about. I’m a Shirley Collins completist (a bit of Morris baggage there, AND a good few 35-versers!). I have a lovely old Watersons recording that I wouldn’t be without. I think John Kirkpatrick has the finest fingers ever to grace D/G buttons. I go to Sidmouth and Padstow. I happen to think that saddo MacColl wrote some of the most moving songs ever written. And I wouldn’t be playing my stuff today were it not for those many long, tedious nights spent in “folk clubs.” I will NOT back down on sea-shanties though! Where is he…!
There’s a teensy-weensy folk tradition in Cornwall but it struggles, a bit like the Cornish language (I know it’s no excuse, but I’m not actually Cornish myself). It’s related to the Irish, Breton and Galician traditions.
I think the Irish have it right. They don’t often talk of “Irish folk music,” which I think is very sensible considering their proximity to England and its tainted folk music image. Paradoxically, ITM is much closer to the heart of the people than English folk music, which is decidedly peripheral.
i, for one, rather enjoyed the rant
mind you, i like a number of the people you mentioned too… if i hadn’t been turned onto steeleye span in high school i may never have gone on to listen to ITM. but i can’t say i listen to it today.
