FOLK MUSIC

The folk boom emerged in the wake of skiffle.

From Cecil Sharp House and coffee bars and then the scene moved into pub.

In the 1960s folk music listeners were either revivalists, who were influenced by what was going on in America, or traditionalists. The former took to using banjos and guitars.

The Troubadour became the hub. Les Cousins opened in 1965 in Greek Street.

The Cambridge Folk Festival started in 1965.

Location: Gyre & Gimble, 28 John Adam Street, WC2N 6HU. The coffee shop was frequented by acoustic musicians. (red, purple)

Thomas Ravenscroft

Thomas Ravenscroft (b.c.1592) collected contemporary popular songs. These were published. They included: Froggy Went Acourting and Three Blind Mice.

Early Music Shop

Moore's

The cover for The Incredible String Band L.P. featured the three musicians holding traditional instruments. The photograph was taken in Harold Moore's Records, an esoteric record shop. The instruments belonged to the shop and none of them were used on the record. It closed in 2007.

Location: 2 Great Marlborough Street, W1F 7HQ (red, white)

The English Hymnal

The English Hymnal is used in Anglican services. It was compiled by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He used a number of folk tunes.

Folk Clubs

The 44 Club

The 44 Club was the initial home of folk in London.

Location: 44 Gerrard Street, W1D 5QG (red, orange)

The Ballad & Blues Folk Club

A.L. Bert. Lloyd hosted the Ballads & Blues folk club in Holborn with MacColl and Peggy Seeger

The Musical Traditions Club

The Musical Traditions Club met in The King & Queen pub in Fitzrovia. In December 1962 Bob Dylan made his U.K. debut there. Martin McCarthy noticed him the audience and invited him to sing.

Location: The King & Queen, 1 Foley Street, W1W 6DL (blue, white)

Peelers

Peelers was a folk club that was run by the husband and wife Roger (1943-2009) and Kay Nicholson.

Folk Musicians

Shirley Collins

Shirley Collins was born into a working-class family in Hastings. The family were giving to singing traditional songs for entertainment. In 1952 the seventeen-year-old Collins moved to London to start a teacher training course. She started performing the songs she had learnt as a child. She dropped out of the course. Her mother was concerned about her singing in coffee bars which she (Collins's mother) regarded as being dens of iniquity.

Collins encountered Ewan MacColl. Her exposures to him led her to conclude that he pompous, pretentious, and sexist.

In 1953 she met the musical archivist Alan Lomax (1915-2002) became on-off lovers for the next decade. In 1959 the couple travelled to the United States. There, they sought out and recorded traditional songs. She was involved in every aspect of the collection process. The pair recorded the likes of James Carter, Texas Gladden, and Fred McDowell.

Collins s debut album was Sweet England (1959). It was followed by False True Lovers (1960).

Her song Space Girl (1960) was included on the compilation album Rocket Along. The L.P.'s designer was Austin John Marshall, whom she married.

Collins was given to accompanying herself with a banjo. Upon occasion she was waiting to Bradford Railway Station. Two policemen concluded that she was a prostitute who was trying to pick up clients. At the time, she had her instrument with her. Her response was to inquire how many banjo-playing prostitutes were there.

Collins recorded the album Folk Roots, New Routes with the innovative guitar player Davy Graham. MacColl's associates in the Critics Group disliked the record. She was of the view that they were middle-class people who were pretending to be working-class.

The subject of the L.P. Anthems In Eden (1969) was rural England in the wake of the First World War. The record combined folk music with Early Music. Her older sister Dolly (d.1995) performed on it.

Collins and Marshall divorced in 1970. The following year she married Ashley Hutchings of Fairport Convention. His Albion Band furnished backing for the album No Roses (1971), which was an electric folk-rock record. The couple set up the Etchingham Steam Band to champion Sussex music.

By 1978 the marriage was falling apart. The couple were performing musically in a production of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise that was being mounted at the National Theatre. Hutchings new lover was one of the actors. Some nights Collins would try to sing but found herself unable to do so. The condition was dysphonia. It also started effecting when she tried to sing in non-public settings. She reduced her performing commitments and in 1982 stopped altogether.

In 1993 she and Lomax met for the final time. The pair argued about the contribution that she had made to his work. However, a tenderness remained between them. Two years later he had a brain haemorrhage and a stroke.

Current 93 was an experimental folk band. In 1991 its frontman David Tibet contacted Collins and subsequently got to know her. He asked her to sing on some of their songs. She was reluctant to do so. However, she sang All The Pretty Horses on the band's The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (1995) album and a verse of Idum a on their Black Ships Ate The Night (2006) L.P..

In 2014 a concert was mounted at Cecil Sharp House to commemorate the Sussex singer Bob Cooper. Collins sang in public for the first time that night. The other performers included her friend Linda Thomson, who had also had dysphonia. Subsequently, Collins performed in her own right at the Union Chapel in Islington.

Jackson C. Frank

Jackson C. Frank (1943-1999) was an American folk musician who worked in Britain. Paul Simon produced his only album Jackson C. Frank (1965). Subsequently, he succumbed to poor mental health.

Location: Levy's Sound Studios, 73 New Bond Street, W1S 1RS (blue, orange)

Percy Grainger

Percy Grainger used phonographs far more than his contemporary collectors. He was a racist who believed that blue-eyed people were superior to non-blue-eyed people. Yet he was friendly with Duke Ellington and a number of other Black musicians and composers. He tried to only use words that were Anglo-Saxon in origin.

Lou Killen

Lou Killen (1934-2013) was prominent in the second wave of folk music.

A.L. Bert Lloyd

From 1924 to 1930 the folk singer A.L. Bert Lloyd (d.1982) worked as a sheep shearer in New South Wales and collected Australian folk songs there. These included Click Go The Shears.

Lloyd recorded an influential album of Bulgarian folk music. It influenced The Incredible String Band who developed a Balkan element to their music.

Ewan McColl

Jimmie Miller (1915-1989) was born in Salford the child of Scottish parents. He became a Communist agitator. In 1934 he married the theatre director Joan Littlewood. Together they ran a radical theatre company. At the end of the Second World War Miller changed his name to Ewan MacColl.

MacColl wrote the song Dirty Old Town (1949) to cover the changeover between two scenes in a play. It was about Salford.

In 1953 MacColl opened the Ballads & Blues Club in Soho. This became one of the birthplaces of the folk music revival.

Peggy Seeger was MacColl's second wife. In 1957 he wrote the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face about her. The composition was relatively obscure until it was covered by the American singer Roberta Flack. Her version of it became an international hit and rendered it a standard. Subsequently, Dirty Old Town acquired a similar status through being covered by acts such as The Pogues and Rod Stewart.

In 1958 the B.B.C. aired The Ballad of John Axon, a radio programme about the heroic death an engine driver of a runaway train in Derbyshire. It an unprecedented manner it was narration free and composed of songs and ordinary people giving accounts of what had happened and the events that had preceded it. It was the B.B.C. producer Charles Parker who initiated the project. His acoustic gifts made him an awkward perfectionist who was prepared to make considerable demands of the Corporation's Engineering Department to secure what he believed was required for a programme. He was inspired by a wartime documentary that had been made by two Americans about Abraham Lincoln s funeral train. It had contained songs by Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. Parker approached McColl.

Up until then the standard documentary process had consisted of a script being written. This would then be performed by actors using watered-down variants of the relevant accents.

Portions of the script were spoken by John Snagge.

Recent technical innovations meant that both the size and weight of recording equipment had been reduced. Therefore, McColl and Parker were able to make a series of field recordings in preparation for writing a script. McColl was struck by the knowledgeableness with which the interviewees had spoken. It was he who persuaded the producer that they should be broadcast rather than transcribed and then performed. McColl wrote the script drawing upon narrative skills that he had learned through his work in the theatre. Some of the songs that he composed for the programme were based on folk tunes. Parker wrote some incidental bridges to facilitate smooth shifts between sections. McColl was an instinctive, self-taught musician who could not read music. Therefore, he turned to Peggy Seeger to orchestrate the programme s music. Her mother was an avant-garde composer who had a variety of compositional techniques.

The trio's skills were complementary. The Ballad was a success. It prompted the making of a further seven similar programmes. McColl's principal compositional technique was to write a lyric and then sing it to a traditional folk tune. He would then adjust the tune. The resulting songs sounded as they had emerged from the folk canon. One of the songs that he composed for Singing The Fishing was Shoals of Herring. He played the piece to Sam Larner of Winterton, an elderly East Anglian fisherman and traditional singer from whom he and Seeger had been collecting songs. Larner's immediate response was to declare that he knew the song. The song was swiftly taken up by folk performers. In Ireland it was adapted to become The Shores of Erin. Other of McColl's compositions experienced a similar fate.

Seeger s favourite was The Fight Game.

Paul Simon

In the early 1960s the American musician Paul Simon lived and worked in Britain. His girlfriend Kathy Chitty inspired the songs Kathy's Song and America. He learnt Scarborough Fair from Martin McCarthy and adapted it into Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. While waiting to catch a train at Widnes Railway Station he wrote Homeward Bound.

Location: Dellow Street, E1 0BW. Between The Highway and Cable Street. (orange, red)

Record Labels

Labels that released folk music albums: Fellside Records, Topic, and Wildgoose.

Cecil Sharp House

The Folk Song Society was founded in 1898. The following year Cecil Sharp encountered William Kimber of the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers. This meeting led to the folk dance revival.¹ In 1911 Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society. In 1932 the organisation merged with The Folk Song Society to form The English Folk Dance & Song Society.

Cecil Sharp House has three spring floors that can be hired.

Location: Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent's Park Road, NW1 7AY (blue, turquoise)

Quotation: Try everything once - except incest and folk dancing - Thomas Beecham (d. 1961).

See Also: HOBBIES; MUSIC

Website: www.efdss.org/cecil-sharp-house

¹. Bampton in Oxfordshire is the hub of the morris dancing universe.

David Backhouse 2024