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Chumbawamba - Guest Editors - 25 February 2010

What is Folk?

They tackle the thorny conundrum head on...

Here’s one definition I just found:

Any style of music which represents a community and can be sung/played by people who may or may not actually be trained musicians, using the instruments available to them.

I don’t go with that one at all – doesn’t this description cover bedroom techno, hip hop and (for the sake of argument) karaoke night at the White Horse on a Friday night? I first became aware of ‘folk music’ through my Dad’s Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits album (he also had Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass play the hits of Simon & Garfunkel, but that’s a story for another day), and following that music back through Dylan to Woody Guthrie and then forward to Leon Rosselson, Dick Gaughan and Martin Carthy, I came to the early conclusion that folk music was people with acoustic guitars singing about what was going on in the world.

And then the waters got muddier as I started finding out about English traditional music, an entirely different thing but which somehow back then cosied right up to this acoustic guitar singer-songwriter stuff. For a while there the folk ‘scene’ was incredibly diverse and interconnected; Martin Carthy and Martin Simpson seemed to take as much from American blues as from English tradition, and ‘folk’ covered everything from Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez doing their next-generation Pete Seeger stuff to the Watersons belting out fishermen’s songs to Nick Drake and Roy Harper and John Martyn with all their fey and faltering beauty to Davy Graham nicking ideas from all over the place to make something shockingly strange to Leon and Roy and Frankie and that lot singing about nuclear war and Apartheid …

It just felt incredibly eclectic, basically, and I wonder if that’s something we’ve lost along the way. I went to see Fionn Regan last week in Leeds, a young and spunky Irishboy playing somewhere between Elliott Smith and Dylan, rich finger-picking and plenty of nods toward The Band and Donovan and all things jangly and melodic. And what shocked me was that the audience was utterly different from a Leeds folk audience. 18-25 year olds who (I dare say, being presumptious) wouldn’t know a fiddle if it hit them over the head – perhaps apart from Eliza sawing away on Jools Holland. This ‘nu-folk’, Fionn and a generation of acoustic singer-songwriters, are effectively separated and kept away from the ‘real folk’ that is English traditional music and its Awards Ceremonies and its radio shows. And I don’t know why, since to my ears Fionn Regan’s music descends directly from Paul Simon and Nick Drake.

And I find it disturbing that our folk ‘scene’, for all its new injection of youth and a whole slew of brilliant young singers and players, sticks so closely to the notion of ‘tradition’ meaning English rural tradition. My completely under-researched theory is that the sons and daughters of the first wave of English folkies grew up in a rarified atmosphere of fiddle sessions and singarounds and somehow missed that connection to not only American and world music (going backwards through Guthrie to the Carter Family and country and Cajun and back round again with the blues …) but also the vital connection to a vibrant and important English urban tradition.

The urban tradition wasn’t of much use to most of the Song Collectors; Cecil Sharp was notoriously sniffy about the working classes and their factory songs, despite the historical significance and importance of Music Hall, industrial working songs, songs made up and brought back by serving soldiers in both world wars and all the popular pub songs. Cecil wanted ‘Merrie England’, a middle-class bowdlerised version of tradition which best suited the post-war yearning for a clean and wholesome national culture. Morris dancing on the village green, good; Lancashire clog dancing, bad.

Read Sharp’s manifesto for ‘educating’ the ignorant peasants:

'Let the Board of Education introduce the genuine traditional song into the schools and I prophesy that within the year the slums of London and other large cities will be flooded with beautiful melodies, before which the raucous, unlovely and vulgarising music hall song will flee as flees the night mist before the rays of the morning sun.'

'We may look therefore, to the introduction of folk-songs in the elementary schools to effect an improvement in the musical taste of the people, and to refine and strengthen the national character. The study of the folk-song will also stimulate the growth of the feeling of patriotism.'

'There are many ways of stimulating the feeling of patriotism. Education is one of them. Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens that we want.'

'The discovery of the English folk-song, therefore, places in the hands of the patriot, as well as the educationalist, an instrument of great value. The introduction of folk-songs into our schools will not only affect the musical life of England; it will tend also to arouse that love of country and pride of race, the absence of which we now deplore.'

Ridiculous, isn’t it? His success with this scheme was remarkable; and plays a large part, I’d argue, in our relative closed-mindedness when it comes to what we’re allowed to call ‘folk music’ nowadays. Here’s Cecil Sharp again:

'(Let us) distinguish between the instinctive music of the common people and the debased street-music of the vulgar'.

Well, I love that vulgar and debased street music and I’d say it has as much right to be seen as an important part of our culture and history as John Barleycorn and the rest. The new generation of folk artists tend to base their songs on a narrow definition of English culture; and while they’re doubtless brilliant and inventive (who can doubt Bellowhead’s incredible way with an old tune?) they’re within quite narrow parameters. Look at the Radio 2 Folk Awards nominees and tot up how many of them are singing those traditional songs; look at the ‘Best Traditional Song’ list and try to imagine a 1920’s Union song in there, or a version of ‘Fuck ‘Em All’ (the original anti-officer soldiers’ song which was cleaned up and passed down as ‘Bless ‘Em All’), or a song from the Jarrow Marchers, the Greenham Peace Women, the factory workers, the prisoners. No chance. You’ve as much chance of hearing Martin Carthy singing a Slade song …

All praise to Martin Carthy on this one. He was around (in fact was instrumental) at the start of the English folk revival but has refused to be pigeonholed merely as a keeper of the tradition; his willingness to mess with the form and to introduce other types of English music is peerless. I saw him the other week with daughter et al onstage as The Imagined Village. What they were doing was basically affronting the patriotic, narrow definition of folk as handed down by Sharp, exploring our history and culture and making it clear that it’s a changing culture, a big and varied culture. Even Scarborough Fair (which brings us neatly back to where I came in somewhere up there) was given a dusting-down and updated with beats and sitar. Brilliant.

So, where was I? Folk music. Fionn Regan is as much a folk singer as Martin Carthy, but he’ll never turn up down at The Grove on Singers Night. Why not? The diversity which folk music once boasted just doesn’t seem to be there; any day now I’m expecting Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass play the hits of The Copper Family. And I’ll learn them all by heart so I can do them down the