Monday 24 August 2015

On folk songs


Last saturday I went to lewes with my new ladyfriend to a folk night in Lewes.

Lewes is just up the trainline from falmer and differs from Brighton in its rural situation and sleepy Royston-Vasey-esque vibe. It has its own currency, its own brand of beer and an annual bonfire parade, on the 5th of November, in which townpeople march through the street, dressed as red indians and pirates and wheeling effigies of the pope which are then blown up in various bonfires around the town. They also carry burning crosses, representing the protestant martyrs killed by Mary Tudor in the 16th century, which are thrown into the river in rememberance, and drop carry firecrackers which explode loudly in your face when you least expect it. I've been 3 times over the years and it is bacchanalian (lots of drunk brightonians make the pilgrimage every year despite pleas from the local council to stay away), incredibly weird and noisy and very politically incorrect, and also very exciting.

So its an odd place, but with a very rich local culture for those who like these sorts of things, and fine music scene. It being mid August much of the life of the place is in the various pub gardens scattered around the town, and if I had been thinking clearly I would have simply found a nice pub with a few friends and enjoyed it. But I had an itch, and it needed scratching.

I've been into british traditional music for a few years now - since the early 2000s, when as a nerdy undergraduate student at UEA in Norwich I would ransack the University CD library for new and appealing sounds. It was there discovered the masterly work of Martin Carthy and the Watersons, and subsequently began to weird out my flatmates by playing their bare, unvarnished, almost punkish a capella singing every chance I got.

Now the folk road is in many ways a lonely road. Its been said - I think by Joe Boyd, the producer who was at the heart of the folk-rock scene in Britain in the 60s and 70s - that the UK is noteable in the contempt in shows towards its traditional culture. Whats more, like all subcultures, the folk scene is, or can be, in my opinion, a bit of a claustrophobic place, with a hobbyist mentality that makes it a bit inward looking and precious. It is a bit mad, basically, and movies like Inside Llewyn Davis, and the stories about Bob Dylan being called 'Judas' for going in a pop direction are accurate in the basic observation that living in the past isn't really entirely healthy.

That being said, the music itself can still be remarkably beautiful. The songs, polished through centuries of collective use, often have emotional weight and a depth of poetic resonance that mean that sung with feeling, they hit home as accurately and exquisitely as any blues or soul song (And of course, the blue is folk music).

The night itself was nice, a trifle odd, with a range of performances from a mix of people, all committed amateurs. It was entirely egalitarian and so I did a couple of songs ('The sheepstealer' and 'Thorneymoor Woods' - both poaching songs) which went down well. More enjoyable was a long ballad called 'the two sisters', sung by a lady who also acted as compere for the evening, about a murder near a town in the scottish highlands. The way the story unfolds with brutal exactitude was as chilling as any Johnny cash song or gangster rap track, but this time recounted in a soft alto voice to a lilting scots melody by a lady who is someone's grandmother.

I am not sure whether the experience of last week means I'll be more involved in folk music. But I found it moving and enjoyable, and it reminded me of the power of a great song to tap ones emotions.
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