Note : this review is for my friend Raymond's folk magazine Stirrings. I know there aren't many English folk fans on Goodreads, but well, here it is aNote : this review is for my friend Raymond's folk magazine Stirrings. I know there aren't many English folk fans on Goodreads, but well, here it is anyway
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The recipe for Shirley Collins’ music is two gallons of harrowing grief, three quarts of overwhelming melancholia and half a cupful of bucolic joyfulness. This intoxicating blend is dispensed quite dispassionately; her voice has the beauty and temperature of a long icicle, the one that's just about to snap and fall and penetrate the heart. Shirley Collins herself comes across as your own dear old mum, rambling more than somewhat about the houses she used to live in, and the flats she used to live in, and the noisy neighbours, and the lovely walks she used to take in the South Downs, and the day she met Jimi Hendrix.
That’s the thing – probably your mum didn’t meet Jimi Hendrix, and probably didn’t make six or so of the all time best folk albums including my all time favourite Anthems in Eden, and my all time second favourite Love, Death and the Lady (with the emphasis on Death).
[image]
(Young Shirl)
Those who have followed Shirley over the years (not literally - well, not after the restraining order anyway) will not find too much new information in this meandering autobiography. Indeed seasoned Collinophiles might well groan aloud at the first chapter which slugs us in the solar plexus yet again with The Great Ashley Hutchings Betrayal, a tale we have been told in every other article and interview for over 30 years now. They had married in 1971 and after he philandered off into the sunset, the implication hovers over the rest of Shirley’s story that he was the cause of Shirley developing dysphonia, an affliction of the voice, the end of Shirley’s singing career. (Until it was remarkably revived in 2016 with the release of Lodestar.)
I’m uncomfortable with the way that Shirley’s life and career is displayed here through her male partners. Even though they were fairly remarkable, the first being Alan Lomax – she met him when she was 19 and he was 39. You can easily see how she would have been quite overwhelmed by this force of folk nature. Shirley wrote a whole book about the Lomax experience called America Over the Water, so here she skips onto the next guy which was Austin John Marshall. He doesn’t get a good press. They were ill-matched – he was a jazz fan and played jazz on the phonograph morning noon and night when he bothered to come home.
I grew more and more intolerant simply watching John listen to it – the snapping fingers, the nodding head, the twitching legs and feet, the almost religious fervour
They met in 1960, married in 1961 and parted in mutual relief in 1970. But look what this guy had done in that fabled decade :
- Persuaded Davy Graham and Shirley to make a (brilliant) album together
- Produced all of Shirley’s great 60s albums, including Anthems in Eden
- Produced the film Be Glad for the Song has no Ending all about the Incredible String band
- Filmed Jimi Hendrix before he was Jimi Hendrix
- Introduced Shirley Collins to Jimi Hendrix!
Shirley says :
For Jimi to come to our house was a thrill and a pleasure; he was handsome, playful, teasing, sweet and graceful. I have no photographs of this occasion (we didn’t own a camera, can you believe)
It might be worth noting that she’d just been to a Hendrix concert and found it "beautiful, exciting, and charged with danger. I sat gasping at the sounds he produced from his guitar and anxious about his teeth”. So Shirley’s instrumental taste was not confined to the portative flute organ played by her sister Dolly. Well, we knew that.
[image]
(middle Shirl)
All in the Downs zigzags its way through Shirley’s life charmingly, but there are so many things left unsaid. Such as, things about folk music. She has a proper go at Ewan MacColl ("pretentious and pompous") but hardly mentions any other folk revivalists other than in passing. I know now that she had a fondness for a particular puzzle printed every week in The Lady magazine, but I have no idea if she liked the work of Martin Carthy or any of the other great folk revival performers. And how about contrasting her own method of letting herself be an almost passive conduit for the songs, just the latest of several hundred unknown singers to be passing this song through the centuries, with other revivalist singers. Did she think they emoted too much?
And how about the odd circumstance that though she sang in as austere and unvarnished a manner as possible, she positively revelled in the most florid and unusual of arrangements for the songs? She had no problem with Davy Graham’s jazz guitar stylings, Dolly’s rococo organ arrangements; the full scale “natural orchestra” of Anthems in Eden; the full-on folk rock of No Roses…. She was all over the map musically. But of this adventurousness she breathes not one word.
A very great deal of the time we seem to be stuck in a tongue in cheek Alan Bennet monologue. Here she is saying goodbye to Alan Lomax:
I stood on the platform and waved a heartbroken goodbye until the train was out of sight. I didn’t expect to see him again. To cheer me up, Mum bought a box of chocolates and took me to a cinema in Leicester Square to see "Attila the Hun" starring Anthony Quin and Sophia Loren.
I would much rather have had her thoughts on what has become of folk music during her long life, what it means now that the oral tradition has been obliterated by recorded music, who have been her favourites, what were her Desert Island Discs, rather than more paragraphs about the cottage she found in 1987 in a lovely village in Sussex.
Whereas America Over the Water is an essential read for any folk fan, All in the Downs is for hard core Shirlophiles, and even those may be a little bemused.
Note : I know only about 0.000001% of you are interested in English folk music but this review which is rather loooooong is for my friend Raymond's foNote : I know only about 0.000001% of you are interested in English folk music but this review which is rather loooooong is for my friend Raymond's folk mag Stirrings. But it's a review, so of course it goes in Goodreads too!
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First, let it be said that this is the book on folk music you have been waiting for, and is essential for any folk fan. You won’t love every one of its 671 pages plus another 100 of bibliography, notes and index, you may even skip a chapter here and there, but mostly you will be delighted and/or deliciously outraged by Steve Roud’s tell-it-like-it-was forthrightness and his vorpal-bladed willingness slay all previous nonsense spouted about the folk and their songs. But there’s always a but. You may not find out what you thought you wished to find out and you may find out that which in retrospect you would have been glad not to have known.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
Is a detailed consideration of the songs themselves, their merits, their themes, what they were about. Steve Roud gives us the social history of the songs, the singers, and the song collectors. How the folk got to sing what they did and where they did it and why and how and who took any notice of them.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS
Is stuffed with great quotes from many places. Here is the composer of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, the reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in 1885 of the problems of collecting songs from one singer:
There is an old grandmother on Dartmoor… she sings ancient ballads. She cannot be induced to sit down and sing – then her memory fails, but she will sing whilst engaged in kneading bread, washing, driving the geese out of the room, feeding the pigs : naturally, this makes it a matter of difficulty to note her melodies. One has to run after her, from the kitchen to the pig-sty, or to the well-head and back, pencil and note-book in hand.
THE ETERNAL INCONCLUSIVE WHIRLPOOL OF FOLKISH DESPAIR
How refreshing it is to listen with delight to a song like “Polly on the Shore” or “When Spring Comes On”; how simple the pleasure as through the open channel of your vestibulocochlear nerve the tender words and plangent melodies gambol and twirl. Dear reader, you may wish to leave it at that, for should you ponder where these beautiful songs and tunes come from and how they did so come you will find yourself very quickly in the Dread Forest of Tangled Theories which leads to the Morass of Imponderables and the Eternal Inconclusive Whirlpool of Folkish Despair. Even Steve Roud’s mighty labours cannot clear up that much. What he can say, quite categorically, is that, mostly, we don’t know. For instance, when and where did the folk do their singing, and how did they come by their repertoires? Let Steve disappoint you :
We are in the bizarre situation of investigating a part of life which was so ordinary that it must have happened countless times, all over the country, every day throughout history. People were hearing, writing, learning, adapting, singing, forgetting and discarding songs all the time – and yet we can complain that we do not have enough evidence to really document what was going on.
And furthermore:
Whatever the characteristics of an “oral” tradition may be, its undeniable failing for historical enquiry is its almost complete lack of a datable evidence trail, and the temptation this offers for wishful speculation on the part of commentators is enormous.
And not only do we not know that much, everything we do know is bitterly disputed, contested and contradicted. Actually, if you even say the words “folk song” to some people, they will quack back “you mean FAKE song, you bourgeois dupe!” meaning that this whole folk shebang was invented by a parcel of mimsy aesthetes who should have been catching butterflies instead. Steve says There is no doubt that this essentially negative perspective became, for a while, the new orthodoxy, both within and without our field, and is only now showing signs of losing its grip
THE LAST GASPED BALLADS
Steve begins by reviewing the personalities and activities of the major folk song collectors from Thomas Percy in 1765 to Bert Lloyd in the 1940s. Of the famous Victorian and Edwardian collectors, he issues this stern warning :
It should be made clear, however, that in their genuine desire to bring these songs to a wider audience, these enthusiasts did not endeavour to replicate the singing styles of traditional singers, but arranged the songs for piano, for performance in middle-class homes and on the professional concert platform… apart from the tunes themselves, and sometimes the words, these performances bore almost no relation to how the songs had sounded or functioned in their traditional sphere.
These polite gentlemen and ladies (Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, Percy “Forty Shades” Grainger, and so forth) were seeking to save the music from extinction. First they discovered that folk music existed (who knew? Who knew??) and then they realised it was dying out, more or less at the same time. So - not a moment to lose! They had to bicycle like crazy to try to catch the last gasped ballads from the fading octogenarians of the South Downs. It seems that the younger folk in the villages had already left for London or were busy learning the hokey cokey. They’d already degenerated. They weren’t folk any more.
WHAT DID THEY THINK THEY WERE DOING?
Apart from their intrinsic beauty, folk song was perceived by some of the early collectors as the answer to the question “what is England’s national music?”. And if English people could only be re-connected with this music, why then, let Cecil Sharp explain:
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 the night mist flees before the rays of the morning sun.
Steve Roud comments
[This] desire to change the course of musical history by improving children’s taste proved naïve, and one of the unintended consequences was that in some quarters it was soon believed that these old-fashioned folk songs were not just suitable for children but were suitable only for children.
It may be worth mentioning here that the major collectors all the way up to Bert Lloyd have always been strongly criticised for editing, bowdlerising, “improving” and generally monkeying with the texts of folk songs. True enough, but let me quote Martin Carthy on the subject of “The Famous Flower of Serving Men” from his sleeve note on the album Waiting for Angels:
There's a fury in those first five verses which sends the same shiver through me as when I first read them in 1970. The parson who sent them to Sir Walter Scott never sent the rest (!) so I glued some bits together and made up chunks to tell a story which is clear and terrifying
To quote Lily Allen, everyone’s at it.
SOME COLD WATER EXPERTLY POURED
Steve disabuses us of some of our vague fond notions about folk and their oral traditions in a robust manner.
There has not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years, and most folk songs owe their continued existence to their regular appearance in print. Most songs which were later recorded as folk songs were not written by ploughboys, milkmaids, miners or weavers but by professional and semi-professional urban songwriters and poets.
How about this
A singer might learn a song from the printed page, or in school, church or a theatre, but as soon as he or she starts to sing it, and others take it up, it becomes “folk”.
Or this on the subject of Child ballads:
a corpus of material which is perhaps 90 per cent 18th or 19th century
Brrrr!
ENGLAND AND AMERICA COMPARED, TO ENGLAND’S DISADVANTAGE
A few collectors in England were quick to use the new invention of the phonograph in the first years after 1900, but the idea was not, strangely, to capture the traditional singers’ actual performances for all time. Instead, the phonograph was used as a (very cumbersome) Dictaphone, to record the tune and the words for future reference. But the use of the phonograph faded away in England. By the 1920s folk song collectors were thinking that they’d completed their task anyway, and there was nothing left to do. AS few variants, maybe but that’s about it. Job done! By contrast, in America, traditional singers were recorded extensively in field trips by John and Alan Lomax, and more piquantly, by commercial record companies, who were happy to issue such items as “Henry Lee” by Dick Justice in 1932 (a version of Child 62, “Young Hunting”) or “The Fatal Flower Garden” by Nelstone’s Hawaiians in 1929, which is a version of “Sir Hugh”, Child 155. It seems clear that by the time record companies had realised there was a market for folk (and blues) in the USA (around 1925-6) the tradition had become quite defunct in England, so there was no commercial point in recording folk. You wouldn’t have got English people to cough up for a 78 of “Brigg Fair” in 1930 when there was the latest foxtrot “Love is Good for Anything that Ails You” by Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans available. Yet in America the folk were buying folk. This means they have vast amounts of folk (aka hillbilly) recorded, whereas Steve has to report miserably:
It is difficult to comprehend just how little genuine traditional English singing could be heard by the average folk fan up to the 1960s.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, SHIRLEY?
The second revival of English folk which took off in the 1950s and really got going in the 60s was partly fuelled by a leftist agenda of wresting it from the dead hands of the butterfly collectors and giving folk back to the folk; and thereby hopefully helping to create a class conscious cultural core which would – er, I don’t quite know, do something important. The ideology never took, but the music did and it’s still here, just as awkwardly inauthentic as it was in 1717, 1817 and 1917. As for instance - Steve and his musical collaborator Julia Bishop who writes two technical chapters are very clear - English traditional song was always solo and unaccompanied. Maybe with some singalong chorus stuff in pubs, but that’s it. The revival dispensed immediately with that notion, and the guitar or concertina or melodeon or banjo or Northumbrian pipes were used all the time to provide the accompaniment. Even the hard-core Peter Bellamy took up the concertina. So the music flows on, now mot because of any political or cultural reason, but just because it’s a beautiful alternative to everything else. It doesn’t have to be like that, it can be like this.
As I walked out one morning in May The birds did sing and the lambs did play The birds did sing and the lambs did play I met an old man, I met an old man I met an old man by the way.
Today I have three wives, seven or so kids, several gigantic houses and various animals. I have 27 very close fr My name is Paul and I’m a folkaholic.
Today I have three wives, seven or so kids, several gigantic houses and various animals. I have 27 very close friends who would all cut off parts of their bodies if I asked. Life is a blast.
But it wasn’t always like that.
No.
Even though I was born into a warm loving family, being so intelligent I was highly insecure. To alleviate this, when I went to college, I started singing folk songs, at first just quietly to myself. I gradually found fellow singers who told me of a club in the neighborhood where people sang openly. And after the club shut we would stumble across to the park where we would continue singing amongst ourselves. I will spare the sordid details, but in only a few months I was singing almost 24 hours a day. I was desperate to get hold of new ballads with 58 verses. I would be learning new Child ballads whilst at the very same time singing the ones I already knew. I would beg for scraps of oral tradition from any passing Irish person. Even children and their skipping chants were not immune from my lust.
I got a job but couldn’t keep my singing under control. I got fired, I got evicted and I became homeless. I stole, lied, cheated and manipulated people. I was a florid folkopath. I was Ewan MacColl crossed with Patrick Bateman. I would do anything for a song. It didn’t even have to be traditional, didn’t even have to be unaccompanied. I sank so low I did Taylor Swift songs accompanied by semi-acoustic and electric keyboard. I’ve learned that this was not really me (although it looks like me in the photographs). It was the folkaholism.
My parents got me into a half-way house where we were allowed to harmonise to an Afro Celt Sound System album. That didn’t work. Then they paid for four rehabs and let me stay at their house until they couldn’t stand it any longer. During the rehabs we were made to listen to modern music, mostly Amy Winehouse. My parents practiced tough love. If they heard the merest peep about roving on a May morning from me, out of the house I went, even though it could be a cold, haily, windy night. It was the hardest thing they ever had to do, my mum said, apart from burying my grandfather in the back yard during January, which was even harder, she says.
I was a typical Jekyll and Hyde folkaholic. I was a belligerent, mean and compulsive liar unless I was singing a murder ballad.
That last morning in jail, I woke up after three days of cold turkey and - you may find this hard to believe – the face of Shirley Collins appeared before me. She seemed a lot sterner than the gentle countenance we see on her CD sleeves. She upended her sister’s portative pipe organ and shoved its sharpened tubes towards me. “My name is Shirley, cannot you see?” she said. “Lords, dukes and ladies bow down to me.” This was the DTs all right. I knew Shirley was good, but not that good. I had visions of her ex-husband Ashley Hutchings dancing lewdly and dangling 17th century manuscripts before me, which in my madness I knew to be crammed with previously unknown broken token sailor songs. Martin Carthy, grinning like a skeleton in a medieval woodcut, muttered DADGAD, DADGAD in my ear, like a mystical chant. I knew then – there had to be a better life than this. I had to get away from this folk singing disease which society seems happy to tolerate , even promote.
Well, I know now I will always be a folk singer. I accept that I am powerless in the face of the oral tradition. Even though now I only listen to Sonic Youth and Rachmaninov, and allow myself one chorus of White Man in Hammersmith Palais every other Christmas Eve, I know that I would only have to speak the first line of The Dowie Dens of Yarrow and I would be back in that jail cell with Shirley and Martin and Ashley, giggling and gibbering at me. But that will never happen again.
And now, a book review!
This may be a 410-page book but it’s a really fast read. It’s an oral history, a river of voices flowing along, and you do get carried right along with the current. It helps that the hundreds of folkies interviewed hardly ever use difficult words. And also that so many of the things they say are exactly the same.
P 100 : I hitched down to London and went to the Singers’ Club before we started our club in Hull.
P150: The first four years of the Ian Campbell Folk Group, from ’59 through to ’63, we kept our jobs and performed in our spare time.
P200 : I’d been going to folk clubs for two or three years when I went to Oxford in 1966.
P250: We did two gigs on the Friday and Sunday but the Saturday night we had off.
This is frankly rather dull stuff, but, of course, we British folkies actually know a lot – maybe even most - of these people, we’ve been interested in them for years, so all this jejune detail is like your mates talking. It’s a thousand cosy chats, is what this is, all interweaved together. A few little insights, some details you didn’t know, gossip you hadn’t caught up on; but roughly, the thing plays out just like you thought it should, like a night down the pub with your 200 best mates.
As well as the fun stuff, this book, in its offhand, stumbling, crablike way, the tale of the definite rise and to one extent or another fall of the British folk club movement. It was a remarkable boom from the late 50s through to the mid 70s. By the time I started going to a number of clubs, in the mid to late 80s, the audiences were no longer young.
Robin Dransfield: The folk clubs were at a low point in the mid 80s. Unless you were Martin Carthy or Vin Garbutt you were singing to 15 people sometimes, whereas ten years earlier you’d done the same club and you were singing to 200.
Clubs continue to die; the younger folk audience moves to arts centres and especially festivals. The book ends with a misty eyed chapter of ooh it were grand, anyone could turn up and would be welcomed in like a long lost sheep – you had a warm, twinkly-eyed environment which gave you the space to hone your genius and all that. But these old buffers have to admit that ossification set in, stalactites grew from the ceiling of the clubs, the dulcimers gradually mummified.
John Leonard : The clubs had stayed much the same and they were impossible to go to as a newcomer. A newcomer - to go in for the first time to this club that had been running for forty years by the same people – could not grasp the culture. And so new people are not going to folk clubs.
The book concludes that whilst folk music is alive and well and growing in fantastical new shapes, the folk club will wither away as the organisers and the audiences shuffle ever closer to their eternal reward.
British folk clubs Born circa 1955. Died circa 2025.
To use Dave Van Ronk’s own classification system, Dave Van Ronk was somewhere near the top of the second division of American urban folkies, I never bTo use Dave Van Ronk’s own classification system, Dave Van Ronk was somewhere near the top of the second division of American urban folkies, I never bothered to listen to him at all. But if you’re at all interested in the FOLK thing he’s always on the radar, always. So this book looked like it would be (and it was too) fun – for a folk fan. Which is me. Might not be you. You might think suburban white twentysomething males doing imitations of work songs collected from old black guys is something you don’t want to be bothering with, all that straining for authenticity whilst actually BEING as inauthentic as possible – what was that thing Jesus said? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye. Oh yeah, that was it. There are wonderful debates about authenticity which have been had* and some of them are rehearsed here again. In fact ALL the old debates are replayed in Dave’s cut-the-crap straight talkin’ straight talk. (This book is a whole series of interviews stitched together.)
Dave informs us that in the 50s folk music was a teeny tiny splinter group before the big folk boom of the very late 50s to mid 60s but even this teeny group was subdivided into hostile sects – the revivalists who tried to replicate the old 78s to the last nuance; the blues freaks, the old timey/bluegrass crowd; the academic folkies who preceded every song with the 1954 equivalent of a Powerpoint presentation about Appalachian kinship systems; the cabaret folkies like Josh White (despised!); and the political gang who sneered at all of the above because they weren’t political. This sub-sub-sub sect was of course majorly fissiparous itself – Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists – they were singing the old union stuff from the 30s and wouldn’t have given Mississippi John Hurt the time of day. Frankie and Johnny? Which side were they on? DVR is very droll about all of this stuff, and I did appreciate that although he was a hard-line Trot, he didn’t sing political songs because he knew that “Way Down in Lubyanka Prison” was not any good and would not be something people wanted to hear in two weeks time.
I also appreciated his rant about how any new song accompanied by acoustic instruments was automatically folk, when it really wasn’t. You can see the metamorphosis from folk to not folk very clearly in Dylan’s stuff – first actual folk stuff (Sally Gal, House Carpenter), then own words plus folk tunes (Masters of War, Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall), then own words and own tune (Mr Tambourine Man, It’s all Over Now Baby Blue) – it’s like that philosophical question – if I lend you my hammer and you replace the handle on my hammer it’s still my hammer, but what if you replace the head on the hammer too? – now it's your hammer - no, er wait. If I had my hammer I'd hammer out a warning. So Mr Tambourine Man is NOT FOLK. However true that may be it’s useless. It’s like Burma – they renamed it Myanmar but everyone still calls it Burma. You can’t fight the collective ignorance of the press and the desperate need to stick music into categories which the marketing guys say is necessary because how otherwise will the idiot punters find it? For instance Richard Thompson is a guy who makes blazing rock music and has done for 30 years but he’s labelled FOLK because he played folk when he was 20. What’s the difference between Leadbelly and Suzanne Vega? None, they’re both folk. Folk may as well be called klof for all the sense the name makes. However, up with this we must put, as Churchill once said between sets at the Café Wha.
Who wrote it and who stole what from who is another fruitful source of bad vibrations in the klof world. Along with where’s the money – that’s a theme which unites all musician memoirs (see X-Ray by Ray Davies, although I don’t recommend you do). Those two plus we were so stoned it was the best ten year party ever makes up a considerable portion of these reminiscences. The best bits are where Dave allows himself some anecdotes about actual people I’ve heard of. (He drops a zillion names I haven’t ever heard of. I could imagine even their ex-wives haven't heard of some of these guys.) But for sure, this book gives a solid insider view of one of the vital locations of American musical genius. Three solid stars. Good ole Dave.
Folk music is a bitterly fought over territory. The original peasants who knew this folk stuff were located and taken into protective custody by some Folk music is a bitterly fought over territory. The original peasants who knew this folk stuff were located and taken into protective custody by some Victorian clerics and given the third degree until they sang like canaries. The clerics then deleted anything that looked like smut and published some of it for thrusting young schoolboys and schoolgirls to sing before they took jobs with the Foreign and Colonial Service and died of dysentery and malaria. Meanwhile some communists began to complain that all this folk was reactionary wimping about love and saucy milkmaids and lords and ladies with cranberries growing out of their brains, and pointed out that factory workers and miners had also made up folk about blacklegs getting their guts spilt. Then other communists, ones with typewriters, said that vicarfolk was all made up by Percy Grainger and Sabine Baring-Gould who used to beat each other's bare flesh with glove puppets. Folk song? Au contraire, I think you mean fake song! they said. Then some people claiming to be Bob Dylan said that folk was still happening and they proved it too. Then some marketing departments decided it was a good label to stick on anyone who wasn't actively taking heroin, because a label of folk guaranteed that an album would sell at least 23 copies. So people who once leaned against a pile of unsold Joan Baez albums while they were not waiting for their man were now called folk. It didn't matter that they'd all written their own songs and played them on saxophones, it was folk if the marketing department said so.
Enough of that. Let us see if we can actually define folk.
The intro to this brand spanking new not-to-be-confused-with-old Penguin Book divides all of music into three areas – classical, popular, and folk. So you know what classical music is, right, and popular is anything composed which isn't classical, which ranges from Roll Out the Barrel to California Gurls feat Snoop Dogg. Everything else is folk. No one knows who wrote it. The toothless old character in the Dog and Partridge used to sing it (if you call that singing)until he died of extreme old age in 1955.
I agree with this. All that "contemporary folk" is actually acoustic popular music. This puts me in the position of saying that if Richard Thompson's band wails away doing a ten minute version of Cold Haily Windy Night with three blasting electric solos from Richard, that's folk, but Martin Carthy singing "January Man" unaccompanied isn't because we know that Phil Coulter wrote it.
But I say substance not style. Faugh to all woolly definitions, and all woolly bullies too.
This is a lovely collection. The first Penguin Book of English Folk Songs was put together by Ralph Vaughan-Williams and Bert Lloyd in 1959. The "English" part was deliberate, as at the time folkies in England were being swamped with other traditions, Scottish, Irish and American. English stuff was being ignored, it wasn't perceived to be sexy enough. At the time American folk was fuelling the skiffle craze (which inspired the young John Lennon to get a guitar, not surprising as skiffle was like folk-punk) and the Scottish and Irish stuff has brilliant instrumental accompaniment, which everyone loved. Whereas the austere English tradition is unaccompanied singing. You can see how that could be shoved aside.
This new collection retains the Englishness of the first but changes its selection criteria completely. Vaughan-Willians and Lloyd were looking for the "best" songs, but Steve Round and Julia Bishop have included the most popular – that is, the most widely collected songs (collected from actual folk singers, that is). There are 151 of them. They have let the people choose the contents. Each comes with a printed melody and detailed notes. So this book is a treasure for folkies.
This is two verses of a folk song.
In Nottamun town, not a soul would look up Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down To show me the way to fair Nottamun town
I sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone Ten thousand stood round me and yet I was alone Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm Ten thousand got drownded that never was born ...more
I started home twixt twelve and one. My lover's hand was on the door. Crying Oh my God what have I done.Your waist it is so slender. Your fingers longI started home twixt twelve and one. My lover's hand was on the door. Crying Oh my God what have I done.Your waist it is so slender. Your fingers long and small. When first to this country a stranger I came I heard my mother say. I heard my mother say that I was meant for rambling. And I would easy go astray. O mother mother make up my bed. We'll prick the little baby with a silvery pin. Of his needle he made a spear. Of his thimble he made a bell. Look how she floats. She's drowing on the tide. She should have been my bride. Your waist it is too slender. Did she light you up to bed? She has taken out her little pen-knife. So now you cruel parents, listen to me. My name is Bold Doherty. My name is Dennis O'Reilly. My name is John Johanna. My name is sweet William. Oh yes sir, my name is Lee. How can you say it's a pleasant bed when none lies there but a factory maid? All you young men with pity look on me. Your pretty little feet they tread so neat. I made her to lie down on red roses. Sally go round the roses. This pretty little maid she grew thick about the waist. Your waist so slender. Not thinking any harm. The pretty little songbirds. ...more
Pete Seeger, the oldest living American folk singer, 107 years old and still going strong, visited the Occupy Wall Street protest recently and sang a Pete Seeger, the oldest living American folk singer, 107 years old and still going strong, visited the Occupy Wall Street protest recently and sang a rousing version of John Lennon's Happiness is a Warm Bank and an acoustic version of the old Motown classic Asset-backed Commercial Paper
The best things in life are free But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees Just gimme asset-backed commercial paper That's what I want
I saw this on youtube. You could call me a fellow traveller, I've been one all my llife, I did go on one protest march once, but that's a story for another day. So, I fellow-occupy at the moment. But only in my mind. I can't just uproot my comfortable middle class existence and go and live in a scrotty tent amongst hippy detritus and woozy aspirations. It's December, it's really cold in London. If it was July, well I might book a couple of days off and go and chat to a few of these enthusiastic young thinkers.
I really like the idea of a protest which deliberately refuses to promote an agenda. Usually the protesters are shoving some improbably ten-point manifesto in your face, but this time they cheerfully say they haven't got a clue what should happen, they just know this can't go on
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In my mind I am also occupying the City of London. And Wall Street. And BNP Paribas. And J P Morgan Chase. But I'm going further than that. In my mind I am occupying 10 Downing Street. And the White House. And the Forbidden City. They are full of my mental tents and placards. They can't move for them. In my mind I'm marching up and down and beseeching them They know I'm not that happy with the way they're conducting this whole human race thing. It's pitiful. The thing is, beyond saving the whale, forcing Macdonalds to be cow-neutral and making kindness compulsory for everybody on the entire planet, I have no idea what to do.
Here is a thing of beauty, it's a collection of old American music on 2 cds contained in a book of old photographs of Americans doing things with musiHere is a thing of beauty, it's a collection of old American music on 2 cds contained in a book of old photographs of Americans doing things with musical instruments into which our editor has sprinkled mysterious quotes from such writers as Nabokov, Hamsen, Wordsworth and Hauptmann, along with Par Lagerkvist who gave him the title :
I listen to the wind that obliterates my traces the wind that resembles nothing understands nothing nor cares what it does but is so lovely to listen to. The soft wind soft like oblivion
This entire book is a collage, the cds are soundscapes, the theme is : who will still be listening to us when we are dead? who will still be reading the contours of our faces? The answer will be : not anyone you might have been expecting.
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I say soundscapes because the cds are a mystic, joyful panoply of jocund poor white and poor black folk and blues from the Golden Decade (1925 to 35) plus home recordings of similar sounds from anonymous sources, plus sound effects issued on 78s at this time - wind, walking on ice (was it thin?), a mocking bird, walking in thin underbrush, rainfall and thunder, Canadian geese (what a racket!), canary birds : several hundred; all these are interweaved with the songs, which include, for instance, the reverend Edward Clayborn, the Guitar Evangelist (there were a lot of those) - his song "Then We'll Need that True Religion" is as primitive as you get, as primitive as the wind or the canaries, for no Lonnie Johnson is he, a two-note one chord pulse with single string slide decorating the breaks between the verses ("Doctor's face looks sad, worst case I ever had") but played so delicately, with such precision; also we have the hermaphrodite voice of John Jacob Niles, Eva Parker singing "I seen my pretty papa standing on a hill and he looked like a ten thousand dollar bill", Bertha Idaho moaning about suicide by iodine, Chubby Parker cheering us back up with a song called “Bib-a Lollie-Boo”...
The photos can be imagined – a lot of serious guys with guitars and fiddles; a lot of serious women with haircuts no longer seen in Nottingham with guitars and fiddles; then a parade of absolute lunatics with bizarre home-made items which I assume emitted some noie or another; and a lot of folks posing with their new engorged phonographs.
People should do more soundscapes – you could, for instance, do a whole lot with a movie soundtrack album but – very surprisingly – no one bothers, except Trent Reznor’s brilliant production of the soundtrack to (of all things) “Natural Born Killers”. It may have been a terrible film, but this soundtrack is a thing of wonder, crushing fragments of dialogue, Islamic Sufi wailing, Patti Smith, Patsy Cline, Leonard Cohen, Duane Eddy and a whole lot more impossible bedfellows together under one weird blanket. Then some years before that David Toop produced a great cd called Ocean of Sound which had another crowd of unusual suspects blending and merging bearded seals into Holgar Czukay into the Beach Boys into Eric Satie into Sun Ra. That record was all about meditation and trance.
But this book/cd/art assemblage is all about those people, so long ago now, 80, 90 years, all dead now, all ghosts, and how they glint and sparkle.
If you’re American, Alan Lomax probably recorded your grandma. Alan Lomax was the man, he was an American giant, and he embodied or became embroiled If you’re American, Alan Lomax probably recorded your grandma. Alan Lomax was the man, he was an American giant, and he embodied or became embroiled in every twist and turn and up and down of every phase of American folk music in the 20th century. As soon as he heard folk singers he knew it was all pure gold. There was no money in anything he did but it didn’t stop him. He was too impatient for the academics, he attempted gargantuan feats of research with no resources, he lived like a bohemian from tiny grant to temporary position to royalty payment to tiny grant. He was in his 50s before he got anything looking like a regular source of income. He was a big Texan guy who had limitless energy, combine-harvesting charm and total commitment. He loved folk music and he even loved the folk who sang it. And sometimes he was a bull and the whole world was his chinashop.
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TEN GALLON HAT
But we need start with John Lomax, brought up as “the upper crust of the po’ white trash” (his words) in Meridian, Texas. He was born in 1867 and grew up amongst actual cowboys, boys with cows. He had one year of college and became a teacher in the backwoods for six years. In 1895 at the age of 28 he scraped enough together to go to the University of Texas in Austin to get a degree and then wound up at Harvard doing some research into cowboy songs. His professor was George Kittredge, who had studied under Francis J Child himself. Talk about the apostolic succession. Soon he turned himself into a star after-dinner speaker. Subject : cow boys and what they like to sing about. In 1910 he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads published with an introduction by only-just-ex-President Theodore Roosevelt.
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- the unlikely cultural radical
By now the ballad-collecting, ten-gallon-hat-wearing, cigar-smoking, raconteuring good ole boy persona was fully formed and this is who Alan grew up with. Alan was born in 1915 when the family fortunes were at their peak. He went to the poshest schools, ending up at Harvard and flirting with communism.
DOUBLE ACT
By 1931 with the Depression crushing the country the Lomaxes had crashed down, like millions of others, and were broke and jobless. John decided his lecturing was the only money-making prospect for the time being. He proposed another book and got a tiny advance from Macmillan. By May 1933 John and teenage Alan were on the road , the first field trip. It’s amazing this has never been turned into an earnest but cringe-making tv movie – it has all the ingredients : the firebrand proto-communist son, the conservative Southern father, continually at loggerheads about the purpose of their song-collecting, the dire expectations heaped upon the enterprise (this has to make some money!) , the wardrobe size shellac disc recording machine bouncing around in the back half of the car, the boldly going where no folk song collectors have previously gone, into black prisons, black churches, black Saturday night dances, into the black world of the South at a point where if the white administrators and officials weren’t already paranoid about their black populations and the pressure of exposes and contempt from Northern liberals already, the Lomaxes arrived just in time to redouble their suspicions. You can hear the prison officials dripping their venom all over J & A, this burly old boy and his teenage son, and they have to charm and smarm and hustle their way inside the prisons and then ingratiate themselves with the convicts who were had a tendency to think that if the Lomaxes made a record of them then it would be released and then they would be famous and then they would be released just like their record.
The people who sang for us were in stripes and there were guards there with shotguns. They were singing there, under the red hot sun of Texas, people obviously in enormous trouble. But when they opened their mouths, out came this flame of beauty. This sound which matched anything I’d ever heard from Beethoven, Brahms or Dvorak.
LEADBELLY
So 1933 and 34 was driving all over the South to the most isolated locations to record white and black performers. On their second foray into a black prison, Angola Penitentiary, Louisiana, they discovered Leadbelly, the human jukebox of black folk music. He got out of prison in 1934 and they became his managers, and he became their house servant and chauffeur. They took him to Washington and New York, laid on concerts, and became embroiled in a horribly complex relationship of mutual admiration, dependency and exploitation. (15 years after his discovery, Leadbelly’s signature song Goodnight Irene became the biggest hit of the year but a little late for him as he died the same year.)
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The American South of the 1930s were of course was where all the great blues singers were, from Son House to Skip James all the way to Robert Johnson. But the Lomaxes didn’t record them at all, thought they were just black pop song stylists. Alan later struggled with trying to figure out if the blues were part of folk culture or merely popular culture. It took him till 1940 to wake up. So his ears and his cultural antennae were not perfect.
The Lomaxes were amassing huge piles of recordings for the Library of Congress in Washington. They were folklorists and they thought that commercial music was the opposite of what they were doing. But of course while they were recording Texas Gladden in Saltville, Virginia singing The Devil’s Nine Questions in 1933 just a few dozen miles away in Norfolk a record company would be recording the exact same type of folk song, which they called hillbilly music, in a hotel suite which they’d booked for that purpose. The record companies would then issue their records in the Southern states, and the Lomaxes would drive back to Washington and deposit their records in a library. When 23 year old Alan finally did turn his attention to the commercial records, he was thunderstruck by their quality. He compiled the List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records in 1940 and – lo and behold – it was this list which Harry Smith used to compile his now very famous Anthology 12 years later. That appears to have been overlooked.
MR ANONYMOUS
AL conceived it as his mission to introduce the rest of America to its own folk music. That was his thing. The city-dwellers had been treated to actors and intellectuals polishing up folk songs and presenting then in suave concerts. There was John Jacob Niles followed by Richard Dyer-Bennett followed by Burl Ives and Carl Sandberg. Finally, in 1940, out of the swirl of Oklahoman dust came Woody Guthrie. AL was gobsmacked.
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I realised…that I was meeting a guy who was a ballad-maker in the same sense as the people who made…all the ballads that I spent my life trying to find and preserve for the American people. I thought they were from anonymous people. Well, here was Mr Anonymous singing to me.
INVASION OF BRITAIN, 1952
After the war the heat from Joseph McCarthy’s red scare was beginning to rain down on AL’s friends and neighbours. This folk song thing was encouraging the negro and encouraging striking workers everywhere and something was going to be done. Alan was probably exactly right when he figured they were coming after him, so decided to take his tape recorder to Europe for a while. He came to England, met and Lomaxed all the folkies of that early time, and got busy recording folk singers in England, Scotland and Ireland along with Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis. After that he did Spain and Italy, then more America (with Shirley Collins), then the Caribbean, and finally, in 1963, he slowed down.
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Rushing about the world recording every singer and player he could find in America, then Britain, then Spain, then Italy and the Caribbean took its toll even on a guy whose energy makes even reading about him exhausting. He’s like Dickens, he lived three lives in one, the pace was relentless, and not surprisingly he fell into periods of burnout and self-doubt.
A cloud of anxiety hung over everything I did… I could never keep a systematic notebook. In the office I could never get around to cataloguing or classifying the songs. So behind me, year by year, there accumulated an ever-growing black mountain of unfinished and unorganised work… What are my reasons for continuing to immerse myself deeper and deeper in this quagmire of folklore?
THE THEORY OF FOLK EVERYTHING
The rest of AL’s career (the final thirty years) is strange. He finally developed a Theory. It was called cantometrics and it was not a little barmy, from what I read. In the 1940s anthropology had met musicology at a party and one thing led to another and suddenly there was a new discipline called ethnomusicology. You might have thought that AL was a born ethnomusicologist, but those guys were too humble for AL, they were all too devoted to spending 15 years studying the use of nose flutes in the hill tribes of the Philippines. Alan wanted to study the folk music – and the folk dances – of the entire world, all of it. He was after a giant theory of folk, just like historians like Spengler and Toynbee had had their giant theories of history. He didn’t care that the days of the giant theory had passed and that they were now thought of as too bombastic, too arrogant, too Victorian and too mystical.
I could try to summarise what cantometrics was and how it was supposed to make things better but.. I can’t. And frankly, neither can John Szwed. Here’s a tiny inkling of what cantometrics involved :
"When we have described the musical styles of humanity and with their families and sub-families, we shall have the principal formative aesthetic currents of human history finally in our view" (1954a). From a hand-sorted sample of world music classified according to vocal qualities, ornamentation, organization (solo or choral), and tonal unity he derived a provisional map of the distribution of nine "grand families" of music, which he announced in a 1955 communiqué to Charles Seeger: Pigmy-Bushman (the oldest); Proto-Melanesian (Highland New Guinea, Central Formosa and Borneo, Melanesian forest, Andaman); Melanesian; Australian; Amerindian; Polynesian; Negro-African; Eurasian; and Old European.
I turn with a shudder back to the records, back to Flora O’Neill, the Trallalero singers of Genoa, the chain-gang laments, Vera Hall, Fred McDowell, all the calypsonians and all the singers of joy and sorrow and love and pain that flood through the 100 plus cds which should be in every library (and for which we desperately need a buyer’s guide).
THE FOGGY FOGGY DEW
This biography is a grand piece of work, but mildly distressing for its extreme lack of interest in AL’s personal life. There is one single photo in 438 pages. Girlfriends suddenly appear and are never mentioned again. A second wife makes a one line appearance and is replaced within four pages by another woman, no explanation. The woman who replaced the second wife was Joan Halifax, and this is what became of her :
Joan Halifax and Alan had now been together for almost four years. They went to conferences and meetings, wrote articles together… did fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Morocco… when they returned they made plans to be married in Florida where Joan had grown up and where her family still lived, but Alan never appeared for the wedding. Their relationship ended shortly thereafter.
Yes, well, I suppose it did. That’s about as much personal detail as you get.
SIGNS AND WONDERS
For Lomax, singing styles and dancing styles were like species and just like the worried ecologists he was living through a century which was rapidly tarmacking them over, where the transmitters of culture had become few in number and bloated with power, their networked voices beamed into every home, spraying everywhere evenly with the same products, the same dreams, and the same future. He had to run to capture something of all these voices and lifestyles before the Cheshire cat fade-out. So an essentially melancholy tone reverberates through AL’s life – the things he loves are vanishing, he’ll never get enough on tape, and so few other people seem to understand how important this is. In this he fits right into the elegiac tone of many cultural commentators, from DH Lawrence and Black Elk to Rachel Carson and Greenpeace. More optimistically he also embodied another of the 20th Century’s great discoveries – that technology now allows us to capture forever what was previously impossibly transient and ephemeral. Not just the songs, but the performances themselves, these particular unique voices. So the butterflies themselves may have perished but we still have great butterfly cds. This is a biography in which every page counts. For anyone interested in folk music it’s essential.
PS
There’s a perfect epilogue to this book in the form of a documentary made in 2004 by Rogier Kappers called Lomax the Songhunter. Highly recommended.
PPS
Rounder Records are in the process of issuing the best of the folk music field recordings Alan Lomax made during his career. They’ve issued around 80 cds so far and they think there’s about 20 more to come. That’s just the a selection.
Like an elephant in a hot air balloon Rob Young’s gargantuan Observer’s Book of Folk comes wafting towards us on a breeze of critical hot air. Now we Like an elephant in a hot air balloon Rob Young’s gargantuan Observer’s Book of Folk comes wafting towards us on a breeze of critical hot air. Now we have our old weird England to set beside Greil Marcus’ old weird America. Newsflash : morris now hip. This just in: folk rocks. Come out of hiding Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood and Mr Fox. The amnesty has been declared. Folk is rehabilitated. Official.
Well I guess this builder’s hodsworth of paper will do for the definitive history of visionary folk and folk-inspired English and a little bit Scottish music until the real one comes along. But reading Rob Young it’s hard not to feel as if you are being beaten softly with pillows each stuffed with ten thousand feathery folk facts which escape and float about until the air is thick with facts and factlets and facticles making you snort and sneeze as you plough, hack and heave yourself through these 600 pages PLUS notes PLUS timeline PLUS bibliography. There’s a lot in here. Is this further proof that you can have too much of a good thing?
A couple of years ago, before the reissue of Just another Diamond Day and before the t-Mobile ad campaign, it’s possible that this book would not now have started off with a 30 page account of Vashti Bunyan’s rural gypsy hippy life, but this gives us a fair idea about what RY is getting at here and really, it’s not that profound. Folk music reconnects us with the past and inspires us to rethink our modern values and plugs us into the old weird England which comes percolating into your brain as soon as Pentangle begin lyke wake dirging or Forest begin their bluebell dance. Sorry, dahnce (they were posh). So the same eldritch eyesockets, green man grimaces and thrawn buttocks connect Steeleye Span back to Arnold Bax, Ralph Vaughan Williams, ley lines, Alisteir Crowley, Grimes Dyke, Gustav Holst, Kate Bush (what was that again?), William Morris, David Munrow, Nick Drake, Robin Williamson, Maiden Castle, Stonehenge, Tinhenge, Woodhenge, Woolhenge, David Sylvian and Julian Cope right back to the very first druid who drugged himself into the very fist blissful stupor and then got eaten by something unspeakable.
Rob’s loose and baggy understanding of the remarkable tentacular reach of this English (mostly) visionary thing has him describing the details of Beatles’ Strawberry Fields promo film and the plot of The Wicker Man, Peter Dickinson’s obscure novel The Changes, the laments of Rambling Syd Rumpo, Kate Bush’s first – and second – and third – and fourth albums, how modal music affected bebop… is there anything which isn’t grist to this vast grinding mill?
We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. This was a hippy thing. But before that it was a first-folk-revival thing. Rob thinks (and I don’t disagree) that the great era of visionary wyrd folk stuff was 68 to 72 and the throbbing heart of it all was an intensely nostalgic yearning for a time you never lived in, for a time that never existed – the Land of Cockayne, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the misty coast of Albany, Middle Earth with better hi fi equipment, and no Disney in the enchanted forest. You can see English psychedelia steeped in this nostalgia -Penny Lane, Pink Floyd’s Syd songs, plus See Saw and Remember a Day – there are dozens of them. Folk music takes away the jazz cigarettes and granny glasses and substitutes the cruel sister, the hanged man, the demon lover, the unquiet grave, the foggy dew, yes, but it’s still a dream world fitting closely on the cultural shelf next to Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast and HP Lovecraft.
So : the narrative arc of Electric Eden goes like this. After a tour of the folk-influenced classical composers of the early 20th C – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Ireland, Warlock (unfamiliar territory to me) we then get the MacColl/Lloyd/Lomax years when folk becomes a hot political potato (a very familiar tale). As we know, McColl in Britain and Seeger & Lomax in America lost the argument and folk detached itself from crude leftwing political alignments, as can be seen in the discography of the once Communist Topic records. RY tells us that this enabled folk to rediscover its true wyrd self. That all takes 100 pages. And then begins the parade of three to ten page potted histories of Rob’s favourite folkies of the golden age. This turns out to be the usual suspects – Watersons, Shirley Collins, Pentangle, ISB, Fairport, Nick Drake – and some lesser spotted ones, like Comus and Mr Fox. This is all familiar stuff too, although there are enough meaty quotes from RY’s own interviews to make it very worthwhile. But exactly how the mod group The Action morphed into Mighty Baby and became folk sessioners and two of them were “instrumental” in the conversion to Sufiism of Richard Thompson is the kind of thing some may find fascinating but others… really won’t. There’s a whole chapter on outdoor festivals (“there was something beyond flower power at work”). That whole section is 400 pages. And finally we get some really quite unconvincing attempts to trace the whole wyrd vision thing in the work of contemporaries such as Julian Cope, David Sylvian and Talk Talk.
Some other reviewers have pointed out in unkind terms how error-prone and un-proof-read this book is. Examples: (p.263) Lord Darnell is not in Fairport’s Tam Lin but Matty Groves; there’s mention of a `twelfth Century Saxon' church (p.399); Donovan's "Gift from a Flower" LP has this song "And Clett Makes Three" when it doesn’t, and so forth. I might also point out how a reader’s teeth can be set on edge by passages such as this :
Compared to The Incredible String Band’s contemporaneous spirit odysseys, Bolan’s songs sound like an unbearably over-spiced cod-celtic gumbo, a kitsch antique store stuffed with onyx dolphins, marble satyrs, astrakhan chaises, ostrich feathers and elkhorn trumpets.
and there are some real head-scratchers ;
The passion with which the String Band addressed the quest made the mystical pretensions of other contemporaries merely sound like the honeyed crumbs of those who had no bread.
Electric Eden is some kind of achievement which may be best taken in small 50 page doses and not eaten whole like I did. After 664 pages, I’m thinking that the next wassailer, mummer or hobbyhorse at my door is going to get a bucket of molten death metal all over their jingly particoloured heads. Which would not be very visionary at all.
RATING :
Rob deserves a full five stars for effort. This boy has been working hard. But deduct one star for all the errors, and the really ridiculous all-encompassing non-theory which all of this...stuff...is strung across. Deduct another star for some horrible over-writing and a general lack of sparkling wit.
Add one star for getting off his arse and interviewing a lot of people and getting some great quotes.
Deduct the same star for frankly tiring me out. Three - that's your lot.
Back in the 1950s, when they were collecting old 78s from the 20s and 30s from the ancient relicts of the Appalachians (and the suburbs of Washington Back in the 1950s, when they were collecting old 78s from the 20s and 30s from the ancient relicts of the Appalachians (and the suburbs of Washington DC) they found that most of the blues records were worn to buggery and had more surface noise than a nationwide bacon-frying contest, but most of the old timey records were in pretty good condition. Joe Bussard explains this strange discrepancy thus : black people played their records a million times each and when they got pretty worn out they used to put half a brick on the arm of the phonograph to encourage it to play the record just that one more time. The white folks played their records two or three times and by then they'd learned the song and didn't play it no more.
This is a great little book on that early magical time in America when there was all this stuff and everybody played it. And the record companies were only just getting started and didn't know what was going to sell, so they recorded everything.
It's wonderful when business people get all confused like that. It allows the lunatics to run in behind their backs and whoop it up a little bit before the janitor chases them all out again....more
It took me a long time to get a handle on the way that British and American music developed in the last century. Well, it's a big subject. In America It took me a long time to get a handle on the way that British and American music developed in the last century. Well, it's a big subject. In America you had a mindbending wealth of popular music recorded from the early 1920s onward, thanks to such entrepreneurs as Ralph Peer. You had blues, ragtime, jazz, gospel, cajun and old timey in their multifarious genius recorded on thousands of 78s which were subsequently rescued from total oblivion in the 1950s and 60s by such collectors as Joe Bussard (see the great Dust to Digital dvd release called "Desperate Man Blues" which i just watched again today, it's a hoot). In Britain : nothing. Nothing. No records. Instead you got the vast ocean of unrecorded folk music which at last began to be recorded in the 1950s.
So in America you had the fascinating intertwining and development of the different strands, as when the country blues became urban blues became rhythm & blues became soul. And for the white folks, you got folk songs transplanted from Britain to Appalachia sung almost unchanged into the 1920s, but with the addition of the banjo first and the guitar later (they think that came in via Spanish America around 1880) they did change and became what we now call old timey (originally hillbilly). That music gradually moved to the city (mirroring the urban drift of black music) in the 1940s and 50s and became : Country. And what happened to Country in the city wasn't good. Somebody spiked its drink.
Nick Tosches in this book takes the Greil Marcus paradigm of "the secret history" and marries it with Dave Marsh's encyclopediamania and produces a book of essays which are the coolness of cool cool. So this is pretty much for country fans who like it like it used to be....more
The first book included in this deluxe three-in-one is Savannah Syncopators, in which one of the greats of blues writers, Paul Oliver, travels to WestThe first book included in this deluxe three-in-one is Savannah Syncopators, in which one of the greats of blues writers, Paul Oliver, travels to West Africa to find where the blues came from, and doesn't really. I remember when in the 1980s white blues fans discovered Ali farka Toure - wow, excitement! This was African blues, the pure fountain! Turned out Ali Farka learned his stuff from old John Lee Hooker records, which put the kibosh on that theory. ...more
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