1
"The failure of folk clubs is ... a failure to recognise and question the kind of world we are living in." Leon Rosselson, Sing Out! 24/4, 1975.
"Folk song is such an important part of our culture, which we neglect at our peril, if we want to retain either our national identity or our universal humanity." Sheila Douglas, The Living Tradition 21 May/June, 1997.
In recent years popular music scholars have recognised the need to address issues associated with popular music and its relationship with place, locality and 'scenes'. This interest has stemmed, in part, from an attempt to understand how music reflects and responds to socio-cultural issues. The word 'scene', for example, is coined so frequently within contexts surrounding popular music activity that it has become a cliché; however, upon closer examination, 'scenes' vary greatly and remain problematic. How are scenes expressed socially? How do they relate to locality? Do scenes restrict or release musical expression? Is the expression 'scene' actually a useful description of popular music practice?
Sara Cohen, Barry Shank and Will Straw have each attempted to address some of these questions. Cohen [1991, 1997] views popular music scenes in Liverpool as both productive and contradictory assemblages constructed via associations with, and counter-balances to, differing interpretations of locality. Shank [1988] has described the musical use of place in Austin, Texas as both historically/musically organic and correlative. Straw [1991] has suggested that popular music scenes are created by overlapping alliances valuing the "redirective and the novel over the stable and canonical ... " 2
The expression 'folk scene' also appears self-explanatory, but remains enigmatic. For example, should one associate a folk 'scene' with the ubiquitous [but declining] folk club? Although those who work on the perimeters of folk music are unlikely to mistake folk club activity as utterly central, the folk club is still regarded as pivotal by those engaged in club activity. A need exists, therefore, to examine the expression 'folk scene' and the relationship of the folk club to that expression, for, while 'scene' appears to indicate, at least to popular music scholars such as Cohen, Shank and Straw, a degree of interactivity and confrontation, to many folkies it expresses quite the opposite. To begin with, a scrutiny of popular and folk 'scene' dichotomies might prove illuminating.
... own ideas about a music scene are more to do with space rather than theories. Ideas change, don't they? moods change, but if you have a location, a place like Telford's, then you can develop a scene which encompasses different sounds and moods. You attract people because of the location and the locality, not just the music. In some respects, that comes afterwards. I don't like the idea of inserting soundtracks into a venue ... a scene to me is also to do with mental space ... you've got to give people time to breath, to come and go when they want, to listen to a variety of sounds. Ideas are down to the individual, not a 'music police' like in a folk club ... or in some dance clubs".The importance of difference and interaction was also noted by Pete Fulwell, former proprietor of Eric's, Liverpool between 1976-1980:
There was an important scene around Eric's ... you only have to look at the bands that played and came out of that club to see that. But Eric's wasn't opened as a punk club. It was a miscellaneous music venue. It was opened for all sorts of different music. It is remembered as a punk club, and rightly so, but we had the Albion Band, Steel Pulse, the Pirates, Darts and all sorts of stuff. That's why the Liverpool bands such as the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes were not essentially punk, they'd drawn on all sorts of influences, not simply from the club, but they certainly mixed them up at Eric's. A scene has to be a musical melting-pot, otherwise it stagnates.As a scholar rather than a practitioner, Straw's emphasis is more in the question of immediacy of experience as central to a scene; he contrasts this with "long-term and evolving expressivity" and notes that, by simply concentrating upon the latter we overlook:
... ways in which the making and remaking of alliances between communities are the crucial political processes within popular music."Horrall, for his part, identifies two particular aspects of the folk club scene which, in his view, contrast unfavourably with popular music approaches:
We've refused to have a folk club here because we want to be in control of the music output and we don't want cliques. You have to avoid cliques based around one style of music ... we get a lot of folkies in here and some have said that they find Telford's refreshing after the dictatorships in folk clubs. That was interesting to me 'cause I've got to make money out of it too ... that's also realism ... folk clubs are not built on realism.Straw also expresses scepticism about the enshrinement of backward-looking scenes because, he notes, no scene is devoid of contact with contemporary movements. This contact, in turn, suggests that modern traditions are as valid as old ones:
... each emerged within international, industrial and cultural contexts which shaped the conditions of existence and certain of the 'meanings' of music localism throughout Western countries."While the straightforwardness of most folk music, therefore, might be interpreted by an 'insider' as a reaction to global conformity, according to Straw folk as a 'scene' has not simplified the paraphernalia of popular music at all, but, rather, remains a characteristic of it.
In their own way, Horrall, Fulwell and Straw suggest that popular music scenes exist in a relationship with their immediate and immediately preceding contexts. Folk club devotees, however, do not always view their club 'scene' from such a contextual point of view. One folkie from Frodsham told me:
This is different ... you can't look at the folk club scene in the same way as pop. This music is about suffering, for a start, it's history and it's not subordinate to the industry. That's how it works, we're obsessives!The folk revival is thus a reminder to popular music aficionados that not everybody perceives a music scene as operating in such a sense of immediacy. If we apply Straw's approach, it would mean a folk scene would be constructed out of a placement of music within the phenomenon of universalisation, but many folkies regard universalisation motifs as forms of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures, but also the creative nucleus of all cultures. In their view, therefore, folk clubs reflect a continuance of the parochial, rather than an expanding cultural web. The folk club is viewed by many as an almost architectural halt to the spreading of mediocrity brought about by the 'melting-pots' commended by Fulwell. This 'block' thus empowers the folk club with an authority to acknowledge a form of musical history and 'natural' engagement. This is obviously invaluable, for folk clubs can serve as reminders to the popular music industry that it is unnecessary to jettison the old cultural past. During the 1960s, for example, the power and presence of folk clubs convinced the music industry that it could be modern and hang on to sources, that it could revive dormant cultures and take part in new forms.
Nevertheless, folk clubs experienced a moderating of dialectic. Objective though it strived to be, the revival became shaped [perhaps even distorted] by its own views of what musical 'normality' should be.
Not unlike Damon Horrall, Barry Shank, in writing about the punk scene in Austin, Texas, has also theorised about music scenes unfolding within a given geographical space. 7 One might draw comparisons between Shank's work and the concepts surrounding the British folk club; for example both suggest physical, stirring and ultimately meaningful space and locality. Shank, however, identifies the significance of continual, 'organic' musical interactivity [Straw differs, citing what Lawrence Grossberg has called 'affective alliances' as "just as powerful as those ... which appear to be more organically grounded ..." 8 ] whereas British folkies postulate a given historical manifestation of authenticity. Shank views a scene as being geographically and historically significant, but also musically correlative, a case of broadening musical space and place to include a discourse of multiplicities. The British folk club, on the other hand, places its given musical styles into a geographical space as 'testimony' of the longevity of both the music and that space. Whereas Shank takes note of the value of growth and development, the folk club validates itself via a collective 'critical' consciousness, a historical awareness that today is now different from yesterday. Shank acknowledges that historical difference, but recognises, in Austin, a critical 'resistance' to that which has gone before. While folk clubs do represent a consciousness of place, a sense of location, this is a rather wistful invocation evoked by the post-war era in which they grew, whereas, according to Shank, the punks in Austin appear to mediate the impact of universal conformity with elements derived both from it and also from the peculiarities of a particular place at a given moment in time.
Although involvement in folk music takes the form of on-going explorations, within the clubs these explorations remain rooted within a specific geographical/historical 'inheritance', together with an appreciation of the need for hierarchical structures [reflecting, not simply a social club committee, but even a political comintern]. Shank states that, in contrast, a music scene requires commitment to an "overproductive signifying community" where cultural space can be occupied by a wide range of musical practices, coexisting and interacting with each other across diverse pathways. The Austin punk scene [like that of Liverpool in the late-1970s (Eric's)?] finds many governing inspirations, ranging from locality, musical interactivity and technology. The British folk club, however, remains focused upon reviving a [perhaps even hypothetical] lost vernacular.
Both popular and folk interpretations of scenes have much to offer. Concepts of continued inspirational growth, on the one hand; concepts of checks on the expansion of the culture industry, on the other. However, thus far, neither appear [at least to this writer] to have been unified by scholars and both interpretations are problematic when used in isolation from one another. While involvement with a folk club equates with a broader perception of involvement with a different, possibly older, form of communal music performance, if that engagement fails to acknowledge the importance of other contemporary musical scenes, then links with the past fall far short of constituting real historical continuity with the present. Ruth Finnegan highlights the difficulty in shifting implicit ideology into practical musicology:
This complex of ideas was part of a more general philosophy, operating nationally, about the nature of 'folk music' and 'folk musicians'. At the local level, these ideas were largely implicit rather than an articulated ideology, but the underlying assumptions emerged when people were challenged to explain the nature of their activity, as well as in the vocabulary used in discussing music and music-making. Local musicians spoke of the 'pastoral' or 'traditional' nature of their music and regarded the test for whether a song [even a new song] really was 'folk' as being whether it passed into 'oral tradition' ...The search for a folk culture via a folk club appears to involve a predetermined and fixed identity. The rediscovery of this identity involves a mythical, backward-looking return to the sources ['pastoral', 'traditional'] which runs the risk of producing a static view of origin and memory ['oral tradition'] and acts as a spur to separatism. This is, in turn, converted into ritual within the cultural space occupied by the club.
On the other hand, interpreters of popular music scenes do need reminding that the 'here and now' are not always of primary importance to the music adherent. While a 'signifying community' does need to expand its horizons, it also needs to recall previous contexts, musical and social struggles. It remains important to have a sense of perpetuity in eras of change. Even if the sense of a music 'being old' is, in itself, a construction, this can still add a value of longevity. Folk clubs also provide visible attestations that society can learn from music subcultures, even adopting them as a 'norm'. While the folk 'scene' of the 1990s no longer simply consists of folk clubs [if it ever did], and to portray a folk scene simply via the enduring image and presence of the ubiquitous folk club is to attempt to define musical activity through only one of many possible manifestations, folk clubs still represent the importance of regional and parochial networking, something that observers such as Cohen, Straw and Finnegan all find significant in expressions of popular musical scenes. These folk networks are far from perfect, being generically bound via a maintenance of musical demarcation which creates an unnecessary tension between tradition and innovation, but they exist as signifiers of musical co-operation, something from which all popular music scenes can benefit. Of equal importance is the folk club's capacity to draw attention to what Sara Cohen describes as: "Music's peculiar ability to affect or articulate mood, atmosphere, emotion etc., and to consequently trigger the imagination."
This, she continues,:
... contributes to people's experiences of places and attitudes towards them, and this occurs in a multitude of diferent ways and contexts ... Music thus constitutes a focus or frame for social practice, and it establishes, maintains, transforms social relations, playing a role in the social construction of place".Folk clubs display the potential to articulate and problematise the opposition of musical artifice versus musical veracity. This debate has important consequences for any musical criticism concerned with how to position musical texts as a force for change. For some folk commentators, therefore, the folk club indeed constitutes a scene.
11 This has a certain logic, for we have already seen how the folk club became [and, for some, remains] the backbone of the British folk revival. In the mid-1960s it was estimated that there were upwards of 300 folk clubs in Britain and by the mid-1970s that figure had probably quadrupled. Innumerable talented singers and instrumentalists were drawn into folk music via the existence of folk clubs. By the 1990s the folk club had become, in itself, a tradition and, by setting the folk scene ostensibly within the club, MacKinnon has been able to frame folk music with signals and systems that appear to establish a continuity with a performing-past and also explain the relevance of folk music in the present.
According to MacKinnon these settings allow the adherent to enjoy a cohesive and coherent aura of "cosiness" 12 within which folk music can be performed through a context of social interaction and in the absence of 'massification'. Ruth Finnegan, in discussing folk music activity in Milton Keynes, also recognises that:
Understanding the folk music world can best start from some description of the folk clubs."Both MacKinnon and Finnegan appear to infer that folk clubs are representative of a broader folk scene. But, while Finnegan also suggests that 'folkiness' was confirmed by its setting together with "ideas about the kind of enterprise in which they [ie. the 'folkies'] were engaged" and discusses folk activity via location, organisational membership and participation [describing the identity of a folk club as "sometimes the most meaningful experience of their lives"], she also notes that the folk ideology she came across in Milton Keynes was an assimilate put together via "the intellectual perceptions of certain scholars and collectors" and records that the clubs she surveyed were peopled by the professional and higher education classes:
If any of the local music worlds could be regarded as 'middle class' it would be that of folk music ... those operating mainly on the folk club and folk festival circuit [were] often well educated, professional and middle-aged with few if any teenage adherents.Finnegan actually refuses to describe the folk clubs surveyed as parts of a 'scene' [preferring the expression 'worlds', an ambiguous term which suggests an environment that is not only comprehensive, but also encapsulating, exclusive and isolated] and states that musicians wishing to experiment are:
... regarded as fringe by the more purist enthusiasts. Bands in this mode - Merlin's Isle, for example - could not always find a ready niche for their performances: not 'folk' enough for the folk clubs ...In the summary of her chapter on folk music activity Finnegan goes so far as to suggest that folkies are "only a small and select minority". Therefore it could be argued that, far from representing any broader musical and cultural activity [ie. a 'scene'], the folk club has become part of a striving to elude a broader social interaction. If sounds, artefacts, instruments and even alcoholic liquids have been 'edited' to conform to the intellectual predispositions of a middle-class interpretation of 'authenticity', then, rather than being endowed with social cohesion [as both MacKinnon and Finnegan claim] perhaps the folk club is closer to the language of musical deja vu, even of simulacrum [the pastiche of the stereotypical past]: displaying a failure to fashion meaning out of contemporary, heterogeneous experiences. Is this a convincing image for the folk 'scene' in the 1990s, when music makes us aware of perpetuity by displaying both the past in the present and the present in the past?
The multitude of soundtracks now existing on the broader folk 'scene' are certainly not bound by the social and musical definitions as laid down by a folk club, and a definition of folk 'scene' via the albeit widespread club is at least questionable. From the work of Tartan Amoebas to Shooglenifty, myriad interchangeable folk forms are evolving and the very presence of this disparate musical activity, and its 'appropriateness' for the folk club, questions whether the club should be placed at the heart of any definitions of folk scene in the 1990s. Indeed, one might question whether the folk club has outlived its usefulness. MacKinnon states that the folk club is an essentially creative and meaningful environment in which:
meaning does not flow from a performer to an audience but is created within performance.... but this might just as easily confirm that folk club audiences merely project into folk performances particular kinds of social and musical fantasies that gratify their 'folk' senses. When such projections are regarded as genuine authorisations, musical history is thus reselected, rewritten and polished-up. The past is made more vivid than the present; it is domesticated and semi-detached; made safe as it is rescued, removed, restored and rearranged. To some young people, therefore, folk clubs appear as 'unattractive' and 'homogenous' as the very musical styles which they exist to challenge ... hardly a 'scene'. Wirral musician Chris Weston, aged 18:
I can't get excited about folk clubs. I know I should be playing somewhere, but the ones 'round here frighten me to death to be honest. I've been to a couple but they're samey and judgemental. I just want to play, but although they want me there, they want to musically restrict me ... confusing and unattractive.This has also been recognised by Folk Roots editor, Ian A Anderson:
For the future a new generation of organisers is required; clubs in the '60s were run in the main by people barely out of their teens, and there's no reason why this can't happen in the '90s. For though Jane Threlfall wasn't deterred by the people round her being twenty-odd years her senior, many young people ... even those that enjoy the music ... are put-off.Finnegan recognised that folkies in Milton Keynes were still heavily influenced by theories about how "they associated their music, and hence themselves, with 'the folk' - ordinary people - in the past and present"
19 which is a rather homogenous historical visage for young people to engage with. Therefore, far from folk clubs representing reflections of identity via 'authenticity', they can suggest creeping retroism: 'pure' culture being mythologised and made intrinsic with the clubs themselves. If folk clubs do reflect a musical fundamentalism, a need certainly exists to question the assumptions of MacKinnon and Finnegan that any understanding of the expression 'folk scene' has to begin with an examination of the folk club.
While folk music performance in folk clubs remains elevated as a certifiable part of our cultural heritage and while the folk revival continues to regard its networks as structures of resistance against the 'demagogic tendencies of pop', this suggests to popular music scholars that folkies attribute value, cohesion and identity to folk music via ignoring value in other popular music genres. Finnegan suggests that, although different generic activities do, indeed, create identifiable 'worlds' around musical activity, there is no such thing as impermeable music and no one 'world' is any more 'authentic' than another:
A choir of local residents - men, women and children - file in special costume on the platform for their annual concert accompanied by visiting soloists and an orchestra of local amateurs. A jazz and blues group play to enthusiastic fans over Sunday lunchtime in the foyer of a local leisure centre. A brass band of players from their teens to their seventies thunder out Christmas carols beside the local shops, making a bright show as well as resounding harmony with their military-style uniforms and gleaming instruments, and one member rattling the collection box. An inexperienced band of teenagers set up their instruments in a pub for their first gig, nervous about performing in public but supported by friends sitting round the tables, and deeply enthusiastic about the new songs they have spent months working on. Or a part-time church organist extricates herself from her other commitments to come again and yet again to provide the musical framework for another Saturday wedding or Sunday service ... It is of course widely accepted that musical activities of this kind are part of modern English culture.But this proposition is not widely accepted by folkies, for there is a perception of 'inauthenticity' within the folk club about the 'other' genres discussed by Finnegan. The folk club coterie have transformed music history by acting out a fantasy of authenticity that our own time appears to have denied them. They have remoulded the past into a 'world', because the present cannot be moulded to serve such desires [after all, we have to share the present with others!]; the past is malleable because its inhabitants are no longer around to contest the manipulations, thus their 'world' projects a historical totality. These folk categories of musical totality need to be rethought when we turn them to our own times, but they survive intact in the folk club because they are dealing with an 'internal historicity'. Yet, as Straw suggests, this escape into the past can never be without contemporary contexts. Although Finnegan also proposes that hierarchies of everyday life are abandoned in the folk club, in my own experience I have found them to be reinforced. Folk music in a folk club is more often than not considered a 'listening' music ["shhh!"] and the space is therefore often an 'organised' and structured space, just like the work-place, office or classroom. Niall MacKinnon asserts that:
Musical performance in each of these folk clubs is tightly structured. We have seen how historical feel can be important and how the scale of the venue and the social dynamics are given careful consideration."So, while popular music scenes comprise many different social and musical functions, one might suggest that if they over-concentrate on the desires for direct experience, they can limit historical appreciation of musical activity. Similarly, while the folk club can revive and then cultivate a resistant, identity-giving culture, it can also serve only a limited amount of functions by existing, effectively, 'within itself' in a state of cultural pessimism. Once again, the situation cries out for a creative rapport between pop and folk. By returning to the broader issues of place, crossover and commitment vis-a-vis folk clubs, we can see that misunderstandings and misinterpretations between popular and folk music scenes remain commonplace.
22 submits, the processes of regional networking are highly significant. But to a popular musician, these processes can seem diffuse. Shim, formerly songwriter and percussionist with Liverpool rock band the Pies, and now with folk band Fatamatiche, told me:
I never realised that the folk scene existed in such a way that London wasn't all that important. When I was with the Pies we were based locally but wanted to go to London because that meant that we were 'on our way', but the most important areas for folk seem to be East Anglia, Cumbria and the West Country. Now I'm with Fatamatiche I know we could get gigs out that way, I've even been told that if I moved out to Norfolk or Suffolk I could get as many gigs as I wanted. I need to get my head around some different ideas if I want to give the folk scene a go!The topography surrounding musical activity also creates misunderstandings about the acceptable perameters of 'folk scene'. The musician who wants to work compositionally with folk music in the folk club is often only regarded as successful if he or she creates a discourse in a 'folk' way; musical crosscurrents are not always welcome in folk club circles. While the broader scene can be encouraging to crossover artistes, the folk club devotees tend to regard the very term 'crossover' as having pejorative connotations. This clearly raises an intriguing issue of value judgement from within the clubs that is not replicated in the broader scene: that, for example, music emanating from crossover will only be a watered-down version of the 'genuine article' [where this leaves Richard Thompson is anybody's guess]. There is an illusion of folk music and its associated socialisation practices as 'art' and thus not to be contaminated, a highly complex juxtaposition with the initial impact of the revival, which was based on an anti-high art and access-based polemic. In the folk club, a crossover work tends to be judged by its congruity either to the standards of authenticity being crossed 'away from', or to the non-authentic standards of the style being crossed-over 'to', rather than as any generic entity in its own right. If young musicians wish to engage with the folk club 'scene', then their commitment to their music and their investment in time and emotion can be undercut by a structural hierarchy judging musical 'appropriateness' [see chapter 8]. Unlike a pop scene, 'originality' and 'difference' are not attractive criteria within folk clubs. A few stalwarts have even suggested that this judgemental attitude has drawn a veil over the folk club as a 'scene'. Derek Illidge of Bebington folk club informed me:
... nobody's supported the folk clubs more than me, but when you can make a digital demo in your bedroom for less than it costs to buy a guitar, something has evidently changed. The folk club in its present state might be something of an anachronism. It's no use saying that it's all changed for the worse and then going back to your club to sulk. You've got to see why, say, dance music is now the skiffle of the 1990s. Then tradition can be re-interpreted in a variety of new ways and the folk club can regain its usefulness.Perhaps any further internal discourse relating the club directly with the broader folk movement in the 1990s can no longer be taken as a genuine historical authorisation. Bill Pook confirms this view:
To me, there's more than one folk scene anyway. There's the appreciation societies in the clubs and then the folk scene. They intersect but often represent at least two sets of values. The clubs being rather 'stick in the mud', the rest of it more open to influence and collaboration. Folk can learn a lot from pop, and pop can learn a lot from folk, probably ... let's talk!Youthquake co-ordinator Jenny Shotliff proffered a youthful perspective:
The folk club scene is fine if you're over a certain age, but what if you're 15 and want to play? I know the older folkies would say 'well that's OK, just come to the club' but not every young would-be folkie wants to go into a pub with a load of old codgers watching your every move, correcting your mistakes. Folk 'scenes' need other sites of activity, too. I don't want to see an end to the folk club, far from it, just other alternatives for the kids. To point to the club as the scene is wrong. Festivals offer more hope, I think. That's what Youthquake is all about.Folk geography and philosophy also generate confusion because, within most popular music scenes, a sense of purpose derives from the building of musical coalitions. Such coalitions provide musicians with:
... a means of communicating ideas, sentiments, and messages, that they cannot convey through other means. Musical performance can be a frustrating, agonizing experience, but one that can also give intense pleasure and a sense of achievement."Popular music activity is so vitally bound up with fusions of musical and social identity that there seldom appears a need to separate the 'authentic' from the experimental.
Ultimately, any music 'scene' comes to be shaped, not simply from within, but by the musical and social perimeter ropes constantly under strain from both sides. Popular music academics concerned with scenes acknowledge these tensions. For the most part, however, they have ignored folk music in their studies, and, although this does indicate a level of neglect, it also suggests that folk music studies have always appeared rather too clearly confined. More recently, however, folk music studies in the United States have shifted to concentrate upon plurality in society, acknowledging interweaving patchworks of overlapping musical alliances and conflicts [Bohlman 1988; Bluestein 1994] and have attracted attention from popular music scholars. These studies have not, thus far, filtered down to the British folk clubs where oppositions to cultural pluralities and processes of production [and perceptions of a fixidity about past performance] still promote canonisation.
In fact, the very preoccupation on the part of folklover-academics such as MacKinnon with the expressive substance and political potential of the music and the folk club at the advent of the revival has tended to obscure the extent to which particular inputs of difference came to alter perceptions of what constitutes folk music. Even at a comparatively early stage, the folk 'scene' was divided amongst those who saw the folk club as an 'authentic' site for dissemination of real folk music, and those who, having been attracted to folk music from the broader scenario of popular music, moved comfortably in and out of generic interaction. But the more visible, understandable folk club became the [albeit distorted] model for 'folk scene'. It was/is easier to represent reliability of output and the fixidity of historiography than define musical interaction. But a number of questions, directed specifically at folk clubs, have now arisen. For example:
(i). Does musical activity within folk club culture now resemble 'high art'?(ii). Are folk clubs, therefore, becoming musical museums?
(iii). Do British folk clubs now exist to shun any musical transformative processes, reading each instance of musical/social change or synthesis as evidence of a decline in musical and social relations [and escaping into a 'never-never land' of dubious historiography]?
An examination of a few specific topics will help to answer these questions. Via a brief discussion of issues relating to folk clubs and - gender, aura, place - we might be able to further track the trajectory of the folk club in the 1990s. The folk revival was instigated by the romantic impulse to challenge all music canons but, via the club, it retains 'purity' as a necessary precondition for creativity. Is this really representative of a music 'scene'?
Folk, Pubs and Gender
Folk clubs have always publicised their goodnaturedness and relaxed atmosphere, however behind this socially serene facade there lie strict cohesive patterns of behaviour, even to the point of promoting ideas about how men and women should behave when singing and listening to folk music. The clubs tend to emphasise what they see as an historical accent upon gender relationships. Men do sing about male and female matters but perform in a strictly male manner. Whereas the pop scene can produce a number of 'gender bending' performers, the folk scene seldom ever loses its sense of masculinity, neither in presentation nor venue. Presentations are often clichéd reproductions of male stereotypes in stance as much as in sound, particularly when dealing with traditional material. In fact when contemporary songwriters perform in folk clubs and attempt to deal with a more fragile masculinity, although they can be readily accepted, they also run the risk of appearing "rather up their own arse" [John Martyn, December 1995], a common expression in folk circles. Finnegan 28 suggests that women feel relatively comfortable in folk clubs, but the very location of a folk club creates a predominantly adult 'male' atmosphere, usually being sited in well established, 'historical' pubs or social clubs. Performance is often described by folk aficianados as 'unpredictable', 'natural' and 'spontaneous', however this can mask the [often masculine] concepts of durability, invulnerability and resistance to change.
In this respect, tradition has as much to do with the man and 'his mates' in the pub, the male sphere of socialisation [and thus authority], than with any overt expression of female collective behaviour. Even in the 1990s, the contemporary pub is still a predominantly male demesne. In 1974 Bradley and Fenwick found that 90% of women interviewed stated that they would not go into a pub on their own and, although this study is now over twenty years old, there is still considerable feeling amongst women that male gender stereotypes dominate pubs; the invasion of English high streets by fake 'Oirish' pubs full of 'traditional' soundtracks [and behaviour] confirms this [e.g. in the spring of 1997 a pub in Blackheath known for years as the 'Three Tuns' became 'O'Neil's Builder's Merchants']. In fact, many females do not regularly attend folk clubs on their own. In my own experience, women are usually accompanied by [a] male[s] and I have never known females to have made up the greater percentage of a folk club audience. The folk scene is not exclusively male-orientated; it does, at the very least:
contribute to the continual process through which categories of male and female, masculine and feminine, are defined, negotiated, contested and transformed"... but it does so with the weight predominantly on the 'male' side. Folk music in the folk club, therefore, propositions a range of acceptable socially and ideologically-constructed masculine roles.
The second folk revival of this century has a rather unenviable record when one attempts to underpin its philosophy with the paradigms of social behaviour from which it grew and received sustenance in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, from a gender point of vew, there has always remained an avoidance of discussion about the content of folksongs and ballads. There appears to be a patriachial universality at work in the folk movement which involves singing blithely and uncritically about male dominance. Harker points out that the very title of Lloyd's 1944 work The Singing Englishman was "redolent of the Anglo-centred and masculine attitudes still common on the British left". This has also come to the attention of some of the younger female folk musicians of the 1990s. For example, Jenny Shotliff, 22 years old when interviewed in 1994, told me:
I still love those songs, but I don't see why I should sing about rape and men forcing themselves upon women; women being a sort of underclass and all of that just to be 'traditional' ... that doesn't seem very productive to me. It smacks of a folk scene instigated and dominated by men ... very revolutionary, I must say.The lack of interest in women's issues on the part of musical left has always been evident and never more so than during the pre-eminence of Ewan MacColl. His songs included matters relating to miners and apartheid but he failed to embrace gender issues. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson have pointed out, the omission of these issues can be placed into a broader relief:
When in the 1960s, women in the new left began to extend prior talk about 'womens rights' into the more encompassing discussion of 'womens liberation', they encouraged the fear and hostility of their male comrades and the use of Marxist political theory as a support for these reactions. Many men of the new left argued that the gender issues were of secondary importance because subsumable under more basic modes of oppression, namely class and race.This is how it was with MacColl, as Bob Buckle remembers from a conversation in the mid-1960s:
From what I remember it was just when women's rights started to get a little press. Ewan said that women had to stand in line behind the rest of us. The class war came first, then we could deal with women's issues. But I was never really convinced that he had any interest in gender issues. He had laid-out his political stall years before, and stuck to it.So, although people can interpret folk music in different ways in folk clubs, they are also strongly influenced by institutional and socially collective practices. There is a signifying folk organism and the folk club is still perceived by some to be at the 'heart' of that organism, but the dynamic "embryonic signifying community" which Shank
33 uses to describe a 'scene' does not appear attributable to the folk club scene, at least as far as gender issues are concerned. For people to circulate within music scenes, accessibility must be promoted. If gender stereotypes are reproduced, then access is limited to those few willing to be contained by those processes.
Yes, the longer its gone on, the more it seems like that ... we were so convinced that we were right that the folk club scene has become rather hallowed turf. There's the suggestion that folk music HAS to stay in that environment for it to remain 'legit' but who said that folk songs HAD to be performed that way? Probably those with their arm resting on the nearest bar! It's been great, but does it have to stay the same? We INVENTED those criteria, let nobody say otherwise.A kind of 'aura' is being sought in a folk club, an aura considered 'suitable' for the traditional song to move in. John Howson of Veteran Tapes suggested that the reason why traditional music had survived in East Anglia far better than elsewhere in England was precisely because:
A lot of it is to do with the lack of change. Unfortunately, it is beginning to happen now, although we still don't get many tourists ... Up to now its been relatively untouched-and it's still got some cracking pubs."The very nature of the pub is in question here for, by "cracking", Howson is not supporting any ideas about fun or family pubs. He feels that the closure and renewal policies operated by some breweries are killing the potential for traditional music to survive, simply because:
You can't step dance on a carpet, or sing against a juke box. And the old boys tell me that the other difference is that people don't sit around one big table any more; they sit around little tables in groups of three or four in their own company, and you can't have a sing like that. But the back bar in my local, everybody talks to everybody; the whole room will get involved in discussions and arguments, and that's the sort of situation in which people can sing together.However, although there is some evidence that pub singing in certain parts of the country [the aforementioned East Anglia, Norfolk and Suffolk] has continued unabated, there is little to connect it directly to the cognisant efforts of folk clubs. One suspects that a critical demographic and ethnographic analysis of the region of East Anglia might reveal rather more about the survival of singing in ale-houses [and that apparent 'dilution' process of which Howson speaks] rather than an investigation into the folk club movement. If a pub was stripped of its 1990s 'hardware' such as fruit machines [as Howson proposes] would that create the correct environment in which folk song could develop? If so, what would then constitute folk song in the 1990s? When issues of class, work, race, gender, transience and context are all mixed together they show that traditions are active, not inert. One cannot travel back to the ethno-historical 'place' and recreate it as a 'scene', for it simply isn't there. Howson's propositions attempt to separate an historical culture from the realms of modern social norms, when those very alternatives are no more than the withered social norms of a bygone age. He also attempts to blame the former [ie. the present] for the disintegration of the latter [ie. the past].
When I'm asked to sing at the Liverpool Shanty Festival I'm delighted, but I do think ... why Liverpool? When I sing shanties away from Merseyside [which happens a lot] I introduce them with a little preamble about Liverpool. But I try to stress that its the Liverpool CONNECTION that's important. These songs weren't JUST sung IN Liverpool [if at all] they were sung aboard ships thousands of miles away. They mention the city because it was home for some and a link in the chain for others. They mention Paradise Street, the Mersey, Perch Rock, the Landing Stage, and all of that, but the songs only 'belong' to Liverpool inasmuch as they represent the 'Leaving of Liverpool'. They're not simply a static thing ABOUT Liverpool. The links are actually rather tenuous with the PLACE!So, according to Buckle, this albeit 'virtuous' stress placed by folk clubs upon regionalism, specificity and indigenous soundtracks can actually mask the historical material of plurality, heterogeneity and dissidence and, while folk clubs continue to place popular music soundtracks within a global trawl of indigenous culture, they appear to ignore the fact that popular musicians have also frequently succeeded in re-integrating mass-produced music back into a framework reflecting parochial chauvanism and regionality yet, at the same time, difference and contradictions [e.g.The Macc Lads; Half Man-Half Biscuit ... even the Dave Clark Five and Chas & Dave!]. The industry will always operate as an industry, but popular music activity also grounds itself in the parochial, the regional the ‘authentic’ and the political, without overtly obfuscating about the autochthonous mythology of place.I've found that sea shanties don't always get sung in Liverpool, anyway, except maybe occasionally in a folk club. I'm not sure whether Liverpudlians actually identify with that stuff much. I've performed at the Shanty Festival a few times and the really interested people aren't usually Liverpudlians, in my experience ... Of course it's good if we remember them, but we also need to put them into context. The real contexts of these songs are not tied to a city, but the sea. I might be hung, drawn and quartered for this, but I think that Liverpool's musical heritage has as much to do with Hank Williams and Elvis Presley as sea shanties. That's the music that people have brought home and made their own. Shanties are sort of 'once-removed'. So you pick your own heritage.
In fact, the very expression 'folk scene' may be a hindrance. There have been considerable changes in popular music perception since the days of the initiation of the folk club as the vanguard of the folk revival and, particularly in the folk club, the word 'scene' appears to limit musical expansion for the sake of testimony. What the folk club devotees fail to appreciate via definitions such as 'folk scene' is that the inter-relationship of different musical spaces is not only productive for hybrids, but also for the 'initial' soundtrack. When sound takes the form of overlapping conduits and there is potential for artistes to record and circulate from one genre to another, folk music can never fade away [hybridity will continue to draw attention towards a source in both a reverential and ironic manner].
Expressions such as 'scene' and 'tradition' then fulfill their real tasks in representing the future as well as the past. The different listening practices of the 1990s require little of the 'formal' social adhesion that was previously thought to be so crucial, and so the folk clubs feel their 'scene' to be duly threatened; however, if clubs were to embrace more fully the musical dynamics of which they appear so fearful, this might turn the musical fixity into multiplicity. Determinants for music do not have to be specialized; participation can surround the 'non-specific' as well as the 'casual' or 'passive' listener [surely, to be over-determinant is, in effect, to marginalise]. The folk club 'scene' should be careful not to over-emphasise the seeming banality in today's popular music without discussing its own appropriateness on a wider basis!
But the case is not one of elimination of folk clubs; indeed, popular music scholars do need to appreciate that historical innovation in music has always been determined in the context of creative refinements to what has already been given [like the second folk revival, itself]. There is no need for new genres that are singular per se; we require a singularity in performance that casts new light on musical traditions and on our broader relations to cultural activity. We cannot continue to view artistic creativity and musical representations of tradition as mutually exclusive when, according to Bohlman, they are interdependent and "define each other by their balance and interaction." 37 This exposition from one of America's leading folklorists is ultimately as good a definition of 'folk scene' as any. By using balance and interaction as criteria, artistic experimentation is seen as dependent upon tradition for a sense of direction and, in turn, tradition is rendered as pliant and moribund without an aesthetic challenge to stimulate it. Folk clubs have the potential to present this equilibrium while also giving us a fascinating insight into the ways in which oppositional musical hierarchies have been culturally established and then 'naturalised'. All musical activity is a complex relation between future projection, context and the past, and "the main danger in classification" cautioned George Herzog "is that it leads to assuming that objects in a storeroom were originally created and deposited in that order." 38 Folk clubs now require an upheaval in classification, an audit of their own sense of composure. The folk club is not a redundant institution, but it cannot represent a folk 'scene', as a whole, without a balanced dialectic.
Certainly the time is appropriate to discuss the status and balance of performance in the folk clubs, for this also appears to be an 'historical certainty' requiring overhauling. For a musician, one of the most exciting processes in trying to construct anything is that important stage of not quite knowing where the work will lead. But the folk clubs have succeeded in working around this creative decision by favouring a look back at what has already been done. This has now created a folk artist who has to conform to the social and musical restrictions of the folk club.
Mike Brocken
Article MT027
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