Rise Up Like the Sun: 1

• Introduction
• Democracy and Control
• Performance as an Expression of Community
• Genre Appropriateness
• Approachability, Virtuosity and Structured Informality in the Folk Club
• The Session
• Conclusion
• Footnotes

"Music creates political order because it is a minor form of sacrifice."  Attali [1985:6].

"Let it be literally cried from the house tops that the folk singer is a personality, an individual, and most of all a creative artist."  Phillips Barry [1961:76].

It has been argued in the previous chapter that folk clubs are need of a degree of redesignation; that they have become self-absorbed in a passion, a certainty, that the musical authentic can be relocated.  Within folk clubs, folk music is regarded as an ineluctable sign.  But this cannot be so, for not only is any musical performance a conversation, it is also a dialectic.  No music can insure us against uncertainty, much less provide us with a strategy for life.  It exists as a musical, lyrical and also supra-lyrical [phonetic] engagement between the performer and the receiver.  It involves an understanding, an agreement, but also a dialectic involving aural, verbal and visual referrals, suggestions, points of reference, associations, style indication and genre synecdoche.  Of course, assumptions concerning genre association can mask the dialectic of the performer before being deciphered.  Many people appreciate music in broad-based, relatively collective affiliations [fans, clubs, concert-goers etc.] and can base their tastes upon what they and their listening colleagues discern to already know rather than what they are willing to learn.

Performers have to balance their side of any dialectic or polemic very carefully.  Without wishing to broach new areas too quickly they must introduce new moments; without wishing to be repetitive they must cling to associative genres.  They have to stereotype themselves to appear 'in touch' with an audience's preconceptions of performance.  This delicate balance can be aurally and visually exciting as the performer engenders a level of personal tension.  A performer battles with an audience to establish a place for musical kinesis alongside their ideas about musical stasis and aural comfort.  Expectancy, for example, is a potent force to deconstruct.

Expectancy is especially important in folk music, for one of the primary concepts behind folk listening practices has been a 'knowledge' of historical performance 'givens' concerning levels of socio-musical democracy and de-staging; around a concept of a non-audience and an equally valid participatory listener.  Performance must unfold within this spiritual mode, just as it was entangled in it 'in the beginning'.  The radical 1950s concept was that of unfixing performer-audience relationships.  A model performance became an inscription of cultural coherence and, together with a concept of the performer as a 'specialist', incorporated abstractions surrounding the importance of listening space [the club] and a vigilant listener/receivership [the 'folkie'].  The organisation of performance space had to include the serious listeners for they were regarded as equal to the performer in every way.

This is a good principle as long as the receivers do not come to dominate that space physically.  If they become torpid and/or remain the most significant feature of the performance process, if their methodologies remain unchallenged by performers simply wishing to support the principles of the listening process, an aural hierarchy is created.  A real democracy in performance may only persist if that democracy is constantly brought under pressure.  If the democracy slips too far into the hands of the receiver, the power of the performance dialectic is diminished, thus producing a musical stalemate.  Consequently the music, as a kinetic practice, ceases to reflect external challenges and pressures, adopting internal rhetoric and modes of associative and acceptable behaviour.  The maintainance of stylistic listening processes becomes rigorous and strict; relationships are re-fixed.  This is especially true in the case of musical movements that have expressed their culture through forms of resistance, such as the folk revival.

Under these circumstances musicians have to be especially powerful if they are to alter internalisation and institutionalisation of musical reception.  Dialectic processes suffer if there is no contemporary material to challenge the listener, and a long [perhaps unending] selection of traditional material perpetuates a canon.  The less a performer uses contemporary material, the more the establishment remains cemented.  The longer the process continues, the firmer the cement hardens so that the democracy becomes a form of musical fascism.  Musical performance becomes sanctioned from the floor and the hierarchy of a folk club becomes based around that sanctioning of musical performance.  Policy is dictated to a musician; limits are set on repertoire via an 'internal communality' determined by the echelon system within a club.  Thus canon formations cease to assume flexibility, employing a priori points of generic departure.

Niall MacKinnon [1993] and Hazel Fairbairn [1994] have identified performance in club and session as encompassing a necessary and unique element of social identity.  MacKinnon's approach is especially positive and his use of expressions such as: 'de-staging', 'destruction of performance', 'listening as engagement' and 'informal participation' are benevolent.  However, if the social location and thus identity of the folk club audience has undergone important changes since the early days of the revival, performance and related strategies could be described less magnanimously [strictly regulated and musically demarcated].  MacKinnon fails to take due account of the social hierarchies that have been created via reception in a club, together with the shifting social status of his 'folkie' in society during the history of the revival.  In fact he declines to regard the revival as historical [subject to mutation via social changes], deeming the folk club all-pervading in an ever-changing world - surely an illusion of disparate activity and otherness.  Fairbairn, in discussing the ubiquitous session as an example of de-staged performance democracy, also fails to fully consider the social echelons involved in folk performance [related hierarchies, social mores, 'spontaneity' and expectancy].  She blithely assumes that every folkie wishes to play, when, quite clearly, many people find equal enjoyment ['crack'/'craic'] from listening.  In fact Fairbairn relegates 'passive' listening beneath 'spontaneous' performance.  All this, despite conceding that the session is a relatively recent construction [1940s].  Both MacKinnon and Fairbairn are typical example of internalised perspectives.  This chapter offers itself as a displacement from internalised narratives.

Democracy and Control

Over 70% of 'folkies' spoken-to by myself in England and Wales between 1993-96 sang or played a musical instrument, and over 50% performed at some time or another.  This is a high level of musical engagement.  However, unlike MacKinnon, who is very excited by this musical interactivity and doubts whether it is matched by any other popular music genre in the UK, I would suggest that it has extended the elitism of the folk club.  If, for example, even chorus singing is a problem to some [such as my own wife] then musical engagement [together with constructions concerning virtuosity and non-virtuosity] has lead to exclusion, rather than inclusion, for one is expected to participate in order to cultivate and express the canon.  Whereas simplicity was once an ideal for the revival, it has now become part of a scale of values and techniques ranging from the absolutely simple [some floor singing] to the frighteningly [and usually self-defeatingly] complex.  Perhaps it is little wonder that the festival has grown in diametrical proportion to the decline of the folk club, for at least a perceived Volksgeist seems to be at work.

I would therefore suggest that by the mid/late-1990s, performance in folk clubs has become an indicator of stasis rather than kinesis, that it has become an efficient tool for reproducing and reinforcing power and authority in the folk club, and that the informality and communality often claimed for this model of performance are actually highly structured and divisive.  Change, as often as not brought about by the young has been, in my own personal experience, all but banished from many clubs, so that the young [Youthquake ... see chapter 10] have had to organise themselves, musically and socially, in order to get a look-in.  This is not a very promising start for any young person interested in folk music.  Any social category specializing in the reproduction of authority is bound to be somewhat superfluous to the young, and the folk club membership, which has always been one of the fundamental spatial and aural organisers of the revival since its inception, precisely because it is 'well qualified' and efficient in producing modes of performance in an organised space, has come to represent something of an anachronism for many young people.  Katherine Lyons, aged 15, remarked that:

Liking folk music - especially if you're young - is regarded by many as something you confess to either under torture, or in a state of mental imbalance.  I find it hard to believe that in a school of 900 people, I'm the only one who likes it.  Even my friends think I'm slightly strange ... it conjures up an image of old men in pubs [probably with beards and Arran sweaters] singing out of tune. 2

A folk club regards itself as operating very differently from many other musical venues in the popular music sphere, where the audiences are [apparently] somewhat disengaged, not only musically but physically, from the performer.  Folk performance values are seen as being articulated by the performer, the receptive audience and the site of that performance together with the structure surrounding that space.  For the folkie, it is all 'societal', but does this mean that popular music performance isn't?  If folk music performance and reception are also tightly structured, then what are the principal differences?

It is readily apparent that the dividing line between a larger folk festival performance and the average Boyzone concert is more slender than the folk fraternity would claim.  Both engage in singalongs, audience participation; both encourage mixtures of emotions; both involve the cult of personality.  The differences between a popular music 'gig' and an indoor folk 'concert' [rather than a folk club or festival performance] are even slimmer, where both types of artistes perform in a showmanship manner.  Furthermore, the traditional folk club image of 'spontaneous performance' is frequently thinned down by an 'army' of aural legislators.  Members of Scottish folk group Iron Horse informed me after a concert at the Harlequin Theatre organised by the Northwich Folk Club in 1996:

When it comes down to it we probably do it better on the stage.  It's our thing then, not part of a club's 'dos' and 'donts'.  When your band is on a stage, you take full responsibility.  When you are in a folk club, your ideas are modified by the club 'atmosphere'.  This can be positive, but also very negative.  The clubs can be good, but we've enjoyed this tour into England most of all when we've played on a proper stage, giving it as much as we can, such as tonight. 3

... as far as I can see its about total memory loss for a boys group gig.  As a promoter I want the young people to forget even who they are once they have crossed the threshold into the gig and looked at that stage.  The stage then becomes as real as anything they have ever known.  Nothing else matters except the now, the stage.  And then, when its over, I want them to try to continue that 'now' experience for as long as they can.  It'll wear off of course, but that doesn't mean to say that we are giving them just an illusion.  I'm not sure what is or isn't illusory, in any case.  If you experience something it's real enough ... it doesn't have to be explained by music intellectuals.  That was the plan with Ecos. 4

I even find a connection between the canal boat painting and selling canal crafts, and the music.  There just seems to be a sense of reality about all of it.  This is what people did; this is what people sang, you know.  There are connections.

Dances and ceilidhs have become popular in the mid-1990s and some folk clubs organise ceilidhs owing to the increased popularity of this wilder form of folk engagement.  The Bothy Folk Club in Southport [estd 1965] raises funds for the 'core' club by holding profitable celidhs and barn dances in and around the Southport area.  The Chester Folk Survivors also raise funds for their annual festival at Kelsall by generally promoting a few socials and dances throughout the winter months in Chester.  In St Helens, Poynton, Clitheroe and Wigan there are monthly large-scale folk dances.  However, in all cases, folk club involvement remains very high and the broader community is not attracted en masse.  Celidhs are actually viewed by some folkies as a 'means to an end'.  I was informed by one folk club member at a Bop to the Box dance promotion in Ellesmere, Salop "It's a good crack, I suppose, but we do it to keep the club going and to keep people's interest up.  I would prefer to just have the club, and that; but it don't keep the wolf from the door any longer!"

Within the folk club the accent remains upon the precept of 'communal' engagement with tradition.  But it is an internal communality.  This is reflected in the range of music performed, for this also remains somewhat limited.  MacKinnon suggests that "a wide range of performers" appear at folk clubs, however those he mentions appear closely [and, in fact, occasionally, were] related; perhaps he is discussing a range of 'material' within a given genre rather than a range of genres, as such.  Folk music canons do have the potential for variation but when they are perceived as existing outside of popular culture the dialectic between performer and any broader community is reduced and aural canon-formation controls output.

This internalised aural domination has created a 'catch 22' situation for some clubs.  Faced with dwindling finances brought about by performance constrictions, some clubs have rejected 'performers' outright.  An emphasis has swung towards perpetuating [but not expanding] the membership, at the expense of 'performers'.  Some singers clubs ideologically attempt to bestow upon folk music a singular dignity which relates only to itself.  Helen McCall, former organiser of the 'Mags' in New Brighton told me:

We didn't have guests.  It was an expensive luxury, but in any case, we believed that the song was the important feature of the club.  The singer was carrying a tradition, not an ego. 5

A certain minority taste exists for poetry and music hall song.  The genre of music hall has experienced mixed reactions from folk revivalists and continues to be an area of conflicting musical tradition.  Ewan MacColl, for example, held music hall in a certain amount of veneration before entering the folk scene but he then used the genre as an example of political social control [as did other left-thinking political historians].  The question of whether the music hall existed as part of a 'real' British singing tradition remains in debate owing to the political inspirations at the inception of the second folk revival.  Music halls have been thought of as an opiate of the masses.  A good example, perhaps, of an overt form of aural canon formation.

There has been a tendency amongst folkies to turn a 'blind eye' to the complexities surrounding contemporary music culture, arguing for a particular value in folk club communality and musicality over that in other musical genres.  In fact, there is often a refusal to acknowledge that other genres of music actually have forms of communality or musicality.  This is further indication that the folk club environment is controlled by internal receptive connoisseurs at the expense of creative interpretors.  This is a pity, for the folk performer enjoys an active awareness of and participation in the possibilities for mutation which does not prevent any upholding of musical traditions.  New songs have the potential of entering any number of traditions at one and the same time and contemporary creativity in performance should not be considered a bar to tradition.

Perhaps when any musical output is metered by an idealised performance mode ['natural', 'unaffected', 'unrefined'] it can result in being, not broadly-based, but rather stylised, having to conform to certain traditional prerequisites.  Folk's hidden classifications dictate that both the performance and the music have to conform to a certain relevance re. the historical folk community.  If performers become somewhat irrational from a folk performance perspective, they are viewed as having abandoned affiliation.  This is linked in no small measure to the pre-eminence of ideas about the very transmission of the music.  To some in the folk scene, the folk performance should actually eschew all aspects of 'performance' in contemporary terms.  This means that the singer 'carries a tradition' and suppresses the performance in order to transmit the song.  For example, describing the singing of Fred Jordan fellow unaccompanied singer Roly Brown stated that Jordan was "... a true carrier and offers multiple satisfactions, never predictability; intelligence, passion, and awareness ...". 6  Brown identified that Jordan has acquired and formulated identifiable skills and musical focus.  But one might also describe the work of [say] Tony Bennett in the same way.

The difference between Jordan and Bennett is perceived to lie in the idealistic concept that what the folk musician is seen to absorb in musical terms he or she is expected to disseminate with a minimum of extra cultural 'baggage'.  This also means that for some 'folkies', the folk singer or instrumentalist has to be rather dispassionate, maintaining a certain non-emotional style, perhaps even a 'distance' from the music being performed.  This distance is then expected to maintain a certain level of purity and probity.  But if a folksinger is supposed to express his communality, surely cultural baggage is part of that expression.  Dick Gaughan, who also likes to experiment with technology [Clan Alba; Five Hand Reel] is proud to carry a tradition but does not regard that role as being exclusive.  He re-casts the above mentioned social concepts so much that his own contemporary songs are often regarded by purists as traditional [e.g. The Banks of the Tweed].  He does not regard one facet as being more important than another, but instead sees a relationship between individuality and communality based upon a tension:

It's all there to experiment with.  One thing is not exclusive from the other.  It's like being pro-Scottish.  I don't see why that should mean that you are 'anti-English'!  You operate in a position of tension.  That's good. 7

But, in contrast to the likes of Dick Gaughan, other performers have taken what could be described as a reactionary performance stance, recognizing a folk performance process that abstains from those 'performance' methods which appear to 'represent' another form of music.  So, while some performers have a tendency to use creativity, experimentation and technology as a way of concentrating audience response on folk musicians AS experimenters within tradition, expanding the definitions of that tradition via their own musical performances, others attempt to diffuse the importance of self by effectively and consciously sidestepping ideas about creativity for the sake of a universal [yet inherent] historical rationalism.

Ultimately, an aural hierarchy sits in judgement on generic appropriateness.  The performer is judged by the knowing receiver so that the structures surrounding folk identification avoid uncomfortable pressures.  The values associated with an appropriate de-staged folk club spontaneity are social constructions to support continuity with an imagined, yet strangely immutable, past.  Yet, if one examines folk performance away from this isolationist social construction, intertextuality immediately questions folk music repertory.  Unrestrained performance of traditional music can draw one towards 'folk music' in a way unimagined by illusory criteria.  Bob Buckle, for example, remembers:

I was showing the youngsters the array of instruments that I play and I found that they were fascinated by the 5 string banjo.  In my ignorance I thought that I had made a real breakthrough, but when I asked whether they had any questions, quite a few of them asked me whether I played like the Grid.  I didn't know what they were talking about to begin with but I realised that there was a dance track by a duo called the Grid.  They'd sampled a 5 string banjo.  The kids were using that form of creativity and linking it through to my ideas about tradition.  So I played them a Flatt and Scruggs style of breakdown and they went mad!  Now don't tell me that the pop charts are worthless when that sort of thing happens because I have the evidence to show you that it's the reverse.  The Grid unknowingly HELPED me that afternoon.  They drew attention towards what I do.  My instrumentation didn't seem half as archaic as it would have done without a chart entry, it's as simple as that.  All power to them! 8

... almost everybody has been given a solo slot ... except for me!  I sing and recite my own stuff, but I'm also influenced by American music.  This is not altogether appropriate at Northwich.  Although people seem to like my stuff, the organisers don't consider my selections to be part of their canon, as such. 9

The long-standing failure of folk music scholarship to take account of individual creativity is perhaps the most visible testimony to the undercurrent of conservatism that has saturated many of our most entrenched concepts of folk music.  Considerations of cultural and musical change, for example, muddy this undercurrent and thus are too often channelled into the 'nondescript' pools of popular music. 10

In all cases, if any music 'scene' elongates to such a point that it becomes a community simply maintaining a repertory, its validity as a challenge to implicit rules becomes subsumed under canonisation.  Performance becomes ritualistic and performers are not as free to explore or to realise potential via hybridity.  From personal experience, I discovered that the Northwich folk club found a blues and poetry night presented by Bill Pook and myself [April 1997] most challenging to their canonical preconceptions [despite the fact that such nights were common during the 1960s].

In the folk movement, most audience/participants tend to agree that successful folk performers such as Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick, Roy Bailey and Bert Jansch are eminently approachable and even the humblest of floor singers identify, via performance, historicity and social setting, a perceived relationship and affinity with these 'stars'.  There is an a priori understanding that the music itself is able to communicate without staging or effect, therefore a conceptualised affinity, also based on proximity, exists and is perceived as different from those associated with popular music.  This encourages a structure to develop in a folk club replicating a level of informality.  However, this apparent conviviality is based upon an 'event' of judging.  The informality is structured around a prevailing theory against which other social/musical behaviour is judged.  Thus folk club informality is tantamount to a systems theory ... a structured informality.

Within popular music the subject of approachability is mixed with ideas about exclusivity.  The underlying reality is that contact with [say] Take That remains difficult, if not impossible.  However I describe this as an underlying reality because, while the unapproachability of a pop icon adds to his or her charm, it also suggests that, in reality, these stars are ordinary people existing under a showbiz veneer.  This is a move away from any subscription to folk's totalising 'approachability' as a governing theory [especially when such theories are tested 'internally', by reference to that theory itself].  Pop suggests we are all approachable; we are all inapproachable.  Perhaps this is the real democracy of the senses.  Folk performers are renowned for their self-effacement, but so is Gary Barlow.

In fact, status [and aspiration to status] exists within the the folk clubs, just as much as without.  Despite notions of common repertoires, musicians who are establishing their own status and individuality require their own performance pieces.  The use of traditional material as a basis of that repertoire can lead to tension.  Singers wishing to build reputations as revivalists have to place their individual stamp on material, injecting individuality.  The development of folk status, then, involves a relationship between inventiveness and generic appropriateness, as in many other scenes.  Differing folksingers are confronted with innumerable selections and deselections of a canonical nature.  The performer then communicates these choices, which become subtle but concomitant alterations to the folk canon!  But, of course, the aural institutionalisation of folk music performance seldom takes account of this recontextualisation and canonical referentiality continues to dominate the folk club hierarchy, producing certain 'types' of acceptable singing models.  Therefore a dour presentation can be a claim to status, demonstrating serious commitment and the passing on of tradition.

However singers such as Martin Carthy are also respected because they can, within allowed folk stereotypes, 'mach shau'.  Carthy's knowledge of traditional musics has helped him attain his high placing on the folk scene, but he is also a fine professional.  To a popular music historian this points to Carthy as a specialist entertainer as much as a transmitter of culture.  Of course, had he been 'merely' an entertainer', his reputation would not have been so great within the folk scene.  Both the dancer Michael Flatley and composer Ronan Hardiman [Lord of the Dance] are not regarded as 'serious' folk performers by some folkies because they are seen as entertainers!  There is a perception of a deeper significance than that which Flatley or Hardiman can offer and the canonical dialectic between performance, text and context does not appear to stretch to West End theatres.  Some folk music lovers, of course, even criticise Carthy.  He has never been quite forgiven by some for his electric sojourns with Steeleye Span, whereas others [including his own daughter Eliza] have suggested that he is too politically correct.

We can see from this, therefore, that musical performance in folk clubs is not as relaxed as one might at first imagine.  It is, in fact, tenaciously preserved via folk club reception modes that are tightly structured and organised formally.  Despite having a friendly atmosphere and a spontaneous and 'natural' environment, reception and socialistion expressions are neither 'natural' nor stable representations [after all, the folk club is a relatively new concept and context for folk music performance].  Tension exists through a judgemental appropriateness of genre or style in proportion to the construction of a canon of 'tradition'.

Another kind of meaning [and tension] in folk music performance has continued to be based around skills and complexities of virtuosity.  There are a large number of extremely important musicians performing on the folk scene whose reputations are based upon vocal and instrumental virtuosity.  Names such as Bob and Alf Copper [song], Aly Bain [fiddle], Martin Carthy [guitar], Kathryn Tickell [Northumbrian pipes], Davey Spillane [Uilleann pipes], Micho Russell [whistle] are all held in high esteem.  However, conversely, from the outset of the folk revival one of the impulses emanating from the folk club hierarchy has also been to traverse musical virtuosity and to relinquish any notion of technical polish; literally to let go of musical formality.  There has also been a desire to refuse differentiation between the performer and the ordinary club-goer.  There have been divisions created within the folk milieu with an emphasis of expression over technique.  As previously suggested, some clubs appeared to drop-out of 'performance' modes altogether, over-emphasising concepts about musical perpetuity and democracy.

For instance, from my own experience, the Northwich, the Lymm and the Bollington folk clubs in Cheshire all appear to perform from a repertory in which there is a subjective conceptualization of both traditional performer and performance.  The less a song appears to be 'contemporary' [stylistically, lyrically], the more it [and the performer] appears to be worth.  There is a sense of performance in which the musician intends to adhere to the piece only as it has been learned.  This has to do with another oxymoronic performance model which suggests 'unskilled virtuosity'.  There has been, in certain parts of the folk scene, following the enforcement of rather strict [non] performance codes, an evolution of a virtuosity based upon the concepts of 'non performance' and 'non virtuosity'.  In some clubs everyone is a musician or a singer in the name of traditional music 'performance', and, rather like a form of heritage-based karaoke, 'everyman' is the folk personality.  This is a perception of performance as an egalitarian form.  This rather inaccurate historical model [has not musical life always been specialised in one way or another?] has positive, but also negative results.  Some performances within the folk movement can show great sensitivity and the ability to maintain a balance between the past and the present, but others can be rather more curatorial.

This custodianship of a performing past tends to exclude positive ideas about sound systems.  As MacKinnon has recorded, there is a on-going debate concerning the uses of PA in a folk club environment.  Whereas the popular music fan might assume that most clubs had settled for at least the odd monitor some years ago, this has not always been the case.  Unaccompanied singing without the 'support' of a microphone and/or PA is openly encouraged at many clubs as evidence of historical continuity ['like they did it in the old days'] and traditional 'none' virtuosity.  I have even known some club 'officials' to grimace at artistes bringing their own PA systems.

These abstractions add to the impression that the folk club is an 'approachable establishment', and that the performer is a relaxed 'member' of that institution.  The folk club does not usually have separate entrances for performers; only infrequently does a club have anything resembling a dressing room.  It is in this kind of atmosphere of historically-based egalitarian virtuosity, camaraderie and levelling that most folkies favourably compare the folk singer with the pop singer, and can base their opinions on the 'fact' that a pop performer would not 'put up' with the kind of conditions present at a folk club.  For example, this comment from Leigh Folk Club, September, 1996:

... you just wouldn't get a pop singer accepting the sort of conditions that are on offer here.  Even without the musical differences, there are the more obvious ones of facilities, lack of flunkies and ego-builders!  You don't get any of that at a folk club.  The ego has to be left behind, otherwise it won't wash. 11

That opening session incidentally, provided the one controversy of this year's event: the singing of Dorset singer Norman House.  Now, it should be clearly said that he has a pleasant light tenor, and that his singing is not in question.  What IS, is his total reliance on the songbook: he never looks up from the page.  His eyes seem welded to it.  You might ask, what is the difference between this and a singer who sings with his eyes closed: neither make eye contact with the audience?  Well, there is an obvious difference: the difference is that the latter, at his best, can give you the impression that he is composing the words that he sings ... that the song is his creation.  That's what makes folk-song the sublimely moving art form it often is: you get the sensation that a song is leaving one's heart, and is on a direct course to another heart.  No middleman.  One gets no such feeling when people 'sing from the sheet'.  It seems to me to be a bit like painting by numbers.  It'd be better if they could try and memorise, and just carry the sheets as aides memoires. 12

This confusing mixture of idealised musical democracy and specialisation in musical retention creates performance-related enigmas.  Floor singing can be very poor, yet many folkies that I have spoken to about this have stated that variations in abilities and standards of presentation are healthy, being one way that new performers can gain experience.  Folk club members also appear to deflect criticism about poor floor singing by identifying this musical paucity as a 'living tradition', recognising a democratic and non-professional approach.  Both of these points belong to an attitude which supports the proposition that the folk club is a very encouraging performance environment.  This theory, however, can varnish reality, for floor singing cliques are prominent features at many folk clubs.  In fact I have also been informed by several folk musicians that this idealisation of musical democracy actually restricts and even intimidates some would-be performers [Jenny Shotliff, 1994].  Paradoxically, by attempting to circumvent performance, the folk club has become restrictive via a performance-based cultural hierarchy.  Liz Parry comments:

I understand why floor singing goes on, but it bothers me ... it always seems to be the same people singing the same songs.  Also the whole idea of the democracy is sort of mutually contradictory.  I mean I felt personally responsible for the continuation of the same old thing because I didn't sing myself.  I felt guilty about sustaining the LACK of democracy ... but the way that the club I attended went about its business did not make me want to sing, in any case!  You'd have to put your name down, form a sort of cue or else face the prospect of being 'eyeballed' by a committee member, sort of ... 'would YOU like to sing?' ... all that made me really nervous.  So the theory and the reality didn't amount to the same thing.  I drifted away from the scene, eventually, but I still love the music. 13

... one of the problems with fundamentalist folkies is that you take one step towards them, then they want the next step, then the next, then the next and so on ... they're never happy.

... one of the first times I went to a folk club was to see Ralph McTell in Chester some years ago.  I didn't know the rules ... just thought that one of my heroes was playing in a pub ... great!  It came as a shock to me that the whole night was really heavy.  There were these awful floor singers, then the resident duo, who were also dreadful, and then McTell came on.  He was great, but I'd had a lot to drink by this time and needed the loo.  I had to get up in the middle of a song and everybody just stared at me.  I had to go but I was regarded as a social leper.  It was one of the worst nights of my life.  Even Ralph picked me out and stared at me.  I was responsible for a litany of social deviation! 14

I was talking [I thought] in a low voice to the bar person.  At the break one of the organisers John Moncur said to me 'Bill, do you know your voice carries quite a distance?' I replied 'is that a polite way of telling me to shut up?' He smiled and proceeded to sell the raffle tickets. 15

In addition, lack of formality and staging belies the fact that even folk performers have to construct a stage identity; people may only witness the performing part of a folk singer's personality.  There appears to be a common assumption that the person one meets in the street is the same person who sings on a stage.  These ideas of informality and de-staging, as desirable as they appear to be in the removal of expectations of performance behaviour, are inaccurate.  They can frighten off those new to the folk scene and make hypotheses about the performance-self no other genre in music would dare to make.  Both style and content in performance are based around the socialisation processes that established the clubs in the first place, rather than on any proximity to an authentic model.

The Session

The structure of a session is usually quite simple and any forms of musical expression such as rolls or slurs or different types of bowing on the fiddle occur without any written articulation.  This fact makes coming into folk music session playing from other more formalised playing traditions rather strange.  A friend who played with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra some years ago went to a session at the Liverpool Irish Cenre with a book of notated music to follow.  He was told, however, that reading from a book was frowned-upon.  He actually discovered that, due to his years of training, he couldn't 'get into' the session without his notation, and had to leave.  His musical 'spontaneity' could only be derived from his formal training but this structural device proved to be at odds with the folk methodology of structured informality.  Within the folk revival written music plays a very small part.  It certainly does not serve as an aid to performance and the immediacy of the session means that each session is viewed as having acquired characteristics that are 'unique' to the musicians attending, rather than any formalised instructions.  The object of the session is to structure an informality around the characteristics of those involved.  A form of musical and social coherence.

This does not always work, however.  On many sessions that have I attended over the years I have witnessed one player 'hogging' the whole affair.  Also, I have occasionally noted that if there have been one or two players who are rather reticent, then they have been excommunicated by other more forthright players, even occasionally relegated to a 'second division' session where they were able instigate tunes at a slower pace.  Jenny Shotliff also told me that "younger people are often considered 'too slow' and are not always encouraged by the seasoned session players". 16

Good sessions can normally last for hours with people coming to and from the session as they please.  For example, the last session that I took part in was at the Morris Dancer in Cheshire in 1995, and this lasted for over three hours.  The construction of informality can work as a liberating force in a session, but only as long as you play.  Paradoxically, listeners are often overlooked and feel rather isolated as the musicians rather self-indulgently 'get off' on each other's [and their own] playing.  This could be viewed as a reversal of the imbalance in a folk club, where the listener is king, however this is not a strictly accurate portrayal of the session.  Performance is also restrained at a session; indeed, ideas about individual performance are strictly limited and tradition serves a canonical function.  Although sessions are ostensibly musicians' platforms, effectively eliminating the listener, it is seen from within the scene as a democratic and egalitarian musical gathering and a 'non-performance' strategy.  For many folkies, a good session is where the best music can be heard.  Hearing the best music at an event which in itself is regarded as 'spontaneous', is observed as a highlight.  However this egalitarianism is also something of a facade.  Hazel Farbairn recognises that:

The idea of the session as an egalitarian musical gathering is an attractive one, but inaccurate ... the status of individual musicians is an important organizing principle, contributing to the creation of a hierarchy expressed through spatial organisation and the proportional distribution of the melodic lead ... the combination of these factors, together with the personality, whether the musician is forceful or passive, the volume of the instrument played, and the existing relationships between the players, tends to create roles of leader, filler and beginner.  In regular events, these roles become relatively static. 17

The spontaneity of a session is also undercut by a general expectation of performance.  Although one's aim might be to perform rather than listen [apparently democratic] the session can be very competitive and rather clandestine.  A good group sound is a good attainable desire and is 'creatable' but sometimes an assertive desire to lead, or a jealousy of another's ability can over-ride the 'structured informality'.  There is excitement in participating for the musician, but this does not involve listening, which is regarded as rather passive, as Hazel Fairbairn observes:

The fact that communication in sessions is not a matter of musicians directing their efforts towards an audience, but is contained within the musical circle, means that the session can only really be experienced and observed from a playing seat.  The musical process is integrated into a social and drinking environment, and interactive detail is often obscured to all but the participants themselves. 18

In effect, the folk establishment has based its performance models on unstable and idealised representations.  Consequently the performance preconditions adopted in many folk clubs can, at best, be described as debatable antiquarian re-enactments.  The performance/reception model which the folk world contrives to sustain is both socially more complex and historically less locatable than it at first appears and it is imperative that further reseach into these structures is undertaken.

Despite many claims that the popular, the professional and the experimental remove the performer from the sanctions of tradition, quite the reverse is often the case.  Even an extreme form of experimentation within traditional music forms requires that the performer understands both the social and musical tolerence levels of that tradition.  Ultimately, static folk performance without a dialectic fails to refer to any musical tradition whatsoever, for the real performance tradition at work within the British Isles is one of expansion of musical and cultural boundaries.  Most folk musicians are innovative and creative on one level or another; they might accept or reject change; they might observe tradition or violate it.  Now that folkies have experienced a time of self-protection, they are in a position to consider how much a juxtaposition between change and stability, between popular and folk, determines a future for folk music.  The balance in performance dialectic, which has swung a way from the musician and towards the antiquarian listener, needs to be be restored so that creativity, rather than re-enactment, is paramount.  By doing this the folk musician's tradition of innovation and kinesis will come to underpin the future of the folk revival, rather than the social mores and clandestine hierarchies that have continued to surround the singing traditions of this country. Like-minded people can actually share the same degree of ignorance.  The following section will attempt to present some ideas about experimentation, intereferentiality and intertextuality.

Mike Brocken

Article MT028

Footnotes:

1 - The Albion Band. Rise Up Like the Sun LP Harvest Records, 1978.
2 - Katherine Lyons. Out of the Closet Folkie and Proud. Youthquake 1. November, 1995, p.3.
3 - Interview with Iron Horse, March, 1996.
4 - Interview with Tom Hardman, Carlton-Brooke Enterprises, December, 1996.
5 - Interview with Helen McCall, July, 1995.
6 - Roly Brown. Fred Jordan. Folk Music Journal 6/3, 1992, p.412.
7 - Interview with Dick Gaughan, April, 1996.
8 - Interview with Bob Buckle, August, 1996.
9 - Interview with Bill Pook, September, 1995.
10 - Bohlman, 1988, p.69.
11 - Leigh folk club member, Sept., 1996.
12 - Dai Woosnam. The National Folk Festival at Sutton Bonnington. The Living Tradition 6. July-August, 1994, pp.24-7.
13 - Interview with Liz Parry, December, 1994.
14 - Interview with Wendy Williams, March, 1995.
15 - Interview with Bill Pook, September, 1996.
16 - Interview with Jenny Shotliff, July, 1995.
17 - Hazel Fairbairn. Changing Contexts for Traditional Dance Music in Ireland: The Rise of Group Performance Practice. Folk Music Journal 6/5 1994 pp.566-599.
18 - ibid.18

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