root salad f22 Folk Song In England
A book by A.L. Lloyd, a course run by the EFDSS under Steve Roud. Christopher Conder gave the latter a try.
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olk music is participatory. It’s not about being a passive consumer, but getting involved, be it singing in a pub, learning to play an instrument or joining a dance team. Unless, like me, you are uncoordinated, rhythmically challenged and own a singing voice that justified you being asked to mime in school productions.
An academic workshop series on Folk Song in England though, that’s more my kind of thing. Earlier in the year I signed up to six dark, winter evenings in a room at the top of Cecil Sharp House, the red- brick home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The course was led by well- respected historian, writer, librarian and expert on English folk song and folklore, Steve Roud. There were around fifteen attendees in total, from a wide back- ground that ranged from hardened folkies
Steve Roud
to the newly converted (although, suffice to say, at 29 years old, my friend and I were the youngest there by a long shot).
The first session was billed as covering ‘the many possible definitions of folk’, but I was relieved to discover it was more about what is meant by ‘folk’ in the con- text of the course. I’ve witnessed as many cyclical ‘what is folk?’ arguments online as a sane man can handle. Steve used this ses- sion to set the ground rules, rather force- fully insisting that “this is not about you!”
“I said [that] right at the beginning,” Steve told me when we had a proper chat a few more weeks into the course, because “the hardest thing is to get people to step out of their current role. Folk now means so many different things to different peo- ple, but if you take that baggage back with you it makes no sense whatsoever. It’s performers who really have the trouble, because they’re always trying to think about their own experience of folk and their own notion of themselves as a folk singer.”
What the course was about was the English source singers, the collec- tors and, most importantly, the songs themselves. The format was that Steve led from the front, interspersing his talk with record- ings and videos. One of the most edifying bits for me was see- ing old footage of folk songs being sung in pubs. Some- how I was never able to clearly picture these songs in their pre-revival setting before. Steve encouraged two- way dialogue, but not to the point that it dominated the evenings. “I have pretty strong views about the definition of folk music and what happens, and when you’re doing a course like this you have to pretty much give a strong lead,” he admitted to me.
“There has to be some fairly hard-line con- tent. I don’t say anything I don’t believe in, but some of the things I say, we could spend all evening discussing.”
This was the “fourth or fifth time” that Steve has run the beginners’ course, and attendees have the opportunity to continue on to Levels 2 and 3. It was pro- duced in partnership with the EFDSS, and this year was billed as being an element of their Full English programme.
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“Over the years,” Steve considered, “EFDSS has often had bad press. It’s had its ups; it’s had its downs. But at the moment I think it’s doing wonders. I go to Katy [Spicer] who’s the boss here and say, ‘I want to do some evening classes about the history of folk song.’ Now if I’d done that fifteen years ago: ‘Ooh I don’t know if we want to do this, ooh it sounds a bit aca- demic and dry.’ Whereas Katy said ‘That sounds like a good idea. Let’s try it.’ While they’re working with schools, with perfor- mance, bringing morris dancing into the 21st Century and that sort of thing, EFDSS is also paying its dues to the old, and I think that’s good. Long may it last.”
lot of the content of the course was already fairly familiar, but Steve’s telling gave it the clarity and chronological structure it needs. One of the things that did startle me was how relatively recently many ‘traditional’ songs were written, and how often there is a traceable author. “Nothing I’ve known has quite been wrong”, I told Steve. “But it ain’t quite been right!” he laughed with me. “The trouble with the folk world is people can make things up so easily that we get a lot of disinformation. Until somebody comes along and actually does the research we can all go around saying ‘Yes, they’re medieval, or pre- Christian’. In the folklore world, people started saying that mummer’s plays were pagan rituals. No they’re not! Mummer’s plays, as far as we know, go back to the 18th Century. It’s hardly pagan is it?”
From September, Steve will be taking the course on tour in the form of a Satur- day day-school calling at all the major cities in England, including Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham and Cambridge. “On each one we’re having a guest speaker from the area we’re going to. Each time there will be a different person and a different per- spective on it.” And then, also starting in September, “just to make a change”, a six week course called Folklore In England. “We’re branching out into folklore, but,” I was assured, “we won’t stop doing the folk song course.”
www.efdss.org F
Photo: Christopher Conder
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