33 f The Way We Were
fRootseditor Ian Anderson peers back through the mists of time at our early years: how it was in 1987 when we released our first compilation, Square Roots. Long unavailable, it’s this issue’s birthday bonus download. Crikey, some you weren’t even born then…
R
oots music history is littered with significant dates and gold- en eras of varying lengths. At the end of the 19th Century, a Mrs Kate Lee noted down
songs from two gentlemen called Copper and presented them at the inaugural meeting of the Folk Song Society. Within living memory of more elderly readers will be Lonnie Donegan’s 1954 recording of Rock Island Line which launched the skif- fle era and, many say, the seeds of the British folk club movement. In 1958, Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins made a record- ing trip through the southern states of the USA, in the process discovering a man called Fred McDowell. Bob Dylan’s 1965 Newport festival electrification along with the Byrds success of the same year began ‘folk rock’. Also in 1965 came the first release of a limited edition album called English Country Music that would hugely influence a movement that blossomed in the 1970s with bands like Oak and The Old Swan Band. And elsewhere on the planet, the Sekou Touré era in Guinea from 1958 to 1984 brought about a great age of evolution for modern West African music rooted in local traditions that was influential well beyonds its borders.
In strange ways, dust from all these things settled in the publication, in June 1979, of a little regional magazine called The Southern Rag, which changed its title to Folk Roots when it went monthly and onto the national news stands (and in 1998 abbreviated that to fRoots). And it can be detected in the start of a series of compilation albums that began in 1987 with a vinyl LP and cassette release called Square Roots, and continued through many years of free fRoots covermount CDs and more recently download albums which will reach fRoots 50 next issue.
What actually catalysed the launch of
Southern Rag was Fred Woods, the editor / publisher of Folk Review, which had been the main UK folk magazine throughout the 1970s, losing interest in it and asking me if I’d like to take it over. So I got a little group of local folk friends – promoter and graphic designer Lawrence Heath, and typesetter Caroline Walker – to meet up in the lounge bar of the Swigging Pig in Bor- ing On Thames (well, actually, the Fox & Hounds in Fleet but that’s not as good a story!) We got quite enthusiastic until we looked at Folk Review’s dire accounts, but by then were so fired up with the idea of running a magazine that we decided to launch a new one, just a regional quarterly for the central south of England. The title came from an old Blind Blake record.
At that point, by general agreement, the English folk scene was not what it had been. The boom years of the 1960s when most towns had several freewheeling folk clubs were gone. The factionalism of the ’70s when clubs polarised into either ‘tra- ditional’ or ‘entertainers’ and rejected the spirit of the punk explosion (nearly losing a questing generation in the process) had decimated attendances. The old audience began to age and a new one had been rejected. Folk rock had become an embar- rassing parody of itself and hit a dead end. Festival culture was in its infancy and hori- zons were very low. And then, just before our first issue came out, the shadow of a monster fell over the land: Thatcher came to power. It wasn’t an auspicious time to launch a new folk magazine.
Somehow, we must have done some- thing right though. Folk Review fell over and so did the only other national maga- zine Folk News / Acoustic Music. Perhaps because of being a little more profession-
ally produced than the many other region- al magazines, we quickly gained many national and international readers.
And out there, something was stir- ring. Roots music from other parts of the globe, for many years only findable on record in a few specialist shops, started to become more available more widely. Over- seas artists began to tour – our second issue excitedly reviewed a concert of Chi- nese traditional music – and with the help of Visiting Arts and Ken Livingstone’s GLC, organisations like Arts Worldwide, the Commonwealth Institute and eventually Womad began to thrill and inspire us with great music from all over the planet.
Topic Records under the direction of
Tony Engle upped the quality expectations for home-grown folk records. New labels like Stern’s, Earthworks and GlobeStyle started putting out readily available albums of music from everywhere and newly formed imprints like Cooking Vinyl and Rogue began raising the profile of
The 3 Mustaphas 3 – refrigeration for their generation
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