67 f


for publication but died at the age of 35 in 1926 just before the book first appeared.


These isolated seasonal communities


I Got A Song: A History Of The Newport Folk Festival


Rick MassimoWesleyan University Press (ISBN 978-0-8195-7703-0)


This book’s genesis lies in a Providence Jour- nal interview that Massimo conducted with Newport Folk Festival founder George Wein in 2009. Through its efforts to reconcile con- flicting attitudes towards idealism and com- merce, and authenticity and innovation, Newport Folk Festival has often been the arena in which the American folk movement struggles to define itself.


Of course there’s a whole chapter about that Bob Dylan electric performance in 1965 (with all the familiar quotes from all the usual suspects) but it’s the festival finale from two years previously (which saw Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and Pete Seeger linking arms on stage with The Freedom Singers and Theodore Bikel) that provides the festival’s most significant and enduring image. For Wein, the personal really was political. When he mar- ried his African-American wife Joyce in 1959, their union was illegal in nineteen states.


Massimo does a good job of tracing the


Festival’s varying fortunes through its tempo- rary embrace of corporate sponsorship (Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) in the 1980s to its 2007 sale to Festival Network – a company who ran the 2008 festival before the Rhode Island Depart- ment of Environmental Management can- celled their contract amongst spiralling debts. He’s also a perceptive observer of the revi- talised Festival (and scene) of today, noting that much of its appeal to the new young audience lies in its conscious evocation of the past, rather than in current political activism.


Whilst the late Mike Seeger’s stipulation that performing acts demonstrate: “connec- tion in form and content to what we in gen- eral call the traditions of folk music” is some- what open to interpretation (Roger Waters, anyone?), Newport Folk Festival’s core values still manifest unexpectedly, as in 2014 when Jack White cut a White Stripes hit from his set and instead concluded with a Pete Seeger- inspired singalong of Goodnight Irene.


A useful and readable account of an important cultural event, I Got A Song is rec- ommended to anyone who’s watched Murray Lerner’s 1967 film Festival and wants to learn more.


wesleyan.edu Steve Hunt


Pinery Boys: Songs & Songcatching In The Lumberjack Era


Franz Rickaby University Of Wisconsin Press (ISBN 078-0-299-31264-0)


Just about the time when the vast logging industry with its myriad of winter shanty camps in the Upper Midwest states was giv- ing way to mechanisation, Franz Rickaby was wandering around with his fiddle and note- books collecting the songs from these lumber camps in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dako- tas. He prepared a representative selection


offered ideal conditions for songs to have an important function, each short-lived camp meant that songs spread and mutated quicker than they would in more stable settlements. He collected songs that came with immi- grants from various parts of Europe, some that you might expect (the ubiquitous Bar- bara Allen) but The Battle Of Harlaw comes as a surprise. The songs that were composed and transmitted orally in the camps are of particularly interest. Most are stories of the lives of the shanty boys or relate to particular incidents, but particularly striking and clever is Ye Noble Big Pine Tree, a sort of John Barley - corn tale of the life of a tree and its wood.


Of at least equal interest to the songs are


Rickaby’s comments on their context, their background and provenance and the lives and lifestyles of those who brought them about. His comprehensive approach to ‘song- catching’ seems quite modern especially when it is considered that he started his work at the same time that Sharp was in the Appalachians.


This is an important collection and it is good to see it becoming available again but two things make it even more of an interest- ing and informative read. Firstly is the inclu- sion of contemporary photos of the ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ quality which aug- ment that text considerably. Then there is the long introductory essay by his granddaughter born long after his death.


Gretchen Dykatra researched extensively the life of the grandfather she never knew and found that they shared a “restless curiosi- ty”. Another thing that they shared was the ability to convert their research into fascinat- ing and well-constructed prose.


www.uwpress.wisc.edu Vic Smith


Organising For Creative People


Sheila ChandraWatkins (ISBN 978-1-78678- 022-5) £10.99


Sheila Chandra is on a mission to save artists from the damaging myths that keep them in chaos. This book opens with a powerful testi- monial from the artist Stik, whom Sheila mentored from homelessness to successful artistry. From the outset it is a straight-talking, no-messing guide to getting your shit togeth- er as an artist. Within its welcomingly large- print pages, the romantic myth of the crazy artist is deconstructed and replaced with a comprehensive system for self-care – from streamlining shelving to organising last rites!


The nuts and bolts of surviving as an artist in a schizophrenic world which both fetishises and impoverishes artists, are rarely taught in arts education. So much financial anxiety, substance abuse and general bewil- derment could be spared if this practical, empathic advice was more widely available. The power-politics of the arts industries would also be challenged – Sheila’s suspicion that the “uncontrollable, creative chaos myth” has been spread to “make creative people malleable” rings true.


So this book is not just a tidy-your-desk manual – even though it may well inspire you, as it did me, to throw all your paperwork in a big pile, sort it out and feed a lot of it to the recycle bin – it is a handbook for self- mastery. Whilst there is plenty of detailed instruction, there is also space to “make this book your own”. Sheila anticipates and offers ways to navigate the questions, dilemmas and obstacles that arise in the course of a cre- ative career. Written in a conversational and friendly tone, this book offers the reader a highly intelligent consultation with a world-


class artist. Not only that, but as a map to building a solid foundation for artistry, you can consult it time and time again. Which for £10.99 is a pretty good deal.


www.watkinspublishing.com Katie Rose


Folk Horror: Hours Dread - ful And Things Strange


Adam Scovell Auteur Publishing (ISBN 978- 1-911325-22-2)


The term ‘Folk Horror’ has become pretty much ubiquitous since Mark Gatiss used it in his 2010 BBC 4 documentary A History of Hor- ror to describe Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, Piers Haggard’s Blood On Satan’s Claw and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man – the unholy trinity of late 1960s / early ’70s British cinema. In all three, the horror is locat- ed not in fantastical spectacle but in the para- noia, superstition and fear present in isolated communities and folklore-haunted landscapes.


Scovell’s fascinating and exhaustive study of the genre takes the same trilogy as its start point, searching back to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, to Ben Wheatley’s 2013 A Field In England. Readers should expect to spend hours watching YouTube and ponder- ing the affordability of DVD box sets. Those of my generation (I’m in my my mid-50s) will gain fresh insights into the television of their childhoods (and the respect and the envy of the young). I was just seven years old when my sister had a nightmare after watching The Owl Service and nine when I witnessed Doctor Who being assailed by possessed mor- ris dancers in the season finale of The Dae- mons. Ah, treasured memories. By the mid- 1970s, a fascination with neolithic henge monuments had been instilled in Britain’s kids by Children Of The Stones, and a life- long fear of drowning in cow shit by the public information film Apaches.


Sadly (for fR readers), this book doesn’t cover Folk Horror’s considerable influence on music ever since Marcus Keef’s iconic infrared shot of Mapledurham Mill adorned the gate- fold sleeve of Black Sabbath. From the horse skull beasts that cavort across the Sussex Downs in the video for Shirley Collins’ Death And The Lady and the Camberwick(er) Green animated villagers of Radiohead’s Burn The Witch, to literally everything that The Owl Service ever recorded, there’s a whole other book waiting to be written.


Meanwhile, Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror is an impeccably-researched film studies book by an author who is clearly both an academic authority and an instinctive fan. Did he do it right? He did it beautifully.


auteur.co.uk Stephen Hunt Folk! Horror! The Wicker Man…


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