f74 Fifty Percent Folk
A Sussex University conference titled Locating Women In The Folk proved to be inspiring for Elizabeth Kinder – academic but witty and passionate (even if with the odd clash!)
he assumptions that frame and fuel our lives fit us like comfort- able old socks. We wake up wearing them and knowing them so well that we don’t bother to look at or question them. So ordinarily, though they may be full of holes, we still feel them fitting snugly when we go to bed. But June 9th, the date of the Locating Women In The Folk confer- ence – subtitled “Perspectives on women’s contributions to folk song, folklore and cultural traditions” – was no ordinary day.
T
The conference was held at the Uni- versity of Sussex, nestling between Brighton and Lewes in the South Downs, and I was on the train down from London reading Shirley Collins’ insightful, gor- geously evocative, warm and witty new autobiography. Her own contribution to English folk, though never advertised, is self-evident, as is her love of the Downs where she grew up and now lives.
I was too absorbed by her writing to care about the painfully early hour and laughed out loud at the passage on page 115 outlining how a university gig contract had billed her and her sister as “Shortlegs and Dolly Collins.”
Turning up with some minutes to spare, I bumped into Shirley in the audito- rium. “Don’t call her ‘Shortlegs’. Don’t call her ‘Shortlegs’.”
“Hello Shirley!” I said. Phew. “Or ‘Shortlegs’ as I now think of you.”
She laughed. “Hello! Sit down Eliza- beth.” Other local folk legends Tina and Vic Smith kindly budged up one and I sat between Vic and Shirley, feeling happy and very much that I’d arrived.
Nicola Kearey of Stick In The Wheel stopped by to give Shirley a copy of her band’s album, From Here: English Folk Field Recordings, released last year to great acclaim. She wondered, given that it features recordings by folk luminaries young and old, male and female, in places of their own choosing, if Shirley might consider participating in the next one.
Shirley had spent some time in her youth risking her life with Alan Lomax, making field recordings of unknown poor black and white singers across the Ameri- can South amidst the seething unrest of a nascent Civil Rights movement and contin- uing atrocities perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and the systemic racism that support-
ed them. She questioned the term ‘field recording’ being extended to well-known singers, like her friends Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick, in their kitchens or any other place of their choosing, given that they were a) professional singers and b) in a place probably featuring hot and cold running water, an electricity supply and minimal chance of sudden violent death. Not that she mentioned point b).
Nicola replied that to her a field recording was really something not done in a studio and the point of her record was to explore “what ‘here’ meant through the music in a personal setting.” So Shirley agreed to give it a listen, as Dr Margaretta Jolly walked up to the mic to deliver the opening speech. But seeds of dissent were sown that would burst out in a few hours’ time.
D
r Jolly (Director of the Univer- sity’s Centre of Life History and Life Writing Research) gave us the heads up on the inspired collaboration
between herself, EFDSS and Sussex Tradi- tions (set up to explore, nurture and advance the culture and heritage of Sus- sex folk traditions) that had drawn all of us here to a full house. It had all been organised by folk singer, dancer and Library/Archives Director of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Laura Smyth, with author, folk expert and Vice Chair of Sussex Traditions, Steve Roud, singer and Sussex Traditions executive Laura Hocken- hull, and singer, researcher and Sussex Tra- ditions trustee Dr Elizabeth Bennet.
The idea for the conference sprang from a paper that Dr Bennett gave, based on the last chapter of her PhD thesis, that focused on the life and work of Dorothy Marshall, who collected songs in Sussex at the beginning of the last century.
It’s a powerful ‘reflective account’ that shows the author’s experience in relation to the work so that we might (as she quotes) “see and rediscover the past not as a series of events, but as a series of scenes, inventions, emotions, images, and stories.” It means that the past springs to life in the present, as it does today, with the people who created it being introduced to us like intimate friends.
Photo: Tunde Alabi Hundeyin
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