A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Auntie Beeb
Monitor captures the sights and sounds of a ceilidh – a traditional Irish get-together, filled with music, singing and dancing – at Spiddal, Connemara.
Performances by local people are interspersed with beautifully-filmed snapshots of their daily life in the rugged west of Ireland countryside.
Clip taken from Monitor, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 11 March, 1962.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist had presented BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk from 1983 to 2010.
Folk musician and former BBC Scotland presenter Archie Fisher has died at the age of 86.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist had presented BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk from 1983 to 2010.
Born in Glasgow into a singing family, he released a number of albums over the years and was among the earliest steel-string players in British folk music.
In 2006, he was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours for services to traditional Scottish music.
In posts on social media, Scottish singing star Barbara Dickson described him as “the great Archie Fisher”.
She said: “My musical mentor and huge cultural icon here in Scotland. Rest in Peace, Archie. Bx”.
Scottish BBC radio and TV presenter Vic Galloway said: “I’m very sad to hear the news about the passing of Archie Fisher.
“I met him many times at the BBC over the years & he was always a real gentleman, as well as being a great broadcaster. Obviously he was a legend of Scottish folk & traditional music as well… Archie RIP.”
Scottish folk singer Iona Fyfe said: “So sad to hear of the passing of Archie Fisher. A true folk music hero and inspiration. Rest easy Archie. Thoughts with the family and all who loved Archie and his music.”
Fisher, who died on Saturday, moved to Edinburgh in 1960 and lived in the south of Scotland in his final years.
Source: Folk musician and BBC presenter Archie Fisher dies aged 86
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in September 2016.
Annie Briggs was a leading figure in the English folk revival of the early 1960s, inspiring Bert Jansch (famously, in Blackwater Side), Sandy Denny, The Watersons and many more. But she was a restless spirit, travelling through the British Isles and Ireland, finding songs and living close to the earth.
As Sandy Denny depicted her in The Pond and the Stream:
Annie wanders on the land.
She loves the freedom of the air.
She finds a friend in ev’ry place she goes.
There’s always a face she knows.
I wish that I was there.
And so she remains, now a grandmother living by the water in the west of Scotland. She’s always resolutely resisted celebrity and commercial success, withdrawing from the folk scene in the early 1970s, but her legacy – her voice and her attitude – continue to inspire and to carry a link to life as it was once lived in ‘the imagined village’.
Annie talks to Alan Hall about childhood holidays singing along with the waves, writing songs while living on a beach in west Ireland, her garden and the wildlife that she shares it with, and the ballad tradition she discovered as a teenager and that she ‘belongs to’.
Producer: Alan Hall
Sam Lee and forty members of London’s Roundhouse Choir perform a capella at the Folk Awards 2016 in London.
lyrics
I once was a ploughboy, but a soldier I’m now,
I courted wee lovely Molly, as I followed the plough;
I courted wee lovely Molly, at the age of sixteen,
But now I must leave her, for to serve James, my king.