Cecil Sharpe

Debating about whether we should be debating folk music

by
Ewan MacColl

By Jim Carroll | The Ballad Tree: Traditional Folk Ballads and Songs

I put this up earlier on a thread on this debating and listening to folk music forum, debating about whether we should be debating folk music (you work it out – I can’t)

Rather than it get lost in the ever descending debates, I thought it might be debated here as it affects my decision whether to go on debating Ewan MacColl and the Critics group ( a debatable question for some) Somebody suggested that he will stop attacking MacColl if I will stop debating his work (a debatable proposal, if ever there was one) 😈

Ewan McColl Bert Lloyd and Cecil Sharp were the most industrious and important benefactors, folk song has ever had It has always been nigh on impossible to discus MaColl’s work on singing because of attacks on his character.

As you say, “the real point, people need to talk about the songs as songs, traditions as traditions, and techniques as techniques.” MacColl and the Critics Group took that further than anybody on the folk scene has ever done – how can we possibly discuss if is that work is a no-go area ?

I’ve just experienced a somewhat unpleasant interval here because I criticised what I believe to be bad singing – my criticism was deleted – It was rationally laid out in detail and put in polite terms yet it was removed Today’s folk scene wants only praise for its stars – I learned that the hard way, that does not help either the songs we are here to promote nor those who have put in he work to preserve them

Since Dave Harker’s ‘Fakelore’, all Sharp’s work has been changed from England’s introduction to it’s folk culture to “the invention of Victorian Middle Class ladies and gentlemen on bicycles” – this by the academics who are now claiming that “the “Voice of the People” was really the work of bad poets scribbling songs in hurry, not only does this undermine working people as culture makers – it raises the question “Why the hell should we waste our time defending yesterday’s pop songs written by the fore-runners of today’s gutter press?

Recently A L Lloyd has been exhumed in order to prove he was a fake who sold us forged folk songs.

Pretty soon we will have no academic folk history just as Britain no longer has a folk scene worth talking about

The recent raise in membership shows that our problems lie within our own ranks – the potential is obvious and to me, the answer is just as obvious.

We need to discuss it critically and openly. If we don’t this site may as become an “all good fellows and fellowesses backslapping brigade.

Make up your mind time, I think. Discussion, even argument is the way we share ideas – it has been part of my education for as long as I have been on the folk scene; without it, I’d probably have become bored with listening to the same old same old songs and gone and joined my mates in Mathew Street paying homage to The Beatles. I’ve been around folk song for over sixty years now and I’m still learning – a permanent student, you might say.

Can I just add one more thing to this over-long ramble, In the 1970s Pat and I got involved in a rather disturbing discussion regarding the singing of two Traveler brothers – both had their family’s traditional songs, one sang them using a superb traditional style, the other preferred County and Western Americanese – the songs included The Outlandish Knight and The Grey Cock

As so-called ‘experts’ we were asked to judge – we declined,

The argument continued – while we watched – it got more and more heated till we began to think it was time to leave.

It suddenly stopped – arms were thrown around shoulders and pints were consumed amicably – I went home pissed – Pat was driving.

These were the non-literate “Nackers” who are regarded as violent and dishonest sub-humans not fit to live among ‘decent human beings like us”.

Makes you think, doesn’t it, it does me.

I shall go on discussing and arguing as long as I have puff – if not here, somewhere else.

https://ewanmaccoll.bandcamp.com/…/lang-johnny-more…

‘I’ve got to stop somewhere!’ How Steve Roud compiled his epic folk song archive

by
Cecil Sharpe

The former librarian has spent more than 50 years compiling the Roud Folk Song Index, cataloguing 25,000 traditional songs. So how did he do it? And what exactly is a folk song?

 

By Andrea Valentino

When Steve Roud was young, he began collecting records. Hardly unusual for a child of the 1950s – but this boy from south London was different. Not content with just listening to LPs, Roud began indexing them – his own and ones he found mentioned in newspapers and magazines. He used old shoe boxes as a primitive filing system and wrote the titles on 5×3 inch record cards that his mum bought him once a week. He soon realised his hobby was turning into something more. “Without knowing it,” he says, “I was becoming a librarian.”

 

Soon enough, Roud would become one for real, working much of his career for the London borough of Croydon. His infatuation with indexing would persist too, those shoe boxes finally swelling into something remarkable. Even as a teenager, Roud had been fascinated by folk music – how across the centuries, dozens of voices could send songs shooting countless different ways, their titles and lyrics shifting even as their cores remained the same. As he grew up, armed with proper training and new technology, Roud took to collating this bounty in earnest, hunting down leads and developing an elegant method to trace a song’s heritage.

 

The result, the product of 52 years of effort, is the Roud Folk Song Index. Including hundreds of thousands of references to tens of thousands of songs, Roud’s work spans the anglophone oral tradition, taking in English villages, Appalachian hilltops and harbours in the Caribbean. The index has become indispensable for folk fans worldwide, bolstering genealogy projects and inspiring musicians. In its size and ambition, Roud’s project speaks to the challenges of constraining such a varied tradition – and even to deciding what folk music actually is.

People have systematically collected traditional English music for more than a century. In the years before the first world war, enthusiasts such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp scoured country lanes and village inns for people to record, worried that industrialisation and urban life would soon wash traditional tunes away. Musicians both, Williams and Sharp also wanted folk melodies to inform English classical music, just as Sibelius did in Finland or Antonín Dvořák in Bohemia. Visiting King’s Lynn, in 1905, Vaughan Williams spent time at the Tilden Smith, a pub where local fishers were sheltering from January storms. The songs Vaughan Williams heard there may have influenced some of his most famous compositions, appropriate for a man who once called music “the expression of the soul of a nation”. These early English collectors, for their part, were shadowed by colleagues across Britain and Ireland, and in the New World.

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