The genre is reaching more audiences than ever but two historic events are facing cancellation and scores of others are fighting to stay afloat
On an August evening in the idyllic grounds of a country estate on the border of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, a rising star of folk music, Katherine Priddy, will perform her set at the Towersey village festival. It is the event’s 60th edition and also its last.
Up to 10,000 people attend each year. But after suffering heavy losses since entertainment re-emerged from lockdowns, the Heap family, who run Towersey, have bowed to economic reality. Their festival is among the latest casualties in a crisis threatening the future of gatherings that have been a fixture of the British summer since the Fifties.
“It’s devastating to see Towersey close,” says Priddy, 29. “Ticket-buying habits have not returned to what they were pre-Covid, but this is a wonderful festival in so many ways and its loss is awful for those who have been going for years.”
Thirty miles away, the village of Cropredy in Oxfordshire is the venue for another endangered festival, also in August, the annual reunion of past and present members of the celebrated folk-rock band Fairport Convention.
Towersey and Cropredy are not alone in facing bleak times. The Association of Independent Festivals says more than 40 UK events have been postponed, cancelled or lost altogether this year. Faced with a surge in operating costs, at least 170 have disappeared in five years.
Eliza Carthy, a singer and fiddler and president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was shocked to learn of Towersey’s closure. “I feel it personally because it was the first festival to give me a solo gig, more than 30 years ago,” she says. “I was absolutely terrified but ended up loving every minute.”
Terry Donahue, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks, Dave Swarbrick and Trevor Lucas of Fairport Convention performing in the garden of The Brasenose Arms in Cropredy on July 22, 1973. This event became the precursor for the annual Cropredy Festival
BRIAN COOKE/REDFERNS
Carthy, a member of Britain’s pre-eminent folk dynasty as the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, believes folk music is at a crossroads, events folding despite large, loyal followings, while, paradoxically, some observers see a resurgence driven by inventive young musicians pushing at old barriers and embracing other genres.
A brief article and playlist in which British folk singers select their favourite British folk songs and explain what makes them special.
By John Wilks
When we first came to traditional folk music, we stood at the foot of the mountain and wondered at the sheer size of what loomed ahead. There’s just so much of it – we can fully understand why many people might find it daunting and put it much further down their bucket list. As many of our readers will have experienced themselves, however, if you can find an initial foothold then you’ve found your way onto a joyful exploration and adventure that will likely last you a lifetime.
Finding that first chink isn’t easy, though. You might find it by chance – a centuries-old song that grabs you and sticks with you and makes you wonder what else might be out there – or you might find that someone offers you a leg-up.
Over the last few years, we’ve had the great fortune to chat and spend time with some of Britain’s better known folk performers. The thing about folk music and its exponents, of course, is that none of these people are necessarily ‘the best’ at what they do. After all, each have tales about some chap in some pub somewhere who can play the hind legs off all the donkeys, but chose not to make a career out of it, or someone legendary who passed away years ago (but, boy, you shoulda heard them play the spoons).
That said, it’s worth noting that the people who helped us with these articles do make their living by singing traditional folk songs, and probably spend most of their waking hours immersed in some part of that world.
A playlist: Some of the best traditional folk songs
This British Folk Songs Playlist series was intended to be a fortnightly collection of snippets and recommendations from various well-known folk singers living and working in Britain today, each talking about the old ballads and folk songs that inspired them, offering newcomers to the genre a leg-up so that they can find their way forwards. I hope you find it useful.
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“I’m not sure that you can separate the singer from the song at the level that gets under my skin. Part of things being of ‘the oral tradition’ means it deeply matters to me who is singing or playing, and whether they can communicate stuff.
“So my choice would specifically be Nic Jones’ live version of ‘Clyde Water’. He told me that he felt that he missed the mark on the recorded version (recorded as ‘The Drowned Lovers’ onPenguin Eggs) and the arrangement he was playing live just before his accident is one of the greatest pieces of storytelling that I’ve ever heard. It’s available on the Game Set Match compilation, but my favourite recording comes from an Italian bootleg from the ‘Teatro Bonci’ in Cesena.
“Folk singers sometimes have a habit of thinking that singing something slowly makes it more profound (when, actually, it just makes it take longer to get to the important bit). Nic had skills almost comparable with a great Shakespearean actor of knowing which part of a line contains all the weight, and how to pace it so you get caught up in a tidal wave as the story reaches its conclusion. There are other long ballad performances which do that for me (including things by Martin Carthy and June Tabor) but Nic was the master of it and that song is the peak of his ability.
“It’s not a version that you will find in a book in Cecil Sharp House of course – he made it out of parts from different versions and crafted it to fit in his own vocabulary. And that’s what the best people do – they make the song their own truth instead of someone else’s. And thats what traditional music is about for me – finding your own truth in something that other people owned before you came along, and that other people will pick up when you’re done with it.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Clyde Water’?
As a Child ballad, ‘Clyde Water’ also takes the name ‘The Mother’s Malison’. Child noted three places of origin, including a collection of it from “Mrs Brown’s recitation, apparently in 1800”. Reinhard Zierke notes at least five sound recordings of it before Nic Jones’ performance was released on Penguin Eggs in 1980, so it’s not surprising to find that – as Jim Moray says above – what may be the best-known version is an amalgamation of several others.
If anything, this wonderful recording points to the danger of assuming that ‘a folk song’ sung by a performer is an accurate representation of how it may have been in the past. As we’ll see in our forthcoming interview with folk song historian, Steve Roud (check back next week) – and to pick up on Jim Moray’s point – a performance of a folk song in modern times can only ever be a snapshot of something organic and transitory. The chances of it sounding very much like the original are slim indeed.
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“My choice of song is ‘Adieu, Adieu’. It got to me first through The Watersons’ album For Pence and Spicy Ale and also Martin Simpson’s album, Kind Letters, both of which I took out from Huddersfield Library in my mid-teens and both of which are still in my top 10 favourite albums of all time.
“I love the tune so much, and throughout the song’s many versions, interpretations and performances (it’s also known as ‘Newlyn Town’, ‘The Flash Lad’, ‘Wild and Wicked Youth’) I really like the chap’s forthrightness when faced with his oncoming execution. It’s one hell of a cinematic song.”
The sleeve notes to The Watersons’ version describe it as, “The ace and deuce of robber songs”, noting that, “English, Irish and American versions of it abound.” However, it’s Eliza Carthy who sums it up in the most pithy manner, writing in her sleeve notes to Fishes & Fine Yellow Sand, that this is:
“…the story of the tragic Good Time Boy from Newry Town who just robbed a few people who had far too much of everything. Did them a favour really. Less for them to worry their pretty little heads about. And one does what one has to for one’s girl friend who so likes shopping. Sooo likes it…
These songs of terminal regret were literally two a penny in the 17th to 19th centuries. The ballad writers of the time would sell the songs under the gallows just as the unfortunate crime was getting his or her desserts – just or otherwise – right there and right then. Here in its cradle is the modern music industry.”
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“It was so vital sounding – about a place in London. The woman saying, ‘yeah, I’ll take you all on’. It just had a fierceness I could get behind. I first heard Martin Carthy playing it in his garden for the BBC Folk Britannia programme. That is the only version you want.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Georgie’?
‘Georgie’ (also known as ‘Geordie’) has been recorded by a great number of people, with Nicola Kearey’s version (on the Stick In the Wheel From Here field recordings compilation) perhaps being the most recent. As usual, a comprehensive list of recorded performances can be found on the Mainly Norfolk website, but key versions include those sung by Martin Carthy (as mentioned above), Sandy Denny, Shirley Collins, Peter Bellamy, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl (at least twice).
While Nicola places her version in London (as do many other singers), approximately 360 entries can be found in the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House relating to this song, with versions having turned up everywhere from London Bridge to Aberdeenshire to Nebraska. Cecil Sharp alone seems to have collected over 20 fragments in places as far flung as Cannington, Somerset, to Villamont, Virginia.
While many singers attribute their version to Cecil Sharp’s collecting of it in East Coker, Somerset (sung to him by a chap named Charles Neville on September 3rd, 1908), A. L. Lloyd felt that it owed its existence to, “several different ballad strains. The ballads in question are a traditional Scottish ballad, the earliest known version dating from the end of the 18th century, and two English broadsides, both of which date from the 17th century.”
As great and robust songs go, it doesn’t get much greater than ‘Georgie’. It’s a marvellous example of one of those wonderfully well-travelled folk songs, able to adapt to most surroundings.
‘Cariad Cyntaf’: chosen by Ffion Mair of The Foxglove Trio
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“The traditional Welsh love song Cariad Cyntaf is a great song. The lyrics are powerful (lots of hyperbole about how wonderful a woman is – the song title translates into English as ‘First Love’) and the tune has a lot of passion. It’s short and has an irregularly-lengthed last line. These two things mean there’s plenty of scope to play around with timings and arrangements.
It has a special place in my heart because it was when I heard Julie Murphy and Dylan Fowler’s arrangement of this song on their CD Ffawd that I realised how much you can play around with folk songs/tunes. It’s also a special song for the band – we all played versions of it before we formed and our current arrangement came about by playing two previous arrangements on top of each other! It’s one of our most played songs to this day.”
Ffion also keeps a blog focusing on traditional Welsh songs, their origins, their meanings and the performances of them. On the subject of ‘Cariad Cyntaf’ she writes:
“In the song we hear someone telling his lover that he loves her and that he wants to marry her. It’s a monologue so we don’t get to hear her response. I always tell audiences that they have to guess what her answer was to the question about getting married but that the sad melody gives us a clue. But perhaps it’s not a simple matter of unrequited love – perhaps the girl does love him back but something, such as meddling parents, is going to keep them apart which is why the boy is lovesick and the tune is so mournful.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Cariad Cyntaf’?
Tough question, unless you can speak Welsh (drop me a line on Twitter if you can and you have any information). However, a lovely anecdote concerning this song and the Welsh folk song collector, Ruth Lewis, appears in Phyllis Kinney’s book, Welsh Traditional Music.
“In 1909, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales held in London, J. Lloyd Williams gave a lecture on collecting Welsh folk songs, which resulted in tremendous enthusiasm for this aspect of Welsh traditional life. Despite this, some highly regarded Welsh musicians still maintained that everything of value had already been published, and any other folk tunes that might be discovered would prove to be worthless…
Wherever possible, Ruth Lewis tried to find someone who knew the area and could locate suitable people willing to sing into the phonograph. Sometimes, to get them started, her daughter Kitty would sing a few Welsh airs and with patience they got songs from farmers and blacksmiths, weavers and housewives, including some country-dwellers who could only speak Welsh. In this way they collected a number of songs, some of which were published, but many more can be found in her unpublished collections in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the Welsh National History Museum in St Fagans…
‘Y-Cariad Cyntaf’, with words and music from an earlier period, was transcribed from her phonograph recording of the singing of an Aberystwyth van driver.”
Since the auspicious singing of said Aberystwyth van driver, several people have recorded ‘Cariad Cyntaf’, including Bryn Terfel (performed on the Last Night of the Proms, 2008), Meredydd Evans (a great, scratchy old recording), 9Bach, Elin Manahan Thomas and Wyn Pearson. The Foxglove Trio’s version of the song can be found on their 2013 EP, Like Diamond Glances.
Mohammad Syfkhan trained as a surgical nurse but fled Syria after Islamic State killed one of his sons. Settled in Ireland, he is now creating vital cross-cultural bonds
t Lankum’s sold-out concert at Cork Opera House last summer, their sharp-suited support act had the crowd in the palm of his bouzouki-strumming hand. It was Kurdish Syrian singer and musician Mohammad Syfkhan, whose debut album I Am Kurdish has become part of a thriving, collaborative music scene in one of Ireland’s smallest counties.
A 57-year-old father of five whose music is a thrilling mix of electrified Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish traditional songs, covers and originals, Syfkhan arrived in Ireland as part of a refugee settlement scheme in December 2016 with his teacher wife, Huda, and young daughter, Noor. “I love music that reminds me of the past,” he writes over email (spoken English interviews are tricky for him, but his written English is expressive and warm). “I usually love music that brings joy because it makes me forget a little of the pain of the past.”
In Syria, music fitted around work. He began learning the bouzouki (a long-necked Anatolian lute) while studying to become a surgical nurse in Aleppo, moving to Raqqa in his mid-20s after he qualified. He then founded the popular Al-Rabie Band, playing festivals, concerts and parties throughout the ensuing decades. Then, in 2011, the Syrian civil war began. Two years later, Raqqa was taken over by the Syrian National Coalition, and then by Islamic State, which murdered one of Syfkhan’s sons, Fadi, a year later.
Syfkhan was told the news by one of the jihadi terrorists, calling on his son’s mobile phone. “When I try to relax, I look at pictures of my children when they were young and try to draw a beautiful future for them,” he writes. Not able to flee Syria together as a large family, his three other older sons found refuge in Germany while Mohammad, Huda and Noor made it to Greece by February 2016. This trio arrived in Ireland 10 months later, housed in Mosney Village, a former Butlin’s holiday camp repurposed as an asylum centre.
Syfkhan played his first gig there a few weeks later. “It was during Christmas and approximately 100 to 150 people attended it. It was nice to see this audience. It was a special and unforgettable party.” Singing was his way of communicating, he says. “I did not speak English well, so music was the language I spoke to everyone because music is the language of the world. It talks about love of all kinds, the love of people for each other, and love of the homeland.”
Seven months later, he settled in a council house in Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim and started introducing himself to other musically minded people. He met Nyahh Records’ Willie Stewart in 2018, who was DJing at a local event celebrating the culture of new international communities in Country Leitrim. Syfkhan asked Stewart if he could plug his bouzouki into his mixing desk so he could play, which filled the room with adults and children doing traditional Syrian and Kurdish dances. “I was both stunned and excited,” Stewart recalls. “I immediately began to start booking him gigs.”
Stewart also runs experimental all-dayers called Hunters Moon with sound artist Natalia Beylis, where Syfkhan watched improvising cellist Eimear Reidy and saxophonist and sound artist Cathal Roche perform. He later asked them to play on his album; Reidy learned about his use of precise glissandi – glides between notes – and the 24-tone Arab tone tuning system, calling their collaboration “intense, musically enriching and joyful”. Concertina artist Cormac Begley, singer-songwriter Ciaran Rock and Alan Woods of the Traditional Music Archive also get mentioned warmly in Syfkhan’s email (“I have met wonderful musicians”).
I Am Kurdish includes luscious covers of 1970s Turkish hit Leylim Ley, Baligh Hamdim’s A Thousand and One Nights and Kurdish songwriter Mihemed Elî Şakir’s gorgeous Put a Coffee in a Glass. The title track, an original with Syfkhan’s deep, husky voice in full flow, is also a highlight. It’s made Stewart reflect on how the Kurds, who now number up to 45 million people worldwide, “have been brutalised and scattered throughout the Middle East and have never had a place to call their own. The fact that Mohammad chose this title for the album has a lot of power behind it.”
Mohammad Syfkhan performing on the bouzouki.
Photograph: Caroline Minshall
Another friend that Syfkhan calls “a brother whom I cherish”, the well-known Irish poet and playwright Vincent Woods, agrees: “I think he really misses the depth of that connection.” Syfkhan, Huda and Noor act in a 2021 film Woods made with choreographer Edwina Guckian, Hunger’s Way/Bealach an Fhéir Ghortaigh, commissioned for the Strokestown international poetry festival. It begins with the Syfkhans walking to the National Famine Museum, where Noor, 11 at the time of filming, does Irish dancing at the door. The film ends with them entering.
Mohammad Syfkhan trained as a surgical nurse but fled Syria after Islamic State killed one of his sons. Settled in Ireland, he is now creating vital cross-cultural bonds
By Jude Rogers
At Lankum’s sold-out concert at Cork Opera House last summer, their sharp-suited support act had the crowd in the palm of his bouzouki-strumming hand. It was Kurdish Syrian singer and musician Mohammad Syfkhan, whose debut album I Am Kurdish has become part of a thriving, collaborative music scene in one of Ireland’s smallest counties.
A 57-year-old father of five whose music is a thrilling mix of electrified Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish traditional songs, covers and originals, Syfkhan arrived in Ireland as part of a refugee settlement scheme in December 2016 with his teacher wife, Huda, and young daughter, Noor. “I love music that reminds me of the past,” he writes over email (spoken English interviews are tricky for him, but his written English is expressive and warm). “I usually love music that brings joy because it makes me forget a little of the pain of the past.”
In Syria, music fitted around work. He began learning the bouzouki (a long-necked Anatolian lute) while studying to become a surgical nurse in Aleppo, moving to Raqqa in his mid-20s after he qualified. He then founded the popular Al-Rabie Band, playing festivals, concerts and parties throughout the ensuing decades. Then, in 2011, the Syrian civil war began. Two years later, Raqqa was taken over by the Syrian National Coalition, and then by Islamic State, which murdered one of Syfkhan’s sons, Fadi, a year later.
Syfkhan was told the news by one of the jihadi terrorists, calling on his son’s mobile phone. “When I try to relax, I look at pictures of my children when they were young and try to draw a beautiful future for them,” he writes. Not able to flee Syria together as a large family, his three other older sons found refuge in Germany while Mohammad, Huda and Noor made it to Greece by February 2016. This trio arrived in Ireland 10 months later, housed in Mosney Village, a former Butlin’s holiday camp repurposed as an asylum centre.
Syfkhan played his first gig there a few weeks later. “It was during Christmas and approximately 100 to 150 people attended it. It was nice to see this audience. It was a special and unforgettable party.” Singing was his way of communicating, he says. “I did not speak English well, so music was the language I spoke to everyone because music is the language of the world. It talks about love of all kinds, the love of people for each other, and love of the homeland.”
Seven months later, he settled in a council house in Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim and started introducing himself to other musically minded people. He met Nyahh Records’ Willie Stewart in 2018, who was DJing at a local event celebrating the culture of new international communities in Country Leitrim. Syfkhan asked Stewart if he could plug his bouzouki into his mixing desk so he could play, which filled the room with adults and children doing traditional Syrian and Kurdish dances. “I was both stunned and excited,” Stewart recalls. “I immediately began to start booking him gigs.”
Stewart also runs experimental all-dayers called Hunters Moon with sound artist Natalia Beylis, where Syfkhan watched improvising cellist Eimear Reidy and saxophonist and sound artist Cathal Roche perform. He later asked them to play on his album; Reidy learned about his use of precise glissandi – glides between notes – and the 24-tone Arab tone tuning system, calling their collaboration “intense, musically enriching and joyful”. Concertina artist Cormac Begley, singer-songwriter Ciaran Rock and Alan Woods of the Traditional Music Archive also get mentioned warmly in Syfkhan’s email (“I have met wonderful musicians”).
I Am Kurdish includes luscious covers of 1970s Turkish hit Leylim Ley, Baligh Hamdim’s A Thousand and One Nights and Kurdish songwriter Mihemed Elî Şakir’s gorgeous Put a Coffee in a Glass. The title track, an original with Syfkhan’s deep, husky voice in full flow, is also a highlight. It’s made Stewart reflect on how the Kurds, who now number up to 45 million people worldwide, “have been brutalised and scattered throughout the Middle East and have never had a place to call their own. The fact that Mohammad chose this title for the album has a lot of power behind it.”
Mohammad Syfkhan performing on the bouzouki.
Photograph: Caroline Minshall
Another friend that Syfkhan calls “a brother whom I cherish”, the well-known Irish poet and playwright Vincent Woods, agrees: “I think he really misses the depth of that connection.” Syfkhan, Huda and Noor act in a 2021 film Woods made with choreographer Edwina Guckian, Hunger’s Way/Bealach an Fhéir Ghortaigh, commissioned for the Strokestown international poetry festival. It begins with the Syfkhans walking to the National Famine Museum, where Noor, 11 at the time of filming, does Irish dancing at the door. The film ends with them entering.
Woods hopes it underlines how displacement continues to be part of Ireland’s history, as “so many displaced people now are coming to Ireland in search of a new home”. He and Syfkhan have also discussed the common ground between Kurdish and Irish cultures. “They both have storytelling at the heart of them and are a key part of a cultural identity that had to struggle to preserve itself.”
“I love these beautiful people,” Syfkhan writes when I ask him specifically about Ireland. “I love music that talks about its cultural heritage, and music that is accompanied by dances, agility and footwork. I thank Ireland, the wonderful country, and the government, for everything they have done to support people.” For the many lives he has already touched, that gratitude flows both ways.
Mekons’ Sally Tims with Lu Edmonds. Edmonds describes his new recording as “just a tiny slice of the mountain music of Tajikistan
A glimpse of Tajikistan’s roots musical traditions and the new music Tajik musicians are developing .
By Andrew Cronshaw
Tajikistan bordering on Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and China, is a mountainous country with a population of about ten million, the great majority of whom are Tajik. It became independent in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. This album is what British musician Lu Edmonds describes as “just a tiny slice of the mountain music of Tajikistan, whose rich traditions have soaked up the traffic of the Silk Roads and beyond for thousands of years.”
Lu Edmonds, a member of Public Image Ltd and at various times of 3 Mustaphas 3, The Mekons,Billy Bragg’s Blokes, Les Triaboliques and many more bands stretching back to and through punk times, didn’t so much get lost in Tajikistan as sucked in. At first, in 2004, it was as an interpreter for a biodiversity project. (He speaks Russian which, while Tajiks generally speak Tajik, is used as an inter-ethnic means of communication). But he got more involved, meeting and helping musicians create performances (which have now grown to include the annual Roof Of The World festival in the high Pamirs), get their instruments repaired with the help of London luthier Andrew Scrimshaw, and also surreptitiously digitising a mass of recordings of musical material from the old Soviet archives in the country’s capital of Dushanbe.
The recordings on this album aren’t from archives, though. They’re from 2008 when, with the help of Taneli Bruun of Helsinki’s Global Music Centre, Edmonds and key Dushanbe musician Iqbal Zavkibekov, put together a 16-track recording setup in Dushanbe’s Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments, founded by Zavkibekov’s musician and film-star father Gurminj. We’re not talking Abbey Road here. It was -20°C outside, and although the museum was heated, much of the warmth came from the musicians who packed in to grasp an opportunity to record. It’s only now that those recordings have been cherry-picked and mixed (in London by Leo Abrahams) to make the album.
The first five tracks are by the group Mizrob, featuring Iqbal Zavkibekov on setor (Tajik long-necked steel-strung lute) and guitar, singer Davlat Nasri, who also plays harmonium and dotar (another long-necked lute), and percussionist Zarif Pulodov. In melodic form and sound it could broadly be described as having a middle-eastern feel, with a modal melody over drone and rippling darabukka or tabla-type percussion, but while a root drone is implied there are also harmonising lines. The first two tracks are instrumental; in the third enter Nasri’s vocals, perhaps comparable to some of the melismatic declamatory singing of the Indian sub-continent, while “Hurshedam,” with its winding harmonium melody line under Nasri’s singing, is in a flamenco-like mode. (I’m making these observations as description, not analysis).
The recordings on this album aren’t from archives, though. They’re from 2008 when, with the help of Taneli Bruun of Helsinki’s Global Music Centre, Edmonds and key Dushanbe musician Iqbal Zavkibekov, put together a 16-track recording setup in Dushanbe’s Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments, founded by Zavkibekov’s musician and film-star father Gurminj. We’re not talking Abbey Road here. It was -20°C outside, and although the museum was heated, much of the warmth came from the musicians who packed in to grasp an opportunity to record. It’s only now that those recordings have been cherry-picked and mixed (in London by Leo Abrahams) to make the album.