Folk

Brian Ferguson: Trad scene is booming, but can anyone replace Runrig?

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Manran
Trad scene favourites Manran. Can they fill Runrig’s footsteps?

The Elephant Sessions, Tide Lines, Skipinnish and Manran are part of a new wave of bands from the Highlands and Islands filling venues up and down the country

Not so long ago it was a case of feast or famine for many of Scotland’s musicians. The summer and winter festivals were still a time for hectic schedules, long journeys and playing to packed crowds in concert venues, village halls and tents across the UK. For those who associate themselves with the ‘trad’ scene, Celtic Connections was a rare chance to take to a much bigger stage than they were used to, and win new fans perhaps unfamiliar with their music [ . . . ]

Source: Brian Ferguson: Trad scene is booming, but can anyone replace Runrig?

The vibrant tradition of English folk song | The Spectator

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After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s passion — I am none the wiser as to why folk song collectors assumed that a man singing in a pub for free drinks in, say, 1890 or 1920 was de facto a folk singer? A singer of folk songs, yes. A folk singer, maybe not. Such men were ‘professional’ singers of popular songs. They sung what people wished to hear, for recompense: a pint.

If a collector was lucky — and they often weren’t — he might hear on a particular evening the weal and woe and muck and mire of ‘auld ballets’, but they would be buried amid what the 19th-century ballad editor Francis James Child called ‘a veritable dunghill’ of broadside ballads and music-hall pastiches [ . . . ] More at: The vibrant tradition of English folk song | The Spectator