The Hidden Musicians. Ruth Finnegan
there were about a dozen folk bands of one kind or another in and around Milton Keynes. Some were ephemeral, but all had put on at least some performances. They included the Cock and Bull Band (mixed amateur and professional); the Boodlum Jug Stompers; the Hogstymen; the Hole in the Head Gang; Merlin’s Isle; Pennyroyal; the Whittlebury Residents; the Green Grass Band; Streets Ahead (folk rock); Threepenny Bit (a school group); the short-lived and part classical England’s Lane; and various school and church groups. In addition there were the barn dance or ‘ceilidh’ bands: Music Folk; the Gaberlunzies (and its stretched version, the Gaberlunzies Elastic Band); the Banana Barn Dance Band; and Sunday Suits and Muddy Boots.
These bands performed in the local folk clubs just described, and for local fêtes, weddings or dances. Some also appeared on an occasional or regular basis at pubs and social clubs. Outdoor events and local folk festivals were also popular occasions for performance. Some of these, like the Cock and Bull Festival, were short-lived only, but there were also annual events like the one-day Black Horse Folk Festival. The largest regular gathering was the ‘Folk on the Green’ festival in Stony Stratford (figure 12). This had taken place yearly in June since 1973 and by the early 1980s was attracting 2,000–3,000 people a time, having become accepted, as a local newspaper rightly expressed it, ‘as one of the great family events of the year, now an established tradition’. It was the brain-child of a local primary teacher and a low-cost event dependent on local performers rather than imported professionals. The 1982 ‘Folk on the Green’, for example, included seven named local artists performing as individuals, plus the local groups Pennyroyal, the Hole in the Head Gang, the Stony Stratford Morris Men, Old Mother Redcaps and Mentil and the Lentils, and other years followed the same pattern – a magnificent show-piece of local folk talent.
The dance or ‘ceilidh’ bands (as they were usually referred to) formed another category, specialising in playing for country-type dancing. Such bands had been growing enormously in popularity and there was scarcely a PTA dance or sports club social for which the organisers did not at least consider the option of hiring one of the local folk dance bands for a ‘barn dance’. Since the band came complete with a caller to instruct the dancers the whole event was ready-organised, with little for the committee to do but provide the food and enjoy themselves. These bands were in great demand and able to charge high fees.
Music Folk can serve as an example of one such ceilidh band. It was founded in 1980, growing out of an earlier Open University folk club, then becoming associated with a local folk dance club when the caller joined. It consisted of six players on melodeon/harmonica, double bass, piano-accordion, recorder, acoustic guitar and fiddle plus a dance caller. Most of the players had academic connections: a couple worked at the Open University as editors, one had a Ph.D. in physics, and another was an FE computer lecturer who also brought along her son – still at school but already an effective double bass player (family links within bands were common in local folk music). The fiddler alone had a different background, working with the Water Board and joining through a personal motor cycling connection. Some of the players were self-taught, two were classically trained but had had to adapt to folk style, one had previously learnt the piano formally but had taught herself the piano-accordion for the group, and two had passed A level music – a mixture of learning styles and musical backgrounds characteristic of the folk music world. They played lively and melodic music and clearly derived the greatest enjoyment from the various medleys of familiar tunes which they played as ‘so many yards of music’. Their own preference and the view they had of their music was to emphasise ‘traditional’ forms, some based on manuscript collections, others on newer compositions by other folk musicians which were classified as ‘within the tradition’ – pieces like ‘The boys of blue hill’, ‘Orange and blue’, ‘Oh Eliza’ and ‘The king of the fairies’. They had begun to establish themselves as one of the recognised local ceilidh bands in the area, performing every two or three weeks at barn dances for local PTAs or social clubs, folk dance events, folk clubs and various private occasions, concentrating on the nearby area to avoid too much travelling. Their fees scarcely covered expenses, and were in any case sometimes handed back when they played for a local charity like Willen Hospice. They thus had some way to go before they reached the popularity of older bands like the Gaberlunzies or the Cock and Bull Band, and were still trying to expand their clientele by pressing their telephone number on all likely contacts. But they were already experienced enough to need only the occasional rehearsal in each other’s homes and to be very aware of the satisfactions of joint playing: ‘2 + 2 = 5’, as one put it, for ‘by playing with other people you get another dimension to performance’.
Figure 12 (a) and (b) ‘Folk on the Green’ in 1981: the annual folk event on Horsefair Green in Stony Stratford, attended by hundreds of participants and scores of active performers
Figure 13 Publicity for local folk events: posters by the local teacher and musician Rod Hall
A related set of activities were those of the Morris dancing groups. The best known were the Stony Stratford Morris Men with their female counterparts Old Mother Redcaps (named after a historic local hostelry), but there were also the more recently founded Garland Dancers, and, further afield but still with Milton Keynes links, the Akeley Morris Men and Brackley Morris Men. These were not primarily music groups but did include the kind of music that overlapped with that of the folk bands. There was overlap of personnel too, and Morris dancers frequently appeared at folk festivals and fêtes, accepted by local folk musicians as belonging to the same folk world.
It is not easy to define precisely the kind of music played in the folk clubs and groups. It varied not only between different groups and clubs, but even at the same clubs on different nights; and it was not fully agreed exactly where the boundaries of ‘folk’ should be drawn. Generally the music known locally as ‘folk’ tended to be melodic, relatively quiet and intimate in presentation (in contrast, for example, to much rock or country and western music), with particular emphasis on song and often an explicitly regional flavour, from Ireland, Scotland or particular English counties. The range of instruments was wide. In Milton Keynes folk groups these included: mandolin, banjo, guitar (often but not always acoustic), fiddle, melodeon, concertina, string bass, ukelele, harmonica, recorders, flute, euphonium, and, in a few cases, dulcimer, psaltery, pipes and tabor, crumhorn or washboards; also occasionally piano and percussion (drums, cowbells, wood blocks); and, very important, the voice. There was thus no one set combination of instruments or number of players, so groups of from three up to six or eight (the latter especially in dance bands) were quite normal, with a whole variety of instruments being played by their often multi-instrumental members.
The ‘folk’ness was indicated not so much by the instruments or musical works as by playing style and the musicians’ approach to it. This was often different from classical tradition even when the instrument was the same. For example there was a marked contrast between classical violin playing and the short-bowing, largely one-position, and loosely held form of folk ‘fiddling’. The pattern of learning and transmission was also distinctive. The main emphasis was on memory and playing by ear rather than the characteristically classical reliance on written forms. On the other hand there was less opportunity for extensive improvisation than in jazz and more attention to fairly exact reproduction of songs and tunes in broad outline (there could be detailed variation in performance). Given the repetitive stanzaic form of much of the music, learning an item was quick and bands often had enormous repertoires without much need for frequent rehearsal. Paralleling this, learning to play or sing folk music was commonly (though not always) learnt ‘on the job’, inspired by recordings or live performance instead of or as well as written music.
Above all the ‘folkness’ of the music was assured for the participants by its enactment within a setting locally or nationally defined as ‘folk’, and by a strongly held, if not always articulated, set of ideas about the kind of enterprise in which they were engaged. Understanding this needs a short excursion into