The Hidden Musicians. Ruth Finnegan
to which folk tradition was handed down over the ages, primarily by little-educated country-dwellers. The lore of this ‘folk’ was held to be simple and spontaneous, owing more to ‘nature’ than conscious art, more to communally held tradition than individual innovation, with each nation and, to an extent, each region having its own ‘folklore’ implanted deep in the soil and soul of its people. These general ideas were reinforced in the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century collections by Cecil Sharp and similar collectors of ‘folk songs’ and ‘folk music’ which were seen as springing from national or regional roots over the ages, remembered especially by the older people, and pertaining essentially to unlettered country folk.
The views of these earlier scholars and collectors fundamentally influence the whole concept of what it means (still) to classify something as ‘folk’. During this century the concept has been widened to include urban and industrial forms like mineworkers’ or political songs, expressing ‘the people’ against authority. The British ‘Folk Revival’ in the 1950s introduced yet another twist, together with the popularity of the acoustic guitar and the beginning of the present system of ‘folk clubs’ from the mid 1950s, but these new forms too became assimilated within an overall ‘folk’ ideology and the staple repertoire continued to be validated by reference to regional rural roots or drawn from the collections and styles authorised by such bodies as the English Folk Dance and Song Society or books like The Penguin book of English folk song or A. L. Lloyd’s Folk song in England.
This series of assumptions is not just a matter of intellectual history, for it still influenced how contemporary folk music performers in Milton Keynes interpreted their activities. In practice their music came from varied sources (i.e. not just oral and regional tradition ‘through the ages’), it was played on a variety of instruments (guitars and drums, as well as the ‘older’ fiddles, pipes or vocals), it contained new compositions as well as older songs, and was carried on by players both with and without formal musical training. They saw themselves nevertheless as carrying on a tradition from the past – and in a sense, of course, they were right. For the music and modes they cultivated, changing though they were, were indeed broadly set within recognised conventions of what was to be counted as ‘folk music’ – even though the images of the modern executants may have been set not so much by ‘rural tradition’ as by the intellectual perceptions of certain scholars and collectors. It may be questionable whether there really ever was a distinctive corpus of music produced by a definable ‘folk’ in the rural setting envisaged by the purists, but this belief, conjoined with socially recognised definitions and practices, provided an implicit authorisation for ‘folk music’ as it was being performed and enjoyed in urban settings in the 1980s.
This complex of ideas was part of a more general philosophy, operating nationally, about the nature of ‘folk music’ and ‘folk musicians’. At the local level, these ideas were largely implicit rather than an articulated ideology, but the underlying assumptions emerged when people were challenged to explain the nature of their activity, as well as in the vocabulary used in discussing music and music-making. Local musicians spoke of the ‘pastoral’ or ‘traditional’ nature of their music and regarded the test for whether a song (even a new song) really was ‘folk’ as being whether it passed into the ‘oral tradition’: ‘if it’s still valid after twenty years then it’s folk’. Some valued contact with ‘the regional roots’ of their music (one band, for example, arranged a tour of Scotland ‘to find more tunes’), and musicians liked to stress their own links with particular English or Celtic origins. They associated their music, and hence themselves, with ‘the folk’ – ordinary people – in the past and the present.
When one looks at how ‘folk music’ was actually organised in Milton Keynes, however, it is striking how far it was at variance with many of the tenets of this implicit ideology.
First, the social background of the local folk music participants was far from the rural unlettered ‘folk’ of the ideal model. They were a highly literate group, most of them in professional jobs and with higher education; many had degrees, even postgraduate qualifications. There was a high proportion of teachers, and other jobs (to give some typical examples) included banker, accountant, medical researcher, pharmaceutical chemist, civil engineer, business director, personnel manager, and social worker. Members of the folk music world liked to think of themselves as in some sense ‘the folk’ or at any rate as ‘classless’. In a way they were justified: once within a folk club or band their jobs or education became irrelevant. They were thus themselves startled if made to notice the typical educational profile of folk enthusiasts. If any of the local music worlds could be regarded as ‘middle class’ it was that of folk music, for all that this ran so clearly counter to the image its practitioners wished to hold of themselves.
A further complication was the variety of learning and transmission modes. There was a tradition of self-learning and playing by ear, and it was unusual to see written music used in performance, but in practice many folk performers could also read music or had learnt an instrument within the classical mode. This was hardly surprising considering the typical educational background, but it certainly made the picture more complex than it first appeared. Similarly, in spite of the emphasis on oral transmission, writing in fact played an important part. Many songs in the recognised folk corpus derived from published collections, and printed or manuscript songbooks were also used (several local players had consulted manuscript archives in Cecil Sharp House in London). Certainly there was also oral transmission and singers often learnt songs from each other and from recordings, but the highly literate background of antiquarian scholarship was one prominent strand in the folklore movement and its local practice.
Despite the broadly agreed parameters of the ‘folk’ model there was also controversy about exactly where in practice the boundaries of folk music should lie. At the local level this was expressed in two opposed camps. There were those operating mainly on the folk club and folk festival circuit, regarded by many as the context of ‘folk music’ today – often well educated, professional and middle-aged with few if any teenage adherents. This wing was judged by the other side to be stuffy and ‘narrow’, opposed to innovation. Others favoured the more experimental and – in their eyes – creative mode of trying out new forms and combinations, in particular blending with rock, using electric guitars, amplification and a greater emphasis on percussion, even sometimes referring to their music as ‘folk-rock’. Several musicians also played blue grass or jazz along with ‘folk’ or were co-operating with orchestral players in the classical mode. Some wanted to break away from the ‘traditional folk club’ paradigm and tried out clubs for a wide range of music (as in the short-lived Cannon Blues and Folk Club or Muzaks), not surprisingly regarded as ‘fringe’ by the more purist enthusiasts. Bands in this mode – Merlin’s Isle, for example – could not always find a ready niche for their performances: not ‘folk’ enough for the folk clubs (to which in any case they did not wish to confine themselves), not close enough to rock to be welcome in many pubs. Folk music of this innovative kind was having quite an influence. A blend of various types of music centred round, or at least including, accepted ‘folk’ genres helped to make the annual ‘Folk on the Green’ day so popular, and the musical plays on local historical themes such as All Change or Days of Pride also owed much to the talents of a local teacher who combined his primary devotion to ‘folk’ music with a classical interest (further details in chapter 13, p. 164).
The controversy between the folk club purists and the (mostly younger) experimenters was unlikely to have any quick resolution. Both sides in fact accepted innovation in instruments, presentation and composition, and even some of the established clubs were trying to transform a narrow ‘folk’ image into a more open one, as in the Stony Stratford Folk Club’s change of name to the Song Loft, and the Hogsty Folk Club to Hogsty Music. The difference was thus partly just in emphasis, but it also lay in the performance settings (folk clubs and festivals on the one side and the less specialised pubs, clubs and halls on the other) and in differing personnel and social groups. In the end both sides shared something of the same basic model of ‘folk music’ as well as a remarkable commitment not only to shared experience in the beauty of their music but also, in an obscure but deeply felt way, to the ethical and imaginative