Youngsters? Fast approaching 70, I tend to think of Eliza Carthy and Fay Hield as young, Sam Sweeney and his contemporaries even younger. These are performers in their 40s and 30s.
Fay Hield is a lecturer, runs workshops, helps run two folk clubs. Sam Sweeney’s band mate in Leveret, Rob Harbron teaches. One of my favourite live duos, The Hut People spend significant time in the community (Gary Hammond was percussionist with The Beautiful South).
Their efforts I guess will continue. Despite about a third of my collection being broadly folk based, my 30 something daughter has no interest at all, her collection contains The Beatles and Pink Floyd. A friend who is a flute player had abandoned playing after uni, she describes her musical interest as limited, indie band based. That is until I took her to see Carthy, Hardy, Farrell and Young. She bought the CD, dug out her flute and transcribed every tune by ear. She has joined a wind band and constantly surprises me by learning tunes I have mentioned. One convert.
Younger than that? A nearly 18 niece is strongly influenced by social media, would leave the room if anything more than a year or two old is played, yet even younger 11 and 13 year olds joined a country dancing class through gymnastics.
The future? In our hands? Supporting live acts, buying through Bandcamp.
This new Fay Hield album was released late last year and got its own thread in the Music Room, but seems to have been rather overlooked there.
At least I missed it at the time but I’m really enjoying it now. So I’m making amends by recommending it in this thread.
Roger
Thanks Roger, I’d missed this one too.
Bandcamp seems an excellent deal for musicians, if more people are aware of it. Thanks for you good news story! I said at the outset that there are lots of younger players, but that the audiences are older than the performers. Dis asked about younger listeners. Perhaps one answer might be that folk attracts young listeners who are themselves players (or dancers?) I’d like to think that folk is like gardening in that ordinarily most people grow into it as they get older. But I think that there was a generation who were excited by it in the 1960s - 1970s who have retained a life-long interest. Leveret are wonderful, live or recorded. We saw Sam Swinney’s stage show ‘The Unfinished Violin,’ but knew him from Bellowhead and Leveret. I will look out for ‘The Hut People’.
A good version of The Blacksmith
Looking forward to Folk East this summer just down the road from me … two piccies I snapped from 2019 to whet the appetite…
John Spiers in full song and squeeze…
Richard Thompson
And Suffolk boys the Quay Street Whalers from Orford… helped by plenty of Victoria from the nearby Earl Soham brewery.
Richard T has a new EP out on Friday, available from Bandcamp.
Excellent news - just downloaded ‘live from London’ - sublime. However we’ll you know these songs he always brings some new to each iteration.
Indeed, I have a large number of RT live albums and they’re all worth having. I subscribed to and watched the streamed gigs that Live from London came from, great use of time during lockdown. I believe from the email that these are new songs, and he mentioned during the gigs that he had new songs for an album.
On a side note, he has an autobiography out, Beeswing, covering the bit he thinks we’ll be interested in, a small bit on his early life, then his musical life up to 1975. I’ve got the audiobook which he reads, I listened to the first few hours driving down to see my mum, and will do the next few hours going back in a couple of days. Really interesting, not much new information (for Fairport/RT nuts), but his perception of it is insightful, and I think with his voice it works well as an audiobook.
The musicians keep 90%. “Bandcamp gift certificate” is now my default response when asked “what do you want for Christmas / birthday / etc.”
Bandcamp also do occasional Bandcamp Fridays where they waive their fees and all the money goes to the artists. I suspect this Friday will be one as Richard Thompson is doing an EP launch and last time he moved the launch a week to coincide with a ”Friday”.
Bandcamp Fridays continue in 2021, the next being May 7.
Yes, the audiobook read by RT himself is entertaining. But it reveals very little that isn’t already in print. It is clear that Sufism has remained meaningful to him, but beyond not drinking, what does this consist of? Does he pray five times a day? Recite the Quran in Arabic? Go on the Hajj? I had a Jordanian PhD student and played some RT and other British music to him. He was scathing about the Sufis. I walked him up Malvern and gave him Menuhin’s recording of Elgar’s Enigma Variations to remember us.
It is clear that RT a very private man (we knew this already). He gave a cathartic account of Jeannie, who died so young and who RT had known for three weeks before the crash. The final chapter of RT’s dreams is curious and I’m not sure what to make of them. He does not write about his future move to the USA while continuing to mine the seam of British culture.
Here’s a bit of Morris with handkerchiefs for May Day. (2015). My favourites are Shropshire Bedlams but I couldn’t find any video that wasn’t blackface, so posted this instead. Rapper Sword is exciting too in the North. I could never drink enough to be a Morris dancer 
Bedford Morris in action
I find it a little sad that a tradition which has roots dating back to the 1400s has to fall victim to this current paranoia with causing offence. Morris ‘blackface’ has nothing to do with race, being simply a disguise used originally to avoid prosecution for begging.
I remember reading some years ago of an official of some sort in America who was attacked for using the word ‘niggardly’.
Bluegrass is a term coined to describe a wonderful eastern US folk music style derived from a fusion of European, well mainly, albeit not limited to, English and Scottish folk traditions as well as Gospel and African musical influences , and Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys captures these types of US ‘roots’ folk traditions superbly.
Most sides who wore blackface have adopted blue, green or yellow and black stripes apparently. Britannia Coconut Dancers in Bacup are an exception at the moment. Public perception is important and the Joint Morris Organisation issued a press statement in June 2020 that responded to Black Lives Matter. The English Folk Song and Dance Society insist that the tradition should be inclusive. There’s no continuous unchanged tradition since 1400, traditions are made and unmade. Wikipedia has a page on Blackface and Morris dancing. But the public isn’t going to explore the history of Morris and its possible relation to Moors (or not). They will read blackface as a racist statement.
John and Sue Kirkpatrick who created Shropshire Bedlams and Martha Rhoden’s Tuppenny Dish from the mid- 1970s started with a clean slate. Kirkpatrick researched and constructed his tradition. I hope next May to see them dance in Clun in blueface.
So what we do and how we do it should be driven and guided by ignorance as much as anything else?
May I suggest that this excellent thread on folk music leaves the issue of blackface at the door, otherwise the thread will go. In my view, the origins of the tradition are irrelevant. Times move on and it’s what it signifies now that matters.