English Folk Music Part 1

Just 3 miles (5 kms) or so up the road from where I am typing this post there is a hotel, with a bar and performance area where I have been on several previous occasions to concerts, plays and the like.
 I repeated that habit again yesterday when I went to a well attended performance by those very icons of the second and third English folk revivals, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick.
The influence of both of these men, who have been making music together now for the last 48 years on the traditional music scene in England and across the world is immeasurable... but immense.

They are the masters of the cotemporary English folk genre, which to some significant degree they have crafted and shaped themselves through the various bands and projects they have been involved with over the years.

When I experience them playing while sat perched on a not very comfortable seat in a makeshift concert hall I thought of all the strands of my life that their music weaves together in one way or another, going  back to my adolescence and that is quite a long way back believe me.

I first became aware of Martin Carthy at the age of 14 when I saved money from my paper rounds (I did two) to buy Freewheelin' Bob Dylan's classic second studio album released in 1963.

LPs as they were then called were expensive commodities in my youth and not easily come by. Freewheelin' was only my second album having already acquired With The Beatles as a matter of indispensable necessity. I consumed that Dylan record when I got it like a prized work of art which despite its mass production and global distribution is exactly what it was to me and to millions of others of course. I avidly read the sleeve notes which described the way Bob Dylan immersed himself in the London folk scene, making contact with the Troubadour folk club organizer Anthea Joseph and folksingers Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport. "I ran into some people in England who really knew those [traditional English] songs," Dylan recalled in 1984. "Martin Carthy, another guy named [Bob] Davenport. Martin Carthy's incredible. I learned a lot of stuff from Martin."

Martin Carthy taught Dylan two English songs that would prove important for the Freewheelin' album. Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" would be used by Dylan as the basis of his own composition, "Girl from the North Country". A 19th century ballad commemorating the death of Sir John Franklin in 1847, "Lady Franklin's Lament", gave Dylan the melody for his composition "Bob Dylan's Dream". 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan#Footnotes

Shortly after playing host and mentor to both Bob Dylan's and Paul Simon's visits to England in the early 1960s, Martin Carthy started his collaboration with Dave Swarbrick (Swarbs) from1965 when they began recording together. Dave Swarbrick grew up in Birmingham. According to his Wikipedia entry he learned to play the basics of violin from a local fiddler and he attended Birmingham College of Art (now absorbed into the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design) in the late 1950s, with the intention of becoming a printer. When I left school I wanted to be a printer too, but I lacked the academic qualifications to gain entry to the printing trade, so I went off to be a dairy farmer (for 6 months) instead. 

But this post isn't about me, it is about two musicians who have made a massive contribution to English and world music over half a century individually as a duo and collectively in a multitude of projects.

There are intersections throughout my life with this music and its performers from my earliest musical awakenings as a young teenager and actually before that at school doing English country dancing and singing Bobby Shaftoe age 7....that folk music theme runs from then right through to the present day.
Before going on to be a foundation member of Fairport Convention in 1969 Dave Swarbs as he likes to be known, played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group (1960-1966), a Birmingham based institution and a band on my own radar since they got to number 42 in the British singles charts in 1965 with a cover of Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin' . I hunted down this music with very limited resources from around the age of 13.
I followed all leads at every opportunity. I saw Bob Dylan himself play in 1966 which was the high point of my dedicated sojourn, a right of passage the first time I was out all alone in the city all night long queueing for tickets outside the Birmingham Odeon, a venue which is still there on New Street.

Much later on I came to know Ian and Lorna Campbell of the band, at Sunday afternoon music and beer sessions after the pubs had closed during lock-ins at the member-only (dead exclusive) Star Club then in Essex Street (later to move to Digbeth before its decline). Those were great times for me in the 80s mobilised around the anti-Thatcher coalition movement first behind the miners and then on the back of the Poll Tax, we never stopped the struggle and  resisted the monetarist and nationalist propaganda on all fronts 24/7.

This was all going on during the social upheavals of the Miners Strike (1984-85) and for several years after it the party raved on a bit while we licked our wounds and regrouped around CND, the anti apatheid movement, Nicaragua solidarity against the Falkland/Malvinas war and US cruise missile bases in eastern England. .

 The Star Club was owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain and it was a great place to go for political meetings, folk music, it was for a while a foremost punk rock venue ... and a veritable hub for revolutionary activity of one sort or another...as well as one of the best left bookshops in the English Midlands and probably the whole country... if not the English speaking world at that time (why hold back?).

This venue became a regular hangout for me during the turbulent 1980s and into the 90s. Gone now sadly, but the building reverberated with the 'people's music' and it is from that background that Dave Swarbs emerged as a virtuoso of the fiddle and a hero of the second folk revival (and now it seems the third).

What follows shortly is some live footage of the concert, a sharing of a musical event for the pleasure of it... a celebration of a musical culture and a reminder of the universal timelessness of music that for every community has its special place close to its heart.

Musical languages speak to each other and while the voices we hear here are English that 'voice' comprises elements from the languages of the Celts and the Norse, the Saxons and the north African and mid European camp followers of the the fallen Roman Empire, Brythonic natives of these islands and the northern European Belgae to name but a few.
It is perhaps fitting that since the English language has become globalised we remember it is a language made up of many borrowed words from languages that originate all around the world as well as the original Anglo Saxon tongue.

Check the link below for a list of borrowed languages that have helped to create modern English

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin

This is an important thing to realise about English national identity I think, it is intrinsically all inclusive, multicultural, communalistic and mutually tolerant and is resolutely not what the far right portray it as jingoistic, militaristic, white supremacist, this what the fascists want English nationalism to look like. Neo-nazi groups have more or less hijacked most of the symbolism and icons of English nationalism.
England is a land created by immigrants and one of its greatest virtues has been its comparative capacity to absorb incomers it was built on multiculturalism and diversity and to argue otherwise is profoundly un-English  I think. Therein lies the happy truth that you cannot be a reactionary thug in the name of England because that very condition means that you have not yet attained the the right to be considered English youself and it is the fascist scapegoating bullies that always find themselves isolated and shunned by the overwhelming majority of 'ordinary people'. It happened in the 1930s and it is happening again now.

So while the English fascists howl their alien messages in the wilderness the people's music is in alternative hands, safe hands....hands held out in a gesture of solidarity and not as a clenched fist of racial hatred! 

The people's music belongs to everyone irrespective of their sex, sexuality, ablebodiedness, health status, race or cultural identity... it is all equally ours to share and to compare and to admire our shared musical universal heritage.  Its a sharing of musical traditions

 The revelation back in 2010 that British National Party leader Nick Griffin was actively targeting English folk music as a potential vehicle for his party’s nefarious agenda galvanized the folk world into retaliatory action . Those BNP advances have been roundly rebuffed but we have to remain vigilant for the enemy within traditional English roots music, the very un-English snake in the grass with a British nationalist agenda and a nazi axe to grind.

FAF CONNECT http://www.folkagainstfascism.com/about.html 

Having said all that then here's the video-
 

Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick The Gaol/ Treadmill Song- Live 18 October 2013 

ENJOY!