Christmas & New Year Greetings

We hope you have all had a great Christmas and send best wishes for the New Year from all of us at Tales from Under Blackhill. For the second Christmas running we got out in the snow and for the second time I have decided to build a bigger toboggan. That must be job 3021 on my list of things to do!

Things have been rather too quiet on the blog posting front but with a bit of luck there might be a bit more coming through in 2011. I think the General Election postings probably took up more energy than at first thought although they proved the most popular political articles in the collection. Many students made use of the series on 'Resolving a Hung Parliament' and I suspect there will be many issues which will spin off from the present political settlement. Should we really be moving towards 5 year fixed Parliaments etc? And, of course, we have a referendum on the voting system coming up as well as a Royal Wedding. We have already been invited back by our old neighbours in Worcester to join in their street party!

You will see that there will be more reports and reviews on folk music matters including a ‘Memories’ series looking back at musical trends in the past. The first of these can be seen on the Memories of the Troubadour posting. It is also clear that articles which recount earlier times are popular such as those on cycling in the 1950's, so we hope to bring you a few more of these as well as the occasional book review and reviews of events.

Mary Horesh is still an editor and occasional contributor and is currently in the middle of a re-location to London. She is still a keen environmental campaigner with special reference to farming and food. She is currently a member of the Friends of the Earth Advisory Committee on Food and Bio-diversity. Should you be moving to either Birmingham or London yourself and need some contacts @maryhoresh might be a useful source.

Sian & I continue to be members of Birmingham Friends of the Earth and try to help out from a distance and I try to get to Management Committee meetings, weather permitting.

Sian and I have been very involved with FolkWorkshops which has developed very quickly in recent months due to the great enthusiasm of those involved. We have no idea where it is all leading save to say that we are gradually building up our network with the intention of bringing more live folk music to south west Herefordshire and making sure we do not overlook events which we could car share to attend.

Mary has given us a years membership of the English Folk Dance and Song Society so we will be inundated with lots of information. We are looking forward to our next trip to London so we can spend some time in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House and possibly attend a ceilidh.

An ambition in FolkWorkshops is to develop an expertise in harmony singing and our rehearsals for the Carols at the Crown Inn session at Longtown before Christmas shows that we are on the way. The key is that our meetings should continue to be an enjoyable joint effort and in this spirit new musicians and singers are most welcome.

The trouble is trying to fit everything in, not only in our own lives, but in among the many events that get organised up here in these beautiful hills. You will not catch us complaining about that however as we are firm believers in 'community' and whatever quibbles the sociologists might have in defining it, we definitely know it when we see it!

Looking forward to your company in a peaceful 2011,

Dacier, Sian and Mary

Memories of the Troubadour Coffee Bar, Earls Court, London: Winter 1962

The present winter conjures up the vision of waiting for a bus in Seabrook on the coast road between Hythe and Folkestone and watching, through the sodium street lighting, the mass of snow falling on me and everything else. This was New Years Eve 1961 and I was leaving home for the first time. I got to the station in time but the train took nearly seven hours to reach Charing Cross through the Kentish snows. My first contact with work was to ring in and tell them I had been stranded on a train all night and would be in the next day. 1962 was not starting very well for this 18 year old.

My accommodation was primitive and had been found by a school friend who had moved to London about six months earlier. It was at the Youth Travel Bureau at 16, Cranley Gardens South Kensington and the room was split off from another resident’s room by a dividing wall of sorts. It was cheap and I soon found out why. The food was inedible, the rooms were freezing and the two characters who ran it knew full well that the cheapness kept a near full hostel throughout the year. Among the victims who endured this were some estate agency students of some kind who must have been studying nearby. As temporary residents these were the remand types, while we felt more like properly sentenced miscreants, especially when we found out that paying rent in arrears was not such a good idea when you went to move on. All the other landlords wanted rent in advance and so to be able to pay off the hostel’s rent in arrears and a new landlord all on one day meant that many people just did a moonlight flit.

Somehow or other we found a small bed sit further down the Old Brompton Road in Drayton Gardens. In one short walk we moved from South Kensington to Chelsea. It was a major cultural shift however. Our bed sit, with its own little balcony, was one room in an apartment on the third floor of Drayton Court opposite the Paris Pullman Cinema. This was what I would now call an art film venue in the nicest possible sense. I remember going to see Fellini’s 8½ but gave Last Year in Marienbad a miss as I was still trying to work out what the hec the other film had been about. Instead of becoming a film buff I became a regular visitor to our nearest acceptable coffee bar, The Troubadour, in Earls Court. Yet another short walk down the Brompton Road we soon discovered the club in its cellar which by today’s standards would be a health and safety nightmare. At the time it was a very warm, comfortable, and most important to a clerk with few prospects on £7 a week, just affordable. Such were my finances I never gave the poetry readings or the flamenco nights a go. I didn’t even buy copies of the new satirical magazine which was specially acquired by the proprietor hot off the press on publication day. When I did eventually borrow a copy of Private Eye I understood why the cafe had been filled with so much laughter so soon after its delivery.

The current Troubadour Coffee Bar and Club, which now occupies much extended premises, records on its website , ‘ the roster of troubadours ... includes Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello...’ but sadly doesn’t mention Martin Carthy ( awarded the MBE in 1998 for services to music) who was a resident singer. He also performed with Redd Sullivan’s Thameside Four. Sadly I don’t think I was there the night he brought along Bob Dylan anymore than I can remember Paul Simon dropping in. They would have all been part of a glorious procession of new voices from a world I hadn’t known anything about. At one time or another during those early years of the English Folk Revival anyone who was anyone, or no one, took a spot in that dark, smoky, crowded and wonderful cellar. I now know that Bob Dylan stayed with Martin Carthy during his cold winter visit to London. He had been asked to take part in a film for BBC TV called, Madhouse on Castle Street (1962) out of which came the The Ballad of the Gliding Swan.

It was so cold that he and Martin chopped up an old piano that happened to be in Martin’s garden for extra warmth from the open fire. I also now know that Martin is credited with being an inspiration for both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and that there was an English folk tour circuit developing for American singers. That is why Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound came to be inspired by waiting in the cold for a train at Staly Bridge station where I am told a plaque notes this event.

The harmonies and singers I heard at the Troubadour in those days have stayed with me. I heard the guitar and the banjo played in a way which I had never heard on the Home Service or BBC television. I couldn’t understand where all this music was coming from; never having heard of Cecil Sharpe House or been aware of how much music had been preserved by the English and Scottish immigrants to America. I knew a bit about traditional jazz and followed skiffle’s short life. ‘Trad Jazz’ had been my first big musical enthusiasm in the late fifties but it was only later that I understood how all this joined up through the migrations to North America from Europe and the awfulness of the slave trade from which so many of our cities profited and on which many of our industries depended. I was eventually to learn the awful truth why the slave traders made sure there was a primitive banjo and other African instruments on board for the gruesome practice of ‘dancing the slaves’. By making them dance this warded off their wish to die while at the same time exercising them in an attempt to keep mortality rates at an acceptable level while the slaves were chained to the deck in the squalor of a slave ship. I had no idea that playing a funny sort of banjo in such a peculiar way ( nothing like George Formby or the Black and White Minstrel Show) had come to me by such a vicious route and at such an awful price. In the meantime the ignorance of my youth shielded me from this history while I soaked up the music of a momentous musical period I could not appreciate was happening around me.
Dacier

For full details of the Troubadour Cafe and Club and events go to: http://www.troubadour.co.uk/
Also, why not follow @FolkWorkshops on twitter

Folk Music, Harmony Singing and the West Gallery Choirs

If you haven’t heard a full West Gallery Choir complete with the old instruments then Vital Spark, which is performing at Clodock Church, Longtown, Herefordshire on December 28th at 7pm, weather permitting, is an evening out you should not miss. There is no charge for entry but there will be a retiring collection:

Traditional Old English Carols by Candlelight
with Vital Spark West Gallery Singers and Musicians
plus Mince Pies and Mulled Wine

Folk Music, Harmony Singing and the West Gallery Choirs

The first time I really heard this type of singing was at the famous Troubadour venue in the Old Brompton Road. I knew nothing about folk music but it was a cheap and warm evening out in the winter of 1962. I could just about afford the ticket and the cheapest meal on the menu; cheese salad. Little did I know that people like Martin Carthy, Bob Davenport, Red Sullivan, Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor, Colin Wilkie and many others were the emerging establishment of the English folk revival. An evening in, by contrast ,was usually involved a feeble attempt to learn to play the guitar. In my case a rather dead sounding product of the now well known guitar rush of the 1950’s.
Although I enjoyed the sound it was only in recent years that I learnt the basic theory of harmony singing and started to understand what was involved. I had heard many harmonies without realising and of course this type of folk singing is most famously preserved by the Copper Family of Rottingdean in Sussex and the singers of various communities up and down the country. Many still singing Christmas carols of this sort in similar styles. It was only a few years ago that a fuller picture began to emerge when I first heard Vital Spark sing in Clodock Church. It was then that I first heard the term West Gallery singing.
As the name indicates it is the music which used to be sung in the West Galleries of our churches from about the start of the 18th century until it met its demise at the hands of the reforming Victorians. The first time I heard this music I recognised what to me was a ‘folk sound’. Where had this music been all those years. It was of course always there but like so many things during a working life my music had had to play second fiddle to surviving in the conveyor belt of rat race which rarely left an evening free for musical outings. OK, I now know that I should have made more of an effort but I realise that this is easily said now I am an escapee of the system.
Unfortunately West Gallery music did not escape another form of attack, church reform. My reaction to hearing Vital Spark for the first time was very much along the lines ‘ We was robbed’. Granted, the thieves, a combination of the anglo catholic Oxford Movement and the introduction of the more manageable Church Organ, has created a new tradition of English Church music which we would not like to lose, but even so, a rich heritage has been hidden away and only in recent times has it started to come out of the closet.
You have only to read Under the Green Wood Tree by Thomas hardy to see the resentment which was felt on both sides as the new formal and spiritual music replaced the more melodic and energetic tunes which would have been sung the night before in the pub before the choir managed to be in place on a Sunday morning. Luckily, like many of our old English songs, our ancestors who settled in America in the 17th had continued to sing in the style of the old country and happily preserved the old styles.

A FolkWorkshops publication by John Baxter with acknowledgments to Wikipedia.

FolkWorkshops Christmas Newsletter

We all deserve a big thank you from ourselves to ourselves! Without FolkWorkshoppers we wouldn’t be getting together to sing at regular intervals and to eat some rather splendid cakes. We are all at different stages of our musical journeys, but I think you will agree it’s great to be on the move together.

We are not really just a Folk Club or just a choir. We are ourselves, and long may our relaxed and mutually supportive ethos continue.

In addition we wouldn’t have been around for the following:
i) A summer solstice barbecue courtesy of John and Bridget
ii) John and Bridget’s fund raiser Ceilidh for a school in Nepal
iii) Singing at a fundraiser for Longtown Village Hall and School
iv) the Village Quire Workshop Concert fundraiser for St. Margaret’s and Newton Churches
v) The Workshops in Newton Church Room which also contribute to the hall’s running costs
vi) Car sharing to the many events in our area such as Harp Songs at the Harp Inn Glasbury
vii) Meeting people like the Village Quire who value our group and want to encourage us
viii) Starting to improve our musical skills, both through rehearsals for carol singing and the occasional ‘strum- ins’ to swap tips for playing the banjo or guitar
ix) Being asked by the Vicar to sing carols at the Crown on the 17th December
x) Making plans for a Burns Night on Wednesday 26th January in Newton Church Room
xi) Making plans for a ceilidh on Saturday 12th March in Escleyside Hall. (Hall booking to be confirmed)

John Biggs and Allison Price asked us whether we had any idea that so much would have happened in FolkWorkshop’s first 12 months and I suppose the honest answer is probably that we always try to travel hopefully and that arriving somewhere enjoyable is always a bonus. FolkWorkshops has an expanding mailing list and can now be found on twitter as @FolkWorkshops, link http://www.twitter.com/FolkWorkshops . There are various folk music contributors being followed and we already have 9 followers from the folk music world. This might prove to be a useful notice board and a collector of useful information.

This Newsletter will eventually appear on www.blackhilltales.blogspot.com and the link http://t.co/nk1AlFV will take you directly to any articles involving folk music, thus avoiding the various other polemics/articles on this blog site. This could be a purely temporary arrangement while someone sets up our own FolkWorkshops blog site. Any volunteers? You could start by seeing if Wordpress would be a suitable medium.

Other interesting bits. The Cecil Sharp Library is a source of lots of material from 5 collectors and visiting the Cecil Sharp House home page might give you an idea for something to do if you are in London. If you sign up you will get their national newsletter e-mail sent to you each month.

Stop Press: Village Quire at the Globe, Hay. 23rd December. Christmas program with Parti Mari Lwyd ,from Llantrisant Folk Club. (Check out the Mari Lwyd on Google)

As usual I am going on a bit too much. Many thanks to all who have provided cakes, sheet music, suggestions, hospitality and very good company.

Happy Christmas from your very own,
FolkWorkshops and from John and Jane Baxter