So here we are – Launceston Folk Club. What is it about?
Launceston is clear enough – a place in Cornwall, sometimes pronounced and spelt Lanson. We live hereabouts. And Club seems clear – it’s something you can join as a member. Members can help run things and get some benefits like discounted tickets to events, but most events are open to the public.
So what is this Folk bit in the middle all about? Could it be a club for folk (i.e. people) in Launceston? Well yes, But also folk is a type of music – a style or genre which once you try to define it defies definition – like trying to nail down mercury.
We can all agree its about the music first and foremost – and largely about live music (which sometimes gets recorded, for sure) played by people (folk) in Launceston. They may be visitors for the night to our fair town, maybe they’ve come from afar to give us an earful of the sort of music folk in their part of the world enjoy. Or maybe they , the folk who play, live and write and perform music in Launceston about their lives and concerns.
Maybe another way of looking at folk music is to say that it always has quite a strong sense of place. The content is grounded in the lives of the people who make it, with whatever instruments come to hand. It tells stories about their lives and their place, not about some idealised romantic ideal, or dreams of far away places.
So we could say that folk music is music that speaks to, and of, the lives of the people who make it and listen to it. But isn’t all music in this sense someone’s folk music?
Certainly folk music is played all over the world – using completely different instruments and musical styles – and when it travels to foreign parts it gets called “world music” by the industry which packages it and bring it to our shores. For Launceston Folk Club we tend to focus on local musicians and performers in and from the South West, but we are not adverse to bringing in acts from other parts of the UK and maybe further afield.
Some people, call them the folkie purists, or nerds, insist that folk music, and particularly folk songs, can only be ones that have been found in the wild and recorded on scrolls stored in an archive (Cecil Sharpe House, perhaps) and dusted off by appointed experts to perform on authentic acoustic instruments true to the roots in whatever backward corner of the past where the songs were first transcribed. The image of peculiar men (mostly) wearing beards and jumpers and sandals reverently listening while not really hearing. Music preserved in aspic. (Chumbawumba have a good song about this called “The Song Collector“)
Unkind – it is never really like that, but the image has become a cliche and like all cliches it contains a nugget of truth. But that was only ever one aspect of the “folk music” scene. It has always had innovators and moved and changed with the times, and is a very broad church with multiple sects and cults within it.
Some people claim that folk music has to be essentially acoustic – music that can be made and enjoyed without amplification, and certainly without non-portable or electric instruments. But what about the piano then – can that not be used to perform folk music. There was a time before juke boxes, let alone screens, when every pub had a piano and there were people around who would play for beer and customers would join in for a sing-song. That was folk music for sure.
I’m old enough to remember the fuss when a young folk singer plugged in his guitar and brought an electric band on stage with him at the Newport Folk Festival (sadly not our own Newport in Launceston but one on the other side of the Atlantic – now there’s an idea – should we start our own Newport Folk Festival here, there are fortnightly sessions in the White Horse already?)
I may be over 70 now, but I was so much younger then, and thought what he (his Bobness of course, Mr Dylan) was doing was fantastic. I still thought it was folk music – certainly not simple old school rock’n’roll, nor the more complex forms of rock music that were also emerging at the time. Popular, but not “pop”, Jazzy at times in its anarchic atmosphere but definitely not jazz. The difference was the poetry. Folk music has always been closely linked with poetry – people’s poetry – the words and stories they tell are a key part of it – and Dylan was certainly a wordsmith. Maybe that is the key to nailing down folk music – it has words that carry meaning and stories. Folk evolves with the people who are it.
The suddenly everyone was doing it – the bass guitar became an acceptable alternative to the double bass, the fiddle got an electric pickup, and a hard working minor rock band picked up a fine fiddler for their fourth album and started reinventing traditional British folk songs as well as writing new ones, and thus became one of the longest lasting folk bands through many changes but always Folk. There’s even a rumour that they are coming to play for us later this year (that’s a teaser for you).
As well as poetic elements, folk music has also always been closely linked with dance – in particular people getting up and being moved by the music in a more or less formal way. Dance enables the audience to become participants and that tight link between performance and audience is another key feature of Folk.
And then there’s the whole business of commerce – in its purest form folk music actively shuns commercial exploitation. Every artist who starts to garner commercial recognition tends to get accused of “selling out”. Folk rejects the idea that music should be packaged up and sold to the listener as separate from the artist. There is always a strong link in folk music between the performers and the listeners – at its best the divide gets blurred as people join in with the chorus and get up and move with the music.
Its the Lakeman family on the slopes of Dartmoor making music of stones and weather and the harsh moorland life, its Beer and Knightley on the Exe estuary with songs of rural deprivation and the air of the sea, its the friends of fishermen with the work songs of the men who hunted in the deeps from our rugged North coast – these and many more connect with places we know and experiences we, and they, had before they were picked up by the big music industry and sold to a wider audience. We love them all still, despite their later commercial success, because they connect with us.
Ultimately that is what Folk is about – music that firstly connects people. Quite the reverse of commercial music which sets out to sell a pre-packaged connection to a segmented audience. Folk is for all people, and the Folk Music is whatever music comes from the folk who make and enjoy it. All musicians start out as folk musicians – the best stay connected to their roots.
And thus Launceston Folk Club – we simply set out to enable folk in Launceston to perform and enjoy music that connects them.