Following on from his first blog post about the Essex folk movement oral history project and his second about the folk revival in England, MA placement student Callum Newton explores what the folk movement looked – and sounded – like in Essex from the 1960s.

Folk clubs

Those interviewed for the Essex folk movement oral history project recall a very active folk club circuit around all areas of Essex, with the more prominent clubs being Blackmore Folk Club, Chelmsford Folk Club, and the Hoy at Anchor in Southend. Blackmore’s influence is felt particularly in the interviews, as Sue Cubbin, the interviewer, and several of the interviewees – including Simon Ritchie, Annie Harding, Jim Garrett and Paul O’Kelly – had performed either within the club or with Blackmore’s associated Morris team. Ritchie, Cubbin and Roger Johnson had also participated in running the club at various stages.

There were dozens of folk clubs across the county, however, from Harwich to Colchester and as far as Brentwood and Havering. Associated with the Essex Folk Association (EFA), or the earlier Essex District Committee of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, all of them were documented in Essex Folk News [LIB/PER 2/22/1-50], so that every club was regularly accessible to anyone involved in the movement.

Essex’s relationship with the larger London folk circuit is also evident due to its geographical relationship. Many practitioners were born in London, discovered folk and later moved to Essex, like Jill-Palmer Swift; or travelled to London specifically for folk, like Dave Vandoorn who ran his first folk club in East Ham in the 1960s despite working in Brentwood.

The close proximity no doubt enabled practitioners to travel between: many already worked in London, like Reg Beecham and Simon Ritchie; or others simply travelled to perform, like Alie Byrne and Jim Garrett. There were considerable differences between the two locations however – while Byrne cites the typically younger audience members in London,Jill Palmer-Swift had always noted the typically wider mix of ethnicities present in London’s folk clubs.

The role of folk clubs was not universal – some existed to have performers, to be watched by those who attended, while others encouraged group singing lead by a particular performer [1].

This was certainly the case, also, in Essex. Paul Kiff describes how the Old Ship in Heybridge acted as a more informal club, entirely focused on singarounds.

This stands in contrast to a club like Maldon Folk Club, where performers were specifically booked by the host, Rick Christian. It is crucial to consider the individual philosophies of those who ran folk clubs; Christian maintained a professional folk career, and this certainly bled into his organisation of folk festivals, where the performer tends to be the focal point. Paul Kiff, on the other hand, openly rejected festivals and artists as the centre of performance entirely, citing that it was against the tradition, while maintaining a reformist political career within the EFDSS. Ultimately, this is just one of the themes central to finding a definition for the tradition – as in, what is legitimate folk? Sometimes, the vocal, passionate people involved would split bands, or even entire clubs over their position on that question (for more on this topic, see the interviews with Simon Ritchie and Myra and Red Abbott).

Repertoire

Essex had a very pronounced tradition of its own – largely attributed to the song collections of Vaughan Williams but also from particularly Essex dances like ‘Sally’s Taste’, ‘The Tartar’ and ‘A Trip to Dunmow’ as discovered by John Smith and Jim Youngs (as referenced in interviews with Tony Kendall and Jill Palmer-Swift).

The songs themselves were also a point of contention by some who practiced folk music. Don Budds explained that to his band the Folk Five, folk was an orthodoxy of strictly ‘modal’ style songs like “Maids when You’re Young” or “My Bonny Boy” (see also copy of the Folk Five repertoire, SA 30/1/37/3).

Peter Chopping described folk songs as ‘workers songs; sea-shanties, capstan shanties and halyard shanties’ as well as ‘forebitter’ songs – all some form of worker chant or sea-shanty. Others were less strict; Annie Harding, for example, opted to incorporate jazz and other types of non-folk into her folk act repertoire, alongside traditional songs.

Alie Byrne is indicative of this less orthodox approach as the tradition progressed, as a relative newcomer to the folk scene even at the time of the interview. She suggests that there is a fundamental difference between performing folk and listening to folk, and that while some audiences were strict about ‘purist’ songs “they’ve heard before”, others were more appreciative of less orthodox, more experimental songs. She describes folk as a common ownership of songs, and that there is no one way to perform any song, and that every performer “owns” a song at the moment they are performing it. Byrne’s depiction of folk is a more romantic approach, though certainly this was not always generally accepted. It is certain that there was no universally accepted way to perform folk, even by the people actively performing it, and that the philosophy was actively argued inside and outside of clubs, or between clubs.

The EFDSS and the Essex Folk Association

The politics and philosophy of folk was felt quite heavily within Essex, induced by Essex’s relationship with the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), which was seemingly tumultuous at the best of times. In 1995, the Essex Folk Association was founded from the remnants of the Essex District Committee of the EFDSS [EFN Spring 1995, LIB/PER 2/22/23]. Instead of being a regional committee of the EFDSS, the Association instead adopted affiliate status and organised its own affairs. Ivy Romney and Paul Kiff both explore the arguments for this – with Romney claiming that many believed a “non-English” designation would encourage specifically non-English style dancing and music, of which many clubs existed in Essex, such as Scottish country dancing or Irish music, to associate with the Essex movement.

The EFDSS policy, since its founding, of ‘English only’ had prevented some groups, such as Romney’s own Society for International Folk Dancing, from being incorporated properly into the folk scenes despite the universal theme of folk between them. Paul Kiff, additionally, proposed the idea of affiliated clubs within the EFDSS to give each Association its own direction behind some guiding principles, and suggested that some unspecified but consistent names had held back the folk movement within the executive of the EFDSS. This criticism of the EFDSS is explored within the interviews, with some accusing the EFDSS of gatekeeping, and others proposing that dance was always the priority for Cecil Sharp House.

Practically, as a response to the EFDSS monopoly on folk song collecting, the Essex folk movement is of note for its own individual second-revival collectors. Some of those interviewed, like Dennis Rookard and David Occomore, spent countless hours recording in folk clubs.

These collections – alongside those of other collectors, notably John Durrant and Jim Etheridge – are now housed in the Essex Record Office as part of the wider folk music collection, catalogued as SA 30. Additional recordings made by Dennis Rookard are catalogued as SA 19, and David Occomore as SA 21.

Folklore and oral history are inextricably linked because the traditions of folk were themselves an oral tradition. In a modern world, where recording equipment is practically accessible by any person, oral history with a recorder is seemingly the natural successor to this kind of oral tradition [2]. In the spirit of Ewan MacColl’s radio ballads, which combined elements of song and interview into a documentary, folk can and does exist as a wide-ranging, permanent record of the lifestyle people lived [3].

A folk archive then, like the one idealised by Paul Kiff, is fundamentally an extension of the folk movement itself. The collection housed at the Essex Record Office, and the project Sue Cubbin began in 1998, is fundamentally, itself, the folk tradition in the twenty-first century.

Find out more about folk archives preserved at the Essex Record Office in this guide: Sources on Folk Music.

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[1] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.3

[2] Graham Smith, The Making of Oral History, (2008)https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/oral_history.html [accessed July 2022]

[3] BBC, The Original BBC Radio Ballads, (2006) https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads/original/orig_history.shtml [accessed July 2022]. To find out more about one of the radio ballads produced by Dennis Rookard, Wind Over Tilbury, see one of our previous blog posts.

Following on from his first blog post, MA placement student Callum Newton explores the history of folk revival in Britain, through the Essex folk movement oral histories and recordings held in the Essex Sound and Video Archive.

It may appear as though there is a dichotomy between the emphasis placed on the importance of folk music in the extensive archives at the ERO, and the lack of prominence it is afforded in the British popular consciousness. To many in Britain, traditional folk music has been considered a niche interest – somewhat ignored compared to its popular cousin, pop folk. Morris dancing has often been viewed as eccentric and alien, while folk clubs have had no place within most people’s daily lives.

Yet, this limited perspective did not detract from the detailed, vibrant and quite living world those interviewed for the Essex folk movement oral history project inhabited. In many ways, it was a universe of their own, as conservators of a tradition as well as practitioners of it. It was their culture, and still is today [1]. There should be no doubt that this is a legitimate reason for capturing the folk movement, and Essex’s role within it. If preserving the tradition, practices and knowledge is integral to folk itself, then preserving the history and making it accessible within an archive is integral to the movement too. After all, Morris sides often keep their own archives and have a designated archivist for this very same task [2].

However, to fully understand the intricacies of the Essex folk movement, and the traditions practitioners incorporated into their lifestyles, one cannot ignore the wider context in which Essex’s folk music collection exists.

Where did folk music come from?

Folk, ultimately, means people. Folk music, then, must mean a music of the people. The history of the folk movement in Britain is one arranged around a question of how that definition might be interpreted. There is no clear concept behind what ‘folk music’ is, as it is one that has evolved over the last two centuries with social, political and technological impositions [3].

The story starts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the first ‘folk revival’, where amateur historians began their collections of folk songs and ballads by going out into the world and making a record of them [4]. These pioneers, like Sabine Baring-Gould, Frank Kidson, Lucy Broadwood and Cecil Sharp, were limited by technology – their writings, rather than recordings, would go on to begin the collection later housed at the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) [5], based at Cecil Sharp House [6]. Rooted in antiquarianism, the EFDSS assumed an authority over all English folk scholarship, enjoying a monopoly on “promoting vintage musical and dance styles” [7]. It existed primarily as a vehicle for an academic style and rejected popular folk music, leading to a historiographical perception of gatekeeping folk music from “rowdy” people [8]. In their own words, they were ‘protectors’ and ‘preservers’ of folk [9]. The legacy of this philosophy would repeatedly come into conflict with the practices of the second folk revival from the 1950s and 1960s. Performance became the driver of the tradition, but the purpose of performance became hotly contested [10].

A history of the second folk revival in England cannot be complete without touching on the lineage of folk song collecting in the USA. The two nations were interlinked in the early movement, with collectors and performers travelling across the Atlantic. With the release of American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934, John and Alan Lomax “set the standard for folk song collecting” globally [11]. The USA had always been more receptive to folk music generally, allowing various collectors to rise throughout the early twentieth century to cover the huge range of popular American folk songs. In contrast, the British collections largely began and ended with the EFDSS [12], although a generation after the likes of Cecil Sharp, private collectors did exist, with individuals like Ralph Vaughan Williams collecting in Essex from 1903 [13]. Yet the lack of popularity of English folk meant collectors were few and far between, or concentrated at Cecil Sharp House, while the popularity of American folk meant collections across the Atlantic were in vogue [14].

These worlds would start to collide during the second folk revival, particularly during Alan Lomax’s travels to England [15]. American country music became popular during the 1940s, as American soldiers stationed in Britain began broadcasting through the American Forces Network [16]. Eventually the British interpretation of those country folk songs became skiffle, inspired by Lonnie Donegan’s number one hit cover of ‘Rock Island Line’, in a very homemade fashion due to the relative expense of instruments [17]. Alan Lomax arrived in Britain in 1950 and further propagated the skiffle scene by broadcasting American folk songs and collecting the English songs where he could. During this time, Lomax became the inspiration for the left-wing actor and writer, Ewan MacColl [18]. MacColl saw folk music as a platform for the working people of Britain, to give the ‘common man’ back his music. After Lomax introduced him to A. L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd, this became a reality with the six-part radio series Ballads and Blues – though MacColl’s professional career had only really just begun [19].

Lomax predicted that skiffle would be a short-lived phenomenon, and that many American-inspired skiffle musicians would turn to their own folk tradition for new inspiration. After all, argued Lomax, ‘Do it Yourself’ music was, by definition, folk [20]. MacColl accepted Lomax’s vision, but saw skiffle as only a means to an end. Despite his politically socialist internationalism, in 1958 he instituted a policy of national restriction at his Ballads and Blues club; only Americans could sing American songs in his club, he argued, in order to protect the English tradition from being replaced [21]. To MacColl, folk music remained an image of unity for working people. This began his relationship with Topic Records, a company under the umbrella of the Worker’s Music Association based in the United States. Alongside the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which made use of skiffle and folk as a rallying cry, MacColl became the face of political folk music, and introduced many on the left-wing spectrum to folk [22].

As Lomax had predicted, when skiffle music began to fall out of favour, the performers turned to folk. Skiffle clubs became folk clubs and began to attract a new generation of performers with an interest in the English tradition. These names included Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Bob Davenport [23]. They arrived at folk clubs housed at a temporary location, usually in a pub, and performed for or with each other [24]. At the height of the movement, there were hundreds of these permanent and semi-permanent clubs in London, and possibly at least one in every major city in England [25]. There was little financial incentive for these clubs to run; often they barely broke even [26]. And what was played in these clubs was never static, as popular folk of the Donegan strand, propagated by touring American folk artists like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or Bob Dylan, continued to be played alongside more English traditional songs straight from the EFDSS library [27].

In some cases, this resulted in schisms over the legitimacy of the songs performers adopted, as with MacColl’s ruling over national songs, and also in divisions over ‘electric folk’ and ‘popular folk’ [28]. The latter is most prevalent in the case of Bob Dylan, who was infamously jeered by a folk audience by changing his persona and style, sensing a possible decline in folk [29]. With the professionalisation of the folk movement, particularly by bands like Fairport Convention, folk no longer existed in the vacuum of the folk clubs where everyone participated in singarounds led by a performer [30].

By the 1990s, folk was largely seen as being in decline. The nature of folk had changed over the decades, and the original practitioners no longer held a monopoly over the practice. As folk had become a genre rather than a lifestyle, folk festivals came to replace the folk club. JP Bean cites BBC radio’s transition to ‘fresh’ artists, with an appeal to a younger generation, for the decline in ‘traditional’ English folk [31]. Elsewhere, folk continued to be inherited by the children of the older practitioners of the 1960s onwards, who grew up with folk and the lifestyle. The tradition, in this sense, does live on [32].

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[1] Folk Singing in Essex from the 1960s, Sue Cubbin SA 30/7/3/37

[2] Essex Record Office, Interview with Daniel Fox, 6 April 2000, SA 30/7/1/25/1

[3] Britta Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, (Oxford University Press, 2005), p.25

[4] Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel C. Donaldson, Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s, (Illinois, 2014), p.7

[5] For the purposes of this section, the activities of the English Folk Song Society and English Folk Dance Society are being combined under the label of EFDSS, although they did not merge until 1929. In principle, though, the organisations had identical aims and goals when it comes to preservation.

[6] Jacqueline Simpson, and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore, (Oxford, 2003) and Frederick Keel, “The Folk Song Society 1898-1948”, Journal of English Folk Dance and Song Society, 5.3 (1948), p.111

[7] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of the Revival, p.61

[8] Sweers, Electric Folk, pp.31-32 and Billy Bragg, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, (London, 2017), p.235

[9] Frederick Keel, The Folk Song Society 1898-1948, p.111

[10] Bragg, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, p.253

[11] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of the Revival, p.14

[12] Ibid, p.17

[13] Tony Kendall, “Through Bushes and Briars: Vaughan Williams’ earliest folk-song collecting”, in Ralph Vaughan Williams: In Perspective, ed. By Lewis Foreman, (Tonbridge, 1998), pp.48-55

[14] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of Revival, p.21

[15] Ibid, p.40

[16] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of Revival, p.19

[17] John Robert Brown, A Concise History of Jazz, (Fenton, 2006), p.142 and JP Bean, Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs, (London, 2014), pp.1-2

[18] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.1

[19] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of Revival, p.44 and Bragg, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, pp.252-253

[20] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of Revival, p.96

[21] Bragg, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, pp.367-368

[22] Cohen and Donaldson, Roots of Revival, pp.20, 40, p.130 and Interview with Myra and Red Abbott, 9 February 2000 [SA 30/7/1/20/1]

[23] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.2

[24] Julia Yvonne Mitchell, “Subterranean Bourgeois Blues: The Second English Folk Revival, c. 1945-1970”, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University College London, 2014), p.62

[25] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.xiii

[26] Mitchell, “Subterranean Bourgeois Blues”, p.63

[27] Bean, Singing from the Floor, pp.3, 18-19, 30, 56, 68

[28] Folk Singing in Essex from the 1960s, Sue Cubbin [SA 30/7/3/37]

[29] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.31 and Sweers, Electric Folk, pp.23, 30

[30] Sweers, Electric Folk, p.23 and Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.3

[31] Bean, Singing from the Floor, p.350

[32] Ibid, p.326

Each year the ERO offers a placement to students on the MA History course at the University of Essex, jointly funded by the university and the Friends of Historic Essex. Last year, we were lucky to be joined by Callum Newton, who catalogued the Essex folk movement oral history project, conducted by Sue Cubbin between 1998 and 2002 (SA 30/7). Over the next three blog posts, Callum delves into the oral histories and chooses some of his personal highlights from the folk collection held in the Essex Sound and Video Archive. In this post, he explains the background to the collection and explores some of the issues discussed in the interviews.

In 1998 Sue Cubbin began an oral history collection that can only be described as a passion project. Inspired by the everyday lives recorded in the Colchester Recalled project (SA 8) she encountered through her work with the Essex Sound Archive, Sue set about conducting interviews with individuals involved in a lifestyle that she herself was deeply enmeshed with: the Essex folk movement.

Sue’s belief was that the people involved in preserving the English folk tradition had their lives completely and utterly transformed by their relationship to folk. It was not simply a hobby for those involved; many committed every day of their week to participating in different folk clubs like Blackmore or the Hoy at Anchor. These clubs were home to a dedicated group of singers and musicians, like the Folk Five, Mick and Sarah Graves and the Grand Ceilidh Club. Every year, Essex also became home to folk festivals, most famously at Leigh-on-Sea.

Over the next few years, this archive grew beyond the oral histories to include music recordings, video, photographs, scrap books and all kinds of other assorted materials, all preserved by Sue at the ERO.

From the beginning, Sue saw the project as an opportunity to help protect Essex folk by keeping a record for future generations to be inspired by. This idea is parallel to the oral nature of the folk tradition itself, in which music and dances were inherited generation after generation, by communities for future communities. The nature of this tradition in a modern world, however, was not without question. In a world with commercial records, big-name artists, and large festivals, one might ask what place a folk club might have. As we will see, many interviewees who were patrons of folk clubs asked this same question, suffering a kind of existentialism about the nature of folk and what place their lifestyle and tradition had in a country that often seemed to soundly reject it.

This series of blog posts will explore how the individuals involved interpreted their commitment to the movement, and to the folk revival overall. For the rest of this post, I shall briefly spell out the main themes of the interviews: definitions of folk; the issues posed by commercialisation; and how to keep folk alive. The second and third posts shall explore the story of the folk revival and the nature of the folk movement in Essex.

What is folk?

The definition of folk is not a simple one. To many of us, folk music is often associated with singer-songwriter artists like Bob Dylan or Judy Collins, or perhaps even American country music. Yet many of the interviewees in the collection describe folk as something more: a lifestyle that they commit entirely to, a tradition they have inherited from ‘ordinary people’ of the past. There was not one idea of folk, however. It appears everyone involved had at least their own interpretation of the philosophy.

Some describe it as a continuation of that tradition, a very tangible lineage, rather than something separate or new. But others – like Colin Cater – view this lineage as not necessarily linear.

Others felt strongly that folk was a living tradition, rather than a re-enactment, the ‘folkies’ of Essex often deriding the English Folk Dance and Song Society for aligning with the latter. Folk clubs came under especial scrutiny. Did the music enjoyed locally and communally within these clubs constitute a living tradition? Was having guest performers, on a stage, being watched in silence, contrary to the spirit of a communal folk tradition? Does folk belong to one economic class?

Or, as Paul O’Kelly suggests, is folk for personal enjoyment? Does it need to be communal at all?

Popular folk and commercialisation

Popular folk music has a fundamental connection to the definition of folk. As the folk revival progressed, many folk practitioners became professional musicians. These artists were writing music, producing records, and gigging under the guise of folk music, very often in folk clubs but certainly within the popular sphere as well. To some of the local folk practitioners, however, this was seen as a degradation of the tradition. Many practitioners thought folk should stay true to its traditional roots, as a communal activity. Putting artists on a stage, separate from its audience, was not considered within their definition of folk, and was even treated as damaging to traditional interpretations of folk music.

This debate also raged within Morris dancing. Those who were lucky enough to be given television appearances were accused of, in the words of Peter Boyce, ‘prostituting’ the tradition, because their costumes were experimental and unique, rather than by the book.

On the other hand, some viewed commercialisation positively. It provided opportunities for those with unique song-writing talent the opportunity to make a living from what they loved and gave folk a platform to present itself positively. Popular folk introduced many of the interviewees to folk clubs in the first place.

Keeping alive and communicating a folk tradition

Unlike the other issues discussed, the interviewees all agreed that more could have been done to keep the folk tradition alive, and that a lack of communication and pride in folk was to blame. Many felt that English people were ashamed of their folk roots, seeing a snobbery or embarrassment that was not present in Irish or Scottish folk traditions. Others tried to encourage the tradition, by writing new dances and songs, as a method of keeping it active and alive, instead of rehashing the older music that some had grown tired of.

Many suggested that young people simply had no interest in folk, with many alternatives for entertainment in a modernising world; none more so than Tony Kendall, who envisioned a revival based in teaching the folk tradition in primary schools across Essex and Britain.

While folk music and dance was certainly still alive when the interviews were recorded, there was an acceptance amongst practitioners that folk was in decline by the 1990s. Some feared this would lead to the folk tradition disappearing altogether, without fast acting documentation.

While the Essex folk tradition does live on, preserved by a dedicated group of practitioners, some twenty years on from when she began, the interviews and the folk song and music collection held at the Essex Record Office acts as an insurance for Essex folk. Forever can the sounds and dances of the movement be experienced and inherited, and the lives attached to the golden age of the folk movement be remembered through their own experiences, in their own words and on their own terms.

Find out more about folk archives preserved at the Essex Record Office in this guide: Sources on Folk Music.