folk music old and new

We watched the Radio 2 folk awards last night.  The BBC televised the whole ceremony for the first time this year.  I was brought up on folk music, my father being one of the first wave of revivalists in the 1950s, and a pretty fair unaccompanied singer.  As a teenager I never had any problem with simultaneously adoring Blondie and The Police, and Planxty and Paddy Tunney.  My father's tastes were purist in the extreme.  Irish traditional music was his favourite, with some English trad and a little Appalachian.  He disliked Scottish music, English dance music unless played strictly in the correct tempo for morris dancing, and anything involving an electric bass, drums or a brass section.

As a lifelong fan I'm disconcerted that the media have recently pronounced that folk music is now fashionable.  It's as bad as with the beekeeping.  I don't want to be fashionable, then in a couple of years become unfashionable.  Folk music's new fashionability is apparently due to the refreshing wave of new talented young artists that are reinvigorating this faded musical scene.  Really good musicians like, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.  I did once think about buying  Sigh No More, after hearing their first hit single, until I heard some more of their songs and realised that I only liked the first one.  I suppose it would be too much to expect journalists to go away and actually listen to the folk music that has been going on over the past thirty years that led us to a dark sad place from which we needed to be rescued by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.

One of the best guitarists on the planet, and from the 1970s to the 1990s one of the best and most original songwriters, is generally considered to be a folk musician.  He is of course Richard Thompson.  An utterly mellifluous guitar player is Martin Simpson.  He has an accurate feel for British and American traditional music, and has written some songs that will enter the tradition in the truest sense, which is that they will still be sung in a hundred years time by people who have forgotten who wrote them.  His musical career stretches back about four decades.  June Tabor has been declared by Elvis Costello to have the finest female voice in Britain.  She can make the big Scottish ballads sound as immediate and relevant as if the events (mostly ghastly) happened last week, and she has been recording since the 1970s.  Katherine Tickell is a Northumbrian piper and fiddler of genius and total authenticity who released her first record in 1984 and has been performing live ever since.  And so on and so on.  Great singers and instrumentalists continued to emerge in the 1990s and beyond (Julie Murphy and Fernhill, Julie Fowlis, Tim Van Eyken, the Vass twins).  My CD racks, and the cupboard where the pre CD era vinyl still lives, are weighed down with really fine music, some traditional and some recently written, that has been made over the past forty years by musicians who have worked very hard touring around the UK (and the world) and been supported by people who have noticed and valued what they were doing.  If good musicians can play to bigger audiences and find it easier to make a decent living that's great (as long as they don't get too exclusive.  There aren't many art forms where you can see a world class practitioner close up and live for twelve quid a ticket!).  But please spare us the myth that the moribund folk scene is being saved by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.  They're OK.  They're just not nearly as good as a lot of the musicians who were occupying the scene already.