Singing from the Floor

by J.P. Bean

In smoky rooms above pubs, bare rooms with battered stools and beer-stained tables, where the stage was little more than a scrap of carpet and sound systems were unheard of, an acoustic revolution took place in Britain in the 1950s and '60s. This was the folk revival, where a generation of musicians, among much drink and raucous cheer, would rediscover the native songs of their own tradition, as well as the folk and blues coming from across the Atlantic by artists such as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy. Singing from the Floor is the story of this remarkable movement, faithfully captured in the voices of those who formed it by JP Bean. We hear from luminaries such as Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Peggy Seeger and Ralph McTell, alongside figures such as Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding, who all started their careers on the folk circuit. The book charts the revival's improvised beginnings and its ties to the CND movement, through the heyday of the '60s and '70s, when every university, town and many villages across the country boasted a folk club, to the fallow years of the '80s and '90s.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

448 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2014

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

My name is Paul and I’m a folkaholic.

Today I have three wives, seven or so kids, several gigantic houses and various animals. I have 27 very close friends who would all cut off parts of their bodies if I asked. Life is a blast.

But it wasn’t always like that.

No.

Even though I was born into a warm loving family, being so intelligent I was highly insecure. To alleviate this, when I went to college, I started singing folk songs, at first just quietly to myself. I gradually found fellow singers who told me of a club in the neighborhood where people sang openly. And after the club shut we would stumble across to the park where we would continue singing amongst ourselves. I will spare the sordid details, but in only a few months I was singing almost 24 hours a day. I was desperate to get hold of new ballads with 58 verses. I would be learning new Child ballads whilst at the very same time singing the ones I already knew. I would beg for scraps of oral tradition from any passing Irish person. Even children and their skipping chants were not immune from my lust.

I got a job but couldn’t keep my singing under control. I got fired, I got evicted and I became homeless. I stole, lied, cheated and manipulated people. I was a florid folkopath. I was Ewan MacColl crossed with Patrick Bateman. I would do anything for a song. It didn’t even have to be traditional, didn’t even have to be unaccompanied. I sank so low I did Taylor Swift songs accompanied by semi-acoustic and electric keyboard. I’ve learned that this was not really me (although it looks like me in the photographs). It was the folkaholism.

My parents got me into a half-way house where we were allowed to harmonise to an Afro Celt Sound System album. That didn’t work. Then they paid for four rehabs and let me stay at their house until they couldn’t stand it any longer. During the rehabs we were made to listen to modern music, mostly Amy Winehouse. My parents practiced tough love. If they heard the merest peep about roving on a May morning from me, out of the house I went, even though it could be a cold, haily, windy night. It was the hardest thing they ever had to do, my mum said, apart from burying my grandfather in the back yard during January, which was even harder, she says.

I was a typical Jekyll and Hyde folkaholic. I was a belligerent, mean and compulsive liar unless I was singing a murder ballad.

That last morning in jail, I woke up after three days of cold turkey and - you may find this hard to believe – the face of Shirley Collins appeared before me. She seemed a lot sterner than the gentle countenance we see on her CD sleeves. She upended her sister’s portative pipe organ and shoved its sharpened tubes towards me. “My name is Shirley, cannot you see?” she said. “Lords, dukes and ladies bow down to me.” This was the DTs all right. I knew Shirley was good, but not that good. I had visions of her ex-husband Ashley Hutchings dancing lewdly and dangling 17th century manuscripts before me, which in my madness I knew to be crammed with previously unknown broken token sailor songs. Martin Carthy, grinning like a skeleton in a medieval woodcut, muttered DADGAD, DADGAD in my ear, like a mystical chant. I knew then – there had to be a better life than this. I had to get away from this folk singing disease which society seems happy to tolerate , even promote.

Well, I know now I will always be a folk singer. I accept that I am powerless in the face of the oral tradition. Even though now I only listen to Sonic Youth and Rachmaninov, and allow myself one chorus of White Man in Hammersmith Palais every other Christmas Eve, I know that I would only have to speak the first line of The Dowie Dens of Yarrow and I would be back in that jail cell with Shirley and Martin and Ashley, giggling and gibbering at me. But that will never happen again.


And now, a book review!

This may be a 410-page book but it’s a really fast read. It’s an oral history, a river of voices flowing along, and you do get carried right along with the current. It helps that the hundreds of folkies interviewed hardly ever use difficult words. And also that so many of the things they say are exactly the same.

P 100 : I hitched down to London and went to the Singers’ Club before we started our club in Hull.

P150: The first four years of the Ian Campbell Folk Group, from ’59 through to ’63, we kept our jobs and performed in our spare time.

P200 : I’d been going to folk clubs for two or three years when I went to Oxford in 1966.

P250: We did two gigs on the Friday and Sunday but the Saturday night we had off.

This is frankly rather dull stuff, but, of course, we British folkies actually know a lot – maybe even most - of these people, we’ve been interested in them for years, so all this jejune detail is like your mates talking. It’s a thousand cosy chats, is what this is, all interweaved together. A few little insights, some details you didn’t know, gossip you hadn’t caught up on; but roughly, the thing plays out just like you thought it should, like a night down the pub with your 200 best mates.

As well as the fun stuff, this book, in its offhand, stumbling, crablike way, the tale of the definite rise and to one extent or another fall of the British folk club movement. It was a remarkable boom from the late 50s through to the mid 70s. By the time I started going to a number of clubs, in the mid to late 80s, the audiences were no longer young.

Robin Dransfield: The folk clubs were at a low point in the mid 80s. Unless you were Martin Carthy or Vin Garbutt you were singing to 15 people sometimes, whereas ten years earlier you’d done the same club and you were singing to 200.

Clubs continue to die; the younger folk audience moves to arts centres and especially festivals. The book ends with a misty eyed chapter of ooh it were grand, anyone could turn up and would be welcomed in like a long lost sheep – you had a warm, twinkly-eyed environment which gave you the space to hone your genius and all that. But these old buffers have to admit that ossification set in, stalactites grew from the ceiling of the clubs, the dulcimers gradually mummified.

John Leonard : The clubs had stayed much the same and they were impossible to go to as a newcomer. A newcomer - to go in for the first time to this club that had been running for forty years by the same people – could not grasp the culture. And so new people are not going to folk clubs.

The book concludes that whilst folk music is alive and well and growing in fantastical new shapes, the folk club will wither away as the organisers and the audiences shuffle ever closer to their eternal reward.

British folk clubs
Born circa 1955. Died circa 2025.

“We had a good run.”

[Jack Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive account of the very english phenomenon that is the folk club. Arising out of a communist party initiative to reconnect 'the folk' with the music of their working ancestors, it grew to become one of britain's most close knit underground communities. A breeding ground for exceptional and authentic talent that, despite vicissitudes of commercial music and the decline of traditional culture, still remains strong today. The folk club is uniquely encapsulated by the notion of humble performers getting up in front of sticky tables littered with pint glasses, in the steamy back room of a pub. Long may it live.

[Andy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Singing From The Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs’ by JP Bean provides a valuable service in capturing, as an oral history, the contributions of almost all the key players to the British Folk Revival. I was entranced by this music as a youngster and it is wonderful to have collected together in one volume the voices of so many of these prominent musicians, some unfortunately already no longer with us.

This is my video review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAaF...

[Fred Garnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous book! If you have read the magisterial Electric Eden and felt that it floated too far above the everyday experience of listening to, as well as making, music, and that Seasons They Change was a too-long mad ramble down every fascinating diversion of acid-folk then Singing From The Floor has the right balance of personable key artists and judicious editing of its many oral histories to make it an even better book than either.
I love folk music and i revere folk "super-group" Pentangle (possibly the only folk-jazz group too) so I get the value of writing a history of the folk clubs, which this is. Maddy Prior comes out as a surprisingly active force (as does June Tabor), as well as Shirley Collins whom everyone knows as a key force in folk music. Martin and Eliza Carthy both give generously of their time and this hints at a key aspect of the book, it isnt just the usual history of the hey-day of folk music and clubs in the sixties. Singing From The Floor also covers the recent resurgence, the festivals and inter-generational aspects of folk, allowing the changing context to develop and emerge as we read.
The oral history aspect, and the wide-ranging nature of the contributions and the chapters, makes this very-detailed and full of delightful anecdotes (Josh McRae drunkenly late for meeting Rambling Jack Elliot & Buffy St Marie at Heathrow in 1960 said "I'm looking for a cowboy with a broken leg and a Red Indian").
Wonderful editing work by JP Bean from the inestimable Sheffield and its post-industrial folk scene (not a synth in sight); such work isn't easy. The book is an easy read because the editing and sequencing is superb - great job Mr JPB! I think anyone interested in post-war British history, let alone music, let alone folk music, will love this because it isn't just an oral history of folk clubs it is also a great insight on our shared post-war history too.
My "Radio YouTube" review of "Electric Eden" can be seen online here; http://radioyoutube.wordpress.com/201...

[Skord · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive and exhausting. If you want to know everything about the history of the folk revival this is your book. Basically a huge collection of interview excerpts from anyone still alive from the folk scene of the past 60 years. Less a book more a reenactment.

[Steve Gillway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neatly arranged snippets of oral text of key figures in the UK folk scene. More heartwarming than insightful but evocative.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing "oral" history of British Folk Clubs - highly recommended.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read about the emergence of folk clubs in Britain in the words of those musicians who played them. This record of events is a worthy tribute to all those commited revivalists and a timely reminder that folk music truly was/is... of, by, and for the people.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this can only be described as an oral history. In some ways it reads like the transcript of a lost documentary series on the history of the British folk movement. A more in-depth Folk Britannia if you will. Or won't.

The British Folk movement seems to have come out of the politics of the 1950s - CND, The British Communist Party - in a disorganized way. The politics is important influencing people's reasons for pursuing folk as a musical outlet. This seems to have merged with the influence of folk/blues musicians from the USA and Alan Lomax school of looking for the roots/survival of traditional music.

Bean's book tells that story from its emergence, through what I'm going to call 'peak folk' in the 50s & 60s and into the more entertainment led 70s (with the emergence of people like Jasper Carrott, Billy Connelly and Mike Harding) and through what looks like decline in the 80s and 90s. In fact it is less a decline and more a shift from a club based circuit - although they still exist - to a festival based circuit.

Throughout the book Bean introduces the key individuals, the clubs and the controversies let's those who played, saw and heard the music tell their own stories and it pays off. Because what comes across is the importance of the music. There are tales of the debates between those who wanted 'purity' in the music - Peggy Seegar and Ewan McColl's rules at the Critics group being the more puritanical - and those who basically just wanted to play the music they liked. These debates seem to get people's hackles up, on one side or another, even now.

The book also has a chapter on Bob Dylan - what he bought to and took away from the British Folk Club circuit - which seems to vary on whose account you hear. There's also a chapter, 'Following in Footsteps' on the children of the first folk generation who have now gone on to have folk music careers of their own: Seth Lakeman, Eliza Carthy and others.

In fact the 'new folk' movement (or whatever we want to arbitrarily labelled it as) is where my personal experience begins. I got into Folk slightly late in life - if you exclude buying Clannad albums in my youth - so I kind of discovered the music in the reverse order to this book. I started with the descendants and influenced and then went back to discover what had influenced them. So for me this book has been a real pleasure to read. Opening my eye to people who I was obliquely aware of and making me want to listen to their music.

I always think the key test of a book about music - which might not actually be the objective of the writer at all - is whether it makes you want to listen to the music being discussed. And this book definitely passes that test. It also reminded me of the lost mid-80s of my youth when I loved Billy Connelly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding (along with Max Boyce), which I had almost entirely air-brushed from my memory.

But that is damning this book with faint praise really. It's a fascinating series of stories weaved centred around the Folk Clubs. It opens your mind up to a whole almost forgotten period of British history and the people that were involved in driving it and their motivations.

I'd recommend it not just as a oral history of a particularly kind of music but also as a history of a different time political, culturally and socially. So go buy it. Ideally from Bookmarks Bookshop or any other independent bookseller and not our uber-capitalist literature overlord A****n. It would be a fitting way to mark the book's subject matter

[Laurence Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read, particularly for me as my Dad played in exactly those clubs through the 60s and 70s (particularly the Sheffield ones)

It's strength is also it's weakness: pure testimony and no narrative can make the book feel unstructured, overlong and repetitive at times, but it's worth the trouble