#dave arthur

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Dave and Toni Arthur - Hearken To The Witches Rune - Trailer rec. - 1975

[karldallas]

Pix from Bill Leader's "Gold" gig

Bill couldn’t be at the gig, because he was unwell, so his son Tom – also a highly respected recording engineer in his own right – accepted the medal on his dad’s behalf. The good news is that Bill is making a good recovery.

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[oldwinenewbottles]

There are no right and wrong texts or tunes

There's an interesting interview with Dave Arthur about his now-released biography of AL Lloyd over at Folk Radio UK. I particularly liked the closing thoughts:

"[W]hat sort of Bert Lloyd legacy would you like to see new folk artists taking forward, if any…and do you still see/hear his influence in music today?

Bert’s legacy is all around us on the folk scene. Even young singers who may hardly know of him will undoubtedly have heard many of the songs he introduced into the folk clubs, if not from his many available recordings, then through the singing of people such as Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, Fairport Convention, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Frankie Armstrong, Louisa Killen, Bob Davemport, Roy Harris, Johnny Handle, and even myself.

His book Folk Song in England remains an essential read as does his and Vaughan Williams’ The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, reprinted by the EFDSS in 2003 as Classic English Folk Songs. A follow-up collection The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Steve Roud and Julia Bishop, published in 2012 by the EFDSS, will provide young singers with an abundance of fresh material.

What I’d like to see young artists taking forward is the desire to research original material, to go back to original sound recordings and manuscript collections of traditional songs and tunes and soak up styles and techniques of performance and repertoire, and then with that knowledge go on to interpret the material in their own way. Be original, search out different versions, multiple versions of songs that interest you, don’t simply learn all your songs and tunes from the revival singers of the 60s, 70s and 80s, whose albums are available on CD. Read about the background to the songs, set them in a social and historical context. Check up on words, names, places that you don’t know. The more you know about a song or a tune the more convincing and satisfying will be your performance. Don’t be pedantic and make a fetish out of folk song, there are no right and wrong texts or tunes, musical folklore is always in a state of flux. When that ceases it becomes a mere museum piece, a sad thing trapped forever, unchanging, like an insect in amber, or a butterfly pinned down in a museum case. Be inventive, original, but always from the vantage of knowledge and understanding of the material. Above all don’t take yourself too seriously, be suspicious of all the hype and flim- flam of the commercial music world. Even if in general, folk music is just one more tributary of the commercial music river, try not to treat folk songs and tunes like packets of sausages in a supermarket, to be packaged, hermetically sealed, piled high and sold cheap. They invariably taste like crap compared to free-range organic pork sausages, produced from lovingly-reared happy pigs, by farmers and butchers who care, and understand their trade."

Bert: The Life and Times of AL Lloyd

davearthur.net