The Child Ballads, nostalgia and scholastic research

Originally published in FoT Issue 99: Apr-Jun 2004

If, like me, you long ago gave up searching second-hand book shops in the hopes of finding a Traditional Music section, let alone an affordable edition of the “Child Ballads”, I have good news. Bill Gates has yet again come to our rescue. Well, not Bill Gates exactly, but you know what I mean. An American company, The Heritage Collectors, has developed the complete set of Child’s works on CD-Rom. The digital edition offers fully searchable text of all 305 ballads and their notes, with enhanced study aids, including a glossary and a new place names index, ballad maps, computer-playable midi files and new essays on the ballads as literature, and on folk-music collectors and collecting. There is an audio CD in the package containing ballads and interviews with contemporary interpreters, preservers, and collectors of the tradition, including Jean Ritchie, Martin Carthy and Louis Killen. At the time of writing, negotiations are under way with a UK distributor. But check the web site, and if this has still not been sorted out, you can order direct from the US.

And if, like me, you frittered away your adolescence in the golden decade of the Sixties, then a few names from Fifties television - such as Prudence Kitten, Four Feather Falls and Mr Pastry - will probably ring those Pavlovian bells and take you back to a time when Blackjacks were a farthing each. Please wallow to your heart’s delight in Whirligig’s 1950s Television Nostalgia web site. See test cards, which 24-hour programming of course killed off, interludes such as the potter’s wheel or London to Brighton in four minutes, adverts (you’re never alone with a Strand) and information about the programmes themselves, in some cases with stills, clips or theme tunes. There is also a companion radio site with facts on everything from Al Read to Workers’ Playtime.

There is also a wealth of nostalgia (or social history if you are feeling serious) at the British Pathe Film Archive. You can preview items from the entire 3500-hour archive, which covers news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970. You can also pay for higher resolution copies. Schools can download content free of charge for use in the classroom. To steer matters back on-topic, you can download a 1962 clip of Princess Margaret watching a traditional English folk dance and then joining in. I searched the expression “folk music” and came up with 26 results, including the first National Colliery Music Festival at Harringay Arena, London, in 1948; musicians and dancers at the 1952 National Eisteddfod; and the annual blessing of the circus performers and animals at Chessington Zoo in 1955. Such are the vagaries of Internet searching.

Even more on-topic is the Traditional Music in England project at the British Library. About 1,500 hours of recordings of folk songs, sea shanties and children’s rhymes from the library’s Sound Archive are available. You can search the catalogue online - it includes various collections such as those of Bob Davenport, Carole Pegg and John Howson - but unfortunately you must travel to London or Boston Spa to listen to the songs and interviews. The web site has a couple of downloadable songs, including ‘Generals All’, sung by Walter Pardon, and the interview summaries make for fascinating reading.

Now you would hardly credit ‘The Wild Rover’ with being an object of fascination. Surely it is one of those songs that has been done to death and would arouse scorn among folk music enthusiasts. But no. For when David Dalton in a newsgroup asked: “Anybody know who wrote this or if not, approximately when it was written and maybe where? The House Band also do a slower version to a different tune, entitled Wild Roving. Jackie Sullivan does a nice version as does Dermot O’Reilly. Who else sings it to your liking?” David goes on to suggest some rather esoteric interpretations of the song. He writes: “Now in the past I speculated that “ten sovereigns bright” poetically means shamanic knowledge” and “the term landlady may mean earth goddess or Gaia or in Irish tradition maybe Anu or Danu or Eriu or Queen of the Fairies though that is debatable.” I don’t think that was what the Dubliners were thinking as they sang the version I have on CD, but not only did the posting elicit sensible replies, but also rather erudite ones.

Wade Miller wrote: “As has already been noted, it’s English and at least a couple of centuries old. At the height of their fame and influence the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had a song-spotter working for them looking for likely material in the folk clubs of England, and it was brought to them by one of these folks who heard the great Lou Killen singing it.” And I thought it originated in an Irish theme pub. Wade continues: “It may be unfashionable to admit to a fondness for the Clancy Brothers, but the fact is that they’re the ones who put the song on the map, at least in Ireland and North America. And they do a terrific version.”

But now step forward Malcolm Douglas. This is where the erudition comes in. He wrote: “In an earlier thread on uk.music.folk, Jack Campin quoted a reference in the Bibliotheca Lindesiana Catalogue of English Ballads (#578 p211) to a broadside song entitled ‘The Good-Fellow’s Resolution,’ beginning “I have been a bad Husband this full fifteen year”, and dated 1680-82. There is a copy of this in J W Ebsworth’s “Roxburghe Ballads”, which I’ve now had a look at, and it is pretty clearly the basis of the later ‘Wild Rover’.” Malcolm goes on to quote verses 1, 8 and 9 from ‘The Good Fellow’s Resolution’ by Thomas Lanfiere - it is 13 stanzas long - but I’ll just quote from the eighth verse:

I went to an Hostiss where I us’d to resort,
And I made her believe that money was short;
I askt her to trust me, but she answered “Nay,
Enough of such Guests I can have every day.”
Then quoth she, “Pray, forbear, there’s no staying here,
Except you have money, you shall have no beer.”

And for comparison:

I went to an ale-house I used to frequent
And I told the landlady my money was spent.
I asked her for credit, she answered me “Nay
Such a custom as yours I could have any day.”

He’s not wrong, is he? And if you want to read the full thread, as usual my advice is to visit the Google Groups site and do a search on, for example, “Roxburghe Ballads”. You might be lucky. Or you might get the annual blessing of the circus performers and animals at Chessington Zoo.

Spam, spam, spam, the state of folk clubs, the search for song lyrics and guitar lessons at Old Bridge Music

Originally published in FoT Issue 98: Jan-Mar 2004

As I sat down to write this column, events seemed to be conspiring against me. Had my PC been attacked by some mystery virus? So much spam (see “Folk on Line” issue 96) was clogging up my inbox my email was virtually unusable and my computer was starting to play up. Software that used to give me hours of pleasure now did nothing but generate error messages. I had started going for long walks just to reduce the percentage of each day spent at my keyboard before there was no more hair to tear out. But as my cursor froze for the third time in as many hours I had a sudden and thankfully lateral thought. I put fresh batteries in my cordless mouse and voila! - it’s a new dawn.

Filled with renewed hope, I perused the newsgroups. In uk.music.folk Jacey Bedford, Artisan’s very own cyberbabe, raised an issue dear to all our hearts - and therefore bound to get keyboards rattling:

“... we’ve discussed this subject before, but it seems to me that some folk clubs are dying on their feet while others thrive ... we’re in the 21st century now and with declining club audiences, we need to bend before we break. What can we do to make folk clubs or their equivalent more palatable to both current folkies and potential ones? Let’s face it - a proportion of current folkies are an ageing audience and know that I, for one, am not happy to fight my way through a crowd of underage drinkers in the bar, find an unmarked (secret) staircase that’s sticky with spilt beer and then perch on a hard bar stool for three and a half hours in a cold room - whatever the standard of entertainment.”

It was at this point that bells began to ring. I’ve been up that sticky staircase! Though if I remember correctly there were no hard bar stools left and I had to stand behind the tallest bloke in the room.

“I know we’ve had the floorsinger debate recently - but what about venues? Is it about time we abandoned the scruffy pub in favour of something more comfortable? With lottery funding there are now plenty of places with swish, new or refurbished village and community halls. There are also plenty of arts centres that might be grateful for a regular event, midweek, in their bar. I’m not saying all pubs are lousy, some are excellent, but as we travel round, there’s a definite correlation between low audiences and scruffy or intimidating pubs. The gigs I run in our village hall - mostly well supported, occasionally not - are not a prime example of what’s right with the world because although we’re not in a scruffy pub, our hall is in need of refurbishment. However, we’ve had lots of nice comments about our new upholstered chairs which make the whole evening much more comfortable - so I’m guessing that comfort matters to more than just me. We pay a small amount for the hire of the hall - but we get a good enough audience to cover that. What do you think? Should we be looking for nicer surroundings? Does it really make a difference, or could all the comfy chairs in the world not prevent a folk club decline?”

I was tempted to add some of the responses here, but kept finding myself at first agreeing with the various arguments put forward, then tearing them apart. It was as if I was turning into a grumpy old man before my very PC. OK, an older grumpy old man. If you want to read them, do go to the Google Groups site where the thread will be easy to find. The important thing is that Jacey has thrown the topic open for discussion, and the aspect that caught my attention, but did not seem to be picked up on by many others, is that any avenue we can go down to get lottery money used to support traditional live music should be explored.

One of the respondents in the thread was Hamish Currie, the webmaster (Onine update 130208: at least he was then. Click here for Hamish's Lombardy pages, here for the TFC) for the Tudor Folk Club in Chesham, Bucks, who includes on his site an excellent guide to setting up a folk club along with sections on Floorsinging For Beginners and Joining Your First Session. Here is the introduction to Hamish’s Starting A Folk Club section:

“This is an edit of a thread started by Dave Thackeray, who asked, in uk.music.folk: ‘I’m intending to start up a folk club shortly and wondered if those running established clubs might offer me some (positive) advice about the best way to go about it’ ... which raised one of the more enthusiastic threads in recent years - these pages are a consolidated and edited version of that thread. Read, learn, enjoy! There’s lots to think about: and as many opinions on each and every aspect of running a club as there are versions of John Barleycorn.”

I have mentioned the Mudcat Cafe in these pages before, most recently in issue 89, but then only its Internet radio pages. Originally the Digital Tradition Folk Song Database, it specialises in folk and blues. I was pleased to learn that it seems to be going from strength to strength and is an excellent resource for lyrics, chords and tablature of traditional and contemporary song as well as discussion groups with a lot of UK content. In the 10 minutes or so that I visited the site I managed to find the lyrics to ‘She Moved Among Men’, ‘Slip Jigs And Reels’ and ‘The Galway Shawl’. I even downloaded a couple of midi files of variant tunes for the latter. And let’s not get involved in a heated debate about copyright. I could stick on my June Tabor CD and type out the words to ‘The Barmaid’s Song’ as an aid to learning it and nobody would mind. If I can download it, I don’t have to type it. I admit to laziness, not theft.

No need to steal from Chris Newman’s Old Bridge Music site, for not only has he got a new address - he’s obviously gone broadband - but he is giving away guitar lessons. Yes I know it’s just a trailer for his book but there is an exercise and a James Scott Skinner tune to download so if you will forgive me, dear reader, I feel the need to go and practise. Like I said, it’s new dawn.

Heatwaves, virtual banjos, music notation, the Carpenter Collection, Sara Grey and heatwaves

Originally published in FoT Issue 97: Oct-Dec 2003

At the time of writing, gentle reader, it is too hot to surf the Internet, let alone write a column about it. I know that by the time you read this, the heatwave of 2003 will be no more than a memory, and, if you’re anything like me, you probably won’t even remember which year it was. But if you’ll forgive my audacity, I will just relax with a cooling pint or two while my random article generator does the work for me.

Desktop Banjo is a great little shareware program for anyone learning the banjo. It’s a tuner, tablature generator, accompaniment player and MIDI file generator. The software allows you to see and hear chords, scales and songs on an animated banjo neck. You can use the sample song files to start learning new material right away or you can easily create songs and lessons for yourself. For the uninitiated, being shareware means you can download it from the Internet and try it without paying for it. But that doesn’t mean you can get away with using it forever at the programmer’s expense, because its save facility is disabled unless you pay the asking price, though it can still print tablature and output Midi files. But for just $29.95 (about £18.50) you can’t really complain. It comes with five different tunings, plus a custom tuning that you can set yourself. It’s very easy to use, as the notation is generated or written in a text editor. It can create ASCII tablature for uploading to Internet newsgroups or graphic tablature for printing. A full chord dictionary is included. (Online update 120208: The program seems to have grown. It is now just over £25 but includes guitars, pianos, bass, banjo, mandolin and drums. Here is the main site.)

The art - or is it a science? - of music notation has come on leaps and bounds thanks largely to the Internet, by virtue of the number of users wanting to swap tunes. We’re not talking about piracy here, just the same sort of sharing of melodies that goes on at a session but conducted at a distance. Recently cyberbabe Dick Gaughan put forward proposals for a new newsgroup - called uk.music.notation - for the discussion of all matters related to musical notation from a UK perspective. To quote from Dick’s proposal on uk.music.folk: “On-topic discussion includes notation systems, software used for notating and transcribing, problems such as transposition, scoring techniques and other general questions relating to notation. Discussions relating to musical criticism are strictly off-topic.” As I write this, the newsgroup had been approved and created on Usenet, but the only posts relate to its setting up, for which there is a strict and quite rigorous procedure. But hopefully by the time “Folk On Tap” drops through your letterbox there will be healthy discussions going on.

The catalogue of the James Madison Carpenter Collection has been made available online courtesy of the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute, for anyone to search or browse. The collection is one of the largest and most important collections of folk song and folk drama ever made in Britain. Carpenter was born in Mississippi, but travelled 40,000 miles around the UK in an Austin Seven between 1929 and 1935. He searched for singers of sea shanties, traditional ballads and folk songs and performers of mummers’ plays and recorded their performances, as well as noting down their words. The collection is held at the Archive of Folk Culture, in the American Folklife Centre at the Library of Congress, but it had never been catalogued and was largely overlooked - until now, that is. The papers in the collection were microfilmed shortly after they were bought by the Library of Congress from Carpenter in 1972 and the discs copied on to tape. Copies of the microfilms and tapes are available at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House, and a copy of the microfilm is available at the Central Library, Aberdeen. The eventual aim, once all the permissions have been obtained, is to make the collection generally available online.

While on the subject of Americans who put us Brits to shame when it comes to keeping an eye on the tradition, the delightful Sara Grey - along with her son, Kieron Means - has a web site which is well worth a visit. Articles and information about the gigs, workshops and various educational projects she is involved in are included. By the way, on the EFDSS web site is another new resource - the Sessions Page. (Online update 120208: not any more it doesn't.) When I looked, there were only three sessions, so if you know or attend a regular session, make yourself known to the webmaster, and get some free publicity.

Error message: Explorer caused an invalid page fault in random article generator.dll. Please save all work and restart your computer. I’ve got a better idea. See you next time.

Old Time Radio, Pete Seeger and spam

Originally published in FoT Issue 96: Jul-Sep 2003

With your permission, gentle reader, I will begin by going off-topic - because this item, just for a change, has nothing to do with folk music. If you can remember when Sunday lunch was a time for the family to get together, eat roast dinner and listen to the Clitheroe Kid on the wireless, RadioLovers.com is a must for your favourites list. It is an American site, offering “old time radio shows” which can be downloaded for free, so the likes of “Amos & Andy”, “Bing Crosby Entertains” and “I Love Lucy” are all here. But it also includes “Educating Archie”, “Frankie Howerd” and - yes, you’ve guessed it - “The Clitheroe Kid”.

Presumably there is a copyright issue here. The site gets round it (and I can forgive myself for listening to it) by stating that it believes the copyrights have lapsed or didn’t exist to begin with, and in any case doesn’t charge for downloading or access to the site, but is “just trying to bring the exciting world of Old Time Radio to a whole new generation of listeners”. And it offers to remove any recording which can be shown to violate copyright. I just hope the suits at the BBC don’t find out or they’re bound to object. In fact - please forget that I ever told you about the site. The Beeb also has its own nostalgiafest on BBC7, a digital radio channel where you can listen to old episodes of “The Goon Show”, “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again” and “Round the Horne”, where of course you can hear the traditional ballads of Rambling Sid Rumpo. So you can see I have almost brought myself back on-topic again.

And indeed as I write this, I am listening - thanks to the Internet - to the fine Radio 4 programme “Across the Divide 2”, which I missed when it was broadcast in May, but which remains available for seven days on the Web. Bob Copper interviewing Pete Seeger. One legend chatting to another. Folk music heaven! By the time you read this it will be long gone, but there are always a few gems around, and with Internet radio you are not limited to your own area when it comes to the regional broadcasts - though the powers that be have axed without warning a Radio Humberside folk programme, Henry Ayrton’s “Folk and Roots Show”. Thanks to the Web, the likes of Terry Wogan and John Peel get emails from listeners in Florida - but it works just as well for we southerners if we want to listen for instance to any of Radio Scotland’s folk programmes - and they are many.

Speaking of Pete Seeger - I was, wasn’t I? - Jim Capaldi runs a fabulous site dedicated to the man, the music, the monument. Not *the* Jim Capaldi you understand, just *a* Jim Capaldi. An unofficial web site, it is clearly a labour of love, but gathers together a wealth of material about Pete and you can even download some of his songs. It is worth looking at just to read the comments page. Harry Belafonte got it right at Pete’s 1996 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when he said: “If they ever decide to put a fifth face on Mount Rushmore, I would nominate Pete Seeger. He is one of the great sons of this country.” Rock and Roll? Well I ain’t ever heard no horse sing it.

There - have you noticed the way I have seamlessly arrived on-topic? Folk on the Internet indeed. And here is one of the most interesting, if bizarre, examples of the use of online folk music I have found. If you have an email account, you will probably have noticed the recent increase in spam. If you don’t, I had better explain that these days the term “spam” means Internet abuse, particularly unsolicited email and junk postings to newsgroups. It was 25 years ago this May, when there were only a couple of thousand people on what was called the Arpanet, that someone realised that instead of sending 600 emails to invite people to see some computer systems being demonstrated, he could send one email to all 600 of them. His name was Gary Thuerk (pronounced Turk) and he was in marketing. Hmmph. As the Arpanet was intended for scientific research purposes only, he got into big trouble. He was reprimanded. When the Internet came along and his idea had been seen to have worked (his company sold 20 computer systems - at about $1million each) advertisers quickly realised they could use mass emailing software (which had been around for decades to handle mailing lists) and use it to send junk email to large audiences who hadn’t asked for it. Which is why more and more Internet users are finding their email accounts almost impossible to handle.

In January, more than half of the email arriving at the world’s biggest Internet service provider, AOL, was spam. By May it was rising above 80%, or more than 2.5 billion pieces of spam a day. Other ISPs said the same - Yahoo was handling five times more spam than a year ago. I receive around 50 emails a day, 45 of which go straight into the trash. I am offered ways to make $$$cash$$$, guaranteed enlargement of certain body parts - unmentionable - and reduction of others - weight or wrinkles. I can get credit, a university degree and - gosh, how exciting - 80% off PRINTER CARTRIDGES. Not to mention all the porn I want. (I said not to mention all the porn I want!) Go away for a couple of weeks and there could be 700 emails in your inbox. You can see why people are giving up on their email accounts. Try looking for something important in that lot.

The reason for this year’s sudden increase in spam rather perversely is down to the successful blocking of it by ISPs. A spammer used to send 100,000 emails touting, say, generic Viagra in the hopes of getting one reply. If 90,000 of those emails are now being blocked, he needs to send out a million emails just to find that one customer and keep his response rate the same. Did I say that I was on-topic? So where does folk music come in? Anti-spam - “You know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may think you’re really lame and won’t take you off their spam list. And if two people do it - in harmony - they may think you’re both jerks and they won’t take either of you off the spam list. And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people hittin’ Reply, typin’ a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and hittin’ Send? They may think it’s an organisation! And can you imagine ten per cent of spam victims per message? I said two hundred thousand replies per message - hittin’ Reply, typin’ a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and hittin’ Send? They may think it’s a MOVEMENT, and that’s what it is: THE ALICE’S RESTAURANT ANTI-SPAM MASSACRE MOVEMENT!”

The ARA-SMM claims to have actually had spammers closed down. It’s a dangerous tactic, because one of the last things you want to do is reply to a spammer. Then he knows you have an active email address. But if everybody did it... Who was it who sang ‘We Shall Overcome’?

Dodgy backs, Damien Barber and the folk club web sites of south-east England

Originally published in FoT Issue 95: Apr-Jun 2003

First a health warning. Look after your back - it’s your best friend. Don’t sit hunched over your keyboard for hours on end. Back straight, keyboard and mouse within easy reach. Forearms parallel with the ground, knees slightly lower than the hips. And take regular breaks, even if it’s just for five minutes an hour. Ten is better. It’s not just your eyes that can suffer strain, you can do a lot of damage to your spine if your posture is all wrong. Take a look at the posters on the Advanced Seating Designs web site if you want to read more. That is the end of this public service announcement.

One wonders in any case if it is all worthwhile. Imagine how Chris Dalrymple must have felt when he read the following post on the uk.music.folk newsgroup. I should first say that Chris runs the web site for Damien Barber, and had posted an announcement inviting people to have a look. This is what Andrew Wigglesworth had to say about the site.
“IF (please notice the IF) Damien has parted with good money (and hard earned for a folk musician) for this web site, then he should be asking for a refund. IF (please notice the if again) this has been put together by a “professional” then they ought to be ashamed. The code for the web site is a shocking mess, with strange effects on some pages. This is not up to standard... The basic design ideas are good (I do mean that), but you need to have someone run their eye over it to sort out the code, apply a whole raft of nesesary (sic) HTML standards etc.”
Andrew seems to be being careful not to hurt anyone’s feelings, bearing in mind the number of brackets he uses, but hurts them anyway. The web site does admittedly start to do strange things when viewed with the Netscape browser - not with Internet Explorer or Opera though - but “a shocking mess”? I don’t think so. The site is helpful, informative and easy to navigate - a lot more so than many others. There were several more responses to that effect in the newsgroup. What more does Andrew expect? And incidentally the site is maintained for free by Chris “in lunch hours at work”. He admits that the code is bad, but you don’t need to look at the code, just the site, which does largely what was intended, “to give info about Damien and what he’s up to”. No average viewer in his right mind sees the code anyway. He or she wants to read pages, get information, and perhaps be entertained, amused or provoked, and keep his phone bill down. Did I mention that I quite liked the site? (Online update 080208: Chris's site is long gone - Damien and his Demon Barbers can now be found here - I recommend a visit.)

With this in mind I’ve taken a look at several sites belonging to folk clubs in the Sussex area. If my own experience is anything to go by, these will be run by well-intentioned enthusiasts with a little too much spare time on their hands. The Famous Willows meets on Wednesdays in the pavilion at Arundel cricket club and has a good, welcoming site. Each page is relatively small, so is quick to download. The webmaster has taken the trouble to put photos and short biographies of their guests up, though I thought Derek Brimstone had more than an air of Allan Taylor about him, or perhaps he just looks more than good for his age. There is also a page listing the guests over the past five years, which is impressive, though with a little effort could have provided links to the artists’ web sites.

The 6 Bells Folk & Blues Club meets at Chiddingly, near Hailsham. Its web site includes helpful advice for potential floorsingers. It includes the all-important encouragement policy also followed at the Ram: “Don’t worry too much if a song goes wrong, re-start it or abandon it - it won’t be the end of the world. You might be kicking yourself but come along again next time and that time get it right.” A good policy to follow - and I speak from experience. And the site has the eminent good sense to include the Ram’s web site on its links page. Did I mention that I run the Ram Club’s web site? Online update 080208: Not any more, I don't.) The site for Horsham Folk Club sticks more or less to the one page and is little more than a flier - though if that’s its job it does it well. Chichester Folk Song Club meets at The Gribble Inn, Oving. Its site has a bit of information about its residents, but not much else. The Lewes Arms Folk Club has just a guest list and a list of workshops, along with a page of links.

The Wellington, Steyne Road, Seaford, goes into quite a lot of depth on the one page and carries large pictures. The Royal Oak has a good amount of information on guests and the policy of the club, but its pictures are also full-sized, so take a while to load. Far better the approach taken by the Harbour Sessions which meets at Southwick, West Sussex. (Online update 080208: Neither the sire nor the sessions appear to have survived.) It just has thumbnails on the main page, which you can click on to see the bigger picture. Mind you, the information on guests is a bit short, and when I looked there were some broken links to pictures.

The Lamb Folk Club meets on the first and third Wednesday of each month at the Lamb Inn, Old Town, Eastbourne. Or it list it did. I can only guess that it is still running, as if you click on the link to find out what’s on, the programme of events for 2001 is displayed. Which is the problem with web sites, as Damien Barber can tell you, as Mo Bradshaw still has a web site in his name on the web, which still gets picked up by search engines, but is also two years out of date. My thanks to Vic Smith for his Sussex Folk Guide site, which I used for the links to all the pages here. His monthly round-up is invaluable. Text only, a bit harsh on the colouring-in, but all the information you need.

So what have I learned in this trawl through the local area? In short, keep the information up-to-date, and make it quick to download. It’s so easy to persuade your readers to click away to another site if they get fed up waiting for pictures to appear, and you don’t want to give them that opportunity. Make the pics thumbnail - a smaller version - in the first instance, and the punter can click on the thumbnail if they want a better view. If they don’t, you’ve still got their attention. And always set the picture size on your html page, so the text will load into the page around the space without waiting for the picture to download. If you want to see a site which does it all wrong, go to Croydon Folk Club’s site. Everything there is in graphic format, even the text. It takes forever! And the webmaster is a friend of mine. I must have a word with him. (Online update 080208: I did and he ignored me - but since I now have broadband along with the rest of the civilised world (!) the site is fine.)

And did I mention that alcohol is bad for you? Mind you, it makes everything else seem bearable, so perhaps we can leave it be. It’s even quite good for back pain.

Bad luck and trouble, Roy Bailey, John Kirkpatrick, Paul Brady, Barbara Dickson and melody recognition

Originally published in FoT Issue 94: Jan-Mar 2003

As I surf the World Wide Web in search of sites worth waxing lyrical about for this article, Tony Blair and George Bush are flexing their muscles, the monarchy is in disarray and firefighters are on a national strike for the first time in 25 years. It’s pouring with rain too. It gets worse. The Queen’s Speech - I presume that was a flak jacket she was wearing under her robes - sounded the death knell for live music in bars, the Albion Band have announced they are splitting up and Lonnie Donegan has stuck the last ever piece of chewing gum on his bedpost! On a personal front, this has been my own special annus horribilis. My girlfriend dumped me on my 50th birthday, I am about to be made redundant before the year is out and I keep getting a fierce shooting pain when I kneel. But hey - I’m a professional - I’ll keep looking for interesting sites to write about. At least at 3 o’clock in the morning no-one else needs to use the phone! In the meantime I must confess I did buy myself a beautiful Taylor guitar this year. (Not a Martin after all - “Folk on Line” issue 91 refers). And my girlfriend and I are trying to work things out, so life ain’t all bad. But my knee still hurts.

It was the firefighters’ strike that led me to check out Roy Bailey’s new site. I wasn’t expecting any topical remarks, just a feeling of solidarity. Not that I necessarily agree with the firefighters. Indeed I intend to stay firmly on the fence on the issue until one of them comes along and rescues me. Preferably with a turntable ladder. And a fireman’s lift. Aah yes, solidarity. The quotes from the likes of Billy Bragg and Tony Benn did the trick. It’s a lean site, with few frills, but what there is is pleasantly designed and worth reading, which is not always the case. As well as gig dates and a discography, Roy publishes his latest newsletter on the site. The August issue - Roy does apologise for not updating it as often as he’d like - included the delightful news that he seems to have changed his mind about not making any more CDs. He says of his recent work with John Kirkpatrick: “John is a fantastic musician and our programme is well received. His style of playing seems to generate an energy in me that I thought had faded! We’re also thinking of recording a CD together. We’ve not decided finally but I am certainly tempted even though I said I wasn't making any more CDs. Well... maybe a duo one is different...? Isn’t it?” Roy also includes a few extras alongside his newsletter, including a chilling poem by Australian poet Keith McKenry about what one might describe as the “real meaning” of September 11. He has also added a brilliant and moving prose poem called ‘Questions’ by Les Barker written I suspect in the wake of the Bali bombing, which asks a lot of very powerful questions about the true nature of Bush’s War on Terror. Questions like: “Would you trust a nation that has weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical and biological - and has already used all three against other nations? Would you trust a nation that has given arms to both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussain?”

Of course I had to sneak a peek at John Kirkpatrick’s site, which has also undergone a bit of a transformation. A bit more snazzy than Roy’s, though in Netscape Navigator the menu buttons don’t quite work the way they should. Which is usually held up as an argument for not having snazzy bits, but with Netscape’s share of the browser market down by September to 3.4%, according to Internet researcher WebSideStory, I guess the webmasters among us can stop worrying so much about cross-browser compatibility. But don’t tell Dick Gaughan I said that! In fact I take it back immediately - but you get my drift. As well as the obligatory gig guide and discography, John has posted on his site various articles he has had published over the years, including one on English folk music for the 2001 edition of Alan Bearman’s directory of folk music and arts “Direct Roots”, which ends: “The raw material of English traditional folk music is sensational. Let’s do it justice, let’s be proud of it, let’s cherish it. Let’s listen to all those field recordings of singers and musicians and wonder at their strangeness. Let’s use our brains and our hearts, and get out there and build up something unique to where we live, like they do in Allendale or Abbots Bromley, or Bampton or Abingdon, or Handsworth or Grenoside, or Helston or Haxey. And if these names mean nothing to you, then join the English Folk Dance and Song Society and support the work of The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library - one of the best folk music libraries in the world - and go there and find out.” Rousing stuff!

And speaking of rousing stuff, Paul Brady’s site has the lyrics to ‘Arthur McBride’ among others of his songs, which I learned such a long time ago that I’ve forgotten it. But no matter - he also has a tablature transcription on the site! He has perhaps moved quite a way from the folk club scene, as has Barbara Dickson. But check out her web site. She’s made loads of albums of, shall we say, folk club standards, and the lyrics are all there on the site, from ‘Parcel of Rogues’ via ‘Fine Horseman’ to ‘Love Hurts’. The fanzine site, that is. The official site has fewer lyrics but several sound samples, its aim being to sell stuff rather than worship its heroine. (Online update 070208: The sites appear to have merged into one - the fanzine is now BD's official site and as such appears quite comprehensive. Couldn't find any lyrics there though...)

Finally, I have found just the site for those occasions when a tune keeps going around in your head and you can’t remember its name. The Melodyhound uses a melody recognition system developed by Rainer Typke in 1997. For a while, it was known as “Tuneserver” and hosted by the University of Karlsruhe because Rainer was a student there when he wrote the system. It uses a form of notation called “Parsons Code” devised by Denys Parsons, who published “The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes” in 1975 with Spencer Brown. This strips away everything but the fact that each note in a tune is higher, lower or the same as the one before. So key something like *uuddrduruu, where u means up, d down and r repeat, and the search engine will come right back at you with the umpteen possibilities that have used that sequence. Mind, you, its database includes 15,000 folk songs and it didn’t know I meant ‘The Banks of the Bann’. There is a java applet on the site that allows you to whistle your tune into your PC and get a response, but could I get it to work? The chances are like me you will have to configure your java settings first, and like me you are probably too busy. After all I have an article to write!

Blogs, farewell to Hamish Henderson, Alan Lomax and Fred Jordan, Joni Mitchell tunings, useless Wap phones and virtual hi-jacks

Originally published in FoT Issue 93: Oct-Dec 2002

Tempus fugit when you’re having fun - which Sandy Denny so eloquently translated from the Latin as ‘Who knows where the time goes?’ And it seems the older you get, the quicker it fugits. I recently noticed that I have now been running the Ram Club’s web site for five years, which I thought was quite a long time until I realised I have been writing this column for six! But hold the applause - the reason I am drawing this to your attention, however much I may enjoy bathing in the warm glow of your good wishes, is that when I was proof-reading through the Ram’s links page, consisting of all those artists who have visited the club during that time, it struck me that what I was reading was a remarkable roll-call of the turn-of-the-Millennium folk scene - and not just from the UK - from the Albion Band to the Wrigley Sisters. So of course I thought I should do something about it. By the time you are reading this, I should have completed said project, which will be an alphabetical index of all the Ram’s guests since 1997 whether they have a web site or not, and if they do, a link to their site. If they don’t, you can check out the blurb heralding their visit. It could be quite useful to someone who is trying to make contact with, or find out a little more information about, an artist or band.

I don’t think I have mentioned blogs - otherwise known as web logs - in this column before. Though of course I might just have forgotten, which also seems to be happening more frequently. Blogs are effectively online journals, in which the writers sometimes do little more than shoot the breeze, but often also share with the reader links to web sites they have found interesting or provocative. In a way they are like the online version of a treeware column such as you are holding in your hands right now, except they are usually witty. Find one written by a folk enthusiast and you have a ready source of folk-related links. I have included a few examples in the panel at the end of this column. (Online update 030208: The blogs are here, here and here). I used to write one, until my ISP blocked uploads from anywhere other than its dial-up number, which is how blogs are invariably written, using freeware such as Blogger. So my blog is now written quarterly and first appears in “Folk on Tap”!

It’s been an annus horribilis for folk music royalty, what with the loss of Hamish Henderson, Alan Lomax and Fred Jordan. I dare say if it hadn’t been for Alan Lomax the repertoires in clubs up and down this country would be a lot smaller than they are. The Alan Lomax Collection web site is full of information about the man and his work, including his research papers and the Alan Lomax Archive. There are also links to relevant pages about topics such as folk music collecting, or how Lomax’s cutting-edge approach enabled the Coen Brothers to use a 1959 field recording by Lomax in their film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”. Being American, the site is pretty sophisticated. Being British, sadly Hamish and Fred are poorly represented on the Web.

I recently stumbled upon a couple of fascinating Joni Mitchell sites, Wally Breese’s very thorough fan site Joni Mitchell.com and the Joni Mitchell Discussion List. While I have always known Joni used a variety of open tunings, and have long been aware of her innovative yet under-rated technique, I have never really attempted to emulate her style of playing. What I wasn’t prepared for is the extraordinary variety of tunings she uses. And the best bit is - and this was completely new to me - she even uses her own notation system, and it is one which actually makes a lot of sense. Instead of writing out tunings using the note names for each string, she uses a letter for the pitch of the bass string, which is followed by numbers representing the fret numbers to which you tune the next string. So standard tuning EADGBE becomes E55545 and DADGAD becomes D75535. Bearing in mind this ties in with the way most of us tune our guitars, it is surprising this system isn’t used more often. Former classical guitarist Jim Leahy has compiled a list of the tunings for more than 90 Joni Mitchell songs for Wally Breese’s site. (Online update 030208: That link no longer works, but there is a database of Joni tunings here.) The Discussion List goes even further, with words and chords or tablature for 160 of her songs.

The autumn issue’s column by the way is the one I write each year while preparing to spend a couple of weeks in my low-tech caravan at the foot of a little piece of heaven on the Dorset coast otherwise known as Golden Cap. A pint of Palmers 200 in my favourite pub, the Telegraph crossword and a view of God’s own country by day, or another pint, the same crossword and local artists knocking out transatlantic folk and blues standards by night. Splendid. So I had an idea. I could write a paragraph or two about how useful my fancy new Wap phone is. Surely I could download song lyrics or guitar tunings. Forget it. Two years ago reviewers were complaining about how slow and how prone to collapse the system is, despite the heralding of this great innovation by the people who wanted us to buy them. More people would be accessing the Internet with Wap phones than with PCs, they insisted. Sadly, two years on, the system still stinks, and as a result not that many people are inclined to make their content available on it. What is the point of labouring over a web page if you know no-one can read it? The Internet grew out of a vast group of people sharing information. The text messaging boom grew out of a vast number of people wanting to communicate with each other. Then it all went horribly wrong. A few people realised they could make a lot of money by inventing a system where you could check your share prices on the train to work. How inventive. Anyway, I don’t expect to be able to locate anything useful for my guitar practice, kite flying or lying on the beach. Weather reports maybe - but then I can always find out what the weather is like by opening my eyes.

Finally, a word of warning. It is becoming quite common for web sites to be “hijacked”. This seems to have taken over from cyber-squatting, where someone would register a domain name such as www.folkontap.com - obviously a highly desirable cyber-residence - and wait for Sam to cough up. Some people have gotten away with it, some have not. With cyber-hijacking you need a little more patience, because you wait a couple of years for Sam to forget to renew his subscription and then you leap in and take over the name. And wait for Sam to cough up again. This is what happened among others to John Renbourn. His replacement site has bags of information, with exclusive merchandising of signed CDs, sheet music and of course live dates, as well as a particularly interesting section on John’s guitars. But of course it has had to be re-written more or less from scratch, because these hijacker chaps don’t tend to leave the pages around for you to copy. So the message is - don’t forget to pay the rent. Which reminds me...