Originally published in FoT Issue 104: Jul-Sep 2005
This must have been how Bob Dylan felt when he plugged into those new-fangled electric amplifiers and brought the house down. Or Keith Harris and Orville as they made man’s first powered flight. Or Jamie Oliver as he tucked into his first plate of Turkey Twizzlers. Objection! Sustained. Strike that from the record. No, ladies and gentlemen, I have not gone mad - I have gone broadband. And just like Mr Zimmerman, there is no looking back. I know I have gone against all my principles, as expounded in this column on a regular basis, but broadband is so fast, once you have tried it you really don’t want to give it up. And all of a sudden there is a whole lot more out there. I guess what I am extolling here is the wealth of multimedia content available on the Internet, but updates also suddenly become do-able. I have updated a lot of my programs, such as Internet Explorer, Real Player and Windows Media Player, which before would have taken too long, but now download in a matter of minutes. Of course, this causes a lot of problems because the programs start taking control of your PC and conflicting with one another, but these are mere teething troubles to be ironed out over a period of time. There, I’ve convinced myself.
When you look at the amount of multimedia content available to download or stream the mind, as they say, boggles. The difference between downloading and streaming depends on which side of the computer you are sitting. Providers will tell you streaming - listening or viewing a file as it arrives on your player - is more convenient. But if you download and save it you can hear it as many times as you want whenever you want without the need to hook up to the Internet. And then the issue of copyright crops up. A quick tip - once you have watched or listened to a streamed file, it is often worth looking in your Temporary Internet Files folder. You will sometimes find the cached file in there, which you can then save.
Enough of this subterfuge. A good place to start looking for content is the Internet Archive. There I found a stunning 15-minute film from 1947 by Alan Lomax called “To Hear Your Banjo Play”. He and Pete Seeger discuss the development of folk music in America and as well as some stunning banjo playing by the man himself, its performances include a rousing ‘John Henry’ by Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Brownee McGhee, and ‘Wondrous Love’ sung at the end of a country picnic. As you would expect, Seeger’s enthusiasm is infectious. This is a little gem, and bearing in mind it is supposed to be the only film in existence of Woody Guthrie in performance, it is extraordinary that it has taken the development of the World Wide Web to prevent it from remaining hidden away.
The site is really a portal into various web collections, such as the Live Music Archive, which contains more than 22,000 live concert recordings. This is a great place to have a wander - or should that be a wonder? Within a few minutes I had found a recording of Billy Bragg singing ‘World turned upside down’, Warren Zevon singing ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’ and tons of stuff by Bela Fleck (135 concerts on file at the time of writing!). The Naropa Audio Archives include lectures by musicologist Harry Smith, Helen Adam on topics including repetition, Kipling, poets as music makers and ballads, and a Lorenzo Thomas class on the history, context, and structure of blues songs. Just the sort of thing you need on a summer evening to help you avoid “Big Brother”.
You can always trust Damien Barber to bring something different to folk music - or in fact life in general - so it’s good to see the very entertaining website he has put together to promote the Demon Barbers in their varous guises. His site even includes games such as Asteroids, Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Who says folk music has to stay still?
The Al Stewart website put together by Kim Dyer and Neville Judd is well worth a look, whether for a nostalgic and perhaps at times embarassing trip through his publicity photos, or for the excellent bunch of tabs to a selection of his songs. On the links page, there are even more Al Stewart sites, and you will find a samples page with lots of clips from his songs, which is handy if you have broadband.
Just to show that I haven’t gone exclusively multimedia mad, another useful site is that of Topic Records. Just pages and pages of information, enhanced by the odd picture and a few clips from the Topic catalogue, which Andy Kershaw describes as “the most important record label in Britain”.
I was saddened to hear of the death of the wonderful singer, songwriter and national treasure Cyril Tawney. No doubt it is reported elsewhere in this issue. I first became aware of him in the Sixties through ‘Sally Free and Easy’ on Davy Graham’s “Folk, Blues and Beyond” album, which unfortunately I lent to my old mate Roger Curtis. I never saw it again - but that’s another story. Suffice to say I now own it on CD. Then about 15 years ago I started to see Cyril in person at festivals. I added ‘Sally’ and ‘On a Monday Morning’ to my repertoire - when I had a repertoire - his songs were so easy to sing, so comfortable, if you know what I mean. His excellent website, run by his widow Rosemary, has fascinating articles about the genesis of some of his songs, and also a moving history of his failing health over the past couple of years. Recommended.
Finally, a mention for SoundClick, a site packed with songs people have uploaded, available to stream in both lo-fi and hi-fi and to download if you register. The content is variable, but in most cases you would certainly applaud them at the end of a floorspot. Take Steve Suffet. A dozen or so standard fok songs, delivered with competent guitar. I was going to write a smart remark here about how Steve couldn’t ruin ‘The House Carpenter’ any more than Bob Dylan. But first I listened to “The Bootleg Series, Volume 1”, disc 1. It is superb. Anywho, back to Steve Suffet. I’ll let him explain:
“The three new songs are ‘Tramps and Hawkers’, ‘T for Texas’, and ‘Railroad Bill’, but please don’t limit yourself to them. I now have fourteen songs all together, are you are free to do with them as you wish - stream live, download to your computer or iPod, burn on to a CD, post to another website, etc. All are traditional folk songs, so there are no hassles with copyrights. You can even bootleg them. In fact, someone in Russia already has.
“If these recordings sound like old Library of Congress field recordings, they might as well be. They are completely unengineered. I simply sang into the microphone built into a boom box and then later converted the tape recordings to MP3s. The recordings span a period from 1984 to date. Ain’t computers wonderful?”
Now, where have I heard that before?
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Interesting comments, if I do say so myself! After four decades of swearing I would never do it, my friends finally dragged me kicking and screaming into a recording studio, and the outcome surprised me no end. I really liked what I heard. My first CD sold well enough that I came out with a second and then a third. I eventually dropped the "field recordings" from my SoundClick page and replaced them with professionally recorded tracks. You are welcome to go to www.soundclick.com/stevesuffet and take a listen.
--- Steve Suffet
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