What Are People Singing in Folk Song Clubs?

Reflections on songs sung in two East Midlands folk clubs 2017-2023

Abstract

There is a long-standing debate over the nature and definition of ‘folk music’.The Victorian and Edwardian collectors have been criticised for filtering the repertoires of their sources to promote class-based ideas of ‘the folk’. This study proposes an alternative, behavioural, definition of folk music: that which is performed in folk music clubs. The music performed in two clubs in the East Midlands was recorded and categorised by authorship and date of composition. Sessions were noted at various times over the last four years, before, during and after the pandemic, giving a total of several hundred individual performances.The results show a very wide range of sources, dates, and kinds of music, with a very strong representation of post-World War 2 compositions, self-written songs, and importations from 20^th and 21^st-century popular culture, together with more ‘traditional’ material. Performers at the clubs sampled are mostly elderly and of lower middle-class background and these clubs may not continue in their present form for very long.  Their repertoire is not representative of the whole of the current folk music world. These results are compared with some of the unfiltered accounts we do have of source singers’ repertoires, like a Copper Family songbook and Henry Burstow’s repertoire. It seems that the repertoires practically developed in the current folk club movement may be a modern equivalent of the full repertoires of earlier source singers, as suggested by writers like Harker and Cole. The processes of selection of vernacular music have repeated themselves. This leads to a suggested description of ‘folk music’ as practiced here, and a comparison between informal singing practices and Illich’s ideas of convivial activity.