Merrie Angle

[greenilex]

Various news items recently and some folk groups at our Environmental Rock festival on the bank holiday have made me reflect on English as opposed to British culture.

Fusion is there, of course, but the city is full of people from the four corners doing their own thing, culturally speaking.

Is "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" really our only point of contact?

[MrGongGong]

Is "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" really our only point of contact?

I guess the short answer is NO
and i'm sure some Folky Friends will give up loads of examples

(or even a "punky song with a folky twist" ?)

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

a very good question ...

the four corners have had a few hundred years of oppression by the English Crown to stimulate their nationalist coherence whereas within the borders of the monarch we have had a faux nationalism in support of inedible dynasties for the same centuries

i was in a conversation in the south of Cork in which the absence of trees in the local landscape was attributed to the actions of the English ... i pointed out that neither Loise nor Isabella [my grannies] had any thing to do with the rempoval of the trees ... which English did they have in mind? the landlords they said [let's forget their national origins, i have a feeling the Irish call anybody they don't like the English] ... the Landlords stole my grannies trees too i said ...

culture follows older pathways than monarchies i hope and trust ... the music indigenous and traditional in these islands is not essentially nationalist so much as anti monarchic and anti landed gentry mine and factory owners and the like ... with such grand persons my grannies have often been confused though it completely escapes me why two little old ladies with no landed estates, money, education nor influence beyond their wit, should be so mistaken for such rotten gangsters and rogues

i think a case can be made that The Beatles and Slade sing the songs of the middle lands and that The Who and Rolling Stones those of the urban south but there might be all kinds of argument about the Cultural Imperialism of the USA and how crap Slade or Quo are/were for that matter .... but they were not the manufactured commercial music of Stock Aitken and Waterman and their predecessors and successors in Tin Pan Alley ... just poor middle class white boys identifying, inter alia, with the poor African Americans and their culture and having some fun in the process, after all no one foresaw just how much money they would make ...

and nowadays we would most certainly address P J Harvey Massive Attack or Radiohead as singers of peoples' songs; nor indeed would i share the Frankfurter view that USA music was all Capitalist Tricks; my Ma and Pa loved the American Song Book, Duke Ellington et al for more complex reasons than the flicks on a Saturday Night and pint or two, American music comes in many measures from these islands and still speaks to those who remain on them of their lives and cares and joy [less so now than then though] ...

but i have no idea what music my grannies listened to or liked .... my Ma's Pa sang on the street to scrape a few bob but what songs no one ever said - for my Ma and Pa i think Ambrose and Duke Ellington on the wireless said those days of grinding poverty were gone and they never sang songs to remind themselves of that, nor did they feel it was a holy state or golden age and Isabella would have passionately agreed with them that the poverty and ignorance of Tyneside in the early 20C was an evil thing and not to be celebrated ... from the borders, she did not blame the 'English' but the gangsters who ran the City and the Country ..... i have no idea if she was a republican, i rather hope so ....

[greenilex]

Agreed that American folk song fills the gap worldwide. Still a little sad that Lykewake Dirge and so forth are not better known - or The Waters of Tyne? We miss Isla Cameron, really.