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Jon Wilks Posts

Songs from the Attic

“His love for folk music manifests itself throughout this lovely album.” – Folk Radio UK

Songs From the Attic is a genuine, carefully considered album which is made with a lot of heart. It deserves to be noticed.” – Bright Young Folk

Songs from the Attic, the album, was the result of nine months spent researching and writing traditional folk songs here on this blog. Each song at some point began to get under my skin and, following a lengthy process of fairly obsessive study and performance, I found I’d fallen in love with them – just as many, many people have done before me and will do again.

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The Greenland Whale Fishery | Folk from the Attic

Fresh from my Steve Roud interview, having learnt that the folk singer is an entirely modern construct, today I found myself itching to get my guitar out and dive into an old sea shanty. Let’s be clear, though: while this is some kind of performance of ‘The Greenland Whale Fishery’, it doesn’t in any way bear any resemblance to the original ‘Greenland Whale Fishery’ [Roud 347]. Nor can I claim to be a folk singer. In fact, it’s probably best that you – the reader – limit yourself to thinking that this isn’t really a performance at all. More a murmuring. Possibly an accident. I don’t think you’ll find that too difficult. 

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Steve Roud interview: What is folk music, exactly?

Over the eight months I’ve been running this blog, I have – because it genuinely interests me – repeatedly asked interviewees for their folk music definition. It hasn’t been terribly easy, to be honest with you. Some react well, clearly delighted to be asked the very question they’ve been secretly pondering for years themselves, while others insist it’s a pointless task and seem rather put out to have been bothered by something so apparently trivial. 

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Andy Bell: Chatting with a folk producer in demand

If you’re a fan of the contemporary folk scene, the chances are that you’ve been listening to Andy Bell’s work for some time. A kind of unsung hero, he has been working with some of the genre’s biggest artists for a decade or more, and his relatively new label – Hudson Records – is home to The Furrow Collective, Jon Boden, The Transports and an ever-growing roster of well-loved artists. 

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Ross Couper & Tom Oakes: The Interview

There are so many ways to interview musicians these days – phone, Skype, WhatsApp (yes, it’s possible) – but nothing beats sitting backstage at a festival, face to face, with the music from the main stage pounding away in the background. That’s the setting for the second half of this double interview with Ross Couper and Tom Oakes, two musicians who come together to play music heavily influenced by a variety of traditions (Scottish, Irish, Shetland, Scandinavian), mixed together with driving contemporary rhythms and a smattering of jazz, all played on stripped-down fiddle and guitar. If that sounds remarkably complex, then it’s a complexity that is very cleverly disguised on their debut album, Fiddle & Guitar.

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Martin Simpson, ‘Trails & Tribulations’ – a review

The life of a folk musician in 2017 is something of a nomadic ritual. In search of audiences, you spend huge amounts of time traversing A-roads, B-roads, deserted night motorways lit in murky orange and country lanes lit by nothing at all. It’s time spent thinking, working things out, meandering down half forgotten memory lanes, wondering how many times you’ve known this road before or whether it’s a new one that just looks like all the rest of them. Many musicians find inspiration in the journey – others are driven round and round the bend. 

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Photos from Wickham Festival 2017

Wickham Festival is a decade and a half old, so you get the sense it ought to be better known. At the same time, you kinda hope it stays as intimate as currently is. Set on the southwesterly tip of the South Downs, it’s a real gem of a festival – a gorgeous location, an easy size to get around, a not-too-big-but-definitely-not-small audience, three well-sized stages… and performers that make you wonder just how the organisers can afford it all. Ours not to reason why, though. Ours but to get stuck in. 

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Rosie Hood on folk song collecting in the 21st Century

In the months that I’ve been interviewing folk singers for this blog, one thing that tends to come across perhaps more strongly than anything else is the sense of enthusiasm for the subject. It doesn’t seem as though traditional folk music, in England at least, is something you get into lightly. It becomes a bit of an obsession. You suddenly find yourself with a head full of stories and a library (you never had a library before!) full of obscure books and archaic biographers of people who were once as caught up in it all as you now find yourself.

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