By David Francis
This holiday I’ve been rooting around my old cassettes and LPs and dusting off some items that haven’t been heard for many the long day. Most of the folk/ trad items are from the mid 80s, round about the time that I really got the bug, and some of them were much cherished in their time.

By David Francis

This holiday I’ve been rooting around my old cassettes and LPs and dusting off some items that haven’t been heard for many the long day.   Most of the folk/ trad items are from the mid 80s, round about the time that I really got the bug, and some of them were much cherished in their time.

However… many have not travelled well into the 21st century.  We are faced with the paradox that tradition-based material, which we often think of as ‘timeless’, can date as much as any other cultural object, and it seems that the more contemporary-sounding the work at the time, the mouldier it seems to us now.

Put on something like the Bothy Ballad collection put out by the School of Scottish Studies all those decades ago, and those songs by Jamie Taylor, Charlie Esson, Jock MacDonald and the rest sound just as fresh now as they did when they were recorded.

Not so the songs drenched in drum machines playing ersatz samba beats, or the arrangements of traditional tunes which bring in that old Yamaha DX7 sound, and guitar solos straight out of the Yellowjackets play-book.   It may be that electronically derived sounds date quicker than acoustic ones, but then fashions in arrangement of acoustic instruments can also fix the music in its time.    But then one might argue that a ‘Liege and Lief’  (folk music played on electric instruments) transcends its time in a way  that, say, ‘Sweeney’s Men’ (all-acoustic from roughly the same period) does not.

If we are musicians and artists working with traditional material then here’s the question we have to face:  do we build an audience by presenting the work in ways we think a contemporary audience will readily accept, and risk that audience diminishing when fashions change?  Or do we find another way of connecting?

(The views expressed in this blog are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board and members of the TMF.)