Just Another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960. A Folk Music Scene? (Part 4)

The involvement of the traditional singers

When the traditional singers began interfacing with the folk revivalists they were thus caught up in a gathering momentum, developing definite scenic qualities. This interaction involved a two-way movement. On the one hand, the revivalists travelled to pubs to see the traditional signers at first-hand. Yet these occasions could lack the spontaneity of the usual traditional signing context. Being ‘hosted’ events they carried a weight of expectation that too often caused them to be contrived. Such sessions have since been dismissively described as organised “for the benefit of the folk academics who usually outnumbered the singers ferried in from outlying areas for the event” (cited in Bennett, 2002, p. 170). The spontaneity was also lost when the movement was reversed and the traditional singers themselves appeared at organised club events. The informal and spontaneous nature of the older generation’s singing diminished as their involvement at formal club events conferred on them the status of officially performing guests. These occasions, moreover, began to be mediated in a highly literate manner via events publicity to a set of enthusiasts.


The presence of the older singers at the clubs organised by the younger generation began as early as 1958 when the Horsham Songswappers was founded and traditional singers such as George Belton (1898-1980) and Bob Blake (1908-1991) became regulars at its largely informal meetings in the church hall. In July 1961 the Songswappers organised one of the first folk festivals in the county, at Horsham Boys’ Club, where the aforementioned two traditional singers performed along with their contemporaries George Townshend (1882-1967), Cyril Phillips (1911-1990), concertina player Scan Tester (1886-1972) and mouth- organist Bill Agate. By 1967, the organiser of Friday’s Folk club at the Springfield Hotel, Brighton had begun to put on ‘Special Traditional Evenings’ with the stated intention of introducing traditional singers to the younger generation of folk club attendees. The first of these events was a celebration of Scan Tester’s 81st birthday. Also attending was Cyril Phillips and George Belton.

After both Belton and Blake appeared at the Lewes Arms Folk Club, Lewes, in August 1969, the club organisers were encouraged to hold a regular ‘Sussex Singers Night’. The first of these in 1971 was to celebrate Scan Tester’s 85th birthday! Another ‘Sussex Singers Night’ originated around the same time at the Ram Inn, at nearby Firle. This was intended as a regular social gathering for traditional source singers to supplement their occasional meetings at pubs and festivals. A link between the venues was the presence of members of the Coppers of Rottingdean, a Sussex family with a long-established heritage of traditional singing. Bob Copper (1915-2004) was the licensee of the Central Club at the coastal resort of Peacehaven, and it was there in 1971 that Bob began a folk club. His many guests included traditional singers who were also personal friends of the famous singing family. In the autumn of 1978, the Brighton Singers Club at the Marlborough Hotel was holding a bi-monthly session devoted to traditional guest singers.


As late as the mid-1990s, appearing at clubs in Lewes and Seaford were traditional signers such as the Coppers, Louie Fuller (1916- ) and Ron Spicer (1929-1996), son of the same George Spicer whom Brian Matthews had met over a quarter of a century earlier in the Punch Bowl pub, Turners Hill. The folk revival had by that time dissipated but it is difficult to estimate at what point beforehand the local scene had broached the boundaries of Sussex. This point is important for a local scene’s regular connections with devotees in more distant places enable it to take on trans-local properties (Peterson and Bennett, 2004). That there had been a national folk revival is undeniable but what is to be assessed is the degree to which devotees (performers, fans and producers) interacted and communicated with each other across different localised areas, with a particular focus on Sussex and the traditional singers. Brighton’s first formal folk club “had a stated policy of bringing the top national performers of the day” to that town (Bennett, 2002, p. 20) and many of their promotional posters ran the strap-line: REGULAR APPEARANCE OF LONDON ARTISTES.

Even as early as 1961 the Brighton Ballads and Blues Club had presented a sell-out solo evening concert with an internationally famous figure no less than the great Pete Seeger. Bennett and Peterson (2004, p 9) also make reference to the music festival a particular type of trans-local scene and it is well documented by Bennett (2002) that for the thirty or so year span covered in his book, Sussex hosted a wide variety of folk festivals, some of which (for example, Lewes Folk Day, 1977) received national press coverage. A focus on performers does not, however, tell us anything about the geographical composition of audiences at such events.

Nor is it clear to what extent the traditional singers were represented at these performances: the Coppers, George Belton and Cyril Phillips all performed at Lewes Folk Day, 1976, but these appear to be in a minority compared to younger and nationally famous figures. It is easier to demonstrate the integration of the residual culture of Sussex singers into the local scene than to be certain about their trans-local interfacing. Unless, that is, we turn away from face-to-face interaction to focus on the circulation and exchange of recordings.

 

Sources for whole article

Books

Bennett, Clive (2002), Sussex Folk: The Folk Song Revival In Sussex, Bakewell: Country Books.

Clarke, John and Critcher, Chas (eds.) (1979) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchingson.

Copper, Bob (1973) Songs & Southern Breezes: Country Folk & Country Ways, London: Heinemann.

Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony (eds.) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchingson.

Harker, Dave (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong 1700 to the Present Day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Muggleton, David (2011) Just another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 – eine Folkmusikszene? In ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen (Edited by W. Fichna and R. Reitsamer), pp. 21-36. Wien: Löcker Verlag.

Musical Traditions Records (2000), Just Another Saturday Night, Sussex 1960: Songs From Country Pubs, Liner notes accompanying Double Compact Disc MTCD309-10, Stroud: Musical Traditions.

Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004), ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (eds.) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, pp. 1-15, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Sinfield, Alan (1989), Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain

Thornton, Sarah (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity.

Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Websites

EFDSS – English Folkdance and Song Society, http://www.efdss.org/history.html, (accessed December 2009)

Musical Traditions, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Topic Records, http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

 

Just Another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960, A Folk Music Scene? (Part 3)

The development of a local scene

While friendships and social networks linked some of the traditional singers, it would have been a mistake to assume that, despite their shared Sussex location, most knew each other and interacted on a regular basis. Theirs had been a relatively static culture with scant social or geographic mobility and minimal mediation via publicity to a wider public. Yet the 1950s and 1960s saw far-reaching social changes that impacted upon this residual culture, forcing its members into greater proximity and prominence.

While the breaking up of the urban traditional working-class community in the period after the Second World War has been well documented (e.g. Hall and Jefferson 1976; Clarke and Critcher 1979), this period also witnessed the decline of the agricultural labour force and the transformation of traditional rural communities.

As the extensive railway network was dismantled, private car ownership correspondingly grew bringing greater geographical mobility and easier access to neighbouring towns and to villages. Many small village schools were closed, catchment areas were widened and more children travelled by bus to larger educational establishments in towns, thus breaking long-established generational continuities in hitherto isolated rural communities. With the break-up of the British Empire considerable numbers ex-Colonial armed-forces officers and senior government civil servants returned to the home country and became landlords or regular customers of rural pubs. The idyllic vision of village life held by this ‘Gin and Tonic brigade’ (as they came to be colloquially and unflatteringly known through their choice of drink) effectively gentrified the public house, heightening its class tensions and marginalising the traditional customer base.

A contradictory movement of same time was the ideology of ‘classlessness’ that dominated the, then, contemporary socio-political discourse and pervaded public-house architectural design. Spatial divisions reflecting status and class differences were thought to be no longer relevant or appropriate. The resulting open-plan settings spelt the end for the traditional multi-room public-house layout. Spontaneous singing in pubs became less tolerated, out of keeping with the spirit of the times and an unpleasant throwback to a cruder culture.

Traditional singers who were made to feel unwelcome sought alternative, more sympathetic surroundings, forcing them into more face-to-face meetings and the forging of networks, not only with each other but with the younger members of the emergent culture. To fully appreciate this impact upon the older generation we must first examine how the emergent culture of younger singers became a fully-fledged folk revival with five clearly defined local scenic qualities.

Firstly, it was temporally and geographically delineated and distinctive. The Sussex folk revival began in earnest in the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s. It blossomed first in coastal Brighton albeit with preceding developments to the north at Horsham and to the east at Hastings. It then quickly spread via transportation networks to other county towns such as Worthing, Shoreham, Lewes, Seaford and Eastbourne. Its second scenic feature was the formalisation of musical events. Leading figures in the emergent culture set up and helped run folk clubs. Some clubs had formal membership with annual subscription although most necessitated paid admission by an audience to scheduled sessions by specialised singers at advertised venues. Many used pubs as venues but others employed entirely different types of buildings – coffee bars, church and public halls, ballrooms and restaurants. Even in pubs there was perhaps the utilisation of a stage in a separate upstairs ‘club-room’.

What was therefore occurring here was the organisation of regular singing ‘performances’ differentiated from the wider context of sociality. Although singaround and song-swap sessions remained popular, this led logically to the third scenic feature, the establishment of more formalised role distinctions between producers, fans and singers. The fourth scenic element was the way in which this revival was created, sustained and developed by informal D-I-Y networks relying upon volunteer labour and support facilities. Fifthly and finally, this involved the use of what, in another context, Thornton (1995) has labelled niche and micro media to create an alternative, localised identity in contrast to a mass-mediated, marketed musical mainstream. An examination of how the folk clubs were promoted will provide an interesting illustration of these fourth and fifth scenic elements.

Early events were publicised by the use of micro media such as posters, handbills and brief newsletters. These were independently produced, often crafted or typed by hand, and personally distributed or posted to club members. As the folk revival grew, the increasing number of individual clubs ensured the proliferation of such publicity material. An attempt to collate these into one publication had led by 1970 to The Brighton Folk Diary.

Edited by scene members Jim Marshall and Vic Smith, early issues of this listings magazine were produced though home-based collation and stapling sessions by volunteers. Its success in spreading the word and subsequent expansion of areas and clubs covered was reflected in its change of title by 1973 to The Sussex Folk Diary. Jim Marshall continues to this day to edit and produce what is now called The Folk Diary, spreading the word beyond the county boundaries into Surrey and Kent.

Niche media such as the local press were uninterested in developments happening in folk clubs until Jim Marshall secured a regular column alongside the existing jazz section in the Brighton and Hove Gazette. First published in June 1967 and interestingly entitled ‘The Folk Scene’, these “What’s-On” guides ran until 1981. A new technological development occurred when Jim Marshall began to produce home-made tapes in his front room for transmission on local radio. As it was with the press, the radio station had no in-house folk specialist, so invited Marshall to submit suitable material. The ensuring combinations of interviews and musical snippets made on his portable tape recorder were broadcast monthly on BBC Radio Brighton from late-1968, the fifteen minutes format reflected in the title ‘Folk 15’. By 1971 these radio slots had become a half hour programme re-titled ‘Minstrels Gallery’. Subsequently lengthened to one hour and recorded at the studio, they continued until 1996 – British radio’s longest-running folk music programme.

Sources for whole article

Books

Bennett, Clive (2002), Sussex Folk: The Folk Song Revival In Sussex, Bakewell: Country Books.

Clarke, John and Critcher, Chas (eds.) (1979) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchingson.

Copper, Bob (1973) Songs & Southern Breezes: Country Folk & Country Ways, London: Heinemann.

Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony (eds.) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchingson.

Harker, Dave (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong 1700 to the Present Day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Muggleton, David (2011) Just another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 – eine Folkmusikszene? In ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen (Edited by W. Fichna and R. Reitsamer), pp. 21-36. Wien: Löcker Verlag.

Musical Traditions Records (2000), Just Another Saturday Night, Sussex 1960: Songs From Country Pubs, Liner notes accompanying Double Compact Disc MTCD309-10, Stroud: Musical Traditions.

Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004), ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (eds.) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, pp. 1-15, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Sinfield, Alan (1989), Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain

Thornton, Sarah (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity.

Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Websites

EFDSS – English Folkdance and Song Society, http://www.efdss.org/history.html, (accessed December 2009)

Musical Traditions, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Topic Records, http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

 

Just Another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960. A Folk Music Scene? (Part 2)

Residual and emergent cultures

It is possible to portray these two musical cultures, of which the above two men – Spicer and Matthews - were the unofficial representatives, in terms of ideal-typical oppositions. The residual, as we have said, consisted of an older generation of traditional singers. They were born within the period 1870-1916 and had strong geographical ties to the locality. Many had been born within or near Sussex, or had moved there at an early age and had since remained. They had little formal education or were self-educated and could be characterised in social class terms as skilled or semi-skilled workers, typical occupations being railwaymen, roadmen, fishermen, agricultural labourers or travellers [3]. Their habitat was rural and they were the inheritors of an oral tradition of folk song, having learnt their repertoire from family, friends or workmates.

The figures of the emergent folk culture were born during the 1930s and 40s. Few of those who became central and committed members of this revivalist movement were born in Sussex. Most had been educated beyond the level of compulsory schooling with art-school and university students or graduates making up a sizable number of their ranks. Having taken the grammar school route into such middle-class occupations as lecturers, teachers, civil servants and librarians, they had experienced a significant degree of social and geographical mobility. Their habitat was urban, their politics if pronounced and articulated were liberal-left or radical, in some cases aligned to a bohemian sensibility – what in another context Alan Sinfield (1989) has termed ‘new-left subculture’. Theirs was a more literate and mediated voyage of discovery of the folk tradition, via traditional jazz and blues, American folksong, Ewan McColl and the voice of protest.

To what extent can the traditional singers be regarded as constituting a local music scene, according to the definitions put forward by Peterson and Bennett (2004)? I would argue that this older generation could be regarded as a local scene by virtue of the ‘organic’ set of relationships existing between the music and their long-standing local culture. While many of their songs had been documented in other areas of the United Kingdom, thereby forming a national heritage, often celebrating national events and reflecting perennial human concerns, they had been appropriated and relocated to represent Sussex surroundings. The songs were localised variants of the standard versions, often sung in dialect and personalised to reflect the idiosyncrasies of a particular singer. For this older generation the very act of singing was, moreover, grounded in the local traditions of their everyday life. Songs were learnt and sung in the contexts of both work – the fields of the countryside, the railways and brickyards, the beaches, boats and the huts of the fishermen - and leisure – the local village public house as the focus of the community.

The rigid class divisions of the time were embodied in the architecture, the actual spatial layout of the ‘pub’ (as it is known in its diminutive term). The ‘Saloon’ was frequented by the respectable tradesmen and business class; the ‘Public Bar’ was for the labouring working-class. It was these latter, prosaic surroundings more conducive to singing in which Matthews made most of his recordings. The pub was also the locus for traditional games, such as shove ha’penny, skittles, quoits, darts and marbles. Marbles has been part of Sussex folk-lore since the 16th century and many alehouses in the area had been marked out with the tell-tale ring on which the game takes place. An annual championship had been revived locally in 1932. George ‘Pop’ Maynard (pictured), captain of the 1948 champions, the Copthorne Spitfires, was one of the great traditional folk singers and a significant member of that older generation recorded by Matthews.

On the other hand, there are characteristics of local scenes as defined by Peterson and Bennett (2004) which the older generation did not display. One is the construction of an alternative musical identity, a differentiation from the mainstream mass-marketed music industry. Now it is true that this clustering traditional singers could very obviously be contrasted with the commercially-driven popular music of the time where a nucleus of producers provide multi-national sounds as ‘products’ for ‘consumers’. Yet it was very doubtful that his older generation had any self-constructed sense of identity that allowed a perception of distinction from a mainstream. It was, in fact, not a distinguishable musical community at all in the specific sense; rather, music was just one element, albeit an important one, in a residual, entirely natural ‘way of life’.

Whereas scenes are defined by the forming of “clusters of producers, musicians and fans, collectively sharing their common musical tastes” (Peterson and Bennett, 2004, p. 1), this residual culture did not have formal distinctions between producers, fans and singers, because their signing and the playing of instruments was not a formal ‘performance’ [4]. Just as singing in the fields at work was an integral, undifferentiated part of routine activity, the singing and playing of traditional songs in public houses was neither a formal session nor a series of regular, scheduled events. Although public it was also spontaneous, part of the wider sociality of pub-going. It would therefore be a mistake to think of singing in public houses as having the status of official sessions or regular, scheduled events.

“The idea that a singer was someone exclusive was not there then. Everybody sang. Some sung well, some didn’t, but singing was a normal as breathing. We sang up in the woods, we sang anywhere. You sing when you felt in the mood – you’d be in the pub and someone would start a song and all of a sudden the whole place lit up. It was never, “Well, let’s have a sing.” – it either happened or it didn’t” (Musical Traditions 2000 Double CD liner notes).

When one person in the pub finished singing, another may have started up, possibly before the assembled company had realised and had come to attention. Thus, the positions of audience member and performer were easily elided.

Notes

3. The use of the male gender here is deliberate. While some women were known singers of traditional song, they were more likely heard in a private or domestic context and rarely so in public or the patriarchal surroundings of the public house. The majority of singers recorded by Matthews and his contemporaries were men.

4. It is for this reason – to avoid the suggest they were engaged in a ‘performance’ - that I have collectively termed the older generation ‘singers’ rather than ‘performers’ even though some of them were non-singing instrumentalists.

Sources for whole article

Books

Bennett, Clive (2002), Sussex Folk: The Folk Song Revival In Sussex, Bakewell: Country Books.

Clarke, John and Critcher, Chas (eds.) (1979) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchingson.

Copper, Bob (1973) Songs & Southern Breezes: Country Folk & Country Ways, London: Heinemann.

Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony (eds.) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchingson.

Harker, Dave (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong 1700 to the Present Day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Muggleton, David (2011) Just another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 – eine Folkmusikszene? In ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen (Edited by W. Fichna and R. Reitsamer), pp. 21-36. Wien: Löcker Verlag.

Musical Traditions Records (2000), Just Another Saturday Night, Sussex 1960: Songs From Country Pubs, Liner notes accompanying Double Compact Disc MTCD309-10, Stroud: Musical Traditions.

Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004), ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (eds.) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, pp. 1-15, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Sinfield, Alan (1989), Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain

Thornton, Sarah (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity.

Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Websites

EFDSS – English Folkdance and Song Society, http://www.efdss.org/history.html, (accessed December 2009)

Musical Traditions, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Topic Records, http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Just Another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960. A Folk Music Scene? (Part 1)

Setting the scene

In November 1959, in the Punch Bowl, a public house in the village of Turners Hill, in the county of Sussex, England, a part-chance meeting took place between two men, who we will conveniently construct as the respective representatives of two musical cultures: one residual and traditional, the other emergent and revivalist [1]. It was also a coming together of two generations. The residual is represented by folk singer George Spicer, then in his fifties. The emergent is embodied in Brian Matthews, then in his twenties and the co-owner of the Ballad Tree Coffee Bar, Brighton, Sussex. Matthews had taken the name of his bar from the book he was then reading: a study by Evelyn Kendrick Wells of British and US ballads, and was motivated to attempt a similar documenting of traditional folk song in Sussex. Equipped with a portable but cumbersome 5-inch reel tape-to-tape recorder, Matthews recorded some of this older generation of traditional singers in the public houses of Sussex, based on a snowball sample started by his meeting with Spicer.

This chapter will situate the development of this older generation of traditional folk singers in the academic context of the concept of a music scene, with particular respect to Peterson and Bennett’s (2004) distinctions between local, trans-local and virtual scenes. It will argue, first, that only certain elements of the residual culture of traditional singers could be regarded as locally scenic, despite some of these singers having already achieved a trans-local audience; second, that this older generation then became involved with the emergent culture of revivalist folk song with local and trans-local scenic properties; third, that this scene subsequently took on virtual scenic qualities, long after most of the older generation had died. In so doing we shall examine how it was possible that a CD recording of the spontaneous singing of traditional folk song by a farmhand, who rarely strayed out of his local area and who died some thirty years ago, could be heard in an academic conference in Vienna, in the new millennium [2].

Notes

1. The concepts residual and emergent are taken from Williams (1977). The use of the words traditional and revivalist to describe these two musical cultures is not intended to convey any sense of relative authenticity of the former compared to the latter. For an argument about the manufactured status of traditional folksong, see Harker (1985).

2. To save extensive and repetitive citations, I acknowledge that except where indicated otherwise, the empirical information presented in this chapter - on dates, times, recordings people and places - is from three sources: (i) the liner notes of the Musical Traditions (2000) Double Compact Disc that provides part of the title to this chapter; (ii) the Musical Traditions website; (iii) Clive Bennett’s (2002) comprehensive book on the Sussex folk music revival

 Sources for whole article

Books

Bennett, Clive (2002), Sussex Folk: The Folk Song Revival In Sussex, Bakewell: Country Books.

Clarke, John and Critcher, Chas (eds.) (1979) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchingson.

Copper, Bob (1973) Songs & Southern Breezes: Country Folk & Country Ways, London: Heinemann.

Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony (eds.) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchingson.

Harker, Dave (1985) Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong 1700 to the Present Day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Muggleton, David (2011) Just another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 – eine Folkmusikszene? In ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen (Edited by W. Fichna and R. Reitsamer), pp. 21-36. Wien: Löcker Verlag.

Musical Traditions Records (2000), Just Another Saturday Night, Sussex 1960: Songs From Country Pubs, Liner notes accompanying Double Compact Disc MTCD309-10, Stroud: Musical Traditions.

Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004), ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (eds.) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, pp. 1-15, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Sinfield, Alan (1989), Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain
 

Thornton, Sarah (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity.

Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Websites

EFDSS – English Folkdance and Song Society, http://www.efdss.org/history.html, (accessed December 2009)

Musical Traditions, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Topic Records, http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/, (accessed December 2009)

Just Another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 - An Introduction

The title of this Blog is taken from a CD of the same name, subtitled “Songs from country pubs”. First released in 2000 on the label Musical Traditions, the live recordings on this collection were originally made in 1959, 1960 and 1965 on a portable five-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder by local folk song enthusiast and collector Brian Matthews, then in his twenties and co-owner of the Ballard Tree Coffee Bar, Brighton.

The pubs, clustered in the central part of Sussex, in which Matthews made his recordings were The Abergavenny Arms (now closed) and the Cherry Tree, Copthorne; The Plough, Three Bridges (now a Sky Sports and Karaoke pub); The Oak Tree, Ardingly (now The Oak); Three Cups, Punnetts Town; and the Royal Oak at Milton Street (now renamed the Sussex Ox and on the cover of the 2013 Good Beer Guide). The renditions are given by George ‘Pop’ Maynard, Sarah Porter, George ‘Spike’ Spicer, Jim ‘Brick’ Harber, Harry Holman, Jim Wilson, Cyril Phillips, Lewis ‘Scan’ Tester, Louie Saunders, Jack Arnoll and Bill Agate.

For more detailed information on the singers, songs and the other pubs and clubs in which traditional singing took place, the CD liner notes can be accessed at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/saturday.htm

I became aware of the CD through investigating the World Marbles Championships, held at the Greyhound pub, Tinsley Green, Sussex. George ‘Pop’ Maynard (pictured) was captain of the 1948 champions, the Copthorne Spitfires; his several songs on the CD were recorded at his local, the Cherry Tree, Copthorne. Playing the CD on Saturday evenings after I had spent the day in Sussex pubs motivated me to begin researching the history of folk song in Sussex. I soon became aware that other collectors, notably Ken Stubbs and Bob Copper, had been active in the 1950s but in different parts of the county, finding other traditional songs and singers to preserve for posterity and that some of these recordings had also been publicly released on LP records.

Around the same time, 2009, I found myself in the unusual situation of having been invited to an academic conference in Vienna, yet ostensibly knowing very little about the theme of music scenes. The invitation could be called a ‘reciprocal arrangement’ and I found it impossible to simply refuse. In mounting desperation I protested my lack of specialised knowledge in this academic area, only for the conference organisers to find even more flattering terms in which to expect my attendance! Casting around desperately for some empirical example to hang upon the conceptual theme of the conference, I realised that I had one ready-made and to hand.

 

And so it was that, as an introduction to my half-hour paper on traditional folk song in Sussex pubs, George Spicer’s rendition of 'The Cunning Cobbler' was played on CD at the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna, nearly half a century after it was first recorded by Brian Matthews on 12th November 1959 at the Oak Tree, Ardingly. The conference papers were eventually published as a book, ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen, but only in the German language. My own contribution on the folk scene in Sussex is a modest one, even more so given the restrictions of a thirty minute talk and some 4700 words for the written version. Nonetheless, I thought it a pity that it was not publicly available in the English language, so think of this as an introduction to my releasing the chapter in instalments on this Blog over the remainder of the month. 

Sources:

Muggleton, David (2011) Just another Saturday Night: Sussex 1960 – eine Folkmusikszene? In ‘They Say I’m Different’: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteruinnen (Edited by W. Fichna and R. Reitsamer), pp. 21-36. Wien: Löcker Verlag.

Musical Traditions Records (2000), Just Another Saturday Night, Sussex 1960: Songs From Country Pubs, Liner notes accompanying Double Compact Disc MTCD309-10, Stroud: Musical Traditions.

Musical Traditions, www.mustrad.org.uk, (accessed December 2009)