I was interviewed at Sidmouth last year, and one question, in particular, has rattled around my brain ever since. “How serious are you?” As a journalist, I’ve interviewed a lot of musicians over the course of my career, and that’s not a question I’ve ever even thought to ask. It seems like the kind of thing you might ask someone who has turned up at a job interview partially undressed. I can assure you, I had all my clothes on (for once).
But I understand why the question was asked. It’s partly because folk music seems an easy target – something that a musician might flirt with for an album before moving on to something else. And it’s partly because, as someone who published 30 long-form folk interviews on The Grizzly Folk website in the space of 18 months and then turned the whole thing off, I must look a bit flakey. “Oh, so you’ve done the writing thing and now you’re a folk musician, are you?” I can see that. That’s a fair response. People take traditional music very seriously indeed, and it’s clearly something that inspires passion, awe and the need to protect it from bearded tourists.
So, just how serious are you?
I’ll give you the long-winded answer. After I turned off the Grizzly Folk website (for financial reasons rather than anything else), I got my guitar out and trundled off down the road that so many turn to when they’ve discovered what the traditional canon holds. I adore the fact that this music can be geo-located. It gives me a huge thrill to know that “If I Was A Blackbird” [Roud 387] was collected from a house that still stands a stone’s throw from my front door here in Hampshire. So I went back to my hometown and started exploring the songs around Birmingham and the Midlands.
Birmingham has more canals beneath it than Venice. It attracted a vast legion of migrant labourers, and, in my youth, the Digbeth area was always the place to go if you wanted to hear Irish folk music. The area was also home to the country’s biggest traditional folk club. In the mid-sixties, 400 paying customers would cram themselves in every week. Folk music and folklore run through its arteries.
And yet, the songs of Birmingham and the Midlands seem to have been rather overlooked. As soon as I started researching them, I quickly uncovered the amazing work done by Roy Palmer and the people who now run the Trad Arts Team, but was rather surprised to find that nobody seemed to have recorded any of it since the early 70s. One longtime folkie joked that Birmingham was a bit like a folkie black hole: if there was anything going on inside the M42, it never got out.
I started collecting books collated by Jon and Michael Raven, Roy Palmer et al, and I began listening to the albums they’d been involved in. The 1972 Topic Records release, The Wide Midlands, particularly caught my attention – I found a copy on Discogs, and I think I’ve nearly worn the vinyl out (it’s on Spotify, in case you haven’t got a record player). I spent hours lost between Birmingham New Street Station and areas I’d know so well in my teens, all the time knowing exactly how the character in the song “I Can’t Find Brummagem” must’ve felt. In short, I spent a lot of time really focusing on the music from the place I came from, and I fell in love with the city in a way I have never done before.
I can’t divorce my interest in researching and writing about traditional music from the need to sing the songs. I know the areas that the songs come from, so to study their origins and the singers who sang them originally brings vivid life to them in my head as I perform them. One of the things I love so dearly about singing traditional songs is that you’re breathing new life into them and sending them forth for someone else to discover. To do that with these Birmingham songs felt more like “giving something back” than anything else I’ve ever done.
Part of that is being able to tell the stories that accompany the songs, so a large part of the work I did on what became my Midlife album was in the form of note-taking and blog posting. It’s a great way to reach out to other enthusiasts who can correct your misunderstandings, encourage you and point you in the direction of new material. Through that process, I made the acquaintance of several people who had been involved in the recording of the original Topic album, one of who replied regularly and ended up making Midlife her first ever downloaded album (thanks Pam!)
I began arranging the songs in early summer last year, consciously trying to mix paired-down solo versions (of the kind you might expect to hear in a folk club) with versions that sound like they’d sit comfortably on a Blur album. I may be “serious about folk music”, but I’m also acutely aware of the fact that my musical background is not trad folk. Put me in the same room as Sam Sweeney and I’ll struggle beneath the weight of my Imposter Syndrome. I can’t do the vocal adornments well enough to fool anybody. But that doesn’t make my desire to perform these songs any the less valid, so I decided I’d bring my own musicality to them. I produced some of them in a style that would’ve appealed to the young Brummie me, dancing at Snobs nightclub to indie and Northern Soul. In doing so, my hope was that they’d find their way to the ears of llike-minded similarly aged Brummies who might find something that kindled a lost memory.
Midlife came out in November, and lots of Midlanders have contacted me to say how much they’ve enjoyed finding out about their heritage through these songs. So… job done. But it doesn’t stop there. As I mentioned earlier, writing about folk songs and performing them are now two sides of the same obsession, and my aim throughout 2019 is to research, arrange, write about and record a couple of songs each month, publishing everything on my website www.jonwilks.online. I intend to stay fairly close to the Midlands, but that’s not as vital to me as it was for Midlife. I’m mainly looking for great tunes and decent yarns, and I think I’ve managed both on the recently released first digital single of the project.
Oh, It Was My Cruel Parents Who Did Me First Trepan is from the Midlands – Quarry Bank in Staffordshire, to be precise – and I found it first in a Roy Palmer book and then on the George Dunn album (released on Leader in 1972). I’ll be honest, it was the title that got me. That word, trepan… you don’t come across it often and it’s rather jarring to find it used in this context. It was quite a relief to find that trepanning wasn’t another of the Midlands’ past misdemeanours, to be filed alongside wife selling (listen to Midlife if that sentence surprised you), and that “to trepan” means something less lethal (although no less sinister). Take a look at this blog post for more info.
Who Hung the Monkey? is not from the Midlands, but from Hartlepool… or at least, that’s how the story goes. Again, once you plough down into the history behind the song, you find that all is not as it seems. Many readers will know the tale of the Hartlepool monkey that washed up on the shore during the Napoleonic Wars and was mistaken for a French spy, but few will know that the song seems to have come first, and not from Hartlepool at all. In other words, monkey, tale and place all have huge question marks over them – something I explore in this blog post.
When Alex Gallagher, the editor of Folk Radio UK, first asked me to write a song-by-song article on Midlife, I’m not sure he expected this. I may have waffled a little, but if I’ve managed anything at all, hopefully, it’s to answer the question posed to me in that other great folk publication: how serious am I? Well, anyone who spends their weekends researching songs about trepanning is either pretty serious or pretty ill. You decide.
Jon Wilks will be performing the Brummie songs from his Midlife album at various venue this year, including Bodmin Folk Club (March 15th), Green Note Camden (March 25th), Redfest (April 6th) and Sidmouth Folk Festival (August 3rd). You can find out more on www.jonwilks.online.