June is Pride Month, and from 23rd-25th June, George Sansome and Sophie Crawford of Queer Folk are curating a series of nights to celebrate Pride! “We’ll be showcasing some of the best performers on the folk scene, as well as sharing some songs from our research, in three exciting and varied shows this June.”
Queer Folk has been travelling around the country gathering music and unearthing LGBTQIA+ history hidden in traditional music, so we invited them to talk about how Queer Folk came about and to share some of the songs they’d discovered ahead of the Queer Folk Pride Tour at Cecil Sharp House, the University of Sheffield and Sage Gateshead (see full details and ticket links below).
George and Sophie will also be performing an online concert tomorrow: Tuesday 7th June, at 8pm BST – Live To Your Living Room (details & tickets here).
Beginnings of Queer Folk
George Sansome: I first came across Sophie’s music via one of my favourite websites, the incredible resource for English folk song that is Mainly Norfolk, and soon became a fan. When I released my solo album in lockdown 2020, I asked Sophie [Crawford] to do a support slot, and she very kindly sent me a song despite us having never spoken before. I had a feeling she might be queer but was too shy to talk about it. About a year later, Sophie saw one of my posts in a Facebook group for queer folkies called “Nowt So Queer As Folk” and dropped me an email saying she’d be interested in working together. We soon established that we were both keen to take our own research into queer traditional songs a step further, as well as to highlight the presence of queer people within the current folk scene, and so we started Queer Folk.
After some of our own initial research, with some support from the Alan Surtees Trust and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, we started working together online to dig through various archives for any traces of queerness in traditional songs and folk history. In September 2021, we finally managed to get into the same room together (as opposed to Zoom!). We spent a couple of days at Cecil Sharp House in London, looking through the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. We were overwhelmed by our findings and came across all sorts of queer folk songs – some explicitly queer, some more implicit/coded, and some which were absolutely ripe for queering!
Over the past few years, we’d both been very aware of an increase in prominence of LGBTQIA+ folk performers and a burgeoning out queer presence on the audience side of things. We wanted to do something to recognise and celebrate this and amplify the voices of queer performers, as well as help queer audience members feel seen and welcomed in a scene that can sometimes be unwelcoming to LGBTQIA+ people.
Getting a bunch of queer folk musicians together and heading out to play some gigs seemed like the next logical step, so that’s where the Queer Folk Pride Tour came from!
We’ll be showcasing some of the best performers on the folk scene, as well as sharing some songs from our research, in three exciting and varied shows this June. We’re really looking forward to sharing some queer folk music with audiences, introducing them to amazing new artists, and hopefully encouraging queer folk community! We think it would be great for as many people as possible in the folk scene, not just LGBTQIA+ people, to hear the amazing queer folk music and musicians that are out there. There are so many great performers and songs with different perspectives and stories to offer, and we’re only scratching the surface with our research and this upcoming tour. We really hope more people will get interested and inspired to look into this music themselves.
The Songs
Willie O’ Winsbury – Anne Briggs
Whenever we tell people that we’re researching queer folk songs, Willie O’ Winsbury is usually the first song they mention. There are a number of great recordings of this song, but one of our favourites is Anne Briggs (interviewed here), on her self-titled debut solo album from 1971. It’s a gorgeous and well-known performance, with an undoubtedly queer slant to the narrative.
The King is furious with Willie of Winsbury, the man with whom his daughter is having a child, and is fully intent on sentencing him to death until he sees Willie in person. The King is immediately overwhelmed by Willie’s beauty and, instead of killing him, asks if instead, he will marry the King’s daughter.
But when he came the king before,
He was clad all in the red silk.
His hair was like the strands of gold,
His skin was as white as milk.
“And it is no wonder,” said the king,
“That my daughter’s love you did win.
If I was a woman, as I am a man,
My bedfellow you would have been.”
Our Captain Cried “All Hands” – Sophie Crawford
This is another widely known song that both of us have known and sung for a while. It’s a powerful song of love and loss and, in Sophie’s words, has a “lesbian twist”:
There’s no believing man, not your own brother,
So maids, if you must love, love one another
Sophie recorded a performance of this song, along with an introduction about what it means to her, in Kennedy Hall at Cecil Sharp House on our Alan James Creative Bursary Residency in September 2021.
Recitation Upon A Gentleman Sitting On A Cremona Violin – Barry Dransfield
We came across this song in the archives at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library while we were there on our EFDSS residency. It’s a ballad about a fiddle – which is recognised as a phallic object in traditional song by Vic Gammon and other scholars – being sat on by a ‘masculine bum’ and causing some ‘deep penetration’.
We found it in A Collection of Old Ballads, a book from 1738, and then after some research spotted that Barry Dransfield had recorded it on his 1978 album Bowin’ And Scrapin’.
Polly Oliver – Sophie Crawford and George Sansome
This song has it all! Polly puts on men’s clothing and heads off to London to enlist as a soldier. In some versions, she sets off on her father’s green dragon, and in others, she dresses in her dead brother’s clothes. Our handsome soldier then gets propositioned by the captain (“Come lie with me, pretty countryman, if you please”), and naturally, there’s a bit of a twist at the end!
Jack Went A-Sailing – Simon Robinson
This song was collected from Mrs Gentry in Hot Springs, North Carolina, by Cecil Sharp. Like many songs that feature gender-nonconforming people, the main character puts on men’s clothing and heads off to battle, following her true love. She’s told, “Your cheeks too red and rosy, your fingers neat and small / your waist too slim and slender to face a cannon ball”. However, she ends up saving her true love’s life, and they get married. The song ends with a somewhat pertinent question: “This couple they got married, and why not you and me?”.
This version comes from Simon Robinson, who learned the song from one of our videos of us sharing our research at Cecil Sharp House. This is a crucial part of what this project is about for us – getting queer folk songs out into the hands of musicians and into the ears of new listeners.
Short Jacket And White Trousers – Shirley and Dolly Collins
The theme of women heading off to sea in “men’s clothes” is highly prevalent in folk song (see also Canadee-I-O, and many more songs!). In this song, it’s a step further, and we get a thinly veiled expression of homoerotic desire from the ship’s captain:
Our captain heaved a sigh and said, “I wish you was a maid.
Your cherry cheeks and ruby lips they have beguiled me
And I’ve often wished with all my heart you could my sweetheart be.”
This variant was recorded by Shirley and Dolly Collins and was an outtake from their 1970 album Love, Death & The Lady, later reissued in 1994.
The Doffing Mistress – Sophie Crawford and George Sansome
While we have found plenty of explicitly queer folk songs in our research, we also believe it is important to focus on queering folk songs and to identify songs that are perhaps more implicitly queer. Sophie always felt this song, The Doffing Mistress, had a sense of queer love in the way the narrator speaks of Elsie Thompson and that the song was overdue a queer re-framing. We sang this on a creative retreat at Britten Pears Arts in Suffolk at the start of 2022.
Years And Years – Amy Thatcher
This is by far the most recent song on this list – it’s a new song written by Amy Thatcher, featuring Holly Clarke on guitar. A few months ago, we spent a couple of days at Sage Gateshead, working with local LGBTQIA+ musicians, including Amy and Holly. On our second day with them, Amy came in – and completely unprompted – told us she’d written this song. We were absolutely blown away. We all had some really open and honest conversations, and it was really powerful to connect with other queer musicians. This is another aspect of our Queer Folk project that we feel is really important: to connect LGBTQIA+ folk musicians with each other and build community together.
As Amy says, “We live in a heteronormative world and we all assume our kids are straight. That convention alone is a very powerful and heavy anchor for someone who isn’t”.
You can read more about the song, and Amy’s story, here: https://amythatcher.co.uk/2022/03/30/years-and-years/
Both Amy and Holly will be performing in our Queer Folk Pride Tour show at Sage Gateshead on Saturday, 25th June.
Queer Folk Pride Tour
About the Artists
Hannah James
Hannah James is “a true original” (The Guardian), renowned as one of the best accordionists on the British folk scene and one of the key figures in the revival of English percussive dance in recent years.
On Folk Radio: Sleeping Spirals (With Toby Kuhn) | Hannah James & The Jigdoll Ensemble: The Woman and Her Words | Shortwinger (with Maddy Prior and Giles Lewin) | Chatterbox (with Tuulikki Bartosik) | Jigdoll Interview
Burd Ellen
Burd Ellen uses traditional song to explore and evoke dark landscapes and deep stories. Their recent album, Says The Never Beyond, was listed in the top 10 of 2020 for many publications, including The Guardian and Folk Radio UK. Debbie Armour will be performing solo, showcasing stripped back versions of Burd Ellen material and more from her extensive traditional song repertoire.
On Folk Radio: The High Priestess and the Hierophant | Says The Never Beyond
Maddie Morris
Maddie Morris received the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award in 2019 and has been described by Jim Moray as “leading the next generation of socially conscious songwriters.”
On Folk Radio: Live Review
Amy Thatcher
Amy Thatcher is an accordionist and composer primarily working alongside The Shee, Kathryn Tickell and Monster Ceilidh Band.
On Folk Radio: Let What’s In, Out | Amy Thatcher and Fran Knowles | Solo | Guest Feature (as part of The Shee)
Holly Clarke
Holly Clarke is a singer and guitarist from the Lake District, “with a story-teller’s gift to make the listener laugh, cry and just glad to be in her presence.” (James Fagan)
Sophie Crawford and George Sansome
Sophie Crawford and George Sansome are the founders of Queer Folk and together sing queer traditional songs sourced from their research. Sophie’s debut album ‘Silver Pin’ was released in 2018 and was Mainly Norfolk’s album of the year. As a performer, she has worked on the West End and toured internationally. George performs with Granny’s Attic, and his debut solo album was listed as one of Songlines magazine’s “Essential 10 Folk Albums of 2020”.
On Folk Radio: Sophie: Silver Pin | George: George Sansome (solo debut)
Dates & Details
Hannah James
Burd Ellen (Solo)*
Maddie Morris
Amy Thatcher+
Holly Clarke+
Sophie Crawford and George Sansome
*London + Sheffield
+Gateshead
Thursday 23rd June – Cecil Sharp House, London – https://www.efdss.org/whats-on/26-gigs/10987-queer-folk-presents-the-pride-tour
Friday 24th June – University of Sheffield Drama Studio – https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/universityofsheffieldconcerts/queer-folk/e-zdxkla
Saturday 25th June – Sage Gateshead – https://sagegateshead.com/whats-on/queer-folk-presents-the-pride-tour/
Queerfolk: https://queerfolk.co.uk/