Interlude 2. How weird is folk?

I was born in America, raised in England, and for the past fifteen years I’ve been making what’s best categorized as folk music.1 I discovered traditional English, Irish and Scottish music at a folk session I stumbled upon in Oxford whilst I was a student. The late night lock-ins, lusty chorus singing, fast and furious tunes and spooky murder ballads cast a spell on me. Though I felt a bit of an outsider in the company of these hearty, mostly middle-aged singers and musicians, I got sucked in, learning tunes and songs and coming back for more. At the same time, I was singing and playing keyboards in a gothic/industrial band, listening to John Peel, travelling to London to see acts like Nick Cave, Swans, Patti Smith, Diamanda Galas, as well as going to see local indie bands at venues like the Jericho Tavern and the Zodiac. After completing the doctorate I had gone to Oxford to do, I moved to California for two years and, finding myself feeling homesick for England, immersed myself in the traditional music of the British Isles. I frequented a folk session in Berkeley and honed my craft as a singer and interpreter of traditional songs there. At the same time, I started writing my own songs on acoustic guitar and banjo. Being away from the place I called home inspired me, but eventually its pull dragged me back across the sea. It was the English countryside I missed most-I longed to wander along footpaths, through fields and meadows, to get lost in dark woods. But I also missed the Oxford folk session and yearned to return and take my place among the fine singers there, to be accepted into their ranks. For me, the songs I had been writing were on a continuum with the traditional ones I had been singing. I wrote songs that told stories of love gone wrong, of rising floods, of incestuous love, of imprisonment and release. I had started to develop my own musical style and idiosyncrasies, and my characters were sometimes strange, but I borrowed melodies from traditional tunes and saw parallels between my stories and those told in the old ballads I had been learning. Coming back home with songs to sing and a real hunger for traditional music, I hoped to find my way into the heart of the local folk scene, to be embraced as a prodigal daughter. But that never really happened. Over the years I’ve made some great friends through the folk scene, but the acceptance of my own music that I was hoping for in that community never really materialized. It gradually dawned on me that my friends in the traditional folk scene had quite conservative musical tastes, only really being interested in traditional music, some even scorning songwriting and composition as pretentious and arrogant-I should be content to sing tried and tested traditional songs, not try to create something new! From outside the folk world, there seemed to be no real appreciation for folk music: my non-folkie friends generally saw folk music as old-fashioned and twee, and the “finger in the ear” stereotype was what the word “folk” tended to conjure up. It was hard to communicate to them what excited me about folk music, where its magic lay. The only British musician I came across who was treading anything like the same path I was on was Alasdair Roberts. I was excited to hear him in session for John Peel in the early 2000s, singing songs of his own that referenced or included motifs from traditional songs. The one that struck me most was about a woman turning into a gosling, a riff on the traditional ballad “Polly Vaughan,” in which a woman is mistaken for a swan and shot. I wrote to Alasdair and we traded music. He hadn’t yet recorded the songs he’d played for that Peel session so sent me some of his earlier albums. Our paths would cross a year or two later when I was touring Britain with US band The Iditarod. We shared a stage in Aberdeen and Alasdair gave me a promo copy of his forthcoming album Farewell Sorrow. Listening to it in the car as we drove through the Scottish countryside to the next venue and hearing “I Went Hunting,” the song I remembered from before, was magical. I had been put in contact with The Iditarod by Tony Dale who had released my first album, Beautiful Twisted, on his label Camera Obscura. Their music incorporated traditional folk songs as well as psychedelic elements, drones, extended instrumentals. They seemed to be musical kindred spirits. They invited me to tour the US and Canada with them, and we became firm friends. As well as playing shows with The Iditarod, I found myself on the same bill as artists like Espers, Fursaxa, Jack Rose. It was a musical community I fitted in with, a loose network of people making folk-related music that referenced John Fahey, Pentangle, The Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins, as well as Pauline Oliveros, Amon Düül, Nico and Black Sabbath. The looseness and breadth of musical connections and tastes shared by this Amer ican “psych-folk” or “free folk” community was refreshing and exhilarating after the narrow confines of the English folk scene, so much so that I decided to move to Philadelphia the following year to live together with some of the musicians I had met and bonded with on this tour. I arrived in Philadelphia, ready to move in, just as my housemates-to-be were returning from the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival that David Keenan would write about in an article entitled “Welcome to the New Weird America” in The Wire.2 The label seemed appropriate: there did seem to be a connection between this new music and the “old, weird America”—as Greil Marcus famously put it-of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music.3

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