Sweet Little Sixteen: A Folk Song?
I started my musical life with songs learned from my Irish grandmother:
Ìý²¹²Ô»å , like the best of country music, seemed more rooted in real music than people like Ìý²¹²Ô»å .
When I moved on into the folk world I loved people like The Young Tradition and The Watersons, Tony Rose, Nic Jones, Dave Burland and The High Level Ranters. Their music excited me as much as my first brush with Leadbelly and Chuck Berry, it seemed to me to be the pure drop, the Real McCoy. When and Ìýcame along, their music too seemed to have that feel of authenticity, still does in fact. I listen to Maddy singing When I Was On Horseback now, and my spine tingles in the same way it did when I stood shoulder to shoulder with , on one of our rare nights off the road,Ìý watching Steeleye make their debut at
All of this leads me round to a track I heard the other day and to a debate that has been raging inside me for a while: Ìý(together with ) does a brilliant version of on the album Toolin' Around Woodstock. To me it is pure American Folk, a celebration of innocence; a lost moment in American history; the story of a young girl who travels round collecting autographs, pretty much in the same way that women followed soldiers on the march in Napoleonic times. The story is told simply and captures the truth of the times better than any newsreel. The fact that Roth uses electric guitars and drums may put some people off, but if it's good enough for Steeleye and Richard Thompson...
I'd be interested to hear what you think.
Comment number 1.
At 15th Aug 2008, Keith wrote:Of course Sweet Little Sixteen is a Contemporary Folk song.
I have trouble with the concept that no new folk songs can ever be written. I sometimes wonder how "Greensleeves"would have been received by a 16th Century Trad Ultra when Thomas Tallis (or whoever) presented it for the first time!
As to Sweet Little Sixteen and Surfin' USA sharing their tune, well "borrowing" a good tune is a good folk tradition in its own right.
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Comment number 2.
At 15th Aug 2008, Keith wrote:Paul Anka's "It Doesn't Matter Any More" is however a song that I suspect may well also live on via the "folk process".
(NO Buddy Holly didn't write that for anyone that thinks he did)
"My Way" is probably going to last too, even if he did steal the tune to the French song "Comme D'Habitude". The theme song for a certain sort of folkie everywhere and can be sung with a finger in any orifice (or none) of one's choosing!
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Comment number 3.
At 21st Aug 2008, boffwhalley wrote:This is the thread of conversation I use all the time with friends – 'folk music' doesn't belong in a certain time frame, it belongs to a changing and evolving world, it's music that tells the stories of real people. For some it might be Irish traditional songs, for some, Buddy Holly on a transistor radio. For some like me it could be (gasp) punk. That's what got me listening to music made by ordinary people about ordinary people, not love songs cooed by millionaires on major record labels. A lot of us were too young for Holly or Dylan or Carthy or Fairport, and we didn't have folk parents to teach us about traditional music.
At the Stokes Bay (Folk) Festival the other week I loved how Roy Bailey and Dick Gaughan were sharing stages with Alabama Three, Levellers and The Blockheads. The first two being stalwarts of the 'folk scene'; the other three descendents of a post-punk version of 'folk music' that, even if you don't love it, are part of a diverse and exciting surge in 'folk' music.
There's no one definition of 'folk', obviously. But I'd hate to see that definition belong only to the offspring of that great tradition (much as I love Eliza, Kate etc). No, the modern-day Buddy Holly's are now mixing folk tales with songs of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their teachers are not just their Mums and Dads who joined Morris teams but people like Joe Strummer and Ian Dury, real British storytellers and folk heroes...
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