Culture Editor Florence Wilson explores London’s growing folk scene and its surprising potential to bring people together.
It’s Valentine’s Day at a chapel in East London. Groups of thirty-something-year-olds trickle into the beautiful circular space. In the middle, there’s room cleared for dancing, beside a makeshift bar made from flimsy tables that wouldn’t look amiss at a village fete.
This isn’t a normal Valentine’s night out. This is a barn dance.
At 8 o’clock, the folk band strikes up. The ‘caller’ — a fifty-something man boozed up on local beer and responsible for teaching us the dances — shouts instructions to the room of strangers.
“Stand in four rows facing your partner, everybody. Come on now, move into the middle!”
We’re organised into parallel lines, facing our partners. Four steps in, four steps out, clap, do-si-do, and right-hand star – it goes on. My face hurts from smiling and I start to recognise the faces of people I’ve danced with: a man twice my age in a waistcoat, twenty-something Hackney creatives.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my open-armed welcome into London’s ever-growing folk scene. A scene so abundant that it has been labelled as part of Britain’s Third Folk revival. And in an increasingly divided country, this folk culture can provide the unifying force that we ever more desperately need.
What is ‘folk culture’?
To provide one, likely reductive, definition, ‘folk culture’ refers to song and dance transmitted from person to person through either oral or practical demonstration. One of its most distinctive facets – as demonstrated by the modern ceilidh – is its in-person transmission. The word ‘folk’ is often traced back to the Old Saxon ‘folc’ or German ‘volk’, meaning ‘common people’. And folk culture is just that – the person-to-person sharing of movement, performance, craft, stories, and song.
The Scottish ceilidh emerged as the 18th century’s answer to the nightclub. The word ‘ceilidh’ initially referred to social gatherings, and, much like today, they provided an opportunity to connect, gossip, share music, and dance. Other regional variations emerged, including the Cornish royl, the Welsh twmpath and noson lawen, and the Cumbrian merry neet.
Brits and Celts have been cultivating folk culture in taverns, village greens and squares for hundreds of years. After a decline in the 19th century, the First Folk Revival emerged in the early 20th century, followed by a second, Americana-influenced revival in the mid-century (thank you, Bob Dylan!).
So here we are, in London, continuing the great British and Celtic tradition. Even in a city, even a country, where communities feel increasingly insular and often divided, folk finds a way.
Bringing people together
In London’s melting pot of cultures, folk music collectives have become a way of sharing cultural stories.
In early May, I find myself at Brixton’s Hootenanny watching the Flotsam Folk Orchestra. The performance opens with the ensemble gathering onstage after an intensive three-day folk residency where members gathered to share and teach songs from their various ancestral roots. Forty musicians from across continents squeeze onto the stage to perform songs learned during this collaborative workshop.
The set starts with a Finnish folk song filled with rhythmic stamping of feet. The backing singers sing in seemingly fluent Finnish. What follows is a flowing set of Yiddish, Cornish, Andalucian, Palestinian, Bengali, Ukrainian, French, and Colombian folk songs.
The joy on the stage is palpable, and so is the poignancy of the diverse orchestra of folk musicians. Introducing her folk song, a Ukrainian woman in traditional dress tells the story of coming to the UK as a refugee five years ago to the day of the concert. There are shouts of “Free Palestine” as a Palestinian folk song is introduced. Against a political backdrop which often seems to emphasise differences between some, though not all, Jewish and Palestinian people, I’m struck by the orchestra’s equal devotion to a Yiddish song sung by a Jewish man and a Palestinian folk song.
In a country that is increasingly divided, the ability to share space, time and music with each other is rare, poignant, and valuable.
Are we experiencing a folk revival?
In the months that follow, I roam around London’s folk events: from folk jam nights at King’s Cross Jamboree to Cut-A-Shine ceilidhs at the Hackney Round Chapel. I begin to recognise regular faces at ceilidhs, and try and untangle what about this world brings me so much unbridled joy.
For author Zakia Sewell, Britain’s emerging folk revival gives us exciting new ways of seeing ourselves. Pointing to eclectic feminist morris dancing collectives and youth-led folk craft groups, she describes folk culture as a way of reclaiming a progressive, textured, inclusive British identity. One that’s less ‘God Save The King’ and more British mythology, rhythm, song, and cultural exchange.
So as I’m whirled around the hands of that eclectic group of Londoners on that Valentine’s night out in Hackney, and watch folk tunes shared across cultures, I start to see, ever more clearly, folk’s potential to bring us together.
About the author
