How humans attempt to label and list music (and enjoy arguing about it)...

This became a topic, off-line, yesterday evening.
How are 'folk', 'roots' 'bluegrass' and others actually defined? Indeed are there any clear boundaries at all, when it comes to what may, or may not be included? This is a topic that I just know could run forever.
It came back to mind just now as I am thinking about, and  listening to, the 2014 recorded music I have acquired. Here's a picture of the first tranche (and yes, that is an Island 'pink label' on a 2014 vinyl release)...

It has also made me consider that which I wish to listen to or more problematically regret having missed live, which is a matter of self-questioning.
Above all this, however, it throws up a wider metaphysical question. Why do we tend to favour the process of 'classification' and why is such comfort gained by associating the very diversity (which we also tend to like) of things with a rather small number of 'boxes' in which we aim to 'put' them?
Digital devices are all very good for making and storing lists, assuming we are organised enough to store the stuff on them. Digital devices don't argue about the lists we chose to inflict on them and as an example I can find no reliable report of a digital device that has unilaterally declared that it can't abide U2.
Amazon's algorithm is quite good at suggesting things that I might like but not because it knows me and how I think. It simply knows about other people and what they have purchased or browsed and therefore, indirectly, how they think. What digital networks are not yet any good at is what humans are innately good at. That is spotting apparently curious connections or comparisons that are not within any logically associated domain but which very often our fellow humans can relate to. We humans do so endlessly, much to our mutual delight and annoyance.

This is where we get to the arguing part of it. Folk/roots music does not work by rules - it evolves and it does so unpredictably. That is important because if that were not so then it would be a dinosaur. There would be nothing new, original and incisive about it.
When Bob Dylan was pilloried for going electric others such as Fairport Convention took the idea and ran with it. It was ever thus. One other important point is that until quite recently folk/roots music was seen at best to be a minor genre managing decline as best it could.
In a few years, and due to changing technology as much as changing taste, that concept has altered quite remarkably. It is now possible to record and release music without the expenditure, in equipment, facilities or even travel and other sundries such as it recently was. It is true that many fine labels - Topic Records and Fellside Recordings being just two that spring to mind - had continued to release such music and while it is most certainly still not easy to make even a modest living from it, the balance of power has shifted and also in another very important way - the traffic in folk/roots/Americana has also become fully fledged two-way traffic as the often perceived insularity has broken down.

There are some instruments that have evolved to belong, even though until quite recently they did not. Bouzouki is an instrument from Asia Minor. By the early 20th century it had migrated and evolved and was found in music of the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. One of the first, and the best known to introduce it to Celtic folk music was Dónal Lunny of Planxty. The band spent time behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1970s and this is reflected in several tracks on the 1974 album 'Cold Blow and The Rainy Night', to which I am listening as I write. Also on the album are several other songs that do not come directly from the UK or Irish folk canon - The Lakes of Pontchartrain and The Green Fields of Canada being two of them.
There are several others that are not native to UK folk but I'd find to argue that they are no longer assimilated, to all intents and purposes.
Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin are at the top of their game, winning best duo at the BBC Folk Awards 2014, and they headline North Dorset Folk Festival this coming Saturday. They extensively play two instruments that do not feature in the traditional folk canon. Hannah, as well as playing awesome fiddle, is a mean banjo player. Quite when it arrived in UK folk I don't know but it is an essential of bluegrass and also Appalachian 'old time' music, especially when played clawhammer (that is with the back of the fingernails rather than traditionally plucked) in the latter case. Phillip is an amazing resonator guitar player and this instrument although probably of Hawaiian origin entered popular music in the early 1920s via Jazz as it was loud enough to compete (unamplified) with the brass section. Often simply known as dobro this is a brand - it is exactly like calling all generic vacuum cleaners hoovers. Any which way the instrument quickly became a feature of both blues and bluegrass too, as they spread north up the Mississippi. Another Hawaiian instrument to gain traction, because of its general versatility is the ukulele. In all cases these instruments were readily adopted because they were very usable within the existing structure but also bought with them new possibilities. Not everyone welcomed these developments, that much is certain, but this is what a living tradition needs to do to flourish. The fast changing USA absorbed and developed all these influences, including those that came from Africa, whether via the Carribean, south and central America or simply directly and new dimensions took shape.
Inevitably the result was exported once again. There would have been no British blues, in the mould of Free and early Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, had that not happened. An interesting corollary to this is 'Black Magic Woman' - the Carlos Santana version (1970) is so well known that it is often forgotten that it is a cover of a 1968 Peter Green original (but only a single and then only released in the UK). It appeared on the Santana album 'Abraxas' by which time it had acquired new parts influenced by traditional eastern European Roma music and also Latin american rhythm. Plenty of the eastern European tradition had also made its way west across the Atlantic and that is evident in much bluegrass and Appalachian fiddle music.

So where does this find us? In a whirlpool that none of us had imagined, I rather think!
I shall continue in a new post if only because Blogger tells me that I can't add any more 'labels' to this one!
What is more, come this weekend I will also have a whole lot of live music to write about and, if I have my way, plenty of photos to go with that. I can't wait.

Lyrics again - not just my obsession?

I love it that so many like lyrics too but it has certainly proven rather more of an interest than I imagined. I thought, when I first mentioned the matter, that all was doing was setting myself up for ridicule because it was merely of foible of mine.
It would seem that I was much mistaken. I will try to do my best but the list of requests is becoming as interesting as it is daunting, even for those that I have a reasonable chance of doing.  Here is today's list and they are all from albums that I have mentioned before and thus have only myself to blame.


'The Green Fields Of Canada' - Planxty (1974)
'Don't Say A Word' - Phantom Limb (2008)
Deranged - Stacee Lawson (2008)
That's a whole album, 'Deranged', and two songs. That is quite a lot of lyrics to do, so please don't expect them tomorrow!


Stacee Lawson's 'Deranged' includes a rather worthwhile cover of Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians' 'What I Am', originally from the equally worthwhile album 'Shooting Rubber Bands At The Stars' (1988).
Phantom Limb, while from Bristol more or less, are in LA and recording their second album.
The Facebook site I use-music-as-an-escape-from-my-problems has its merits too but is struggling, if not for attention then certainly diversity.  If anyone feels like writing a bit about music; any music that you like is just fine (or even that which you don't), and why, please feel free to join in and add something.  It is not a scary prospect, I can assure you of that, and if you choose to add something slightly challenging then that is all the better.

Eurovision 2010 live - part 2

Thank you to 'The Voyeurist', who commented upon my first post about Eurovision 2010 in which I didn't make it clear that what I posted were only some of my live musings and, specifically, I did not include the entry from Serbia.  That said here are most of the rest of those notes that I did take and it does include a brief note on the Serbian entry... 

I simply didn't have the time to write everything I might have done just on a single listening and certainly not the fascinating lyric highlighted.  What I will say is the Balkan influence on much western European traditional music is centuries, perhaps even far more than a millennium, older than Eurovision. 

The entry from Moldova caught my ear too. Another entry that I commented on is that from Albania and that is not merely a comment on the fact that it was a good shot from a nation so recently integrated into Eurovision.  If I had to choose one song to plug from the whole competition then this would be it - what a wonderful fusion of apparently incompatible influences.  Expect this kind of thing anywhere, and everywhere, across Europe soon.

We (in the UK) complain about the Eastern European influence (in Eurovision terms) in recent years but, on the latest evidence, I'm coming to like some of it.  The problem is ours: we can do great music but when it comes to Eurovision we are always something like a decade behind.

You can find any number of similarly minded, and very successful, artists and acts in the UK at the moment but why would they want to risk their reputation by participating in Eurovision?

It is a sad state of affairs, as regards the UK, but it is no reflection on the the Eurovision Song Contest itself and this might seem to be a very curious place to start to explain why...

The album is ostensibly Celtic folk and this my example of it, Polydor 'SUPER 2383 301' of 1974 and thus on vinyl. Several tracks on it are taken from North American renditions of folk songs and two others are interpretations of Romanian folk tunes. The thing is that there isn't a huge musical gulf between any of them...

It also includes 'P stands for Paddy I Suppose', a track that I rather like and one that has also been covered much more recently.

Age is not always a bad thing...

I sometimes think that, being the far side of forty, it might seem strange that I should like so much new music but I'm quite able to ignore such things, or even rebut them if that is strictly necessary.
On the other hand things that I'm too young to remember first-hand I am simply never asked about and perhaps the best thing about having a music collection is that in all probability, when the everyday listening seems exactly that, you can always find something strange to listen to that you haven't heard in ages.
I've long had a soft spot for folk music in most disguises and this is one album, certainly not the only one, that has been in my collection for over twenty years now but is actually far older than that:

Planxty - The Well Below The Valley (1973)

This is available on CD from the usual sources but Polydor 2383-232 (the original issue vinyl) might not be. The following year they released 'Cold Blow and the Rainy Night', which is regarded by some as even better. I have that on original vinyl too but I wouldn't care to say I like one more than the other. The one thing I don't have is their eponymous first album, and many regard this at the finest of the lot. It is readily available on CD, of that there is no doubt, but as I have the other two on vinyl there is a certain temptation ...