University of Bath folk roots
Sophie Thiele, Copy & Print Assistant, The Library
Sophie Thiele traces the origins of the University of Bath Folk Club as she prepares to embark on PhD research into relationships between folk music and dance and marginalised communities.
When we were scanning SUL for the digitisation project we came across many interesting articles on folk music and I was delighted to recognise some of the names in the texts, for example Bert Jansch who is mentioned here, and Sandy Denny, who played a gig at the University in 1972.
It was so amazing to see articles in SUL tracing the evolving folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s. While we were scanning, we learned that the Women’s Morris Federation was founded in Bath and had its inaugural meeting at the University of Bath in 1975. If you would like to find out more, read Val Parker’s paper on the history of the Federation linked to below. This was an important part of the folk scene’s big revival, as it opened Morris dancing fully to women.
For me, folk will play a big role in my life from next term when I start a PhD in collaboration with the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. I will study how folk music and dance is marginalised in classification systems in libraries and archives. This will lead me to examine how collections of folk music and dance can be a marginalising force in their treatment of Gypsy, Traveller, and immigrant communities and how these marginalisations could be resolved. This project takes me away from Bath (and my beloved scanner) and towards London’s UCL.
My interest in folk (music) stems from two sources. First, I loved going to the Folk Club in Bradford-on-Avon, which meets every Tuesday, where I learned new songs from other singers and gained enough confidence to sing myself (I can relate to Liz’s “if I can sing anyone can”). Second, my taste in music slowly developed to be more ‘folky’. I like singers from ‘back then’, such as Texas Gladden, Jean Ritchie, and Walter Pardon who sang the songs they had learned from their parents or grandparents. Artists from ‘then’, meaning the revival, such as the Watersons, Joan Baez, and singers and bands from ‘now’, such as Lankum, Frankie Archer, Daisy Rickman, and Joanna Newsom.
I don’t know if it is just me, who is immersing myself so much in folk music, but I feel there might be another folk revival on the horizon? Maybe Bath Time will soon be full of articles on Morris Dancing, Folk Clubs, etc.?! I hope so!