( Folk Music – America )
Without kidding around I’d say that my roots are a lot more folk than I’d like to admit. I mean it’s the manly thing to say I play rock or dirty blues, but saying one plays folk music or any hybrid thereof seems to conjurer up a picture of frail nerds strumming and singing sweet as a bird on a wire. Okay, some of that is true but the stigma attached with being a folk musicians often causes our breed to hide out in other genres and I guess to some extent I’ve hidden out and not been very assertive about it.
Pentangle
( Folk Music – England )
In the beginning when I came to England I found a massive underground movement of folk musicians in Norwich. Though, The Music House didn’t get a very big crowd because of the small room at the back of the pub it was always full to capacity and I witnessed some of the finest musicians at work sharing their compositions.
It was primarily original, though occasionally a group or solo act would pump out a well known ditty.
I guess the pressure to earn a living (daresay, such a dream has managed to allude me so far) one avoids that which conjures up (there’s that word again) visions of money washing down the drain and is then forced to rock the folk, or get down and dirty with the blues and stay away from all that sensitive, melodic and heart rending folk type music. I know I’m not being entirely true about this for folk music does have it’s moments in England and then it goes back into the woods and is enjoyed by a faithful few who gather nightly or once weekly around the microphone and share something very powerful and moving.
I mean if one considers that the first song to draw me to the guitar was this ancient folk song which was covered by Traffic (in a school library in my first year at high school by two senior boarders playing their guitars) and that I was absorbed in the early music of Bob Dylan (Blood On The Tracks) and Niel Young (Harvest, After The Goldrush, Comes A Time ….) , I’ve been into a blend of Folk, Country, Country Blues, Country Rock though my personal tastes out paced my technical ability I’d say that I’d be as happy doing Folk, Blues, Country and some Rock as well as going into fusions (which I have) like Folk-Rock, Blues-Rock (recently with ‘Smoke Stack Lightning’), Country-Rock, Prog-Rock and even good old fashioned Rock ‘n Roll (In a South African band called ‘Britesyde’) and as I’ve shared before that’s certainly my earliest root.
It’s all good —- and folk music has some really great roots especially if one considers the likes of Ledbelly and Sleepy John Estes.
It’s there in the blues, the country and the rock but it has a voice of it’s own and so it’ll always be a part of my life.
Folked, 
Blue Django.
