Folk Music of England - Folk Clubs

Folk Clubs

Although there were a handful of clubs that allowed space for the performance of traditional folk music by the early 1950s, its major boost came from the short-lived British skiffle craze, from about 1956-8. New clubs included the ‘Ballad and Blues’ club in a pub in Soho, co-founded by Ewan MacColl. As the craze subsided from the mid 1950s many of these clubs began to shift towards the performance of English traditional folk material. Many became strict ‘policy clubs’, that pursued a pure and traditional form of music. By the mid 1960s there were probably over 300 in Britain. Most clubs were simply a regular gathering, usually in the back or upstairs room of a public house on a weekly basis. They were largely a phenomenon of the urbanised middle classes and known for the amateur nature of many performances. There were also ‘residents’, who performed regular short sets of songs. Many of these later emerged as major performers in their own right, including A. L. Lloyd, Martin Carthy, and Shirley Collins. A later generation of performers used the folk club circuit for highly successful mainstream careers, including Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott, Ian Dury and Barbara Dickson. The number of clubs began to decline in the 1980s, in the face of changing musical and social trends. But the decline began to stabilize in the mid-1990s with the resurgence of interest in folk music and there are now over 160 folk clubs in the United Kingdom, including many that can trace their origins back to the 1950s.