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English Country Music
English country music is a term that gained currency in the 1960s and early 70s to specifically describe a genre of instrumental music then receiving attention from the folk revival. This was a deliberate attempt to avoid the term "folk", at the time being used widely to include much acoustically performed music with or without genuine folk origins or "traditional" which would strictly preclude the more recent material country musicians performed. Those like Keith Summers who sought traditional musicians in rural areas often found that both songs and tunes from published sources, music hall, radio, 78 recordings or later coexisted in a performer's repertoire, sometimes, but not always, alongside music which could be strictly defined as "folk" or "traditional". The focus for revival performers of English country music became the style of their informants as much as their repertoire. Rather than a folk club a venue might be a remote country pub where revival and traditional musicia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Folk Revival
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Billie Holiday, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music. Overview Early years The folk revival in New York City was rooted in the resurgent interest in square dancing and folk dancing there in the 1940s as espoused by instructors such as Margot Mayo, which gave musicians such as Pete Seeger popular exposure. The folk revival more generally as a popular and commercial phenomenon begins with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taffy Thomas
Taffy Thomas, MBE is a storyteller, based in Grasmere in the English Lake District. Biography In September 2009, Thomas accepted the honorary position of the UK's first Laureate for Storytelling, which was officially launched on 30 January 2010 at the British Library as part of a series of national events for National Storytelling Week, for a period of two years. Brian Patten, Michael Rosen, Pete Suchil Chand, Patsy Heap, Del Reid and Simon Thirsk are patrons and official guardians of the first laureate for storytelling. Thomas trained as a Literature and Drama teacher at Dudley College of Education, before teaching in Wolverhampton. While teaching, he also founded two companies to promote folk theatre and rural arts. Thomas fronted and performed in the ''Fabulous Salami Brothers'', the popular touring unit of ''Charivari'', while ''The Magic Lantern'' traveled Europe illustrating folk songs by use of shadow puppets. A stroke at the age of 36 brought another change in directi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Country Dance
A country dance is any of a very large number of social dances of a type that originated in the British Isles; it is the repeated execution of a predefined sequence of figures, carefully designed to fit a fixed length of music, performed by a group of people, usually in couples, in one or more sets. The figures involve interaction with your partner and/or with other dancers, usually with a progression so that you dance with everyone in your set. It is common in modern times to have a "caller" who teaches the dance and then calls the figures as you dance. Country dances are done in many different styles. As a musical form written in or time, the contredanse was used by Beethoven and Mozart. Introduced to South America by French immigrants, Country Dance had great influence upon Latin American music as contradanza. The ''Anglais'' (from the French word meaning "English") or ''Angloise'' is another term for the English country dance. A Scottish country dance may be termed an . ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Country Music
Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, old-time, and American folk music forms including Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, and the cowboy Western music styles of Hawaiian, New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country. Country music often consists of ballads and honky-tonk dance tunes with generally simple form, folk lyrics, and harmonies often accompanied by string instruments such as electric and acoustic guitars, steel guitars (such as pedal steels and dobros), banjos, and fiddles as well as harmonicas. Blues modes have been used extensively throughout its recorded history. The term ''country music'' gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to '' hillbilly music'', with "country music" being used today to describe many styles and subgenres. It came to encomp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oak (band)
Oak was an English folk band in the early 1970s. History The members of Oak met in the 1960s in Kingston upon Thames, where Rod Stradling ran a folk club. The Stradlings moved to Camden Town in 1968 and became involved in running another folk club in Islington. Engle and Webb also moved to North London soon afterward. In 1970, while Rod Stradling's wife, Danny was pregnant, Rod Stradling played together with Tony Engle as a successful duo and as part of The Garland, replacing Mel Dean. After the birth of their son, the Stradlings and Engle and Webb joined forces as Oak and performed at most of the folk clubs in the London area. They were asked by Bill Leader to make an LP for his Trailer label but as Engle worked for Topic Records, he felt obliged to offer to record for them first. To his surprise, the offer was accepted and ''Welcome to Our Fair'' was recorded on May Day, 1971. The record created interest and the band played 163 gigs in the 18 months between the record's relea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Topic Records
Topic Records is a British folk music label, which played a major role in the second British folk revival. It began as an offshoot of the Workers' Music Association in 1939, making it the oldest independent record label in the world.M. Brocken, ''The British Folk Revival 1944-2002'' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 55-65. History The label began as an offshoot of the communist led Workers' Music Association in 1939, selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order. After a period of relative inactivity in the Second World War, production resumed in the later 1940s, moving towards traditional music for the emerging revival market. Up to 1949 the composer Alan Bush was involved with choral and orchestral music released on the label. Topic also produced some of the first American blues records to be commercially available in Britain. From about 1950 the two key figures of the second revival, Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd, became heavily involved, producing several records o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scan Tester
Lewis "Scan" Tester (7 September 1887 – May 1972) was an English folk and English country musician. Overview Lewis Tester was born in Chelwood Gate, near Horsted Keynes, Sussex, England. At about the age of five he acquired the nickname "scantelope". There are several variants on the story, but his immediate family used the name "Scan" and he used it when advertising himself as a musician. He spent most of life in the area north of Brighton, playing Anglo concertina, bandoneon, melodeon and fiddle. He occasionally sang. Both his older brother, Trayton and a younger brother, Will played concertina. He lied about his age in order to be able to leave school early and earn money for his family. Parish records of the school suggest he was born in 1887, but he claimed it was 1886. At his father's pub, the Green Man at Horsted Keynes he learned step-dancing. He danced and played at weddings, harvest suppers and pubs with his elder brother and other local musicians. Gypsie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cheltenham
Cheltenham (), also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a spa town and borough on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort, following the discovery of mineral springs in 1716, and claims to be the most complete Regency town in Britain. The town hosts several festivals of culture, often featuring nationally and internationally famous contributors and attendees; they include the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the Cheltenham Science Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival, the Cheltenham Cricket Festival and the Cheltenham Food & Drink Festival. In steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup is the main event of the Cheltenham Festival, held every March. History Cheltenham stands on the small River Chelt, which rises nearby at Dowdeswell and runs through the town on its way to the Severn. It was first recorded in 803, as ''Celtan hom''; the meaning has not been resol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Swan Band
The Old Swan Band is a long-established and influential English country dance band. Early years Its origins lie in the early 1970s with the English country dance band Oak, one of a tiny handful at that time that combined melodeon with fiddles. Two members of Oak, husband and wife Rod and Danny Stradling (melodeon and vocals), went on to form The Cotswold Liberation Front, which became The Old Swan Band in 1974. They recruited fiddler Paul Burgess, percussionist Martin Brinsford and the Fraser Sisters (Fi and Jo). Fi (short for Fiona) is a fiddle player and singer; her sister Jo (aged 13 when she joined the band) plays saxophone, clarinet and whistles, and is also a singer and composer. The new band took the English country dance scene by storm. Up to this point the English Folk Dance and Song Society had set the tone for polite decorum at Cecil Sharp House. With a drummer and sax player, The Old Swan Band brought punchiness to a very English repertoire of tunes (and occasional so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cricklade
Cricklade is a town and civil parish on the River Thames in north Wiltshire, England, midway between Swindon and Cirencester. It is the first downstream town on the Thames. The parish population at the 2011 census was 4,227. History Cricklade was founded in the 9th century by the Anglo-Saxons, at the point where the Ermin Way Roman road crossed the River Thames. It was the home of a royal mint from 979 to 1100; there are some Cricklade coins in the town museum.Christopher Winn: ''I Never Knew That about the River Thames'' (London: Ebury Press, 2010), p. 6. The Domesday Book of 1086 records a settlement at ''Crichelade'', with a church, and at the centre of a hundred of the same name. Anglo-Saxon fortification Cricklade is one of thirty burhs (boroughs, i.e. fortresses or fortified towns) recorded in the Burghal Hidage document, which describes a system of fortresses and fortified towns built around Wessex by King Alfred. Recent research suggests these burhs were built in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
