I actually really enjoy listening to June Tabor’s “The Dancing”:
It’s very mellow and the sentiment is quite cutting – a moment of escape from a hard work life.
But the sadly delivery is rather demonstrative of several things that somewhat confuse me.
June Tabor is an Oxford educated singer, and I’d bet 20p that she usually pronounces the “g” on the end of a verb – so why go out of her way to accentuate a rustic-sounding accent she doesn’t usually have? It just seems silly – I don’t put on a fake Irish accent to sing The Wild Rover, or a comedy Scottish accent for Au Lang Syne – why do any different?
In addition, I find it hard to understand why there is such a tendency to write about heritage – I mean, the song above The Dancing – is not explicitly about old days, yet the clear references to Flaxworks, looms clearly place the song in the past, despite it being a contemporary piece. Why? Why is there such a tendency to look to topics in the past, when writing new folk songs? It just seems shortsighted – there are great modern folk songs – why such a retrospective vision? If folk music is supposed to be a historical re-enactment, that’d be different, but as far as I can understand, folk music is largely meant to be music “of the people, by the people” – surely there’s more on people’s minds than the industrial revolution?
What can we do to separate heritage music from folk music?