Janet Elizabeth's folk activities

This is folkie Elizabeth's page containing local folk clubs, favourite folk festivals and other useful web sites.

Some of the folk clubs in Brighton, Lewes and Sussex

This folkie goes mostly to the very traditional Lewes Saturday folk club at the Room in the Elephant. I occasionally go to the more eclectic Brighton Singers' Club / Cellarfolk run by Ian Fyvie at Round Georges on Tuesdays.

Musicians would do well to consult Bryan Creer's excellent automated list of traditional music sessions - free, participatory tune and song sessions happening in a loosely defined area roughly corresponding to Sussex, Kent and Surrey.

Sussex alone offers a folk event almost every day; whatson.brighton.co.uk/folk lists the regular Sussex club meetings.

Shape Note or Sacred Harp songs

Another good opportunity for singing with gusto is with Sacred Harp and Shape Note, such as can be experienced at Brighton Shape Notes twice a month or Lewes on Second Monday.
The dots on the music stave are in four different shapes - fa, lah, sol, mi - and I for one certainly find these fa-so-la shape-notes easier to recognise and "read" than unshaped notes; there are only four different notes and I don't have to worry about different clefs or key signatures.

The Brighton-based band Tight Squeeze play for ceilidhs or barn dances who pride themselves on versatility and good musicianship. They are also good fun to dance to.
The Sussex Pistols are a well established ceilidh and barn dance band based in Lewes & Brighton.

Special Events and Festivals, hooray!

You can get to a lot of folk festivals by public transport - check online at Traveline SE large text and mobile (accessible) version, or the uncluttered and easy-to-use Accessible Train Times.

First event each year is the Sussex all-day sing on the middle Saturday in January at the Royal Oak, Barcombe, BN8 5BA. See Lewes Saturday folk club web site for confirmation and details.

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Chippenham (easy by train!) offers festival-goers good song and folk club style sessions, and features some excellent talks on folk-song-related themes such as songs of the lumbermen, plus a number of dance workshops such as morris, Playford, contra and sometimes sixteenth century, renaissance or earlier dancing.

Crawley festival is probably the nearest to me.

Travelling Folk Song&Ale in Upper Dicker (a few miles from Berwick station) is a fairly informal, friendly and very popular event and it includes a walk on Saturday morning which I lead.

"Laugh, drink and sing" with the middle bar singers in the Anchor at Sidmouth Folkweek. Oh no - I've been captured singing "Row On" in a weird, but thankfully short, clip on YouTube!

The Whitby Folk Week was well worth the trip - with Charles - when the first weekend was the weekend of the Regatta with tall ships and fireworks. Going by train via Middlesbrough takes 6h34 but Traveline Yorkshire recommends train to Scarborough then a one-hour bus journey, total 6h7.

The Wail we sang, unaccompanied by instruments, in a marquee or two. On Saturday starting at Midnight we shared a roast pork "banquet" in another marquee - and we dress up!

Barns are good not just for dances, you know ... at Whittlebury Song and Ale we used to in the barn and it was one of the best! Our unaccompanied chorus songs made the rafters ring (see picture).

At the Tenterden folk festival, sadly no longer being run, we could take a ride on the Kent & East Sussex Railway.

I once went to Bedworth and thoroughly enjoyed it - not least, thanks to Ali & Steve, the unexpected trip to the Village Carols at Dungworth.

Brighton has for several years run excellent Pub Carols sessions in December, with rehearsals on November, organised by members of Brighton Morris. All good fun singing lustily some great songs from Sussex and beyond. My favourites are Blow Ye the Trumpet and Remember O Thou Man.

More festivals at UKFolkFestivals' Big List.

Other folkie sites

Sussex Folk Association SUSFA lists just about all the folk groups that meet in Sussex. An excellent, well organised and comprehensive folk site.

Listen to A Folk Song A Day by Jon Boden, a project that Jon set out to do for a year in June 2010. You can download the 365 songs in iTunes. A Folk Song A Day includes lots of information about each song too!

The folk poet Les Barker wrote very clever, amusing, ironic and thought-provoking poetry. He deliberately left all his material uncopyrighted, so singers can perform them any time and you can hear people performing material by Les Barker on YouTube. He created his own campaigning YouTube Channel too and there is a Wikipedia page. The most famous collections of Les's poems are the Guide Cats for the Blind double CD of Mr Barker's work featuring a multitude of more famous people.

Local songwriter Maria Cunningham wrote songs in folk style about Sussex folklore and history and there a web site has been set up in her memory - Sing4Maria. Here you can find previously unpublished recordings of Maria's songs. Maria's include The Long Man (of Wilmington), Mad Jack (Fuller), Hastings' Jack in the Green festival, the Mary Stanford Disaster, the Hat in the Road and the windmills Jack and Jill.

Words, words, words!

The best site to visit is Mudcat.org where you can find find folk song lyrics, discuss song meanings or provenance or ask people for lyrics and other information.

Other useful sites are Robokopp Folksleider with folk songs from across the world, the Contemplator's folk music search, Rod Stradling's mustrad musical traditions magazine, so-called "celtic" lyrics collection which includes a fair number of English traditional songs and even some recently written songs in English traditional style by English people.
There is a good list of many internet folk music resources at Martin Nail's site. Find all sorts of facts and figures about folk and a list of traditional songs at Folk File: A Folkie's Dictionary by Bill Markwick - you can spend hours browsing there.
For sea songs and shanties (or chanteys) - those lustily rhythmic traditional songs - try Contemplator's songs of the sea. I quite like to browse Schoonerman's sailing terms too.
I have written some songs in traditional folk style too. See what you think of my song for September and my song for Wet May Bank Holiday .

Some local Morris sides

Brighton Morris Men (mainly Cotswold), the Cuckoo's nest women's side which is also based in Brighton, Sompting Village Morris (Cotswold, North-West, Sussex and Border Morris, ladies included), Old Star (Border) Morris who meet at dawn on May Day (that's 4am!) at the Hollingbury Hillfort and lunchtime on New Year's Day dance outside the Pump House in Brighton Lanes. The women's morris Knots of May were formed in Brighton but now practise in Lewes. Also in Sussex is Broadwood Morris (Cotswold) which Doug used to dance with.