AUSTRALIAN FOLK MUSIC FROM KITCHEN TO CONCERT - Graeme Smith

AUSTRALIAN FOLK MUSIC FROM KITCHEN TO CONCERT

Graeme Smith

Folk revival performance often places musical styles which were often small scale and domestic, into new and more public contexts. That which was created within the intimate interactions of face-to-face societies is placed before audiences assembled in a public sphere, and the music set within new surroundings are given new associated meanings.  Understandings  shared by the individual performer and the audience are unavailable and the public performer of the folk revival must create new performance styles, new modes of self projection and new interpretations of traditional material. This article will discuss this process in the Australian folk movement, from the 1950s to the current decade, in the performance of Australian traditional vernacular song, and the ways that modes of performance have emerged from ideas about Australian traditional song, and have in turn found ways to express these ideas to public audiences.

The past 15-20 years has been an increasing interest in ethnomusicology in what might broadly be call folk music revivals; these are increasingly seen now not as pale and distorted imitations of “the real thing” but as important musical movements in their own right.  Livingstone has suggested some characteristic features of revivalist activity, including  groups of "core revivalists" and a revivalist community, revival informants and/or original sources (e.g. historical sound recordings), revivalist ideology and revivalist activities, and that these activities almost always include some form of re-creation in performance. (Livingstone 1999: 69)  Within this re-creation, revivalists “create a new ethos, musical style, and aesthetic code in accordance with their revivalist ideology and personal preferences” (Livingstone 1999:70). 

This phenomenon has been examined by a number of authors in the collection Transforming Tradition: Folk revivals examined edited by Canadian Bluegrass scholar Neil Rosenberg. In his introduction to this collection he puts forward  the term of “named systems” to describe genres such as revitalised traditional musics and other similar styles. Here,  the sustained attention of enthusiasts on a range of musical activities defines a genre and its boundaries, creating a defined uniformity upon which the presumptions of authenticity and value can be applied (Rosenberg 1993:177-82) .  The tasks of a folk revival and music movement is ostensibly to continue the performance of a type of music in a particular way, but this process is always a complex one. At one extreme, a folk revival movement can be the vehicle for the romantic fantasies of upper crust enthusiasts,  producing self-satisfied burlesques of lower class entertainment forms, and at the other are cultural preservation movements through which marginalised groups attempt to hold on to their cultural history and resist socially destructive disempowerment. Revivals are not monolithic , and the “ideology and personal preference” of performers varies widely. Robert Cantwell, in his study of the American folk has demonstrated the legacy of the complex history of the idea of folk culture.  But many performers in a revival attempt  to create in performance a simulacrum of the social relations which the performers recognise or imagine in the traditional cultures they are representing. (Cantwell 1993, 1996)

The origins of the Australian folk revival movement  are  in the radical nationalism, of the 1950s.  Intellectuals and enthusiasts who drove this movement included performers, mainly musical amateurs who were drawn to the early Bush Music clubs. The activities of  such enthusiasts as Cecil Grivas, Brian Loughlin,  and of course  John Meredith, this has been documented well by Rob Willis in his oral history recordings held in the National Library of Australia, on the activists of this revival. Keith McKenry (1997) has documented the scope of the  primary collection activities which fuelled the revival in the 1950s,  and the central importance of the collection of Australian folk song for creating the folk song movement. However, parallel to the assembling of a corpus of songs from which a canon of Australian folk song could be selected, a variety of ways in which these songs might be performed began to be developed as folk enthusiasts became public musicians. 

The ground breaking significance of Dick Diamond’s play Reedy River has been often regarded as the first significant public occasion of the public performance dissemination of Australian folk songs within the Australian folk revival. (Smith 1984) With the unprecedented success in its premier performance in Melbourne, and the following productions in Sydney and other capital cities, the play awakened an interest in Australian folk song, particularly amongst contemporary supporters of radical politics.  John McKenzie, activist and chronicler of the left in the 1950s relates how Reedy River  ‘demolished the myth that Australia had no folk songs’,   inspired new places for the songs in social performance and   ‘revived the old Australian habit of singing around the piano and took on among our friends and progressive people of the left’. (McKenzie 1993:163)

The first models of performance were developed in the Melbourne performance which began the tentative movement towards an effective mode of public presentation of Australian folk song. However, the second Sydney production was the more significant.  When the play was first staged by the New Theatre in Melbourne, the songs, selected from the collection of songs edited by Vance Palmer and Margaret Sutherland (1950),  issued a few years earlier, were arranged for a conventional small stage orchestra by Miles Maxwell: the original program from Melbourne describes the show as opened by an “Overture of Australian Ballads arranged by Miles Maxwell” . Maxwell, son to prominent Melbourne literary academic Ian Maxwell, was a member of the Communist Party, part of the large cohort of young political activists who joined the party in the post war  years. He was studying music at Melbourne University Conservatorium, and he brought the stance of a legitimate composer to the music. He had been drawn to folk music through the  performances of English folk song settings of Hughes, Vaughan Williams and others of the first English folk revival, and his settings, though there is no record of the original scores,  were inevitably influenced by the conventions by which folk song could be set within the norms of art song setting.  His taste drew away from the vulgarities of popular song and jazz. Thus it is not surprising that the music from the Melbourne performance, while warmly received by audiences, had little influence on how these audiences thought Australian folk song might sound.

It was only in Sydney that a distinctive approach to the performance of this material was developed. Ultimately this performance, in its theatrics  and its musical style, was able to mirror the social relations implied by the songs. It did so by drawing upon a performing group which had already been formed in Sydney. In 1953, while the production of Reedy River was being written and staged, John Meredith had assembled a small concert party group to perform the few Australian folk songs that they knew.  Meredith’s musical interests, while inspired by his memories of  informal performances in rural NSW where he grew up, were strongly influenced also by his introduction to more formal musical education in the left choral group lead by another trained musician Doreen Bridges (nee Jacobs), the Unity Singers.  Meredith’s Heathcote Bushwhackers was the first influential  Australian folk  ensemble (Meredith and Campbell 1986).

Within the play, the songs  were presented informally by the characters,  in a style that could be adopted for amateur informal social performance, but the theatrical context within which they were presented was also significant.  In the Sydney production the songs are lead by the Bushwhackers Band. As we hear in the recordings from the 1955 production, they performed the songs onstage with unison choruses, and the arrangements were melodically lead by John Meredith on button accordion, and supported by bush bass.  From its inception, the Heathcote Bushwackers had donned false whiskers and colonial costume for their concert party appearances, and thus a theatrical presentation of the songs was a seamless transition for them. 

So in this period, while informal performance practices were developing, presentations of  Australian folk song in larger public fora often displayed an echo of these theatrical origins.  We can trace the effect of Stanislawski method acting which was the focus of the New Theatre. Cecil Grivas, a new theatre member  and singer with a  groups the Galahs which emerged from the Sydney Bush music club consciously emphasised the  importance of the deep involvement  of  “method acting”  as the basis for powerful projection of the songs.  

Meredith in this period insisted on the political and cultural importance of their activity, and told his fellow performers in 1955  “ some Bushwhackers don’t seem to realise the importance of the work they’re doing and are inclined to treat performance as a bit of a joke. We must remember that although our style of presentation calls for informality , we must be strongly disciplined at all times” (quoted in Bradley and Hazlehurst 1996: 25-6)  Meredith, then at this stage was strongly aware to the importance of establishing a sympathetic ear for the material, and one that would lead the unfamiliar listener to a suitable understanding of its significance.  In spite of this serious commitment, Meredith was apparently a reluctant performer. The Bushwhackers group were later to split on the question of whether presentation of songs could include some greater musical complexity, and in particular the use of harmony in group singing.  Meredith insisted on a single vocal line, and the dissenters went on to form the more musically adventurous Rambleers.  This group, in its attempts to develop more sophisticated musical arrangements provides a transition to the second period of the public performance of Australian traditional song was the folk revival boom of the early 1960s. This period established public performance of folk song  as direct entertainment, and this emerged within dedicated folk venue performance site, the new coffee lounges and small restaurant venues that began to open from the early 1960s.  

Ellen Stekert has described the style of performance which emerged in the folk revival of the 1960s as “the new aesthetic”(Stekert 1993).  Although she expands on this description with examples from the American folk movement, the trends she describes were followed in Australia and Britain, as singers were attracted to ways of performing within new pubic entertainment contexts. Within “the new aesthetic” folk songs were treated as more than historical documents, or expressions of a national spirit. In performance, folk song could be the vehicle for the presentation of a new authentic individual performer. In this there was the possibility of continuity between the various styles of traditional song and the new existential expression of the contemporary folk singer, as the new singer songwriters of the era were named.

The performer who best exemplified this new approach of the period was Gary Shearston.  Shearston had begun performing in the late 1950s, and  already had some experience as a performer in theatre and children’s theatre and television when the folk boom hit Australia.  After leaving school, Shearston had been involved from the late 1950s  in the theatre company of Hayes Gordon, an American radical actor  who made his home in Australia after being blacklisted in Macarthyist America. (Ausstage nd , Strickland 1997). Shearston was thus well placed to establish himself as a performer who could connect a powerful personal performance with the aura of a historical traditional repertoire. 

Shearston established a reputation as one of the most talented of the early public folksingers when a circuit of coffee lounge venues emerged around 1963 in Sydney.  Shearston released his several LP recordings in 1964. The first was his Folksongs and Ballads of Australia, which contained 12 songs introduced in cover notes as follows 

Folk song - traditional and contemporary - serves as an integral part of the oral record of a country's history. Over the past 15 years the tremendous revival of interest and research into the Australian folk heritage has brought about a deeper insight into the lives of those "that set us high". Presented here are 12 songs - old and new - which are part of that living folk history.

Within this honouring of the repertoire, however there is relatively little overt  highlighting of the musical specificity of the material. His performance employed  his guitar supported by a second guitar or banjo played by Les Miller,  and is  delivered in a voice confidently projected,  and if there is a nod to broad Australian pronunciation in the singing, it is generally clearly enunciated. Only his version of “Humping of Bluey”, delivered unaccompanied with a more speech like projection moves away from conventional modes of singing. 

 This recording was followed in the next year by two more LPs, each a collection of contemporary songs in the current folk idiom. There were a couple of songs by Shearston on each, but most of the material was composed by others, or were settings of poems often by Australian social realist writers such as Mona Brand or Dorothy Hewitt, or of Henry Lawson poems. 

However in 1965 he issued two LPs which attempted a much focussed attempt to present a specific musical stylistic approach, one that assumed that folk song was more than a repertoire to be transparently presented. These were The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing and Traditional Australian Songs of Bolters, Bushrangers and Duffers .

He was advised and helped on both these recordings by the scholar and writer Edgar Waters, who vigorously directed Shearston to field recordings; and  these were approached with an ear to the performance style of informants. There are three main sources for the songs to which he was directed. These are described in the informative cover notes to each LP,  which were complied by his mentor Edgar Waters. The notes document the most prolific singers from whom the collectors of the period had recorded songs, Simon MacDonald and Sally Sloane, and indicate the sources of versions which Shearston drew upon. The notes subtly calibrate the relationship, implying either direct learning from field recordings of merely taking a text and melody from a printed publication.  Many of the versions are linked with the recordings of the English folk song scholar, A L Lloyd. Lloyd, whose Australian repertoire came from his memory as a teenage emigrant station hand in the late 1920s and 1930s, had resuscitated this in the 1950s in his leading role as singer and intellectual interpreter in the English folk revival. His LP recording of Across the Western Plains was one of the most distinctive recordings presenting Australian traditional song, and carried the authority of Lloyds highly idiosyncratic singing style. (see Seal 2006, Smith 1996)

Amongst Shearston’s musical models, the dominant force was Lloyd. Of the sixteen songs on Shearston’s  The Springtime it brings on the Shearing , ten are taken directly from Lloyd’s Australian recorded repertoire.  Lloyd  was not only a source of repertoire, but more importantly he also became a model for singing songs which Shearston had from other informants, such as Sally Sloane or Simon McDonald. While aspects of the phrasing and melodic approach of these Australian singers can be heard in Shearston’s performance, their influence is minor compared with that of Lloyd. Not only are Lloyd’s vocal scoops and glides, his vocal breaks and use of speech-like delivery prominent, but Peggy Seeger’s distinctive percussive and dissonant accompaniment licks from Across the Western Plains are taken up by Les Miller to create a homage to Lloyd’s approach. This can be heard by comparing Shearston’s two versions of “Lachlan Tigers”, as recorded on Folk Songs of Australia (1964) and  on The Springtime it Brings of the Shearing (1965). 

Besides Lloyd’s authority (however controversial) as a source of  Australian folk material,  Lloyd’s primary appeal to singers like Shearston and others was in the sense of personal authority he carried in his performance style: his manneristic vocal scopes and glides, as well as his ability to suggest an exotic flavour  to Australian folksong style fitted well with the movement towards what was called at the time “ethnic” style: epitomised by Bob Dylan’s disregard for the niceties of legitimate singing styles: both popular and folk-popular: fixed intonation, clear articulation etc. (Shelton 1975, Miller 1964)

The new folk aesthetic projected so effectively by Shearston was particularly suited to solo performance, where the authority and intensity of individual experience are given pride of place. At the same time, the image of collective performance that had been advanced by the first performances of the Heathcote Bushwhackers, had been continuing on in the more informal groups associated with bush music clubs through the 1950s and 1960s. And meanwhile, in the coffee house period, Australian folksinging groups were more likely to follow the models of the clean cut college style groups, and despite popularity were often derided for their lack of an authentic Australian style  (Turnbull 2008). However in this period popular music groups lead by the example of the Beatles had displaced the solo performer from centre stage, and folk music performers and enthusiasts moved their attention towards similar musical combinations. 

The new folk group style was developed by a number of the groups such the Wild Colonial boys, in Sydney, followed by the Bushwackers and the Cobbers. (Smith 1994) However it was anticipated by the way in which Martyn Wyndham-Read  presented his material on his LP Bushwhackers Bullockies and Booze (1967)

While Martyn Wyndham-Read  had established himself in the folk club circuit of the 196os as a solo performer, on this album he organised a larger than usual number of backing musicians and described them thus: 

Without the bush band these songs would be perhaps a bit weak  and inaudible. The majority of shearing songs were sung with a tremendous amount of gusto in extremely high keys and at the top of the singers’ lungs; the bushranging songs with as much defiance as was feasible; the droving songs with as much clippity-clop as the singers were capable of. (1967)

Here Martyn Wyndham-Read  presents the proletarian bohemian image of the bush band which was developed by many later groups, but compared with the bush bands which followed him,  his  presentation and arrangements of the songs are rather restrained. The band of the recording, mainly performers associated with the Victorian Folk Music Club,  are still only accompanists to the solo singer, with minimal filler breaks between verses of songs.

The Wild Colonial Boys, forming in 1969 greatly extended this approach and established to basic form of the bush band which came into fruition in the next few years.  They drew on the performance model of the Dubliners, combining  lusty and lively singing with instrumental dance tunes. Vocal delivery tended to be forced and powerful, and the image was working class rebelliousness was easily translated into the social constructions of the Australian Legend which had underpinned the Australian folk revival. (Smith 1994). The new Australian bush band, presented songs with powerful rhythmic accompaniment, instrumental breaks and interspersed dance tunes based largely on Irish models.   The model was extended by the Bushwackers and the cobbers in Melbourne, and hundreds of bands were to form in the 1970s and 1980s in imitation of this approach. Many have noted how the Bush Bands effectively limited the number of songs performed, and have criticised the  “invented traditions” which it fostered.(McKenry 1991, Meredith).

In general the performers of this movement had little close awareness of traditional performance. John Meredith considered that these modern groups had no awareness of the sound and repertoire of Australian traditional folk music and song, and it was clear that the style had no particular interest in referring to archaic performance practices and sounds. This might be linked to the Melbourne centre of this development, and in part was a consequence of what Wendy Lowenstein described as the comparative middle class nature of the Victorian folk organisations the Melbourne Bush Music Club, the Australian Folklore society, and the  VFMC compared with the Sydney Bush Music Club, and much less contact with source singers.  

In Sydney in the early 1970s Warren Fahey assembled the Larrikins, which aimed at a closer reference to traditional performance styles and a more committed approach to the body of collected song which had been assembled.  Warren Fahey had a much closer association first with traditional performers, secondly was familiar with the ambiance of the Sydney bush music club, as well as a sense of new public folk club performance, 

Much of their output of the Larrikins reflects Warren Fahey’s awareness of the old time styles of performance which he heard and recorded in singers in his period of field collection in the early 1970s. His singing delivery is  balanced between the projected theatricality of the revivalist and the understated, speech like delivery of the kitchen performer.  We can hear this in Warren Fahey’s version of the Limejuice Tub with that of his informant Mr Gilmer.  While Fahey’s version is much more projected and powerful than the performance of the octogenarian source singer there are still significant signs of the original version.

The recorded output and the public performance and broadcast performances of the Larrikins extended over a couple of decades, we see them oscillating taking on both the educative, didactic role of revivalists: basing themselves on the model of the folk festival workshop which had developed at the national festivals, and the entertainment band, tempered with a folk-traditionalist sensibility. Thus we see themed LPs like the Man of the Earth, Navvy on the Line, Billy of Tea,  as well as many ABC radio series and programs and public workshop presentations. Their arrangements were much less frenetic than those of the Bush Bands, and they were more likely to draw upon collected Australian dance music rather than Irish tunes to enliven their performances. They tended to a more relaxed vocal delivery, relatively free of obvious mannerisms and based on an enhanced vocalisation of a believable, if somewhat archaic rural speech register.

There was another model of traditional source performers which began in earnest in the 1980s. At this time a number of bands moved towards playing Australian traditional music, especially dance music as a  “named system music”, emphasising and perhaps creating its stylistic unity and integrity. Here we are using a term coined by Neil Rosenberg to describe the process by which such genres as Bluegrass, Klezmer and others were given shape by conscientious performer-curators. (Rosenberg 1993: 177-82) Rosenberg draws attention to the strategy of performance established by the American old-timey group, the New Lost City Ramblers in the early 1960s. These performers were interested in an imitation of tradition ensemble forms, with high musical virtuosity and a directness with a just a pinch of historical theatricality. But most important to this approach is a sense that the source music is a specific definable style, which deserves listening to on its own musical terms. 

This interest was supported by a new generation of collectors that had emerged in the 1980s, including Mark Rummery, Chris Sullivan and Mark and Maria Schuster. Operating largely in Northern and Central NSW and southern Queensland, they were able to collect and record a number of ageing performers who had been active local musicians usually in the period before the second world war, and who still retained playing facility and repertoire. They were particularly interested in propagating the old time dance music they collected within the public performance platforms of the folk movement, and it was shown to be quite distinct in sound and style from  the Irish-based dance music of the bush band.

In 1983-1984 Chris Sullivan and Mark Rummery  organised performances of the fiddle player Charlie Batchelor from Bingara, Northern NSW, with a group of dedicated revivalist  performers which were gathered around him.  These were presented at the Newcastle and the National Folk Festival. Sullivan and Rummery note that “the appearance of Charlie and his music caused a bit of a stir in the Australian folk revival, spawning a number of new field collectors and a renewed focus on Australian vernacular music(s)” Audiences familiar only with the bush band style were shown the “blend of the familiar and the exotic”  that often is the foundation for the appeal of archaic traditional music forms to modern audiences. (Sullivan and Rummery 2000) These activities lead the formation of a few Australian folk bands attempting new combinations of repertoire, context and theatre.

One example of these is the Harvest Moon Band lead by Alan Musgrave. Musgrave, a fiddle player and vocalist brought together his Harvest Moon Band with an accordion player, occasional piano player and fiddle player.  Inspired by the material he was collecting from traditional dance musicians and singers, particularly through the 1990s. In particular he developed the sort of band formation created by the New Lost City Ramblers and other old-timey bands, and this was reinforced by the experience of the fiddle player Greg O’Leary in the band, with long experience in playing in old-timey and roots based American fiddle styles. Like many of the singers he recorded he developed a repertoire which extended from classic oral vernacular ballad styles blended into Australian hillbilly songs, sometimes with instrumental accompaniment. Here the model of American old-timey groups was adopted, in that an imagined style back-formation of how a small group performance “might have sounded” had it brought together the musical elements which are emphasised in the current revival. Thus a Tex Morton song from the 1930s is not so much copied in style, but re-imagined through the prism of the current folk movement. 

As the classic stylistic models of vernacular song recede into the past, some singers are finding new ways of bringing them into public performance. 

Kate Burke and Ruth Hazleton in their recording Swopping Seasons  intercut some of the classic field recordings with their own versions of two songs; one from Simon McDonald, one from Sally Sloane.  Here the singers of this period emphasise both their historic distance from the classic recordings of the vernacular singers of the 1950s and 1960s, but also by the contrast, invite the listener to contemplate the continuities. This approach creates a self reflexive commentary of the relationship between performer and collector and traditional source. Karl Neuenfeldt has investigated the ways CDs have been incorporated into the modern folk performer’s attitudes to their music and documented how folk enthusiasts now reassess their residual commitment to direct performance and suspicion of technology. (Neuenfeldt 2000) Kate Burke’s and Ruth Hazleton's recording can be compared with other uses of traditional field recordings in the artier send of mainstream popular music. For example the American musician and sound artist  Moby, (Richard Melville Hall) in his acclaimed album Play (1999) used large samples from field recordings of Alan Lomax,  taken from his Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey From the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta. (1959)

This survey of the strategies of revitalisation of vernacular material within the public performance contexts provided by the Australian folk movement is by no means complete. Groups like the Wongawilli, or Chloe and Jason Roweth have maintained a powerful attachment to vernacular repertoire. Some performers, such as Jennifer Gall or Jenny Thomas  have produced reinterpretations of traditional song that moves away from the male paradigm of Australian Legend constructions, often in more complex and challenging  musical arrangements.  Barry McDonald  in a review of Gall’s recording notes how these songs,  taken from field recordings, are reworked using highly original and innovative arrangements and 

…suggest that the tale of the stock-camp or river bend must be taken together with the portrayal of the elemental forces of love, loss, and ambition, as contributing equally to the expression of a fundamental Australian feminineness (MacDonald 2006) 

Similarly Jenny Thomas brings strikingly original backings to songs with solo violin inspired by Southern Indian classical music, and rethinking of the tonal structures of  what are the most familiar melodies and utterly remaking them without changing the vocal line. Some Jazz oriented performers have used the bush band repertoire as a foundation for interpretation and improvisatory creativity. As is perhaps demonstrated by the new directions, even as the recordings of the oral traditions of early 20th century rural Australia become more culturally remote, they can still form the base for  new forms of reinterpretation inspired by their subject matter and by the striking personal voice that the process of collection and recording has been able to preserve.

 

REFERENCES

Bradley Kevin  and Ruth Hazleton “ John Meredith: The Performer”  Kevin Bradley (ed) John Meredith: A tribute , National Library of Australia, Canberra,  2006 

Cantwell Robert, When we were good. The Folk Revival Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, p 291

Cantwell, Robert, Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993.

Cohen, J., ‘Overview I’ in Wasn’t That a Time: Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Revival, ed R.D. Cohen, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1995, pp. 25–56

 “Hayes Gordon” nd at Austage (website)  http://www.ausstage.edu.au/

 Livingstone, T.E., ‘Music revivals: Towards a general theory’, Ethnomusicology, vol. 43, no. 1, 1999, pp. 66–85

Lloyd A.L., Folksong in England, Panther, London, 1969 Lloyd A.L., The Singing Englishman, Workers Music Association, London, 1945

McDonald Barry, “review of  Jenny Gall, Cantara” available at  http://folkstream.com/reviews/cantara.html

McKenry, K., 1997 Origins of the Australian Folk Revival  available at http://folkstream.com/reviews/revival/origin.html 

McKenry, K., Inserted notes into Battler’s Ballad CD FWD 001, Fanged Wombat Productions/National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1991

McKenry, K., Inserted notes into Battler’s Ballad CD FWD 001, Fanged Wombat Productions/National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1991

McKenzie, J.A., Challenging Faith: An Autobiography, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, South Fremantle, 1993

Meredith, J. and Campbell, B. ‘John Meredith speaks for himself’, Stringybark and Rawhide, vol. 6, no. 2, 1986, pp. 4–9

 Miller. Les, 1964 `Folk Corner', Music Maker, Jan 1964, p 33.

Neuenfeldt, Karl 2000   "The Transformative Effects of CDs on the Australian Folk Festival   "Transformations,  2000, available at http://www.cqu.edu.au/ transformations

Palmer, Vance and Margaret Sutherland, `Old Australian Bush Ballads', Allan and Co, Melbourne, 1950.

Roper, Hugh Trevor, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger(eds), The Invention of Tradition Cambridge , Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp **

Rosenberg, N. (ed), Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1993k. 

Russell, I. (ed), Singer, Song and Scholar, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1986

Seal, G. 2006. “A.L. Lloyd in Australia: Some Conclusions”. Folk Music Journal vol 9 no 1 pp 56-71

Shelton, Robert, “Something happened in America” in The Electric Muse: The Story of Folk in Rock”eds D. Laing and K. Dallas , Methuen, London, 1975

Smith, G "Irish meets Folk: The Genesis of the Bush Band" in Margaret Kartomi and Stephen Blum (eds), Music-Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions Currency Press, Brisbane and Gordon & Breach, USA, 1994. pp 186-203.

Smith, G., ‘A.L. Lloyd and Australian folk revival singing style’, Australian Folklore Society Journal, no. 34, Dec. 1996, pp. 747–52

Smith, G., ‘Making folk music’, Meanjin, vol. 44, no. 4, 1985, pp. 477–90

Stekert, Ellen  Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930-66, in Rosenberg 1993, 

Strickland, Katrina,  “An ideal life”  Australian, 23-24 August 1997, p 11.

Sullivan, Chris and Mark Rummery 2000 “Charlie Batchelor: An Australian Fiddler”  Musical Traditions available at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/charlie.htm

Trevor-Roper, H., ‘The invention of tradition: The Highland tradition of Scotland’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 198

Turnbull, Malcolm “Some fondly remembered boy-bands of the folk years: Ivy League Trios” available at http://warrenfahey.com/revival_boybands.htm. 2008 [First published Trad and Now , no 26, 2008]

 

Recordings

Burke,  Kate and Ruth Hazleton Swapping Seasons, Kate and Ruth, Dickson, KR003, 2002

Fahey, Warren, A Panorama Of Bush Songs Bodgie Productions ,13924 ,  

Gall, Jenny, Cantara, Elidor Records, 2006, JGIB06

Harvest Moon Band In Some old Shed xxxx

Larrikins Man of the Earth Larrikin, LRF001 1974

Larrikins Navvy on the Line Larrikin LRF009 1977

Larrikins Billy of Tea Larrikin LRF028 1978

Larrikins Limejuice & Vinegar Larrikin LRF159 1985 

Lloyd, AL Across the Western Plains  Wattle D1 1958

Martyn Wyndham-Read  Bushwhackers Bullockies and booze Score, POL 039, (1967)

Moby 2000 Play , V2, B00000J6AG 

Rambleers,  The Old Bark Hut, Wattle C8, 

 Shearston, Gary  Australian  Broadside CBS BP 233186 1965

Shearston, Gary  Bolters, Bushrangers and Duffers CBS BP 233288 1965

 Shearston, Gary  Folk Songs And Ballads Of Australia CBS BP 23309 1964

Shearston, Gary  Gary Shearston  Sings His SongsCBS BP 233320 1966

 Shearston, Gary  Songs Of Our Time CBS BP 233133 1964

 Shearston, Gary  The Springtime It Brings On The Shearing CBS BP 233226 1965 Larrikin LRF 022 (reissue) 1997(?)

Thomas,  Jenny M Farewell to Old England , Black Market Music , JT002, 2006

Wild Colonial Boys, Glenrowan to the Gulf, EMI SOEX 9631., 1968