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Going back to their roots

Paul Sartin and Benji Kirkpatrick feel that folk music brings with it skill and craftsmanship sorely missing in much of the popular music today

PHOTO: K. GOPINATHAN

UNPLUGGING AUDIENCES Paul Sartin and Benji Kirkpatrick find that the growing popularity of folk music is a direct reaction to the growing music industry

For most English musicians, the one aim in life is to create a completely new sound, unheard of ever before. While Paul Sartin and Benji Kirkpatrick do pride themselves on bringing their own characteristic style to their music, however, their primary focus as professional folk musicians is on returning the music to where it came from. The duo was in the city recently as part of the British Library's Buzz series of events.

Oral tradition

"Our music comes from the past, and from mostly unknown composers. It was mostly passed on by word of mouth, although they have more recently begun appearing in books too. The subjects range from love stories to historical ballads to nonsense songs to music for ceremonial dances," says Sartin, attempting to crunch hundreds of years of musical history into a few seconds worth of explanation.

Although cross-cultural influences have exerted some changes over the music, he adds, the English folk music is easily differentiated from other forms such as Irish and American folk by the way it is ornamented and its rhythms inflected. "In English folk, the delivery is less ornamented than the Irish, and the music has more of a four-square style, while American folk music is very influenced by swing."

Much like folk arts elsewhere around the world, the English folk music tradition also came under threat around the turn of the 20th Century, but was preserved thanks to the first of several revival efforts undertaken. "Between 1890 and 1910, the oral tradition had died because of changes in population, growing literacy and changes in musical taste. At that time, a lot of scholars set out to collect the music from the working population, usually the elderly, and recorded it on phonographs. Another revival took place in the 1930s, and in the '60s, a major link between folk music and politics emerged. Now there's our generation of popular musicians, who love the music for what it is, and are looking to get it back to where it was musically," explains Sartin.

Both he and Kirkpatrick themselves were introduced to folk music early in their lives, thanks to parents who were folk and classical musicians. Kirkpatrick, the son of popular folk performers John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris, was brought up in the tradition and took to the guitar and then the mandolin at a very early age. He finally settled on his trademark instrument the bouzouki, an instrument of Greek origin, because "the mandolin had a lovely pretty sound, but I wanted something that made more noise."

Sartin picked up the love of traditional music from his mother who was trained in the classical forms, and when he went to university found a vibrant folk atmosphere in the pubs at Oxford. "So instead of studying, I would go down to the pubs and learn to play folk music." It was in another pub music session that Kirkpatrick and Sartin met too, in Shropshire County on the Welsh border.

As both speak of their music, one finds that many of the instruments they mention such as the sousaphone and the helicon sound exotic and previously unheard of. Even as one puts that down to being from outside the culture, Sartin points out that for even most English audiences, it is this curiosity that works. "The concertina is the only musical instrument that originated from England. But most people don't know about it, and for them it is an exotic instrument." Their band Bellowhead does occasionally play on this curiosity, often bringing in many brass instruments as much for their novelty value as for what they add to the music.

Big fear

Besides the curiosity, says Sartin, the growing interest in folk music is also a direct reaction to the music industry that one would imagine constantly threatens to swallow up indigenous folk forms. "People are so used to hearing music on DVD and on the tele that to see it being performed live and in the flesh is astonishing. They're surprised that it's us creating all the sounds, and that nothing is electronic." He adds that folk music also brings with it skill and craftsmanship that is sorely missing in much of popular music today.

Issues of quality, craftsmanship and industry controls, however, all disappear the moment the duo strike up a chord. And as they play, it's easy to see what keeps the music alive: a sprightly groove that one can't resist dancing to, but more importantly, a genuine warmth that is bound to solidify community spirit with every note played.

R.M.

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