20 Years On - Experiences of Ethnic Diversity in the Trad Scene
by Joanie Bones
Find out more about Joanie Bones here.
In the North London house I grew up in during the ‘80s and ‘90s, aubergines, pomegranates & saffron were common kitchen ingredients. My mum was Persian, my dad of Ashkenazi Jewish background, the son of a doctor from Vienna who walked across Europe to escape the Nazis and the grandson of Jews who had fled their native village when the Russians started to burn the them out of their houses in what is now Ukraine. In this urban multicultured world, I was surrounded by people 'like me'.
In 1999 I arrived in Edinburgh to study and was intrigued to notice that when people asked me where I was from, I would always say ‘London,’ never ‘England’ like many other students. And so I discovered that ‘English’ or British were not categories I felt affinity to. Born London, bred London. A city kid through and through.
In that first term a friend introduced me to the singing of English folk singer June Tabor. I’d never heard unaccompanied English folk song before and was immediately captured. I’d written songs and sung all my life, but now I had a compass point, a direction. Although I had no biological ties to this island I’d spent all my life on, something deep inside me resonated with this music, and knew it to be home.
“And I find myself longing for conversations around these issues, a conversation which feels so much more possible now, given the leaps in social awareness around differences, intersectionality, power and privilege that have arisen over the decades.”
That was twenty years ago. In the intervening years since I first fell in love with folk song I’ve done many things, and singing was always in my heart and often on my lips, but I’d given up the dream of pursuing a career long ago. I’d told myself various reasons for this, but it wasn’t till I heard about a north London Jewish boy making it big in the folk world that I understood the real reason why.
‘You mean it’s possible?’ I found myself declaring.
And thus I learned that, until Sam Lee’s rise to fame, I had believed that someone from outside ‘the tradition’, someone from an urban centre, someone not even ethnically Britain, could not be accepted in the trad scene.
Someone like me.
When I was visiting folk clubs in the 90s and early 2000s, I don’t recall once seeing someone who looked like me, or, perhaps more importantly, someone who I thought ‘felt’ like me, whatever that meant. Someone who mirrored me. And so I walked away.
I realise now it wasn’t about my looks, but my internal landscape, an internalised sense, of perhaps inner awareness, of difference. Of a lack of shared cultural heritage. Of knowing myself to be somehow different, even if perhaps no-one else saw me that way. I’ll never know - was it my own sense of difference that created a sense of there being no place for me? I know for a fact I never experienced a moment’s prejudice from anyone. Why wasn’t that enough?
Twenty years on and with the maturity that comes with age and the changes in the English folk scene over this time, I’ve recently found the confidence to return to my singing as a profession. And I find myself longing for conversations around these issues, a conversation which feels so much more possible now, given the leaps in social awareness around differences, intersectionality, power and privilege that have arisen over the decades.
Black folk singer Yola says in an interview around race and folk music (note that’s folk, not trad, music), ‘unanswered questions make people feel like they don’t belong’. As a non-ethnically British trad singer, there are some things I need to talk about.
I need to know from the white ethnically Scottish trad musicians if ‘someone like me’ is indeed welcome in the Scottish trad scene. And I don’t really mind what the answer is, I just want an honest and open conversation around some of these ‘difficult’ questions:
Who is ‘allowed’ to sing Scottish folk songs?
As a ‘music of the people’, folk music could be said to be intrinsically aligned with the disadvantaged. This is perhaps one of the reasons I found my urban and English background to be so problematic in my youth: although I had some characteristics that were ‘disadvantaged’ relative to the white Scot folkies I was so keen to join, namely my ethnicity, I also had traits that situated me in a place of privilege compared to them.
“Black folk singer Yola says in an interview around race and folk music (note that’s folk, not trad, music), ‘unanswered questions make people feel like they don’t belong’. As a non-ethnically British trad singer, there are some things I need to talk about.”
So - Is it OK for me to sing Scottish songs? Is it OK for me to sing my own songs in the folk idiom in Scotland? Or English folk songs in Scotland? Is it OK for me to sing English folk songs?
If no, is there anything someone like me can do to make it OK, or is it simply a no handed down by birthright? And if so, what is someone like me ‘allowed’ to sing? I don’t have a homeland other than this island with which I feel such a deep connection.
When discussing cultural appropriation, American/Persian/Armenian singer Lydia Violet talks about the central importance of ‘right relation’ – that it’s the intention and connection that counts when engaging with a culture that isn’t one’s own. So is the simple fact that I love trad song more than any other genre and feel it keenly in my heart ‘enough’ to legitimise my part in the trad scene? If so, to what extent? Could ‘someone like me’ ever become a tradition bearer?
Who has the legitimacy to answer these questions? What is ‘authenticity’?
And continuing from these questions, I need to talk about place. It has been said that folk music is ‘essentially the experience of a group seeking to articulate an indigenous relationship with place’ which is based on a belief of ‘high levels of legitimacy and authenticity (based on historical rootedness), relative to the relationships of other groups’ (Keegan-Phipps, 2017).
This is important – nothing in me wants to deny or belittle the importance of rootedness, culture and history.
But today’s world is so much more complex than this, so how does something so aligned to land take account of issues like the ever-increasing global surge in migration (Britain has just seen its highest ever numbers of migrants trying to enter the UK via the channel, and there are already 50 million people in the world displaced as a result of the climate catastrophe, a number which exceeds that of those fleeing political persecution, and will only rise massively). What does this mean for our future in the times of ‘the great upheaval’ where circumstance may force us to overcome ‘the idea that we belong to a particular land and that it belongs to us’ (Vince, 2022)?
What then for folk? Is it back to ‘right relations’? What does this mean? As an incomer to the Highlands, I enjoyed this idea of what one can do towards consciously ‘putting down roots’ in one’s new home with respect: show keen attention to the local land and culture, and desire to ‘become a good ancestor’, ie make a positive contribution (Warburton Brown, 2021).
Recently I had a distressing conversation with someone from Creative Scotland who could not get their head around the fact I was not trying to highlight the lack of support for different folk musics in Scotland, but the lack of support for non-Scots to play Scottish folk music, a totally different issue. Yes it’s great that Eastern European and Asian bands are playing at Celtic Connections, but how many Asian kids are playing the clarsach or the fiddle? I asked the Conservatoire for their stats: in the last 6 years, 100% of the intake into the BMus (Traditional Music) course has been ethnically white.
“I asked the Conservatoire for their stats: in the last 6 years, 100% of the intake into the BMus (Traditional Music) course has been ethnically white.”
It seems that England is quite ahead of Scotland in contemplating these issues: last year the English Folk Song and Dance Society organised a conference around diversity in folk and there is a whole team at Sheffield University researching how accessible folk music is for people of different backgrounds. But I’m not aware of any such thing in Scotland to date.
So what now?
Like I said, for me the most important thing is having these discussions.
Then we can work out where, if anywhere, to go with it, and what, if anything, to do.
Joanie Bones and her band Halfwise in the early 2000s, with bandmates Jed Picksley, Armeet Panesar and Robin Mason.
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The BIT Collective’s November monthly catch-up will be hosted by Joanie and focus on experiences of ethnic diversity in Scotland’s traditional music scene.
If you are interested in joining, please visit our events page here: Events — The BIT Collective, or respond to the Facebook event here: https://fb.me/e/2mbdwazLI.
SOURCES
Keegan-Phipps, S. (2017). ‘Identifying the English: essentialism and multiculturalism in contemporary English folk music’, Ethnomusicology Forum 2017, Vol 26 no 1, 3-25 2017
Nade, L. Does folk music in the UK have a problem with diversity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs60URwpuK8
Vince, G (2022) ‘The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval’ 18 August 2022, The Guardian.
Warburton Brown, C. (2021). ‘Re-rooting Industrial Humans’, Permaculture Works, Roots Issue, Spring 2021.
With thanks to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland for sharing their entry diversity statistics.
