THE “FOLK” OVER THE YEARS
by VFSS Life Member Jon Bartlett, January 2025
In June 1968, shortly after arriving in Vancouver from London as a new immigrant, I found Kits beach. There I heard the sound of an autoharp, familiar to me through the folk clubs I had known in Brighton. The player was Jim Willoughby, and the song he was singing was “The Lusty Young Smith.” I quickly joined in with the chorus, and we talked about folk songs and sang some more. He said he had some friends who were also interested in folk song, and would I like to visit them with him? Indeed. We walked a couple of blocks to a big house on Stephens Street. It was a co-op house, with about ten people, mostly new graduates of the local high school. One of the people I met there, who visited often, was Paddy Graber. He was an Irish singer, and he took me to the Vancouver Folk Song Circle, which held meetings every first and third Wednesdays each month. This was the beginning of a sixty-year membership. Though at first glance “the Folk” (as it was commonly called) appeared quite a staid group in comparison with the more rollicking ways of English clubs, mostly in rooms in pubs, it was an arena which was much more attentive to what music was being made, and thus more daunting.
I learnt a bit about the early days of this unique club. It had been founded by two couples and a bachelor – Phil and Hilda Thomas, Al and Jeannie Cox, and Rolf Inglesrud. Jeannie later wrote about those early days:
In the years previous to 1959, there was a small group of us who met at each other’s homes as much as possible to enjoy both singing and listening to folk songs. Our numbers increased very rapidly. We then decided that if so many people were interested in folk music, we could perhaps have a meeting place where many more could participate. We approached the Alma YMCA and asked permission to use their downstairs hall on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. This arrangement was agreed to, and we held our first Folk Circle meeting on the first Wednesday of July, 1959.
It was this first informal organizing group who hosted well-known visiting sings – Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Josh White and Jeanie Redpath, to name a few.
The Folk Song Circle was aptly named, and for many years its meetings followed the same pattern. An MC (frequently Jeannie herself) was chosen, and those who would sing (by self-selection – no audition was ever held) gave their names to the host and were able to sing up to three songs. This meant that, at most, twelve singers could present their songs. There’d be a tea and coffee break halfway through the 8-11 meeting. The year I joined, a membership was established at $5 a year; otherwise a donation was expected.
The Circle, as it then was, differed from the clubs I had known in the UK. Firstly, there was no drink, apart from coffee. This was a bit of a shock, and I recall in the early days singing with a hand in front of me holding a non-existent glass of beer. Secondly, there were precious few British traditional songs or industrial songs. The repertoire was mostly modern commercial “folk” – songs from Peter, Paul and Mary, from Burl Ives, and such like, and some Canadian songs –Ian and Sylvia and Wade Hemsworth were both popular. In 1968, we heard Irish songs from Paddy, Quebecois songs from David Browne, and Scots songs from Murray and Kirstie Shoolbraid. Phil and Hilda Thomas, two of the Circle’s founders, introduced people to BC songs, which Phil had been collecting for some fifteen years. My contribution was songs I had learnt at the clubs I had frequented in Brighton – one or two Child ballads, some shanties and a few rural songs from Sussex. It was nerve-wracking at first, because this audience listened.
I had not been able to lead songs in the UK as much as I would have wished, because the people I learned the songs from were also at the club. It was a matter of folk etiquette, then as now, not to sing other people’s songs, at least not in their presence. I had thus already acquired a healthy repertoire and was now able to sing and lead songs that were new to those at the Circle. I stayed away from Scots songs, because Murray and Kirstie were Circle members, and similarly avoided Irish songs to avoid stepping on Paddy’s toes.
Murray and Kirstie, Fred Muelchen, Jean Strachan, David Browne and Margaret Strang had a loose group called the Ad Hoc Singers, which used to perform in local hospitals and often opened the Folk Song Circle meetings. They asked me to join them, and I did. Perhaps it was my association with them which encouraged them to elect me as the new President that fall. The task was infinitely smaller than the present President’s. I had merely to organize the buying of the necessities of the half-time tea break and line up Hosts for upcoming meetings.
In September 1969 I quit work and went back to school at Vancouver City College for a 1st year university course, and when it ended in the spring of 1970, 1 spent the summer in Kitimat earning money for my next academic year. I was overjoyed to be invited to move, in that September, into Murray and Kirstie’s house, when Fred Muelchen was moving out. The move did wonders for my own repertoire, too. Murray and Kirstie had an extensive library of folk song and I spent many hours at their house (as also at Phil Thomas’ ) going through dozens of books and finding new songs, songs I had heard, and variants of songs I knew.
In 1970, I went to Australia, and sang in a few clubs in Sydney. It was there I learned a whole bunch of shearing and droving songs. Curiously, the Australian singers I met had no interest in these songs, and themselves sang modern US songs. It was left to me and the few Brits I met to share these wonderful songs. On my return in 1972, I connected again with Murray Shoolbraid, and discovered that in the previous year and in my absence the Folk Circle committee had suggested to Murray that he edit a folk magazine for the membership. Nothing had come of this proposal, but it excited me, and I nudged Murray into taking up the task. I would be his editorial assistant or general dog’s body.
We quickly agreed on the shape and size of this little magazine. It was to be a monthly, 8 ½” by 7”, with two pages on each Gestetner “stencil”. Murray had a typewriter with a wide bed, long enough to take this foolscap or legal-size page. He also had a Gestetner, “the first piece of office equipment,” says Wikipedia, “that allowed production of numerous copies of documents quickly and inexpensively.” Once your copy was written, you’d load a stencil sideways into the typewriter, and type away, using some fixit chemical in a bottle to cover up mistakes. Once the stencil was cut, you’d mount it on the machine and crank away, one turn for each copy. The first issues were 16 pages long, so with four pages on each sheet, that meant four sheets of legal-size paper.
The next job was putting them in the right order and folding them, making the job permanent by leaving them overnight in a big iron press. Presto! The first issue of Come All Ye emerged July 1972, and went free to the membership (who, at this stage numbered some seventy or so).
Murray, being perhaps the widest read of us folkies, was the backstop, supplying articles on Scots songs and his own expert area of Slavic song. Phil submitted articles too, drawn from his song collecting in BC. Others in the folk were urged to write, and each issue carried songs with tunes, either standalones or songs connected to articles.
In 1974 Murray passed the editorship to me and Peter Barkham, a Brit who was my singing partner at the time. We discovered that a local community centre had an offset press, which allowed us to change the size of the magazine to a standardized 8 ½” x 11” format. Press day then consisted of making a master for the press, printing, gathering, stapling and binding. By this time membership had doubled and Come All Ye was going out to non-members, including other clubs, colleges and universities – we ended up with about thirty universities, and the Library of Congress to boot.
That was the easy part – the hard part was writing knowledgeable articles to fill sixteen letter-sized pages each month. We roped in everyone we knew to do this. Two I remember well: one was a graduating essay from a chap at UBC called “The Gems in the Ring” about Child ballads, the other a first-rate piece by Alan Grierson (who later became my singing partner) on London rhyming slang. Our knowledge of folk song was thus “forced” like the rhubarb my dad kept under a big pot in our garden in Sussex. After Peter left, I continued to edit the magazine for five more years.
1975 saw the establishment of one of our longest-running projects – a Summer Retreat, a weekend of song. Our first attempt at this used a ski cabin belonging to the UBC Outdoor Club, and we tried in turn Kwomais, but we eventually settled on camp Alexandra in White Rock. It was a closed space, ideal for the dozens of kids the Folk was raising in those days. I have on the wall a picture of the 1989 Retreat, featuring at least twenty-eight youngsters, sitting cross-legged in the front row. 2025 will see our 50th Retreat!
The magazine was one of the first outreach projects the Folk undertook. The next was the Seattle Festival, properly called the Northwest Folklife Festival. It was a project originally of the City of Seattle, the Seattle Folklore Society, and the National Folk Festival Association, an attempt to find a locus to share the thousands of songs and tunes collected by the growing number of folk music enthusiasts. Its first Festival was in 1972, but we in Vancouver didn’t hear of it until 1974. In 1975, after renting a big car, several of us went down to perform. It was a very small festival at that time, compared to its massive size now. The US friends we made on that trip opened our eyes to other music on the west coast, and we began to think about ways in which we might share some of it.
That year we began to dream of our own festival, and made connection with the Victoria Folk Music Society. We had located a site in the Victorian suburbs and had a great deal of agreement about the tone and style of the festival. We in Vancouver knew enough about grants including that we would need to be a registered non-profit society to access them, and so, with Hilda Thomas leading the way, we established the Vancouver Folk Song Society. We borrowed its “objects” from the Canadian Folk Music Society because they seemed to focus our concerns about performance, promotion and academia:
The objects of the Society are:
- a) to encourage the study, appreciation, and enjoyment of all aspects of the folk music of Canada and other countries,
- b) to promote publication and performance of Canadian folk music,
- c) to stimulate intercultural understanding through a common interest in folk music.
“Performance” directed our thoughts to a possible festival, but also to concerts. I don’t remember how it came about, but we put on (or helped John Ullman, the agent) a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for the Boys of the Lough, an Irish/Scottish group. Al Grierson was the MC, and his introduction featured one of the funniest, but blackest, Northern Irish jokes. In November 1975, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill, the Wobbly songmaker, we put on a concert at a union hall, which featured Earl Robinson, the man who made the tune for “I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”, made popular by Joan Baez, Utah Phillips, a modern Wobbly singer and songwriter, local VFSS singers and a couple of Vancouver poets, who specialized in songs of work. That same year, we put on Ruthie Gorton in concert and in 1977, did the same for Frankie Armstrong, both concerts being held at the “Cultch” (the Vancouver East Cultural Centre). Rika Ruebsaat and I were interviewed on “Touch the Earth” a national CBC folk program hosted by Sylvia Tyson.
1975 was also the year we began a monthly newsletter, called the Three-Quarter Times. Its first editor was Elizabeth Houser, and it ran until at least 1998. It was originally a four-pager, legal size and most often included a song, an editorial, lists of new ad renewed members, an events calendar, and various bits and bobs. In 1975 the Folk Song Circle was forced to move from the Alma Y, which was scheduled to be demolished. We moved to Bayview School, to the Kitsilano Lutheran Church both in 1979), to Kits House (1979-80) and the False Creek Community Centre (1980-1985) before finally settling in at the ANZA Club (1985-1992) and, in 1993, our present (and best!) location, the Friends Meeting House.
25 March 1977 saw the opening bash for the Folk’s Green Cove Coffee House. Here was an opportunity to hear voices from afar, and to provide a space for local singers to share their songs. It was organized by a committee led by Michael Pratt, and ran every Friday night at Britannia Community Centre. For those in the know, when the Coffee house closed at 11, we headed for the clubhouse of the Scribes’ rugby teams, and most of us didn’t leave until we had sung our lungs out, or 2 am arrived, whichever came last.
Come All Ye ran until December 1977. Those of us involved in the magazine were keen to move to the next level. We wanted a magazine that was properly printed, with a readership across the country. We also hoped that we would find, as we made contact across the country, other strong centres of folk music similar to Vancouver’s. We knew that Quebec had a vibrant culture of la musique folklorique, but the problems they faced were not the problems folk music had in the rest of the country. We intended to reach out, through regional contacts, to discover those strengths and weaknesses. We hoped to find clubs and societies sharing many of the ideals of what we had here in Vancouver – the interest in Canadian songs, the enthusiasm to encourage new singers.
The new magazine, called Canada Folk Bulletin, would be a 36-pager, bi-monthly, with songs, articles, interviews, and calendars of folk events across the country. We imagined, that, with advertisements, we could sell yearly subscriptions.
The Bulletin did well, editorially and musically. It was immensely hard work for the editorial staff of six, and after three years and seventeen issues, it proved to be too strong a task. It folded with a double issue at the end of 1980.
That year was an annus horribilis for the Society. The Green Cove closed its doors, and the weekly radio show, Folk Circle, which had begun on Co-op Radio in the spring of 1975, went off the air. Though we still had the bi-weekly Folk Song Circle, the Three Quarter Times newsletter, and the summer retreat, it felt as if a lot of the air had gone out of the Society. And it had.
But it began to come back two years later. That year, an annual Walk for Peace had begun in Vancouver. Started by an umbrella organization called End the Arms Race, the walk, which started on the south side of Burrard Bridge and ended, after a trip through downtown, with a rally on Sunset Beach, set the tone for the next few years. Interest shifted to a new form of politics, in which environmentalism met with peace activism and women’s liberation. Groups such as Rhythm and Greens were formed, songbooks were written and a new raft of song and music created.
The early 1990’s was a time of growth for the Society. We helped other organizations find their feet, most notably the Georgia Strait Guitar Workshop (now Georgia Strait Music Camp), which began in June 1992. We also supported the new Vancouver Country Dance Association, which still organizes the local contra dances, with live fiddle music. In September 1992 new members of the Society encouraged us to start the Sapperton Folk Song Circle, and to organize the Spring Shindig, an evening of potluck, singing and dancing began in March 1993. Another Retreat was organized in 1993 – this time in mid-winter, at Lake Sasamat, complete with hot tub.
The dream of a Folklife type festival was revived the following year, and in summer 1994, the first CityFest was held, at the Vancouver Community College on Broadway. We told people that the music and dance it presented, with a very few exceptions, was the music you could hear “through the walls”, as it were. Vancouver was an enormous tapestry of different musical cultures, and we wanted a festival that would reflect all of them. If you lived, as we said, “west of Mission, north of the border, south of the mountains, and east of the sea” you could, if you chose, share your musical culture at this festival. We had no auditions, and saw our artistic tasks as making the right space available for whatever people brought, from the concert hall at the college to small classrooms – whatever was appropriate.
We started, with others, a Society to organize this, reached out to other communities through the region for support, and inveigled all the supplies needed for six or seven stages. Hard work by the organizing team and strong support from grassroots community groups was enough for several successful sfestival, but CityFest folded in xxx when it had to change location.
There had been since the earliest days a event held on 5th Wednesdays, which occurred three or four times a year. These were occasions for an “educational”, where a Society member would present a topic (such as “Cowboy Songs” or “Child Ballads”). These 5th Wednesdays were popular and well-attended.
In 1995, the VFSS started hosting “2nd Wednesdays” as well, which would feature, in the months between October and May, in a house concert setting, a singer or group of singers, who would present something more than the three songs they could sing at the Circle.
At about this time, a handful of singers in the Society, intrigued with ballads, in particular the collation made by Francis James Child (the Child Ballads) started a Ballad Group, which met monthly to sing and talk about the songs.
That fall, a partner to the Spring Shindig emerged, the Fall Fooferah, or Fall Fandango. Held at the Aberthau House in Vancouver, this featured, like the Shindig, dance, potlucks, and songs.
The Folk always had an interest in shanties, and a group called the VFSS Shanty Crew came about in the 1990’s. The group sang at sea festivals, at the Wooden Boat Festivals and at the Steveston cannery. In 2002 came an opportunity to actually sing on a Tall Ship. The Tall Ships Festival was held in Steveston and the VFSS Shanty Crew were front and centre. We had been given a large enough sum of money from CityFest (where we had also performed) to create a CD. Recording “Blow the Man Down: Tall Ships in the Fraser” was a chance for me to do some historical research into the days of sail on the west coast. Two obstacles stood in the way to prevent BC from having as large a part of its history determined by sailing ships. One was the lateness of settlement – the days of sail were nearly over by the 1890’s, and steam ships were becoming more common. The other was the lack of convenient ports for ships of sail. The Strait of Juan de Fuca, though some 110 kms wide, was, because of its winds and tides, a dangerous entry to the mainland coast. West coast rivers, too, had deceptive entries. It was hard to find the actual mouths of the Columbia, the Fraser and the Skeena, especially on a dirty night. And so New Westminster and Vancouver only became active ports when steam- or diesel-driven ships could override winds and tides. The sixteen-page booklet I made to go with the CD contained many photos of ships in the harbours, information about shanties, and about how they were used.
Rika and I moved from New Westminster to Princeton, some 300 km east of Vancouver, in the summer of 2007. We established a Traditional Music Festival there, but that’s another story. Our connection with Vancouver stayed strong, but another hand will have to take up the task of completing our history of the “Folk.”
Having traced that history from 1959, I would like to add some remarks about what keeps the Folk together, a piece I wrote in January 1988 when first I took over editorship of the Three-Quarter Times. I call it:
How Things Happen Around Here -or- What Makes The Folk Different?
We are the oldest-established folk music club in the country. Why?
Not because BC is the hottest of hotbeds of folk music, nor because our provincial government is more generous with grant money than any other (stop that laughing) .
I think it’s because of our organization.
Always there has been at the centre of the Society two, three or more people for whom the Society is the top priority. These people have formed the core of the organization, sometimes doing all the work themselves, sometimes getting a lot of help from others. But always a strong and stable core. They’ve been the ones who have decided on the direction of the Society.
There have been several “generations” of these core people since the foundation of the Folk in 1959, and each has brought to the Folk its own view of folk music, and its own view of what’s important. And that’s the way it should be, though these ideas might not be shared by those from preceding generations. Those who do the work set the tone.
But in the process, they’ve oftentimes burned themselves out. It’s an exhausting job swimming upstream, as anyone who has attempted to run counter to mainstream culture can attest. Fortunately for us all, the torch has always been passed – and those who burned out come back after a year or so’s rest.
The size of the Society has reflected the rise and fall of each generation, too. We’ve had as few as thirty, as many as two hundred members at any one time. The size of the Society and the interests of each generation have also influenced what we’ve done, as outlined above.
But bigger isn’t necessarily better. It seems that the more you do, the quicker the burn-out comes – but, at the same time, the more you do, the more people are attracted to help you do it, and the more you 1earn. Many of us have learnt all we know through “the Folk.”
Throughout all this is organization. We’ve run the gamut in organizational styles, from quasi-anarchic methods so loose as to test the definition of the word “organization,” to byzantine structures of committees and sub-committees, nestled inside each other like Russian dolls, which would do credit to a multinational holding company based in Albania. But whatever the organizational style, we’ve a1ways made sure that the work got done. As I said earlier, each generation has had its own style, both in terms of structure and in terms of the kinds of music either encouraged or frowned upon. Different genres have come in and out of favour over the years.
Though many members have come and just as quickly left because the tone wasn’t their tone, as many have stayed on over the years to make the club theirs. That sense of ownership and responsibility has stood us in good stead for the last 66 years, and bids fair to see us through another.
Jon Bartlett, January 2025