SPOTLIGHT ON ... BENNY GRAHAM
By Karen Duncombe
“All we can do is smile sweetly and keep singing.”
"Why folk music?" It wasn’t a conscious choice, says Benny; in fact, it “snuck up” on him.
Benny sadly lost his parents in his teenage years and the youth club in Stanley was something of a life-saver for him at that time.
ome of the older lads were also going to folk clubs and dragged him along.
He soon discovered that, if you sang a song, you got a pint or two – so he sang a song!
Benny and some of his youth club friends put a band together and, started performing in a pub on Shield Row which, coincidentally was a road written about by Tommy Armstrong, one of Benny’s heroes.
At that time, Benny was one of the youngest, if not THE youngest persons travelling around and doing gigs as he was only just 15. That then expanded – there were more folk clubs at that time than you knew what to do with!
He got into collaborations with some other musicians and started Pegleg Ferret which became a touring band, working all over the UK and into France.
It built up “all by itself” because the scene was expanding and Benny met and worked with “more performers than you could write on a sheet of toilet roll”. “Everybody was in the same boat,” he says. “We stayed in each other’s houses because there was no money for hotels, even though we got paid”. Or you drove home - Benny recalls lots of conversations with other musicians in roadside stations on motorways in the middle of the night!
Benny’s influences include Johnny Handle, Tommy Gilfellon, Alistair Anderson and other members of the High Level Ranters; being from the North East, there was no way not to be influenced by them. In for an honourable mention also is the sing-around club at Birtley with the Elliott family who had a wealth of songs about the area. Benny also like to go to Shotley Bridge club which was also into the songs of the North East.
The North East, says Benny, is one of the richest areas of folk music. From the old traditions of the fiddles and the pipes, the storytelling and the industrial influences from the late 18th century which still go on today. Jez Lowe, he says, is a good example of taking this style forward.
The availability of print was key in Tyneside – Newcastle had printing presses and so it was an extension of their existence to print anthologies of songs – you could hand them round and people would share the songs and take the music onwards. Nowadays we have recordings to preserve the music.
“It always amazes me,” says Benny, “that so many people will go to see the Pitmen Poets for example”, a collaboration between Benny, Jez Lowe, Bob Fox and Billy Mitchell. Their whole point is singing with a social conscience.
Benny believes that this largely changed in the 1980s. Folk music before then, he says, was fairly political but then it became more sanitised and “nicey nicey”.
Benny feels that this is to the detriment to what has gone before.
“Sometimes you need to poke the fire with a stick to make the sparks fly and the early performers weren’t afraid to do that”. Tommy Armstrong is a hero of Benny’s. He performed 2 distinct functions – he had a music-hall folk event on Friday nights in a pub called the Top House in Stanley where he held sway in the upstairs room. He sang mostly witty and funny songs, but he also would pen a song in the week if something had happened in the news and perform that. He wasn’t afraid to say what was needed. Benny finds Tommy’s work impressive, especially when you consider that he had little schooling and was a habitual truant. W.H.
Armstrong put Tommy’s songs into print in the early 1930s, complete with spelling errors.
Benny always remembers there being musicians who played the banjo, the guitar or the mouth organ in their own homes and they brought the music with them – outside in the street with the neighbours, playing a tune and singing a song. The mining communities were particularly close as your life could be in your mate’s hands so you worked together and played together. In the pubs there was always singing but nobody was “the star”.
Benny has seen over time a shift towards performance – young people seem to want to be a performer rather than go to folk clubs which tend to be attended by older people. Part of the problem has been that some of the clubs could be a bit “exclusive” and some new or younger people have felt that they don’t “fit in”. Benny feels that this is not a problem around here but has heard of this in some other places. But younger people do seem to want to have a repertoire and perform – trying to grab an audience, rather than people gravitating to them. So now, instead of having a room where people all sing, you have miniature concerts.
Benny gets into trouble for getting people to join in the chorus but he feels that is why people wrote songs with a chorus in the first place! So, people could enjoy joining in and everybody has a voice. Pete Elliott used to run the club in Birtley with 150-200 people in the room and they would go round in a circle and take it in turns to sing. If he didn’t get round to you, too bad. Nobody complained and everybody got to sing the choruses anyway.
Benny is optimistic about the future of folk music. The format might change but the music will survive. Martin Carthy did a programme about folk rock, which some people felt was destroying the tradition of folk music. He says the only way to destroy the songs is to stop singing – it matters not where they survive as long as they do.
At one time, everyone thought folk clubs would only be in pubs – there is still plenty of singing in pubs (or there was, pre-lockdown), but also in small theatres and arts centres. The music is also going back outside now, due to social distancing – maybe this means it’s going back to its roots.
What is next post-Covid for Benny? Hopefully another Pitmen Poets tour (yay!) and some other gigs in Scotland with a couple of Ceilidhs – of course, they’re all dependent on what happens with lockdown and when restrictions are finally eased.
Does Benny have one message he’d like to pass on to the readers of Folk Roundabout? Keep reading, he says; and pass the songs on; with that in mind, Benny himself has contributed a song (see below)
The Sailors Strike. Magazines like Folk Roundabout are important – they open doors and, as long as folk magazines exist, voices will still be heard. The only way to kill folk music is to stop singing.
So, keep singing!!!
