Queer Folk: Reflexive Heritage, Temporality and Queerness in Manchester’s Folk Music Culture
Cover picture provided by author
By Rishi Milward-Bose
Well, the king has called on his merry men all
His merry men thirty and three
Saying, "Bring me Willie o' Winsbury
For hanged he shall be."
But when he came the king before
He was clad all in the red silk
His hair it was like the strands of gold
His skin it was white as milk
"Well, it is nae wonder," says the king
"My daughter's heart you did win
For if I were a woman, as I am a man
My bedfellow you would have been."
Willie O’ Winsbury, an old folk song
For me and many others Manchester’s folk music culture represents a space of joy, community, and cultural warmth that is a rarity elsewhere. As an immigrant to England, the folk cultures of the British Isles represent no obvious link to my identity, heritage or past, as they may for some. Yet in a short period of time, I found an inexplicable yet very tangible sense of belonging to a community initially so alien to me. Others expressed similar sentiments in our conversations. Within Manchester’s folk community I encountered many queer young folk, unwaveringly proud of their countercultural identity having formed a space of subversion. Folk culture can be deeply weird; simply participating in a wintery wassail or singing a merry song about an old man’s erectile dysfunction can reveal as much. It is in the context of folk culture’s apparent strangeness that a paradox arises; that despite a prevalent anti-mainstreaming sentiment within the community, folk music is currently experiencing a popularity boom (Keegan-Phipps & Winter, 2015). It has gone through various revivals and re-emergences historically, yet some of my interlocutors expressed that there is something discernibly different about the way the current boom is being experienced.
There is definitely something going on, whether it’s full-blown folk revival, or just a cultural moment, that feels very real to us - Oliver
By using the micro-level as a heuristic tool for analysing broader issues, I attempt to assess the questions that arise from delving into Manchester’s folk music scene. Why do parts of Manchester’s folk music community draw in so many queer people? What is the relationship between queer temporalities and folk temporalities? How do members of Manchester’s folk community understand their relationship to heritage? How do the contents of folk songs reflect the wider ideologies and concerns of my interlocutors?
I use queerness broadly as a term for sexualities that do not correspond to hegemonic sexual norms, where many members of the community experience ontological ‘otherings’ (McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011). My arguments will draw on several key ideas. Firstly, that folk spaces constitute a democratic, anti-hierarchical structure which appeals to those experiencing marginality. Secondly, that my interlocutors envision folk music to be a battleground for the politics of heritage, one they can affect by uncovering subversive histories and by encouraging reflexive heritage (Craith and Kockel, 2007). Furthermore, historical reflexivity emphasises the natural synergy between folk temporalities and queerness as an ontological condition. Both subvert chrononormativity (Freedman, 2010) and aid in remedying the disjunctions some of my interlocutors struggle with, by expressing hauntological (Fisher, 2012) concerns about past and current societal wrongdoings.
For my research, I attended sessions (open folk ‘jams’) at Platt Field Market Gardens, the ‘folk train’ from Manchester to Glossop and several gigs with my interlocutors (and one at which I performed). I also conducted folk archival research to explore folk histories.
Photo taken by author
In the womb:
Her father, once my true friend
Now turns me from the door
Her mother owed me worthy
Now bids me love no more
Why should I not love my love?
Why shouldn't my love love me?
Why should I not speed after her
Since love to all is free?
Newcastle by Lankum
Clasped within the warm embrace of an octagonal church spire, the clutches of Manchester’s clammy, dark winters are briefly evaded. We are safe in the ambience of the room, transfixed by the ethereal, soothing soundscapes being performed to us. Performer Lili’s yearning voice resonates within the church walls, now lit up an animate, fleshy red, as she sings to us of the feeling of safety and comfort found amongst gentle bodies of water.
Keep me inside the hallway home
Lay down your head,
No thoughts in the way
Daughter of mine, lay down inside
Uterine metaphors are one of Lili’s ways of expressing longing for belonging and rootedness in a world where Capitalism thrives and social alienation looms, a sentiment that is not irregularly echoed within Manchester’s folk community. It seems that for many, the folk community at least somewhat fulfils this desire.
I don’t really get unhappy in January [anymore], since doing folk stuff. A lot of people need to go on holiday; I don’t mind it anymore, when I know I can go to a pub to be surrounded by warm people and play some music together. It's made for people, by people - Jacob
Jacob’s hint at the inherent democratic potential of folk music can contribute to our explanation of why queer folk are so drawn to it, and why it denotes belonging and comfort. All musicians were allowed, even encouraged, to play songs they wished to perform, and the rest would catch-on and support. Participants were free to tell stories and express their sentiments as they relate to songs, and audience participation was adored, contributing to the egalitarian intimacy of the space (Blake, 2018). My interlocutors prided themselves in creating an unintimidating social environment, in which participants were free to express their non-normative being.
If anything, Folksoc (UoM’s Folk and Ceilidh Society) is too anti-hierarchical (laughs). Sometimes we just end up clambering over one another to get our tunes played - Charlie
In this way, queer folk culture is one of many queer spaces which pride itself of both a political and embodied rejection of the hierarchies and power relations that structure queer lived experience (Brown, 2007; Jeppesen, 2010). ‘Heteronormativity is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life, reproducing itself systemically in nationality, the state, and the law... in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance, and other protected spaces of culture’ (Brown, 2007: 464). Folk’s queer appeal, therefore, partly derives from its social autonomy and democratic counter-culturalism, allowing people the freedom to subvert heteronormativity and express their ‘weirdness’.
Folk, since the 2nd revival, has been associated with alternative culture – we dress differently, and we gravitate towards it as ‘others’. Folk is very queer! I'm used to getting dressed up in my ridiculous gear, every summer, and going and waving my hankies around with my belts attached to my leg (in reference to the Morris folk dancing tradition). For me its liberating, I love being that silly - Ellie
The spaces I explored were sustained by the active practice of democracy and inclusivity and were therefore accessible to queer folk. However, my interlocutors recounted experiences of homophobia and general ‘turfing out’ of other spaces that did not prioritize those values. These spaces were perceived as reifying false notions of what constitutes the proper way of ‘doing folk’, by shunning those who strayed too far from its normative forms. My interlocutors envision themselves, therefore, as opponents to those who constrain folk’s radical, subversive forms and insist on ‘preserving tradition’, as I now explore.
Photo taken by UoM Folk and Ceilidh Society.
The story surrounding the story:
Mahsuri is born to a poor paddy farmer and his wife. Beautiful Mahsuri attracts many suitors, including the wealthy village Chieftain, Jaya, who is already married with children. Jaya’s wife, Mahura, vows revenge on Mahsuri, and spreads false rumours about her apparent adultery. Convinced, executioner takes a sacred sword to Mahsuri, and as she is killed, white blood gushes from her wounds, proving her innocence. Before she dies, Mahsuri curses the villagers with generations of bad luck for their wrongdoings, and her spell proves true.
Osman’s (2020) legend of Mahsuri is one that has been told and retold countless times through Malay generations. What was originally a morality-tale, infused with themes of wicked witchcraft and whore-hood, now has been adapted to include narratives of female agency and victimhood; of women misunderstood and erroneously sentenced to death, and creating affect through this wrongdoing. ‘What emerges in this contribution is not just the import of a story in itself but also the importance of a “story within a story” as well as the “stories surrounding a story”’ (Craith, 2007: 11). Folklore, and similarly folk music, are reflexive traditions. Tales and themes evolve dialectically as communities undergo inevitable shifts in ways of thinking and being. There are those who believe folk is a tradition that should be ‘preserved’ or performed in its purest form. Charlie discusses Klezmer, for example, a Jewish folk tradition.
Klezmer, specifically, is a lot more focussed on historical authenticity than the folk that we play… There’s much more of a focus on looking at old manuscripts and archive recordings. It’s a lot more academic - Charlie
My interlocutors also discussed experiencing similar sentiments in folk sessions in England, particularly where the ‘session crowd’ (1) was older. Yet the idea of folklore being bounded and fixed is one that my interlocutors generally ridiculed.
The idea that we should be preserving our Folk culture as a historical relic to me is laughable because the folk traditions of England are oral. You can’t fix down and codify an oral tradition - Ellie
Preserving’ [folk] is a non sequitur, there’s nothing to preserve. There’s no fixed point from where it starts to where it progresses to - Ainsley
My interlocutors exhibited such strong feelings about heritage reflexivity partly because they are engaged in projects to unearth radical and queer folk histories and further queer them, to make their own mark on the culture. ‘Queering’ folk histories involves a process of searching for folk songs that subvert heteronormativity, making them public and sometimes altering the lyrical content to make it more explicitly queer. Ellie, a lesbian woman with a huge repertoire of queer, lewd songs she loves to perform, sings an adaption of a song called “Maids when you’re young, never wed an old man”, about old men with erectile dysfunction:
They’ve got no phallorum, fi diddle I orum,
He’s got no phallorum, he’s lost his ding-dorum da
Maids when you’re gay, never wed an old man
The word ‘gay’ was altered from ‘young’. When sung by an old man in its original form, this song can feel bawdy and somewhat problematic. When Ellie sings it, however, along with several other lyrical adaptations, the song adopts a cheeky, liberatory potential; it has been reclaimed. At the gig in the church, the whole room cracked up at hearing a raunchy song from Rochdale (2) about a promiscuous old woman that Jacob had heard and re-constructed .
We roamed down spider alley, too tired to stand or sit
When I heard somebody shoutin’ ‘mrs Holroyd, up a bit!’
Then she gave a little yelp, as though she were in pain.
She’d landed in a wasps’ nest and I could not help but say:
Now, tell me Mrs. Holroyd, can you feel owt? If you can i’d like to know
For they say that theres a breeze on down in blackpool, and I think I’d like a blow.
The Rochdale song comes from politically Labour but morally conservative Yorkshire, so I find it very entertaining that this bawdy song came out. She falls in the wasp’s nest at the end – wasp is a lesbian in old slang, so she’s fallen into some bizarre alleyway where some mad lesbian orgy is going on in Yorkshire! - Jacob
The existence of sexually subversive stories and songs allows us to imagine the existence of queer folk in the past and how they may have lived. Tradition is often cast as the antithesis of ‘progression’ or modernization, yet this is a false dichotomy (Craith, 2007). Rather, tradition may be seen as the authoritative relationship constructed between the past and the present, denoting an active political process of creating historical meaning. Hence, dialectically imagining the lives of those who came before us is a potentially powerful expression of solidarity and reflexivity regarding our own ways of being.
By singing these songs, you are connected with everyone who has ever sung them before you and to the people who did work the land - Ainsley
Who ploughed the fields & scattered the seeds - Ellie
Time accordions when you sing. It pushes together everyone who has sung it. It ties into a belief that I know you (Ellie) share, in immortality. That no one ever really dies, no one is ever really forgotten because you live on in the people after you, who live on in the people after them. We are all products of people who have come before us - Ainsley
Photo taken by UoM Folk and Ceilidh Society.
Queer Magic:
The Witch’s family lie dead, slain by their seven deadly sins, and she reaches her transcendental form, as foretold by her kin. Walking through the woods, she becomes entangled into nature, entangled into cycles of decay and regeneration. Reverberating feminine vocals echo in the background, delayed, decaying into unseen temporalities. (Celia recounts to me the ending of ‘The Witch’, a film of the folk horror genre) Folk horror is about clashing temporalities. Not rational or linear time, [instead] it’s about regression, going backwards, [how] now is not so far from the then. Heteropatriarchal, ‘straight’ time is about moving forwards; life is structured around birth of the child. Folk horror looks at time in squiggly, dialectic lines.
Here, Celia is introducing the final piece of the puzzle as to why queer people are attracted to folk culture; that folk and queer temporalities are synchronous. Under hegemonic power structures, human bodies are organized to maximize productivity, subject to chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010) which conditions us to ‘Cut off the strongest instincts of youth, its fire, defiance, unselfishness and love, at the roots… [and] suppress or regress its desire to mature slowly’ (Nietzche, 1997: 115). ‘Chronobiopolitics’, the process of biological temporal regulation is used to assert ‘teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health... reproduction, childrearing, and death’ (ibid: 4). Queer folk experience ontological disjunctions deriving from chronobiopolitics, marked by ‘untimeliness’ and historically associated with failures to ‘harness their drives and to orient themselves properly with respect to the future’ (McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011: 7). Queer time is therefore the radical process of rethinking temporality through phenomenology, and by participating in folk temporalities, we are embodying a queer, youthful defiance to the structures that demand our compliance. There is an almost childish, magical quality to the collective joy we experience when we sing, relate, and reflect on the lives of those before us during folk sessions.
Magic is deeply political!... [it] doesn’t require you to have a fixed relationship to space and time. Capital and Fordism required a fixed relationship to the clock, whereas magic is ‘irrational’, it doesn’t tell us… that our bodies must be organized in space - Celia
Folk stories and songs are brimming with magic and surrealism, with little relationship to fixity and bodily demarcation. From bizarre postmodern reinterpretations of Cinderella (Morrissey, 2011), to Jacob’s hilarious social commentary in the form of Bonnie and the Goose that laid golden eggs, the folk stories I came across evidently did not limit themselves to reality or narrate time as continuous or impersonal. Instead, they represented time as lived, choice time, the way memory selects it to be (Dolby-Stahl and Newall, 1980). Celia believes that magic and surrealism are popular with queer people, as they reject heteronormative notions of ‘rationality’ and Capitalist normativity, and queer people recognize these qualities in folk culture.
Hauntological film and music (Fisher, 2012) are ones that are suffused with melancholy, of mourning caused by alienation and dispossession of one’s ways of being. Hauntological culture is defined by its refusal to yield to realism and postmodern finitude, haunted by ‘lost futures’ (ibid: 16) of things that could have been, and collective wrongdoings that now torment us. Folk horror and folk music are both saturated with hauntological themes, specifically those that relate to our wrongdoings to nature.
[The gruesome themes of] folk horror is about re-imbuing natural spaces with the bodily pain and violence that we have brought upon it - Celia
Celia explains how in both ‘The Witch’ and ‘Midsommar’ the final, transcendental form reached by the lead characters is one where plant and human permeate into one, formless structure. Both are set in locations where nature asserts its agency over human beings.
Spaces of nature and spaces of “wildness” are outside of Capital control, they are freer and more interconnected; less linked to Capitalist space and time, which is unfriendly to queer people.
Celia refers to ‘The Green Knight’ a gender ambiguous figure who appears in Arthurian stories. A monstrous, villainous figure, the Green Knight is also gender queer in that its structure is linked to plant regeneration and femininity, despite being a man. She explains how all these strange, surreal, pastoral beings are linked to queerness, beyond their mere androgyny.
Plant life exists of growing parts, parts that have not yet been formed and decaying parts. The temporality of them existing together is why they are related to queer time. They need decay to exist, rather than just moving forwards.
Folk horror therefore offers explicit warnings about the dangers of forgoing our relationship with natural environments, and how queerness can subvert these wrongdoings. Similar themes appear in folk music, but in different forms, offering hauntology instead through imagination and escapism.
Oh, the summertime is coming
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather
Will you go, lassie, go?
And we'll all go together
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather
Wild Mountain Thyme by the Corries
Manchester’s folk community is ‘self-replicating’, according to Charlie. The community has likely produced a space which will sustain its cultural and political tendencies, continuing to aid those who similarly struggle with ontological disjunctions from normative ways of existing. Folk music culture constitutes form of sociality that reflects queer phenomenology, where established temporalities are deconstructed in our performances of solidarity and imagination. For Nietzche, ‘haste... is waste, whether it is the rush to become employable as a [wo]man of science or the rush to become fruitful (and, presumably, multiply)’. By contrast the “cultivated [wo]man”—clearly refined, probably effete, no doubt gay— is operating on queer time, off the designated biopolitical schedule of reproductive heterosexuality’ (McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011: 5). By operating heritage as a reflexive practice, and by navigating folk music as a space of hauntological and ontological expression, the folk community becomes a potentially powerful source of grounding, comfort and organising for the queer community. Furthermore, the use of pastoral magic and storytelling can aid us in deconstructing risky, reified notions of rationalism and its relationship with fixity and order, lest ‘the [current] relationship between science and power kill us all’, as Celia warns in reference to the ecological destruction caused by the unrestricted dominion of industrialism over ‘nature’.
Notes
Referring to the demographic make-up of a folk session.
A town in Greater Manchester
Bibliography
Blake, D. (2018). ‘Everybody makes up Folksongs: Pete Seeger’s 1950s College Concerts and the Democratic Potential of Folk Music’, Journal of the Society for American Music. Cambridge, 12(4).
Brown, G. (2007). ‘Mutinous Eruptions: Autonomous Spaces of Radical Queer Activism’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 39(11), 2685-2698.
Craith, M.N., Kockel, U. (2007). ‘Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions’. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Dolby-Stahl, S., Newall, V.J. (1984). ‘Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century: Proceedings of the Centenary Conference of the Folklore Society’. New Jersey: Totowa.
Fisher, M. (2012). ‘What Is Hauntology?’. Film Quarterly, 66(1), pp. 16–24.
Freeman, E. (2010). ‘Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories’. Duke University Press.
Jeppesen, S. (2010). ‘Queer Anarchist Autonomous Zones and Publics: Direct action Vomiting against Homonormative Consumerism’. Sexualities, 13(4), pp. 463-478.
Keegan-Phipps, S., Winter, T. (2015). ‘The Mainstreaming of English Folk’. Performing Englishness. Identity and Politics in a Contemporary Folk Resurgence. Manchester University Press, pp. 41-78.
Kockel, U. (2007). ‘Reflexive Traditions and Heritage Production’. Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
McCallum, E. L., Tuhkanen, M. (2011). ‘Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Mediations’. Queer Times, Queer Becomings, The State University of New York Press, pp. 1-21.
Nietzsche, F. (1997). ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Cambridge University Press, pp. 57-124.
Osman, S. A. (2020). ‘Folktale Adaptation and Female Agency: Reconfigurations of the Mahsuri Legend in Selected Contemporary Malaysian Young Adult Fiction’. Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age, pp. 215-243.
Articles:
Commission for Racial Equality. (2005). ‘Citizenship and Belonging: What Is Britishness?’. Retrieved January 2024 from:
http://www.ethnos.co.uk/pdfs/9_what_is_britishness_CRE.pdf
Socialist Party. (2022). ‘How Mass Working-Class Action Established the “Right to Roam”’. Retrieved January 2024 from: