Queer as folk: traditional British music is now telling LGBT stories
In February, on the final night of this year’s Celtic Connections festival, folk music travelled through time in two directions at once. In the main room of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was a variety evening with some of the genre’s biggest names. One floor up in the Strathclyde Suite, the Bogha-frois (or rainbow, pronounced Boa frosh) project was bringing together queer folk musicians from Scotland and beyond, with “Trans rights are human rights”marked out in black tape on a cajon drum, and a rainbowcoloured fiddle lighting up the back of the stage. The setup in both rooms was much the same – intriguing collaborations in which emerging acts shared the stage with more established ones. But while one room celebrated folk music’s recent history, the other pondered what it might yet be.
This month’s global Pride events acknowledge the richness of queer identity, and folk music is increasingly part of that: gay, lesbian, trans and other artists are using it to communicate their experiences and speak to a community whose stories are rare in the genre. As the Canadian folk songwriter Ariana Brophy says, “folk songs and clubs are overwhelmingly dominated by men, in intimidatingly masculine and heteronormative contexts.” Now, space is being carved outside the traditional club circuit.
“The tradition is storytelling, and the point is that stories change all the time,” says Pedro Cameron, the Scottish singer-songwriter and fiddle player who set up Bogha-frois in 2018. “You don’t have to just sing old songs. Even the way stories are told down generations is that they change and reflect what’s happening at the time.”
The Bogha-frois collective debuted with a gig at Celtic Connections in 2019, and were invited back this year. Both gigs showcased dozens of queer musicians, from established trad performers Anna Massie and Rachel Sermanni to emerging songwriters Scarlett Randle and Finn Anderson. “It felt like a bit of a gamble: who’s gonna come? Who’s it for? But it turns out there was this whole audience of people that were waiting for it,” Cameron says.
In London in 2018, Brophy set up FemFolk with a similar impetus: to support women, non-binary, trans and intersex musicians on the UK folk scene. She acknowledges that folk music has “amplified female voices throughout history,” but is addressing a lack of representation that has knockon effects across the scene. “If you look into playlist statistics on Spotify the number of women or non-binary artists being listened to is abysmal in comparison with the number of men,” she says, adding that such artists can end up stuck in a bind: “Their ability to find audiences is directly linked to the support they receive, which is directly linked to the number of opportunities available for them.”
It wouldn’t be right to say that queer stories have never made their way into folk. Tom Robinson released Glad to Be Gay in 1978, and Billy Bragg and Kirsty MacColl sang Sexuality in 1991, an elated hymn to sexual liberation. More recently, there’s Grace Petrie’s Black Tie, which rails against patriarchal structures and anti-trans rhetoric, and American indie-folk singer Erin Rae’s Bad Mind, which deals with how she wrestled with her own sexuality growing up in the conservative south.
But you have to know where to look for songs like these, something that Jane Edwardson, musical director for LGBT community choir Gay Abandon found out when preparing a queer-themed folk set. “This is quite a big change for Gay Abandon,” she says. “I wanted to bring in songs that they could relate to, that would be impactful for now.” One was the “very, very beautiful” Fragile Water by English singersongwriter Nancy Kerr, about a trans friend of hers; Kerr tells me that it takes its themes from stories that she grew up with about selkies, seal-like Scottish mythological creatures who can change into humans. “Beings struggling to thrive in the wrong skin, desiring to find their true element – I thought this ancient meme had some lovely applications for expressing feelings about gender and identity today.”
Progressive, liberal values are more often than not taken as read in folk music. However, it’s also a genre that Nick Griffin attempted to co-opt for the British National party only a decade ago, and while that move did provoke widespread condemnation from the scene, maybe more should have been done to question what common ground a prominent member of the far right discerned. Indeed, in Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor’s Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, the authors point out that the English folk-song collector Cecil Sharp, after whom the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s headquarters is named, was interested in “isolating British whiteness”.
So maybe folk’s self-examination is overdue. It can still look to the past, but there are so many new stories to be told, new songs to be sung, and in time, new traditions to be formed.
Folk songs and clubs are overwhelmingly dominated by men, in intimidatingly masculine and heteronormative contexts
Ariana Brophy