With the summer now truly acumin in, our thoughts are turning to our Summer Sessions event at Stowmarket’s John Peel Centre on June 5th. Headlining this year is Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, whose mastery of the Anglo concertina and melodeon – not to mention his commanding voice – put him at the forefront of the next generation keeping the traditional music of England very much alive. We managed to find time in his touring schedule for a quick virtual coffee to find out a little more about how and why his love of traditional music began…

Let’s start at the beginning, Cohen. What’s your first memory or experience of traditional music?

That’s a really good question. Probably the first encounter I remember was when I was about six at primary school, and a pair of musicians – a fiddle player and a guitarist – came in to play some folk tunes. I’d never heard folk tunes before. I didn’t really know what they were but I do remember them talking about their music and their instruments.

Do you remember any of the music?

Well, I don’t remember who the musicians were, which is of course a shame because I’d love to write them a note and say thank you so much. But the one song I remember them definitely singing was Cockles and Mussels – and I remember that because that’s got a ghost verse at the end. And that really captured me, because it’s a bit scary and I was really into Scooby Doo at the time…

Actually, a couple of weeks ago I was invited to a primary school – not my own, unfortunately! – to share my folk tunes and my instruments and tell them a bit about what I do. That was a nice full circle moment.

What do you think made folk music stick for you? 

Yeah, I mean, I didn’t go from that first exposure to folk music at six straight to folk clubs – there were lots of chance encounters along the way, all of which started getting me interested in folk music.

Take Brian Peters, for example. So in addition to being a great squeeze box player, one of his other claims to fame is that he’s done quite a bit of music library work – and some of his soundtrack library recordings had got picked up on various TV shows, including SpongeBob SquarePants, which was another thing I was obsessed with when I was about seven. And, as strange as that might sound, hearing those little folk tunes crop up in the background of shows like that helped introduce the melodies to the ear without me even making the immediate connection that I was hearing a folk tune, or a jig, or a hornpipe. Likewise, John Kirkpatrick played the concertina on a Phone4U advert so when I did become more into traditional music, I was already familiar with the sounds of these instruments and some of these tunes – as I suppose we all are, really.

How would you define traditional music? Or, to put another way: what is it – and why does it matter?

I think the definition that I like the best is the one Steve Roud offers in Folk Song in England. He says a folk song is a song that is sung by a folk singer, and a folk singer is someone that sings folk songs. And I just think that’s so beautifully put. It’s the fact that the song or the tune or whatever it is, has been absorbed by a community and has lost its sense of ownership and its sense of origin, and in doing so the community has shaped it and evolved it and changed it and filtered it. It might have originally been a composed piece. It might have had a known composer, but that origin becomes less relevant. It’s all about that journey. 

Are there any particular songs where you find this to be particularly true?

One example that maybe springs to mind is on my first solo album [Outway Songster]. There’s a song on there called the Country Carrier, which has a known writer. It was written by a man called Harry Clifton, who was a really, really prolific songwriter of the 19th century. What’s interesting is that although it was hugely popular with folk singers of the 19th and 20th centuries, they would all probably have been unconscious of the fact that they were singing a Music Hall song. The ways in which it was performed – particularly into the 20th century – were quite divorced from how it must have started off its life. Melodically of course, you can still see a thread that links it back to Harry Clifton’s original tune, but it’s quite distinct – and some of the verses have changed as well. There’s a nice natural track of evolution.

So the musical evolution is one thing – how about the influence of place? Does this change the song or tradition in any way?

Sure. I mean, that can be one of the really exciting things about working with traditional repertories: exploring repertoires that have a local connection. 

When I started getting interested in folk music, that was one of the things that really drew me in: on the one hand you had all the music being produced in America, singing about places that I’d never heard of – and then with folk music you had tunes that were named after places in Birmingham that I’d been to, roads I’d walked down, areas that I knew. 

And there was that real sense of immediacy and familiarity – and that was one of the things that really hooked me when I started really getting into traditional song was that sense of place and that sense of regionality. 

That’s a very special thing – and being a region where such a huge amount of material was collected, we see this too…

Absolutely. One of the things that I found interesting about the East Anglian repertoire is that – and this might be slightly romanticised – when Vaughan Williams was doing his collecting in East Anglia, he had this theory that, because it’s closer to the Eastern Sea and to Scandinavia, that there’s a link between the Nordic repertoire and some of the melodies that he was finding in the East, particularly around King’s Lynn. He reckoned that there was this sort of Scandinavian quality to a lot of the melodies that they were singing there – The Captain’s Apprentice is one example that he particularly drew out. That tune has such an incredible, otherworldly melody, which he likened to Scandinavian folk tunes. 

Final question Cohen: as we’re speaking close to May Day I wondered if you could share a seasonal song that you like?

One of my favourite May song recordings is one that the band Magpie Lane did on their first album, which was called the Oxford Ramble. Their last track is just called May Day Carol, and it’s got the most charming tune to it. Of course there are so many May tunes out there, but that’s probably my favourite.

Cohen will be headlining our Summer Sessions concert at the John Peel Centre, Stowmarket on Friday 5 June and tickets are available now. For more information about Cohen’s music and other upcoming concerts and tours, visit his website.