page_title: Popular music of Birmingham
section_title: Folk revival
hierarchical_section_title: Popular music of Birmingham / Folk revival
caption_attribution_description: Fairport Convention in AVRO's TopPop (Dutch television show) in 1972
context_page_description: Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s the city's music scene had emerged as one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; a "seething cauldron of musical activity", with over 500 bands constantly exchanging members and performing regularly across a well-developed network of venues and promoters. By 1963 the city's music was also already becoming recognised for what would become its defining characteristic: the refusal of its musicians to conform to any single style or genre. Birmingham's tradition of combining a highly collaborative culture with an open acceptance of individualism and experimentation dates back as far back as the 18th century, and musically this has expressed itself in the wide variety of music produced within the city, often by closely related groups of musicians, from the "rampant eclecticism" of the Brum beat era, to the city's "infamously fragmented" post-punk scene, to the "astonishing range" of distinctive and radical electronic music produced in the city from the 1980s to the early 21st century.
context_section_description: Research by folk music scholars recorded a rich tradition of folk-songs from the West Midlands as late as the 1960s, including songs being performed by local traditional singers such as Cecilia Costello and George Dunn entirely within an oral tradition, and songs documented by other folk music collectors over the previous 70 years. These included songs of social protest and songs of everyday life referring to places in and around the city, and reflected the area's underlying native rural traditions, its industrial culture and the influence of successive waves of incomers bringing and assimilating musical traditions from elsewhere.
  Ian Campbell, who moved to Birmingham from Aberdeen as a teenager, was one of the most important figures of the British folk revival during the early 1960s. During the 1950s he fell under the influence of the Marxist Birmingham writer George Thomson and in 1956 founded the Ian Campbell Folk Group, initially as a skiffle group, but from 1958 performing politically charged folk songs including Fenian and Jacobite songs, and songs of miners, industrial workers and farmworkers. The group's 1962 record Ceilidh at the Crown was the first live folk club recording ever to be released, and in 1965 they were the first group outside the United States to record a Bob Dylan song, when their cover of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" reached the UK top 50. Campbell also ran the Jug o' Punch Folk Song Club, originally at The Crown in Station Street, but later at the Digbeth Civic Hall on Thursday nights. This was arguably the most important folk club in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, and certainly the largest, attracting an audience that regularly reached 500 people a week. Other notable Birmingham folk clubs during the mid-1960s included the Eagle Folk Club at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street and the Skillet Pot Club above the Old Contemptibles on Livery Street.
  Two Birmingham musicians from the Ian Campbell Folk Group would become key exponents in the development of folk rock over the next decade through their involvement with the band Fairport Convention, which had formed in London in 1967. The fiddler Dave Swarbrick joined the band in 1969, his knowledge of traditional music becoming the biggest single influence on the following album Liege & Lief, generally considered the most important album both of Fairport Convention as a band and of the folk rock genre as a whole. Swarbrick's former colleague from the Ian Campbell Folk Group Dave Pegg joined as the bass player later in 1969, and by 1972 the two Birmingham musicians were the band's only remaining members, holding the group together over the following years of rapid personnel change.
  Singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading was the first British woman to have significant commercial success in the field of folk music and the first Black British woman to enjoy international success in any musical genre. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, she brought up from the age of 7 in the Brookfields area of Handsworth. In 1972 she released her debut album Whatever's for Us and recorded the first of her eight Peel Sessions, but her commercial breakthrough in Britain was 1976's Joan Armatrading, which reached the top 20 and which included top 10 hit "Love and Affection".
  Of all of the folk musicians from the Birmingham area, the one with the greatest long-term influence would be Nick Drake, who was brought up from 1952 in the commuter village of Tanworth-in-Arden – five miles outside the city's boundaries in Warwickshire – the son of the chairman and managing director of the Wolseley Engineering company in Birmingham's Adderley Park. Drake completed his education at a tutorial college in Birmingham's Five Ways, from where he won a scholarship to study English literature at Cambridge. Having had a musical childhood, with a mother who wrote songs and performed them on the piano, at Cambridge Drake began himself to write and perform his own compositions. In 1968 he was discovered by Joe Boyd, who signed a contract with him as his manager, agent, publisher and pro
caption: Dave Swarbrick and Dave Pegg performing with Fairport Convention in 1972
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