Traditional folk for punks

How to use trad folk for fun, spiritual fulfillment, and for profit. Oh and a new Johnny Kowalski song.

Greetings all. Kind of a long one today so if you just want to hear the new tune feel free to scroll down to the end. Don’t forget to click those buttons!

The musical genre of “folk” can mean many different things and include a wide variety of sounds. Today I’m going to focus on the world of traditional songs and melodies, and how they fit into the modern musical landscape.

So why should a young musician starting out today dive into the complicated and often fusty world of folk traditionals? Why not play songs people have actually heard or even (gulp) write your own music?

Well I believe if a melody or song has been around for 100s of years and people are still performing it, there’s a magic there. If that piece of music has survived all that time, being passed down from generation to generation, being missplayed, rewritten, stolen, stolen back again, medleyed and remixed, there’s a power there that’s very hard to find elsewhere. And any musician that performs the tune with a bit of passion and conviction can tap into that power.

How can I say this with such certainty? Well about 15 years ago I formed a band called Johnny Kowalski and the Sexy Weirdos . Our live set came to be based around a mixture of mine / our own original compositions and our own versions (or bastardisations) of Balkan traditionals. Our source for these traditionals was a slim music book that looked a bit like the kind you learn recorder from in primary school. Me and Johnjo (the original JKSW fiddle player) had been jamming tunes from the book in the couple of years prior to the band starting, at open mics and on street corners.

After couple of years into the band it became clear something unusual and unexpected was going on. We were starting to see rooms full of people lose it to our music, and a big chunk of that was due to the traditionals. It should be noted that we weren’t playing these pieces to “specialist” audiences either, the vast majority of people dancing to this stuff had little to no idea where the traditionals had come from.

The phenomenon became even stranger when we began regularly gigging in Czechia in the mid 2010s. We didn’t know how our music was going to be taken when we went there. But to our surprise, it seemed like our audiences out there took the Sexy Weirdos to be a new, exciting type of music, rather than cheap appropriation or gimmickry.

The author onstage at the Dark Horse, Moseley, some time in late 2021. Photo by Stalingrad O Neil.

Somehow, in our little corner of the music scene, we gained a reputation for “authenticity”, even though none of the band had any special training or tuition whatsoever in this kind of music. What we were armed with was good old fashioned punk energy, a sharp eye for arrangements and dynamics, and that one slim song book.

And as for that word, well, I think you can judge with some certainty the “authenticity” of say, a 1961 Fender Stratocaster guitar or a vintage bottle of Chardonnay. But that word gets very slippery when you try and apply it to music. It’s patently obvious that mine isn’t what would be usually considered at “authentic” approach to playing folk, in fact in some ways it’s the opposite. We take the bits we want, mold it together with bits we take from other places, and hopefully make something new.

I’m not at war with people who perform folk music in a more “traditional” way either. Like most people, my tastes go beyond the petty arguments of armchair musicologists, and how a piece of music makes me feel is the most important thing at the end of the day. But I do have a few pointers for those budding musicians looking to dive into the deep murky world of traditional melody and song.

1. Know a bit about where the tune comes from.

   At least have a bit to say about the music you are ripping off. Where did it come from, what was the context it was originally performed in, that kind of thing. This is just basic etiquette, and easily done nowadays by anyone who has the internet at their fingertips. Have a flick through the wide array of information about there before you take your project to the world. Who knows, maybe you’ll send some intrepid muso down a wonderful rabbit hole they were never expecting.

2. Perform with passion.

   This is a good rule for all music but folk music responds particularly well to passionate performance styles. It’s what makes the difference between trite background music and a piece that makes someone cry or dance like a lunatic. It’s what invokes that very genuine magic I was talking about earlier. Performing with passion is a difficult skill to teach but you trick a room full of players into doing it if you set up the vibes and boundaries of your jam session correctly.

3. Make it your own.

   That is, if you’re playing on a stage or your project exists for more than just the entertainment of the musicians playing it, find a way to make it distinct. This could be as simple as slightly different instrumentation, or playing a song that’s traditionally played slowly very fast, or vice versa. The upper limit of how complicated that process gets is up to you, the artist. But I have two reasons for making this point. One is that we live in such a media saturated world that we really don’t need that 600th medicore version of Dirty Old Town on Youtube. But more importantly, this is how folk music has always worked. Classical music is a form that requires the musician to play exactly what’s on the page, folk demands you to screw around, and make that piece your own!

   So add notes, take them away, change keys, tinker around to your heart’s content. It’s what the tradition demands of you, keeps the spirits happy and makes you a link in a golden chain stretching into eternity.

   ****

   So without further ado, I present my new tune, “Roll The Old Sailor” by Johnny Kowalski, available on streaming platforms 03.03.25, premiering for the first time, anywhere in the world.

   Don’t forget to find it when it comes out. What we have here is a medley of two shanties, “Roll The Old Chariot” and what has been described as possibly the most famous song in the world, “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?”. Anyone who has seen one of my acoustic sets over the last couple of years will probably recognise this version. Violins are by the Mary Poppins of folk punk, Katherine McWilliam. Everything else (bass, guitars, recording, production) was all done by me, in my own home, in the spot where I type these very words to you right now.

   Two local acts deserve shout outs in connection with this tune. One is The Mistakings whose world beating version of “Roll The Old Chariot” was my introduction to the tune sometime in the early 2010s. The way the high speed version of “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor” smashes in at the end is directly lifted from a shanties medley by Brummie stalwarts Ire-ish. They won’t me nicking their arrangement ideas cos they’ve done it to me, so it’s a compliment, really.

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