Who are the people – and what the folk is folk? Edinburgh Folk Gathering's director asks what the term "folk" actually means

After three years working as the Folk Film Gathering’s director and programmer, I continue to be intrigued by the way in which, when I talk about folk, everyone seems to think they know what that means, yet everyone seems to think it means something different.

One of the common images the word conjures is of rural communities, often with links to the past. Frequently that sense of connection with the past is through cultural forms which are partially pre-industrial, or sometimes – in the case of certain folk customs in Scotland – even pre-Christian. “Folk horror” films (of which there are a growing number) often root their drama in the clash between contemporary life and something older; the sense of the past casting an uncanny, unsettling shadow over the present.

Think of The Wicker Man (1973), in which mainlander Sergeant Howie is literally consumed by the pagan, pre-Christian customs which he discovers on the small Scottish island of Summerisle.

(From a folk cinema perspective, The Wicker Man is, of course, problematic, given its almost colonial disregard for the interior experience and cultural reality of the people it is depicting.)

The word also ‘folk’ frequently retains strong associations with socialist political movements driven by working-class experience and culture. Here “folk” can imply a sense of democracy, inclusiveness and access: a sense that anyone can take part. Folk music usually involves instruments that are affordable to most or, as in the case of the human voice, don’t cost anything at all.

And yet, the more we try to make a list of the usual associations we bring to the word “folk”, the more elusive its meaning becomes.

The great Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams made a similar observation about the use of the term “the masses”. “To other people, we also are masses,” he wrote. “Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

The concept of “folk” has divergent degrees of resonance for different communities and national cultures. In Germany, the word “volk” retains a darker pall than the come-all-ye sense of democracy it has in Scotland, through associations with the Third Reich’s pursuit of an ethnically-pure nationalism. I’m told the word “folk” is little used in African culture. Elsewhere still, the American writer James Clifford associates the word “folk” with Greenwich Village, New York, and a Utopian (and perhaps naïve) moment when, buoyed by the Western world’s international folk revival, musicians such as Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie expressed a sense of political solidarity claiming to transcend cultural boundaries.

In the Village during the mid-20th century, wrote Clifford, one could encounter “songs around the world ... an Irish fiddle tune, a Virginia reel, and African chant, a Negro spiritual, an Israeli hora, a Japanese song about the Hiroshima bomb. Every song and tradition was accessible, noble, progressive”.

In Scotland, the word “folk” retains an enormous degree of resonance and power. The Scottish folk revival, as driven by activists such as the poet and songwriter Hamish Henderson in the 1950s, was a movement which would spill outwards from Scotland into the rest of the world to impact such iconic 20th century figures as Nelson Mandela (Henderson’s song Rivonia, to which he danced with Mandela in 1993, travelled across the world to the extent it was sung by South African fisherman off Robben Island in the hope it would be carried to prisoners beyond the walls) and Bob Dylan (who based The Times They Are A Changing on aspects of Henderson’s The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell To Sicily) and American folklorist Alan Lomax, who made his first song-collecting tour of Scotland in 1951.

The first People’s Festival Ceilidh took place in Edinburgh’s Oddfellows Hall in 1951, where Scottish travellers and workers sang “for the first time on any stage, as opposed to the reeling road, or the booths of Porter Fair” as Henderson later recounted.

Many great Scottish singers, artists and personalities came to prominence during the folk revival: singer Jeannie Robertson, the Stewarts of Blair and Jimmy MacBeath, to name but a few.

In more contemporary terms, “folk” makes me think of Scotland’s diverse, fertile traditional arts sector: of Celtic Connections, TradFest, the Feis, the Storytelling Festival and so forth. And, you may disagree with me here, but “folk” also makes me think of the deep, inclusive positivity of such recent moments in Scottish politics as the 2014 Yes campaign, and folk trio Lau’s pre-European referendum ceilidh-IN, which saw hundreds gathered outside Holyrood to perform an enormous strip the willow in support of Remain. The more recent Women’s March was another inclusive, grass-roots driven moment of collectivity and common experience.

Considering the confusing jumble of historical and cultural connotations “folk” has had over the years, it’s clear that the word’s meaning depends on who is using it, and for what purpose.

No-one owns “folkness”. “It’s ordinary folk ... that are paying the financial price”, said Nigel Farage, while Donald Trump constantly claims to represent “the people” (“ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for the people”).

But who are “the people”? We should be wary of appeals to populist politics which implicitly fence off a native-born, indigenous, white “us” from an incoming, unwelcome “them”.

So should we shelve the word “folk” as being simply too ambiguous? If the word is as much at home in the vocabulary of Nigel Farage as it is in anti-imperial thinkers like Ethiopian-born American cinema professor Teshome Gabriel, is the ambivalent power of “folk” not best left alone?

While I’d contend we must always continue to ask ourselves, as cultural theorist Mark Selber Phillips once did, “how wide is the we”, I remain convinced the word “folk” still has an intense value, both in Scotland and further afield, in terms of its rallying power for progressive political causes. At the Folk Film Gathering we’re most interested in the ideas arising from the life and work of Scottish activist, poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson. Henderson was the first to translate the writings of Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci into English, and was inspired by Gramsci’s observation that folk culture “must not be conceived as an oddity, a strange, ridiculous or, at best, a picturesque thing; rather it might be conceived as something very serious and to be taken seriously”. Only in this way, Gramsci believed, “might the separation between modern culture and popular culture or folklore ... disappear”.

In these terms, Henderson’s attempts to put folk culture in the spotlight, both within Scotland and upon the world stage, could be seen as an attempt to break down the separation between “us” and “them”, which, in 1950, would have prevented a voice as rich and significant as Scottish traveller Jeannie Robertson’s from being heard at the Edinburgh Festival. Furthermore, Henderson’s notion of folk culture is built upon a deeply resonant notion of collectivity; a sense of common experience from which certain forms of culture (such as the Scottish oral tradition) were wrought.

Henderson used to talk about the “Niagara” he could hear in certain poems or songs, by which I believe he meant the deafening presence of people; the many voices and pairs of hands that a song, story or idea had passed through before reaching its most recent audience. That sense of collectivity prized by Henderson retains a powerful resonance within Scotland. It’s there in the vernacular poetry of Tom Leonard and the novels of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. (Welsh is like Robert Burns, or Italo Calvino, in the way that he is able to channel the genius of a common culture into art that is simultaneously somehow “of the people” and very much his own).

It’s there in the deft orality of Scottish rappers Loki and Solareye. It can also be detected in the strong community voice in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song, whereby Chris Guthrie’s individual narrative is continually rooted within the experience of the community. Grassic Gibbon continually informs us what Long Rob of the Mill or Mistress Strachan said about this or that, as if the story itself arose from the combined oral imaginations of the Mearns community.

The poet George Gunn once wrote: “Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre, by declaring ‘Reader, I married him’, is making a mono-cultural assumption as to the individual relationship of the consumer to the work of art. If she were Scottish, she would be more than likely to exclaim: ‘Listen everybody, I married him. See you at the dance!’”

At the Folk Film Gathering, we are not only interested in channelling Henderson and Gramsci’s notions of a collective culture, and in breaking down existing notions of “us and them”, but also in challenging some of the common perceptions of what folk is. Rather than folk being rural, and rooted completely in the past, we’ve screened a lot of films that conjure a sense of folkness in contemporary urban settings; such as the choral, community perspectives in the work of Tyneside’s Amber Collective, Ken Loach’s Up The Junction, or Charles Burnett’s Killer Of Sheep.

We’ve also challenged the way in which images of “the folk” so often revolve around men’s experience, through a strand of programming dedicated to women’s experience and the work of female directors. The film Dream On, directed by the Amber Collective’s Ellin Hare, is a brilliant celebration of the lives of a number of women on a pub darts team in North Shields, while elsewhere Amber explore women’s experience in the wake of the 1984 mining strike in The Scar.

We’ve also looked at the way that a sense of “folkness” or community isn’t always bounded to a particular place or time, in films such as Tony Gatlif’s masterful Latcho Drom. Part folk musical, part quixotic road movie, it charts the migration of Romany communities from Egypt and Rajasthan to sometimes uneasy new homes across Europe.

Perhaps most importantly in 2017, the Folk Film Gathering also tries to puncture the notion that a sense of folkness has to be culturally or ethnically homogenous; the sense that “the people” all necessarily need to be racially and culturally the same. John Sayles’s Matewan is a powerful portrait of different communities – white American, black American and Italian immigrant– coming together to fight the cruel labour practices of the Stone Mountain Coal Company. The film doesn’t shy away from how difficult a process that is, and how riddled with tension, difficulty and compromise such hard-won solidarities often are, but its picture of togetherness, of an inclusive folk universality, feels deeply resonant for our times.

The first ever Folk Film Gathering opened two years ago with Timothy Neat’s unsung masterpiece of Scottish cinema, Play Me Something. Featuring a mesmerising John Berger as a storyteller who walks in, as if by magic, off the sands at Barra airport, Play Me Something celebrates the ways in which a story, a song, a festival or a film can bring a group of very different people together for a moment of time, as a community.

As Berger tells his story, the passengers at Barra airport (all from different places, going in different directions, and yet together for a moment) lean in, loosen up, share their own stories and songs, let down their hair, and listen ...

Jamie Chambers is director and programmer of The Folk Film Gathering, which continues in Edinburgh until Saturday, May 13. For programme details visit www.folkfilmgathering.com

Latcho Drom screens at the Filmhouse this Thursday (May 11)