Frank Harte
A source of traditional
songs among folk-revival singers, Harte
has collected thousands of songs and has published a book and several albums of
Dublin street songs. Steve Winick, All-Music Guide
Tim Hart
A young duo from St.
Albans who founded Steeleye
Span with Ashley
Hutchings and Gay
and Terry
Woods, most of their influence on the music scene has been with that band,
but their solo albums are also classics. Steve Winick, All-Music Guide
Martin Hayes
Ireland-born and
Seattle-based Martin Hayes is a master of the slow, lyrical Clare style of
fiddling. The son of P.J. Hayes, fiddler and leader of the 50-year-old Tulla
Ceili Band, Hayes has continued to expand on his father's legacy.
Hayes comes from one of
Ireland's most important musical families. In addition to his father's
influence, Hayes inherited his musical skills from a grandmother who played
concertina, and an uncle (by marriage), Paddy Canny, who was a national fiddle
champion. A six-time winner of the All-Ireland fiddle championship, Hayes
received his first fiddle as a Christmas gift at the age of seven; much of his
youth was spent playing with his father's band. After college, Hayes emigrated
to Chicago where he played with a rock band, Midnight Court.
Shortly after moving to
Seattle, Hayes recorded his first solo album of traditional Irish music, The
Shores of Lough Graney, released on cassette by Ice Nine. His subsequent albums
-- Martin Hayes and Under the Moon -- have been released by Green Linnet. Under
the Moon, which was recorded in County Clare, featured instrumental
contributions by P.J. Hayes, guitarist Steve Cooney and Hayes' American band,
the Randal Boys. In June 1997, Hayes recorded an album, The Lonesome Touch, with
Irish accordion player Dennis Cahill. Live in Seattle followed two years later.
~ Craig Harris, All-Music Guide
The High Level Ranters
A Northumbrian group,
they formed in the late '60s, featuring Alistair
Anderson, Tom
Gilfellon, Johnny
Handle, and Colin
Ross. The High Level Ranters were very regionally oriented, with lovely
songs in broad Geordie dialect and tunes identified with the region. Steve
Winick, All-Music Guide
The House Band
A pan-Celtic approach is
taken by the British group House
Band; while their sound is rooted in traditional music, their repertoire
includes tunes from Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Bulgaria and even Africa. In
addition to numerous folk songs and instrumentals, the House Band has
interpreted songs by contemporary songwriters ranging from Archie
Fisher and Richard
Thompson to Elvis
Costello and jazz pianist Abdullah
Ibrahim (Dollar Brand).
The House Band was formed as
a quartet by Ged
Foley (vocals, guitar, Northumbrian pipes), Chris
Parkinson (accordion, harmonica, melodeon, keyboards), Iain
MacLeod (ten-string mandolin, guitar, vocals) and Jimmy
Young (smallpipes, flute, whistle). They were together for just over a year
and recorded the band's self-titled debut album.
A native of County Durham,
England, Foley had performed on the British folk circuit before joining the
Battlefield Band in the early 1980s. The grandson of a piano player, he received
his first guitar at the age of 14 or 15. After seeing a musician play
Northumbrian pipes, a scaled-down version of the Highland pipes played with
bellows, he acquired his own instrument and taught himself to play.
Yorkshire, England-born
Parkinson began playing harmonica at the age of three of four and later taught
lessons on the instrument. He received his first melodeon as a teenager. At the
age of 21, he was introduced to folk music by a sister who was interested in
folk dancing. In 1976, he acquired a piano accordion and taught himself to play
in a French Canadian or French-influenced style that he dubbed Lancashire Cajun.
An active session player in the early 1980s, Parkinson was a member of the
tradition-rooted band Yorkshire Relish.
In 1986, MacLeod and Young
left the group, and John
Skelton (flute, bombarde, whistle, bodhran) joined along with vocalist Brian
Brooks after the demise of their London-based group Shegui (she-gwee). Skelton,
who grew up in Somerset, England, played tin whistle for dances as a youngster.
While attending college near London, he rediscovered Irish music and started
traveling to Ireland for several weeks each summer. He acquired a flute after
hearing a performance by Mikey Cronin of Bally Desmond, County Kerry. As a
member of Shegui, he sharpened his skills by performing in Irish pubs six nights
a week and Sunday mornings. In 1973 he bought a bombarde, trading lessons in
Irish music for instruction on the instrument.
When Brooks left the House
Band after two years, the group temporarily continued as a trio. The band's
newest member, Roger
Wilson (guitar, fiddle, vocals), joined shortly before the recording of the House
Band's seventh album, Rockall, in 1996.
Tracks from the House Band's
first two albums, The House Band and Pacific, were released in the United States
as Groundwork in 1993. Craig Harris, All-Music Guide
Ashley Hutchings
Ashley
"Tyger" Hutchings first achieved recognition as a co-founder of Fairport
Convention in 1967, but his work and his musical influences predate Fairport
Covention by several years, and he has since gone on to found and lead
numerous other notable groups, including Steeleye
Span, and the various Albion
Bands. In many respects, he is to English folk-rock the rough equivalent of
what John
Mayall is to British blues, except that his recordings have remained
interesting for far longer.
Ashley
Hutchings started his musical life as a fan of skiffle, a highly rhythmic
British answer to American folk and R&B, played at its most basic level on
acoustic guitars, washtub bass, and washboard percussion, which became popular
in England in the middle and late '50s. He also had an appreciation for "trad,"
a British form of Dixieland jazz that had become popular in Britain at the
beginning of the 1950s. He listened to a lot of early English and American rock
& roll, but by the early '60s had developed a deep and abiding love for folk
music as well. He began singing and playing bass in a skiffle band, and later
graduated from the washtub version of the instrument to a proper upright bass.
In 1966, he formed the Ethnic
Shuffle Orchestra with Simon
Nicol (guitar), Steve Airey (guitar), and Bryan King (washboard), which
played a mixture of English skiffle, American R&B, and folk music from the
British Isles. Their work together led Hutchings
-- who was known then as "Tyger," a nickname he'd picked up because of
his aggressiveness on the football field -- and Nicol,
and new colleague Richard
Thompson to form Fairport
Convention in 1967, with Martin
Lamble (succeeded, after his death in a car crash, by Dave
Mattacks) and Judy
Dyble (later replaced by Sandy
Denny) added to the line-up. Fairport Convention performed a similar mix of
traditional English folk, original songs, and American singer/songwriter
material. After three albums structured along those lines, the band recorded Liege
and Lief, a record drawn largely from traditional folk material. When it
became clear to Hutchings,
however, that future albums would include far more original material, he exited
the line-up and began organizing a new band, Steeleye
Span.
Formed by Hutchings, Tim
Hart, Maddy
Prior, and Peter
Knight, with Martin
Carthy coming in as the fifth member, Steeleye
Span in its original form (and for several line-up changes after) was
devoted to purely traditional music, adapted to the forces of a five-piece band
with a growing arsenal of electric instruments. Ultimately they shared the
limelight with Fairport
Convention, vying for the greater loyalty of folk music fans and even
reaching out for a time to rock audiences -- the decision to go almost fully
electric, and the addition of a full-time drummer toughened their sound
considerably, and an association with Jethro Tull, opening for the chart-topping
band on an American tour, and getting the services of Ian
Anderson as producer for one album.
Before that point, Hutchings
was gone, having exited after the recording of the group's third album Below
the Salt. In late 1971, he found himself a member of the
Albion Country Band, formed to back his then-wife, Shirley
Collins, on one of her albums, and decided to keep the studio ensemble
together under that name. The initial line-up included his ex-Fairport bandmates
Simon Nicol
(guitar) and Richard Thompson (guitar), and vocalist/concertina players John
Kirkpatrick and the late Royston
Wood, and the group subsequently had upwards of 26 musicians in it at
various times. This Albion
lasted in various line-ups (Kirkpatrick exited the original line-up very
quickly, to return later on, while Wood
was gone after October of 1972 -- Steve
Ashley joined on harmonica, along with ex-Fairport drummer Dave
Mattacks, Linda
Thompson came in on vocals, fiddle and banjo player Sue
Draheim came into the fold for a time).
In January of 1974, the
Albion Country Band evolved into the
Etchingham Steam Band, with Hutchings on acoustic bass guitar, Shirley
Collins on vocals, Ian
Holder on accordion, and Terry
Potter on mouth-organ. Nicol, Mattacks,
and Hutchings'
Steeleye Span bandmate Martin Carthy all passed through this line-up, which
lasted into 1975. The group's next incarnation, lasting from 1975 until 1977,
was the
Albion Dance Band, with Hutchings (back on electric bass) and Nicol still at
the core. Finally, in 1978, Hutchings formed the
Albion Band, with a line-up that included future Fairport Convention member Ric
Sanders on violin. This group, with some line-up changes (including Nicol
and Mattacks
passing through) has lasted into the 1990s, recording numerous albums, and also
became the subject of a BBC documentary. (See separate entry on the
Albion Band).
Hutchings also recorded
several quasi-solo projects during the 1970s and '80s, including Kickin'
Up the Sawdust, A Word in Your Ear, The View from Pa's Piano Stool, and By
the Gloucester Docks, The Compleat Dancing Master with John
Kirkpatrick, Rattlebone
and Ploughjack (credited to Ashley
Hutchings & chums) and Morris On, Son of Morris On, and Sway
with Me (Hutchings and Judy Dunlop). He appeared on numerous albums by other
artists throughout the 1970s and '80s, including work with Ian
Matthews,The
Bunchh (a rock showcase album by a group of English folkies), Shirley
Collins, Royston
and Heather
Wood, Ray
Fisher, Richard Thompson (Henry the Human Fly), Mike
and Lal
Waterson, Martin
Carthy, the
Kipper Family, and Polly
Bolton. With so many associations in his past, Hutchings has turned up on
numerous compilation albums and boxed sets devoted to such artists as Richard
Thompson and Sandy
Denny, among others. During the 1980s, Hutchings also wrote and performed
his own one-man show about folksong collector Cecil Sharp, which he took
throughout England beginning in 1984, and resulted in the album An Hour with
Cecil Sharp and Ashley Hutchings. In the 1990s, he also put together Ashley
Hutchings' Big Beat Combo, a revival group specializing in skiffle, trad,
and early English rock & roll.
By now one of the grand old
men of English folk-rock, Hutchings has been a major force for close to 30
years, fostering the foundation of more than his share of legendary and
important bands. His skills as a bassist have placed him in demand beyond the
boundaries of typical folk bands, but the most important aspect of his
contribution to music, apart from the bands he has organized, is his ability to
take traditional music, long predating this century, and transmute it into
something accessible to young, modern listeners, without violating its spirit
wholesale. He also has a sense of humor that radiates as brightly as his musical
ability on most every project he has ever participated in. Bruce Eder, All-Music
Guide
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