The (Grand) Maternal Queenly Canon

The (Grand) Maternal Queenly Canon Queens, both of them. Queen of Calypso and ‘Queene’ of English Folk, Calypso Rose and Shirley Collins are lauded musicians, recording and performing in their eighties. They are two female performers in ‘older age’ who make up a (grand)maternal canon within popular music. This canon goes across genre and includes women who are valued for both their ongoing contribution to music and for their participation in the formative histories of those musics. Performing well past the ‘menopausal gap’ they act as familial beacons in their respective genres, markers of a longevity imbricated and wrapped up with discourses of authenticity that in turn, speak to national and diasporic heritages (Bascombe, 2015). Their contributions to music are recognised in film (The Ballad of Shirley Collins, 2017), cemented by memoir (All in The Downs: Life, landscape and Song, (2018), documented through official websites that measure musical outputs and significance against broader cultural markers (www.calypsorose) and presented in music video. Using an interdisciplinary methodology the paper focuses on these metatexts of Collins and Calypso Rose who are both in ‘old’ age and producing music anew and, in part, through alliance with younger musicians and producers. As one chapter in a book on ‘Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians’, its motive is to spotlight age as a pertinent theme of enquiry within popular music studies and to note how the production and performances of these women in their 80s signifies a veneration of a ‘grand-maternal canon’ which is both a manifestation and a rebuttal of appropriate ageing

Whose Record is it Anyway? Musical 'crate digging' across Africa

The search for old and new African sounds is based around a nostalgia culture that is endemic to Anglo-American popular music

Framing Grace: Shock and Awe at the Ageless Black Body

‘Thirty years of the high life have not taken their toll on Jones’ perfect hindquarters, which she shakes and wiggles in the faces of the photographers’. Kitty Empire 22/06/08 The Observer Thirty years of such a high life may not have taken their toll on Grace Jones’ posterior but something is ‘rotten’ in the use of the term ‘hindquarters’. It is what is at stake in such language that is the concern of this paper, which maps out broadcast press and blog discourses surrounding Jones’ recent re-emergence onto the British popular music scene to establish how she becomes framed both through the vectors of race and age in ways that highlight her as an awesome and ‘awe’ful artefact

My Story. Digital Storytelling across Europe for Social Cohesion

‘My Story’ (Mysty) is a pan-European, Erasmus+ funded Digital Storytelling project focused on intercultural competency. It has eight partners (HE, secondary schools and NGOs) across four countries (Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK) and involves the collection, editing and uploading of digital stories to a shared ‘toolbox’. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. The project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity common across the EU. The paper discusses the process the project went through, some of its challenges and its results and, on the basis of these, looks at the role digital storytelling as a way of expressing different ethical, cultural or personal issues

Ageing, Travelling Folk: Sam Lee and Songs across Time

Sam Lee is a British songwriter and collector whose music is a reimagining of traditional English and traveller folk music. His first album, Ground of Its Own (2012), was the first ‘folk’ album to be nominated for The Mercury Prize, a critically acclaimed UK music award, whilst his second Fade in Time (2015) continues his exploration of UK folk and traveller heritage. Lee travels around the UK, working with elderly travellers and amateur folk singers to recast and reinterpret their songs. His activities are part of a wider folk movement network across Europe and the United States, where age is valued, both as a life lived and as a quality embedded in the songs performed (Boyes, 2010; Elliot, 2015; Negus, 2012, Winters and Keegan-Phipps, 2013). This paper is framed by an understanding that his work is related to the preservation, encoding and transference of a collective musical experience; what we might term ‘mimetic inheritance’. It is rooted in English folk music but reaches out beyond the borders of ‘Englishness’ through the travellers’ own familial inheritances to encompass migratory musical traditions. The paper focuses on the conceit of ‘travelling’, whereby music is at once rooted, or ‘grounded’ and ‘de-territorialized’ (Deleuze and Guattari (1972), since it travels not only across differing spaces but across time. Using Negus’s work on Ricoeur (2012, 1984) the paper argues that this musical practice is a manifestation of Ricoeur’s ‘present of the past’ where remnants float up from shared and found pasts to circulate within the present, which Lee makes apparent in his treatment and versions of the old folk songs he refashions and records

PJ Harvey and Remembering England

PJ Harvey is an English musician who has, to date, enjoyed a career spanning nearly a quarter of a century. She comes from Dorset, a rural county in the South West of England, where she still lives. This fact is important because it locates her in a particular rural and potentially ‘pastoral’ place, one that is far away from the metropolitan, from Thomas Hardy’s ‘madding crowd’. This chapter focuses on White Chalk (2007) and Let England Shake (2011) to argue that they are her ‘English’ albums, a claim that rests not only on their musical temperament, lyrical concerns or audio-visual representation, but also on the nature of how they remember England, especially when this collides with narratives of war and home. Remembering is often selective and selection is part of the archiving process. What we leave in and what we leave out of the archive dictates in turn, what is and is not remembered. In these two albums, Harvey presents a version of Englishness that adds to contemporary discourses on (memories of) national identity by foregrounding the forgotten, the rural, the disappointed; by narrating tales of love and war that are not those of victory or triumph but of longing and loss.This chapter interrogates how and why this has happened and argues that it is, in part, due to her narration of Englishness and what aspects of it are remembered. To map this out, the discussion entails an analysis of the development over Harvey’s recent career (2007-2011) of audio-visual aspects of her work that might be construed as ‘English’ particularly in relation to locality and land (Aughey, 2007). One of the questions posed here is to ask whether these aspects might be seen to culminate in her more recent work at a time when nation and identity may be considered to be pertinent political and cultural themes. In this sense, the chapter asks whether her albums are part of an archiving process that contributes to a reframing of Englishness

My Story. Digital Storytelling across Europe for Social Cohesion

‘My Story’ (Mysty) is a pan-European, Erasmus+ funded Digital Storytelling project focused on intercultural competency. It has eight partners (HE, secondary schools and NGOs) across four countries (Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK) and involves the collection, editing and uploading of digital stories to a shared ‘toolbox’. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. The project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity common across the EU. The paper discusses the process the project went through, some of its challenges and its results and, on the basis of these, looks at the role digital storytelling as a way of expressing different ethical, cultural or personal issues

The (Grand) Maternal Queenly Canon

The (Grand) Maternal Queenly Canon Queens, both of them. Queen of Calypso and ‘Queene’ of English Folk, Calypso Rose and Shirley Collins are lauded musicians, recording and performing in their eighties. They are two female performers in ‘older age’ who make up a (grand)maternal canon within popular music. This canon goes across genre and includes women who are valued for both their ongoing contribution to music and for their participation in the formative histories of those musics. Performing well past the ‘menopausal gap’ they act as familial beacons in their respective genres, markers of a longevity imbricated and wrapped up with discourses of authenticity that in turn, speak to national and diasporic heritages (Bascombe, 2015). Their contributions to music are recognised in film (The Ballad of Shirley Collins, 2017), cemented by memoir (All in The Downs: Life, landscape and Song, (2018), documented through official websites that measure musical outputs and significance against broader cultural markers (www.calypsorose) and presented in music video. Using an interdisciplinary methodology the paper focuses on these metatexts of Collins and Calypso Rose who are both in ‘old’ age and producing music anew and, in part, through alliance with younger musicians and producers. As one chapter in a book on ‘Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians’, its motive is to spotlight age as a pertinent theme of enquiry within popular music studies and to note how the production and performances of these women in their 80s signifies a veneration of a ‘grand-maternal canon’ which is both a manifestation and a rebuttal of appropriate ageing