REMINDER: EFC's annual songwriting competition is on Wednesday 6 June 2018.

Deadline for entries is Monday 28 May 2018. Click here for the rules-n-regs.

NEXT EFC GIGS: May-July 2018

The SQUIRREL HILLBILLIES

Wednesday 23 May 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

And, here's another welcome return visit - The Squirrel Hillbillies.

This duo from deep within Pittsburgh's urban forest, were a surprise success when they first visited us in 2016. Surprise? Well, we didn't really know what to expect. Who or what was a squirrel hillbilly? As it turned out they impressed enough to be coming back this week.

The duo return to share their eclectic mix of folk, country and blues. Rabidly social, clawingly curious, they relish interacting with diverse audiences performing at festivals, folk clubs and non-traditional venues across the US and the UK. Through a collaborative, non-linear songwriting process, Jenny Wolsk and Gary Crouth, draw from personal experiences, third-hand stories, and vivid imaginations to craft songs that are unpredictable and quirky yet widely accessible.
 
JENNY WOLSK (vocals, uke, mando, bass, percussion) grew up in Greenwich Village but was completely oblivious to the folk music scene raging just outside her front door. Instead, she listened to Casey Kasem's weekly countdowns and dabbled in musical theater, landing a starring role in an off-off-Broadway production of Heidi at the age of 10, a job that paid $12 per show, in cash. Her musical tastes matured during high school and in college she joined a co-ed a capella singing group, acquiring an ear for harmony, an interest in arranging music, and an appreciation for just how much abuse a voice can withstand before laryngitis sets in. She’s immersed herself in Americana now but she continues to derive way too much pleasure from singing along to top 40 radio with her daughters.

GARY CROUTH (vocals, guitar, uke) was born in a sleepy city in upstate New York at a time when the President was an army general and people talked seriously about bomb shelters and communists. His musical brain awoke around the 5th grade and he chose to play guitar, mainly because it looked nothing like an accordion, studying with a guitar master who recklessly drove a red Karmann Ghia and had once played with the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. Nepotism got Gary a his first gig, singing and playing banjo on a replica packet boat pulled by Belgian horses on the Erie Canal. His style is deeply rooted in the musical dirt of his past: traditional and contemporary acoustic music, early country, and sixties pop songs.

KYLE CAREY

Wednesday 30 May 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

Kyle Carey’s back story is as worldly as her music. Raised by her schoolteacher parents first in the Alaskan Bush (where she heard Yup’ik Eskimo spoken as often as she heard English) and then in rural New Hampshire, Kyle studied literature in college, before travelling to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia on a Fulbright Fellowship to begin her study of the Gaelic language and its music. Carey is one of those scarce-as-hen’s-teeth Irish-Americans fluent in the language of her ancestors.

That was followed by a two-year sojourn on the Isle of Skye; there she cemented her command of the Gaelic language and fell under the tutelage of Christine Primrose, a native of nearby Lewis and one of Scotland’s most revered traditional singers. From Christine she learned the secrets of pronunciation and tone that distinguish those who sing from the deep heart of that music.

In Kyle's original self-penned material, however, she breaks new ground in her ability to make that style the pulse of a new American sort of folk music. The essence of that revolution lies in the real distinction Carey draws between Celtic Americana, ie. the well-traveled path of American musicians performing in the style of traditional Celtic music, and the Gaelic Americana that she writes and performs. Her music is innovative not only in its bone-deep feel for Celtic tradition, but in all that she is able to graft on to it by way of a personal vision as capacious as the North American continent.

The “Americana” portion of this synthesis has been plucked variously from bluegrass, gospel, and Appalachian ballads and fiddle tunes and in the lyrics from personal experience, Appalachian folktale, Dustbowl narrative, the Old and New Testaments, Greek mythology, and the rough-hewn poetry of West Virginia’s Louise McNeill. Eclectic or what!?

There may well be a well-travelled path for folk music in these transatlantic lanes, but no one has done it like Kyle Carey, to shift into reverse, to go back to the graves of her ancestors, learn the language they spoke, the songs they sang, and use this knowledge in creating a new sort of American folk music, one that continues to cross boundaries, to forge alliances.

42nd ANNUAL EDINBURGH FC SONG WRITING COMPETITION

Wednesday 6 June 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

ALL THE INFO for songwriters is to be found here.

Closing date for submitting entries is midnight, Monday 28 May.
All entries to be emailed to this address.

MARTYN WYNDHAM-READ

Wednesday 13 June 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

Martyn has been involved with folk music for over 50 years. In his late teens he left his mother’s farm in Sussex and headed off, with his guitar, to Australia where he worked on a sheep station in South Australia. It was while he was there that he heard, first hand, the old songs sung by station hands and became captivated by the songs and the need to know more of them and where they came from grew. He headed off to Melbourne and became part of the folk song revival there and throughout Australia during the early1960’s..

Back to England in 1967 where he met up with the renowned singer and song collector Bert Lloyd, who himself had spent time in Australia. Martyn was asked by Bert Lloyd to be part of the album ‘Leviathan’ on the Topic label and soon after he started recording for Bill Leader and touring extensively worldwide.

In the early 1970’s Martyn started the ‘Maypoles to Mistletoe’ concerts which portray the seasons of the year through song, music, dance and verse and illustration. Martyn is also the instigator of the Song Links Project. Martyn worked with Shirley Collins on a production called ‘Down the Lawson Track’ (2009) featuring stories, poems/songs of the great Australian 'Poet of the People', Henry Lawson with Pip Barnes, Iris Bishop, Gary Holder and Jackie Oates.

Martyn's CD Jackeroo portrays his life through songs both old and new.

ROBB JOHNSON

Wednesday 20 June 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

Robb Johnson is now widely recognised as one of the finest songwriters working in the UK today. His songs feature in the repertoires of a wide variety of musicians, from Roy Bailey to acclaimed cabaret diva Barb Jungr, and he enjoys a similarly diverse spectrum of critical acclaim – “a modern-day Dostoyevsky” (Dirty Linen mag, USA), Mojo made the double CD Gentle Men Folk Album Of The Month (1997), while The Daily Telegraph made it their Folk Album Of 1998, and the late Tony Benn said Johnson’s “Winter Turns To Spring” was his favourite song.

Johnson has played pubs, clubs, pavements, pickets and benefits, arts centres and festivals, local radio, BBC Radios 3 and 4, Belgian Radio 1, Nicaraguan TV and Channel 4 TV and London's Albert Hall. In February 2006 Robb appeared at the Barbican as part of the prestigious BBC “Folk Britannia” series, where “for the encore, Robb Johnson leads all the artists (and the audience) in the World War I song (‘Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire’)” (BBC Folk Britannia website) in a concert that was screened later that month on BBC4.  Robb also plays extensively in Belgium, Holland and Germany and he has toured Britain supporting Chumbawamba and the US with David Rovics.

Robb has worked with a variety of bands, with friend and fellow songwriter Leon Rosselson, as well as solo. In 1997 Robb wrote the song suite Gentle Men, an ambitious family history of the First World War for the Passendale Peace Concert, where the musicians were a jazz combo led by Belgian jazz legend Koen De Cauter, and he subsequently toured it successfully in Britain. Robb’s album Metro (released in September 2005) featured piano accompaniment by the late Russel Churney, who had previously worked with Julian Clary, Barb Jungr and Fascinating Aida. Again, the album received widespread praise in both music and national press: “unquestionably classy... excellent songs (that) show again what a fine, if provocative writer Johnson is” (The Daily Telegraph).

His label Irregular Records has also facilitated releases by a variety of song-orientated artists, including an album celebrating the work of Jacques Brel that has done much to focus a renewed interest in the chanson genre. He has translated several of Brel’s songs and performed concerts celebrating Brel’s life and work. Robb has also co-written Woman, a biography of Yoko Ono, published by Chrome Dreams.

ROYAL SCOTTISH CONSERVATOIRE TOUR

Wednesday 27 June 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

Another EFC ‘first’ is this visit to the club by the third year undergrads from the Traditional Music Course at the RCS in Glasgow. This four-year course leads to the UK’s only Bachelor of Music degree dedicated to traditional and folk music. The gig is part of a tour the students are undertaking. They’ll be in the company of their tutor, Highland piper Eddie Seaman, himself an RCS graduate, who plays with Scots band Barluath and also with Luc McNally; Eddie is no stranger to EFC audiences of course. Let’s hope that we may be privileged to spot some great talent that we’ll see again and again in its own right in the future at EFC.

SKIP GORMAN

Wednesday 4 July 2018

The Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9TJ
Time: doors 7:30pm / showtime 8pm
Admission: ... £10 (non-members), £9 (conc), £8 NHS & emergency services staff, £7 (EFC members), £5 (students)

Tickets are available on line or at the door from 7:30pm

Skip Gorman was introduced to traditional music at eight years old, when he received his first guitar and a Jimmie Rodgers record. A few years later, he was lucky to have the opportunity to see musicians like the legendary Bill Monroe and Maybelle Carter at Newport Folk Festival. An encounter with Monroe at age 14 years was pivotal in young Skip’s life and, aside from being a masterful cowboy singer and fine fiddler, Gorman is one of the premier mandolinists in the style of Bill Monroe.

In 1995 Skip's album, A Greener Prairie (Rounder), was released to universal acclaim and was named one of the top ten folk recordings of the year by the Boston Globe, “one of the most masterful and flat-out gorgeous cowboy albums to lope down the trail in years.” Gorman’s 1996 release, Lonesome Prairie Love, was a finalist for the prestigious NAIRD Traditional Folk Recording of the Year award. In 1999, he released his eagerly awaited third Rounder album, A Cowboy’s Wild Song to His Herd, which had the honour of being selected by Amazon.com as one of the Top Ten Folk CDs of 1999.

While he pursued a degree in Latin American Studies and Spanish at Brown University, Gorman played in various old-time music and bluegrass bands, including a stint with bluegrass legend, Frank Wakefield. After graduating, Gorman traveled to Ireland, where he explored the Celtic roots of American music and to this day, Skip remains an accomplished Celtic-as well as Western-style fiddler.

In 1973, he headed to graduate school in Utah and began collecting rare recordings by early cowboy singers like Carl T. Sprague, Jules Verne Allen and Powder River Jack Lee. While in Utah, he performed the music of Western pioneers with the Deseret String Band and in 1977 went on to record his first album of old-time cowboy songs and fiddle tunes, Powder River. This seminal recording on Folk Legacy Records along with his Trail to Mexico (1983) was among the very first attempts by a folk revivalist musician to reintroduce the older traditions of the music of the American cowboy.

Skip returned East and taught high school Spanish and history for twelve years. During these years, he performed with Rick Starkey of Martin Guitars in a bluegrass duo, Rabbit In A Log, and released a solo instrumental recording, The Old Style Mandolin Vol 1. One of the tunes from this album, Cowboy Waltz, was featured in Ken Burns’ acclaimed BASEBALL PBS documentary behind the slow motion pitching of the great Walter Johnson.