FOLK music is enjoying something of a revival. The woodcut-illustrated covers of folklore books can be found in the bestseller sections of bookshops — and even morris dancing is attracting a cool young crowd, the magazine Rolling Stone has discovered. Folk music, whether you think of it in strictly traditional terms or as the heart of an evergreen acoustic-troubadour scene, never really went away.
From the 2010 ubiquity of folk-influenced pop by Mumford and Sons, who have been regularly asked about the Christian influences in their lyrics, to the recent success of folk-country chart-toppers such as Tyler Childers and Billy Strings, folk seems to be permanently, or at least cyclically, embedded in the global music industry. Local listings offer shanty sessions and open-mic or folk nights in pubs, churches, or village halls, all year round.
And yet the folk music scene in Britain still struggles to shake off its connotations of stale-ale pubs with a culture of “no beard, no entry” and inertia-bound traditionalism, not to mention a perceived identity steeped in pagan and neo-pagan religion which some Christians might see as inhospitable.
But, in the folk world, some musicians are pushing the boundaries of Christian music, and challenging both contemporary assumptions and historical injustices. Others are challenging traditions of gendering God and revitalising venerable hymns about the justice of God. And some are examining the legacy of slavery and seeking to situate the story of abolition in the heart of current discussions and reappraisals. Some offer a new imagery for God, while at least one other of these artists is a bishop.
The feminist folk hymnists: Siskin Green
SISKIN GREEN is a Scottish folk trio initially formed during the Covid lockdowns, with the help of the Iona Community’s John Bell, as part of the BBC’s Reflections at the Quay series. Jane Bentley, Suzanne Butler, and Margaret McLarty had known one another from the Scottish folk scene, and had occasionally made music together.
The intention was never to create a long-term project or form a band, but, after the sessions, McLarty says, the feeling was “We all quite like this; so let’s keep going.” The result was their début album, named after the group and containing a mixture of adapted hymns, songs written by the group themselves, and pieces offered by the Wild Goose Resource Group.
The album is both overtly Christian and socially radical. Siskin’s version of Rory Cooney’s “Canticle of the Turning”, for instance, features sweet folk harmonies that contrast with a fiery vision in which the rich, powerful, and warlike are thrown down, and the meek and poor are raised up — reminiscent of the Magnificat, not to mention Amos, James, and significant portions of St Matthew’s Gospel. “The love of God is for everyone, and at the same time God has a clear bias for the poor and those who struggle,” McLarty says.
Such themes are, however, rare in contemporary Christian music and the worship industry. “We have a bit of a band joke that we have this super-niche of folk, feminism, and faith,” McLarty says — because, if radical justice is a subject rarely mentioend in today’s Christian worship-song lyrics, Christianity is far from ubiquitous in British folk music.
“In Scotland, anyway, folk is not the warmest place for faith in some ways. But it is a very political place. People feel very able to talk about spirituality, but, in my perception, there’s probably been quite a push away from religious faith.”
But, if there is one aspect of Siskin Green’s art which pushes boundaries as far as audiences go, it is putting women and their experience centre stage both in song and faith. “People aren’t surprised or challenged by the politics,” McLarty says: the Greenbelt Festival and Iona are the communities that they have engaged with most, and they tend to be politically progressive. “Where people are challenged has been the feminist aspect.”
McLarty’s reworking of “Heart full of anxious request”, a 19th-century hymn by Anna Waring, is a possible example. In McLarty’s version, the pronouns for God are all female, and “my Mother in heaven” makes the petitioner “pure by the blood she shed”, which, McLarty says, people tend to find challenging, as they have not encountered it before.
“The blood that God as man shed is very different from the blood shed by women, whether that’s a motherhood thing or a menstruation thing,” she says. “There are suddenly very different experiences encapsulated in that; and, in a church-based setting, that is something that is probably still more uncomfortable for people, whereas, in a folk setting, that is something people are more willing to engage with.”
It is not hard, equally, to imagine a secular audience being challenged by Siskin Green’s religious verses. The opening track of the album is “Will your anchor hold?”, a hymn whose music was reimagined by Butler and McLarty, but whose text were written by Priscilla J. Owens, in 1882, and reflects the unflinching Christian fervour that made it a favourite of the Boys’ Brigade.
Words affirming a faith that “keeps the soul steadfast and sure” and “grounded firm in the Saviour’s love” might be as challenging for some audiences as imagining a female God is for others. “People will be challenged by the faith, the feminism, and folk — but, hopefully, there’s enough comfort there that you’re able to engage,” McLarty says. “That’s what we’re trying to do, anyway.”
And they do it through music as much as lyrics. As soon as “Will your anchor hold?” is not sung in “a bold, declamatory way, as soon as you take it into that minor bluegrass Appalachian picking thing, it’s a question”, McLarty says.
Siskin Green manages to turn a potentially alienating rallying cry, which draws hard lines between those inside and outside the circle of faith, into a blurred space for empathetic connection. McLarty captures its new spirit as: “Hey, you’ve got some struggles. I’ve got some struggles, man: it feels like the sea is pouring over us here. We’re really being turned around the place. We’ve got an anchor, though. Right?”
“We’re not interested in telling people what to think or believe, and traditionally that’s been a lot of what religion is about,” McLarty says. “We’re always very conscious of wanting to be inclusive and open while still speaking with real vigour and real challenge. But no one listens to you if they feel like you’re not talking to them and they’re not included.”
Ian YarwoodAngeline, Cohen, and Jon
The Abolition balladeers: Angeline, Cohen, and Jon
“AMAZING GRACE” and the story of its author, John Newton, are enormously well known. Newton’s Christian faith turned him from an enthusiastic participant in the trading of enslaved people to an ardent opponent of it.
Grace Will Lead Me Home is an Arts-Council-funded project by Invisible Folk (a non-profit organisation producing radio, podcasts, plays, and music focused on heritage) to examine Newton’s life but also to priority to the lives and experiences of the African women, children, and men who were kidnapped and incarcerated as part of Britain’s colonial and industrial projects.
At the heart of the project was a series of radio and podcast interviews with organisers and academics. Now, a folk album has been created in response to interaction with places, stories, and objects from the history of racial enslavement.
The folk artists Angeline Morrison, Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, and Jon Bickley collaborated to create Grace Will Lead Me Home, producing 12 tracks that range from traditional English folk to a cappella soul, with many genre twists in between. The songs dig deeper than the usual narratives that pay most attention to the slaver and his redemption narrative. Instead, they ask more difficult questions about our history and its legacy.
Bickley was responsible for the interviews in the podcast component of Grace Will Lead Me Home. After his upbringing in the Baptist tradition, he says, Christianity is something that he is “currently wrestling with”, and he has “a fairly dynamic relationship with God”. He says: “He kind of follows me around, and I’ve always had an active prayer life. I’ve always found him lurking in his own creation.”
He was the only white member of the trio, and this was a complicated space to occupy, both creatively and artistically. “Before I started this project, I was very self-conscious about my whiteness, because white in this story doesn’t come out so well,” Bickley says. “So, I was almost asking permission, in any training or social or heritage situation that I was in, if there were Afro-Caribbean people there: ‘How do I approach this subject?’”
Bickley recognises that, as a white man, he was likely to have “tons of unconscious bias”, and that he had to “wrestle with that” before he could start writing. “I had to be convinced that it was OK.”
What was most helpful, he says, was taking his lead from Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne. “Both Angeline and Cohen had already done quite a lot of work in this area,” he says, and he points, first, to Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s essay “Black Singers and Folk Ballads: Songs and stories across the Atlantic”, published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
Braithwaite-Kilcoyne opened his eyes to the “fertile and chaotic” process by which enslaved Africans, as well as African Americans, adopted British folk songs, evolving and developing them and adding a rich seam to their history which has often been ignored or even erased by European folklorists.
In Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s words, “The notion that these songs belonged to people of a particular background — that is, British — was and remains incorrect.”
Bickley points also to Morrison's collection of black British folk music (produced by folk royalty, in the form of Eliza Carthy), The Sorrow Songs: “Angeline went into the canon and found the black voice missing. She researched stories of black people at the time, and created the songs they would have sung. I highly recommend it to your readers.”
Morrison herself says, in her description of the album, “Whilst people of the African diaspora have been present in these islands since at least Roman times, their histories are little known — and these histories don’t tend to appear in the folk songs of these islands.”
And yet, for Bickley (and clearly for Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne), folk music seems to be an ideal vehicle for, if not righting, then writing about these historic wrongs: “Folk music can accommodate it very easily.”
Bickley feels that it may be because folk is a “lithe and flexible form”, able, on the album, to accommodate Morrison's writing about Newton’s relationship with his wife and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s writing about the “skills” needed to be a ship’s captain like Newton (including the capacity to throw human “cargo” overboard).
Bickley’s concern with the continuing legacy of slavery in Britain led him to pen the lines: “Newton is still sailing in a ship full of slaves, while beneath the streets of London Stephen Lawrence is in his grave.” It is echoed by Bickley’s lines in “Sorry”, which sits between two versions of “Amazing Grace” in the album Grace Will Lead Me Home: “A white man’s tears mean nothing. Only justice will set us free.”
A radical kind of repentance is being asked of a white listener; and that is a tone that Bickley finds to be a “convenient confluence” when it comes to expressing hard spiritual truths in the folk medium. He says: “I’m just re-reading the Gospel of John, and it is unavoidably radical.” He speaks of the “binary fork in the road” between the flesh and the Spirit which John presents.
“Whether it’s climate change, whether it’s human rights, whether it’s immigration — if you start making those binary choices in your life, choosing the Spirit as your guide, you’re going to end up radical.”
When considering folk music, or any art, as a vehicle for those who wish to be boundary-pushing and challenging, Bickley says: “The big question isn’t, ‘Why are Christians radical?’ The question is, ‘Why are people who go to church not radical?’”
Harbottle and Jonas
The expansive Church: Harbottle and Jonas
HARBOTTLE and Jonas sing songs about nature, the sea, God, and life which can best be described as expansive. They are not sure that they even fit into the folk mould, although their overt Christian content has been well received by reviewers, even in the Socialist newspaper the Morning Star.
“We play a lot of folk festivals, folk clubs, folk gigs,” Dave Harbottle, partner to Freya Jonas and the man responsible for the guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, and cittern, on the albums, says. “It’s something that people have called us, and we just went along with it.”
Their CDs, he explains, are full of original material, but their live gigs end up being a 50-50 split of originals and existing folk songs. “There’s nothing like a folk-music crowd who know the words, and everyone’s singing in harmony,” he says. “It’s kind of like church.”
Jonas, who is responsible for piano, harmonium, concertina, and vocals on the H&B albums, agrees that a room full of people singing folk music together has a spiritual element to it. “It instantly and deeply connects everybody in that room that is singing together,” she says. “I find in church that it’s during the music or the worship that I’m most moved, really, and can feel God’s presence.”
Both Harbottle and Jonas remember fondly the “Tube Station”, in Polzeath: a surfer church, where creation played a large part in worship, and baptisms might involve surfboards.
“Where we live, church feels like just being in a lake, being consumed by water. Seeing a heron go past — that can feel just as powerful as music or church to us. It’s all connected, I feel,” Harbottle says.
Harbottle and Jonas gigs include a lot of talking — explaining songs and the stories behind them — and that organically leads to mentions of their faith, and people coming up to talk to them afterwards.
Jonas says: “I think it’s expressed as a belief and as a faith, but much more linked to nature and to people rather than confined within a church building and church routines.”
The Rt Revd Andrew Rumsey, Bishop of Ramsbury, in Salisbury diocese
The bishop of British indie folk: Andrew Rumsey
A MORE familiar face to Church Times readers is that of Dr Andrew Rumsey, a poet, singer, and songwriter whose 2023 folk album Evensongs, recorded in a single session in an ancient church, drew critical acclaim (News, 20 October 2023).
While his CV also includes a stint working for the Cambridge Folk Festival, Dr Rumsey is now the Bishop of Ramsbury, in Salisbury diocese. His work within the broad world of folk challenges the idea of what a folk musician can and cannot be — and what his vocation can involve.
Asked whether being a bishop is a help or hindrance, he replies: “It can be both, depending on where you’re playing. I used to keep music quite separate from my ministry — almost as a counterpoint to church life — but, as a bishop, I’ve found it more natural to integrate the two, especially now I play a lot in church buildings.”
And that integration, a crossing or blurring of boundaries, has yielded fruit. “Generally speaking, my unusual vocation brings curiosity and interesting conversations about life and faith — which I love.
“There’s also something about folk music’s relationship to tradition that can be instructive in church life. Bonhoeffer once wrote that faithfulness to the basic melody of Christianity was essential if we want to freely harmonise or improvise. I’ve always found that helpful and true.”
Rumsey holds that the relationship between the Church and folk goes beyond that metaphor. “I am . . . interested in redressing the balance a little to show the close relationship of the Church to, for example, the 20th-century folk revival,” he says, referring to the The English Hymnal, edited by Vaughan Williams and the socialist priest Percy Dearmer, which incorporates English folk tunes gathered during trips across the country.
“The English Hymnal alone makes a case for the parish church being the most significant carrier of folksong during that period,” he says: “less cool than the ’60s folk-club scene, but hugely influential in keeping the tunes alive”.