I am pleased to report that there has been some activity on the Folk on Tap Web site - even though the Webmaster still hasn't deigned to include a link to the on-line archive of my modest quarterly offering. But you can't say I'm one to bear a grudge - so do visit, if only to chivvy the powers that be into keeping the diary dates pages up-to-date. A very useful resource and a complement to the excellent Sussex Folk Guide, which I have probably mentioned before but am happy to recommend again due to the fact that it is quite a feat keeping such a site up to date, so well done Vic Smith, who emailed me to draw my attention also to his Royal Oak, Lewes, pages. A most welcoming site for what I know is a highly enjoyable club.
As usual, I managed to catch the magic-fingered Martin Simpson on his annual pilgrimage to the packed-to-the-rafters yet intimate atmosphere that is the Ram Folk Club, only to discover that the man himself was a little fretful (sorry!) due to what we might call a slight mix-up with the advance publicity for his tour, resulting in a somewhat less than full house for the previous gig. Less than empty, actually. Always one to oblige, I rushed home to put the services of the World Wide Web at the great man's disposal.
I wonder if they appreciated back in the late Sixties as they developed ARPAnet to spread and develop military research, what a wonderfully useful tool it would one day be to music lovers everywhere. Probably not. At the time of writing, BT is claiming there are 300,000 pages added to the Web each week, with a new UK-based site appearing every two seconds, and as by the time you are reading this Christmas will have taken its merry toll on many of us, those figures have probably increased. So let us use this space wisely.
Rod Stradling may not have a link to my pages (does anyone?) on his always interesting Musical Traditions site, but a quick browse through his links page turned up some very interesting sites - not least Martin Graebe's pages dedicated to Sabine Baring-Gould. These include a biography, information about the Baring-Gould Heritage Project and songs from the collection. And however much we may question the reverend gentleman's predication towards censorship, we cannot deny his importance to the tradition. He's kept quite a few performers in amusing anecdotes for a start.
I've just come across my first case of eviction from a home page. It appears that in the course of chatting to folk club and concert organisers to promote Chris Sherburn and Denny Bartley, Alistair Russell (ex-Battlefield Band and Chris's brother-in-law) began to get the taste and the opportunity for getting back into performing, with the result that he has kicked Chris and Denny out of the home page they were inhabiting and taken it over for himself. As you would expect, there is information there on past and forthcoming gigs and recordings. Meanwhile I checked out Chris and Denny's new site and got fed up waiting for the graphic-heavy home page to open.
I have already upset Dave Tong a couple of issues ago about this issue of hi-tech pages - though to be fair, Dave then altered Mike Silver's Heartland page to make the text download first, so at least you have something to read while the pictures appear. My criticism, even more so with Chris and Denny's site, was less to do with looking professional, as long as it's in a caring, sharing way, than with making pages inaccessible to the average Web surfer, who will probably not be using a state-of-the-art system. Echoes of "Does the synthesizer have a place alongside the 'long, boring ballad'?" Well of course it does, but which one refers to a page that takes so long to download you fall off your surfboard?
Luckily, for every enemy I make, I manage to make a friend, and I got a very nice email from Garry Gillard from right round the other side of the world, who had appreciated my comments about his Watersons site, and wanted to tell me about his Copper Family pages. And a fine tribute it is too. It's appeared at just the right time, what with the release of Coppersongs 3, a celebration of yet another generation of singing Coppers. It has information about the new CD, and even lyrics of the songs, which of course throws up all sorts of interesting questions about copyright. But then if Kate Lee hadn't gone down to Sussex and written down the words of James Brasser Copper's songs all those years ago, we wouldn't have just been celebrating 100 years of the English Folk Song Society, would we?
By the way, before we receive a ton of mail (OK, a couple of letters) on this vexing issue, which always draws a crowd in the newsgroups, I would add that I asked Garry Gillard whether he slept at nights, having cribbed all this material, and he pointed out that the Coppers had effectively adopted his as their unofficial Web site, and that Jon Dudley in particular had been highly supportive and provided material for the site. Which is as it should be. And speaking of the EFDSS, he clumsily inserted, brings us to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, whose Web site is hosted at the University of Sheffield and includes information about the society and events at Cecil Sharp House, as long as you only want to find out what was on in 1996! Remember how impressed I was with the Sussex Folk Guide?
If there were such a thing, the award for my favourite Web site of this quarter would have to go to Isaac Guillory. I've checked out a site I found for Martin Simpson, which gave a fair amount of information but which I realised when I reached the bottom of the page was little more than a lure by a company that makes guitar pick-ups. And I visited a site for Stefan Grossman, which listed all his guitar tuition videos and had horrible little buttons with "add to shopping cart" on them. Shudder. But Isaac's site is fab, because as well as the obvious gigs and recordings info, it even has a guitar school! Now I know it won't have anything like the effect on the world as Bert Weedon's Play In A Day, but then not many things do. But as an example of professional-looking, tastefully designed, easy-to-navigate and generous use of Web space, The Isaac Guillory Homepage is a treat. Do visit it.