1968, SAM SHERRY AND HARRY BOARDMAN
In Paris, French students were rioting. In Galgate, just south of Lancaster, singers Bill and Delia Glaister ran the Plough Inn. Also living in the pub was Delia's father Ted Hoban, banjo player, exhibition dancer and monologuist extraordinaire. The pub was just by the railway bridge carrying the main west coast line. In front of the pub was the A6; behind it the Lancaster canal and the boat yard run by Sam Sherry the famous veteran clog dancer. I lived immediately through the railway bridge, my front door opening onto the A6; the M6 was just beyond my back yard.
We had regular raucous traditional music sessions in the pub, as well as goodtime jazz nights when Delia sang "Bill Bailey" and "Nobody Knows You". Folk clubs at the time seemed to be getting a bit introverted, with the navel-gazing songs coming in, and a lot of us were looking to the pub session for musical salvation.
Harry Boardman, noted Lancashire singer, turned up from time to time, and Sam, Harry and I made a sort of informal pact, to preserve and revive northwestern folk culture.
Sam would take care of the dance, Harry the songs, and me the tunes. The trouble was, I didn't know many northwest tunes, and neither did anyone else that I knew.

1972 AND THE BEGGAR'S OPERA
Working as musical director on the "Beggar's Opera" at the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, I met actor/fiddler Chris Ashley. I was also playing in the Original Callity Band with Dave Lyth, the kingpin of the local Irish session scene, though he was actually an Englishman, from Whitby originally. Dave was on fiddle, Gordon Johnston on guitar and five-string banjo, and me on guitar and tenor banjo, later joined by Pete Mickelborough on standup bass.
We started looking into northwestern tunes, in a desultory fashion, and wondered what to do with them. Broadcasting and theatre seemed a good idea, so we set up a larger group, with a flexible and interesting line-up, and optimistically contacted the BBC and various other people. We called it Crookfinger Jack, after one of the Beggar's Opera lowlife characters.

1974 BURNLEY RUBBISH TIP
Crookfinger Jack only ever played one live gig, for the legendary avant garde theatre group Welfare State International. They commissioned me to write a suite of music to play for a banquet to celebrate something at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Perhaps its opening, I don't remember. The piece was called "May Music", and Crookfinger Jack were to play it.
Half way through rehearsal, we were told that the location of the banquet was being changed: no longer to take place in a prestigious site in London, we were to play on a rubbish tip in Burnley: this was the company's base, where they lived in caravans when not on tour.
The event was extraordinary, a meal and a show. It involved a disgusting shanty town, which at the climax was sprayed white with foam from a fire-engine while an archer fired flaming arrows to light the ceremonial bonfire. The first two missed, but luckily he had a stock. The music was lovely and Crookfinger Jack sounded great. It was a great success. We never played live again.
Incidentally, I played for Welfare State's first gig in 1968, and its last in 2006, using the same traditional English tunes on both occasions.

1974 WATERSON: CARTHY AND WET BREAD

About then, we got our first bite of interest from the BBC, for a twenty minute spot on
Radio 2's Folkweave about northwest music: a subject about which I knew next to nothing at that stage. I cobbled together a few appropriate tunes, and wrote them out and photocopied them so that we could rehearse them, One of those tunes, the "Cobbler's Hornpipe", surfaced thirty year's later on Eliza Carthy's excellent "Rough Music", with a nice thank-you note to me in the liner notes. It said that she had got the tune from her mother, who had got it from me. Interesting, as I'm sure I've never given a tune to Norma Waterson in my life. I can only guess I gave a copy of the tunes to Martin Carthy, and he passed it on? Who knows? Anyway, the Bible enjoins us to cast our bread upon the waters, and in this case I got the wet bread back thirty years later.
The broadcast happened a year after, I think, in 1975, and was the first exposure of the concept of "northwestern music" as a genre (as opposed to northwestern song, which was well-known). Whether anybody heard it I am not sure: I don't recall any very excited reaction, except from my mum who was quite interested. We also did the first workshop that year on the old tunes, at Fylde Folk Festival, and I have to say a few people did come. I would love to be able to remember who they were.

REG HALL, ROD STRADLING AND THE SOUTHERN CONSPIRACY
We made that first broadcast, started playing some of the tunes at gigs with the Original Callity Band, and tried to establish the concept of northwest music. I was fuelled in my missionary zeal for this by a reaction to what was going on elsewhere. A whole movement was getting underway in southern England, where a few enthusiasts for musicians like Walter Bulwer and Scan Tester were rebranding their favourite stuff as "English country music". Nobody would have objected if they'd called it "Southeastern English country music": it was only the music of one little bit of England, basically those parts where the likes of Reg Hall, Rod Stradling or whoever could get to conveniently on a weekend from London. Soon it was being purveyed as the definitive music of England, by their followers and documentors. But England is a big place, and a lot of us didn't live in their little bit of it. We felt a touch squeezed out in the far northwest, with these southern chaps making the national running, and the Geordies plugging on regardless with their own completely different stuff in the northeast: we were between the upper and nether millstones. So we tried to do something about it.

1977 AND THE BEGGAR BOY OF THE NORTH
It was time to make a record. I researched, naively and inefficiently to start with, a few tunes to reflect the historical sweep of northwest music. We didn't want to locate it in the backrooms of pubs (which was actually the only place you could really find it); we wanted it to sit in the landscape, in the middle of the history and the culture. So we didn't want the record to sound like an old codger with a concertina. I don't really know, thirty years after, what to make of the sound we did decide to use. It has its moments, I suppose I could say. And the sound wasn't a conscious decision anyway really, it was just who was there at the time. The fact was, we didn't have an old codger with a concertina in Lancaster.
We recorded it first in 1977, with Hugh O'Donnell on fiddle as an extra, in an old engine shed in Lancaster, the premises of New Planet City, pioneers of street percussion in community arts. Paul Adams of Fellside Records manfully twiddled the knobs on the tape recorder, but he was defeated by acoustic problems and torrential rain, So we rejected those recordings, and redid the whole thing in 1978, in Lancaster and Workington: minus Hugh on fiddle, but plus Chris Ashley.
Wild rain happened again in Workington, which explains the rather strange fade-in start on "The Northern Lass". Peadar Long's impeccably played very quiet start was nearly drowned out by rain drumming on the roof, so after careful listening later on Paul had to fade the start in a bit late, when Peadar had got going a bit. Funny start or not, that track was definitely the hit of the record.
Luckily, when the recording was finished in Workington, Paul cleared the microphones and leads away, lined us up and took a photo. So, a little blurred, those wonderful provincial 70's hairstyles are preserved for posterity.

1978 FAME AND FORTUNE
The record came out: "a curious album", as Paul Adams described it in the notes to "Bankside", his Fellside retrospective compilation. We got excellent reviews, and we sat back awaiting the flow of gigs, platinum sales and the triumphant resurgence of northwestern fiddle. Unfortunately, the record sunk without a trace, like many another before and since. It sold about three copies, the remainder lying stacked under Paul's bed. Luckily he got so fed up with them he started giving them away, and one went to Brian Peters, who has been faithfully publicising us ever since. Another piece of useful wet bread.
It didn't lead instantly to popularity for the music, but it did get the ball rolling. My research continued, much more productively, and for two years I read northern fiddlers' manuscript books with enthralled excitement. We had hit paydirt.
I was too busy theatrically to publish the results of the research, but luckily the publicity of the project helped us to meet up with fellow enthusiast Jamie Knowles (of the Tom Shepley Band), who decided to produce a couple of books of northwestern tunes. So I turned my notebooks over to him, and a hundred of the gems I had found made it into the wide world via his "Northern Frisk" and "Northern Lass" tune books (now alas out of print: - hint hint to somebody). Another notebook I filled up at the time I gave away and the tunes unaccountably surfaced on a website recently: my name, I must add, is not mentioned.
So things started to happen. We used some of the tunes in my Welfare State and other theatre work, which was good, as I was too busy to run a performing folk outfit as well. Crookfinger Jack continued broadcasting, and we recorded some lovely music: a programme about Carolan's music (with Wendy Stewart drafted in on harp), the music of Thomas Hardy's novels, and a very eccentric series of broadcasts on seasonal celebrations. That series was the swansong of Crookfinger Jack; Peter Pilbeam stopped producing BBC folk programmes, and so our main outlet was gone. I was also doing more outside community arts work and needed brass and percussion, not wind and strings.

TO WILLIAM IRWIN AND THE PRESENT DAY
One great thing happened to me in 1977 (ish), and again Paul Adams was the cause. He pointed me in the direction of the notebooks of the 19th century Langdale fiddler William Irwin, who was the source for "Keswick Bonny Lasses" on this record. This opened up a whole new world, and started placing the music firmly in the context of the surrounding culture. I had also been meeting more traditional singers and players. Soon I started feeling I was really on to something. Cultural differences and similarities throughout the British Isles, and beyond, became clearer. Oddities occurred: why was our northern music so well received in County Waterford, and with such indifference at home in Cheshire?
Reading Nicholas Blundell's 17th century Lancashire diaries made a whole world come alive. Here was a landed gentleman who socialised, ate and hunted with the bagpiper who he hired to play for family celebrations. This rough and ready egalitarianism (of a kind!) was such a contrast to what I took to be the cultural norms of southern England that I started looking deeper and deeper into the social background of the music. I realised how ignorant we all were: I am sure 99% of the population didn't even know there had been bagpipers in Lancashire. Regional culture started to emerge, and changed shape as you looked at it. If you divided the British Isles into countries, along the rather arbitrary medieval political lines, and sit in the metropolitan centre of London, then of course the English northwest becomes remote, a far flung place of which we know little, except George Formby, tripe and onions and trouble at t'mill. But in the British Isles as a whole, the northwest is the centre, where England rubs against Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and where Liverpool and Manchester were the centres of the world in the industrial revolution. It's all a question of viewpoint. And then you consider that the music went away with the emigrants, and then came back from New Orleans. It's a rich and colourful world.

1485 AND THE BATTLE OF BOSWORTH FIELD
At the end of the Wars of the Roses Richard III's troops, from the far north and the far west, went down spectacularly to the Tudors' mercantile centralist supporters. From then on, London was firmly in charge. And still is, in England at any rate. Northern music is peripheral, marginal, barbaric, quaint and occasionally romantic. The southern plodders have been leading the race for a while, polka-ing away, and the Beggar Boy of the North is still begging. But the tunes are lovely, aren't they? Enjoy.

As Brownie McGhee so aptly observed:

"We may be fighting a losing battle
But having a lot of fun
While trying to win"

Greg Stephens
August 2006