“The past is a fake. It must be destroyed.” Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Actually, that isn’t a quote by Henry Miller. I just came up with it. Which takes me neatly onto my grand thesis…. There’s a persistent misconception in the folk community around “authenticity” and the spit-flecked need to preserve it. There’s a convention of researching the most obscure version of a song. Committing it to memory. Performing it along with a lengthy introduction about its origins (knowledge-wielding masqueraded as information-sharing). Then delivering it at a solemn pace, as if the performer is a medium at a seance; channelling the ancient voices of our forebears for our supplicant edification. Whilst pretending to be a milkmaid who’s been wronged by a plough boy or some shit.

Fuck that.

Folk music is a mongrel breed. Unreliable. Malleable. Promiscuous. The most exciting moments happen in its imperfections. The grit and grain of the old voices and their idiosyncratic ornamentations. The unintentional shifts in pitch. The untutored relationships to their instruments. The misheard lyric. The personality of the performer bringing out all the elemental, carnal beauty of the text- as if leavening a trowel under the mossy rock of our collective memory and showing us what’s writhing beneath.

Thank Jack-in-the-Green then for banjo player, Jacken Elswyth, who is so fluent in the tradition that she immediately evokes most of its major contributors (Roscoe Holcomb, Dink Roberts, Margaret Barry, Dock Boggs) while bringing something new to the conversation. In fact she has more in common with avant-hillbilly Henry Flynt in terms of zoning in on the most abstruse details of folk-form and amplifying them into hypnotic prayers. Foregrounding the shadow-drone that underpins all folk song and manifesting it as a devotional pulse. Using repetition and pattern-shift like the warp and weft of a weaver at their loom. Her banjo cogitating and coagulating like memories tunnelling into apprehension.

Mixed metaphors and spurious comparisons aside, Jacken is only equivalent to folk iconoclasts such as Flynt or Alastair Galbraith because she’s reached similar conclusions. By immersing herself in the medium and operating at its margins, she has developed a very singular voice and an intensely personal approach.

This observation is borne out by the fact that she makes her own banjos. And spent lockdown breaking them in, while dancing around the great totems of British culture- Topic Records’ Voice of the People series- birthing a music that reflected both the ennui of our self-isolation and the sophisticated savagery of our greatest music.

That is what we hear here. Six Static Scenes is a masterpiece in stasis. Exhibiting the slowly blossoming beauty of a single idea pushed to its limit. Jacken is like Giotto in her ability to apply deeply human faces to predicaments that had previously seemed anonymous. And to use peripheral information as a rich bouquet of detail, bringing to mind the old gardeners adage; there are no such things as weeds. Only misplaced flowers.

The past isn’t fake. And doesn’t need destroying. It just shouldn’t be put in a jar and mansplained at folk concerts. It can be used as a springboard to creativity, not a ring-fence. All hail Jacken Elswyth for being brave enough to blaze the trail.

Alex Neilson, Gran Canaria, December 2021.