No guide to the folk music of Derbyshire would be complete without a chapter on the mighty Muckram Wakes. Over the years, the group has served as a who’s who of the county’s folk scene, including at various times in its ranks John Tams, Helen Watson, Roger Watson, John Adams, Suzie Adams, Keith Kendrick, Ian Carter and Barry Coope. As Lost Folk Tapes continues delving into Derbyshire’s folk history, courtesy of John Terry’s wonderful archive of live recordings, it’s fitting that one of our first stopping off points is not only Muckram Wakes, but the original line-up of John Tams and Roger and Helen Watson. John Terry doesn’t remember many of the details of this particular recording – it was, after all, made nearly 40 years ago – but he thinks it was probably 1973 and that the concert definitely took place in Derby Cathedral. The sound quality isn’t brilliant – but it’s easily good enough to get a flavor of what was clearly an excellent performance by a group who have sadly left little recorded evidence of their existence – the one album released by the original line up, A Map of Derbyshire, is long since out of print and has never made it onto CD. And despite being in the middle of recording a programme commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Luddites due for broadcast by the BBC later in the year and preparing for a trip to the States, John Tams very kindly took time out of his schedule to talk to Lost Folk Tapes.

We began by asking John what if anything he remembered of this concert. “I really have no recollection of the Derby Cathedral concert or what it was for,” he admits. “It might have been something we did for Radio Derby. It’s lovely to hear Gilliver, though, which was one of the great songs written by Roger Watson. And the Holmfirth Anthem came as a bit of a surprise, because I don’t remember us singing it in concert – I’m sure we used to sing it in the car on the way to concerts, though!”

LFT: Going right back to the early days, what was it that first attracted you to folk music? 

JT: I think it was the language of folk song that first drew me to the music. I was drawn to the sorts of information the songs contained and the way that they told certain truths. History books tended to be written in a style that accommodated the views of the day – but the folk songs seemed to tell a different, more basic truth.”

LFT: In the mid sixties, you and a group of friends decided to set up a folk club. Could you tell us a bit about that?

JT: It was in Alfreton in Derbyshire. We had to sort out a team who could run the club and a team who could perform at the club. As my organisational skills weren’t that great, I became part of the team of performers and singers. From this, over time we grew a band, who came to act as the club’s residents. We had some great guests at the club – every Thursday we had people like Mike Harding, Anne Briggs, Nic Jones and Martin Carthy coming through. Not bad for a small market town!

After a while, we started getting enough attention and interest to be invited to play at other clubs – often in the form of exchange visits with the residents of those clubs. We began to get about a bit. We played clubs both locally and further afield – I recall us visiting Nic Jones’s club in Chelmsford on one occasion. We started to get quite successful: we were working as a quartet by now and we had quite an unusual line up of instruments for the time – melodeons, fiddles, even a bouzouki. I was playing the anglo concertina – my grandfather had played and it was his concertina that I played.”

LFT: And was it was around this time that Muckram Wakes was born?

JT: Yes, it was. Roger was playing in a duo with Colin Cater at the time and we used to book them for the club. Roger and I decided we should form a trio with his girlfriend, Helen Wainwright, or Helen Watson as she became. We toured extensively from the early to mid-seventies and had the opportunity of becoming professional, or at least semi-professional musicians, which was quite an experience for us. 

LFT: What about the name, Muckram Wakes? Where does that come from? It almost sounds too good to be true… 

JT: The name Muckram Wakes comes from a real place. I spent my early years living in a pub run by my parents in Somercotes, which was a coalmining area. There was place nearby called Pennytown, which is famed for being the smallest town in the world – it has just two houses! The area around Pennytown is known as Muckram. Lots of members of my family are from round there, including my Uncle Roland, who was a hedger and ditcher. In fact, everyone in the area called him Uncle Roland, but he really was my uncle. I always liked the name Muckram – for a start off, it’s got ‘muck’ in it - and ‘ram’ has the obvious Derbyshire connotation. And I’ve always been fascinated by the wakes – in fact I used to work on the fairgrounds for a while when I left school. 

After I left the group, I was very pleased that the others kept using the name – and quite a lot of people went through Muckram Wakes over the years, including, at one stage, Barry Coope, who I perform with now. 

LFT: So was the exploration of your Derbyshire roots an important part of what you did? 

JT: The Derbyshire connection was always important to us. I used to go to a club in Chesterfield run by a wonderful and saintly man by the name of Frank Sutton. He was a great songwriter but he was also a collector. One of the most important things he told me was to ‘look in your own backyard’ - go out and find the songs from your own area. And so I did, looking in local libraries and collections and archives and doing some song collecting myself. In a way, that was what the album, A Map of Derbyshire, was all about – we were trying to encourage other revival singers to do the same sort of thing we were doing. I met a singer called George Fradley and from him I collected some of the songs that we sang on A Map of Derbyshire: he gave us Mrs Merry’s Ball and Fifty Years Ago. He was a great reliquary of songs – he knew many traditional songs but he also had songs that had been made by members of his family, particularly his father, Albert, who by all accounts was quite a prolific maker of songs.

LFT: How did A Map of Derbyshire come about?

JT: Bill Leader had heard about us. He invited us down to Cecil Sharp House in London where he had a four-track studio set up in the basement. We recorded the album with him in two, at the most three, days. It was time of real joy for us, making that album - and especially so because we were celebrating the songs of our own neighbourhood. 

The collection and celebration of our local songs is still going on. I’m part of a group called the Derbyshire Volunteers. There are about twenty of us, and we get together to play for charity – it’s an opportunity for to sing and dance and drink together. We have set up a charitable fund and we distribute the money we make to a variety of causes – we’ve recently sent some to the fund for the victims of the tsunami in Japan and we sent some to Christchurch Folk Club following the earthquake they suffered - we’ve got links with them stretching back for years. And we’re still investigating and researching the songs and tunes of the county.

You can find out all about John Tams and his current activities at his website. There are a couple of videos of the Derbyshire Volunteers in action up on Youtube that you can find here and here. The photo of John Tams is courtesy of John Terry and was taken one cold Easter on a narrowboat heading from from Market Harborough to Oxford and back. 
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We've managed to get in touch with Helen Hockenhull, who has given her blessing to us making this recording available, but we still haven't spoken to Roger Watson. So if by any chance you're reading this, Roger, please do get in touch with us at contact@lostfolktapes.com.