So What's It All About?
Lost Folk Tapes is a website dedicated to bringing you forgotten and nearly forgotten folk recordings from the period 1965 - 1984. The first thing to say is that the time frame we've chosen is completely arbitrary - if anyone sends us something that fits with the general theme of the site but is a bit older or a bit newer, rest assured it won't get turned away - the main rule of thumb is that we're not really looking for new or recent stuff - there's plenty of other places on the internet for that.
What we'll be doing is posting stuff from self-released tapes and vinyl and from albums issued by long-defunct independent labels that can loosely be described as folk - whether that's traditional music, acoustic singer song-writing, gentle psychedelia, folk-rock, country-folk... you name it, we want to hear it and share it! We're also interested in demo tapes and halfway decent live recordings from the era, too.
What's different about this site is that it's not just another bootleg site. All the music you hear has been sent to us by the people involved with making it, or if they've passed on, their good friends and family members. The performers themselves decide what we do with what they send us - if they just want the music available for people to listen to on the site, we'll do that; if they want to make their stuff available for free download, we'll do that. Just as importantly, we want to know about who the people were who made this music, so we'll post biographies, reminiscences, photos and stories to provide a little background and context. Finally this is a blog, which means you can add your comments - if you were there, but in the crowd rather than on the stage, we want to hear from you.
We don't intend to impose too many limits and boundaries to the site (apart from obviously stuff like if you were in a hair metal band we won't be adding your music to the archive!) because we're basically liberal-minded, easy going types. If we were older we'd probably be old hippies. The fact that we are liberal-minded does mean, however, that if stuff like a bunch of hymns in praise of the master race or anything similarly distasteful comes our way we're pretty unlikely to add it.
So welcome to Lost Folk Tapes. We hope you enjoy your visit!
