New traditional English folk music and dance style tunes composed by Anne Gregson enhance the pub folk music session repertoire

Occasionally, at the beginning of a mainly traditional English music session in a pub somewhere in England, I ask whether today we are going to play a completely new set of traditional English tunes.

Of course this draws a wry smile from the gathered traditional English musicians because we all know that we are there to play tunes that have often been played not only by ourselves but also by other musicians over many hundreds of years.

Playing these tunes keeps the tradition of English dance tunes and music alive, they have stood the test of time and we enjoy playing them.

The general public in the pub too seem to enjoy listening to them (they even clap sometimes). English tunes have a straightforward cheerfulness that is endearing and listening to this sort of music seems to put a smile on their faces which cannot be all bad.

Well, at the Priddy Folk Festival 2011 last weekend, after playing with Chris Timson and Anne Gregson (seen in photo on left) in their mainly traditional English session at the Royal Oak Saturday lunchtime for about three hours, when I turned up to repeat the experience on Sunday lunchtime, I was passed a booklet of tunes entitled 'A little book of tunes by Anne Gregson'.

According to the introduction of the book, these are tunes that 'have 'come to me from time to time, a process that has been going on since 1965'.

I've often wondered where the many tunes that we play in folk music sessions come from. Somebody, somewhere must have composed them, even if they didn't write them down but instead passed them on by ear to be recorded for posterity by a passing folk tradition enthusiast perhaps many years later. Maybe this was a little bit of folk history in the making.

Indeed, I discovered very quickly, when I played the tunebook through on my flute this morning, that at least one of the tunes was one I had played before at previous mainly traditional English folk music sessions, without knowing it was written by Anne Gregson. So a start has already been made for the tunes to become a standard part of the traditional folk music repertoire.

The tunes are written in a variety of styles and further information will soon to be found, I'm told, on a new website called www.annegregson.co.uk. Some are waltzes, some are polkas, there is at least one with a distinct swing and some have a rather French flavour, others are perhaps reminiscent of the Playford style.

So if you want to try some new tunes that will fit in very well with the traditional English pub session playing repertoire, or if you are a beginner at playing traditional English tunes and would like a handy list or booklet of reasonably easy tunes for instrumental practice purposes, Anne Gregson's book of tunes could well be worth checking out and I look forward to playing some of them with you at a future traditional and perhaps not so traditional English pub music session :-)