Salut! Folk

Colin Randall writes: in a bit of a rush to beat the end of June, I have brought forward a long-standing plan to feature Johnny Handle in some way.

To quote what I said here in our series on music from North-eastern England, Handle has for decades been an ´outstanding fixture of the North-eastern folk scene with his authoritative knowledge of mining, an evocative way with words and his pioneering of the Geordie/pitmatic humour that enthralled audiences well beyond the region’. Now 90, Johnny Handle is long overdue for inclusion in Salut! Live’s Artist of the Month academy ….

Long ago, I came up with an idea for an arts feature for The Daily Telegraph – I worked there for 29 years without inhaling – highlighting a novel course at Newcastle University to nurture and promote promising young folk musicians. In the resulting piece, which with gratifying prominence graced the front page of the Weekend supplement, I wrote these words:

Thirty years ago, I badgered my sceptical father, the secretary of a County Durham workingmen’s club, into hiring Johnny Handle, a prominent Geordie folk singer, for a Sunday lunchtime slot. The hall filled with men supping pints of Federation Best, men whose working lives had been spent in railway works and coalmines. How they would warm to an artist whose songs and jokes reflected their experiences, I thought.

They did not. In the first half, they carried on talking and ignored him completely. After the interval bingo session, they poured downstairs for darts or dominoes. My father made a mental note never again to pander to his son’s perverse musical tastes.

I then quoted Alistair Anderson, a revered Tyneside musician and inspiration for the university course, as siding with the drinkers. Anderson has deep appreciation of and affection for Handle but pointed out that for all his qualities, Handle had been imposed – effectively by me – on an unwilling audience, invading their “space”.

As much as I was embarrassed, I knew he was right. As he went on to say, Handle might in more suitable surroundings – such as the upstairs room of a pub – have had the same men singing along with his choruses.

With usual thanks to Roger Liptrot and his wonderful Folk Images site

Certainly, Johnny Handle deserves to be known as a performer who represents, champions and loves his region, its history and its ordinary people.

He plays accordion, keyboards, banjo, whistle and the Northumbrian pipes and has a rich, warm voice and an almost effortlessly engaging and amusing stage presence.

I have seen him out of what might be considered his comfort zone. At a folk club in Gloucestershire, he had the audience laughing in stitches at his wonderful Geordie adaptations of biblical stories, also deeply impressed by his musicianship. His discography goes back on my brief search to Northumberland For Ever, an album by the High Level Ranters that I have previously cited as marking my transition from pop and rock, and American folk, to tradiitonal British folk. I can listen to it again still and do.

It has often occurred to me that this important but relatively small region of England, where I grew up, has generated music as worthy of recognition as the magnificent output of Ireland.

 

Johnny Handle is up there with the towering figures of this vibrant cultural scene, along with – in no chosen order – the Elliots of Birtley, Tom Gilfellon, Ed Pickford, Mick Elliott, Nick Fenwick, Louis Killen, Bob Davenport, Bennie Graham, Bob Fox, Alistair Anderson, Tom McConville, Vin Garbutt, the Doonans, the Unthanks, Kathryn Tickell, Mick Sheehan, Pete Herring, the Wilsons, the Fettlers, the Reivers, Alan Hull, Jez Lowe, Marie Little, Bill Jones and so many more that I shall be tweaking this for days to come to avoid unjust omission.

 

Back  in 1958, with Louis Killen, Handle founded the celebrated folk club at Newcastle’s Bridge Hotel. With the Ranters and in solo performance or with collaborators,  he toured the folk clubs and other venues where folk could be found.

 

A fine article in in the Hexham Courant from 2017 summarises Handle’s career in exemplary fashion:

Eric Burdon once said that the first time he heard House of the Rising Sun, it was being sung in a Newcastle club by the then young Northumbrian folk singer Johnny Handle.During the same period, in the early 1960s, one Luke Kelly was working as a porter in Newcastle and going along to the folk club established by Handle in the city’s Bridge tavern. Kelly later said he “went home and founded the Dubliners”.