Folk Festivals
Folk festivals began to be organised by the EFDSS from about 1950, usually as local or regional event with an emphasis on dance, like the Sidmouth Festival (from 1955) and the Keele Festival (1965), which was abandoned in 1981 but reinstituted three years later as the National Folk Festival. The EFDSS gave up its organizing role in these festivals in the 1980s and most are locally run and financed. One of the largest and most prestigious English folk festivals at Cambridge was founded in 1965 and attracts about 10,000 people. Probably the largest is Fairport's Cropredy Convention, which since 1979 has provided a venue for folk, electric folk and rock artists and now attracts up to 20,000 people a year as well as performances for Fairport Convention and their friends. Like rock festivals, folk festivals have begun to multiply since the 1990s and there are over a hundred folk festivals or varying sizes held in England every year.
Read more about this topic: Folk Music Of England
Famous quotes containing the words folk and/or festivals:
“In the past, the English tried to impose a system wherever they went. They destroyed the nation’s culture and one of the by- products of their systemisation was that they destroyed their own folk culture.”
—Martin Carthy (b. 1941)
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)