Mike Yates, 1943–
Mike Yates is one of the most important post-war collectors. He has recorded singers and musicians in Yorkshire, Scotland and, following in the footsteps of Cecil Sharp, in the Appalachian Mountains of the USA. But the majority of his recordings were made in Southern England, particularly among gypsies and travellers, and while he recorded relatively few singers in Kent itself, he made numerous recordings of singers with Kentish connections.
Mike has written about how he came to be a collector in an article entitled ‘Time Has Made a Change – some reflections’ (Musical Traditions, 2021, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/time-change.htm). His interest in folk music was initially sparked by BBC schools radio programmes, the songs sung by his father and grandfather, Peter Kennedy’s As I roved out radio broadcasts, James Reeves’ anthology of folk song words The Idiom of the People, then skiffle and blues. He borrowed a tape recorder, and made his first recordings, while doing Voluntary Service Overseas in the Solomon Islands. On his return to the UK in 1963 he worked in the Sound Library at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, as an assistant to Peter Kennedy. His parents bought him a Uher tape recorder in 1964, and he used it to make his first recordings of an English singer:
One of my first song collecting trips was to Shropshire, to visit Fred Jordan. Fred had previously been recorded for the radio program ‘As I Roved Out’ and had sung in quite a number of folk clubs and festivals. He was quite used to singing into a microphone and was quite happy for me to record many of his songs. Shortly afterwards I contacted Topic Records in London and asked if they might like to issue an album. Gerry Sharp, then Topic’s managing director, liked the idea and Bill Leader, Topic’s recording engineer (and a man who taught me a lot about recording techniques), collected Fred en-route to my parent’s pub in Altringham. We recorded the album -‘Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker’, Topic 12T150 – in my bedroom over a couple of days.
In the mid-1970s numerous LPs of Mike’s field recordings were issued on Topic Records. One of the first of these was the 1974 album Blackberry Fold, which presented a selection from the repertoire of George Spicer (long resident in Sussex, but born and brought up in Little Chart) and several compilation LPs featuring multiple Southern English singers. Among these compilations were Green grow the laurels (two tracks recorded at St Margarets at Cliffe from Jack Goodban), and Songs of the open road and The Travelling Songster, which featured songs and dance tunes recorded from English gypsies. The singers on these albums included Joe Jones and Bill Ellson (both recorded in Kent), Phoebe Smith (recorded in Suffolk, but born and raised in East Kent), and the siblings Minty, Levi and Jasper Smith, who had spent their lives travelling through Kent and Surrey.
Jasper Smith, Bill Ellson and Joe Jones also appeared on the 1985 Topic album, Travellers, as well as Chris Willett, four of whose songs had appeared on the influential 1962 LP of the Willett Family, The Roving Journeymen. Mike wrote of that earlier LP
This was the album that introduced me to the singing of English Gypsies. When I started collecting songs from English singers, I quickly remembered this album and, to start with, I used to take it with me to Gypsy camps, playing the tracks to any Gypsy who was interested in listening. It was a good way of finding out if any of the listeners knew any songs themselves, because they were soon singing along with the Willets.1
In 1984, on a visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the then librarian Malcolm Taylor introduced me to Mike Yates, and I arranged for him to come down to Stone-in-Oxney to record Charlie Bridger. These recordings appeared initially on Veteran Tapes releases, but subsequently – like a lot of Mike’s field recordings from the 1960s, 70s and 80s – have been available via releases on the Musical Traditions label. Copies of Mike’s entire sound recording archive are deposited with the British Library and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
- Mike Yates, Ten Records that Changed my Life, Musical Traditions, 2006, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/ten.htm ↩︎
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