Folk
music hasn’t always been as progressive as it might be – so it’s heartening to see queer-friendly collectives like Bogha-frois and FemFolk flourish
In February, on the final night of this year’s Celtic Connections festival, folk music travelled through time in two directions at once. In the main room of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was a variety evening with some of the genre’s biggest names. One floor up in the Strathclyde Suite, the Bogha-frois (or rainbow, pronounced Boa frosh) project was bringing together queer folk musicians from
Scotland and beyond, with “Trans rights are human rights” marked out in black tape on a cajon drum, and a rainbow-coloured fiddle lighting up the back of the stage. The setup in both rooms was much the same – intriguing collaborations in which emerging acts shared the stage with more established ones. But while one room celebrated folk music’s recent history, the other pondered what it might yet be.
This month’s global Pride events acknowledge the richness of queer identity, and folk music is increasingly part of that: gay, lesbian, trans and other artists are using it to communicate their experiences and speak to a community whose stories are rare in the genre. As the Canadian folk songwriter Ariana Brophy says, “folk songs and clubs are overwhelmingly dominated by men, in intimidatingly masculine and heteronormative contexts.” Now, space is being carved outside the traditional club circuit.