Pub Sessions Are A Delight - How To Have A Good Time At Pubs in Brighton

A pub session means playing music and/or singing in the relaxed social location of a local pub, in which the music-making is interacted with the intake of ale, stout, and beer and conversation. Performers sing and play traditional songs and tunes from the Irish, English and Scottish traditions, using instruments such as the fiddle, accordion, concertina, flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, tenor banjo, guitar, and bodhrán.

History of Pub Sessions All Around The World

Singing and drinking have occurred together from ancient times, but written evidence is scrappy until the 16th century. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Hal and Falstaff discuss drinking and playing the "tongs and the bones". There are respectable depictions of pub singing in paintings by Teniers, Brouwers but

the best ones are by Jan Steen.

The 1830 Beer Act eliminated the levy on beer and rapidly doubled the number of pubs in England. The number peaked in the 1870s and declined after 1900. By the 1850s, a growing number of student songs and commercial song books were printed across Europe. The most famous was the Scottish Students' Song Book by John Stuart Blackie. The blend of traditional songs with hints of erotic humour remains to this day. The Irish tradition also benefited from the compilation of O'Neill's Music of Ireland, a compilation of 1,850 pieces of Irish session and dance music, published initially by Francis O'Neill in 1903.

One of the most popular drinking songs, "Little Brown Jug," dates from the 1860s. By 1908 Percy

Grainger had begun to record folk singers, but not in their natural habitat, the pub. In 1938A.L. Lloyd persuaded his employers at the BBC to record the singers in the Eel's Foot pub in Eastbridge, Suffolk.

At The Eel's Foot, the songs performed included: "False Hearted Knight", "The Dark-Eyed Sailor", "The Princess Royal", "The Foggy Dew", "Underneath Her Apron", "Pleasant and Delightful", "The

Blackbird." Astonishingly, one of the songs was "Poor Man's Heaven" an American IWW song Industrial Workers of the World, dating from about 1920. The oldest singer there was William "Velvet" Brightwell. In 1947 the BBC made more recordings there and broadcast them as "Anglia Sings" on 19 November 1947. Nearly all of the members were in their 50s and 60s. Six years later the first folk club opened in Newcastle upon Tyne, and the average age was in the 20s.

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http://www.uksessions.net/
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