South Riding Folk Arts Network

Today, I attended Making Music for Malcolm, a wonderful and warm celebration of the life of Malcolm Douglas. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working towards breathing some life back into this website, which Malcolm so ably developed and managed until his tragic death in March of this year. But today I feel more strongly than ever the will to keep Malcolm’s work here going.

It was the South Riding Folk Network’s MayFest of 1997 that first got me into folk music and dance, and my enthusiasm for it led me to help out with The Network in the years since. Malcolm, with his hugely generous spirit and can-do attitude, was one of the great engines of the SRFN, and as it wound down and passed the baton to other groups, Malcolm continued to keep this website running as an invaluable resource. As I enjoyed the company of friends today and played in the third attempt to create the World’s Biggest Ceilidh Band, it hit me with full force just how much I miss Malcolm and the Network. In this website, I think Malcolm kept alive the possibility of a South Riding Folk Arts Network.

The SRFAN wound down because of a feeling that it had largely achieved its original mission. It had managed to create a strong sense of community and cooperation between dance teams, folk clubs, singers and musicians. It gave them a sense of their own strength and value, and they started to get some of the recognition they had always deserved from the media and the public at large. When the Network decided to call it a day, there was a rich collection of other groups organising and promoting folk music, song and dance. There still are, and “the scene” seems to be getting stronger all the time.

Today’s event proved that there is a strong network of friendship and collaboration among folkies in the “South Riding”. The South Riding Folk Arts Network has become a much-loved token of our community. I think it has gone beyond being a committee or an organisation. The SFRAN is us. Our website is one of the last remaining services of the Network, which Malcolm nurtured with his deep knowledge and the gift of his precious time (and only now do we fully appreciate just how precious that time was). I think there are few individuals that might match his efforts, and I know I couldn’t even come close. Instead, what I hope to achieve here is to develop the website into an area of collaboration between us all.

I have built this new website using Drupal – an open-source tool for creating community websites. It provides the wherewithal for anybody to create an account, log in and add their own stuff, or work with others to maintain some shared pages. No special technical skills are needed, and I will be “on hand” to help people learn the ropes.

The core part of what I can do here is to manage the technical aspects of the site and add new sections and features according to demand. To begin with, I shall try to gather information and articles to share here. But as time goes by, it is my hope that others will take the plunge and find out how easy it is to add and maintain their own stuff. I hope that many dance teams, folk clubs and bands will add their own events and news. And I hope those with knowledge of our traditions and artforms might find time to write about them in The Library.

Our website belongs to all of us, and it is only our continued fellowship and collaboration that will sustain it into the future. And I think it will be a very bright future.