Over the last few months, I have been able to watch at close quarters the gestation and birth of the British Awards for Storytelling Excellence (BASE), led by my friends Shonaleigh and Peter Chand, and supported by my better half, Abi.  I’ve listened in on their conversations as they’ve navigated round problems and taken on suggestions from the wider storytelling world.  I’ve found it a fascinating process to watch, because it seems that storytellers are to gain their own version of the BAFTAs, BRITs or Folk Awards, different in one important respect – the BASE Awards will be decided mainly by the public, rather than expert panels.

National awards, voted for by the public.  I think there are a couple of really powerful aspects to this.

The public aren’t an industry

Folk arts are “of the people”. They are forged by people going about their daily lives; people celebrating their lives with the turn of the seasons; people collectively expressing their joys and their hardships.  I sometimes get a little uneasy with the growing “professionalisation” of the folk arts.  I think in today’s folk arts community, in Britain, we are tentatively holding a contradiction in balance.  If folk artists are trained and professionalised performers, working in the “folk music industry”, is there a danger we’ll start redefining “folk” as a “sound” rather than a tradition or a culture?  I’m going to stick my neck out and say I think there is.

There are lots of reasons for this profesionalisation, but Awards ceremonies have a role to play. I think that Awards handed out by broadcasting or publishing institutions are inherently part of the industry.  They tend to value that which progresses the industry.  But the health of “folk” may not be best served by an industry.  It may even be poorly served if, as with rock music, the celebration of narrowly defined success leads a majority of people to think they’re not good enough to sing or play themselves, and settle for being consumers of other people’s art.

With their public nominations and voting, the BASE awards are the polar opposite of an industry.  That’s not to say that “industry” couldn’t influence things for BASE.  It might turn out that professional artists with lots of exposure can attract more votes. But with careful targeting of storytelling clubs, and careful attention to the categories, perhaps BASE will be successful in achieving a balance.

Experts tend to view things in a certain way

This point is going to risk sounding anti-academic, which I’m not. Personally speaking, I have an academic nature, and I greatly value learned experts, research and study.  We wouldn’t be where we are today without academics. They carried our traditions through wars which decimated our population and our orally-transmitted folk culture.  If not for them, we probably wouldn’t even be doing this stuff.  Alright then – here comes the “but”…

There is an acknowledged problem in anthropology (the study of people and culture) that academic knowledge or expertise can put a distance between the anthropologist studying a culture, and the people actually living the culture – and this distance can make it harder for the observer to properly understand the subject.  Some things have to be experienced or “felt”, as well as simply understood on an academic level.  Of course, this issue is understood by cultural studies and anthropology these days, so the patronising academics of yesteryear are fading into history. Hopefully.  But one of the best antidotes to this problem is to blur the distinction between academic and subject altogether, as with this Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.  The researchers there completely immersed themselves in the culture they were studying, and the voices of their “subjects” were those that were most strongly heard in the results.

So let me quickly cut to the chase before you move on to YouTube. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, folk arts are crowd-sourced art.  It doesn’t matter how expert someone is, their experience will be just one part of something which is much greater than the sum of its parts.

So who’s up for something a little different?

One of the fundamental aims of the BASE Awards is to promote storytelling as an artform, and to encourage new storytellers.  These people would have us all telling stories if they could get their way.  Well, that’s we all want as folk artists isn’t it?

I’d love to see some of the amazing and not-in-any-way famous singers in our local pub sessions celebrated every bit as much as the wonderful Bella Hardys and Jon Bodens.  I think that the folk arts would flourish even more if we could find a way of coaxing our hundreds of “hidden” singers, musicians and dancers into the limelight – if only because there would be a wider range of sources and influences to inspire us.  The influences of industry are to simplify things to make them easier to package and sell.  Publicly-decided folk awards might counter this tendency by actively seeking out the unrecorded, the unbooked and the unprofessional.

And on that beautifully clumsy note – how do we encourage unprofessional people – I think I’ll open this up to you.  What are your thoughts?