My Cultural Awakening: A 1960s Folk Band That Helped Me Find My Place as a Person of Color in Britain | culture

I He was 15 years old; At that faltering and awkward age on the brink of adulthood, I am desperately trying to figure out who I am, who I want to be, and where I belong in this world. I grew up always feeling “in the middle”: half white and half black; Half British, half Caribbean, and on the fault line between what sometimes feels like two worlds at war.

One night in 2008, my father took me to see the play Pentangle at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The band rose to fame in the late 1960s, becoming known for fusing British folk tunes with blues and jazz. I must have stood out in the crowd – among the bearded men in sandals and socks – with my big earrings and slicked-back hair. And although I lingered on my way in, when I emerged from the concert later that auspicious summer evening, I was forever changed.

The old folk songs I heard from Pentangle that night sounded eerie and old, but somehow comforting; They spoke to an indefinite longing inside me that seemed as old as time. I remember being particularly moved by their version of “The Cuckoo,” a sad 18th-century song about the migratory bird whose song signals the coming of summer. I downloaded it as soon as I got home and connected with the song in private, and was instantly transported into the past; Not just to the late 1960s, when it was recorded, but what seemed like even further back, to an enchanted British past.

Pentangle’s rendition of The Cuckoo was a gateway drug of sorts; It was my entrée into the mysteries of British popular culture, and it sparked an obsession with standing stones, ancient myths, druids, pagans, and seasonal folk customs practiced in remote areas of the country – a strange preoccupation I could never quite shake. I learned about Wassling, Morris dancing, and mummers’ plays. About Welsh Mari Lwyd, Highland folklore and the country’s ancient folk songs, which offer an alternative history of the nation, are told from A to Z. These songs, stories and customs seem to spring from a very different kind of Britain than that conjured up by anthems like Rule, Britannia! Or by Union Jack. They had nothing to do with the monarchy, the army, or the empire; Instead they conjured a vision of a Britain that was enchanted, subversive, and alien: a Britain that I felt I could belong to.

I have kept my popular passion to myself for a long time; I always felt it was a bit strange. But as I got older I began to realize the connections between British traditions and those I had heard about in the Caribbean. Like Carriacou’s Shakespeare’s Mas, in which revelers in flamboyant costumes read Shakespeare’s monologues to each other in the streets; Pole dancing tradition in Jamaica; And the sea shanties that moved back and forth between Britain and the New World along the slave trade routes, absorbing call-and-response as they went. Even Notting Hill Carnival, considered by many to be a distinctly Caribbean tradition, was, in an early incarnation, styled as an old English festival. These fused habits spoke of a kind of meeting place within me; They were products of Britain’s dark and complex colonial history, yet they were expressions of creativity, resistance and exchange: new flowers, rising from the ashes of empire.

Over the years, I have met countless people, from all walks of life, who have also been drawn to the radical potential of folklore and its ability to unite us. Roaming the streets in homemade costumes; coming together to tell stories passed down by older people; And rising at dawn to celebrate the cycles of the sun – these simple actions are the basics that connect us across cultures and across time. They speak to and from the essential part of us that longs for story, ritual, community, and connection to the ground beneath our feet, wherever on Earth we may stand.

It was all there in Pentangle’s music, now that I think about it – in their fusion of old English folk songs and syncopated jazz rhythms, which made their way to Britain, via America, from West Africa; Much like the cuckoo itself, which travels between the two lands every year From which my ancestors descend. I will be forever grateful to Pentangle for this transformative gig.