Folks Magazine 1978-80

Folks Magazine ran for 10 issues in the late 1970s.

It started out as a publication for regulars of Folk at the Pitts, an upstairs room folk club that met in the Pitts Head pub, Far Gosford Street, Coventry but it was soon distributed across many of the city’s folk gathering places.

Edited by Pete Willow, before he took on the 33-year-long role of Coventry Telegraph folk writer, it included contributions from songwriters, poets, reviewers of gigs and albums, writers of feature articles and spoof articles, cartoonists and even a crossword compiler! It also carried news and gossip from the Coventry folk community of that time.

Its production relied on the technology of a portable typewriter, Letraset, scalpel, glue, black felt-top pens and a friend’s photocopying machine, plus additional modest income from local advertisers. Copies were sold at local folk clubs and music sessions. By today’s standards, the appearance was amateur, the humour not always PC, and the enthusiasm of contributors raw but Folks was a product of its time and, from today’s perspective, offers fascinating insights into the developing folk scene of Coventry when it was published just 15 years after the so-called Folk Revival.

CVFolk is indebted to Coventry music archivist Trevor Teasdel, who took the trouble of converting the magazine’s stapled A4 pages into Google Docs files and has agreed to us reproducing them here.