Tenterden Folk Club present TOM
LEWIS in concert
Tenterden Folk
Club, with support from the White Lion, presents Tom Lewis in concert on
Friday 19th March at the Saddlery at The White Lion Hotel in
the High Street, Tenterden from 8.00 p.m. This follows our sell out
evening of Irish songs and stories in February so early booking is strongly
recommended.
Tom Lewis brings
to the stage wry humour, button accordion, ukulele, a great voice and his
unique experience of more than 40 years entertaining the sea-going and
folk-singing communities. According to the Canadian Society for
Traditional Music, Tom is “widely acknowledged as North America's finest exponent of contemporary nautical
songs”. In fact Tom was born in Belfast, Northern
Ireland and then moved with his family
to Gloucester, England for his Grammar School
years. He joined the Royal Navy as an Engineering Apprentice in 1959,
just a few days after his sixteenth birthday. He served mainly on diesel
submarines until leaving the navy in 1983 including spending some time based
in Kent at Chatham.
Tom’s interest in
folk music and sea songs started in around 1960 while based in Scotland where he heard such
luminaries as Willie Scott, Alex Glasgow, Ewan McColl, Archie Fisher, John
Watt and Louis Killen singing at local clubs. Around this time Cyril
Tawney, also a folk singing sailor, and his songs were becoming celebrated
throughout the world of folk music and had an enormous influence on Tom's own
development as a writer and entertainer. Tom managed to establish
himself as a popular singer at folk clubs and festival while still in the navy
and collaborated with the late Johnny
Collins, Jim
Mageean and many others. One of Tom’s best known
and most sung songs is "Marching inland (from the shore)" which originally
featured on the “Live at Herga” album and helped to establish him as a
composer as well as a singer. Since that time it is a rare event for a
song session anywhere in the English speaking world not to include at least
one of Tom's songs.
On completion of
his naval service in 1983, Tom and his wife Lyn emigrated to the mountains of
British Columbia probably taking the advice of the sailor in “Marching Inland”
to get somewhere completely different from a large port and later moved on to
Salmo, B.C. Tom was in great demand to sing at clubs in North America and in 1987 they decided to “take the
show on the road”. The first place it led was to a recording studio and
Tom’s very successful album Surfacing. Now after twenty years, hundreds
of thousands of miles in cars, motorhomes and aircraft, tours in Australia,
Britain, Europe, Canada and the United States, major festival and tiny
coffeehouses, as well as six more albums, Tom is back in Tenterden where he
has appeared several times before.
Tom has translated
his love of singing into a way of life and his previous existence as a sailor
and his reincarnation as a musical ex-sailor bringing enjoyment to all that
hear him.
Tickets £7.00 on
the door or £6.00 in advance from Tenterden Folk
Festival
Festival and Club
information:
More details
of Tenterden Folk
Festival 2010 and Tenterden Folk Club, guests,
accommodation and camping are now being posted on our website at www.tenterdenfolkfestival.org.uk.
Alan
Castle
Folk Spots
Tenterden Folk
Festival
Folk songs from Kent Vol. 3
(2008)
A new CD from Folk Spots and
Steel Carpet Music featuring Pete
Castle, Andy Turner, Bob Kenward and Roger Resch, The Millen Family, Marian Button and
Dave Mason.