Mike Waterson

January 16th 1941 to June 22nd 2011

I first heard of Mike Waterson's via text, rather than as a news article. This shows how important he was to the folk community as opposed to media organisations.

In my time running Fatea, I bumped into Mike about a handful of times and had a couple of short conversations with him twice. On both of those occasions he was more interested in talking about acts that were just starting out in the folk world than he was about talking about his own career and the influence he had on that very world. He was a man passionate about his music.

Ironically, I'd been thinking quite a bit about Waterson Carthy in the few days that ran up to his death as The Watersons were featured in the film club at Beverley Folk Festival. It gave me the opportunity to talk to his fans from across his nearly fifty year career.

Common consensus was that despite his immense contributions to the folk and particularly folk song movement, that he was still under recognised, particularly for his ability to interpret song. He had a great sense of humour, but that on his day he could be, 'a miserable bugger' (You probably need to read that in a Yorkshire accent) and always proud of his working class roots. No one had a bad word to say about him and there's no better obituary you can have than that.

Neil King