THERE are several activities you wouldn’t normally associate with Worcester. Downhill skiing, mud wrestling, clog dancing and making boomerangs are a few that come to mind. Likewise, an all consuming interest in the music of America’s Deep South.

The Hylton Road bund hardly passes for a levee and the marshy areas of Powick Hams don’t quite cut it as being born on the bayou.

Surprise then that three years ago, the city played host to a major conference on what is colloquially known as American Roots Music, which attracted people from all over the world, and now comes the book.

The driving force for this is Dr Jill Terry, who enjoys the lengthy title of head of English, journalism and media and cultural studies at the University of Worcester.

Jill, who comes from Horsham not Houston, has long been a folk music fan and singer. She organised the Roots Music event, which was based at the university, and has co-authored the follow-up book called Transatlantic Roots Music: Folk, Blues and National Identities with Neil Wynn, who is professor of American History at the University of Gloucester.

The book is a compilation of essays based on presentations given at the conference, including material by Paul Oliver, the world’s leading blues scholar, who is English and lives in Oxfordshire.

All this interplay between the folk and blues scenes, considering the merits of people like Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie and Howlin’ Wolf and exactly what The Animals were doing with House of the Rising Sun, might seem a bit like navel gazing among the afficianados, until you come to a chapter entitled Groove Me: Dancing to the Discs of Northern South. Because here, at last, Worcestershire gets a look-in.

As a music style – which really had more to do with a dance tempo than anything else – Northern Soul broke through to national prominence in the UK around 1970 and produced several hits such as The Tams’ Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me and The Newbeats’ Run, Baby, Run, in the following couple of years. However, there were at least a couple of venues playing it regularly in Worcestershire long before, so in that respect the county can claim some credit for bringing it to the nation.

It was back in 1967 that Kempsey record producer and singer with the CMJ band Muff Murfin and his drummer John Haithwaite, who had amassed a huge collection of records, many of them rare imports, began running what were then called Disc-O-Dances at The Bank House, Bransford, which was a country pub looking to expand its revenue.

Initially held on a Monday night – which was a strange night for a night out – and later Fridays too, they soon became highly popular, with about 500 people crammed into a room which was, in truth, probably meant for rather less.

Cars arrived from anywhere between Birmingham and Gloucester and there was the inevitable friction between rival factions. However, out on the dancefloor there were new sounds in town. The events attracted students from what is now the University of Worcester, but back then was a teachers’ training college. Many of them came from up north, particularly Manchester, and would bring, clutched in their hands, some of their favourite discs played in clubs such as The Twisted Wheel.

The music wasn’t called Northern Soul then, but it fitted perfectly into the Bank House mix of Tamla Motown and Stax soul.

Hence the DJs began playing tracks such as I Spy by Jamo Thomas, Love on a Mountain Top by Robert Knight and R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in my House several years before they became massive hits in the UK national charts. Over at Droitwich, the Chateau Impney played similar music and so, for a while, did Severn Stoke Country Club. All unlikely sounding venues, but then nightclubs, as they are now, didn’t exist around here.

From 1968 onwards, Northern Soul in its Midland outpost was a staple part of the Worcester music scene and it was really quite strange to find records charting in the mid-seventies, which local clubbers had been dancing to for years.

So Transatlantic Roots Music, which is published by the University Press of Mississippi and costs $60, is maybe more roots than it set out to be. Because the University of Worcester, which hosted the roots music festival, is actually the place that helped bring northern soul to prominence all those years ago.