1"The folk movement is stronger than ever ... " Colin Larkin. Editor's Notes to the Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music, 1993.
" ... the notions of 'folk', 'tradition' and 'revival' are important organising concepts and as terms have a far wider currency than they are used in 'the folk revival'. They are ideological terms." Niall MacKinnon, The British Folk Scene, 1993.
The second British folk revival grew out of important social and economic circumstances in the immediate post-war era. It was both an historical interpretation of a hidden performance history of this country and a political reading of the practical social uses of that performance history. Half a century later the contexts within which these constructions of folk music continue as an extension of that revival have irrevocably changed and yet the second folk revival has thus far failed to redesignate itself, being held in place by the complex social structures and political illusions inherent in its advent. This study intends to highlight and discuss the social and economic contexts under which folk music listening practices and definitions have evolved, post-1945; and, in doing so, attempts to pose questions about the validity and, indeed, veracity of folk music as a thematic specialisation divorced from popular music performance and listening practices. It also endeavours to raise the fundamental issue of whether the defining principles of any musical soundtrack should be allowed to survive almost half a century relatively intact.
There are important underlying issues of historicity and methodology contingent to the interpretations of folk music as established through the second folk revival. For many who were writing almost within remembrance of the massive industrial and cultural upheavals that had irrevocably altered the British landscape by the turn of the century, folk music signification illustrated a convincing degree of direct encounter with both a social and a performance past; a disappearing world. It has continued to do this via methodologies that offer musical history as a 'democratic enlightenment'.
Folklorists such A L Lloyd and Ewan MacColl saw their task as producing a democratic alternative to performance history, a challenge to the monopoly of the musical and academic elite. Via the industrial ballads, the part of the tradition that seemed most pertinent to the modern world, Lloyd and MacColl attempted to offer ordinary people not only a place in history that had been hitherto denied, but also a role in the production of historical musical knowledge. It was suggested that via an appreciation of folk music, a community might develop its own history of performance, even its own social identity, free from the patronising assumptions of conventional musicology, commercial production and common historical 'wisdom'. It was further suggested that if folk music could show how things actually 'were' and rewrite performance history from the 'bottom up' then a great deal could also be learned about Britain's performing present. Repelled, by 1958, by the barrenness of industrial capitalism - like T S Eliot and the Scrutiny group before him - James Reeves made a differentiation "between the traditional and the commercial in popular art. We cannot always, but often feel the difference, even if we cannot define it, between something made for love, fun, or pleasure and something made for money. That is the real distinction, however hard it may be to apply in practice". 2
One of the principal aims of this study is to attempt to contextualise this form of hypothesis, while suggesting a number of revisionary observations concerning such binary oppositions between the traditional and the popular. In an age which has come to appreciate that all music is a construction of fragments, how can the idea of 'folk purity' be anything other than musical anamnesis? Field collecting and classification resist hybridity and contextual modification and propose unhurried change. Do these methodologies ignore the realities of the British performance experience? Are they merely political constructions - examples of what J H Hexter 3 has described as 'tunnel vision'?
The first half of this study presents an historical and contextual analysis of the advent of the second revival and, through narrative, quotation and interview, asks how any historical-methodological hypothesis about musical performance 'reality' can be historically 'truthful' while trapped within the mental, social and political categories of the post-war collectors and disseminators. By contextualising the subjectivity of any collector and/or disseminator important questions about the veracity of any concept of 'collective' musical testimony in antithesis to contemporary culture can be raised. For example, what political conditions determined the foregrounding of tradition? What circumstances combined to create an abiding folk ideology of folk music as a senior and spontaneous, 'non-mercantile' musical soundtrack? If commercial music can be equally 'traditional' and if commerce must enter into all realms of musical entertainment, past and present, what makes folk music so peerless?
Folk music performance, collection and critical writing has been [and remains] well organised and highly structured. One might suggest that a 'movement' exists; a group of people with a common interest. However, serious questions concerning context, politics and methodologies have been something of a rarity within the critical writing of the British folk movement. Further inquiries into the survival and relevance of this historically-placed movement of musical connoisseurs are equally as uncommon. Therefore the second half of this investigation focuses upon the pursuit of folk music appreciation and raises questions about the movement's potential for survival. It will present a number of theoretical proposals to highlight the problems brought about when repeated definitions of folk music via stereotypical use, repetitive transmission, perceptions of fealty and specialised marketing reduce the music to a non-kinetic quasi-social cement; it will also pose the question, if the context was 'appropriate' in the post-war era for the folk partisan to delineate between tradition and commerce, does it remain 'appropriate' now?
The second folk revival's abstraction concerning tradition has now been handed down for almost half a century and so, inevitably, the social functions and performance tolerance levels of the music have moderated as both society and the social elevation of folk music adherents have changed. Performance, social structure, reception and marketing have all affected and been affected by the revival's elongation. This study will suggest that dialectic has been suppressed to conform to the social mores and rhetorical and symbolic elements within the surviving hierarchy of the movement.
Folk music scholarship certainly appears to have reached something of a crossroads. The definitions of what creates or constitutes 'folk' and 'folk' music in the latter part of the twentieth century, and the ideologies surrounding those definitions, have recently been heavily criticised by Harker [1985]; Bohlman (USA) [1988]; Boyes [1993]; Cantwell (USA) [1993]; Stradling & Hughes [1993]; Sykes [1993]; and Bluestein (USA) [1994] as being overly self-conscious, excessively narrow and out-moded. The uses of folk music have similarly been questioned in the light of an era [modernism] which has appeared to some to have drawn to a close.
Some of the eighteenth century's defining folk music principles as laid down by, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder and the brothers Grimm, were designed to emphasise a concentration upon the music of rural, illiterate peasantry. This linked together with the late nineteenth-century assertions that industrial capitalism was eroding the 'decent' but lower village aspect of common life and this assertion became one of the salient features of folklore study throughout the twentieth century. Alan Dundes [1965], however, was one of the first folklorists to venture beyond these categories, condemning them as "intellectually indefensible" for reflecting antiquated eurocentricity and racism. He suggested that folklore should not be identified exclusively with "peasant society or rural groups ... An equally fallacious view is that folklore still extant today consists of fragmentary survivals". 4 Harker later attacked folk methodologies for reflecting an unhealthy class-ridden, romantic and nationalistic anxiety which failed to appreciate the mosaic of cultures that existed within British life. This study will attempt to further the work of those cited above by recording the historical development and social stratification of the second revival from a popular music perspective, highlighting, in the process, the political ambiguities and performance contradictions involved.
5 entitled The Singing Englishman. The enterprise and profile of Lloyd will be continually explored throughout this work; however, examining them at the outset will enable us to bring the fundamental concerns of this thesis into sharper focus:
What we nowadays call English folksong is something that came out of social upheaval. That is no random remark, but a statement of what happened in history. It grew with a class just establishing itself in society with sticks, if necessary, and rusty swords and bows discoloured with smoke and age. While that class flourished, the folksong flourished too, through all the changing circumstances that the lowborn lived in from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. And when that class declined, the folksong withered away and died.It is to Lloyd that many folk music adherents still turn when any folk historical veracity is challenged, for his work is both powerful and eloquent. Having undertaken to enlarge upon The Singing Englishman by writing Folk Song In England in 1967, Lloyd further attempted to systematically trace the development of the genre from what he viewed as its origins in agrarian songs, dances and plays into industrial song. However, when we contextualise Lloyd's writing, his authority can be seen as highly subjective rhetoric. Even one of the earliest reviews of Folk Song In England, that of Jeremy Seabrook writing in New Society in December 1967, questioned this emotive subjectivity:
He can be savage when he launches into invective against things he does not like, as when he describes the entertainment industry as 'offering sickly bourgeois fantasies to audiences to suck on like a sugared rubber teat'.Francis Collinson was also to remark in his review of the same work for the English Folk Dance and Song Society [hereafter EFDSS] Folk Music Journal in 1968:
His reference to white collar folklorists and song collectors is surely cocking an undeserved snook at many worthy scholar-workers in the field who bore the heat of the day in the early folk song revival ... the phrase is meaningless and unfortunate ... a book that will leave a bitter taste in the mouth by reason of its class prejudice.To Lloyd, the growth of urbanised and industrialised communities had a tangible, erosive effect upon hundreds of years of oral traditions. The collection and preservation of those traditions, viewed as being close to irrevocable loss, were deemed to be of paramount importance. However, Lloyd's concentration upon class boundaries and industrial landscapes in his definitions of the uses of folksong in both The Singing Englishman and Folk Song In England also delivered-up a sub-textual polemic about the retention of any folk song as a representation of political struggle, a 'longing for a better life'. Lloyd was an inveterate Marxist and his enthusiasm was so manifest that in-depth, contextual investigations about folk-popular dichotomies were glossed-over [and there were no investigations into the history of the commercial culture industry whatsoever]. In criticising Sharp, Lloyd was to comment in The Singing Englishman "so much collected but little commented on". It was subsequently argued by Harker, however, that, via a mawkish deification of industrial folksong, Lloyd also adjourned any self-reflexive debate about procedure and signification. Perhaps, to Lloyd, traditional music was 'healthy' because it manifested itself as a concrete example of immediate experience, a dissonance between life as it was and life as it might be, therefore he saw little need to examine his own preconceptions. His ideology, together with a predetermined opinion about the apparent perfunctory nature of popular music, policed future theoretical proposals. Harker remained unimpressed:
Unfortunately, as with Sharp, Lloyd may have allowed his theoretical assumptions to work their way into his collecting and publishing activities ... The problem was, and is, that very little sustained and detailed research has yet been done on the culture of the majority of English people. This is hardly Lloyd's fault; but it does mean that his generalizations need careful scrutiny ... it ill-behoves a person unable to offer a scientific and non-contradictory definition of what he likes, and calls 'folksong', to castigate and smear the music and songs taken up and used by contemporary working class people.Georgina Boyes has attempted to investigate the contexts within which both twentieth century revivals took place. Boyes discusses class relationships, political fealty and internecine strife, the so-called toxicity of technology upon music
10 and a sense of Englishness. Both Boyes and Harker have identified the practice of foregrounding rhetorical excellence over historical accuracy, a consequence of the movement's conviction that rhetoric was essential for its continued existence, and of its subsequent over-reliance on the [admittedly awesome] communication skills of its leaders such as Cecil Sharp and Bert Lloyd [not to mention Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ewan MacColl]. For example, first Harker and then Boyes on Lloyd's powerful work Folk Song In England:
Time and time again Lloyd wrenches us back in his description from the brink of a material history, trailing a liberalist-populist rhetoric ... he lapses into banalities in order to rationalize what are, fundamentally, assertions based on subjective value judgements.But, for all their disapprobation, both historians remain rooted within the ideology of the second revival, and their self-assured enthusiasm for folk music's 'differentness' and 'quality' undermines their analyses. Neither seem able to step outside of their chosen genre for long - something that this study intends to do.
The main strength of Folk Song In England probably lies in its authoritative use of language rather than any overt historical accuracy. Throughout, Lloyd is at pains to emphasise that folksong could not be separated from social validation; he claimed that folk music demonstrated a relevance, both political and artistic, and was an important historical frame of reference for the perception of non-modern forms of life. Jack Froggatt, who started the first folk club in Warrington, informed me that:
Folk Song in England was our Bible. We all 'clubbed' together to buy it for the club. It was used as a reference for any debate over songs or attitudes. I still have the original copy ... It was heady stuff!Folk Song In England was obviously symbolically crucial, but was it historically accurate? Lloyd lacked the skills to explain how one type of music ['folk'] could be an authentic historical representation, while another ['popular'] little more than commercial waste-produce. To Lloyd, mass production had rendered popular music stale and culturally unprofitable, but hard evidence for this conclusion remains, to this day, insubstantial. Perhaps an economic/political history which does not look beyond factors of production and confines itself to a Marxist perspective inevitably risks attributing too much to too few factors in its explanation of change. Harker even suggested that, for Lloyd, marking the difference between a folk and a popular song was little more than "knowing an elephant when he saw one".
14 Yet, for Jack Froggatt and the many other advocates of Lloyd, the belief in the power of discovering not only an authentic tradition, but even a new approach to life, was dutiful, unquestionable. By 1972, this proclamation graced the dust-sheet of Songs Of The Midlands, ed. by EFDSS member Roy Palmer:
Can the generation gap be bridged? Is society now nearer to being classless than ever it was? Is there a setting in which race, colour and creed can become less immiscible than behind the cherty partitions that our newspapers tend daily to buttress than demolish? If the answer to these questions is yes, then a not too gracile portion of the credit belongs to an element that is attaining the proportions of a sociological phenomenon: the folk music revival.However, also by the 1970s, a minority of dissenting voices had begun to question these assumptions of any extensive, subcultural, power for change. EFDSS committee member Dave Arthur, in his review of the aforementioned work, remarked:
So begins the publishers blurb on the back of Roy Palmer's collection, propounding the myth that we live on the brink of a classless, religiously tolerant and non-racialist society ... If as suggested folk music has affected, or is capable of affecting, the social, political, economic and religious climate of this country, it is being very secretive about its progress. I can't remember the last time I saw a black face in a folk club.And by 1976 Bob Pegg, writer, performer and erstwhile leader of pioneering folk/rock group Mr Fox, had also confirmed that, for him, folk music was:
... an illusion created unconsciously by the people who talk about it, go out looking for it, make collections of it, write books about it, and announce to an audience that they are going to sing it or play it. It is rather like a mirage which changes according to the social and cultural standpoint of whoever is looking at it ...In fact, by 1984 folk luminary Dick Gaughan had also informed Mark Moss and Judy Weglarski of Sing Out!, the US folksong journal, of his growing dissatisfaction with the revival's 'conventional wisdom':
I don't agree with the predominant definition of what folk music is because I think it's too narrow. There's a growth of antiquarianism in folk music, where folk music is the music of the past, and it therefore has to be performed exactly the way it was in the past ... I have a great respect and love for the whole process of tradition, but I do not think that it is sacred. I do think that we have to constantly develop the music and play it as we feel, with all the influences that we have ... to say that we must preserve it for all time the way it was played hundreds of years ago is like collecting stamps.Lloyd's political interpretations of music history were evidently coming under pressure.
For Lloyd, the folk revival's function was not simply to trace and identify neglected musical performances. He was primarily interested in the purveying of politically-inspired historical concepts created by him about those performances. Many folklorists and revivalists inspired by Bert Lloyd have continued to view his historical rhetoric as inarguably accurate. This traditional/musical 'other' [ie. 'other' to mainstream popular music] does not simply serve as an Other, but also as an invocation of the 'truth' in which that 'other' music thrives. Yet the perception that types of music can 'exist' in opposition to an undifferentiated mainstream remains highly subjective. For example, if Bert Lloyd was correct in stating in the sleevenotes to The Iron Muse 18 that, in the first revival "Cecil Sharp and other great collectors confined themselves to the rural past and rather shunned the industrial present" in order to substantiate their own class-ridden criteria, was it also true that he, in compiling that long-player, was also given to a degree of selectivity to meet his own calculated political agenda? What was shunned and excluded from this important collection? Why were certain songs selected? What standards dictated Lloyd's de-selections? Was his ideological stand-point about tradition simply not strong enough to absorb musical and ideological variation and experimentation? We never find out. Lloyd also stated in The Iron Muse notes quoted above that:
That other branch of workers' song, made by learned writers and musicians on behalf of the proletariat and passed on chiefly through print is not represented on this record. However excellent, such songs belong to a different order and require some other label than that of 'folk song'. Here, we repeat, our concern is with songs made by working people out of their own traditions and for their own use.What 'different order'? What 'other label'? The highlighting of any word-of-mouth custom is obviously important, but Lloyd's expressiveness is revealing: the somewhat ironic and yet polemical prioritising of the word 'proletariat' through the use of the expression 'on behalf of'; the reinforcing of the concept of uncommerciality via the syntagmatic use of the 'by' and 'out of', as if expressing the creation of music and song rather like a racehorse's birth [and thus 'pedigree': by Mill Reef, out of etc.]; these devices set out a modus operandi via given political oppositions. Both the 'naturalness' of folk music and the politicised judgement of that 'naturalness' are given precedence in rank at the expense of 'popular' styles. Here is Lloyd, once again, from The Iron Muse sleevenotes:
Classical' folksong, music hall song, pop song, art song have all contributed to the home-made lyrical creations of industrial workers, but at heart the matter has remained astonishingly true to the tradition that, for want of a better name, we call 'folksong.Lloyd's rhetoric is very powerful but he offers no evidence to support the hypothesis that a discrete 'non popular' song canon ever existed. Even fellow cultural critic Richard Hoggart was to acknowledge in 1957 that, while a pub pianist used techniques very similar to oral transmission, he also felt the need to know:
... which of the new songs are catching on and, more important, how to play them so that, though their main lines are kept, they are transmuted into the received idiom.Lloyd refused to consider not only the massive diversity of distinctive practices and tastes within popular music activity and use, but also the possibilities for all music to interact with and exist alongside each other. There cannot be one explanation suited to every aspect of the performance-past, any suggestion of this merely indicates a desire to re-create rather than interpret that past. If Lloyd further suggested that "As yet the industrial community is only dimly aware of its own self-made cultural heritage; ... bounded by the bingo hall and the idiot's lantern" - exactly what [or whom] was he getting at? His distress appears more connected to the 'awful' prospect of the working-classes buying [say] Fabian records rather than [say] joining the Fabians; yet if Lloyd also stated that:
Among creators of folksong the desire to explore the obscure margins of private experience is always less than the wish to impose individual order on common experience. So before he starts composing the maker is affected by the outlook and aspirations of his community; in short, each folk song at its inception is at least partly a product of social determinism.... what made the work of a folksinger any different from that of [say] Tony Hatch? As Harker argues "which songs have not been subject to constraints imposed by material factors?"
21 Lloyd's "self-made cultural heritage" was relative rather than absolute and was certainly not a formula that could be applied indiscriminately. As Dick Gaughan further remarked in the interview cited above:
It was only when I came into contact with the outside world that I realised that people actually categorised music. That was very bizzare to me. There was only one music ... if people sang and played, well, that was great.That Lloyd should so clearly see mechanical reproduction and commercial activity as the enemy is symptomatic of the profound threat to some of industrial capitalism during the middle period of this century. He is obviously groping for some kind of historical explanation, striving to create the illusion of direct experience through traditional music, evoking an atmosphere, setting a scene. But while songs such as The Collier's Rant, The Recruited Collier, Pit Boots [all selected by Lloyd for inclusion on The Iron Muse] appear to be highly representative of the hard lives and regionality of pit-men, upon closer investigation these songs celebrate locality, security and procreation ... all universal matters. The Recruited Collier, for example, relates how a young collier falls foul of a recruiting party [a universal subject in the 18th and 19th century, see Ratcliff Highway, The Deserter] and of how his lost love wishes he was back "hewin' the seam'', a very ubiquitous theme seen in many popular songs.
Although songs might be created within societies that exploit both people and nature for profit, can we regard them as 'untarnished' representations of that exploitation? Lloyd appears to be in favour of detailed analytical interpretation, but his binary approach merely suggests that there is an acceptable ideological 'reality' at work in one type of song, but not in another. Little systematic theory comes into view in order to distinguish his musical 'sheep' from 'goats' and Folk Song In England merely encourages the illusion that certain types of music can be comfortably studied in isolation. The reality of historical and musical conjuncture simply cannot support this hypothesis. Such conclusions remain overtly ideologically-orientated, rather than problem-orientated. Francis Collinson declared:
Such a preoccupation with class in a work on English folk song seems to the reviewer to give a distorted picture. This is perhaps most apparent in the last chapter, on the industrial songs, where even after the cumulative build-up of class bias throughout the book, it becomes obvious, as the songs are allowed to speak for themselves, that they are as much concerned with pride and joy of work, as with any discontent at conditions, a fact which, at a moment's glance Mr Lloyd's earlier and excellent book, Come All Ye Bold Miners will reinforce.All historical writing should be characterised by a wide range of forms, yet Lloyd's polemic was symptomatic of an even greater reification of musical work than that of Sharp. By objectifying music via his brand of Marxism, he implied that attention ought to be directed towards his 'chosen' object at the expense of 'something else'. This 'practical criticism' of focusing upon a specific musical genre insinuates confinement rather than convergence, and provides the popular music scholar with at least two expansive, contextual and intertextual questions: firstly, what happens to folk's dissimulation when popular music itself begins to acquire a canon and an aura of 'authenticity'? Secondly, what happens to folk's 'aura' when the popular permeates? Given his ideological bias, how could Lloyd have possibly explained the power and appeal of [say] the popular Geordie folksingers the Five Smith Brothers? Folk and popular culture are both of working class origin [as he suggested] and both have arisen out of certain social and economic situations ... so what are the principal differences?
Perhaps, for Lloyd, folk culture remained unconscious, even unself-conscious, whereas popular culture existed via the deliberate search for objects to gratify the senses ... clothes, heroes, music, etc. Therefore, pop culture, despite all of its socio-cultural uses, was artificial because it was not 'unique'. But if popular music audiences get what they are given, does this limit them from receiving what they want? And what is unique about manufacturing a socio-political vehicle upon which the folksong is intended to be carried [or conversely, carries the ideology], in any case? The identification of these contextual questions has been inadequately handled thus far by folk music devotees, who have revelled in an illusion of musical/social 'differentness'. To have identified hidden musical cultures was certainly valid, but to have done so via a political connoisseurship, a collective musical consciousness as an antithesis to popular music, is at the nexus of this enquiry.
After all, the second folk revival and the advent of rock 'n' roll occurred somewhat abreast of each other. Rock 'n' roll has now also acquired its own sense both of the auratic and the repertory and the supposed ideological differences between rock and folk have been subsumed under a competition for performance and commercial space. Both genres now also provide a plenitude of opportunities for conformist status, rather than dissident activity. Popular music genres have also experienced an abundance of copies being reduced to the scarcity of the authentic and the man in the street finds it difficult to detect any 'authentic' from 'original'. The 'differences' between folk and rock have been compressed via shared, cognisant consumption habits.
How do we go about it? ... First of all, one must listen. You cannot afford ever to stop listening. Listen to every traditional singer whose records you can get hold of, but most of all listen to yourself while you are singing, listen and stand in judgement. Get all the information you can about the songs you want to sing, and I don't mean merely the kind of information that tells you which variant of which tune, and so on ... More important for the singer is to know which kind of circumstances gave rise to a particular song and what that song has meant to traditional singers in whose mouths it has been polished and shaped over the years. Then you must decide HOW to sing a song ...Despite MacColl’s apparent enthusiasm for recorded sound, the connoisseurs needed for this job cannot embrace folk/popular [or, indeed, historical] complications. They must “stand in judgement” and guarantee folk music a distinct and identifiable place in a museum via stylistic analyses. To authenticate folk music in this way requires all of the machinery of the antiquarian, which includes both rhetoric and the subjectivisation of history. Antiquarians convert chance moments of performance into 'historically-based' connoisseurships. Here is MacColl, once again, from the above mentioned sleevenotes:
My objective is not to create a pretty tune but to make a valid musical comment on the story that is being unfolded. To do this it is necessary for me to achieve a state of solitude in public. Paradoxically, when I succeed in doing this I am conscious that the audience is with me, feeling the same things that I feel and even breathing at the same rate.There is no historical evidence to suggest that MacColl's model of performance is an accurate yardstick for his anonymous, nomadic folksinger. While his "valid musical comment" via performance may appear to have historical and political veracity, it has merely been formed by him [and recorded by Topic/Prestige] within the system of capitalist production that he [apparently] so despised. Would an early 19th century singer even understand what he was talking about? In the final analysis, despite being a wonderfully creative artist, Ewan MacColl's 'authentic' performance models were probably just about Ewan MacColl.
However, this concept of an itinerant, bohemian 'everyman' folksinger has one great advantage. It conveys a sense of the non-commercialised [at least by our late-twentieth century definitions], a feeling for the non-appropriated, a sense of the unadorned; but it also masks a singer's specificity and homogenises reception. Although there appears to be the possibility of re-creating 19th century folksingers via stylised performance, they are more often retrospectively created in a series of already-known [or 'given'] folk stereotypes, organised into 'coherent' [and consumable!] wholes. This reinforces fictions and seamless 'realities' into which song is woven [as a politicised narrative] evading indiscriminate musical moments. By avoiding historical ambivalence, a priori mythological and clichéd oppositions between commerce and creativity are sustained.
Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, in embracing the perception that hand-made culture was more genuine and authentic, untainted and less dissolute than that which interacts with commercialism, were ideally placed to lead the second folk revival. By staunchly advocating that such a culture could be located, and that the commercialism of industrial capitalism was nothing but a depressant to this aura of workers' culture [and that the workers perhaps didn't know what they had got until they had lost it] Lloyd and MacColl were granting a self-effacing 'presence' or aura to a very limited number of performance possibilities. Competition for listening space was thus established between 'unique' and unmediated song and commercial 'pap': an aura of authenticity. Certainly the songs and tunes are interesting historical documents as well as extremely entertaining pieces of music, but is it right to suggest that one can legitimately search for the uncontrolled and uncontrollable intrusion of a working class reality in these pieces? Do they really have the unique and even magical quality of subject that cannot be found in the commercialisation of the medium? This is even more difficult to believe when the attentive efforts of Alan Lomax are added into the equation, for Lomax [with MacColl] 'decided' to start a folk revival in Britain and both began working with Lloyd to see whether their theories were practicable. Robin Denselow confirmed that:
MacColl wanted a very different, political revival. He wasn't an academic, interested in quaint customs, but a radical inspired by the left-wing American folk scene, now in a state of Cold War shock. Lomax put him in touch with a man who had already made a start in creating such a scene in England, A L 'Bert' Lloyd.The folk repertoire and performance modes of Britain as viewed by Lloyd, Lomax and MacColl thus became a subject of structural, perhaps even 'scientific', study without overlaps and inter-relationships. But it is the overlaps and inter-relationships that need investigation, as this study intends to show.
Within the folk revival, thematic specialisation [the desire to provide a unified and unifying text] has created idealised, blinding historical imagery which has ignored the proposition that the second folk revival emanated from within popular music and was tied to a social context, being neither an immaculate, nor a revolutionary, conception. If internal folk histories have the potential to be elitist, we must attempt to contextualise the advent of the revival within a broader social context and question the conventional wisdom about that revival as a revolutionary movement.
The manner in which the 'insider' experience of folk music has been articulated has failed to consider any 'outside' vantage point as a valid frame of reference and, in order to discuss the validity of 'tradition', one must discuss it in a 'traditional' way. This is problematic, for, if one considers that at the origin of every musical style there is an artist who can find any place on the spectrum of folk subjectivity, realism and expressionism in music are often only matters of degrees [matters, in fact, of style]. To authenticate 'one' musical soundtrack via political prudence fails to deal with artistic degrees; this authentication leads to an inverted homogenisation which reduces the artistic process to a representation of sameness - ironically, exactly the charge levelled at popular music. Fred McCormick:
... we are bombarded with satellite videos, computer games, cable networks and the whole paraphernalia of a technology designed to entertain, not to express. At the same time the march of progress destroys native cultures almost as fast as it destroys rainforests. Before we are all deafened completely by a soundscape of stultifying blandness, is it yet too late to open the cantometrics debate?Alternative readings of folk music history [i.e. alternative to Lloyd] are creating ripples from within the ranks of the folk movement. The works cited at the beginning of this section suggest that re-evaluation is at hand. Harker [1985] has penetrated the mediations of collectors such as Child, Sharp, Lancaster and Lloyd, whereas Boyes [1993] has attempted to explain how and why folk music in the twentieth century came to be expressed in the cultural form that it did. Bohlman (USA) [1988] suggests that rather than expressing concern over disappearing musics one should view change as normative and Stradling and Hughes [1993] have placed the first British revival into a socio-political context which propounds that a 'national' folk music was a construct in order to rival the status and assimilation of foreign music. Sykes [1993] has also written about this as an evolution of Englishness within the first revival.
Niall MacKinnon [1993] and Ailie Munro [1984, revised 1997], neither cited above, rather conservatively highlight musical performance and social identity within the British folk scene as 'cohesive' whereas Cantwell [1993] and Bluestein (USA) [1994] challenge these social constructions. Cantwell uses the useful term 'ethnomimesis' to historically contextualise notions of authenticity, whereas Bluestein expands upon the 'folklore'/'poplore' dichotomies suggested by Archie Green [1972]. 26
The work of Green remains important for he was the first academic folklorist to seriously consider the significance of commercially-made recordings as source material. So, too, Electric Muse written by Dave Laing with Dallas, Denselow and Shelton [1974]. By making a direct connection between folk and rock music, Electric Muse remains the one substantive investigation of the folk revival from a popular music perspective.
Some young artists working with folk music are also beginning to address issues such as authenticity and originality, suggesting that these claims are rather fictional, showing that folk music performance is always a representation, always already seen. The sounds of the Afro Celts 27, for example, are openly rifled, confiscated, appropriated, stolen even. In their work, the original cannot be accurately located, it is always deferred; even the performance-self which might have considered to have generated an original, is shown to be copy. Bill Whelan's Riverdance and Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance have also recontextualised folksong in the theatre, seriously questioning any 'authentic' site, sound and uses of folk music. Clearly, these artistes do not diminish the value of folk sounds, simply the associated 'folkier than thou' values. Their presence dictates that any analysis of folk music in the 1990s also has to examine issues such as image, marketing, experimentation and crossover.
The second section of this study will attempt to develop concepts relating to such marketing, image, originality, authentic performance practices and musical intertextuality, setting them against the conservative and rather antiquarianist 'authentic' visage that conventional folk music methodology has sustained, particularly by way of the ubiquitous folk club. Chapter six attempts to reinterpret the folk industry and media music via motion and interactivity rather than stasis. This static depiction is further debated in chapters seven and eight where discussions surrounding folk clubs and performance-related hierarchies take place. While revivalists view themselves as representing 'alternative', 'organic' societies, they have continued to explore a limited set of stylistic, historical and musical features. This is neither 'organic' nor 'alternative' and is more characteristic of a shallow, hierarchical discipline in which only the avers of enquirers are illuminated.
Folklorists and club members, alike, appear rather non-quantitative historiographers; reluctant to incorporate findings from diverse sources on trust, precisely because this evidence may challenge their predetermined notions of authenticity. What if folk music representation and performance only takes place because it is always understood that it is there in the world to represent, not authenticate? If we all have our historical idylls are not the claims that these representations are 'alternative', 'organic' and 'authentic' misleading?
The growing authority of quantitative forms of history also place the folk versions of tradition created during the twentieth century revivals under considerable pressure. In the case of pre and early industrial society in Britain, for example, which must have been far closer to the margins of subsistence than any twentieth century folklorist could ever have imagined [!], having to survive as a musician or performer is now being questioned from a contextual, rather than idealised point of view. What did the musician do with a repertoire? How was it changed from region to region? How much irony was employed in performance? How were lyrics, ballad skills or methods of performance changed to meet a paying audience? How much was he regarded as a popular entertainer? What did he earn? All these are demographic questions concerning the 'real' living issue in history - making a living as a performer rather than a physical historical representation of an underclass. For example, Heaney 28 has found that, in the 1840s, morris dancing could be a lucrative, albeit seasonally-limited, occupation. Dance teams could be sponsored, being unable to rely upon their class peers for sources of capital. Audrey Douglas [1994], in her historical study of dance in Salisbury, has also identified Whitsun Parish dancing from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century as being primarily associated with the gathering of money ["th[d]ansynge money"]. Both findings suggest that commercial activity cannot simply be ignored for the sake of a political manifesto. When 'tradition' becomes a veneer under which methodological presuppositions can hide, ideologically-based historiography can be used to colour understanding of musical history and output. This is an unstable historicity which passively accepts the decisions made on its behalf by politicised appointees answerable to no one but themselves.
In fact, despite the trappings of quasi-Marxism within the British revival, closer scrutiny of the movement as it elongated has revealed a middle-class, conservative undertow [Finnegan 1989]. By the late-1980s one of the greatest ambiguities of folk music 'purity' had become distinctly apparent: the songs and dances of the 'folk' could be taken over by ideologues from both the right and the left, alike. For example, during the 1980s drive to cash-in on this country's 'heritage', the Conservative government via English Heritage and the National Trust consistently used 'authentic' folk music as a soundtrack for politicised historicity. 29 The beautiful, authentically-cobbled streets at Beamish Museum [should that be theme park?] repeatedly reverberated to the sounds of 'traditional' music. In this case, the 'purity' of the musical soundtrack helps to disguise the contrived historicity of our Victorian 'greatness'. A dastardly use of traditional material, one might say; however what the opposed political ideologies of the folk revival of the 1950s and Thatcher's monetarism of the 1980s actually shared was the will to control and re-interpret the history of a cultural 'product' perceived to be in a state of disintegration. English Heritage recognised and then became an agent for the social trajectory of folk clubs. Once set in motion, political agendas acquire momentum and develop their own logic, resubjectivizing the diversity of history [and music] along the way.
If we are to confront the inevitable disturbances brought about by changing socio-musical environments, we must seek to understand them, not merely write them off as more evidence of [say] multinational domination. The folk revivalists are in an important position of being able to continue a dialectic between past and present, rather than simply re-create testimony from hindsight, for the voice of the past is inescapably the voice of the present, too. Yet one of the great problems for the folk revival is an inability to rethink ways in which our musical heritage can be used. It appears far easier to mould the present in order to dovetail into our mythical images of the past. But the past must be historically confronted, not used as a referential representation of natural, organic spontaneity. There appears to be a temptation amongst folklorists to continue to amass material so that the time of reckoning is delayed, despite a dire need to recover continuity between past and present contexts. Contexts have changed, so we must apply ourselves to making all music work within new contexts. Disenchantment with the present can spin us back into a 'past', but that 'past' can be little more than historical remnants befitting pre-determined canons. Folk music historians must avoid being trapped within the mental categories of their mentors. There is surely further scope for theoretical development; a development that also takes into account the younger music lover.
30 He has also argued that the folk club has a gregarious unity, but amongst which sections of society? Folksinger Bill Pook questions this assumption:
I took my son, who's 23 to the Warrington folk club last week [Feb. '97]. The first time he'd ever been to a club, and I asked if he'd like to go. He said 'OK, it would be an experience'. He's broad-minded musically, so I thought it would be interesting ... it was. He was deeply embarrassed ... the youngest there ... bored stiff ... and totally bemused by the whole process. Afterwards, I felt that I had to apologise to him for taking him ... he said 'that's alright, Dad, it was an experience.'Whereas the 'golden age' of folk clubs [say, 1960-1976] witnessed a rapid increase in membership, the past ten years or so have testified to the reverse and the revival struggles to attract young people. Folk clubs are closing down, being replaced by Arts Centre concerts, independent freelance venues, and festivals. When a great proportion of younger people now find that mixing and sampling is a far cheaper musical alternative to even buying a second hand acoustic guitar, it is evident that the 'do-it-yourself' culture so integral to folk music during the 1950s and 1960s now manifests itself in the 1990s as part of other music activities. If the folk revival has [as suggested by Bill Pook] developed something of a middle-aged torpor, then the once-meaningful folk clubs, which require formulations such as planning, organising, finance-raising and thematic music-making, probably appear middle-aged, fundamentalist and immaterial. This is not a criticism of folk music as irrelevant, but of the surviving organisational structures of a 'past' social context.
Some younger performers have been attracted into the movement in the 1990s, but their ideas about the future of the music often appear to be 'at odds' with the conservatism of the folk clubs. Part two of this study, therefore, suggests that there is a case for redesignation of folk music structure and performance. For the folk revival to survive perhaps it needs to be represented as something which goes on around us all of the time, not something that is rooted both in the past and in the class-related social hierarchies intrinsic to folk clubs. Musical diversity has a tendency to prevent parochial and misty sentimentality [something for which the folk revival readily stands accused] and many subgenres of folk music now exist in the 1990s which were impossible to imagine when folk music scholarship [and journalism] first began. These new hybrids challenge MacKinnon's assumption that folk music "has to remain in the refuge of the folk clubs" 32 and dispute whether folk clubs actually have to remain at all. If folk clubs are not magnetising younger generations, then what is the point of their perpetuity? This thesis will suggest that this lack of musical and generational interaction now requires serious debate; for by doing so, recognition is then ascribed to the changing social bases of all music making.
By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it can achieve only through narrative.In the long run lovers of folk music may have to recognise a place for themselves alongside the 'standardised' soundtracks of the modern world. If the re-enactment of tradition in folk music attempts to deny the present [and other musics of the commercial popular] by constituting its traditions as an authentic past, and by placing this authenticity on the performance of folk music only, it denies the possibility of the present to constitute real listening traditions. For example, the music associated with the theatre, rave, even hotel elevator are traditional to many.
In addition, if the 'place' [the 'past'] described in folk music is available only through playing or listening to folk music, then the work of the folk industry is at once both unconditionally crucial and completely contradictory! Folk's media and industry must enable traditions of the past, but can only do so by selling in the present, in a 'degrading' market place that has itself imposed commerce upon tradition, the 'mass' upon the 'folk'. This contradicts the simplistic notion that the process of marketing folk can both reach the public and achieve the 'traditionality' of folk music without effectively 'selling-out'; this concept requires broadening to understand the meanings imposed upon folk music by the second revival, the meaning of a musical tradition, and how folk music can exist as an identifiable genre within the music market places of the 1990s. How these definitions are to be understood within the movement, industry and media as we approach the new millenium is also discussed in the aforementioned chapter six.
As previously stated, it is beyond question that folk music scholarship in the British Isles has developed as a result of of ideological leanings of one sort or another. It would be wrong to suggest that folk music should claim a position purified of ideology, for this is clearly impossible and would fail to address the needs of all music to develop within a social context. However, I would suggest that all folk music and writings about folk music, including this study, should henceforth be regarded as ideological positions in their own right. There is also room for a history of the folk revival without the limitations of an internal narrative that produces its own hidden histories. For, although there are many interweaving histories existing at one and the same time [and we cannot record them all], for the popular music historian there must always be the critical question of balance. Instead of looking through one chosen genre at a past and idealizing it, instead of fussing about saving folk music before it discharges its last gasp, a need exists to contextualise the second folk revival, re-evaluating its assumptions from a popular music standpoint. This can only assist our understanding of the revival, the music and the scholarship.
Following a brief overview of the first British folk revival, chapter two will attempt to deal with the social and cultural context of the advent of the second, and begins in the immediate pre-WW2 era. If the revival was, indeed, part of a response to contemporary concerns; if the efficacy of the folk song was linked to both a level of optimism about the future together with a discontent about social conditions, then the study of that social location remains of paramount importance, for it is now over fifty years since Lloyd wrote The Singing Englishman and yet the methodologies of many folk revivalists appear to have remained remarkably uniform. The very pre-eminence of the rhetoric of Lloyd raises a fundamental historical question for the revival: how can the act of persisting to present the values of one man as absolutely binding be both historically valid and potentially constructive for the future growth and development of a movement? Perhaps by contextualising the advent of the movement we can begin to address this query, for it appears doubtful whether any claim for universal musical legitimacy, mediated within a specific social and cultural context of mid-century Britain, can operate without a radical modification. Is the time that we live in different from the time of The Singing Englishman, or merely an extension of that time?
Most people who have studied Lloyd have gone into [and remained with] the text itself, but the first part of this thesis means to concentrate upon the context of post-war Britain. The methodology hopes to tease out the ideology underpinning the second revival and, via cultural history, theory and interviews with practitioners, present a wider picture of that post-war era. In the second part, greater use is made of other scholarly texts such as Finnegan and MacKinnon, but it continues with interview material obtained as a result of participation [including my own]. A lot of this is new material extracted from over 20 hours of interview tapes [see appendix] and expresses a cross-section of contemporary opinion.
I have not intended to re-write history, and have not used oral history to fit into another purpose. Instead, the majority of the interviews were conducted expressly with this project in mind. Following chapter two [summarised above], part one proceeds with the cultural history survey [from a popular music studies perspective] and includes investigations into political input [chapter three], the apparent clashes between folk and popular music [chapter four] and the socio/musical implications of folk/rock [chapter five].
Part two begins by discussing the trajectory of the contemporary folk industry and media [chapter six] and then analyses the folk club and folk 'scene' [chapter seven], performance in the folk club [chapter eight] and reception and intertextuality [chapter nine] also from a popular music standpoint. The study concludes with a brief presentation of three important areas where folk activity has extended itself beyond its own internally coherent framework in an attempt to grasp the popular, together with a call for more research.
Mike Brocken
Article MT021
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