1 - Part 2
"The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion ... if a stubborn one." Albert Einstein.
The second folk revival of this century, which began in earnest towards the end of World War Two and was connected to the first via the upholders of tradition at the [amalgamated] EFDSS, has been recorded as a more accurate representation of 'workers music'; a presentation, perhaps, of a harsher historical reality together with far greater critical examination and detail. It is largely from this revival that the more latterly coined expression of 'traditional music' stems. Indeed, by 1981 the International Folk Music Council [IFMC], which was inaugurated in 1947, adopted a new name to encompass this new expression, that being the International Council for Traditional Music [ICTM].
The ICTM failed to recommend any redefinition of its fields of study to any great extent, for, seen from the present, a definition of what actually constitutes 'traditional' music seems a similarly imprecise exposition to that which defined 'folk' music [see chapter four]. Why a folk song continues to be 'defined' in opposition to that of the popular remains an intangible principle. While it appears to be true that folk music is formed within and in turns forms traditions because it is sung, listened-to and enjoyed, it is equally true that other genres of music exhort similar potential. One can now speak of an Italian Opera tradition, a Punk tradition, a Surf tradition or a Rockabilly tradition with as much veracity. This chapter will attempt to examine the socio-cultural constructions surrounding the uses of folk music in Britain after the second war, and, in doing so, contextualise and thus question folk-versus-popular dichotomies.
There has been some attempt to develop an historical account of the British folksong revival from the post-war era onward. Within this history, the folk revival is often regarded by folk and popular music historians alike as something of a musical and social revolution, but this reading is a rather idealised metanarrative. The principal problem with this sort of history is that it understands the folk revival to have existed within a kind of cultural bubble disassociated from other musical activity. Folksinger Fred McCormick told me that, for him:
The folk scene DOES exist in a cultural bubble. There is no doubt about it. There is the opinion that it is separate, distinct. That it has no need to interact with other genres, considers other genres unworthy. Many folkies still fail to acknowledge that the roots of, say, country and western music are also folk roots. The history of the revival reflects this isolation quite clearly.This insubstantial form of history tends to discuss the relevance of one genre of music ['folk'] without acknowledging the existence of another, except as an 'unmentionable' reference ['pop'].
But the revival was wholly linked to other significant social processes and grew out of contextual interpretations of issues both foregoing and contemporaneous to that revival. That an interest in British folksong emerged when it did therefore requires a level of historical investigation via these social and cultural contextualisations. Important contextual questions might be raised such as:
3
New musical movements and dialectics are constructed within the context of significant social, technological and political changes. John Tosh [1984] describes how historical events are 'produced' in this way. This is a useful avenue towards understanding how musical movements reflect elements of preceding dialectics that achieve some level of fruition. At the turn of the century in the United States, for example, the blues did not simply 'begin'. It emerged as a hybrid of preceding soundtracks, and existed as one soundtrack amongst many others [jazz, ragtime, sacred music, minstrelsy etc.].
Therefore, while new uses were applied to folk music in the light of the development of a mass consumption society after the end of World War Two these uses also signified a political and musical response to the social conditions that pervaded the pre-war years. But, while certain members of British society were concerned with developing what they saw as a socially liberating soundtrack based upon 'worker's music', many others were perfectly happy to accept the advent of mass consumption society and its musical soundtracks. Not as 'Adornian' passive receivers, either, but as partners and agents of change; and these ideas were also based upon pre-war experiences. This latter point cannot be over-emphasised. If one of the major polemics of the folk revival was an attempt to channel music performance and reception through its own political/historical refraction, the meaning and uses of folk music [and trad jazz, to a degree] as an antithesis to pre-war industrial capitalism and post-war mass consumption are highly significant [as are perceptions about the survival of a British singing tradition in an ever widening hegemony of American culture].
But just as important are the contemporary concepts of mass consumption as an agent of benevolent change producing greater leisure time, wider musical choice and sustained social advancement. It is this rather mundane, day-to-day 'conformist' history that tends to be ignored by folk and rock historians, alike. Certainly, the syncretism of popular culture, including the arrival of American-style folk music and mass media agents such as Independent Television, played a far greater part in the broadening of tastes than folk historians have thus far given credit.
Eric Hobsbawm 4 has argued that, prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Britain was on the verge of entering the 20th century. Certainly, mass production was finally becoming a norm. However, he also maintains that the mass goods that had appeared were not expensive consumer durables, for few people could afford them. Despite the growth of suburbia and a visible consumer based middle-class, the 1930s was still a decade of iniquitous social conditions for many Britons, many of whom could barely afford to make ends meet. For example, Hobsbawm notes that, while by 1939 the USA had already provided 150 new 'fridges per year for every 10,000 of its population, and Canada 50, Britain by 1935 had produced only 8. Even the middle-classes had only begun to buy motor cars at the modest rate of four per 1,000 customers by 1938 [Incidentally, the Brocken household purchased their 'fridge in 1965!]. Vacuum cleaners and electric irons were probably the only pieces of domestic machinery to infiltrate many homes by the outbreak of the war, apart, that is, from the prevalent 'wireless sets', which were bought in vast amounts by the end of the 1930s. Instead, the new goods that became available to many working-class Britons were, according to Hobsbawm, "cheap articles of domestic and personal use". Woolworth's and Boots' stores rose in number and importance nationwide during the 1930s on the strength of inexpensive consumer goods [for many years Woolworth's were known as the 3d. and 6d. store], such as make-up and fountain pens.
Despite the recession during the 1930s, records were purchased in large quantities [around twenty million per year and over half of these were dance band records 5], but these were bought mainly by the middle-classes, those families who also had the finances to buy or rent a piece of furniture that actually played gramophone discs. Even some of the cheapest discs could cost in the region of 1/- to 1/11d. [Rex, Piccadilly], and although Woolworth's did sell the ubiquitous Crystalate-pressed Victory, Eclipse and Crown discs for 6d. [Victory 1924-1931, Eclipse 1931-July, 1935, Crown September, 1935-March, 1937] one couldn't hear the likes of Roy Fox, Jack Payne or Lew Stone on these releases. Many of the 'best' records still sold for as much as 3/- [HMV] and for those few interested in traditional music, folksongs and country dance, these recordings were usually on HMV, Columbia Graphaphone, Parlophone or Beltona 6 and were mostly full-priced.
While only a minority of working-class families had the facilities to play gramophone records, of course, the physical act of dancing to live music was hugely popular. One statistic illustrates this well. According to a pre-war Melody Maker [Dance Band and Syncopation News 7 ] survey taken in the mid-1930s, 89% of factory workers, 93% of office workers and 84% of shop assistants regularly went dancing. Unfortunately there are no Melody Maker statistics for the unemployed! My own auntie Mary, my father's sister, was a young working woman interested in dance music and was able to save money to spend on records which were played on her third or fourth-hand mechanical player.
My mother, however, has often discussed these pre-war days with me, stating that her father, a time-served printer, simply wasn't able to afford such luxuries as record players and records. She also stated that my grandfather considered a lot of the current music to be 'rubbish' and, as master of the house [Liverpool Corporation notwithstanding], his statements were legislature. In any case, the family owned a rather smart piano [which had been purchased at great sacrifice from Crane's in Liverpool], for which new sheet music was occasionally purchased, especially the cheaper song books sold by Woolworth's or Davies' Arcade in Lord Street, Liverpool. None of the sheet music purchases were 'traditional' in the folk sense, although a favourite of my grandmother's was Black Eyes, the 'famous Russian gypsy song'. Tradition, to my grandparents, lay somewhere between Count John MacCormack, the light classics and Billy Cotton. Even though some families in my mother's street [all Corporation housing] might have had a gramophone, this usually meant that they had better paid jobs, or else had a few earners in the household at the same time.
The point of this information is two-fold. First of all, under these prevailing circumstances, it was evidently mostly the middle-classes [or those fortunate enough to have reasonably well-paid jobs ... often one and the same] who were actively engaged in record buying in any given musical area, prior to the outbreak of World War Two; and, secondly, the importance of radio was absolutely paramount. Working-class people may have been heavily involved in the production of both forms of domestic entertainment, but were not necessarily in the financial position of enjoying both, particularly without that important radio.
In one area, clearly, technological advances had already created an entirely new scope to life between the wars. The 'traditional' and declining Music Hall, so frequently ignored by folklorists, and the equally old-fashioned [but expanding] palais de danse continued, but were joined by two technologically original forms of entertainment after 1918: radio and cinema. Of these two, it becomes evident to me via the comments of my own mother, that the first was, ultimately, the most radical. Radio introduced almost 'round the clock' entertainment into the home and workplace for the first time in history, although this did not always appear to be the primary aim of the middle-brow public corporation which controlled most of it, namely the BBC. When reading contemporary comments from the BBC during the first year of its life, it often appears that 'entertainment' was often unfavourably equated with 'Americana' and such breaches of the United Kingdom's culture were not quite acceptable.
Post-WW2, this attitude continued to prove fundamental at the BBC, especially during the folk music revival:
By broadcasting grand opera from the actual theatre in which the performances were taking place, the BBC had shown that in Great Britain the technical side of broadcasting was at least as far advanced as that in America ... There were many great events pending of world-wide interest and the BBC would like to broadcast them but it must be understood that the Company itself could not make the final decision in these matters.Typically, while the BBC were slow to realise the enormous potential of popular music broadcasting, European stations Radio Normandy and Radio Luxembourg filled the ample spaces in the dance market left by the Corporation before the war began.
Eric Hobsbawm 9 further states that the picture house quickly overtook the old music halls as the working-class alternative for luxury both before, during and after the second war. My own parents were great cinema-goers in the 1940s, did a lot of their courting in the cinema, but only acquired a second-hand record player in the 1950s - and this was part of an old pre-war radiogram. It was the radio in this piece of polished furniture that was of prime importance, not the gramophone player. It only subsequently occurred to them that they could now also buy gramophone records!
In any case, they enjoyed their weekly visits to the 'pictures' and tea afterwards at Sampson and Barlow's in London Road, far more than the expensive luxury of records. These immense and ornate Essoldos, Forums, Trocaderos and Gaumonts, with their names suggesting exotic lassitude and luxury hotels in London and Nice, some even having cushioned seats [!], were often spectacular buildings presenting multi-million dollar American films. Some also housed huge organs which rose from the depths to blow out melody and were surrounded by coloured lightshows and this also greatly affected working-class tastes and sensibilities; in fact cinema organ music became a new tradition in its own right. Even organists such as Reginald Dixon and Sydney Torch became household names. Much of this rose [especially inter-war] in the working-class districts abreast of the rate of unemployment.10
These cinemas were probably the most effective dream creators ever devised, for a visit to the cinema cost less and lasted longer than a 78rpm disc, a variety show, or a few rounds of drinks and juxtaposed with the radio as market leader for the entire decade, also effectively creating a new tradition. Both of these media could also be easily combined with the cheapest of all forms of entertainment and enjoyment ... i.e. sex. It could be argued, then, that it was largely the middle-classes who enjoyed their Parlophone or Beltona Scottish country dances in the privacy of their own living room, while the rest of the nation was either in the 'pictures' or on the couch listening to Henry Hall.
Not only did the Nazi bombers physically alter the shape of Liverpool as the 1940s dawned, but the war also altered many people's ideas about dancing and the uses of music. Liverpool still managed to keep on dancing during the war [eg. the famous Blackout Waltz at the Rialto], but there was an increased sense of urgency attached to the dancing; personal contact increased, bearing a direct relationship to the amount of bombs falling on the city. One's home became the front line, cruelly exposing the fragility of life. The 'other-worldness' of the dance hall had given way to a marked sense of reality, and 'living for today'.During the war the power of radio also grew, not simply as an entertainment medium, but as a purveyor of a form of entertainment which was also considered to be an essential part of the war effort per se; a morale booster as well as a Government Information unit. All of the dance bands playing at these venues and on the radio, then, were also of great significance to the [growing] esprit de corps of the country. Bandleader Henry Hall became a figure of indisputable national respect, as did the likes of Ambrose, Jack Payne, Lew Stone, Roy Fox, Ray Noble, Geraldo and Charlie Kunz, amongst many, many others.
In its first three years, the war killed more people at home than in the services abroad, and the Blitz, the music and the radio all together became important symbols of formative thought. Once the war was over [and won, presumably], so the theories went, then a new socio-cultural Jerusalem could arise like the phoenix from the rubble. As Tricia Jenkins suggests, during World War Two people's homes had literally become the front line. This was a startling and frightening example of the technological possibilities open to man during this middle period of the twentieth century. Technology was evidently a mixed blessing if this, together with the mass unemployment of the thirties, was the result of industrial capitalism. The British learned to 'cope' throughout this sobering experience and collective comprehension, making this generation consider itself in a rather special position. Out of the ruins at home and the tragedies abroad came a new optimism that absorbed new areas of perception and radical ideas about changing social roles. It was hoped, for example, that class barriers could be broken down via the arts. Richard Hoggart was serving in Naples in 1944 when he and a few comrades conceived of the Three Arts Club:
The men - from all arms of the three services and all Allied countries, most of them conscripts - were, within the [Three Arts] Club, classless and rankless ... There was a democracy of artistic interest and a degree of artistic talent which obliterated class and rank once they came through the door. In that sense the chemistry of the place was immediate and extraordinary ... I do not think any other common range of interests could have produced so completely demotic an atmosphere at all, let alone so quickly.By the closing months of the war, the conflict was increasingly seen by many as a transformer. When the end of the war came in 1945, it was not simply perceived as the end of something, but also the beginning of something new. The war, together with the variety of shared experiences at home and abroad, led to a transformation of thought about how social problems and leisure activities could be irrevocably changed for the better. Soldiers abroad were, like Richard Hoggart, my own father [and his war-time comrade, Denis Healey] taking stock to ensure that things would be different this time, both at work and socially. "It wouldn't be the same as before the war! ... Hoards of unemployed men? ... It had to be different!"
During the war the social scientist William Beveridge proposed social insurance and following on from this the Labour Party in 1945 produced a political manifesto entitled Let Us Face the Future. This document was a hurried affair and basically consisted of Beveridge plus Keynes plus socialism. Interestingly enough, the Labour Party leadership actually postulated keeping the war-time political coalition in 1944/5, but the groundswell of opinion in the country and in the services abroad called for an election. They needed a new beginning, and so it was agreed to draw up the battle lines.
The war years had also provided acceptability and a national platform for songs of anti-fascist resistance. My own collection of Workers’ Music Association publications [now lodged at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool] has shown me that, before the war, left-wing groups such as the WMA, the Clarion Ramblers and various Co-Op Society choirs and music groups had gathered together a number of such songs, particularly during, and in the wake of, the Spanish Revolution and, once the war began, it was discovered that they were specialists with repertoires of highly fashionable and politically pertinent material. During the course of the war the WMA organised large scale concerts and local get-togethers in order to send valuable aid to China and the Soviet Union [the largest of these even took place at the Royal Albert Hall]. National songs in a range of languages were the standard fare at such concerts and broadcasts. Because of these concerts, [many of which were broadcast] some younger people at home began to see the previous construction of folksong as a purely aesthetic category, isolated from current events, in a different light. Towards the end of the war the WMA brought out the 'Keynote' series of low-priced paperbacks dealing with history, literature and music.
The fourth number in this series, issued in 1944, entitled The Singing Englishman by A L Lloyd, was a catalyst for the second revival. Lloyd was attempting to remove contemporary [i.e. EFDSS] "misunderstandings" about English folksongs by relating them to the "times and circumstances they were made up in" [Lloyd:1944]. The appearance of this booklet at this moment in time was, indeed, seminal, for it caught a wave of youthful and creative impulses. By 1945 Lloyd's little reader was regarded by some as a real agent for change. Ideological and artistic imperatives were brought together as folksong became a vehicle for those interested in the rediscovery of 'working-class' art, such as Leslie Shepard:
Those who grew up in the thirties and forties now find it difficult to convey the dead hand of mediocrity and authoritarianism of those days. Britain was a class-ridden society with rigid barriers and social problems that nobody seemed to care about. The mainstream of art, literature, and poetry was largely conformist and snobbish. Even folk music was mainly a middle-class study. It is not surprising that new directions in art, literature, and social change tended to have a left-wing flavour, intensified by the drama of the Spanish Civil War and the fight against totalitarian fascism ... we were all a bit left-wing in those days.Despite shortages and hardships, a sense of euphoric utopianism pervaded and changed many people's lives forever once the war was over. Although it can be described as 'utopian', it would be wrong to suggest that it was all a pipedream ... far from it, in fact, for with the landslide Labour victory in 1945 came a new political consensus: reconstruction, the social services, extended secondary schooling, full employment. And, despite the attempts of monetarist revisionist historians of the post-Thatcher years to re-write this period of history [claiming that industry and commerce were starved of funds to pay for it all], it worked and worked reasonably well, operating at probably a far higher level of effectiveness then than it has done in more recent times [thriving, perhaps, on enthusiasm as much as anything else]. The release after VE Day, one of the great days of modern British history, was manifest with a growing mood of social optimism. Folksong now had the potential to be part of the confirmation of changing values, it was a 'victorious' and 'democratic' soundtrack. If national culture was to embrace a new cultural attitude, then folksong could be part of that, as it came to reflect an active and participatory aspect of people's struggle for the previous six years and beyond. For some, it all seemed to have possibilities.
The years following the end of World War Two were part of an important transitional period in which at least three socio-musical themes were developed around the uses of folksong: politics; audience access and engagement; and [despite the square dance craze] non-American influence. To call a song a song because of its functional relationship to its context was part of a shifting of ideas about the very use of music. Despite the work of Sharp, music had previously remained aligned to, on the one hand, the institutionalised theories of 'high art' or, the 'social dependence' ideas of the Frankfurt School. Folk music was used by some to drive a wedge between these two apparent polarities. Although this had already been implicit via the first revival, the fundamental change in the social atmosphere brought about by the effects and aftermath of WW2, enabled it to be made explicit.
The re-emergence of folksong meant that, initially, several articulations were brought together in a more or less coherent manner. A multivalence magnetised the rest of the community and created many different but interconnected associations. This was not 'revolutionary', as such, but more akin to a socio-musical dialectic. But, as folk music was holding an imprecise yet vaguely political card, so the nebulous political movements of the 1940s and 1950s used the folk revival as a means to stage their battles.
However, as political movements stamped their authority on folksong, what initially might have stood as a great national collective project devolved into little more than an unending diatribe against the late-capitalist world. In that situation, any element of inclusivity initially suggested by the revival found itself without a vocation, as humourless, elitist concepts about the evil role of popular music took over. The [workers'] past became the primary 'referent', an icon. The past was not offered as a way of forging new soundtracks, making new songs in a traditional idiom, but of effacing the modern. Hence the arrival of 'policy' clubs by the late-1950s. Folk music form then came to connote obscure social and political meanings. Even song performance came to symbolise a certain non-mainstream lifestyle, a model for a possible world, and political fidelity. This now fazes Bob Buckle:
When people ask me to comment on that period of the late 50s, early 60s I don't always like to do so too much because it always makes me feel paranoid and makes me sound like a sort of McCarthy-ite. Nothing could be further from the truth, honest! But the intellectuals in the folk scene were very much from the Marxist camp. Some of them had left the CP, I think, but they were still very politically motivated. You would sing a song like Geordie, which I'd learned from the playing of Doc Watson, and they'd give you chapter and verse on it ... how it stood for something or other. I just liked it, you know! Learned it off a record! But it had to be politically correct as well for some of them.But not Frank and Helen McCall:
I would have to say now that we are both purists about it all, politically, historically. The songs in the tradition were more important than the performer. That meant that somewhere along the line you were regarding yourself as something of a social historian in music. That's not nostalgia, its a feel for the past and how it applies to the present. There was a political stance that went along with this for many people, that's true, but there's nothing wrong with that. I actually think the whole thing lost a bit of focus when MacColl was sort of dislodged. He was a real leader. Buckle, for me, has always been more interested in himself AS a performer, and that's where I would question his whole approach to folksong. Yes, from our point of view there was an important ideology to it. The whole thing excited us, it offered new possibilities. It still does, actually.Perhaps the root of this disagreement may lie in the fact that these "new possibilities" could never remain immutable in a kinetic society which effectively 'produced' the folk revival. After all, they were later further reconstructed in the 1960s as non-western philosophies also entered the equation and Hinduism and Zen Buddism became intrinsic to the singer-songwriter outcrop of the folk movement as a direct result of social context. The resonance spoken of earlier came to link new forms, colours and themes. If the original concept of the revival was one of organic social unity, that unity came to express itself in new artists and new settings [e.g. The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, Andy Roberts etc.]. Did this make it any less relevant? Maoist political sects, Oriental fashion in clothing, the changing power relationships between east and west, the war in Vietnam, all created political change and thus all suggested that the folk revival was also required to recreate itself. If multivalence is to continue to remain contextually convincing, it is required to evolve into further unlimited semiosis, responding to and drawing strength from the zeitgeist.
The above perceptions from Frank and Helen McCall merely represent a certain discernment made from those within that particular era in British performance history. They deny whatever the next external context might have been via the 'power' of the revival at its instigation. One precondition for musical relevance is that a complex relation both to the present and the past is constructed. It is true that without memories and associations a song is diminished in meaning, but it is also true that if song remains simply revivalist, its scope to affect is equally depleted. In fact, the song is then regarded as an antidote to any 'alien' modern context. This is surely an inadequate reading of music within history, for song is available to give old forms new meaning. If all the folk revival accomplished was a 'loop-back' within its own established criteria, then, while 'moodily' criticising contemporary songwriters for "moodily contemplating their own neuroses", 16 it undoubtedly stalled.
If the post-war context of the folk revival demanded that song was a medium without overtly expressive or illusionistic effects or references [ie. 'carrying a tradition'], then that striving towards objectivity eventually required re-examination as cultural contexts changed. Instead, 'pure' styles became more stylised as that post-war epoch passed away and, by the mid-1970s, folk club motifs of 'organic unity' represented rather idealistic and politicised cannibalisations of history; elongated representations of the socio-political inputs that constructed the revival - self-reference became the criterion for those involved. Folksong thus carried a burden on its back, for it remained a vehicle for the ideology brought into focus by the social context of post-war Britain, even when that context had all but vanished. It had meaning foisted upon it.
Public enthusiasm for folk music was not simply limited to the rather class ridden folk music organisations, of course, and popularity certainly grew, but folk music was organised from the political left and right, and the growth of the likes of the EFDSS [who had re-organised themselves in the immediate post-war era to cater for the expected revival], the Workers' Music Association, the Eisteddfodau and the Edinburgh Festival all represented something of a hegemony, which is always off-putting to the non-aligned music lover:
I went to the Bluecoat one night with my friend because she showed some interest in country dancing. I think she'd heard some on the radio and liked it and somebody had told her that they held classes at the Bluecoat, so off we went. I hated it. It was so regimented. Tweedy looking spinsters shouting instructions over a scratchy record on the gramophone. I suppose country dances need to be regimented, but it was like being in the Guides. It struck me that this was something that we fought the war to get shot of. We never went again. It wasn't that important to me.As production and styles of life were relatively democratised [mass production techniques turned out 150,000 pre-fabs, making for some, literally, a 'new England'], by the 1950s much of the workers' former isolation from the market for consumer goods began to fade away. No longer did many of the workers see themselves as having to settle for the cast-offs of middle-class society. No longer did they regard themselves as having to accept goods or enjoyments that were ostensibly produced for other people in other walks of life. By the early-1950s, the workers were able to respond financially to idealized petty-bourgeois ideals just as much as the pre-war Daily Express reader. They were able to involve themselves much more in the popular styles that were the province of the pre-war middle-classes.
However, this new 'affluence' brought about by practically full employment also highlighted for many just how the inconsequential drawing room comedies of the pre-war English stage failed to embrace general appeal [despite the inroads made by Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby, a high proportion of the popular song hits of the 1940s had been written by Coward and Novello - a very unproletarian genre, if ever there was one]. So, at a time of increased rationing and extremely bitter winters in the late-1940s, the tension between the entertainment products of the 'Yanks' and the outpourings from London's 'Tin Pan Alley' became more marked than ever; a mixture of austerity and optimism heightened the lure of Americana. In addition, many moralizing teachers whose thoughts and ideas were based upon British liberal humanism were being gradually replaced by a widening schoolteaching spectrum, opened up in the wake of the 1944 Education Act, which raised school leaving age to 15.
So, the immediate post-war period was one of great optimism from the political left, occasionally sponsored, perhaps, by the working classes via Trades Union membership fees and funds, but with the ideology and activity coming from the euphoric state of the essentially middle-class Labour voters. There was a proselytising mood abroad, reaching something of a zenith on New Year's Day, 1947 when the mines were nationalised. Singing traditional songs accompanied much of the flag hauling, and it was all very symbolic that this music and activity should be brought together at the most appropriate hour. Even though, in the fullness of time, it was realised that the government had been far too generous to the old mine owners and that the whole Nationalisation programme had not been properly thought out, these were very intoxicating times. One might argue that the folk music ideology had not been thought out either, because throughout the following decade it was the working-class's musical tastes which came to dominate commercially, forced upwardly into the consciousness of the non-working class music media industry [e.g. the BBC] by the beginning of the 1960s, and emerging into the light of day with Liverpudlian accents by 1962. Indirectly, the vogue for real working-class themes, desires, dreams and aspirations were being reflected by popular music and TV and swept even that bourgeois stronghold, the theatre, where writers began to abandon drawing-room French windows ['anyone for tennis?'] and regional stereotypes ['eeh bah gum!'] in favour of a more critical regionalism.
For a while, Douglas and Peter Kennedy - who by this time effectively were the EFDSS - used this interest in all things American to proselytise about Square Dancing, encouraging a small dance craze in 1950 which lasted until about 1952, but they soon reverted back to indigenous prejudice. But when American folk performers such as the Weavers and Burl Ives ran contrary both to the political beliefs and the almost photographic imagery of the revival's historicism by achieving mass popularity with folksongs in the mid-1950s, the revival's desperate attempt to appropriate an exclusive past became clearly undermined by folksingers from that very continent accused of producing a nightmarish musical future! Folk was popular!
Actor/singer Burl Ives, derided by both left and right for being a 'product', was of crucial importance to the emergence of a younger singing generation throughout the 1950s and early-1960s. For many youngsters interested in music, it was the sound of Ives' recordings played on the BBC Light Programmes' 'Children's Favourites' that created an interest in folk music ... hardly revolutionary! Neil Parry:
Uncle Mac always played Ives on a Saturday morning. I Know an Old Lady, for example. I'd listen to it, absorb it. He played guitar, sang easily, gently. You could see him on the telly. He was an actor, so you occasionally saw him on the films. He opened the door for me. Even if at a later stage you don't acknowledge him because he was 'uncool', at an even later stage, you own up! ... and say yeah, OK, it WAS Burl Ives, not Ewan MacColl ... I admit it! A bit later it was Peter Paul and Mary with Puff the Magic Dragon ... Now chastise me for it!This apparent contradiction of an American film star being lauded as a folksinger severely questioned 'pure' musical representation. By approaching the past through different levels of stylistic indicators, by conveying a degree of 'pastness' in performance, Ives questioned whether any representation of the past could be unsullied. His easy, gentle, yet popular approach to song questioned the logic of writing-off one form of folksinging as insubstantial for having no historical depth, when the historicity used in another was a product of a particular stage of historical development - the political correctness of a post-war left wing interpretation of history. He questioned the very definitions of a folksinger. Ives was a folksinger of the 1950s because people listened to him. You knew that people listened because his records sold ... folk was popular.
This pioneering work also had a soundtrack. Many of the newly-trained teachers entering the expanding education system, occurring in new towns like Stevenage as well as in the centres of urban conurbations, were greatly influenced by both their political leanings and this imprecise variation of rural pioneering. The BBC, still bastions of British culture [at least in their own eyes] set up the Third Programme ostensibly to cater for this new education system. Not only did they provide schools schedules of a more conventional nature, but also musical programmes, especially those including country dances. Singing Together With Herbert Wiseman on the BBC Home service, for example, offered a chance for this 'other' music to appear on the radio, and record companies such as HMV, Parlophone, Columbia and Beltona provided a great deal of country dance product for radio airplay. HMV made recordings 'under the auspices of the EFDSS' which could be obtained from Cecil Sharp House. Teachers were encouraged to join the EFDSS and use these recordings for organised dance classes.
The EFDSS began to run the aforementioned dance courses all over the regions of England and these courses were peopled by many new teachers willing to learn and then teach English and Scottish Country Dancing at their schools. These teachers [as many children in the 1950s and early '60s would vouch] were quite evangelical in their task, and expanded the membership of the EFDSS to hitherto undreamed of proportions, whilst at the same time, used folk music definitions [eg. 'rural', 'regional', 'simple', 'uncomplicated'] as a basis for a vague new horizon ideology. This impulse did not necessarily come from the heart of the working-classes, for many of the newly qualified teachers were the grammar school 'success stories' of the post-war era.
This impetus could not have been sustained without the radio. The country was enjoying a good deal of folksong broadcasting of one form or another. Through embracing technology, folksong did make in-roads into certain sections of the national consciousness; however, even then it had little effect upon those who chose not to listen to the Home Service and the Third Programme for leisure [in other words, the lower-classes]. Many working-class people found the Home Service far too boring and too middle-brow. My own mother told me:
The Light programme had a good balance of entertainment and music in the morning. This was essential, as I never went to work once I'd married your father and the music kept you going until the afternoon. Music While You Work was important, if a bit irritating. Maybe I'd turn over to the Home Service for Woman's Hour, I think, and Listen With Mother, but that was about it.A middle-class Labour ideology was evidently tearing away from the commercial requirements of the new working [and spending] classes and this ideologically unsound behaviour caused great consternation amongst those who were academic and politically left of centre. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, was highly critical of the effects upon the nation's working class youth of 'copper after copper' ["it was silver, actually" - interview with Mick O'Toole 1997] being poured into the "mechanical record machine" in coffee bars up and down the country. The very word 'folk', and the meanings attributed to that word, did not, in the post-war new horizon era, simply mean folk, but more that which grew from a particular ideological and/or patrimonial sod. For the EFDSS it might have meant simply 'England', for the optimists of the WMA and the Young Communist League it had suggestions of a broader political message and a contempt for the potential of industrially-led human progress as expressed in all things American.
Rationing coupons were still used, albeit on a sliding scale, right up until 1954. Given the different uses made of the BBC radio broadcasting systems in the 1950s by different classes of people, music was also rationed. The BBC's Country Magazine; As I Roved Out and the later Charles Parker-produced programmes such as Singing The Fishing, were amongst numerous broadcasts involving folk music from the Corporation during the 1950s, but they were, by and large, broadcast on the 'intellectual' Home Service. Even if these programmes did keep folk music in the forefront of a musical debate over American influences and aesthetics, those that consumed 'mass-produced' American music were largely unaffected and unconcerned.
By 1957 Radio Luxembourg, with disc jockeys such as Gus Goodwin, Jimmy Henney and Jimmy Savile, had already realised that US rock 'n' roll was not the 'passing fad' that it was previously thought to be and most young people tried to find this station on their new transistor radios, not the Home Service. A survey in 1961 showed that Radio Luxembourg had an average British audience of over two million, far greater than the Home Service, which, in any case, was the second most popular BBC station. In fact, when BBC TV were allowed to broadcast in the 'blank hour' between 6pm and 7pm ['time to get the children to bed'] in 1957, even they chose to launch The 6.5 Special to cater for the identifiable teenage market. It was a genuinely live show and, mixing a little rock with trad, folk and skiffle, it caused quite a stir. However, before too long, producer Jack Good had defected to the new ITV, created a rival programme called Oh Boy! and effectively put the rather staid BBC offering out of business by giving the teenagers what they really wanted, i.e.100% US-style rock 'n' roll. Mick O'Toole testifies to the class-ridden ideology of the BBC:
Well-intentioned as the Beeb management was, it was a case of mainly middle-class producers making middle-class programmes and not having a clue as to what teenagers wanted ... but they knew a man who did ... enter Jack Good ... even Arthur Askey pranced and danced his tired old Busy Bee routine to polite indifference. A definite bonus was the weekly film clip taken from one of the rock exploitation movies being made at the time ... the first clip Good featured was Little Richard belting out Lucille from The Girl Can't Help It. This caused a furore with the management and from then on, he felt it best to list merely 'film clip' on the schedule and thus give no clues as to the content in advance.Like the producers at the BBC, Douglas Kennedy of the EFDSS later realised that the society had "lost its opportunity" to capitalise on the British square dance boom because it was "divided as to whether English folk dance should include American variants."
21 He was right - although, in all probability, the interest in square dancing was always going to be a flash in the pan while the sounds of 'real' America [including R&B and rockabilly] were getting ever closer to the ear of the average Briton. Nevertheless the high art polemic against 'inauthentic' American material mounted from both sides of the folk divide, whether it be against folk music played by film stars [Ives], or rock music played by white trash [Elvis], meant that the potential of the folk revival to reconstitute itself in a world of ever evolving contexts was lost in a sea of 'purity'.
It could never be the self-proclaimed folk intellectuals who could effectively plug that gap between art and life. This could only come from the young people who had the spending power. This they managed to do, without any of the predetermined cultural justifications held up by either the EFDSS, WMA or BBC; they did so simply as an innate counteraction to their own new social and economic positions. The critical contradiction of the folk gesture of the 1950s can be measured by the fact that there was, indeed, little organic relationship between the musical history that was being learned from songbooks and the lived experiences of the growing high-rise and urbanised proletariat of the 1950s.
That a change in musicology was required, there is little doubt, but the crisis of the folk revival's historicity is that, because of its CP connections, it merely followed that of the classical, by offering itself up as a formal text to be learned. Of course the highlighting of a supression of older traditions was/is crucial to our understanding of the present; however the folk revival could never hope to represent the continuity between past and present while it perpetuated unsustainable political stereotypes produced in the euphoric atmosphere of post-war social intellectualism. Despte its exciting beginnings, by the late-1950s the folk revival had already become a rather degraded collective, gazing upon a present 'ghastly' world and then back towards a putative time in the past, merely reconstructing an idealised past history that was once itself a grim present! The monumental hypocrisy of the revival was that it had some claim on a rather incipient realism. This became little more than a confinement within the boundaries of these images of the past.
After my uncle's death I discovered that his small record collection contained the likes of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and The Original Dixieland Jazzband, as well as some of the early Ken Colyer Jazzmen recordings on Tempo. Members of perhaps the most productive Ken Colyer Band included Chris Barber and Anthony Donegan. Colyer, especially, was fanatical about attempting to produce authentic styles of New Orleans jazz, and the various musicians who moved through his groups likewise had to be interested in producing 'realistic' music and lyrics of American vernacular. Trad jazz was very appealing from one important respect. It could embrace American subject matters without having to dwell on the problematic area of US commercialism and overkill. It could eschew popularism and look for a modern 'now' with the aid of a preferable 'then'. It favoured what it saw as declining forms of negro music as opposed to the hard bop beginning to emerge in the States. It was, just like folk, somewhat convenient for the purist, for the jazz precisionists were not exactly dealing with the here and now, either.
George Melly later remarked that this was the main reason why the trad jazz scene, although intrinsic to the development of British rock 'n' roll and pop, could not, in itself, be labelled a 'pop' movement. Melly could have been describing the folk revival in the same words:
Where it differed was in the way it looked back towards an earlier culture for its inspiration, thus admitting that it believed in a 'then' which was superior to 'now' - a very anti-pop concept. What's more, both its executants and their public were mostly into their twenties before the movement was even under way and, although this was the result of the war, it did tend to add a certain ballast, a potential respectability. This was further underlined by the fact that, although enthusiasm for the music cut right across the social spectrum, it contained a surprisingly large minority of middle-and upper-class adherents and even a few elderly and distinguished advocates who had formed a taste for the music before the war. In consequence, right from the off, the press treated it as an eccentric rather than scandalous manifestation ... the atmosphere of the British revivalist clubs, while permissive enough by the standards of the time, was jolly and extrovert rather than orgiastic.My uncle was a dedicated socialist in those days and rejected the pop culture of its day as being ideologially unsound. In his diaries he even suspected a deliberate plot to brainwash the working-classes! In his support for both the EFDSS and the WMA he felt that the folk revival was important armour against the erosion of traditional cultures. He stated in his diary that "the working classes didn't appreciate when they were well off" and that one had to be extremely suspicious of "popular anything" because " ... what was the war for? ... to bring us back to the days when the average working man couldn't even afford time for a sit-down, and when he DID sit down, he invariably sat down for years?" Eddie thought that popular culture constituted a "seductive threat to many weak but talented individuals". He told me in the 1970s that he was a supporter of the CP-backed WMA because he "liked the idea of a paternalistic overseer". His job in the Foreign Office, naturally, precluded him from being a paid-up member of the CP despite his sympathies at that time being with the hard left. Harker also affirms that "the history of the second Folksong Revival ... was closely involved with the cultural policy of the CPGB".On balance then, I feel that the antiquarian, post adolescent nature of the British revivalist jazz movement of the late 40s destroys its claim to being thought of as a pop movement. Despite its large public it was never even fully exploited. A series of over-long, over-packed concerts, the defection of Humphrey Lyttleton, and the emergence of the 'traditional' purists were enough to sink it.
23
For the young intellectual in post-war Britain such as my late uncle, the split between high culture and mass production was bridged by an historical appreciation of an 'historical' lost culture. Both folk and trad jazz music helped to ease the psyche of those who found it difficult to equate their intellectual pretensions with any enthusiasm for contemporary popular culture. There was a desperate intellectualizing to justify those interests, and also a defiant over-compensatory arrogance which attempted to forestall any criticism by implying that such criticism could only come from backwards-looking Imperialists. Both forms of defence were common amongst folk and jazz revivals. This musical 'social realism' with its emphasis on 'authenticity' even became somewhat institutionalised as the BBC further embraced and developed its own approaches to folksong. There was an authentic canon to defend, real singers to hear [Harry Cox, Sam Larner, the Coppers, Jeannie Robertson] as well as the prospect of further collecting to be done, and so the BBC launched a nationwide scheme to classify and define this heritage canon in 1952.
Boyes [1993] states that Marie Slocombe of the BBC Recorded Programme Library [and an active member of the IFMC] created folk classifications from little more than value judgements and that, by the 1950s, there was a march to define and measure the canon. Via its mediation and classification by the BBC, and its subjective coalition with British Communist Party strategies folk music, by the end of the 1950s, had become dependent upon a level of antiquarian classification. The various ways of discussing folk music and portraying it as part of the interrelatedness of rural pioneering, workers' culture and post-war utopianism became subject to classification. The context was seen to be right to classify, for by doing so, it really came to mean something. But, by doing so the folk revival was, in itself, historically and contextually locked within that very era.
The folk theorists were providing an intellectual justification for the changes in British life, post-war. The revival correctly suggested that aesthetic premises should be re-examined; however what it failed to do was own up about and critically examine those other areas around them [such as Americana] which they affected to despise, but in which most people actually rejoiced. So the value judgements of classifiers were, in effect, just as personal and idiosyncratic as those of the pre-war era from which they wished to escape. Because of the need to discover a necessary socio-political interrelation between the music and society, the music of the 'folk' became harnessed to as many rigid boundaries [but for different reasons] as it had always been.
It is obvious, with hindsight, that the discourse of folk music classification simply perpetuated old canons, but this would have been far less clear at the time. Occasionally the second folk revival did widen the terms of reference. Musically, for example, it encouraged the use of acoustic guitar when that instrument was often regarded as a 'second class' item in a big band, but it refused to freely embrace electrification and certainly did not lead to a broader approach to performance, as it appeared to promise. The late Wally Whyton 24 informed me that when Chris Barber organised the visits of black musicians to this country, they were persuaded to use acoustic instrumentation to suit the prejudices of the revival, when they had been playing in small amplified combos for a number of years in the USA [e.g. Big Bill Broonzy & His Chicago Five]. There was a valiant and justifiable search for suppressed narratives but it was all too often deprecated via ill thought-out polemics against mass production and the proliferation of copies. There was a dutiful examination of musical presentation which questioned the arrangements of previous folklorists. However, according to Boyes [1993], this mostly drew the conclusion that massed voices and choral arrangements of folk music were also out of place because they didn't 'feel' right; they did not have an aura of authenticity. But why not?
This aura was a hand-made one, something that could be neither mechanically reproduced nor chorally arranged. Mechanical reproduction evidently made that aura wither. MacColl's preface to The Shuttle and Cage [1954] suggested that an aura had been created and yet depleted by the mechanistic world of reproduction, and he somewhat ironically contested that to restore a certain level of uniqueness, a mechanical backdrop ought to be the soundscape within which industrial songs should be voiced:
There are no nightingales in these songs, no flowers-and the sun is rarely mentioned ... They should be sung to the accompaniment of pneumatic drills, and swinging hammers, they should be bawled above the hum of turbines and the clatter of looms for they are the songs of toil ...It might have been more musically relevant if MacColl had adopted the practices of [say] Musique Concrete and done just that! but for entry into MacColl's concept of tradition, a genre had to confirm that tradition's central values. Tape-splicing and soundscape collages could not meet his criteria.
Meanwhile, my mother, sister of my uncle Edgar, was back in Liverpool. She was married to my father in 1949, never went to a jazz club in her life and didn't know anything about folk music on the Third Programme or the Home Service. Mum listened to the Light Programme almost exclusively and sang along to Tony Bennett's Stranger In Paradise and Rosemary Clooney's Where Will the Baby's Dimple Be? She had remained basically working-class while Eddie had risen in class. Not only was he a representative of the declining Empire at the Foreign Office, but also, it seems, a keeper of the appropriate generic musical keys, the latter being one of the better kept secrets of the 1950s[!].
Despite all of the posturing of the folk revivalists [then and now] about "folk at last becoming accessible to a mass audience" 26 most workers had little or no knowledge of the existence of the folk revival. It was also the development of non-literary forms like commercial television that really started to ask questions about devolving class. In fact, some of Ewan MacColl's own songs were often dangerously close to perpetuating class stereotypes, not breaching them [Schooldays Over, Manchester Rambler, Dirty Old Town]. The limited, class-ridden output of BBC television was safe as long as it held the monopoly on TV, but once the independent networks began, the exposition and then erosion of class stereotypes became a little more pronounced. It is no co-incidence that the biggest in-roads that not only rock 'n' roll, but kitchen sink realism, made in 1950s Britain were directly linked to the subsequent output of ITV, rather than the [albeit pioneering] product of the BBC.
At about the time that Oh Boy! was on the television, the aforementioned Richard Hoggart was in the USA [Rochester] teaching and enjoying favourable reviews of The Uses Of Literacy. Hoggart's work remains emotional and observant to this day, and is particularly important as a pioneer of textual analysis of popular song; but, in taking its lead from the Leavisite school of literary criticism, The Uses Of Literacy was something of a post-war period piece even by this time [1957]. It was certainly expressing the same mixture of a pre-war working-class culture consciousness together with an 'enlightened' post-war optimism and intellectualism that one could find in the folk revival. Hoggart was not a member of the WMA [and he was never a Communist], but an active teacher and organiser for Hull Extra Mural Dept. and the WEA [The Workers' Education Association]. Nevertheless, the similarities between the indistinct polemic of Ewan MacColl and the hazy criticisms of Richard Hoggart are marked, indeed.
Throughout the book Hoggart expressed an anxiety for the way a certain level of literary and social 'tradition' had deteriorated. He saw the old jejune but ethical standards on which popular culture was previously based threatened by misanthropic forces bent on manipulation for profit. Like MacColl, Hoggart constantly searched for negative 'difference' rather than an albeit challenging but positive 'similarity' between the new 'pop' and old popular cultures.
MacColl similarly regarded anything 'folk' as sound and 'pop' as decidedly unsound, and while he and Peggy Seeger were speculating that we were heading for a form of musical "Esperanto" [Sydney Carter interview ‘Going American?’: English Dance and Song, 1960/1], Hoggart's writing was also subsumed in a nostalgia of demarcation for Britain's working classes and a resentment of the growing fluidity of life and art [also reminiscent, perhaps, of the MacColl propaganda that the 11,000 [!] members of the Singers Club were "mostly young manual workers"].
Hoggart disapproved of the increasing quasi-sophistication of working-class periodicals, and blustered about the 'sex and violence' paperbacks of the period, whereas MacColl prattled about "cosmopolitan, half-baked music which doesn't satisfy the emotions of anybody" [Sydney Carter interview ‘Going American?’ English Dance and Song, 1960/1]. Both Hoggart and Ewan MacColl were becoming self-imposed rectal thermometers for the cultural temperature of Britain. Neither recognised that many young people in the later 'fifties viewed a great deal of Leavisite-mediated British tradition, whether literary or musical, with a great deal of suspicion. In addition, in the wake of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, they also regarded the political systems associated with folk and trad jazz with utter contempt. Ironically, what neither Hoggart nor MacColl could prevent was the arrival of a 'standardised' British pop figure who owed a not inconsiderable debt to both the folk and jazz revivalists, via the hybrid of skiffle - Lonnie Donegan. And eventually both my mother and my Uncle Edgar were to vote Conservative for many years.
It is to the political polemic of the post-war folk revival that I now wish to turn. For some, faced with an irrational world, only the ultimatum of realism would suffice. If one was to escape the inequalities of pre-war capitalism and the devastations of post-war science, then one had to draw both closer to a sense of 'reality'. In a great deal of folk literature one continues to read that this music is not simply about 'enjoyment'; it is 'real'. Perhaps even no matter how boring, the important thing is to increase boredom, for such an increase in 'reality' is a salvation. What are the roots of such thoughts? Was the folk revival an amplification of musical freedom, an access to 'reality'? or merely an amplification of negativity towards other genres and little more than a 'revolutionary' admonition?
Mike Brocken
Article MT023
| Top of page | Home Page | Articles | Reviews | News | Map |