1
" ... Whatever the definition, folk is always seen as 'real' music, not imposed on or sold to people but produced by them ... where 'folk' and 'popular' meet, clearly important sociological consequences must follow." Middleton: 1990, p.129.
In 1954 the International Folk Music Council decreed that the music that they had decided to study [and, some might argue, subsequently place in a bell jar] was:
... the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are:The terms can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.
(i) . Continuity which links present to the past.
(ii). Variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or group; and
(iii). Selection by the community which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character. 2
Yet by 1967 that word 'oral' had already created a great fissure within both British and American folk revivals and fracture and mutation had already commenced. The principles as laid down in the Council's definition of aims and objectives seemed to many grossly out of tune with the individual interests of musicians and appeared little more than hypothetical retrospections about a 'spontaneous-creative' art form. The work of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch in the mid-1960s had already heralded a different aesthetic within the folk revival. Both artists drew heavily on different traditions whilst developing personalised songwriting abilities and guitar techniques in a search for an indefinable and idiosyncratic set of musical statements. 3. Almost from the beginning of the 1960s [at least from, say, October, 1962 - the release date of Love Me Do by the Beatles] it had become evident to many who had drifted into the folk revival from the access point of skiffle, that popular culture and folk sources had a very close and symbiotic relationship. Liverpool folk/rocker Steve Dale, therefore, became gradually more irritated by the attitudes of certain revivalists:
I got sick and tired of hearing how the transistor radio was evil and how 'telly addiction' was the rue of society; how pop was cretinized. It felt like the revival was beginning to regret the passing of the english gentleman by the 1960s! It felt like the wheel had sort of come full circle ... or had fallen off altogether! I came out of the folk scene then, I never went back.Actually, with technological developments leaping ahead almost month by month, rapid changes in the very sound of music were affecting all musicians. In 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had made a monumental step forward in pop soundscape painting with Pet Sounds and by the following year a wide variety of foot-pedals such as 'wah-wah', phase shifters, 'fuzz' distortions had appeared in the electric guitar market-place [and Marshall amplifiers were also in production]. Walter [Wendy] Carlos' experimentations with electronic music were even becoming staple album chart fare by 1969 [Switched On Bach CBS (s) 63501] as the theremin, the mellotron and the synthesiser became important pieces of studio, and then stage equipment [e.g. Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues]. With the assistance of the aforementioned Carlos, Robert Moog's synthesiser was also in its final stages of development. Moog's comments upon his expansions in electronic music now make fascinating and relevant reading:
The question 'is electronic music less natural than music played on acoustic intruments?' No music is natural! Music is produced only after people invest strenuous and extended effort to gain intimate control over vibrating systems such as vocal chords, a violin, or a synthesiser. Furthermore, all musical instruments, except for the human voice, are highly contrived technological artifices. They are differentiated not by their degree of 'naturalness', but by the technological periods in which they were developed. The string instruments were perfected when woodworking was a flowering technology. Piano designers utilised the processes of a fully industrialised society. And the electronic music medium is being developed now, a time when electronic technology is dominant and the golden age of manufacturing appears to be yielding to what people are calling the 'post-industrial era'. 5
The concerns of the variety of musicians interested in folk music were not simply based around the 'devastating' inroads that technocracy was making [nor the preservation society ideals that the EFDSS had re-embraced after the 'revolution' of December, 1960]; they were concerned with what could be done to recontextualise the folksong into a workable aural soundtrack for the 1960s, ascribing new ventures with familiar materials [actually "refashioning" and "recreat(ing)"].
Pop worked for many musicians [folk or otherwise] because it was 'trans' avant garde; having the potential to supplant, re-invent and recontextualise the avant garde sentiments of post-war utopianism. A Hard Day's Night, for example, had shown in 1964 that pop was not a fantasy. It displayed a real sensitivity for British working-class 'folk-law' in its own right. It presented little Irish grandads, pompous ex-army officers and decaying television theatres in a fascinating pop jigsaw puzzle that posed questions, rather than provided answers. The leaders of the British folk movement, on the other hand, behaved like a nationalised industry; ignoring trends, attacking popularisation and commercialisation without the desire to comprehend that the texts they presumed represented working-class 'purity' were largely doctored pieces of popular music. The majority of young Britons still hardly recognised these folk sources as defined by the revival, in any case, and were not effectively at tracted to them en masse as MacColl and Lloyd had hoped. Internal folk histories tell a different story, but even by 1964 [the year of Shirley Collins' and Davey Graham's seminal album for Decca Folk Roots/New Routes] the folk club 'establishment' appeared, to some, to be retreating back within itself. John Ellis spoke to me of a:
... proselytising to the erstwhile converted, certainly not expanding its membership through its own efforts, basically getting lazy; when I hear of the giant steps being made in the folk revival in the mid-1960s to attract new people, I have to think ... where? Not in our neck of the woods. It was still endless debates about Dylan going electric, about MacColl and all of that. We did have new young people coming to the club but they were attracted by American singer/songwriters. Most of them were in for a shock! our committee were a closed-shop and liked it that way".There is the suggestion, above, that the increasing membership of folk clubs was as a result of a continued pop-based erudition together with an interest in all types of North and South American music [brought about by the growing influence of American musicians such as Paxton, Dylan, Baez and Simon] and there is some evidence to support this. Interest in folk music was fuelled by fairly regular appearances on the television and the radio of some of the more 'acceptable' American folk singers [on television: Julie Felix with David Frost], together with a wide-ranging assortment of British duplications [Donovan]. Paul Simon actually sang on the religious Five To Ten slot on the BBC Radio in March, 1965, introduced by Judith Piepe, and opened the door for other contemporary singer/songwriters. In the years before the advent of Radio 1 a populist appreciation of contemporary folksong also emanated from the broadcasting 'establishment' of the BBC, leading to a 'middle of the road' form of folk singer such as Friday Brown [who regularly appeared with Max Jaffa on the Light Programme] being presented as musical background for domestic activity. Both Val Doonican and Jake Thackray established themselves as radio troubadours in the wake of what Piepe was to describe as the 'folk poets'
7, but via an involvement with the listener and daily household procedures such as hoovering!
The BBC also broadcast Latin 'folk' music at peak listening times. Dorita y Pepe and David and Marianne Dalmour became popular singing political protest songs from South and Central America. The Paul Simon song 'Carlos Dominguez', recorded by Val Doonican, also filtered this 'latin' agit-prop feel, as did the later [Sept. '66] success of the Latin American folksong originally purveyed by the Weavers - Guantanamera. Dorita y Pepe sang songs by Argentinian folk singers Ramon Ayala, Cholo Aguirre and Atahualpa Yupanqui on mainstream daytime radio, enabling a wider listening demographic, in these years immediately preceding the advent of Radio 1, to hear folk music of one sort or another without entering any internecine debate over thematic specialisation, authenticity or social relevance. Dorita y Pepe were Londoners with no family connections with Latin America; they were ex-jazz musicians who simply became interested in Latin American folk music. Critic Herbert Krezmer penned the following sleevenotes to David and Marianne Dalmour's first album, released in 1965 [Columbia 33SX 1715]:
One of the most endearing things about the entertainment offered by the attractive and musicianly Dalmours is that they do not burn, in public, at any rate, with the sort of overblown social conscience that nowadays seems obligatory among professional singers.Both the Dalmours and Dorita y Pepe sold thousands of record albums across the country. Although neither entered the weekly album listings of the day, their sales were spread over a longer period than weekly lists could reflect. Dorita y Pepe's album Latin American Folk [Pye NSLP 18215 1968] was a formidable seller at the famous Musical Box in Liverpool. Proprietor Diane Caine told me:Nowhere in this enchanting catalogue of a dozen songs are we pursued by the voices of social protest. Nowhere are we warned about the ominous mushroom cloud settling like a pall of doom on our civilisation; nor about what Strontium 90 is doing to our milk.
Nowhere are there jeering references to the faceless conformists who live in little ticky tacky boxes on the hillsides of California, and nowhere is the listener scorned for the racial and colour prejudices he is assumed to possess and of which stains all guitar-toting cellar singers are assumed to be free.
David and Marianne Dalmour ... cover a wider range of songs that is normally essayed by this breed of entertainer. They have, in short, conducted a merger between the simplicities of folk singing and even such tin-pan-alley improbabilities like A-tisket-a-Tasket.
The effect, strangely, has been not to narrow the 'folk' field, but to enlarge it. The results are undemanding, unpretentious and eminently listenable. [Let me say, lest certain citizens get too hot under the hoot'nanny, that my respect for certain social protest singers is immense, but that I suspect all those who protest too much, too stridently, and too profitably].
We sold lots of copies of that album. It's funny when you look back now, but it's not really, say, the Dylan or Pentangle records that seem to have sold the most, but the more 'middle-of-the-road' folk artists. There was a call for the 'Latin American Folk' album. I can remember re-ordering that one many times. It was full-priced to begin with, too, not a budget item ... although it probably later became that. Pye used to place everything on Golden Guinea and Marble Arch eventually ... even Dominic Behan!Diane informed me that " 'traditional' folk music sales were far smaller than they have been given credit for" and remembers Topic lurching from crisis to crisis. She also recalls them wholesaling records from "the back of an old van. When we did get enquiries for stuff like The Iron Muse, it was invariably out of stock at Topic, and we'd keep people waiting for weeks, months sometimes! It really got on your nerves".
Perhaps it was the moderate successes of the American folk/rock singers on the British singles and album charts of the day 9 - The Byrds, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Lind - together with the BBC-based populist folk singers mentioned above that really constituted musical horizon-widening. Anne Thomas:
I came to love folk music around about 1965 or 6, but I was 14 ... too young for a folk club! I'd never heard of them in any case. No, I was at Blackburne House School in Liverpool at the time and some of us girls thought that it was very cool to try to read Sartre and/or Camus and 'dig' Bob Lind and Paul Simon. We never had a suitable record player or the money to buy records at home so it was down to catching them on the telly or listening to a few different radio shows. Believe it or not Val Doonican was regarded as something of an interpreter of folk songs for a while! Also singers like David and Marianne Dalmour and Friday Brown. I thought Lind, especially, was quite sexy! I liked Donovan, too, but thought he was a bit of a wimp. I'd never heard of Renbourn or Jansch. I remember seeing the Ian Campbell folk group on the telly around that time and thinking, well if that's British folk music, you can stick it!The media and technologies of the mid-1960s provided a perfect feeding ground for the integration of a variety of 'traditions'. Many young people in Britain felt freed for perhaps the first time from the powerful British sources of culture that had so dominated the previous years of the century. Denizens of new musical frontiers did, indeed, find fertile ground for a deep interaction of everyday elements in music-making, but they drew them from the commercial end of the continuum and American music as much as from the Anglo-Celtic tradition. Musical listening practices cannot be determined like a rigorous form of wine-tasting. Perhaps like other advocates of the conservative, British folk historians have chosen to ignore the indistinct syncretism which fed into the British folk culture of the 1960s, prefering to empirically lay credit at the feet of an outreaching folk revival, rather than the unselfconscious, nebulous power of an inroading popular:
It's incredible that any history about the British folk scene [like Fred Woods] has been written by those with vested interests. So, you don't get, maybe with the exception of Laing or Humphries, the real influences coming through. TV was bloody important, Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor, Diz Disley, even Alexis Korner on Five o'Clock Club. Many of us weren't fucking OLD enough to get into a pub during the early part of the sixties, never mind run a folk club! Seeing Donovan on Ready Steady Go was really important ... you woudn't trust a business producing its own statistics would you? so why trust the folkies' own history? They do it to validate their own importance, I think ... in many cases it's the likes of Gay Byrne and Bob Greaves [Granada newspresenters] or the producers of Five to Ten who should be getting the plaudits ... just like Tony Wilson ten years later is rightfully given the credit for bringing punk into focus in the north-west through Granada Reports.
The growth of interest in folk music from the late-1950s onward actually came from an indefinite area, grouping artists together, not on the basis of tradition alone, but also such 'atraditional' concepts as trends and fashions. In Electric Muse [1975] Denselow established that unaccompanied singers like the Watersons and the Young Tradition were interested in pop and were far from being musical seclusionists. If there was a revolt, perhaps as Melly suggests, it was a 'revolt into style'. Fred McCormick remembers a "distinct second wave. I was attracted more by the first but the second was more immanent, rootless; their backgrounds were different. The terraces were disappearing ... they were, effectively, coming from a different environment. It was only natural that they introduced different concepts". 12
If musical performance via the folk revival was an advocation of one's own part in the historical process; then this had to include singing about one's own experiences and placing these experiences at the foreground of tradition; a realisation that cultural growth extends forwards as well as backwards. The historical evidence for this new wave of syncretic and individual folk writing exists in the emergence of the singer/songwriters in the 1960s. Harvey Andrews, for example, cites Buddy Holly [and his song Looking for Someone to Love] as his prime influence. He stated to Spencer Leigh in 1994 that Holly was, for him, the first singer/songwriter of any note. In fact Dave Burland, Billy Connolly, Wizz Jones, Bert Jansch and Roy Bailey have all stated to me 13 that one could not even begin to write about their own involvement in the British folk revival without mentioning US rock 'n' roll and R&B. They were influenced as much by contextual reception and re-evaluation as by inflexible folk club closed-shops. Robin Denselow further stated that:
... clubs started to take on specific characteristics. Some became exclusively traditional, approving only of hand-on-the-ear unaccompanied singers ... Gradually, the easy-going acceptance of different forms of music broke down. The traditionalists created a ghetto, and a host of excellent musicians were trapped inside.It is also naive to suggest that there is a histoire verite within which people listened exclusively to folk music to the dismissal of everything else, especially during the eras of [say] Elvis, Donegan, the Beatles, the Stones, Motown, Stax, Nat King Cole and Andy Williams. The questions beg to be asked: how? where? when? Even if that syncretism which I describe is neither sought nor desired by the listener, it still has an effect. It is impractical for a folk historian to ignore, say, Five to Ten, The Sam Costa Show or Two Way Family Favourites on the BBC radio, or even the White Heather Club on the television. For, while communication fluxes in meaning as it passes between us, these programmes effectively 'produced' the folk music in a folk club [whether desired or not].
The reception of any soundtrack is relatively 'loose' and music can follow a variety of nomadic directions. If reception is capable of reversing mainstreams and authenticities and introducing subtle, nuanced, ambiguous meanings, a singular interpretation of a 'pure' folk music simply could not have occurred. It is doubly ironic that not only folkies but also commercial culture purveyors fail to understand the consequences of re-ordering apparently disassociated images. Perhaps the industry is also so involved in its Leviathan-like assumptions that it seldom understands its involvement in historical syncretics.
Conventional 'folk' wisdom does appears to ignore any demographic [indeed, geographic] 'blend' factor. A younger generation assembled its ideas about the survival of this chronologically-apprised music precisely via that very 'fake' media, technology and society cited as the antipathy to 'tradition'. While the maxim remained that folklore 'proper' could only be collected directly 'in the field', not gleaned from television radio or recordings, it was, perhaps, inevitable that any new traditions would be dismissed as inauthentic, but this evaluation failed to take account of reception and interpretation. The claim for lack of value in commercial soundtracks merely avowed 'reason' for folkies via the stigmatisation of others.
Many young teenagers of the 1960s discovered folk music well away from the institutionalised British folk club, quite simply because [as Bill Pook suggests] they were not old enough to gain entry to a pub. But this rather basic form of history does not appeal to folk radicals because they attempt to explain everything historically by tailoring music reception to their existing a priori ideologies. A cardinal fallacy of the folk revival of the 1960s was to impose strict musical and social codes upon reception while culture and meaning were becoming evermore diverse. The traditionalists of the revival severed themselves from the 'arbitrariness' of the modern world, objectifying song along the way. If Lloyd implied that an articulate and authentic soundtrack would help ordinary working people to take more control over their lives, he ignored the fact that people also needed to grasp an understanding of the forces which moulded their world [not reject them out of hand]. The pop-influenced singer/songwriters accepted this challenge [in doing so, Dylan described the folk legacy as "nothing but mystery"], whereas the traditionalists merely reinforced their own superficial distortion of history.
If the folk revival could be described as representing a form of avant garde, then the influx of younger performers, this second wave, also interested in Tommy Steele, Stingray, Emergency Ward Ten and Thank your Lucky Stars might be described as 'trans' avant garde. Not simply identifying with styles of the past, but being able to pick and choose from the ranks of the 'superficial' of their own experiences, in the conviction that the real option open was one of a lack of fixidity. There was clearly a generation gap of vast proportions within the folk revival by the mid-1960s. Tim Hart, one of the forces behind the folk/rock aggregation, Steeleye Span, informed the writers of Electric Muse that the folk movement:
... built its own limitations within itself. It came out of skiffle, a popular movement, and popularised traditional music for a while, but then went backwards ... No one said 'let's glamourize it a bit, let's do a bit of publicity, let's really try to sell folk records, let's try to sell a folk act to a larger market' ... My personal philosophy is that most English traditional song is unaccompanied song, and the only argument is ... should you or should you not accompany it at all? After that I'm not interested in any argument as to what degree you can go to.By 1969 Hart was amongst a vanguard of folk musicians, also influenced by rock and skiffle, questioning the assumptions of the revival. It became obvious to a younger generation of folk performers like Hart that recordings, radio, television and the increased mobility of artists had contributed to, not detracted from folk music writing, dissemination and production. Electric Muse also reported that Tim Hart and his singing partner Maddy Prior set-off in a Ford Anglia to "conquer the British folk scene". They did so in a very short space of time [turning fully professional in 1967], realising that:
... the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow on the folk scene wasn't that difficult to achieve ... once you get £25 at clubs and headline at occasional festivals, that's it. You either become a folk intellectual or you become an alcoholic.Hart and Prior, like others, were very conscious of not becoming another part of a folk meritocracy. Hart's drive to become a professional led him into experimentation with musical amalgamation, stretching the limits of his own potential.
But the stalwarts of the folk revival had an especially 'sniffy' attitude towards what could be described as unconditional professionalism and an embracing of the cultural context rather than a cultural 'core'. Bert Lloyd affirmed that:
Donkey and horse both have four legs and may pull carts, but they are not the same beast; nor are the compositions of a Dylan or a Donovan folksongs by any workable definition.For Lloyd, certain associations surrounding the uses of folk music suggested inauthenticity and infidelity. He claimed a music performance 'type' as traditional performance property, and also claimed that this could be invalidated if delivered via the wrong medium or environment. If a folk singer displayed a willingness to embrace 'pop' concepts [Donovan on Ready Steady Go!] then the performance became 'ersatz', and the artist guilty by association, both indicating an unacceptable level of professionalism and an antithesis to the 'real' meaning of folk. Lloyd stated that Donovan belonged to "... the insubstantial world of the modern commercial hit ... [of] poor fare, ... panic, ... emptiness"
18, but how could the musical evidence ever possibly substantiate these political statements? Lloyd was not only ingenuous in supposing that folk music represented a pure distillation of past experience, but also in believing that Donovan's verve to disseminate folk music via the TV had to be tantamount to a 'sell-out'. Lloyd's position as an interpretive historian was undermined via his social position and political leanings. While appearing to be almost 'magically' in touch with the past, he was unwilling to accept personal responsibility for his own interpretations of the present. He was allowing not only his political faithfulness to colour his retrospective perception of class status and conflict, but also his emotional residue to tinge his analysis of the popular ... an internal historicity.
Once the kids began to appear in the late 50s, early 60s ... and that was us, basically; I think some of the older revivalists like Harry Boardman, saw us as a little subversive. We disputed the claims that the value of folk music lay in just explaining the past in musical terms; we saw it as having the capacity to raise new questions about it as representing the past, with new writing talking about the present. Although I was a devotee of Lloyd, I remember thinking that he might be writing about folksong from an ivory tower [he didn't even begin to approach the subject of hymnody, for example, and that made me a little suspicious].The heroes of the skiffle brigade had been Lonnie Donegan, Chas. McDevitt and Tommy Steele, all consummate professionals. Johnny Duncan was also a 'real' American who, for a short while, held pride of place on the British skiffle scene. This carried far more legitimacy for some than [say] an English amateur folksinger who might also be a librarian. The late Wally Whyton [of the Vipers skiffle group during the 1950s] told me:
When Johnny Duncan sang "Well I've gambled up in Washington, I've gambled down in Maine" you felt he could have; it was very hard to visualise that with the likes of me. I worked in advertising in London!Mick O'Toole recalled that, for him, skiffle was:
... a window INTO America. Excitement! The folk scene inherited so much from skiffle, but only grudgingly acknowledged it because of that American connection. For example, Donegan has always been discredited as being inauthentic ... why? when he introduced so much new stuff to us? All because he didn't stick his finger in his ear and liked to play the London Palladium? If MacColl had been offered the same chance, he'd have jumped at it!The skifflers derived much of their musical inspiration from the USA. The work of Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy, together with the slick blues of Josh White and the country music of Merl Travis were of great inspiration to these young musicians who, by 1958, when the skiffle boom had faded, were looking for a new home. While the folk club appeared a natural habitat for some ex-skifflers, the matrix of their artistic incursion was marked by an intertexture of influence and a subjectivity of the musician, neither of which were hitherto salient features of the revival.
'Ex-skifflers' also brought along a coffee bar culture. Coffee bars had sprouted up all over Britain in the 1950s, becoming social centres for many of the country's younger teenagers, in the process. The focal point of the coffee bar could be a juke box and/or a 'do-it-yourself' music culture. Strumming away to a few chords on guitar to a rock, skiffle, folk or calypso tune was commonplace, as was trying to impress the opposite sex with a musical instrument. If, by the end of the decade, every high street had a coffee bar, this important social feature also became a contribution to the folk movement, for it was from this environment that many younger folk aficionados sprang. Too young to go into a pub [the licencing laws restricted access to over-21s in the 1950s] and not really attracted by the dour, dowdy interiors of most public houses in Britain, in any case, these young people were still interested in music and discussion. Johnny Duncan and Chas. McDevitt both opened coffee bars on the proceeds of their hit records Last Train To San Fernando and Freight Train [respectively] to capitalise on this social phenomenon. McDevitt later admitted [Granada TV 1997] that his coffee bar became a great centre for music and discussion [despite his takings never running to much more than £10 per night!]. Folk clubs directly inherited the skifflers of the 'pop' coffee bar. Entertainer Dic Jones informed me:
I think The National Milk Bar was the place we went ... on the High Street, as far as I can remember ... We'd meet there many evenings, after school. Occasionally somebody would bring a guitar or a mouth-organ and we'd try to sing Rock Island Line or something like that. Anyway, this little scene became so popular that we eventually also met at the local church club. From there some of us formed a skiffle group to play at dances and parties ... sometimes even getting paid! When skiffle died, the nucleus of the group got involved in forming a folk club which eventually went to a local pub ... we were old enough by that time ... that's how it started for us ... because of the National Milk Bars!Yet, many of the political-left of the 1950s condemned the influence and uses of coffee bars [and their associations with American music]. They were seen as being part of stultifying massification and inherent to the incursions of Americana. Left-thinking cultural theorists saw an erosion of the traditional processes of art. WEA stalwart Richard Hoggart attempted to rationalise this position by stating:
I have in mind ... the kind of milk bar, there is one in almost every Northern town with more than, say, fifteen thousand inhabitants, which has become the regular evening rendezvous of some of the young men. Girls go to some, but most of the customers are boys between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties and an American slouch. Most of them cannot afford a succession of milk-shakes, and make cups of tea serve for an hour or two, whilst, and this is their main reason for coming, they put copper after copper into the mechanical record-player ... Compared with even the pub around the corner this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation ... Many of the customers: their clothes, their hairstyles, their facial expressions all indicate, are living to a large extent in a myth world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life ... they are ground between the millstones of technocracy and democracy: society gives them an almost limitless freedom of the sensations but makes few demands on them ... they are in one dreadful sense the new workers ... the directionless and tamed helots of a machine minding class.This binary point of view still pervades much folk history writing. Coffee bars have been all but excluded from folk's narrative. Yet, if any one was to doubt the importance of coffee bars as being an integral and meaningful part of 1950s British teenage lifestyles, they need look no further than the UK pop films of that era. Many of these were centred around youth clubs and coffee bars [not folk clubs] and included a variety of musical genres [skiffle, rock, trad, folk, calypso]. Serious Charge,Some People,The Tommy Steele Story,The Golden Disc all asserted an essential vitality intrinsic to the 1950s British coffee bar scene. But, of course, these movies have also been written-off by folkies as insubstantial mass-produced 'pseudo-Americana' surplus.
24 ], but an important conduit of socialisation, fraternisation, sex, and an access into the world of music-making [even a back-door into showbiz 'proper']. These associations were then imported into the folk clubs [they were not essentially inherent right from the start]. Just as folkies had links with the jazz scene, so the rock and beat fraternity interacted with the folk movement. Interaction was commonplace [often these people were one and the same] and political philosophies permeated the folk revival just as much from without, they were not constitutional. Intertextuality had already dawned by the end of the decade. Folksinger Bob Buckle's musical influences, for example, do not fit the official 'credo':
I'd played around with Buddy Holly songs a little, but not seriously ... I still admire him, of course. Folk music, to me, when I was about 16 was rather twee, to be honest. I came to love a lot of it, but at that time I wasn't very impressed. Then my brother brought home a Burl Ives record from America; he used to go to sea. I'd actually asked him to bring back a rock & roll record, but he was hopeless as far as music was concerned, and because the album had Burl Ives playing a guitar on the front he presumed it was rock! I remember throwing it to one side. But one rainy day when I hadn't anything to do, I played it. It was a completely different experience ... simple, but effective; traditional, but commercial. Burl Ives was seminal. We [the Leesiders] came into the folk scene because of Ives, not Lloyd, and I know that was the case for many people. Between them, Lloyd and Kennedy were strangling it at birth. I wanted to be a professional folk singer from that moment onward. But being professional didn't always please everbody!Bob Buckle and Jack Froggatt both testified to me of a backlash from folk club traditionalists. According to Froggatt, Co-Op and WMA education officer Bill Reddish was one of the first of a large minority in the folk clubs to coin the phrase 'pseudo-Americans' for those undesirables inspired by the USA. This phrase stuck and came to be used to invalidate practically all American influence.
This anti-American stance was not only created via the fear of standardisation associated with commodity production, but also through the 'traditional' conservative and nationalist mirror of British society held up by schooled Leavisites within the EFDSS and the WMA. During the 1950s middle and upper-class Britons of both the right and left had spurned all things American as a 'blight on the purity' of British culture. The impact of Elvis Presley on British society was anathema to both the reactionaries of the far right and also the eastward looking thinkers of the left. For some, the folk revival was much more than simply a musical re-evaluation: it reflected nothing less than a whole reading of national music history. Sydney Carter detected this xenophobic intransigence in 1960:
It looks as if the dream of Cecil Sharp has now come true: people sing and actually play folk music, not because it's educational, but because they actually like it! Up at Cecil Sharp House [near the Zoo] you'd think they'd be putting flags out. But are they? ... The Dance, they feel, is going on quite merrily [safely within the wall of the Society] but the song is getting out of hand. The wrong sort of people are singing it. Folk song is going commercial, going American, going [worst of all!] Political. Well, is it?Undoubtedly American and commercial influences were pivotal. They drew such antipathy from the director of the EFDSS, Douglas Kennedy, that he resigned in December, 1961, unable to compromise his middle-brow and upper-class authoritarianism,and wary of the left's politicising of folk music. Ironically, Kennedy's departing message was printed on the same page of English Dance and Song [25/1, December, 1961] as the final sentences of Sydney Carter's typically cryptic editorial:
The Kipsigis tribe in Kenya are entranced by the guitar of Jimmie Rodgers ... cross-fertilization of traditions is occuring at a speed we never dreamed of. All this applies to song more than dance. But even dancers were affected by the Square Dance craze which rocked our society a dozen yeras ago. Some deplored it, because it was not purely English. But the only 'pure' folk music of the future may be [to use an Irishism] the folk music of the past. All new shoots on the old trunk of tradition will be hybrids; and this goes for the English as well as the Kipsigis.Jacquie MacDonald of Jacquie and Bridie testifies to this mixture of influences described by Carter as 'new shoots on an old trunk':
I was teacher training up in Yorkshire when Burl Ives came to play in Leeds. I was getting interested in music and liked skiffle a bit and because I was at teacher training college, we all tried to do something ... I was transfixed ... I'd never seen or heard anything like it. This little man singing with just a guitar. He was SO professional, I suppose.Jacquie MacDonald was so influenced by Burl Ives that she eventually formed a female singing partnership when the folk scene was still rife with misogyny. 'Jacquie and Bridie' became trail-blazers:I became interested in folk music and eventually became a member of the Spinners, then I met Bridie and we began to sing together ... the rest, as they say, is history. For me, the folk clubs came later, really!
It was the likes of Burl Ives that made me want to get involved ... but Bridie and I didn't realise that we were heading into unchartered waters, somewhat. I mean, some of the British folk scene didn't always take kindly to two independent women on their own playing the clubs, having their own clubs ... Some were fine, but there were a lot of remarks along the way and they usually came from the people who you'd least expect it to come from ... the 'politically-correct' lot. They could be very unkind. I felt that we loved the music, they loved the music, so? But they didn't quite see it like that, especially when we didn't always sing British stuff.Indeed, in 1960, American Peggy Seeger criticised British singers for being culturally disloyal in singing American songs:
... to me, as an American, the fact that the Americans have built up a culture which is American, which is absolutely unique, is valuable to me. And that's why I sing American songs. Because they represent to me the particular struggle of a particular people at a particular point in time. But when I hear a British person singing a folk song from America I feel that there's an anachronism, a spiritual anachronism, if you want to put it that way, there's something which is not quite right.But Peggy Seeger's delusions of the singular came to be recognised as such by 1964, when the youth of her own country [including Bob Dylan, Steven Stills, Eric Jacobsen] abandoned preconceptions about a unique folk music in order to embrace the stimulating alloy of folk/rock in the wake of The Beatles' I Want to Hold your Hand.
If one was to develop and encourage younger people into a larger folk movement, then one had to have stars, of sorts. In the United Kingdom Johnny Silvo, Steve Benbow and Robin Hall & Jimmie McGregor all championed the folk cause on the BBC and ITV, they did not dilute it, and the responsibility later fell to Donovan and Jake Thackray. Whatever their proximity to a perceived, 'pure' cultural carbon, these singers helped to encourage a more eclectic generation to enter the folk revival, some of whom had equally as much allegiance to Buddy Holly and Little Richard, as they did to Maggie Barry.
The re-atomisation of the folk movement over the past twenty years has reinforced perceptions about the apparent incompatibility of folk and pop; there has been a restoration of specific interests, a refocussing of dogma and channels of hierarchy. This most suits a less diffuse, collective perception of a performance-past. The productivity of the convergence of pop and folk has never been properly analysed by folklorists because it appears immersed in a pop, rather than folk, chronicle. The very productivity of folk meeting pop stemmed from the disparity between aesthetic approaches, and the accomodating of different attitudes. When you have ill-fitting musical elements the friction of those elements can produce a musical pearl such as Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief.
Therefore, the folk pioneers did not belong to the folk movement, alone. Perhaps the real pioneers are those who linked one recording or genre to another and created genres where none previously existed. By regarding the work of, say, Lonnie Donegan, the Kingston Trio or Peter Paul and Mary as rather pallid versions of the musical 'truth', are we not simply making valuations based upon archaic notions of cultural prejudice, authenticity and standardisation? When individuals create their own musical categories and evaluations they consist of perceptions of dismantling status quos. Nothing [especially music?] exists in or of itself, but always in a fragmented relation to its context.
Popular music creates symbols of continuous mutation. History, admittedly, finds this incredibly difficult to record, for shifts in sensibilities appear rather unstable to relate. However, mutation, if not recorded, become subsumed within a greater narrative. This does little justice to fractures, allowing them to simply disappear amidst a 'historical' veil of linear narrative that condemns disjuncture as little more than brief aberrations. If musical history is written carefully, it shows that solidification never really occurs at all. If the historians of the British folk revival are to avoid romanticising the historical development of their own epoch with little more than a staggering stability on the one hand, and an incorrigible matter-of-factness on the other, they must understand folk music [all popular music] as an ever-changing process.
Thus far, folk music studies has been somewhat unwilling to directly engage with popular music activity, meaning and reception. Yet, by 1981 popular music academic Simon Frith pronounced that while folk philosophies were inextricably linked to the concepts of the rock counterculture of the late 1960s, some form of intertextual consciousness simply had to be at work. Folk sources, however, still prefer to discuss this crossover as a musical Road to Damascus, an enlightenment brought about by a dissatisfaction with the popular. Yet, by discussing popular music activity in juxtaposition with folk music, we can clearly see that any number of transformational relationships are possible. Are not musical forms constructed, rather than discovered? Is there not a correlation between musical sounds? If the history of the folk revival continues to pay little attention to correlation, it shows itself to be subjecting diachrony to the system of synchrony - viewing music as a specific 'response' to historical change, rather than part of that change.
Changing economic and social conditions evidently alter musical perception. But, within the elongation of the folk revival, there has existed a universalizing and totalising of musical expression in search of an authentic [yet mythical?] 'other'. By the late-1960s, while average listeners were relatively free to select the music they wanted, the revival was leading itself up its own cul-de-sac seeking this homogenised 'otherness'. The musical hybrid of folk/rock came to challenge this homogenisation, suggesting that, while realities might, indeed, be caught up in that folk discourse, should they be reduced by it?
Mike Brocken
Article MT024
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