1
"I say it to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me [that is understand] only if you already agree with me." Stanley Fish, 'Interpreting the Variorum', Lodge (ed). Modern Criticism & Theory, London, 1988, p.329.
"Folk authentic? I've seen too many people cry their eyes out to 'My Way' ... " Mick Ord, Head of Radio Merseyside, 1997.
In chapter four I described skiffle as 'intertextual'. I want now to attempt to develop this idea a little more and to display its potential advantages for understanding all popular music [and I include folk music in that category]; in this way, it will be possible to look at the British folk revival under a different light.
There are substantial areas within the ideology of the British folk revival where unsustainable arguments continue to exist. For example, by regarding folk music as more than 'simply' entertainment, while regarding entertainment as insubstantial, an ideological line in the sand has been drawn. And yet, time and time again, it can be seen that this line has been consistantly criss-crossed by certain 'traditional' musicians wishing to express themselves without the ideological bases of the revival but without necessarily destroying or abandoning those structures to which they have become, quite naturally, attached. Some wish to celebrate in a melding process, encompassing many diverse cultural influences and listeners who may or may not wish to engage with that music within a formalised listening process laid down by the folk movement [e.g. the folk club]. Charles Jencks describes these strategies as:
Intertextuality ... the way several discontinuous texts combine to form their own meaning ... There is clearly no underlying thread, coherence, mythology or emergent rule in this heterogeneity ... Yet, through pluralism, the overall movement has a divergent signification and allows multiple readings ...Intertextuality deliberately builds-in features that refer to both past and present contexts, combining discontinuous texts to present different connotations of 'pastness'. Unlike so-called 'real' and 'radical' histories, these interfusions have the potential to undermine conventional notions of folk music-use, which have mutated into expressions of British middle-class bourgeoisie, drawing attention to the folk revival's increasing incapacity to fashion meaning from the present.
Having failed in its attempt to reform musical expression, the folk revival now operates within a middle ground, requiring, in itself, a degree of reformation. The elongated avant garde has now become the establishment, and in doing so has ignored the potential to rewrite or subvert its own history. The folk revival continues to have an 'inner sanctum' and a self-propulgating, self-congratulatory media and both look towards legitimising themselves within their own segment of society by making claims for their own 'alternative' values. Thus Ian A Anderson claims that "just about all the music we cover is a profound alternative to the mainstream" 3, but it is quite clear that this 'mainstream', if loosly defined by the use of the word 'popular', has constantly provided musical stimulus, as singer-songwriter Jim Boyes confirms:
I've never analysed what my musical influences are. All you can do is list the things you like ... there's black music, all through ska and bluebeat, soul music. Both Barry and I were, for want of a better word, mod. So we were both into soul, Motown and Stax music ... then there's the Beatles. There's all that lovely song writing and use of harmony ... the Band, and that sort of stuff.One might argue that this is a 'classic' list of popular music influences and this lends support to the suggestion that, far from being an audibly distinguishable 'alternative' to the popular mainstream, folk music has constantly benefitted from 'intertextuality', drawing in power from that mainstream. After all, if the folk media express paranoia about the threat of mainstream tastes 'watering down' and 'thinning out' tradition, it is very difficult to imagine that this has been simply one way traffic with no potential for the process ocurring 'in reverse'. This 'distance' between folksong and popular music has yet to be critically examined properly from within the folk movement itself; perhaps the end-results might invalidate the systems used thus far to sustain that very 'distance'. Perhaps the initial ideological thrust of the revival can no longer be sustained because its incipient utopianism has been overrun by the rationality and diversity of a technological universe.
Via a critique of methodology and historicity, I have suggested that folk music 'really' exists as a form of popular interaction and cannot be separated from other forms of popular music. To suggest that 'traditional' song is somehow superior to popular entertainment is a falsification of sound and a marginalisation of artistic expression. Music can never be just an instrument in the hands of folklorists, a submissive means of thinking and doing for them alone. We all have our interpretive strategies and, as composers and listeners, we construct music as best we can to serve them. Songwriter Chris Wood:
A great deal of music coming out of France, Sweden, Norway, Brittany, Ireland, Louisiana etc. is NEW music. Maybe it's time for us to lift some of the burden from the historians and accept our responsibility for the future of English music by composing? For example, there is a section of the Kent marshes currently threatened by development, my response to this is to try composing a piece which attracts attention of all kinds of people, maybe even the media. This is not really protest music, it's simply a musician's response to an increasingly relevant problem.Having looked at 'scene' and 'performance' in the preceding chapters [and introduced the term 'intertextuality'], it remains to examine 'reception'; one cannot examine this, however, without also discussing rhetoric.
6, for example, describes how folk music collectors throughout the past two hundred years have been unreliable ideological mediators. What is absent from Harker's work, however, is any discussion about song's existence as a 'reliable' medium, for what often impedes folksong from stating apparently simple truths is not simply ideological mediation, but its own inherent rhetorical strength. Dave Harker is a great fan and friend of Leon Rosselson. Perhaps Rosselson's songs are Harker's ideal model and type: 'truthful', 'honest', 'deliberate'? He might well place himself among those whom The Guardian referred to as " ... cognoscenti who admire the pungent texts and insidious tunes of [Rosselson's] best songs." 7 But any theoretical systems indicating that a song's structure has to offer something universal and 'valid' are continually at odds with its rhetoric, its means of expressivism; whilst even when lyrics appear to state 'exactly what they mean', music relies upon indeterminacy as much as probity - a song has a price to pay for its existence. The rhetorical nature of lyrics and poetry invites reinterpretation while music has the ability to deconstruct the significance of the words; furthermore, the very emotional impact of singing is relatively uncontrollable. Literal meaning, therefore, is far from clear. Mick O'Toole told me:
'Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom' had more to say to me as a young man than the 'meaningful' lyrics of Ewan MacColl [when I got a chance to hear them ... which wasn't often]. When you listened to MacColl the message was sort of under control, somehow, as if you could only respond in one way. When I listened to Little Richard I knew that I could make whatever I liked from it. Also, my parents didn't understand! ... Meaning wasn't so fixed.If performance is never intrinsically 'natural' and if, however determined a singer is to express a message, one can never guarantee that the listener will appreciate that message, a song cannot be fully controlled. In fact, attempts at control can restrict the message by limiting, stylistically, the emotional power of the music. The paradox is that folk performance often attempts to be precise in order to deliver a message; however, that 'message' can never be totally explicit and can actually be at its most effective when there is a loss of stylistic control. What is more, in addition to the irregularity of a song's message, there is the inconsistency of a listener's strategy.
Suppose, for example, I have been listening to a Martin Carthy performance. What have I been doing? Firstly, what I am not doing is simply listening, for I do not believe that this isolated activity exists; this implies the possibility of pure [that is, disinterested] perception. Rather, I am using at least two predetermined interpretive decisions. One, that the music is 'folk'; two, that it is being sung by Martin Carthy. I should also state that the ideas of 'folk' and 'Carthy' are also an interpretation - they do not stand for a set of indisputable facts.
Once those predetermined interpretations are in place, I then perform certain listening acts according to my predisposition towards concepts surrounding the expression 'folk music', together with the proximity of Carthy's performance to my predispositions and preconceptions; to find, for example, similarities between my concepts of Carthy and folk; indeed, my concepts of Carthy and Carthy as a live performer. I might also look for 'themes' in his songs, or look for histories of people in the songs and to listen to Carthy relate his preambles and re-tune his guitar in order to 'understand' the songs better. I might compare this Carthy to previous 'Carthys', this repertoire to previous repertoires, in order to confer a degree of significance on the performance; or I might wish to to mark folk concepts in the musical structures [ballad, broadside, jig, reel, hornpipe, contemporary, Scottish, Irish]. My inclination to perform these acts [and others, this list is not exhaustive] constitutes a set of interpretive strategies 9, which, when put into execution, become part of the listening process attached to my interpretation of folk music.
I am, therefore, adopting a listening 'type' just as much as Martin Carthy is adopting a performance 'type'. But my 'type' may not have anything to do with another person's 'type', as such. Another person listening might dispute my interpretations, they might complain to me that I could not possibly be listening to the same song, and they would be right because each of us would be interpreting the song that each of us had made out of that particular performance of Martin Carthy. Our interpretations give the songs shape, not the other way around, and we make the songs in interpretation. We place our own strategies upon them, and even if both listeners are roughly conforming in some respects to the patterns laid down above, this does not exclude the possibilities for one song to become two [at least], and for those two songs to become relatively different. They don't have to, but they can.
One conclusion that can be drawn from this model of diversity is that the notions of 'same' and 'different' musical texts can be fantasies and that truth in a song is forever mediated, not only by the rhetorical nature of song, but by predetermined listening strategies. If I listen to Lord Franklin and Sgt Pepper differently, I form the songs from my own interpretive strategies based upon my social and cultural construction of genre [which may include my attendances at folk clubs], not because Lord Franklin is 'great' folk or Sgt Pepper is 'great' pop. Neither of them are great 'anything' without the constructions that I have built for them. In fact, inasmuch as this is a personal interpretation, then Sgt Pepper and Lord Franklin can actually be similar for me, I am not simply formed by them. Undeniably, the songs have an impact and reality but I like them [or hate them] not only because they remind me of a certain place, time or era, but because they remind me of me.
I also listen differently to these two songs as I get older. The impact of hearing Lord Franklin the first time is lost, filed or subsumed in the intervening time, mingled with the formulations I have made in that time.
If this is valid so far, one then needs to question one of the most fundamental assumptions of the folk revival concerning musical perception: that by listening to 'traditional' song, our musical interpretations can be almost spiritually altered [ie.'away from the popular']. Although music has vital transformative qualities, ought we not also take into account our predispositions towards interpreting folk music via our social and cultural constructions and experiences? Perhaps people differ about musical 'quality' not because quality is different but because people are different in terms of experience. If this is the case, where does this leave ideas about musical authenticity? When we add this quandary to the power of song as a rhetorical device, how can music actually authenticate any history without significant contextual and intertextual interpretation? 10
So, although listeners do often claim to agree with each other about musical interpretation, suggesting a level of stability of interpretation, this common bond of interpretive communities merely represents those who are prepared to 'share' similar interpretive a priori experiences and strategies. One of the reasons why Black Britain has little interest in the British folk scene is because it has no 'connection' or stability of interpretation prior to the act of listening. If there is an 'article of faith' in a particular musical community [such as the folk movement] concerning 'valid' musical texts, then that community might acknowledge a given musical sincerity [positive] but also accuse the members of a more diverse community or scene of being superficial [negative]. This merely confirms that musical interpretation is usually situational and contextual, rather than natural and authentic, even though our interpretive strategies do not always perceive any overlap.
Neither individual nor community can lay creditable claims to being the musical 'way, truth and life'. Instead, independent conditions for musical reception continue to operate outside of the scope of various musical communities and will always able to re-interpret texts via further strategies. This is unending, and displays how so-called standardised popular music can appeal [differently] all over the world. Global success [if it ever really occurs] does not simply indicate multinational musical dominance but multifarious receptive interpretation. Although Kylie Minogue's cover of The Locomotion was popular all over the Antipodes in the late-1980s, this does not explain why it also became a hit in the UK. Neither does it elucidate why the original Little Eva version from 1962 was successful in Australia and the UK. People hear things differently and the musical success of a song depends upon far more than, on the one hand, the 'right' intention and, on the other, correct analysis of the market. Interpretation cannot be witheld.
The claim that a folk music performance tells the unprepossessing truth is surely as mythological as concepts about the probity of unified reception. MacKinnon appears to view folk performers as being able to hand over ready-made or prefabricated transformative musical meanings. These meanings are then said to have been encoded in a world independent of individual reception. From my own experience, however, I have found that meanings are not so much extracted from the songs but reinforced by them, and these meanings are made not by encoding musical forms such as folk songs, but by socio-cultural interpretive strategies that actually call musical forms into being in the first place. If this is the case, it then follows that what folk singers in a folk clubs actually do is give interpretive communities the opportunity to continue to empower their a priori meanings by inviting them to put into execution their sets of a priori strategies. Within the folk club environment these sets of strategies will be recognised as locatable, historically 'valid' by those communities.
Reception is strategic and has been recognised as such outside of the folk scene for some considerable time. The advertising media, for example, are fully aware that folksong works within 'already known' interpretive strategies and acknowledge that these strategies, together with the persuasive rhetorical power of song, can produce profitable responses to advertising soundtracks:
The Scottish Tourist Board's use of Wild Mountain Thyme is a masterstroke. The advert contains all the visual and musical imagery of the folk scene; the natural, untainted; they know how people will respond because those that are attracted, the monied middle-classes, know the song because they are the folkies. They're not interested in back-packing kids, they've no money! The campaign appeals to the middle class forty-somethings who have a folk vision on life.11
Not very authentic? Perhaps not, but the great irony is that while the ideology of the folk revival continues to scornfully dismiss popular culture's 'mis-use' of folksong it effectively admits to the primacy of its own rhetorical power in constructing its own historicity. For an effective, even-handed historicity which includes both folk revival analysis and media usage, will duly inform the traditionalist of what he/she did not wish to know: that reception is relatively strategic, song is rhetorical and music-use and performance are about as far removed from a cultural vacuum as anyone could possibly imagine. Music is intertextual.
Intertextuality
Returning to our imagined future music historian, one might even suggest that, required to search-out an historical musical document to express [say] the social rite of passage for post-war working class Britons out of the class-ridden mediocrity of the 1950s, he or she might justifiably select the acerbic intertextual work of Bernard Cribbins in 1962 [Hole In the Ground and to a lesser extent Right Said Fred 12 ] rather than the premeditated and nostalgic oversentimentality of Ewan MacColl's Dirty Old Town. 13 Critic George Melly suggested as much:
... Bernard Cribbins also has captured perfectly on two records [Hole in the Ground and Right Said Fred] the feel of the new working class with its non-forelock tugging approach to the bourgeoisie and determination not to be kicked about. These records, on a modest scale, are the equivalent of the New Wave in the British Cinema. Their success is heartening ...Although Cribbins might be a far less acute social critic than MacColl, in this instance he works better as a purveyor of 'meaning'. Whereas Cribbins actively interests a 'disinterested' audience, MacColl only attracts the a priori inquisitive. Cribbins immediately gives his audience a personality to latch on to, whereas MacColl only provides a series of rather Lowry-like stereotypical scenarios. Admittedly, Dirty Old Town also has a singalong chorus line, an open invitation for folk club audiences to join in, but the potential effect of this communal singing, although perceived as 'right on' and 'relevant', is to deprive the song of its message. Because of its social 'status' as a folk song, the temptation is to communally sing Dirty Old Town rather like a mantra of certainty, thus diminishing its potential for irony or political bitterness and stereotyping itself as a typical song of the British folk revival.
Hole In the Ground, on the other hand, succeeds because it understands the multiplicities of pop reception. It has a happy melody, yet it conveys a sense of deep irony by homing in very surrepticiously on the social positions of two protagonists. Cribbins engages one's attention via melody, humour and familiarity before launching into a well-balanced invective and, although MacColl and Cribbins both use the first person singular, it is Cribbins' character who expresses himself more successfully. Although Cribbins identifies class and work divisions via the juxtaposition of the narrator and the 'bloke in the bowler', neither of the characters is overly specific. Thus the narrator of Hole In the Ground succeeds far better as both an entertainer and story-teller [an 'everyman'] because any sense of social justice [e.g. 'it's not there now, the ground's all flat ... and beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat ... and that's that'] is hidden beneath humour and a popular music melody, rather than drearily repeated ad nauseum at the end of every verse [as in Dirty Old Town].
The popularity of 'easy listening' music also confirms the significance of what might otherwise be considered the most mundane of popular music soundtracks. Elevator music deconstructs 'folkist' and 'rockist' elitism via a concentration upon the intertextuality of reception. It recognises that TV soundtracks, elevator music and easy listening variations are at the epicentre of people's listening traditions. Joseph Lanza 15, in his history of the Muzak Corp. has suggested that elevator music has the potential to be meaningful. The ‘loungecore’ genre of 1995-97 even suggested that it could become cool and hip! Telford's Warehouse in Chester, a venue that has embraced many folk genres over the past two years, has given over one evening per week to this musical intertextuality. The observations of proprietor Jeremy Horrall at the venue, when moving the folk/roots night from a Wednesday back to a Tuesday to make way for his 'This Is Easy' presentations were quite illuminating:
It's naive to think that one is supposed to like only one genre of music, which is what a lot of Chester folkies want us to operate like as a venue; also they think that they've either created the world, or are out to save it from musical oblivion, and that just reeks of snobbery. I like Martin Carthy, I also like Count Indigo, I'm sorry I can't help it! I just can't rise to their sense of 'misery' sometimes.
17
Intertextuality leads to an appreciation of tension and a disposal of a sort of pious serenity [a sort of methodological self-assurance, resistant to theory]. It foregrounds the listening experience, but not at the expense of performance. It questions intention and collective agency, but confirms interactivity. For example, although intertextuality acknowledges [say] P F Sloan's Eve of Destruction as evidently influenced by Dylan, it does not berate Sloan as inauthentic, but endorses his sources. Stanley Fish stated that:
Intention is no more embodied 'in' the texts than are formal units; rather an intention, like a formal unit, is made when perceptual or interpretive closure is hazarded: it is verified by an interpretive act ... the critic who confidently rests his analysis on the bedrock of syntactic descriptions is resting on an interpretation; the facts he points to ARE there, but only as a consequence of the interpretive [man-made] model that has called them into being.One might also ask if twentieth century folk music study has ever questioned whether its pre-fashioned understandable yardsticks of music use and reception were anything more than interpretations of music formed from within social and political constructions of history. If music history only syntactically declares what inquisitors already understand to be, how can this explain or even point to anything remotely resembling an 'unmediated veracity' in music? We are all products of our own contexts and create musical judgements from within those contexts. Therefore Harker's judgements upon folksong mediation are illuminating, but inform us as much about Harker, as the mediators. His judgements are relevant, but by no means universal. Even the famous assertion of Hubert Parry in his inaugural address to the Folk Song Society in 1899 that "... old folk music is amongst the purest products of the human mind." merely declared both its rhetoric and its context and could make no claim upon the comprehensive. Ultimately, Hubert Parry was also referring us to Hubert Parry, he delivered up something that he had learned. What can be acquired as ways of learning can also be forgotten or supplanted, or complicated or dropped from favour at the least expected moment. Significantly, when changes occur in society there are corresponding changes in popular musical texts; not only because the music is being listened to any differently [although this happens], and certainly not because the music is 'inferior' because of standardisation or mass production, but because the music is being written differently to respond to that changing situation. This does not demean the music, it is not 'inferior' because of change, in fact change can enhance music via recontextualisation.
However, rather than denoting instances of intertextuality, the histories of MacColl and Lloyd reflect the comments of Geoffrey Barraclough, "veteran champion of contemporary values in history" [Tosh, 1984] who, thirty-five years ago, made a point that has equal force today:
Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false. The challenge is one which no historian with any conviction of the value of his work can ignore; and the way to meet it is not to evade the issue of 'relevance', but to accept the fact and work out its implications.Philip Freeman of Taplas has recently broached this topic, acknowledging the limitations of [his own] historical contradistinctions:
There is the theory, however, that the song does not exist except when its being sung, that it doesn't have an independent existence. On the other hand, deliberate distortions can be extremely offensive. There isn't an easy answer.But who feels qualified to judge the 'fake' in musical performance? There are actually no valid reasons why the Levellers, the Spinners or even the Sex Pistols cannot serve as a testament to some kind of musical tradition. Propagandists divide and rule and the history of the British folk revival has suffered precisely because it has lain in the hands of histories "implicit and false". Folk music scholars try to be true to the past, but, via their own interpretive strategies, they have universalised reception, failing to understand the unending potential of song intertextuality. The folk music historian must appreciate that the broadening of the scope of musical enquiry over the past forty years or so has been in response to ever increasing demands for musical topicality and plurality, not concealment. The intertextuality of Paul Simon is most certainly part of my musical past, as are the Spinners [and the Motown Spinners]. The Levellers are probably more closely linked to the musical past of my younger sisters. But one artist is no more 'pure' [and thus 'better'] than another is 'fake'. They're just different.What I do believe, though, is that there are tests for these things - does it make you feel comfortable?[?], does it FEEL fake [?] - but while we may agree about which tests to apply, we'll rarely agree about the result. So what you get is the old situation of each person with a slightly different viewpoint, each almost overlapping with some and not at all with the others. It's a continuum that stretches in all directions and you have to decide whether you want to be part of what the Levellers are doing, or what Paul Simon is doing, or even - God, help us - what the Spinners did. Damn! Just when it sounded like I was being objective, I let the mask slip. But then regular readers of this column are unlikely to have been fooled for a moment.
As Tosh suggests, our priorities in the present should determine the questions that we ask about the past, but we should not expect that enquiry to then provide us with hard and fast answers about that past, but more a contextual appraisal given our current situation. This is then open to re-appraisal as and when the time arrives. By doing this we then might begin to appreciate, as perhaps Freeman does not, that it is an utter fallacy to suppose that the aspiration to reconstruct the past in its own terms can at any time carry the promise of objectivity.
Music is created by and out of music. There is already an ancestral musical intertextual tradition. The great bluesmen such as Leadbelly, Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, all wrote themselves into songs in innumerable subtle, intertextual ways. Songs such as Spoonful and Killing Floor exist in countless forms. But, despite this evidence, traditionalists still tend to place music into stereotypical situations because they know that the methodologies surrounding the music appear to have worked at least once [perhaps twice] before; in the British folk revival it is a case of already seen, already heard. For example, folk music writer Sheila Douglas:
It is only by being true to our roots that our tradition can grow and live on into the 21st century ... How can a singer or a songwriter explore their own ethnicity or develop to the height of their powers if they are constantly picking and mixing? ... It isn't you that is important, after all-it's your songs! If we all showed faith in our songs, our tradition would flower and blossom like never before.Thus the ethnic, anonymous archetype continues to be pushed forward, serving perceptions of pre-ordained situations, substantiating existing methodologies.
Intertextuality, however, calls for the borrowing of various concepts from the texts of other heritages that elitists consider unworthy or ruined. Some scholars in the United States have now begun to break down stereotypes of primitive artists and faceless archetypes. They [Bohlman, Bluestein, Cantwell, Price] have begun to appreciate that stereotyped anonymity is no longer an imperative element of folk expression, that reference to a privileged 'centre' of pure tradition is to be mistrusted and left open to debate:
A case can be made that the 'anonymity' [and its corollary, the 'timelessness'] of Primitive Art owes much to the needs of Western observers to feel that their society represents a uniquely superior achievement in the history of humanity.Georgina Boyes has also questioned the subjective historical methodologies of the British revival in this way:
Through the later 1960s and into the 1970s [folk clubs] became a way of life-a major source of a Revival subculture ... In pursuit of more authentic traditional material club members researched and photographed and taped, ... The movement had never been as widespread and active. But for all its apparent innovation and variety, the Revival was hidebound by historical theory. Determinedly reproducing a policy of authenticity ... The Folk Revival had succeeded ... but unless its fundamental concepts of the Folk and folk culture were rejected, the movement had no possibility for development.Both comments appear to express a desire to draw attention to the relationships of words and music with other words and music, whereas the historicity of Lloyd decreed that certain sung texts are to be taken as unique representations of historical veracity. We must be extremely cautious not to ground research methods in the veracity of a musical text which 'speaks' of authenticity. Merely singing about Dirty Blackleg Miners does not present an historical ipso facto.
The most famous and revered Indian poet of the twentieth century, Tagore, died in 1941 leaving much of his work as a testimony to anti-nationalistic rhetoric. His work frequently derided nationalists, stating that symbols of nationalism rarely conform to realities. Ironically, two of his songs are now National Anthems! one for India, the other for Bangla Desh; the history of music is evidently the history of appropriation, re-working and imitation. The stylistic devices employed in musical parody and re-accentuation have thus far been little studied by folklorists; thus folk music study obviously lacks that degree of depth which reaches out beyond stylistic classification. Irony and veracity in speech and song, for example, are not discrete musical expressions, but part of a continuum that could include any musical expression from Any Old Iron to Mary Hamilton.
The Intertextual Artist
Recognising the legitimacy of contemporary artistes working intertextual patterns within and without folk frameworks also broadens our understanding of preconceptions about historically-informed music and human creativity, making us realise that stereotypical examples of folk music are formalised, and that the processes involved in the production of folk music are not extemporaneous. But intertextuality also ensures that the generic processes which still identify folk music, its modality and acoustic base, will continue to enrich popular music [and vice-versa]. This is not the end of folk music history. Changes in methodology illuminate our perceptions. This must always be the folk historian's intention: to preserve as an instrument of use value something whose truth value he/she criticises.
Consider the experiences of a singer who has been richly associated with the British folk revival, Louis Killen. Killen was born in 1934 in Gateshead, County Durham and while at Oxford University he concentrated upon developing his acappella vocals and occasional use of the whistle and concertina. He formed one of Britain's first folk clubs in Newcastle in 1958 and, finding himself unemployed in 1961, decided to become a professional singer. Ewan MacColl was a major influence on the early work of Killen and so he concentrated on the British tradition rather than the American, recording two EPs for Topic in 1962.
However Killen was drawn towards the USA and emigrated in 1967 becoming a professional on the college and coffee house circuit on the east coast. He moved west in 1968 and, being largely unknown on the west coast of America, filled in with work in the shipyards. Returning east he joined the Clancy Brothers in 1970, taking the place of Tommy Makem. The Clancy Brothers [born in Ireland] were highly influential in the New York folk scene during the late-1950s and were deeply involved in the commercial end of the business, working with Folkways, Elektra and [latterly] CBS, as well as setting up their own label Tradition. One of their most famous songs, after the arrival of Tommy Makem, was The Leaving of Liverpool which subsequently became a standard, not only in the folk clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, but also amongst mainstream tastes too. Like The Beatles, the Clancy Brothers enjoyed an enormously successful appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV show. Killen saw fit to join this highly commercial group, eventually recording a very successful greatest hits album for Vanguard in 1973. He also saw fit to record with Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band and [the late] Peter Bellamy, of the Young Tradition. Still living in the USA as I write, Killen last toured Britain in 1991. If the example of Louis Killen is any thing to go by, a level of folk expression can continue unabated within the framework of popular music without prejudice. Professionalism, radio and recording were all of of primary importance to Killen as he adapted his repertoire to ever-changing performance situations. He was, [still is] like the Clancy Brothers, a remarkable entertainer. He has also composed a number of songs so 'folk' in quality that they are widely accepted as traditional, e.g. Gallant Lads are We and The Rose in June. Killen's movement and changing circumstances, together with his instincts for popular culture interaction, led him away from the status quo in England, and he has used his professional career as part of a greater dialectic about music performance.
On the other hand examine the following quote taken from an article in The Living Tradition by Marshall Anderson. The writer waxes lyrical about the national-cum-spiritual virtues of walking alone in Lomond, with a Sony Walkman providing the traditional, indigenous and congruous soundtrack of Flora McNeil:
Striking a delicate blend with natural and taped sounds is an exciting thing to try [I would agree here]. A kind of live unpredictable symphony which, when it goes well is a complete joy [Q. would there have been so much 'natural' noise if he hadn't have been there?]. I sat beside a waterfall one still spring day hearing Flora McNeil's pellucid incantations mingle with fluid tintinnabulations in a totality of sound expressing nature's sublime poetry. It was a spiritual experience. Religious, aye, and maybe pagan too.This is a classic example of the folk revival's mistaken concept about song's discursive ability to interpret reality. Evidently Anderson's a priori interpretive strategies are already well in place. So much so, that they conveniently ignore the fact that late 20th century technology was providing the means to mix McNeil's "pellucid incantations" with "nature's sublime poetry". Two questions also spring to mind. Firstly, would the appearance of [say] a Japanese tourist have spoiled this 'religious' experience [especially if s/he had been listening to something other than Flora McNeil]? Secondly, would the music of [say] the Average White Band [also Scottish] have been any less 'worthy' than the singing of Flora McNeil?
Technology is, in itself, intertextual. It begs, steals and borrows in order to proceed. Although there is, undeniably, an uneasy relationship between technology and nature, technology has actually made us a party to a myriad of sounds that surround us, as well as adding many more of its own. Scientists have always learned from nature and animals. The transmissions made by bats, being ultrasonic, remained aurally dormant for centuries partly because people refused to believe in sounds they could not hear. Until the development of an ultrasonic detection system in 1938, the 'natural' sounds made by bats remained a secret. Technology thus revealed "nature's sublime poetry".
For Marshall Anderson [and others] musical conservatism is both a methodology and an ideology that wishes to turns us towards an idealised a state of the past. Musical conservatism implies isolation of text and, despite the manifold influence of popular music, folk music students continue to regard the concept and consequences of popularity as incompatible with tradition. In Folk Song In England Lloyd displayed a sense of pride in declaring how many copies of The Murder of Maria Marten sold as a broadside in the early part of the nineteenth century ["over a million" Lloyd:1967], but this solidarity with the tastes of the workers did not stretch to acknowledging the importance of another million seller: Release Me' by Englebert Humperdinck 25, issued the same year as Folk Song In England. In fact, he was not over-fond of broadsides, either, for in the same work he describes the 'idealised happy ending' of The Deserter as being part of an unreality which "marks it as a broadside poet's product rather than a true life confession" and attested that professional songwriting was an indicator that "the sense of community had been slowly fading out of the folk song for some time." 26
Like Adorno before him, Lloyd certainly moved the study of musicology along. His studies helped to intersect the ethno and semio phases of musicology discussed by Tagg 27; but, like Adorno, Lloyd had a constitutional aversion to music's intertextuality, coupled with an idealist, homogenous celebration of reception. These attitudes are not the best criteria for anyone intent on developing a serious critique on the music of the 'folk'. Especially when, as Middleton suggests:
There is nothing which IN PRINCIPLE could not be applied to the history of Beethoven symphony performance - or to the performance histories of music hall, the songs of Irving Berlin or rock and roll.Popular music study is, in itself, an intertextual discipline and remains significant for the study of folk music. Yet, the folklorists and folk historians have not come to terms with popular music methodologies because their own definitions of text and reception are archaic and their methodologies are unsound. Marshall Anderson, for example, is typical of those overloaded with imagery. Despite theorising about 'his' communal music, any dimension of intertextual significance is lacking in his critique. Where, for example, he might place the bedroom-computer-internet activities of Scottish singer/songwriter Momus is anybody's guess. Anderson is taking his interpretations as universal signifiers of an artist's [and, by association, his own] profundity and depth of being. Can we make this assumption? Listeners are then patronised and invited to compensate for their own lack of experience by vicarious identification with Anderson's endorsements.
By engaging with Anderson, the listener actually becomes an elitist: 'elevated' and 'improved' so that the supposed urban chaos of the 1990s can be ignored, relegated in favour of a wistfulness about the wilderness. According to Anderson, if one is not to be left in a state of inadequacy, in a kind of black-comical recognition of one's own limits, then the 'natural, the 'unblemished', the 'authentic' are to be embraced. But Anderson appears so practiced in paying attention to his preferred genre of music that he regards the sound of that music as a brute fact, rather than as another variant on popular music reception and intertextuality. He is escaping reality for the sake of it and any demand that sound should submit itself to the needs of the escapist ultimately denies the potential implicit in the unfolding permeability of music. Music is fluid, quick, ethereal, temporal, erotic, quixotic, quadratic, rational, experimental, but it is a delusion to see it as an arena of ultimate truth. It exists by anticipating the contextual and intertextual potential of the next important step, not by simply reflecting in its entirety on the 'once was' ... which, historically, is often the 'never been'.
Mike Brocken
Article MT029
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