Folk Revival and Folk Rock

Abstract

To be able to explicate a performance of class within popular music in any meaningful sense, we must first understand its role as an arbiter of authenticity. Displays of class affiliation are most often used as grounding elements that may place a piece of music, an artist or a performance within a social and historical context, and also provide a method by which audiences can form a class allegiance with the performer or the text. However, while class might have its own specific role to play within the pop music experience, it has to be understood as part of a much wider attempt to establish authenticity. The third chapter of this work dealt specifically with the idea of the authentic in pop music, and it is not the intention here to interrogate this problematic category too closely. However, when one looks to the role of class in relation to folk rock and the folk revival in Britain from the 1960s onwards, it is difficult to extricate class from more general debates concerning authenticity. Of course, such debates spring primarily from the way in which folk music in Britain was compiled and performed by the archivists, and also the inescapable influence of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. As outlined in the previous chapter, the activity of collecting folk song in Britain often suggested a temporal freeze of the material, an attempt to perform folk song in a pure and undiluted form. It is precisely such an approach that became untenable as the folk rock scene in Britain developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.