The British Folk Revival, 1944-2002 (review)

Abstract

British Folk Revival, 1944-2002. By Michael Brocken. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xii, 236 p. ISBN O7546-3282-2. $29.95 pbk.] Discography, bibliography, index. folk music revival following World War II has come under considerable scrutiny in the last few years. Monographs by Robert Cantwell ( When We Were Good: Folk Revival [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]) and Ronald D. Cohen (Rainbow Quest: Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 [Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002] ) chronicle the American experience, but not until Michael Brocken's British Folk Revival, 1944-2002, has there been a similar broad view of the second British folk music revival. From the very beginning, Brocken makes his prejudices and point of view quite clear. As a youngster in the 1960s, he found himself drawn towards the music of Americans Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and the folk-rock band, the Byrds. But upon his increased involvement with the British scene of the time, he immediately found himself confronted in the 1960s British folk clubs by the dichotomy between the popularized and admittedly commercial folk style he had come to treasure, and the severe authentic approach which required that all folk music of value be strictly British, or political in nature, or from the past. This ultimately leads to Brocken's thesis, which simply stated is this: The needless polarisation that opposes the authentic to the commercial has stultified growth [in the British Folk Revival] in all but the most progressive areas of the folk commercial sector. Brocken's argument begins by discussing the early revivalists, Cecil Sharp in particular, noting that Sharp made a clear distinction between popular music and folk music while at the same time working to popularize traditional British folk music through published arrangements, or recontextualizing-suggesting that from the very beginning, the British folk music revival had perhaps done something dishonest. Brocken places Sharp's work along with efforts by Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and George Butterworth in a larger nationalist context where the interest in folk music played a role in both patriotic and anti-urban movements. After World War II, the revival, still based on the conservative view of folk music as an inherited tradition, turns more political. Here, Brocken introduces us to the holy trinity of British folk music, A. L. (Bert) Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, and the American Peggy seeger. It is probably Lloyd's publication of Singing Englishman in 1944 that Brocken regards as the beginning date for the second revival. Lloyd, through his work in British folk song, became perhaps its best-known expert by the late 1940s. To Lloyd, the growth of urbanized and industrialized communities had a tangible, erosive effect upon hundreds of years of oral traditions. He deemed the collection and preservation of those traditions, viewed by him as being close to irrevocable loss, of paramount importance. Ewan MacColl, inspired by the work of the American Alan Lomax, similarly took a hard position against the popular or commercial performance of traditional folk Brocken calls MacColl the epitome of the difference between communal and consumer music. Together with his third wife, Peggy seeger, MacColl, more than any other single figure, worked to maintain a critical traditionalist approach. This is the very approach that Brocken himself experienced in the British folk clubs. MacColl's Critics Group literally set policy governing the types of songs that could be sung, and how they should properly be sung to be authentically English. Turning towards the institutions that supported the revival, Brocken introduces three key institutions to the English folk revival: the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), the Worker's Music Association (WMA), and Topic Records. EFDSS, the bastion of the traditionalists, represented a view largely inherited from the earlier revival and heavily promoted folk dance, while the WMA, affiliated with the Communist Party, took more of an interest in song to utilize fully the stimulating power of music to inspire the people. …