The English Revival Canon: Child Ballads and the Invention of Tradition

Abstract

The English Revival Canon:Child Ballads and the Invention of Tradition David Atkinson The 1980s witnessed a marked decline in the singing of the classical or child ballads in folk revival circles in England. More recently, though, there has been something of a recovery of interest, signaled now by the appearance of two CDs comprising exclusively Child ballads: one an anthology of different singers (Ballads: Traditional Ballads [Workington: Fellside Recordings FECD110, 1997]), and the other by one of the veteran exponents of the ballads, Frankie Armstrong (Till the Grass O'ergrew the Corn [Workington: Fellside Recordings FECD116, 1997]). These anthologies, based on the "classic" ballads compiled by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols. 1882-98; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965), come not very long after the re-release in CD format of a classic album of Child ballads by the founding fathers of the English revival, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, which first appeared as an LP in 1964 (English and Scottish Folk Ballads [London: Topic Records TSCD480, 1996]). It appears, then, that the wheel may have come full circle, and it seems appropriate to suggest some reasons both why the Child ballads should provide a cornerstone of the postwar English revival repertoire (even though numbers of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads-the Child ballads-are not really English), and also why their popularity should have been prone to such fluctuation in the course of that revival. To do so, it is necessary to go back briefly over the history of folksong revivalism in England, to understand where the revival repertoire-or canon-comes from. It is common practice to speak of two distinct phases of folksong revivalism in England, and accordingly to acknowledge a degree of discontinuity between them.1 The first revival started towards the end of the 19th century and flourished in the first decade of the 20th century, but had more or less lost its impetus before the outbreak of the World War I, and failed to rekindle after the cessation of hostilities. The second revival grew out of the period of reconstruction following World War II. There are, in fact, significant continuities to be traced between the two phases, but these tend to be masked by their much greater differences, among which could be cited the different class affiliations of their leading practitioners, the different perspectives on nationalism and internationalism that they embodied, and the startlingly different numbers of active participants that each attracted. Subsuming all these sorts of considerations, though, is a fundamental distinction between the two revivals in terms of their actual standpoints vis-à-vis singing traditions in England. In a sense, the first English revival fulfills at least part of a rather narrow definition that can be attached to the term revival: the preservation and revitalization of something that has declined or discontinued. The history of this phase has so far only been written from a self-consciously contentious and iconoclastic point of view (Boyes 1993; Harker 1985), but it is clear enough that the late Victorian and Edwardian folksong collectors saw themselves primarily as preserving the last leaves of a tradition of rural singing that was rapidly dying out in the face of increasingly rapid and unwelcome social change. Insofar as they and their friends did themselves sing the songs and present them to new audiences (schoolchildren especially), they did so in a manner quite removed from the style of the unaccompanied rural singers from whom they had collected [End Page 370] them, in a drawing-room style usually with piano accompaniment in "evening-dress" (Fox Strangways 1933:33). But, outside of the educational arena, performing the songs was not the real aim of the early collectors: that lay in the collecting, preservation, and publication (in particular in the journals of the Folk-Song Society and, later, the English Folk Dance and Song Society) of what the collectors themselves identified as "folk songs" (Gammon 1980; Harker 1985:xiii; Sykes 1993). This reification of a particular and valued body of culture, especially one perceived to be otherwise in imminent danger of dying out, places this first English revival well within an understanding of the...