The British folk revival incorporates a number of movements for the collection, preservation and performance of folk music in the United Kingdom and related territories and countries, which had origins as early as the 18th century. It is particularly associated with two movements, usually referred to as the first and second revivals, respectively in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and the mid-20th century. The first included increased interest in and study of traditional folk music, the second was a part of the birth of contemporary folk music. These had a profound impact on the development of British classical music and in the creation of a "national" or "pastoral" school and led to the creation of a sub-culture of folk clubs and folk festivals as well as influential subgenres including progressive folk music and British folk rock.
Origins Social and cultural changes in British society in the early modern era, often seen as creating greater divisions between different social groups, led from the mid-17th century to the beginnings of a process of rediscovery of many aspects of popular culture, including festivals, folklore, dance and folk song.P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Billing, 1978), pp. 3, 17–19 and 28. This led to a number of early collections of printed material, including those published by John Playford as The English Dancing Master (1651), the private collections of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724).B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 31–8. In the 18th century there were increasing numbers of such collections, including Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20) and Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). The last of these also contained some oral material and by the end of the 18th century this was becoming increasingly common, with collections including Joseph Ritson's The Bishopric Garland (1792) in northern England.
In Scotland the earliest printed collection of secular music was by publisher John Forbes in Aberdeen in 1662 as Songs and Fancies: to Thre, Foure, or Five Partes, both Apt for Voices and Viols. It was printed three times in the next twenty years, and contained seventy-seven songs, of which twenty-five were of Scottish origin.M. Patrick, Four Centuries Of Scottish Psalmody (READ BOOKS, 2008), pp. 119–20. In the 18th century publications included Playford's Original Scotch Tunes (1700), Margaret Sinkler's Music Book (1710), James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (1711), William Thomson's Orpheus caledonius: or, A collection of Scots songs (1733), James Oswald's The Caledonian Pocket Companion (1751), and David Herd's Ancient and modern Scottish songs, heroic ballads, etc.: collected from memory, tradition and ancient authors (1776). These were drawn on for the most influential collection, The Scots Musical Museum, published in six volumes from 1787 to 1803 by James Johnson and Robert Burns, which also included new words by Burns. The Select Scottish Airs collected by George Thomson and published between 1799 and 1818 included contributions from Burns and Walter Scott.M. Gardiner, Modern Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 193–4.
With the Industrial Revolution the process of social stratification was intensified and the themes of popular music began to change from rural and agrarian life to include industrial work songs.G. Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 214. Awareness that older forms of song were being abandoned prompted renewed interest in collecting folk songs during the 1830s and 40s, including the work of William B. Sandys' Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833), William Chappell, A Collection of National English Airs (1838) and Robert Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1846).W. B. Sandys, Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (London, 1833); W. Chappell's A Collection of National English Airs (London, 1838) and R. Bell, Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (London, 1846).
First revival 1890–1920
These developments, perhaps combined with changes in the nature of British identity, led to a much more intensive and academic attempt to record what was seen as a vanishing tradition, now usually referred to as the first English or British folk revival.
Nature of the revival The first British revival concentrated on transcribing, and later recording, songs by remaining performers. An important catalyst for the rapid expansion of this movement around the turn of the 20th century was the work of German expatriate musicologist Carl Engel, who provocatively claimed, in a collection of essays published in 1879, that it seemed to him:
rather singular that England should not possess any printed collection of its national songs with the airs as they are sung at the present day; while almost every other European nation possesses several comprehensive works of this kind.
Engel went on to suggest that:
there are English musicians in London and in the large provincial towns who might achieve good results if they would spend their autumnal holidays in some rural district of the country, associate with the villagers, and listen to their songs.
The significance of Engel's influence on the development of the English folk revival is evident in both the close resemblance of folk music collectors' activities to the fieldwork model he suggested and in the explicit references made by Cecil Sharp to Engel's essays in English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907, p. 2).
Among the most influential of the revival's earliest figures were the Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–96), Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954). Kidson and Broadwood were important in the foundation of the Folk Song Society in 1898. Later, major figures in this movement in England were Cecil Sharp (1859–1924) and his assistant Maud Karpeles (1885–1976) and the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1951), George Butterworth (1885–1916), and the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961). Of these, Child's eight-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–92) has been the most influential on defining the repertoire of subsequent performers and the music teacher Cecil Sharp was probably the most important in understanding of the nature of folk song. Sharp produced the five volume Folk Songs from Somerset from 1904 to 1909 and founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911, an indication of his parallel interest in dance music. His lectures and other publications attempted to define a musical tradition that was rural in origin, oral in transmission and communal in nature. In Scotland collectors included the Reverend James Duncan (1848–1917) and Gavin Greig (1856–1914),K. Mathieson, Celtic Music (Backbeat Books, 2001), p. 55. and in Wales, Nicholas Bennett (1823–99).G. Grove, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 3 (St. Martin's Press., 6th edn., 1954), p. 410.
Revival and national identity There was a strong nationalist element in the motivation for collecting folk song.M. Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present, (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 122 and 129. As part of a general mood of growing nationalism in the period before the First World War, the Board of Education in 1906 officially sanctioned the teaching of folk songs in schools.M. Brocken, The British Folk Revival, 1944–2002 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 6, 8, 32, 38, 53–63, 68–70, 74–8, 97, 99, 103, 112–4 and 132. One of the major effects of the folk song revival was the creation of a distinctive English form of classical music, known as the English "national" or "pastoral" school. Sharp, among others, promoted the revival of English folk music as a response to the commonly held view that English art music since the death of Henry Purcell had relied heavily on European composers and styles and was therefore indistinguishable from other national forms. This connection between the English folk revival and the English Musical Renaissance movement has been heavily emphasized in historical accounts of English art music throughout the 20th century (for example, see Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (1966)).
In any event, the search for a distinctive English voice led many composers, such as Percy Grainger (from 1905), Ralph Vaughan Williams (from about 1906) and George Butterworth (from about 1906), to use their folk music discoveries directly in composition. Vaughan Williams was also the editor of the English Hymnal (1906) and used many collected tunes and set poems to them to produce new religious songs. Similarly, other composers such as Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and Frederick Delius (1862–1934) wrote music that adopted sections, cadences or themes from English folk music. By the 1940s this particular tendency among composers had begun to subside and other fusions would be more significant in the second folk revival.S. Sadie and A. Latham, The Cambridge Music Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 472.
Similar developments could be seen in Scotland in the work of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who celebrated his native Scotland in three Scottish Rhapsodies for orchestra (1880–81, 1911), and in various concerted works for piano or violin and orchestra composed during the 1880s and 1890s.J. N. Moore, Edward Elgar: a Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 91. Similarly, John McEwen's Pibroch (1889), Border Ballads (1908) and Solway Symphony (1911) incorporated traditional Scottish folk melodies.M. Gardiner, Modern Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 196.
Criticism The first revival has been criticized, particularly by David Harker, as having a romanticized view of agricultural society, of ignoring urban and industrial forms of music such as work songs and those performed in music hall, and of bowdlerising the texts.D. Harker, Fake Song: the Manufacture of British "folksong" 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). The focus on collecting performed songs also disregarded the complex, but important, relationship between printed and oral forms, particularly the role of broadside ballads, which were sometimes records of existing songs and sometimes the origin or transmission point for others. Although collectors, from Grainger in 1905 onwards, experimented with new recording technology, it was generally rejected and there was a concentration on transcribing folk song in Britain, in contrast to America, where in a parallel movement John Avery Lomax made extensive recordings for the Library of Congress from 1933.A. J. Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 245. This is thought to have created difficulties, since subtleties of performance have been lost and collectors often adjusted notation to fit their own, often classical, views of music or to fit their own preconceptions.
Second revival 1945–69