English folk music

The folk music of England is a tradition-based music which has existed since the later medieval period. It is often contrasted with courtly, classical and later commercial music. Folk music

Origins#

In the strictest sense, English folk music has existed since the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon people in Britain after 400 AD. The Venerable Bede’s story of the cattleman and later ecclesiastical musician Cædmon indicates that in the early medieval period it was normal at feasts to pass around the harp and sing ‘vain and idle songs’. Since this type of music was rarely notated, we have little knowledge of its form or content. Some later tunes, like those used for Morris dance, may have their origins in this period, but it is impossible to be certain of these relationships. We know from a reference in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late 14th century and the oldest detailed material we have is Wynkyn de Worde’s collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495.

16th century to the 18th century#

While there was distinct court music, members of the social elite into the 16th century also seem to have enjoyed, and even to have contributed to the music of the people, as Henry VIII perhaps did with the tavern song “Pastime with Good Company”. Peter Burke argued that late medieval social elites had their own culture, but were culturally ‘amphibious’, able to participate in and affect popular traditions. In the 16th century the changes in the wealth and culture of the upper social orders caused tastes in music to diverge. There was an internationalisation of courtly music in terms of both instruments, such as the lute, dulcimer and early forms of the harpsichord, and in form with the development of madrigals, pavanes and galliards. For other social orders, instruments like the pipe, tabor, bagpipe, shawm, hurdy-gurdy, and crumhorn accompanied traditional music and community dance. The fiddle, well established in England by the 1660s, was unusual in being a key element in both the art music that developed in the baroque, and in popular song and dance. By the mid-17th century, the music of the lower social orders was sufficiently alien to the aristocracy and “middling sort” for a process of rediscovery to be needed in order to understand it, along with other aspects of popular culture such as festivals, folklore and dance. In the 18th century there were increasing numbers of collections of what was now beginning to be defined as “folk” music, strongly influenced by the Romantic movement, 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 (1784), which paralleled the work of figures like Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland. It was in this period, too, that English folk music traveled across the Atlantic Ocean and became one of the foundations of American traditional music. In the colonies, it mixed with styles of music brought by other immigrant groups to create a host of new genres. For instance, English ballads, along with Irish, Scottish, and German musical traditions when combined with the African banjo, Afro-American rhythmic traditions and the Afro-American jazz and blues aesthetic led in part to the development of bluegrass and country music.

Early 19th century#

With the Industrial Revolution the themes of the music of the labouring classes began to change from rural and agrarian life to include industrial work songs. Awareness that older kinds of song were being abandoned prompted renewed interest in collecting folk songs during the 1830s and 1840s, including the work of William 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). Technological change made new instruments available and led to the development of silver and brass bands, particularly in industrial centres in the north. The shift to urban centres also began to create new types of music, including from the 1850s the Music hall, which developed from performances in ale houses into theatres and became the dominant locus of English popular music for over a century. This combined with increased literacy and print to allow the creation of new songs that initially built on, but began to differ from traditional music as composers like Lionel Monckton and Sidney Jones created music that reflected new social circumstances.

Folk revivals 1890–1969#

From the late 19th century there were a series of movements that attempted to collect, record, preserve and later to perform, English folk music and dance. These are usually separated into two folk revivals. The first, in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, involved figures including collectors Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954), centred around the Folk Song Society, founded in 1911. In 1932 the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society merged to become the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). The second revival gained momentum after the Second World War, following on from the American folk music revival as new forms of media and American commercial music appeared to pose another threat to traditional music. The key figures were Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. The second revival was generally left wing in politics and emphasised the work music of the 19th century and previously neglected forms like erotic folk songs. Major traditional performers included The Watersons, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, and Shirley Collins. The fusing of various styles of American music with English folk also helped to create a distinctive form of guitar fingerstyle known as ‘folk baroque’, which was pioneered by Davy Graham, Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Several individuals emerged who had learnt the old songs in the oral tradition from their communities and therefore preserved the authentic versions. These people, including Sam Larner, Harry Cox, Fred Jordan, Walter Pardon, Frank Hinchliffe and the Copper Family, released albums of their own and were revered by folk revivalists. Popular folk revival musicians based their works on songs sung by these traditional singers and those collected during the first folk revival. There are various databases and collections of English folk songs collected during the first and second folk revivals, such as the Roud Folk Song Index, which contains references to 25,000 English language folk songs, and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a multimedia archive of folk-related resources. The British Library Sound Archive contains thousands of recordings of traditional English folk music, including 340 wax cylinder recordings made by Percy Grainger in the early 1900s.

Progressive folk#

The process of fusion between American musical styles and English folk can also be seen as the origin of British progressive folk music, which attempted to elevate folk music through greater musicianship, or compositional and arrangement skills. Many progressive folk performers continued to retain a traditional element in their music, including Jansch and Renbourn, who with Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson, and Terry Cox, formed Pentangle in 1967. Others totally abandoned the traditional element and in this area particularly influential were the Scottish artists Donovan, who was most influenced by emerging progressive folk musicians in America like Bob Dylan, and the Incredible String Band, who from 1967 incorporated a range of influences including medieval and eastern music into their compositions. Some of this, particularly the Incredible String Band, has been seen as developing into the further subgenre of psych or psychedelic folk and had a considerable impact on progressive and psychedelic rock. There was a brief flowering of English progressive folk in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with groups like the Third Ear Band and Quintessence following the eastern Indian musical and more abstract work by group such as Comus, Dando Shaft, The Trees, Spirogyra, Forest, and Jan Dukes De Grey, but commercial success was elusive for these bands and most had broken up or moved in very different directions by about 1973. Perhaps the finest individual work in the genre was from artists early 1970s artists like Nick Drake and John Martyn, but these can also be considered the first among the English ‘folk troubadours’ or ‘singer-songwriters’, individual performers who remained largely acoustic but who relied mostly on their own individual compositions. The most successful of these was Ralph McTell, whose ‘Streets of London’ reached number 2 in the UK Single Charts in 1974, and whose music is clearly folk, but without much reliance on tradition, virtuosity, or much evidence of attempts at fusion with other genres.

British folk rock#

British folk rock developed in Britain during the mid to late 1960s by the bands Fairport Convention, and Pentangle which built on elements of American folk rock, and on the second British folk revival. It was most significant in the 1970s, when it was taken up by groups such as Pentangle, Steeleye Span and the Albion Band. It was rapidly adopted and developed in the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany, where it was pioneered by Alan Stivell and bands like Malicorne; in Ireland by groups such as Horslips; in Canada by groups such as Barde; and also in Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man and Cornwall, to produce Celtic rock and its derivatives. It has been influential in those parts of the world with close cultural connections to Britain, such as the US and Canada and gave rise to the subgenre of Medieval folk rock and the fusion genres of folk punk and folk metal. By the 1980s the genre was in steep decline in popularity, but has survived and revived in significance as part of a more general folk resurgence since the 1990s.

Folk punk#

In the mid-1980s a new rebirth of English folk began, this time fusing folk with energy and political aggression derived from punk rock. Leaders included The Pogues, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Oyster Band and Billy Bragg. Folk dance music also became popular in the 80s, with acts like the English Country Blues Band and Tiger Moth. The decade later saw the use of reggae with English folk music by the band Edward II & the Red Hot Polkas, especially on their seminal Let’s Polkasteady from 1987.

Folk metal#

In a process strikingly similar to the origins of British folk rock in the 1960s, the English thrash metal band Skyclad added violins from a session musician on several tracks for their 1990 debut album The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth. When this was well received they adopted a full-time fiddle player and moved towards a signature folk and jig style leading them to be credited as the pioneers of folk metal, which has spread to Ireland, the Baltic and Germany.

Traditional folk resurgence 1990–present#

The peak of traditional English folk, like progressive and electric folk, was the mid- to late-1970s, when, for a time it threatened to break through into the mainstream. By the end of the decade, however, it was in decline. The attendance at, and numbers of folk clubs began to decrease, probably as new musical and social trends, including punk rock, new wave and electronic music began to dominate. Although many acts like Martin Carthy and the Watersons continued to perform successfully, there were very few significant new acts pursuing traditional forms in the 1980s. This began to change with a new generation in the 1990s. The arrival and sometimes mainstream success of acts like Kate Rusby, Bellowhead, Nancy Kerr, Kathryn Tickell, Jim Moray, Spiers and Boden, Seth Lakeman, Frank Turner, Laura Marling and Eliza Carthy, all largely concerned with acoustic performance of traditional material, marked a radical turn around in the fortunes of the tradition.

Folk clubs#

Although there were a handful of clubs that allowed space for the performance of traditional folk music by the early 1950s, its major boost came from the short-lived British skiffle craze, from about 1956–8. They were largely a phenomenon of the urbanised middle classes and known for the amateur nature of many performances. There were also ‘residents’, who performed regular short sets of songs. Many of these later emerged as major performers in their own right, including A. L. Lloyd, Martin Carthy, and Shirley Collins. A later generation of performers used the folk club circuit for highly successful mainstream careers, including Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott, Ian Dury and Barbara Dickson.

Folk music and the radio#

The difficulty of gaining regular appearances on television in England has long meant that radio has remained the major popular medium for increasing awareness of the genre. The EFDSS sponsored the BBC Home Service radio program, As I Roved Out, based on field recordings made by Peter Kennedy and Séamus Ennis from 1952 to 1958, which probably did more than any other single factor to introduce the general population to British folk music in the period. Also important were occasional radio shows, such as Lomax’s Ballads and Blues (1951), MacColl’s Radio-ballads (1958–64) and The Song Carriers (1968). “Folkweave” was presented by Tony Capstick 1975–8. “Folk on Two” (Wednesdays) began in 1980. In 1998 Jim Lloyd retired from the programme and was replaced by Mike Harding. In 2007 it was renamed “The Mike Harding Folk Show”. In October 2012 it was announced that Mike Harding would be leaving the programme to be replaced by Mark Radcliffe. Ian A. Anderson, editor of “fRoots”, also presented the occasional series for Radio Two. He hosted a World music programme on “Jazz FM” and then spent 10 years broadcasting on the BBC World Service. He currently hosts “fRoots Radio” on the web. For over twenty years, until 2006, Charlie Gillett presented World music on BBC London.

Folk festivals#

Folk festivals began to be organised by the EFDSS from about 1950, usually as local or regional event with an emphasis on dance, like the Sidmouth Festival (from 1955) and the Keele Festival (1965), which was abandoned in 1981 but reinstituted three years later as the National Folk Festival. The EFDSS gave up its organizing role in these festivals in the 1980s and most are locally run and financed. One of the largest and most prestigious English folk festivals at Cambridge was founded in 1965 and attracts about 10,000 people. Like rock festivals, folk festivals have begun to multiply since the 1990s and there are over a hundred folk festivals or varying sizes held in England every year.

Ballads#

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative story and set to music. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. They are usually narrative in structure and make considerable use of repetition. The traditional ballad has been seen as originating with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe. There have been many different and contradictory attempts to classify traditional ballads by theme, but commonly identified types are religious, supernatural, tragic, love, historic, legends and humour. Many ballads were brought by English settlers to the New World, thus contributing in part to the bedrock of American folk music that had been established via the Afro-American rhythmic traditions, the blues aesthetic, and the cross-pollination of the American immigrant cultures at the time.

Carols#

A carol is a festive song. In modern times, carols are associated primarily with Christmas, but in reality there are carols celebrating all festivals and seasons of the year, and not necessarily Christian festivals. They were derived from a form of circle dance accompanied by singers, which was popular from the mid-12th century. From the 14th century they were used as processional songs, particularly at Advent, Easter and Christmas, and to accompany religious mystery plays. They declined after the Protestant Reformation which banned many religious festivals, but some famous carols were written in this period, including ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ and they were more strongly revived from the 19th century and began to be written and adapted by eminent composers.

Children’s songs#

The earliest vernacular children’s songs in Europe are lullabies from the later medieval period. From soon after we have records of short children’s rhyming songs, but most nursery rhymes were not written down until the 18th century. The first English collections were Tommy Thumb’s Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, are both thought to have been published before 1744, and John Newbery’s, Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1785), is the first record we have of many classic rhymes. These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of Mummers’ plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals. At the height of the revival Sabine Baring-Gould produced A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), and Andrew Lang produced The Nursery Rhyme Book in 1897. Children’s songs, unlike folk songs, have remained part of a living and continuous tradition, for although added to from other sources and affected by written versions, most adults pass on songs they learned from oral sources as children.

Erotic folk songs#

It has been noted by most recent commentators on English folk song that love, the erotic and the pornographic were major traditional themes and, if more than ballads are considered, this may have been the largest groups of printed songs. Many collectors in the first revival either ignored such songs, or bowdlerised them for publication, as Francis Child and Cecil Sharp did in their collections. In the second revival, erotic folk song was more accepted as part of the canon of traditional song, helped by the publication of books such as Gershon Legman’s, The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore (1964) and Ed Cray’s, The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs, which printed many previously unpublished songs (1968). In England A. L. Lloyd was the key figure in introducing erotic songs to the canon, lecturing and publishing on the subject. He recorded The Foggy Dew and Other Traditional English Love Songs in 1959, and then The Bird in the Bush, Traditional Erotic Songs in 1966 with Frankie Armstrong, and Anne Briggs. He drew a distinction between erotic songs, i.e. those that dealt with love and suggested sexuality through innuendo (like ‘The Bonny Black Hare’ and ‘The Bird in the Bush’), and pornographic songs that were explicit and therefore unworthy of attention. Some authors, however, find these distinctions more difficult to maintain. Although erotic songs became part of the standard fare in folk clubs and among folk rock musicians, relatively few of the more explicit songs have been placed on record.

Hornpipes#

The hornpipe is a style of dance music thought to have taken its name from an English reed instrument by at least the 17th century. It is most often associated with the Sailor’s Hornpipe, but has formed the basis of many individual and group country dances into the modern period. Like many dances it was taken up in Scotland and Ireland and given a distinctive national character and moved to America with emigration.

Genre family: English styles of music