Laura Marling, Seth Lakeman, Kate Rusby, the Unthanks, Mumford & Sons: folk music is mainstream these days. But just over a half-century ago it was marginal, viewed with suspicion by parents and politicians, its principal practitioners living on subsistence wages and surveilled by special branch, its informal meetings sometimes shut down by police. As one of the more perceptive interviewees in Singing from the Floor, John Tams of the group Home Service, puts it: “I’ve never been to a Tory folk club yet.” The individuals who set the template for folk clubs in the mid-1950s – Ewan MacColl, AL Lloyd, John Hasted, Hull’s Waterson family, and American visitors such as Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger – were all [ . . . ]

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