Peggy Seeger

In The Wire 493, George Rayner-Law argues that as interest in English folk song grows once again, practitioners, critics and listeners should consider carefully the ideological currents beneath the surface

By George Rayner-Law

There is growing interest in contemporary English folk music. London based groups such as Shovel Dance Collective and Goblin Band are frequently discussed in music criticism as innovating the folk idiom through expanded instrumentation, production techniques and collectivist politics, while staying in continuity with the folk tradition. However, an unbroken English folk music continuity does not exist in any historicisable form; instead, ‘folk music’ should be considered a product of modernity, with any tradition that does ostensibly exist in England traceable to the 1950s.

Folk song collecting in England is generally considered as an act of preservation, conservation of at-risk popular culture against the onslaught of modernity. Since at least American folklorist Francis James Child’s time, collecting itself is better understood as a modern, empiricist project. The analysis of Marxist academic David Harker has demonstrated that folk song collectors in the 19th century routinely discarded industrial songs, pub songs and previously published work from their collections. In this way, they were essentially constructing folk song as a category out of a broader pool of popular song.

This process of re-ordering of the world reflected contemporary concerns around the loss of ‘traditional’ culture. As outlined by British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the collating, ordering and invention of folk traditions and corpuses out of raw custom was a key part of romantic nationalist projects in 19th century Europe – in his words, “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition”. But romantic nationalism is fraught when it comes to England, as Englishness became entangled rapidly with Britishness following the 1707 Act of Union. Writer Alex Niven recently argued that due to this elision, Englishness is essentially an empty vessel lacking positive attributes, and that any emancipatory politics in this country would need to move beyond the idea of England in order to effect positive change.

The contemporary folk idiom in England is rooted in the work of figures such as Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Albert Lloyd in the early 50s. The work of this group in performance, documentation, debate, songwriting and dramaturgy cemented modern folk performance and instrumentation forms. That this group were guided by Marxist politics is unquestionable: MacColl and Lloyd were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When ‘reviving’ folk, one of their key motivations was to fight what they saw as the saturation of British popular culture by American corporate products. This, arguably, is another example of folksong and folk corpus as raw material used anew to reflect new concerns in a contemporary moment, rather than furthering a continuous tradition. Simultaneously, Lloyd’s work developing a catalogue of coal mining songs for the National Coal Board and, later, Workers Music Association widened the scope of what counted as threatened cultural heritage in an era of slow industrial decline.

Beyond the social form of folk music, some of the above were also involved in developing field recording as a concept. Field recording as a term and practice emerges from the work done for the Archive of American Folk Song in the 30s and 40s by collectors including John Lomax, Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax. ‘Field’ originally referred to the anthropological ‘field’, as they were employed to document the songs of rural America. Later, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger developed the radio ballad format with Charles Parker, which mixed field recording, music and the human voice for radio documentary, with field recordings on tape played live in the studio. Field recording practices are another example of new intellectual technologies employed to understand and contextualise the periods in which they were developed, and have been part of this idiom since its early days.

It’s odd that many reviews of Shovel Dance Collective’s releases – notably The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore – discuss the integration of field recording with folk song as a novel approach. A similarly dehistoricised appraisal of Goblin Band focuses on their engagement with early music and their integration of it with folk idiom, particularly in relation to Come Slack Your Horse. Early music as a category, codified by David Munrow in the mid-60s, is another modern classification developed to make sense of the raw material of the past. Munrow, of course, collaborated with the Collins sisters on 1969’s Anthems In Eden, which points to at least 55 years of cross-pollination between these two musical lenses.

Ideas of continuity are one of the most powerful ways to establish narrative frameworks for the world one lives in. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the experience of living in contemporary modernity as liquid: undefined, uncertain and characterised by fleeting experiences and relationships. The desire for something solid to grasp hold of – that can allow one to exist outside of, or even counter to, modernity – is understandably appealing. The comforting idea of folksong as a strand of continuity attached to the premodern world, or more specifically premodern England, can offer a sense of rootedness in one’s surroundings and wider culture.

Narratives of unrecorded histories and culture from below are susceptible to overextension when it comes to the idea of folk song as popular history. This can lead to a framework where things are ‘as if’ or ‘almost’ the same; unbroken, if only one can mentally bridge the gap. When one fills those gaps, one does so through a contemporary perspective, reflecting contemporary concerns and needs, and sometimes without historiographical rigour. In a ‘liquid’ era, this reorganising of historiography and memory can fuel a more ideological desire to understand one’s self in continuity with those whose histories are lost or unrecorded, a line between the unmoored figures of the past and oneself as the unmoored figure – or even victim – of the present. There is nothing inherently wrong with these situating narratives, as long as they are acknowledged, and there is nothing wrong with the joy derived from partaking in this English folk idiom as a player or listener as long as it is historiographically situated.

This essay, the first in a new opinion column called Against The Grain, appears in The Wire 493

Source: Against The Grain: George Rayner-Law on folk revivals and the idea of continuity – The Wire