The first English traditional song to be heard accompanied by a rock drum kit (according to Rob Young) was ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ (Roud 3). It was the opening track of the first, eponymous album by the Pentangle, released in May 1968. This was not, however, the start of English folk-rock. The band did not play any electric instruments, and drummer Terry Cox used brushes rather than drum sticks. Another year would pass before Fairport Convention recorded ‘A Sailor’s Life’ (Roud 273) with a full electric band (and amplified violin).
The coming of folk-rock in the late 1960s was the next step in the development of English folk song performance. In this article, we will continue the search for English folk song, from the onset of folk-rock until the present day, and offer our thoughts on its current condition.
The 2000s were a great decade for English folk. Here, Spiers and Boden perform at Wallingford Bunkfest in 2005
Into the 1970s – the Advent of English Folk-Rock
The late 1960s saw the peak of folk music in England. Folk clubs were numerous and thriving, and folk festivals were starting to proliferate. Albums by folk artists, both traditional and contemporary, were selling well, and singer-songwriters were spending money on sophisticated arrangements and production, and following Bob Dylan in using electric instruments. In short, folk music was mainstream in England, for the first and only time, and it was only a matter of time before electric instruments were used in a traditional song arrangement.
Fairport Convention were brought together in suburban north London by bassist Ashley Hutchings, and recorded their first album in 1967, under the auspices of producer and impresario Joe Boyd. In their early days they were heavily influenced by Bob Dylan and Americana. For their second album they recruited Sandy Denny, who was making a name for herself in the folk clubs as a singer of traditional songs, along with her own compositions. She introduced the band to the traditional song ‘A Sailor’s Life’ and their epic eleven-minute version on their 1969 third album Unhalfbricking, including a lengthy jam featuring guitarist Richard Thompson and guest violinist Dave Swarbrick, ushered in English folk-rock.
All was set fair for the band, until in May 1969 their road manager fell asleep driving home from a gig, and their van crashed. Drummer Martin Lamble was killed, along with an American hanger-on named Jeannie Franklyn. Band members Richard Thompson, Simon Nichol and Ashley Hutchings were all injured (and mentally scarred); Sandy Denny had luckily travelled separately.
The accident could have finished the band, but nurtured by Joe Boyd they regrouped with new drummer Dave Mattacks, and with Dave Swarbrick joining full time. In late 1969 they produced their masterpiece, Liege and Lief, a successful attempt to do for English roots music what The Band had done for Americana on their recent album Music from the Big Pink. The album comprised arrangements of traditional songs and tunes (selected by Ashley Hutchings with help from traditional music guru A. L. Lloyd), and self-penned songs in a folk idiom (mainly by Richard Thompson), and it remains the high water mark of folk rock.
Modest fame beckoned, but all was not well within the band. Shortly after, Sandy Denny left, wanting to promote her own songwriting (none of the songs on Liege and Lief were by her). Then Ashley Hutchings also left his own band (not for the last time), but for the opposite reason, as he wanted to explore traditional music more deeply. Fairport Convention decided to continue without a female singer (the band has never since had one), and recruited bassist Dave Pegg, who had previously played with Swarbrick in Ian Campbell’s band. Their next album, Full House, was their rockiest, and second best, but then Richard Thompson left to pursue his own songwriting and a solo career.
Ashley Hutchings formed Steeleye Span with two established traditional folk duos, Tim Hart and Maddie Prior, and Gay and Terry Woods. They released an album of traditional songs in 1970, whereupon the Woods left, and were replaced by violinist Peter Knight - and none other than Martin Carthy, who treated his Fender Telecaster as judiciously as his trusty acoustic guitar. But after two further albums, Ashley Hutchings left Steeleye, as did Carthy. Hutchings spent the rest of the 1970s exploring English traditional song and dance within a rock context through various iterations of the Albion Band, along with a proliferation of other projects. He worked with a large number of folk musicians, but in particular Shirley Collins (whom he married) and Derbyshire-born singer and songwriter John Tams.
No other 1970s English folk-rock bands reached the heights of the Fairport/Steeleye/Albion three-headed monster. Early in the decade, Bob Pegg, with his then-wife Carol, formed Mr Fox, largely a vehicle for Bob’s somewhat gothic songs. Later, he brought out a couple of well received concept albums (that early seventies indulgence). Hedgehog Pie, from the North-East, briefly flourished, and there were a handful of bands, influenced by Scotland’s Incredible String Band, who fused singer-songwriting with psychedelia and New Age themes. But overall, the floodgates didn’t open.
Needless to say, not everyone in the folk world was enamoured by the advent of electric instruments. In particular, while young oiks like Fairport could be excused, for established traddies like Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy to ‘go electric’ was akin to apostacy. Then in the mid-1970s, folk goddess June Tabor included a synthesiser on one of her solo albums, and outraged folkies spluttered into their real ale.
In Come I
I was too young to witness the great days of the English folk song revival in the 1960s. I first started buying folk albums, going to folk gigs, and attempting to play the guitar and sing folk songs, in the early 1970s. I came to folk through the folk-rock bands mentioned above, but at a later stage in their careers. The first time I saw Fairport Convention live was in 1973, at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. On that tour they were promoting their ninth album, and at that time none of the original members were still in the band (the concert was recorded and tracks from it were included in the 1974 album Fairport (Live) Convention. Perhaps you can hear me clapping along). A few months later, I saw Steeleye Span at the same venue, touring their sixth album, with just Tim Hart and Maddie Prior left of the original lineup.
I continued to loyally follow Fairport through their myriad lineup changes during the 1970s, but I parted company with Steeleye when they entered their Mike Batt produced ‘All Around My Hat’ folk-pop phase. I followed Richard Thompson, and still do – the first time I saw him play live was in 1974 at the Fairfield Halls again, with then-wife Linda, supporting Traffic. I also followed Ashley Hutchings’ Albion Band(s), culminating in the then-revolutionary National Theatre productions of Keith Dewhurst’s plays The Mysteries and, yes, Lark Rise to Candelford, for which the Albions were the house band.
Richard and Linda Thompson played Lancaster University in 1977. Note the (presumably) non-deliberate mistake
I also went to folk clubs, but not as a floor singer. Performers then were young, keen and numerous, and the general standard was high, and as someone bluntly told me, I wasn’t good enough. In the 1970s you could still see top artists in folk clubs, and at different clubs I saw Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Peter Bellamy, Bob Pegg, Steve Ashley and the Scottish and Irish performers Dick Gaughan and the Matthews Brothers, among others. I can’t tell you now exactly where those clubs were. There were so many clubs in those days, many were ephemeral, and most have now gone – but I know I never went to the Singers Club, or Les Cousins.
Finally, when a student in Lancashire in the late 1970s I briefly took an evening class in Clog Dancing – and was so bad at it, and so chastened by the silent scorn I received from the other participants, that I was put off folk dancing for ever.
The Folk Revival Subsides
By the end of the 1970s, the folk revival was running its course. Les Cousins closed as early as 1972; the leading singer-songwriters that it had nurtured had moved on to playing the university and college circuit, or concert halls, and a new generation did not emerge. The advent of punk rock in 1976 blew away a lot of other musical genres, including folk. The number of new performers entering the scene dwindled. Many clubs found audiences becoming thinner, and had to close down. Professional performers found it harder to get gigs and a number gave up and got proper jobs (at the end of the decade I saw Bob Pegg at my college’s arts centre; there were eleven people in the audience. Next year he returned – and played to pretty much the same eleven people. Later, he gave up performing full time and became an arts worker in the Scottish highlands).
I was there - One of the eleven tickets sold for Bob Pegg's Preston gig in 1980
Established singer-songwriters and the leading folk-rock bands (and leading traditional artists such as Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick) had built up sufficient audiences to carry on touring and making records, but the freshness had gone. Fairport Convention disbanded for a few years, but then came together again with a new line-up, and are still going – and still curating their long-standing Cropredy festival (and I still regard the current iteration as ‘new Fairport’, despite it being in existence for over forty years). Steeleye Span is also still around, having gone through even more lineup changes than Fairport. Ashley Hutchings left the Albion Band at the end of the 1970s, but took the name with him and over the next thirty years applied it to a number of different iterations, largely giving up traditional music in favour of his own (and others’) compositions. John Tams kept the classic Albion line-up going for a few years under the name Home Service, but economics led to it disbanding, and he concentrated on his alternative career as an actor and theatre director (most notably in the TV series Sharp).
There were also casualties. Sandy Denny, who had a chaotic, drink and drugs-fuelled lifestyle, died in 1978 of head injuries following a fall, aged 31. Nick Drake committed suicide in 1974 – and became a legend. Peter Bellamy would also commit suicide in 1991; in both cases they were depressed at the lack of recognition their work was receiving.
There were casualties in other ways. Shirley Collins’s marriage to Ashley Hutchings failed after he had an affair with an actress at the National Theatre and she developed dysphonia, for many years losing the ability to sing (Linda Thompson developed the same condition following her divorce from Richard). The fine traditional singer Nic Jones was badly injured in a road accident returning from a gig, and had to give up performing. And Anne Briggs, a singer with a voice so delicate that Andy Kershaw once remarked that “she makes Kate Rusby sound like Ethel Merman”, gave up a promising and highly respected career to live in obscurity in the Scottish highlands (Richard Thompson’s song ‘Beeswing’ may be partly inspired by her story).
The Fallow Years: 1980 to the mid-1990s
By the 1980s, English folk had lost its mainstream status, and there were few top-notch new artists entering the scene. There were some successful new singers and bands in what might be called a folk idiom, such as Billy Bragg, the Pogues (despite their Irishness, they were actually an English band), and later in the decade, the Levellers, but they didn’t brand themselves as ‘folk’, or play folk clubs or festivals. While there was much attrition, the folk club movement continued, and new clubs were sometimes set up. The three broad models of folk club (concert clubs, singers night clubs and singarounds) persisted, but the quality of the guests at concert nights did not, in general, reach the heights of the 1960s and early 1970s, with many performers being semi-professional. I stopped attending folk clubs around this time. There were no top artists to go and see, and still no chance of performing myself. My impression was that folk clubs were becoming entrenched and cliquey, reduced to a hard core of steadily ageing folkies who were more and more embracing the beards, real ale and finger-in-the-ear stereotypes.
Older performers began to fall by the wayside. A. L. Lloyd died in 1982, aged 74, and Ewan McColl in 1989, also 74 (the Singers Club continued for a couple of years, led by Peggy Seeger, then closed in 1991). Some of the children of the early folk revivalists began to make their own mark in music, but not in folk. Ian Campbell’s sons Ali and Robin formed the reggae band UB40 and McColl and Seeger’s daughter Kirsty McColl had several chart hits as a solo artist and sang on the Pogues’ Christmas hit song ‘Fairytale of New York’ (she died in 2000 in a boating accident, aged just 41).
Overall then, this period was one of marking time, with established artists from the 1960s and 1970s continuing their careers and dominating the line-ups at folk festivals, and few new performers breaking into the top ranks. And both the artists and their loyal audiences were getting older.
Just one significant new band unfashionably bucked the 1980s trend, having started in an unfashionable way. In 1979 a group largely made up of former students of the University of Kent, and named Fiddler’s Dram, had a novelty hit with a rather twee song called ‘Day Trip to Bangor’, which reached number 3 in the charts and was used in an advert for Anchor butter. The music world regarded the song with scorn, and it spawned several parodies, but the band were actually well established in the folk scene around Canterbury and when the fuss had died down they re-emerged as The Oyster Band (later Oysterband), and became one of the dominant forces in English folk.
Oysterband at Cropredy in 2002, with Fairport's Ric Sanders guesting
The Folk Revival Revival
In 1993, an album of traditional songs and tunes was released by two teenage girls who both played the violin and sang. It was a good album, fresh and lively, with an energy you would expect from such young virtuoso artists. Most noteworthy, though, was the pedigree of the performers. Nancy Kerr was the daughter of Sandra Kerr, a member of Ewan McColl’s Critics Group and later a notable educator, while Eliza Carthy was the daughter of folk royalty Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. Their eponymous album can be said to mark the beginning of what I like to call the ‘folk revival revival’, a second blooming of English folk music that began in the mid-1990s and has only recently begun to dwindle (to avoid too much clumsiness, I will refer to this movement henceforth as ‘Revival 2’).
In the next few years, more young artists turned their attention to English folk music, making energetic and original albums of traditional music and self-penned songs. The aforementioned Kate Rusby (‘the Barnsley Nightingale) released her first solo album, Hourglass, in 1997, and she, Eliza Carthy and Nancy Kerr were joined over the next few years by John Spiers and Jon Boden, Seth Lakeman, Jim Moray, Tim van Eyken, Jackie Oates, the Unthanks, Dr Faustus, Bellowhead (a folk big band fronted by Spiers and Boden) and others. Like Carthy and Kerr, some artists were the offspring of earlier folk revivalists. Benji Kirkpatrick, of Dr Faustus and Bellowhead, was the son of accordion player and one-time Steeleye Span member John Kirkpatrick, and his then wife and playing partner Sue Harris, while Seth Lakeman’s father Geoff had been a notable folk club organiser and resident singer (Seth’s brothers Sean and Sam were also prominent in Revival 2).
The high-energy approach of Seth Lakeman, at the Big Session festival in 2007
Revival 2 was not, however only a youth movement. The overall revival of interest in English folk led to some older artists, who had been more or less dormant during the fallow years, returning to the scene. The principal duo of Revival 2 was Show of Hands, who released their first CD in 1992. At that time, singer and songwriter Steve Knightley was 38 and multi-instrumentalist Phil Beer was 39. Beer had been carving a living on the folk scene for many years, including a spell in the Albion Band, but Knightley had not until then taken the professional plunge, preferring to make his living as a music teacher. Now he (and Beer) has an honorary doctorate for services to music, he won’t be returning to teaching any time soon. John Tams, who had more or less given up music in favour of the theatre, released three award-winning albums of his own songs between 2000 and 2005 and returned to live performing, mostly as a duo with the late Barry Coope, and also revived the Home Service for festival performances. Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson teamed up with daughter Eliza as Waterson:Carthy. And Oysterband, who had been slogging away since the early 1980s, found themselves on the top of festival bills (and made a multi-award winning album with June Tabor).
...Fairport Convention, looking to outlast the Rolling Stones, at their 50th anniversary Cropredy festival in 2017...
The older generation: Martin Carthy at Beautiful Days 2016... 
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| ...Ralph McTell, also at Cropredy 2017... |
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...and Dave Swarbrick, some years after the Telegraph published his obituary, in the unlikely company of Scotland's Dick Gaughan and a Canadian reggae band, Wickham festival 2012 |
Revival 2 largely bypassed the remaining folk clubs. The top young artists didn’t share their parents’ capacity for hitchhiking and sleeping on club organisers’ floors. The lead performers’ natural venues were Arts Centres, and they would stay in hotels, albeit cheap ones - legends in the folk world were very familiar with the UK’s network of Travelodges.
Revival 2 coincided with the growth of music festivals, and artists and bands could spend their summers gigging from festival to festival. Established festivals such as Cambridge, Sidmouth, Cropredy and Whitby were joined by many others, including those set up by folk bands themselves. The Levellers ‘Beautiful Days’ festival is well established and regularly includes folk acts. For several years, Oysterband curated the Big Session festival, initially in Leicester and later in Buxton. Even Steeleye Span tried to get in on the act, holding a short-lived festival called ‘Spanfest’.
Folk artists also gained some mainstream recognition. Norma Waterson, Seth Lakeman and Eliza Carthy (twice) were nominated for the Mercury Prize for best album of the year. Albums by Seth Lakeman and Bellowhead pierced the UK album charts. And in 2008, there was a Folk Night at the BBC Proms, featuring solo artists Bella Hardy and Martin Simpson and a roof-raising set from the mighty Bellowhead.
The nominees for the 2006 Folk Awards represent perhaps the high point of Revival 2, with the finest English and Scottish artists represented. There were also a couple of anomalies - Show of Hands won Best Duo despite at the time being a trio, with bassist Miranda Sykes, and Seth Lakeman won Best Traditional Track for a song he wrote himself 
Folk's biggest duo - Show of Hands with Miranda Sykes, Wickham festival 2010
The 2000s were a great time to be a folk fan, and my wife and I had to limit ourselves to two gigs a month and three festivals a year, and our CD collection started to bend the shelves. The folk and world music magazine Froots (now sadly defunct) was essential monthly reading. Adding in the great Scottish and Irish acts that were also at their peak at the time, the decade was a high water mark for folk comparable to the 1960s. But clouds were on the horizon. With few exceptions (e.g. Seth Lakeman, Bellowhead), the Revival 2 acts did not bring new audiences to folk music. By and large, the audiences for Revival 2 were people (like me) who had been following folk since the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the success of Revival 2 was largely because its artists kept to the style and repertoire of the earlier revival, while injecting new energy and freshness. The fact that prominent performers were the children of earlier revivalists undoubtedly helped make Revival 2 attractive to long-standing folk fans. At festivals such as Cropredy, the audience grew steadily older year after year, rather than renewing itself with younger fans.
Two rare mixed-race collectives - folk reggae band Edward II at Wickham festival 2017... 
...and Martin and Eliza Carthy with the Imagined Village, which included Johnny Kalsi and Sheema Mukherjee, at Beautiful Days, 2009
Then, as happened in the 1970s, in the 2010s the supply of quality new young artists largely dried up. Festival line-ups became ossified, with the same acts headlining year after year. Festival organisers had to broaden their definition of folk, and welcome into the fold established names who previously they would not have considered (or who would not have considered them), such as the Levellers, Lindisfarne, Steve Earl, Billy Bragg and the Proclaimers. The fresh faced youngsters who had galvanised folk fifteen years before moved into their 30s and 40s, and at gigs concentrated on their greatest hits rather than good new material, while some acts, notably Bellowhead disbanded. By the time of the pandemic and lockdown, Revival 2 had largely run its course.
English Folk Song Today
In 2013, the EFDSS launched a major project known as ‘the Full English’, which digitalised and made freely accessible online its archives of English folk song, and promoted learning resources and school initiatives to raise awareness of traditional music and folklore. Accompanying the project was an album of folk song arrangements, by a ‘superstar’ band of Revival 2 luminaries, put together by singer and academic Fay Hield, and including Nancy Kerr, Seth Lakeman, Martin Simpson and others. The album won awards, and the band undertook a national tour. The hope was that the whole enterprise would kickstart new interest and involvement in English folk music.
It didn’t really happen, and today, the Full English seems more like the end of an era than a new beginning. Browsing the line-ups of this year’s folk festivals, the headliners are virtually all familiar faces from Revival 2, or survivors from the 1960s or 1970s. The few younger performers in prominent line-up spots are more likely to be from Scotland or Ireland than England. The quality of line-ups has been diluted further in recent years by the retirement of prominent acts, including Show of Hands, Oysterband and Martin Carthy. Inevitably, the grim reaper has also cut a swathe through the revival of the 1960s and 1970s. As previously mentioned, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan McColl are long gone, along with Ian Campbell, Cyril Tawney and other pioneers. There are also no surviving members of the Young Tradition or the original Watersons, and only lead singer Jacqui McShee is left of Pentangle. Other luminaries such as Dave Swarbrick are also gone, though Shirley Collins and Peggy Seeger are still going strong in their nineties. But the overall picture is one of time passing. And you can be sure that audiences are made up of the same people who have been attending for years – only older.
There is, of course, no current shortage of prominent English singer-songwriters (Ed Sheeran, Charlie XCX, etc), but they live firmly in the world of pop and it is hard to imagine that in years to come they will become ‘heritage’ acts at folk festivals. The same applies to the so-called ‘nu-folk’ acts that had a brief moment some years ago (Mumford and Sons, Noah and the Whale, Laura Marling). The stellar world of Spotify best-sellers is a million miles from the world of English folk.
Young artists who perform traditional folk songs today have a tendency to be consciously ‘different’ to the revivalists. I sense two reasons for this. First, there is a feeling that the long-standing approach to traditional song derived from pioneers such as Martin Carthy and Shirley Collins is outdated, or at least, they (the young artists) feel they have little to add to it. Second, young performers are more conscious than their older peers that traditional songs are, well, not very ‘woke’. Many extol hunting, or whaling, or the triumphs of the British empire. There are also examples of racism, homophobia and many many examples of misogyny. Newer artists such as Stick in the Wheel seek to explore traditional song from new perspectives, more in tune with modern sensibilities (there is also the feminist folk group Re:Vulva, whose name leaves little to the imagination). To me, their approach sounds wilfully alternative, and it has not gained traction with the bulk of folk audiences. But perhaps, in time, the pendulum will swing again, and another generation of inspired artists will usher in Revival 3.
Conclusion: The Withering Grassroots
For the past ten years, I have been a regular performer at two singers nights, and one singaround folk club. The fact that I can now hold my own in such settings has nothing to do with my improved musical abilities, for I have none. It is simply a sign of the reduced standards in many of today’s folk clubs. The days when clubs were packed with skilful young musicians are long gone; these days audiences are small and elderly. At the age of seventy, I am often the youngest in the room. Some participants are survivors from the early days of the folk revival, and have been singing and playing all their lives, while others, like me, took it up as a retirement hobby. Men greatly outnumber women. Standards across the board are not high.
The definition of ‘folk music’ applied at these clubs follows Eliza Carthy’s dictum that ‘a folk song is any song that can be sung in a pub’. While some performers stick to the traditional songs they have always sung, and a few write their own material, many more sing old pop songs (the Beatles are especially popular), or songs by favourites such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Paxton etc. As the organiser of one of the clubs ruefully remarks, if he insisted that only proper folk songs were sung, there would be about three songs per evening. My own repertoire is wider than most, embracing traditional, singer-songwriter, pop and rock numbers and ‘humorous’ songs (I can be funny sometimes). I don’t try to write songs - there are enough bad songs in the world without me adding to them.
The clubs retain the broadly left-wing political tone of the early revival (remember that Ewan McColl and A. L. Lloyd were both card-carrying communists), but there is little sense of revolution. The prevailing standpoint is best characterised as ‘Old Labour’. Many participants were teachers or worked in the public sector. They are socially conservative – ‘wokery’ has not yet penetrated the folk club scene. The political tone, like the music, is rather stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, and still bears the legacy of World War Two, in which many members’ relatives served. There are laments for the decline of agriculture and the loss of heavy industry, and environmentalism is not a major priority. Songs are still sung, without irony, bewailing the loss of coal mining, despite coal’s massive contribution to climate change.
So that, broadly speaking, is the present state of English folk song. It is a genre of music that has given pleasure to many people for hundreds of years, but is today sung by a diminishing number of ageing enthusiasts. Its musical and political tone is increasingly backwards-looking, and if I am honest, I share that view. In the words of Billy Bragg (turned into a chart hit by Kirsty McColl):
“I don’t want to change the world,
I’m not looking for a new England...”
...And at my age I’m not looking for another girl either!
Further Reading
Bean JP (2014) Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs. London: Faber & Faber.
Pegg B (1976) Folk: A Portrait of English Traditional Music, Musicians and Customs. London: Wildwood House.
Roud S (2017) Folk Song in England. London: Faber & Faber.
Young R (2010) Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. London: Faber & Faber.
