“The Spotted Cow” is number 956 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is included in nineteenth and early twentieth century books of English traditional songs that were collected by musicologists who were concerned that they were dying out. It first appeared on a record by the Norfolk folk singer Harry Cox that was released in 1966, and then on a record by the Copper Family of Rottingdean in Sussex in 1971. In both cases it was sung unaccompanied. There are many more recordings, in a range of instrumental arrangements. I first heard it on Steeleye Span’s 1972 record Below the Salt, played on electric instruments, and I sing it myself from time to time. On the face of it, “The Spotted Cow” is a classic traditional song of rural lust, with the cow in question having a double meaning. But the scholar and folk singer A. L. Lloyd suggested that it was actually written in the early eighteenth century by a London hack writer for performance at entertainments in the famously louche Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, before being taken up elsewhere.
And that, in a nutshell, is English folk song. Throwaway ditties from the nineteenth century or earlier that caught the imagination of generations of singers in pubs and social gatherings and were passed on and on until eventually being written down by earnest middle class antiquarians and subsequently recorded by modern professional folk musicians – and kept in the mix by rank amateurs such as myself. The unknown songwriter who first penned it would doubtless by astonished to learn that his creation is still being been sung, catalogued, rearranged and subjected to scholarly analysis three hundred years later. Building on this example, in a brace of articles I undertake the not inconsiderable task of giving an overview of English folk song, its history and its peaks and troughs of popularity.
What is English Folk Song?
Much ink has been spilt on this question, not helped by the term being used for two different genres of song. The term originally referred to ‘traditional’ songs such as “Spotted Cow”, that were first written by unknown songwriters in the nineteenth century or earlier, and which became the music of the mainly rural labouring classes. They were passed orally from singer to singer before being ‘collected’ in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by middle class dilettantes who were seeking to prevent them from being lost to industrialisation and urbanisation. Then in the second half of the twentieth century, the term began to be applied to contemporary songs written and performed by young ‘singer-songwriters’, usually accompanying themselves on guitars or similar instruments, and often on social or political themes, overwhelmingly from a left-wing standpoint. The ‘folk revival’ that began in the 1950s embraced both genres of song, and then diversified in terms of subject matter, arrangements, instrumentation and playing styles. Today, there is a bewildering diversity of songs and accompaniments that come under the broad banner of folk, and the term has to be applied pragmatically. So, folk songs are labelled as such if they are performed in folk clubs or at folk festivals, by musicians who identify as folk singers; or which appear on records in the ‘folk music’ section of the few remaining record shops, and on ‘folk music’ playlists produced by music streaming companies. As we will see, this means that a lot of artists or songs today get categorised as folk that would never have been recognised as such by early folk pioneers. But diversity has won the day – as the eminent folk singer Eliza Carthy puts it, “a folk song is any song that can be sung in a pub”.
English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh Folk Music Compared
The nations of the British Isles each have their own folk music, but differ in the part that it plays in their culture and national life. In Scotland and Ireland, folk music has long been an integral part of national identity. Scottish traditional songs began to be collected and recorded in the early eighteenth century, much earlier than in England, and poets, in particular Rabbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott used traditional themes in their own works. In the twentieth century, ‘modern’ folk songs, such as ‘Flower of Scotland’, written by Roy Williamson of the Corries, have reached far beyond the folk world. Scotland and Ireland also have rich stores of traditional instrumental music, that have transcended their origins as tunes for dancing. ‘Sessions’, where folk musicians get together to play tunes are common in pubs and community centres across both countries.
In England, by contrast, traditional folk music has rarely been mainstream. Most peoples’ knowledge of English folk song extends no further than the recollection of being in a class of children singing sanitised lyrics in primary school, accompanied by the music teacher on her piano. English traditional songs are regarded as exotic things, performed by men with serious beards and their fingers in their ears. Similarly, English traditional instrumental music is only played to accompany garishly clad morris dancers and the like. English pop and rock bands that include elements of traditional music are few and far between, and have a specialist following, while in Scotland, bands like Runrig and Skerryvore attract large mainstream audiences.
Why is traditional music a minority pursuit in England, but widespread in Scotland and Ireland? I’d hazard three reasons. First, Scots and Irish have long expressed their national identity through traditional songs, that often have a patriotic air, or otherwise celebrate their countries history (not to mention their dislike of English high-handedness). Second, traditional instrumental music has a central place in Scottish and Irish culture, with ‘sessions’ an integral part of musical life, while in England it has never really transcended its country dance roots. And third, Scottish and Irish music, well, sounds better. Their melodies and tunes are more attractive or foot tapping, their lyrics are more meaningful and poignant and their range of instruments and arrangements make the music more interesting. English folk songs, by contrast, are often pedantic, and can sound too much like hymns (it is perhaps no coincidence that the only traditional English songs to become widely known are Christmas carols). English dance music is four-square and plodding compared to the jigs and reels of Scotland and Ireland (by the way, in this article I will concentrate on English folk song rather than folk dance, for the simple reason that I bloody hate dancing). Of course, there are some great songs and tunes that have come out of the English tradition – I wouldn’t be writing about it if there weren’t. But to me most English traditional music lacks the immediacy, emotional thrust and popular appeal of the best Scottish and Irish music, and therefore remains a minority pursuit.
The comedian Billy Connolly, who began his career in folk clubs in the 1960s, had his own take on the difference between Scottish and English folk:
“The Scottish clubs liked entertainers and English clubs liked educators. They seemed to like to be educated by the traditional unaccompanied songs. It was like Brussels sprouts, supposed to be good for you”.
What of Welsh traditional music? It has tended to have a low profile, often hidden behind the Welsh language, and subsumed within the pageantry of the Eisteddfod. Welsh musical life has also focused more on the many male voice choirs that are a distinctive part of the nation’s identity. There are singers and musicians who explore Welsh traditional music, in both Welsh and English, but as in England, Welsh folk music is not mainstream.
Origins and Collectors
The fine autobiographical novel ‘Lark Rise to Candelford’ is a fictionalised account of author Flora Thompson’s childhood in a rural Oxfordshire community in the 1880s. In it she describes a typical evening in the village pub, the ‘Wagon and Horses’. The men of the village, after a hard day’s labour in the cornfields, would gather in the pub to talk, smoke and drink a half pint of beer – all that their meagre wage would afford them. Women and children were of course excluded. The evenings would often end with a singaround, with each contributing a song, ‘to oblige’. Thompson provides the lyrics of some of the traditional folk songs that resounded through the cosy taproom. There were chorus songs like ‘The Barleymow’ (Roud index number 944), a drinking song that lasted as long as the singers wanted it to. ‘King Arthur’ (Roud 130) was another chorus song; the version Thompson includes actually came from a mid-nineteenth century collection of nursery rhymes. The narrator of ‘My father’s a hedger and ditcher’ (Roud 846) is a woman complaining that no one wants to marry her; the villager who sang it in the pub was a bachelor. The older men present would sing lengthy ancient ballads such as ‘Lord Lovell’ (Roud 48; Child 75) or ‘The Outlandish Knight’ (Roud 21; Child 4 – I will explain these numbers later, suffice to say they designate that the songs have all been collected and catalogued). The songs would have been sung unaccompanied – none of the men could play instruments, still less come up with appropriate arrangements.
As these are all traditional songs, by definition we don’t know who wrote them, but someone must have. Doubtless, some had their origins in rural communities, composed by noted singers and passed on down the generations. Others, like ‘The Spotted Cow’ mentioned earlier, probably came from hack songwriters in towns and cities, who were in effect parodying rural life. As such, they were related to ‘Broadside Ballads’. These were songs, often on contemporary themes, that were written by professional songwriters, published on printed posters and sold in London and other towns for performance at local entertainments. Broadside ballads shared subject matter (crime, lust, current affairs, war, etc) and tunes with folk songs of unknown provenance, and today tend to be lumped together with them as ‘traditional songs’.
Flora Thompson’s account of the singarounds at the ‘Wagon and Horses’ is probably a fairly typical example of how folk songs were performed and disseminated when England was a largely rural nation. But it also showed that change was coming, for it was the older men who sang the traditional songs – the young men scorned them and preferred the contemporary popular songs emanating from the Music Halls. By the 1880s, Britain was becoming an urbanised nation, and the culture and tastes of the cities were spreading into the countryside. Traditional song was in danger of dying out.
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| A village in rural Oxfordshire, not far from where Flora Thompson witnessed (from outside) a singaround at the 'Wagon and Horses' |
Enter the intrepid band of folk song collectors - men (and some women) who travelled the country to visit rural communities and write down songs from local singers. Between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many collections of traditional songs were published, having been collected by the likes of Lucy Broadwood, Alfred Williams, Maud Karpeles and others. Classical composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger and George Butterworth also collected traditional songs, and included their tunes and lyrics in their own compositions. But the doyen of collectors was Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), who collected over 5,000 songs and tunes, was a leading light in the nascent English Folk Song Society and founded the English Folk Dance Society (they later merged into the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS)).
Between them, the pioneer collectors gathered and wrote down thousands of songs, and today’s practitioners would have little to perform without their efforts. However, it is possible to criticise their approach to collecting. They could be selective in what they wrote down, discarding songs that they deemed inappropriate and sometimes altering lyrics. They concentrated on rural areas, ignoring the songs coming from industrial towns and mining areas. They were sometimes not very interested in the singers, and failed to include information about their backgrounds, or the context of their songs. Some singers may well have been selective in what they passed on to the middle class, and sometimes rather high-handed collectors. And there was a lack of diversity, with songs by women and people of colour being under-represented. We will probably never be able to retrieve what the early collectors ignored or discarded – but there are still thousands of songs for modern performers to explore.
That exploratory work has been made easier by efforts made to catalogue and categorise traditional songs. An early attempt was made in the 1880s by the American academic Francis Child, who published a collection of 305 English and Scottish ballads (narrative songs that tell a story), giving each a number – we have noted the ‘Child numbers’ of a couple of songs above. In recent years, a professional librarian, amateur folklorist and glorious obsessive named Steve Roud has catalogued and numbered nearly 25,000 folk songs, including their origins, variants and recordings. The ‘Roud Index’, again mentioned above, is today hosted online by the EFDSS and is available for all to search.
The efforts of the early song collectors may have saved many songs from being lost, but did not significantly raise the profile of English folk music. As we have seen, a few songs and tunes were taken up by classical composers, or by school teachers, often in sanitised versions (a classic example is the song ‘No John, no’ (Roud 146), which was originally much saucier than the bland version I remember singing at primary school). But in general, folk songs did not catch the popular imagination, and most were left to gather dust in the archives of the EFDSS.
The Beginnings of the Post-War Folk Revival
In the early 1950s, interest in folk music began to increase, through the efforts of a new generation of collectors, who could use recording equipment, and disseminate their discoveries through radio and television. Early leading lights in this revival were Peter Kennedy, whose father Douglas had followed Cecil Sharp as head of the EFDSS, and Alan Lomax, an American musicologist and song collector who came to Europe to escape the McCarthy witch hunt years. They realised that there were still some traditional singers scattered around the English countryside and recorded them on early reel-to-reel tapes. Singers such as Harry Cox and Walter Pardon, both from Norfolk, and the Copper family of Rottingdean in East Sussex, a long-standing folk music family who sang in harmony, became minor celebrities through appearing on the BBC. In 1953, Lomax hosted a television series named ‘Songhunter’, which featured performances from folk musicians from a number of traditions. The programmes were broadcast live, which troubled his producer, a young man named David Attenborough, who was concerned that the amateur musicians might be overwhelmed by the occasion, and sought ways of putting them at ease. A memo exists in which Attenborough requests that beer be made available in the studio while the Copper Family were playing, to improve their performance – the mark of a young man of rare insight and initiative, who should go far!
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| A young David Attenborough requests beer to lubricate the voices of the Copper Family |
In the late 1950s, Kennedy and Lomax compiled a monumental series of L.P.s of their field recordings titled ‘The Folk Songs of Britain’. Sadly, however, Kennedy made the decision to maximise the number of singers featured, meaning that many songs were represented by brief extracts, sometimes from multiple performers. This approach drastically reduced the records’ enjoyment as a listening experience.
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| Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax's monumental series of records of British folk songs. I bought the lot in the early 1970s, but found them such hard going that most of the discs have never been played. Any offers? |
Singer Songwriters Arrive from America
We noted earlier that the second meaning of ‘folk song’ refers to newly composed songs, often on social or political themes, and generally sung accompanied by a guitar or other acoustic instruments. This genre of music had its roots in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, where the guitar and banjo became the instruments of choice for black blues composers and singers, and later for white writers and performers such as Woody Guthrie. In the 1950s many American blues and folk musicians, both black and white, came to Britain for concert tours, including the Weavers, whose main songwriter was Pete Seeger (a Harvard drop-out whose songs included ‘If I had a hammer’ and ‘Where have all the flowers gone’), and the folk-blues artists Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Young British performers flocked to their concerts, and started writing their own ‘folk songs’. In the mid 1950s, a uniquely British genre of music named ‘skiffle’ became briefly prominent. This was a guitar-based amalgam of American-style folk-blues and trad jazz, whose leading figure, Lonnie Donegan, had a chart hit with an arrangement of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’. Skiffle was soon replaced by rock and roll as the popular music of young Britons, but it brought the guitar to Britain and helped kickstart the British contemporary folk movement.
An early English advocate of the guitar in folk music was an academic physicist named Dr. John Hasted. Today largely forgotten, in the 1950s he was a leading light in skiffle and the folk revival, as a collector and disseminator of songs, and as a performer.
The Rise of the Folk Clubs
Traditional and contemporary folk music came together, sometimes uneasily, in the folk clubs that proliferated across the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a grassroots movement, organised by amateur volunteers, who took over rooms in coffee bars, pubs, parish halls and the like so that young people could sing and listen to folk songs. By the late 1960s, it is estimated that there were over 300 folk clubs in London alone. There were (and still are) three types of folk club. Some were ‘concert clubs’, that had a programme of paid professional, or semi-professional performers, with support coming from ‘residents’, regular attendees of a high standard who acted as warm-ups to the main act. Other clubs held ‘singers nights’, where anyone could take the stage as a ‘floor singer’ to sing a couple of songs. Sometimes clubs swapped roles, with concert clubs holding occasional singers nights, and singers clubs sometimes booking a paid performer. The third, less formal type of club held ‘singarounds’, where attendees sat in a circle and took turns to sing a song. Many clubs embraced both traditional and contemporary folk music, and allowed a range of instruments, but some clubs insisted on traditional songs only – and some of these required participants to sing unaccompanied.
In the early 1960s, the grassroots nature of folk clubs extended to the lives of the young professional performers. Most started off as floor singers, taking their turn at singers’ nights, attracting the attention of the club organiser and being booked for a concert night. Their careers were furthered by word of mouth; there were fewer top class performers than clubs looking to book them and good artists could quickly find themselves with a full diary. Many travelled from club to club by train (a surprising number of leading folk musicians can’t drive), or hitch-hiked, and often slept on the settees of club organisers.
Young English artists started to make their mark, some concentrating on traditional song, others writing their own material. Leading traditional singers included Shirley Collins, who in the 1950s assisted Alan Lomax with collecting songs (and became his lover); Oxford-educated June Tabor, and Martin Carthy, who embraced guitar accompaniment as well as a creative approach to arranging traditional songs. Groups of harmony singers built on the legacy of the Copper family, including the Watersons from North Yorkshire (later joined by Martin Carthy when he married Norma Waterson) and the Young Tradition, whose roof-raising approach presaged the development of folk-rock in the late 1960s. Young traditional singers generally had very different backgrounds to the countrymen and women whose songs they sang – Martin Carthy was raised in Hampstead and before dropping out of education to pursue music was destined to read classics at university, while June Tabor represented her Oxford college in University Challenge.
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| June Tabor on University Challenge, 1968 |
Early folk songwriters included Sidney Carter (who wrote ‘Lord of the Dance’); Cyril Tawney, a former submariner who specialised in songs of the sea, and Ian Campbell, who led a Weavers-style acoustic band and ran a folk club in Birmingham (his song ‘The Sun is Burning’ was covered by Simon and Garfunkel). Another popular group was the Spinners, from Liverpool, who also ran their own club. Then came the likes of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, who took guitar playing to a new level and later came together in Pentangle, Ralph McTell, Harvey Andrews and Robin and Barry Dransfield. And despite Billy Connolly’s ‘Brussels sprouts’ jibe, there were English entertainers who combined songs with comedy, such as Mike Harding, Tony Capstick and Richard Digance. Scottish and Irish artists of course also visited England (and vice versa), including Nigel Denver, Alex Campbell, John Martyn, Christy Moore and...Donovan! In practice, it was of course difficult to distinguish English contemporary singer-songwriters from Scottish, Irish and Welsh. There were some differences in subject matter (and accents), but little in style, and I will not be precious by excluding them from this account.
American singer-songwriters also played English folk clubs in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan visited briefly in 1962, then returned in 1964 as a superstar playing concert halls. Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Jackson C. Frank also did the rounds. In 1964, Paul Simon toured British folk clubs, stole ‘Scarborough Fair’ from Martin Carthy and supposedly wrote ‘Homeward Bound’ on Widnes railway station (I’ve never understood why Widnes celebrates that song, as it is plain from the lyrics that Simon hated Britain in general and Widnes in particular).
The Folk Police
The folk revival of the 1960s was a youth movement, with folk briefly overtaking modern jazz as the music of students and like-mined young people, before itself being sidelined by rock music in the 1970s. But the early years of the revival were dominated by two older performers: the forty-something Ewan McColl and the fifty-something A. L. (Bert) Lloyd, both (like Alan Lomax) avowed communists. Between them, they had an outsized influence on the shape and direction of the English folk song revival.
A.L. Lloyd (1908-1982) had street credibility in the folk world, for as a young man he had worked on an Australian sheep farm and crewed on an Antarctic whaling ship, before settling in London as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. He was a self-taught musicologist (like his successor Steve Roud) and became an authority on the traditional music of Britain, Australia and Europe. He also became a noted singer, and from the 1950s his folk club appearances and records set the standard for the performance of traditional songs. He also acted as musical director for Topic Records, the leading folk label, nurturing the careers of many young artists.
Ewan McColl (1915-1989) eked out a career as an actor and playwright in left-wing theatre groups, before being introduced to traditional music in the 1950s by Alan Lomax. He formed a working, and romantic partnership with Peggy Seeger, younger half-sister of Pete Seeger (she later became his third wife), and they founded one of England’s first folk clubs, the London-based Ballads and Blues club, which later became the Singers club. Like Lloyd, McColl sang and recorded traditional songs (they made several albums together, though generally did not sing together). Listening to their albums from the 1950s and early 1960s today is a rather ennervating experience, as the recordings were stark and simple and the arrangements sparse compared to today’s complex and heavily produced styles. Both either sang unaccompanied, or with minimal instrumentation: in Lloyd’s case often just Alf Edwards’s concertina and for McColl, Peggy Seeger’s banjo.
Unlike Lloyd, McColl also wrote songs, completing over 300 in all. His best known compositions were ‘Dirty Old Town’, ‘The Shoals of Herring’, ‘The Manchester Rambler’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, a love song that he wrote for Peggy, which became a chart hit in 1972 for Roberta Flack.
Bert Lloyd was a clubbable, open-minded personality, who carried his deep knowledge of folk music lightly and encouraged young performers such as the Watersons to find their own approach to traditional song. He was also not above occasionally altering the lyrics of traditional songs to make them sound better. Ewan McColl, by contrast, was opinionated and dogmatic, and inclined to hold that there was a ‘right’ and a ’wrong’ way to perform (his way was right, of course). He ruffled many feathers at the Singers club by insisting that performers only sang songs from the part of the country (or world) that they came from, a rule that many found over-restrictive. He was supported in this policy by Peggy Seeger, who later in life defended it strongly, believing that without it performers would all gravitate towards American folk music, and British music would be lost (other leading clubs did not seem to find this a problem). McColl himself was in a good position to break his own rule, as he had been born James Henry Miller in Salford, the son of Scottish parents, and he airily performed and recorded both English and Scottish songs.
Some of the abiding stereotypes of English folk can be traced back to Ewan McColl. The roots of the “beards and fingers in the ear” jibe can be seen in the photograph reproduced below. The beard is unmistakeable (he wore one all his life), but he is not actually putting his finger in his ear; like many who sang unaccompanied, he cupped his hand over his ear, so that he could hear himself better and help keep in tune. However, many outside the folk scene saw it as an affectation. The reputation of the folk world as one of priggishness and cliquishness can also be traced to McColl and Seeger’s ban on ‘foreign songs’ and McColl’s insistence that there was a ‘right’ way to sing folk songs. In the 1960s, he and Seeger set up a clique (there is no other word for it) called the ‘Critics Group’, which was a small group of performers approved by the couple who were invited to their house in Beckenham to share songs – and be lectured to by McColl. Membership of the Critics Group was an honour afforded to few, and naturally caused resentment among those excluded from the inner sanctum.
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| The face that launched a thousand folk stereotypes. Ewan McColl with beard and his finger |
McColl and Seeger weren’t the only ones who were felt to take folk song too seriously. As we have mentioned, other clubs had an exclusive policy, insisting on traditional unaccompanied songs only. Some in the folk world believed that traditional songs should only be performed with the lyrics, tunes and style of the original source singers. The musician and writer Bob Pegg likened this approach to butterfly collecting. Rather than being living, dynamic and changing things, folk songs were to be humanely killed, frozen in time and stuck on pins, ignoring the fact that the versions collected from nineteenth or twentieth century sources represented just one step in the songs’ journeys. The best performers in the 1960s, such as Martin Carthy, his collaborator, violinist Dave Swarbrick and the Watersons (encouraged by Bert Lloyd), took the alternative view that traditional songs could and should be arranged, adapted and sometimes revised for the next stage in their journeys. The epitome of this philosophy was an album released in 1964 named ‘Folk Roots, New Routes’, in which Shirley Collins sang traditional songs accompanied by the jazz and blues influenced virtuoso guitar playing of of Davy Graham. Revolutionary for its time, it presaged the later work of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. Needless to say, McColl and the Critics Group disapproved.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan caused a sensation by performing the second half of his set with an electric band (The Band!) Hardcore folkies such as Pete Seeger deplored this development. On a subsequent UK tour, Dylan brought the band to Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, where between songs someone in the audience shouted ‘Judas!’ Dylan, naturally, was unmoved and ‘folk-rock’ was born. (The concert was recorded and released as an ‘official bootleg’, and the shout can be plainly heard, as can Dylan’s reaction. At least two men have claimed to be the heckler. Quaintly, at the end of the concert, as the audience is filing out, the National Anthem plays over the PA system).
Ewan McColl, of course, strongly disliked Dylan’s approach, and the Singers Club and Critics Group continued along the true path. However, it shouldn’t be assumed that the Singers Club was a dour, sterile place. It attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, who enjoyed joining in the choruses, and the atmosphere was relaxed, with much laughter. But it represented one extreme of the folk music spectrum, and other clubs were available.
The leading alternative was Les Cousins – the name, for complicated reasons was French, but it was usually pronounced like an English bloke called Les. It opened in 1965 in the basement of a Greek restaurant, appropriately in Greek Street, Soho, and was run by Andrew Matheou, the son of the restaurant owners. It became the venue of choice for young singer-songwriters and guitarists, as well as welcoming traditional performers. A veritable Who’s Who of the principal British (and American) folk and contemporary artists took to its stage during its seven-year lifespan, sometimes contributing to its legendary Saturday all-night sessions (which provided a useful alternative for some out-of-town musicians to finding digs for the night). Deep breath:
Al Stewart, Diz Disley, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Davy Graham, Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Wizz Jones, Alex Campbell, Roy Harper, Alexis Korner, The Young Tradition, The Dransfields, Michael Chapman, Peter Sarstedt(!), John Martyn, Jackson C. Frank, Ralph McTell, the Strawbs, Plainsong...
Oh, and Nick Drake, who was put on at four o’clock in the morning because he was so boring. All of these are today worthy of the folk Hall of Fame, while the members of the Critics Group are largely forgotten.
By the late 1960s, the folk revival was at its peak. Folk clubs were booming and packed. Traditional songs were being sung more than at any time since the nineteenth century. Contemporary singer-songwriters were attracting the attention of major record labels and mainstream audiences; their albums were selling well and some, like Paul Simon, Cat Stevens and Ralph McTell, even pierced the singles charts. The Cambridge Folk Festival was first held in 1965, and was followed by others, while folk acts were among the line-ups of early Glastonbury festivals. But as sure as skiffle was replaced by rock and roll, folk began to lose its mainstream cachet, as the original revivalists grew older and younger artists looked to other musical genres – such as punk rock. In Part Two, I will chronicle the ups and downs of English folk from the late 1960s to the present day, and will reassure readers that English folk music isn’t dead...
..yet.
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.
