This was the last academic essay I wrote. In 2019 I sent it to a music history journal, who replied that it was interesting and well-written, but they didn’t want it. Clearly, they were looking for dull and badly-written pieces. I decided it was time to move on.
‘Something happened in America’
(Shelton 1975, p. 7)
‘Skiffle is piffle’
Melody Maker, March 1957
(cited in Frame 2007, p. 228)
Abstract
This paper begins by comparing Cecil Sharp’s and A.L. Lloyd’s concepts of folk music. It outlines how the cultural turmoil of the Second World War accelerated already-existing cultural trends in UK, leading to a renewed fascination among young people with an imaginary America. This fascination created a sense of cultural authenticity quite different from that which had inspired Sharp.
The Second Revival required a new type of musical venue to popularize its ideals: the folk club, a participatory and democratic institution. The second half of the paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the folk clubs, and ends by noting the reasons why folk clubs found it difficult to integrate the electric folk groups of the 1960s.
In July 1954 two enthusiastic and largely untrained white singers were recording in studios in Memphis and London. They were unknown to each other, but they were working in similar ways: both took songs from the rich tradition of American blues, and sang them faster, adding a stronger beat, transforming them and making them their own (Frame 2007, p. 79). The American singer was Elvis Presley, whose ‘That’s All Right’ became a hit later that year. The Brit was Lonnie Donegan: his ‘Rock Island Line’ was not released until November 1955, and sold a million copies (Frame 2007, p. 86). These two recordings illustrate some important cultural changes in both the UK and USA.
The 1950s in the UK are often described as a grey period. For example, in his autobiography Donovan recalls growing up in a Britain that was ‘stiflingly respectable and ruled by an intellectually bankrupt authority. It was grey, lacking poetry and spiritually sterile.’ (Leitch 2006, p. 85) Recent musical research is suggesting a more nuanced picture: if there was stifling conformity, there was also a vigorous reaction growing against it; if there was drabness, there was also a quest for an exciting new authenticity. Donegan’s surprise hit is a memorable expression of these countervailing forces. There seems good reason to think it marked a kind of turning-point, The song evoked ‘a sense of space and freedom,’ recalled John Peel, ‘a kind of take-it-or-leave-it spirit that made everything that had gone before sound overcooked or claustrophobic.’ (Peel and Ravenscroft 2005, p. 46) ‘Rock Island Line’ confused and transformed popular musical cultures.
Donegan had been playing in a jazz band which, adopting a rather didactic approach, had sought to educate their audiences about blues music. He inadvertently created a new music form: skiffle. In turn, out of skiffle, came rock’n’roll, blues, and new forms of folk. (Frame 2007, Bragg 2017) This article will focus on the original and exciting understanding of folk music that developed in those years, which directly challenged the older model established by Cecil Sharp in the 1900s. It has to be stressed that for a few years in the mid-1950s, certainties about the nature and characteristics of many forms of popular music were up in the air, and there were many unexpected links and exchanges between them. For this reason, while focusing on folk, I will make some reference to jazz journalism: jazz, a peculiarly intellectualised form in the UK, seems to have provided the best forum for debates concerning authenticity and popular music.
In particular, this article analyses how parallel—sometimes rival—senses of authenticity inspired the development of a new folk music during the 1950s and 1960s. These processes will be placed in a larger socio-historical context—specifically the relationship between the UK and USA—in order to explore the links between the Second Folk Revival and wider changes in post-1945 British culture.
It is not my purpose to debate the accuracy of definitions of folk music: rather, this paper will trace how musicians’ and fans’ understandings of folk music changed over several decades. In order to do this, I have consulted folk musicians’ autobiographies (for example, MacColl 2009, Leitch 2006, Heron and Greig 2017, Seeger 2017 and Collins 2018), as well as making use of the interviews with folk musicians contained in J.P. Bean’s solidly-researched study of British folk clubs. In recent years there have been a number of substantial (even very substantial) non-academic accounts of the new musical cultures of the post-1945 decades (for example, Frame 2007, Bean 2014, and Bragg 2017): to my knowledge, this is the first scholarly evaluation of their work in relation to the Second Folk Revival.
Cecil Sharp and the Discovery of Folk Music
The Folk-Song Society (FSS) was created in 1898: while the term ‘folk song’ had been used for several decades before its creation, the FSS was instrumental in fixing a certain understanding of what the term meant. Some FSS members were simply interested in collecting curious old tunes, but deeper cultural and political concerns were central to the FSS’s activities. Sir Charles Hubert Parry (1848—1918), a prominent composer, teacher and historian of music, gave the opening address to the Society. It was a fiery polemic which electrified his listeners. Parry lashed out at ‘the most repulsive and most insidious enemy’: the commercial music hall tunes which were replacing authentic musical culture. He defended ‘the true folk songs’ in which there were ‘no sham, no got-up glitter and no vulgarity’ (Parry 1899, p. 1). For Parry, folk song was a weapon in a war to save Britain from cultural decline.
In 1950, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams surveyed five decades of activity by the FSS and its successor, the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). He identified a single mission: the two societies had ‘set out by instruction and demonstration to give back to the people of England their heritage of folk dances that were all but forgotten’ (Vaughan Williams 1950, p. 109). While Vaughan Williams used more measured terms than Parry, one can see a continuity: the two societies set out to right wrongs, to restore something to English musical culture. This act of restoration was nearly always seen in patriotic, conservative terms: folk music was an instrument that would inoculate the working-class against subversive and corrupting influences, and would firmly root a true English musicality within popular culture.
The sense of a regrettable absence in English musical culture had grown stronger following the composition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846—53), which triggered a pan-European wave of music-based cultural nationalism, and a search for distinct national musical idioms (Goodall 2013, pp. 175—78). In this spirit, Vaughan Williams condemned the taste of eighteenth-century English landed gentry: they had imported foreigners to write music for Englishmen (Vaughan Williams 1996, p. 5). The vocation of the FSS was to assist in a national musical revival. Prominent British composers such as Dvorak, Greig and Elgar accepted invitations to join the Society (Boyes 1993, p. 42). Inspired by such ideas, fashionable, successful composers such as Edward Elgar produced self-consciously English works. His ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, composed in 1902, became a concert hall favourite in 1915 (Crump 2014).
Cecil Sharp’s importance within the FSS was that he codified, clarified and focused these concerns into something resembling a political ideology. His key work was English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907), written as a contribution to an angry public argument with the Board of Education concerning which songs were to be recommended for the elementary school curriculum (Cox 1990). While the Board were broadly receptive to the idea of promoting British culture through song in schools, their idea of suitable works included ‘national’ songs, like the eighteenth-century Garrick-Boyce composition ‘Hearts of Oak’. Sharp’s Some Conclusions was an indignant reply ‘from the field’. He spoke as a self-taught expert in the matter, citing his recent experience of collecting more than 1,500 tunes from some 350 rural singers (Sharp 1907, p. viii). Some Conclusions presented a blunt, acerbic argument: the songs Sharp had collected were more representative of true English culture than the manufactured patriotism of the ‘national’ songs. At the centre of Sharp’s thinking was the argument that the most uneducated inhabitants of the most isolated villages acted, unthinkingly, as containers for an ancient English culture: their songs were pure because they had only minimal contacts with the corrupting modern world.
If one could stop the clock in—let’s say—1939, one would probably conclude that Sharp and the various folk-music societies had had a limited, but real, success. In 1903 Sharp’s first ‘source’ singer, John England, was surprised when he heard Sharp’s arrangement of his song for piano and voice, and commented that Sharp had put it ‘in evening dress’ (MacKinnon 1993, p.29). The phrase neatly captures something of the manner in which the FSS and EFDSS worked. In Sharp’s terms, folk songs and dances had been ‘rescued’. They had been introduced into some sectors of polite middle-class society; folk tunes and songs were played in drawing-rooms and concert halls. A substantial quantity had been copied down, re-arranged and published. True, by the 1930s, folk song no longer seemed so fashionable, and fewer classical composers explicitly cited folk song as an inspiration, but Sharp’s initiatives had provided folk music with a robust base in elementary schools and activist organisations which could weather the twists and turns of cultural fashions.
The Second World War and After
‘Against the violent backdrop of World War II and its aftermath, everything seemed to happen,’ noted jazz critic Stanley Dance (1962, p. 13). His comments applied to folk music as well. The Second World War was a total war which demanded the mobilization of all elements in British culture, including the arts, and even folk music. This required a ‘taking stock’ of resources, both material and immaterial. Something of the gravity of this test can be sensed in a passage from Churchill’s memoirs. Describing the desperate moment of December 1940, when Britain faced the might of Nazi Germany almost alone, he wrote:
this small and ancient Island, with its devoted Commonwealth, Dominions, and attachments under every sky, had proved itself capable of bearing the whole impact and weight of world destiny. We had not flinched or wavered. We had not failed. The soul of the British people and race had proved invincible. The citadel of the Commonwealth and empire could not be stormed. Alone, but upborne by every generous heart-beat of mankind, we had defied the tyrant in the height of his triumph.
All our latent strength was now alive (Churchill 1951, p. 495).
The compatibility of such patriotic rhetoric with Sharp-ian ideas concerning true English culture is obvious, and—at first sight—the cultural policies improvised in those desperate months seem to reflect and reinforce the concerns that had previously inspired the FSS.
The BBC became Britain’s leading cultural institution during the War. It adopted an instrumental, educative approach, integrating and utilizing elements of British society which had previously been outside the strict Reith-ian parameters (Hewison 1988a, p. xviii). Rural singers, including Louisa Hooper, a ‘source’ singer discovered by Sharp, were broadcast on the radio (Brocken 2003, p. 20; Roud 2017, p. 416). But alongside this new, patriotic inclusivity, there was the rise of innovative, critical and loosely left-wing voices, like that of J.B. Priestly, who raised questions about social justice as part of the war effort (Hewison 1988a, p.48). Descriptions of British society such as that written by George Orwell, suggested that the process of ‘taking stock’ could also encourage a new, critical vision of governing structures.
England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory. (Orwell 1968, p. 84)
What would happen if such critical ideas were applied to folk music?
The conditions of war also focused attention on another cultural dilemma. When Sharp wrote Some Conclusions, Germany was the obvious cultural competitor: German music seemed dominant in the nineteenth century, and German industry was already out-performing British industry in some sectors in the 1900s. During the Second World War, America’s cultural dominance became ever-clearer. Even in the 1930s, while American history barely featured on the school curriculum, young people were often attracted to American slang and fashion. They were bewildered and yet fascinated by the images in Hollywood films: elegant women in Manhattan apartments, drunks, Chicago gangsters, sheriffs and outlaws (Reynolds 1995, pp. 38—40). Examining popular songs in Britain in 1919—39, James Nott found that 132 of 182 were American (cited in Roud 2017, pp. 412—13). In 1935, contributors to the EFDSS journal were complaining about popularity of the ‘negro madness’ of American jazz in Britain (Trentmann 1994, p. 598).
The status of American culture was reinforced during the Second World War: shortages hampered the production of gramophone records in Britain while, from 1943, the American Forces Network broadcast in Britain (Brocken 2003, p. 19). Many British people liked what they heard. Bill Colyer, a Londoner who was conscripted and sent to North Wales, spent as long as he could listening to the radio: he discovered ‘hot’ jazz, and went on to popularize new forms of jazz in Britain (Frame 2007, p. 5; Melly 1989, p. 21).
Reactions to the rise of American culture varied (Gienow-Hecht 2006). Undoubtedly, there was some resentment, and it was in these circumstances that another strand of interest in folk music flourished. This had been initially represented by the Workers’ Music Association (WMA), created under the direction of the British Communist Party in 1936, the year when the Soviet Union led European Communists into the ‘Popular Front’ policy. Here, the political strategy was to build coalitions and alliances with all forces which would oppose the rise of fascism; immediate proletarian revolution was no longer the priority. This broad, inclusive strategy, coupled with growing respect for the efforts of Soviet forces at such turning-point battles as Stalingrad (1942—43), meant that Communist and Communist-linked organisations had some real success in Britain during the Second World War. Indeed, for a few years, the distant Soviet Union was viewed far more sympathetically by the British public than the USA, represented by the ever-growing number of American servicemen gathering in Britain before D-Day (Reynolds 1995, p. 37). The WMA was able to organise large and prestigious concerts in order to raise money for aid to China and the Soviet Union: the largest of these was held in the Albert Hall (Brocken 2003, p. 19).
The immediate expression of a post-Sharp-ian approach to folk music was A.L. Lloyd’s pamphlet, The Singing Englishman (1944), written while the author was a serviceman (Gregory 1997). (It was expanded into a full-size book, Folk Song in England, in 1967.) Folk-music scholarship has not been kind to Lloyd: his work has been criticized as romantic, even as semi-fictional (Roud 2017, pp. 179—81; Harker 1985, pp. 239—41). Certainly his use of a class-based vocabulary is often sloppy and inconsistent, and some of his more intriguing thoughts about the origins or meanings of particular songs are—unfortunately—merely speculation, not based on any hard evidence. But such criticisms do not diminish the success with which Lloyd sketched out a new vision of what constituted folk-song, while usually avoiding head-on criticism of Sharp’s ideas and approaches. Initially, this cautious presentation suited the cultural context. Lloyd, a Communist Party member, followed the Popular Front policy of attempting to rally all possible allies in the battle against Fascism; his aim would have been to reach out to Sharp’s followers, not to criticize them. So Sharp is presented as ‘the most respected’ of song collectors (Lloyd undated, p. 34), he is compared to Bartok, he is described as a socialist (Lloyd 1975, p. 13—14). But such appreciative words cannot disguise the radical difference between the two writers. For Lloyd, folk music was an expression of lower-class culture, of ‘the whole nameless and undistinguished masses of working people’ (Lloyd undated, p. 22), and its rise and fall followed the rise and fall of the social and cultural power of that class. Individual folk songs are even linked to particular moments of class conflict: thus a ballad about Robin Hood ‘is simply an artistic generalisation, a hero conceived as ideal by the common people at a given moment in history, the stressful time of the break-up of feudalism’ (Lloyd 1975, p. 134).
The idea that these people are merely unconscious, unlettered bearers of the national soul was firmly rejected: for Lloyd, folk music was a striking demonstration of lower-class cultural creativity. Here, particularly in his Folk Song in England, the influence of the socialist humanism of E.P. Thompson is obvious. Lloyd’s work outlined a ‘history from below’ of folk song. Above all, he never forgot the creators of the songs. Writing of the approaches taken by the older collectors, Lloyd accurately noted: ‘what the song meant to the singer was irrelevant; that it brought her almost to tears was a detail not worth enquiring into; the woman was a mere accessory; pitch and duration were all that mattered.’ (Lloyd 1975, p. 15) Throughout his work, Lloyd demonstrated a passionate concern with the singers and their conditions: their poverty, the back-breaking nature of their work, but also their struggles, hopes, dreams and despair. The contrast with Sharp could not be greater. To my knowledge, not once in any his seventy publications did Sharp express any sympathy for his ‘source’ singers or dancers.
For Sharp, folk song expressed something authentic about the English national soul. Lloyd also had a concept of authenticity, rooted in a romanticized view of folk song as the expression of a centuries-old class experience. For Lloyd, these songs would draw the singer—and the audience—into a deeper appreciation of a radical, popular vision of British history, quite distinct from the conservative patriotism which inspired Sharp’s work.
In places in Lloyd’s work, some explicit criticisms of Sharp emerge. Lloyd noted how the Victorian and Edwardian collectors had to adapt their material for the context in which they were working. ‘Folk song in evening dress’ required the deletion of bawdy or pornographic elements (Lloyd 1975, pp. 184—85). More seriously, their obsession with the culturally primitive in aboriginal villages led the first collectors to ignore the vigour of folk song within the industrial working-class (Lloyd 1975, p. 299).
At times Lloyd sounded pessimistic about the future of folk song. He talked of its ‘debasement’ by commercial forces (Lloyd undated, p. 35). But he was as likely to emphasise folk’s continuing energy in the form of work songs or industrial songs. A new workers’ movement in the 1960s would give rise to ‘a new lyric’ (Lloyd 1975, p. 297; Gregory undated, unpaginated). But if there was a major weakness to Lloyd’s work and his vision, it concerned the future of folk music.
The Second Folk Revival
Following the Second World War, the BBC continued to commission some radio programmes which gave a prominent place to folk music (Western 2015). Lloyd was involved in these: through this connection he met the left-wing American folk song collector Alan Lomax (Gregory 2002), and Ewan MacColl, a Scottish-born, working-class Communist who had previously devoted himself to creating a radical form of socialist theatre. Reactions to their innovative radio programmes were positive, to the point where the three considered the need to popularize folk music in some new form.
Lloyd was a member of the EFDSS, but all three seem to have concluded that the organisation was moribund and beyond repair: an opinion that many on the folk scene shared. Shirley Collins’s memories of her first visits to Cecil Sharp House are relevant to this point: in the 1950s she was a working-class singer acquiring a passion for traditional folk songs. ‘The atmosphere at Cecil Sharp [House]… for many years was so middle-class, so middle-aged, so lacking in energy.’ (Collins 2018, p. 129) MacColl had similarly critical memories of the older generation of folk enthusiasts. ‘How they regret the days when the folk was represented by a charming fellow from Chipping-Camden, who stood there with his cap in his hand and answered their questions, or by a nervous old lady who had at one time “done” for the vicar and now, in a tremulous voice addressed them as “sir” or “madam”.’ (MacColl 1990, p. 289) Lloyd lamented how the EFDSS had reduced folk-dance to the actions of ‘a prancing curate in cricket flannels’ (Lloyd 1945, p. 13). These authors begin by voicing a class-based antagonism to the EFDSS, but then add other characteristics: a resentment of patronizing attitudes, or a frustration with a lack of energy. In these criticisms, one can sense the sort of organisation that Lloyd and MacColl wished to create to replace the EFDSS.
The first Folk Revival had relied on a journal, school classes, courses, concert halls and drawing-rooms. More informally, in the nineteenth century and sometimes still in the early twentieth century, folk songs were sung on city streets, at fairs and markets, in pleasure gardens and glee clubs, in pubs, penny gaffs and music halls (Roud 2017, pp. 219—384). Given this range of venues and formats, why was there the need to create something new? In part, the answer lies in the politics of the two Folk Revivals. The activists of the first Folk Revival had conservative aims: their aim was to use folk music to create a harmonious, stable national culture in which all would know their place. Their courses and activities were consciously, deliberately organized on ‘top-down’ principles (Thompson 2001). The second Folk Revival was more populist, more participatory in its principles. It seemed self-evident to its activists that a different method was needed to take folk music to the people.
Moreover, folk music—no matter how it was defined—seemed in poor condition in the early 1950s. The radio programmes of Lomax, Lloyd and MacColl were memorable and original because they were giving voice to a form which had previously been largely ignored by the national media. BBC patronage was limited, and often tied to the older Sharp-ian agenda of building a single, harmonious national culture. The Festival of Britain of 1950 demonstrates the cultural norms of the time: it included representations of a wide variety of ‘high’ cultural forms, including the sciences, but with no representation of popular or folk culture (Hewison 1988b, pp. 55—65). When folk music was aired, often it was reduced to a colourful parody, exemplified in the long-running success of the character of ‘Buttercup Joe’, performed by Albert Richardson, the ‘singing sexton’ of Burwash, who appeared in a smock, and adopted a ‘yokel’ persona (Frampton 2007).
There were some similarities between the two Folk Revivals. The activists of the second also assumed that ‘the folk’ did not possess the capacity to prevent the inexorable decline of folk music; they too thought that folk music was too important to be left to the folk. But to understand what was new in the second Folk Revival, we need to consider more closely the cultural context in which it developed.
Dreams of America
The all-defining factor was the continuing American domination of British cultural forms during the 1950s. George Melly’s comments concern pop music, but they could be applied to almost any forward-looking branch of British culture in this period: ‘Early or primitive pop music looked exclusively towards America as its source and inspiration, and while it was true that this America was largely imaginary, it represented the present.’ (Melly 1970, pp. 6—7) Musical models from the USA dominated the newly-established British pop charts (Harker 1980, p. 94). Peter Frame’s epic re-creation of the rise of rock’n’roll in the UK supplies a colourful example on the obvious inequality. In the 1950s, the respective musicians’ unions of the UK and USA enforced a rule which only permitted professional musicians to cross the Atlantic and tour in the other country on a reciprocal, one-for-one basis: one British musician had to travel westwards to balance an American travelling eastwards to the UK (Cloonan and Brennan 2013). But how could this be done? Who on earth could possibly be considered as the British equivalents to Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson? (Frame 2007, p. 59) An equal exchange between the two countries seemed impossible. Frame identifies the obvious consequence: ‘worship of America and all things American was an established religion among the young and progressive.’ (Frame 2007, p. 154)
This picture of a radical cultural inequality is confirmed by countless British researchers, musicians and fans. Gillian Mitchell records how Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Bill Haley seemed obviously superior to home-grown rock’n’roll acts like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard (Mitchell 2013). ‘Jazz is not native to this country. It was born in America and remains an American art,’ noted British jazz critic Charles Wilford (1946). Keith Richards remembers his joy at discovering the resources of Sidcup in the early 1960s. ‘Everything was available in Sidcup—it reflected that incredible explosion of music, of music as style, of love of Americana. I would raid the public library for books about America.’ (Richard 2010, pp. 71—72) In this way he discovered the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Buddy Guy—but even with the resources of Sidcup, he made mistakes: he didn’t learn that Chuck Berry was black until two years after first hearing him, and he didn’t realise that Jerry Lee Lewis was white. Trad jazz fans were fascinated by a ‘romantic New Orleans past, a past full of bands marching to and from funerals, of bands on wagons battling in the streets, of bands blowing courageous and supreme in dance halls full of vicious underworld characters. Not least, of course, in this vision, were the happy, elegantly furnished whorehouses where brilliant pianists nightly found fresh musical inspiration.’ (Dance 1962, pp. 19—20) Englishman Paul Oliver was inspired to write The Meaning of the Blues (1960), a once-authoritative work of musical interpretation: however, he was ‘neither… a Negro nor an American nor… a man who had ever seen America and her teeming Black Belts’ (Wright, foreword to Oliver 1960, p. 10).
The same pattern is clear in the folk scene. In the late 1940s, Lloyd contrasted the thriving American folk scene, seizing the opportunities granted by the gramophone record and the radio station, with the moribund, elitist, inward-looking culture created by the EFDSS (Gregory 1999—2000). Britta Sweers, researching the origins of folk-rock in Britain, finds that British folk musicians in the 1950s grew up in in ‘an almost exclusively American-based musical background’ (Sweers 2004, p. 134). Martin Carthy remembers the first three records he bought were ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Rock Island Line’: two by American singers, and the third by a Brit imitating American singers (Sweers 2004, p. 131). When Richard Thompson began to play in folk clubs in the early 1960s, ‘the songs were all American, blues or country or old-timey.’ (cited in Bean 2014, p. 139) When he was 16, Donovan set himself the task of learning the best folk songs. At that time he owned ten folk or blues records: nine by American singers, and one by a Brit. His singing repertoire included about hundred songs, listed by title. It’s harder to identify these, but the clear majority were American (Leitch 2006, pp. 77—79). In the same years, Mike Heron subscribed to an American folk audio-tape service in order to access this exotic culture.
Here I am living with my parents in a stifling, middle-class part of Edinburgh and every month an alien and strangely stamped package travels halfway round the world to clunk through the letterbox. I grab it and rush to the Grundig: cowboys, dusty vistas, secret pickings and tunings, coyotes, yodelling hobos, shady groves and, above all, weirdness. I want in. (Heron and Greig 2017, pp. 17—18)
While, mostly, America was leading and Britain was following, these examples suggest that maybe something else was possible. Certainly, the sheer intensity of this gaze westwards hints at other possibilities than simple imitation.
This unequal cultural relationship was discussed and considered frequently by commentators. One reaction was condemnation and criticism of American influences. Richard Hoggart’s original and provocative text, The Uses of Literacy (1957), is remembered for many reasons, but one major theme in the work concerned the corrupting influence of the rise of a commercialized, American-orientated mass media on native British working-class culture. Such concerns stretched across the political divide. The Tory Evelyn Waugh was horrified by the ‘loud, obvious and prosaic’ culture of Hollywood. (Waugh 1983, p. 325) The pioneering sociological research of New Left writers such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall was, in part, motivated by a search for a Britishness that could stand independently from American culture (Mitchell 2014). Liberal sociologist Anthony Sampson resented the rise of ‘the new classless Americanized world of Wimpy bars, coffee-bars, television, mini-motors, pre-packaged food, ice-skating, Marks & Spencers, Vespas, and airport lounges’ (Hewison 1988c, p. 4). For such writers, American-ism represented a soullessness, an unattractive, capitalist modernity which had to be fought.
Such voices were in a minority. The common admiration for American culture was, however, not a blanket validation of all things American. For many young people, it was specifically black America that attracted them. Jeff Nuttall recalled that ‘the American negroes were the initiators of the mood’ (1970, pp. 9—10). This passion was trans-Atlantic, shared by British and American youth. Black American culture seemed to offer an escape (Boyd 2006, p. 13). What did young Brits escape into? Nuttall found New Orleans jazz. ‘The world was evil, governed by Mammon and Moloch. New Orleans jazz was a music straight from the heart and the swamp, unclouded by the corrupting touch of civilization. It would refertilize the world.’ (Nuttall 1970, p. 38) Keith Richards found the blues: a musical form which ‘is very elemental. It’s not something you take in in the head, it’s something you take in the guts. It’s beyond the matter of the musicality of it, which is very variable and flexible.’ (Richards 2010, pp. 84—85) Zora Hurston found negro spirituals: each was a created by a specific black American congregation. ‘Neither can any group be trained to reproduce it. Its truth dies under training like flowers under hot water.’ (Hurston 1947, p. 2) Nik Cohn found rock’n’roll. ‘Rock’n’roll was very simple music. All that mattered was the noise it made, its drive, its aggression, its newness. All that was taboo was boredom.’ (Cohn 2004, p. 22) George Melly found pop culture, which ‘proposes nothing beyond an immediate and spontaneous reaction to life at any given moment.’ (Melly 1970, p. 9)
The point which is striking in these diverse statements is how they both resemble and diverge from Sharp’s original cultural programme. Sharp and the FSS had believed that illiterate, aboriginal villagers in distant hamlets contained the authentic soul of English culture because they had not been affected by the culture of modern civilization. These voices from the late 1950s and 1960s are sketching out a similar vision: they too seem to find a ‘point zero’ of culture which contains some attractive, elemental quality. The important differences are that they look over the Atlantic to find it, while Sharp only looked over Thames to his mythical ‘South Country’, and their search takes them across an ethnic divide.
Skiffle was the rough, exuberant synthesis of these diverse forces. Bragg (2017) points out that ‘Rock Island Line’, this bizarre, idiosyncratic, dream-like piece of Americana, was a cultural fountainhead, from which late twentieth-century British blues, rock and folk flowed. In 1957, American folklorist Alan Lomax beautifully described the essence of skiffle: it was ‘American-amalgamated, British-derived Africanized music’ (Lomax 2003, p. 136). The lasting importance of skiffle was that it succeeded where Cecil Sharp had failed. ‘The skifflers are learning to play and sing together, and they are establishing a nation-wide audience for what is to come—and this is more than Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams and the British school system have been able to do.’ (Lomax 2003, p. 137)
Folk Clubs
Compared to Lomax or Lloyd, MacColl had the greater experience in organizing keen amateurs. Certainly, a line from his autobiography assessing their activities in the early 1950s suggested his hard-edged, political approach: ‘A revival needs a mass base and must involve more than the activities of a few specialists.’ (MacColl 2009, p. 265) This ‘mass base’ was the folk club, the backbone of the Second Folk Revival (Verrier 2004).
The first folk club in Britain appears to have been MacColl’s Ballads and Blues Club, which opened in 1954 in central London (MacColl 2009, p. 277). The common admiration for American culture created a tension within these first folk clubs. For some, folk clubs were intended as a counter, an alternative, even as an opposition to Americanization. MacColl’s thinking on this point was initially rather more subtle. With reference to his earlier series of radio programmes, he explained that ‘the main objective… was to demonstrate that Britain possessed a body of songs that were just as vigorous, as tough and as down-to-earth as anything that could be found in the United States.’ (MacColl 2009, p. 267) This suggests emulation rather than opposition: MacColl argued that folk clubs would prove that Britain could produce folk music of equal quality to that of the USA. MacColl and Lomax were at first relaxed about British explorations of Americana. Both considered that there was ‘a natural affinity’ between Anglo-Celtic folk music and American folk song (Gregory undated, unpaginated); both were relatively tolerant of the skiffle craze of 1955—57.
The numbers of folk clubs grew steadily in the late 1950s and 1960s. They were ‘springing up and sinking down like mushrooms’ recalls Peggy Seeger (2017, p. 258). There were probably about 36 in 1961, about three hundred in 1965 and a few thousand in the early 1970s (Bean 2014, p. 122; MacKinnon 1993, p. 27; MacColl 2009, p. 279; Wood 1978, p. 58). The overall picture is clear: by the late 1960s, there was one folk club (or more) in every town.
Folk clubs constituted a new musical arena. Mike Heron remembers his excitement during his first visit to a folk club, which was ‘crowded, bright, noisy and hot’ (Heron and Greig 2017, p. 18). They were ‘part seminar, part prayer meeting and part beer festival’ comments MacColl (2009, p. 288). While stereotypically linked to pubs, in fact the first folk clubs were as likely to be held in hotels, coffee bars or universities; sometimes they were supported by trade unions (MacColl 2009, p. 284; Bean 2014, pp. 25 and 130). They performed a number of functions. Firstly, they were places where keen amateur musicians could learn folk songs: one point made in all musicians’ memoirs from this period concerns the basic difficulty in accessing songs. Ralph McTell recalls: ‘We had no one to copy. There were no videos and it wasn’t till ’62 or ’63 that the first invasions of black musicians came over that could play that stuff.’ (cited in Bean 2014, p. 169) Such educational functions were often distinguished from the folk club proper: there might be meetings on a separate evening to teach songs. But during the tours by newly-prestigious singers, keen neophytes could usually be found in the front row, desperately trying to memorize the words, tunes and pickings.
Secondly, there was an ethic of informal participation in folk clubs. For many attending, this was extremely attractive. Usually, there was no formal stage, and therefore no physical barrier between audience and performer (Bean 2014, p. 130). Nearly always, folk clubs had no amplification, which—in theory—also brought the performer closer to the audience. In most folk club meetings, there was time set aside for people from the floor to contribute songs or tunes. This participatory ethic could cause its own problems: MacColl grew frustrated with those who believed that ‘folk-singing requires no special skill’, and so were content to offer ‘incurably mediocre’ performances (2009, p. 287).
Folk clubs successfully developed their own rituals and practices. Lloyd suggested that there was a specifically ‘folk club’ mode of listening, ‘a more modest and a less passive’ form than that of those attending a classical concert (Gregory undated, unpaginated). Of course, even this informal ethic had to be constructed: the informality of the folk club was certainly different from the disciplined attention with which a classical audience shows at a concert, but nonetheless it followed an ethic with its own rules and rituals. People holding loud conversations during songs would be told to ‘shhh’, but good-humoured heckling was permitted, and frequently the movement of people to and from the bar would continue during songs (MacKinnon 1993, pp. 78—80). It seems probable that through a casual process of cultural osmosis, compatible rituals and practices were replicated across Britain. Certainly, the claim circulated that folk club attenders could feel ‘at home’ in any folk club they visited (Finnegan 2007, p. 61), and has been nicely voiced by John Tams: ‘If you hadn’t got anywhere else to go you could go to a folk club and you’d be welcome. They seemed to hold an arms-round sense of belonging, which meant that they inclusive.’ (cited in Bean 2014, p. 376) Bean, summing up how his musician—interviewees felt, notes their repeated references to ‘the feeling of being safe in a folk club’ (Bean 2014, p. 367).
At some level, this structure worked well. It soon became possible for rising folk stars to tour from club to club, earning enough to sustain them. John McCusker expresses his gratitude for the start which folk clubs gave him.
The folk club is, if you’re lucky enough, where you start off. It’s where you learn your craft, where you learn how to speak to an audience, how to entertain. The amazing thing about a folk club is it gives you a gig, a platform to play when nobody else will give you a gig. You learn how to hold an audience. People are right there in front of you. They hear every single note. (cited in Bean 2014, p. 357)
Seeger writes in similar terms, stressing the advantages of having a sympathetic environment for a new, amateur singer. ‘You didn’t have a feeling of being on stage when you sang at a folk club. The audience was often near enough to touch.’ (Seeger 2017, p. 195) Martin Carthy also speaks eloquently on this topic.
‘In art centers I walk in, I get up at eight o’clock and I start singing and I have an interval at ten to nine and I get back on the stage at quarter past nine and I get off stage at half past ten and I leave. And have I heard any other music? Naw! All I’ve heard is me—and I’ve heard all that. One of the reasons why it is nice to go to folk clubs is that you get to hear the residents, you hear the floor singers. And occasionally you’ll hear one of your mates will turn up, and he’ll do a couple of songs from the floor. The whole ethic is something really rather praiseworthy. And generally speaking, exciting as well. Because we’ve all shared in this thing, it was ours, [while] the whole [arts centre concert] ethic is not an ‘our’-thing but a ‘me’-thing. I’m a person who actually believes in “us”—I’m a socialist! I don’t like the lauding of the individual. (Cited in Sweers 2005, p. 139)
But equally, there were problems. For example, consider the issue of no amplification, usually justified on the grounds of expense, and because folk clubs wanted to encourage an intimacy of between singer and audience. But what if the singer wanted to sing a quiet, tender song? Usually, they were forced to belt it out, thus losing nuance. Tams comments: ‘The folk singing style was developed out of scabby carpeted, smoky rooms, which required a muscular delivery.’ (Cited in Bean 2014, p. 207) This problem was exacerbated by the acoustics of the rooms within which folk clubs met: often a bar would remain open during the singing, and would inevitably produce background noises. MacColl recalls other distractions: a bar-lady counting out the take during his songs, traffic noises, the pall of cigarette smoke, the drabness of the rooms, the airlessness caused by the lack of ventilation… (2009, pp. 284—85). Here was a basic problem which divided the keen amateur singer from the aspiring professional: folk clubs could seem like hard work to professional singers. The acoustics were poor, the audiences were demanding, and singers were discouraged from making any assertions of their special status: so, no changing rooms, no amplification, usually no hotel room…
Such issues could be seen as the result of a socio-economic context over which the organisers of folk clubs had no control. Of necessity, they had to keep costs as low as possible. But another factor, created by the folk clubs themselves, spoilt the atmosphere for many. It can be introduced by an example from Peggy Seeger, probably referring to an incident in 1956.
This night one of the up-and-coming floor singers was executing ‘Rock Island Line’—verb chosen for accuracy. I’d heard Lead Belly’s pulsing, steam-engine voice singing ‘Rock Island Line’ on steady tracks since the year dot. Now here it is with charming Cockney vowels—smart, clipped, abroad the Wabash Cannonball and in high tenor. My gut reaction was to laugh. It was rude, outrageous—but I couldn’t stop. (Seeger 2017, p. 188)
This example raises many questions. Seeger is claiming ownership of the song. She insists that she knows how it should be sung, and that she can identify counterfeit or illegitimate versions. More worrying still, the cultural border which she traced follows the issue of Americana: in a decade when most of young population of Britain seems to have identified with American culture at some level, Seeger is presenting a blunt critical rebuff of such attitudes. Finally, Seeger is rejecting those Sharp-ian ethics by which folk music is an unconscious, artless art: her comments suggest a programme, a conscious direction, to take the place of folk clubs ‘where no one… had any idea what a folk song was.’ (Seeger 2017, p. 258) In its place, there was policy.
One could call this the nerds’ revenge. To some extent, it seems to be a British disease. It had been seen among British jazz fans, who frequently took ‘an oddly puritanical and uncompromising attitude’. (Dance 1962, p. 21) Keith Richards met similar dogmatists when he travelled across London in the early 1960s, hunting for blues records from the USA. He’d find people who ‘met in little gatherings like early Christians, but in the front rooms in southeast London.’ They were ‘very stuffy and conservative, full of disapproval, nerds with glasses deciding what’s really blues and what ain’t.’ (Richards 2010, pp. 81—82) Thankfully, for the future of British blues, such people were never in a position to shape a musical culture. In folk music, such people could be. Tams recalls one example from the Nottingham Traditional Music Club.
The committee sat on a windowsill behind you while you were away singing. It had a kind of Nuremberg War Trials feel to it. They’d be burning into the back of your head. Then your customers out front, who you were trying to make contact with, were looking over at these people behind you. Even when great, celebrated traditional musicians came… you’d got this back wall of luminaries sitting on the windowsill. (Cited in Bean 2014, pp. 216—17)
The basic division was between folk clubs that had a policy, and clubs that did not. In most cases, ‘policy’ imposed some form of restriction. One common demand was the logical consequence of Seeger’s laughter at the unfortunate skiffle singer: musicians should only play music rooted in their own musical culture. Seeger herself acknowledges how this concept could have ridiculous results: she cites one Lancashire-based club which would refuse all folk songs from Yorkshire (Seeger 2017, p. 191). Often restrictions might include only singing traditional songs (ie no newly-composed material), and possibly only singing without instrumentation. These types of restriction, particularly when linked to the MacColl’s political dogmatism, could prove extremely unattractive to young singers (Dallas 1975, p. 93).
To a large extent, this poverty of vision, in which dogma replaced any reasoned discussion about what constituted folk music, was inherent in Lloyd’s approach. On the one hand, Lloyd was clear that a real, living tradition meant an enthusiastic embrace of change: ‘Only a moribund tradition is dominated by the past’ (Lloyd 1975, p. 68). But, on the other hand, there were clear limits. Lloyd was certain that the major new ‘folk’ stars of the 1960s—Bob Dylan and Donovan—were not folk-singers (Gregory undated, unpaginated). Their work belonged ‘to the insubstantial world of the modern commercial hit’ (Lloyd 1975, p. 385). The obvious affinities between the melodies and themes used by the new singer-songwriters and the older ‘source’ material was dismissed. What Lloyd could not or would not see was how the nature of authenticity might change. There was still a folk ‘ethic’ within contemporary folk: recall the informal discipline that governed the folk club, even if the boundaries of what constituted ‘folk music’ were constantly up for debate (Finnegan 1989, p. 65). There was still a sense that the ‘folk’ singer spoke for and related to a wider, historically-constituted community. ‘Authenticity’ in the late 1960s relied on this carefully constructed informal style: thus Joni Mitchell and Neil Young were criticized for arriving at the first Isle of Wight festival in a Rolls Royce (Redhead and Street 1989). Folk music was supposed to be pubby, blokey, far from the glamour of the pop star… it didn’t take itself so seriously.
Certainly, the music played in folk clubs was changing in the late 1960s. Singer-songwriters were on the rise. Jazz, rock and even eastern forms inspired new singers. Purists in the folk clubs regularly decried the rise of singer-entertainers like Billy Connolly and Jasper Carrott (Bean 2014, pp. 312—16), but the success of such figures demonstrates how the folk medium was changing in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The other major issue, which can only be addressed in summary form here, was the electrification of folk bands (Burns 2007; Brocken 2003, pp. 89—109). This simple change of technique raised multiple issues. Electric bands were generally bigger than the older solo artists, duos and trios. They needed larger venues to play in. They required more discipline and more practice. Their music was orientated to a steady beat: there was less room for creative improvisation or changes of tempo within performance—a clear break with the older practices of the unaccompanied singer. Inevitably, folk-rock bands were better suited to a larger, possibly less personal, context than the folk clubs. Finally, they were more expensive: their equipment cost more, and their bigger groups required a more substantial fee to cover their costs. In a word, they were distinctly professional, while many acoustic folk artists retained a type of amateur ethos, even when folk-music constituted their principal income.
Conclusion
In the period covered in this paper, there were two commonly circulating definitions of folk music. One was that provided by Cecil Sharp: didactic, moral and patriotic, it created a culture to be produced and reproduced by teacher-led courses. The second was initiated by A.L. Lloyd, and exemplified by the folk club. This was participatory, self-consciously informal and usually left-leaning. (Both revivals had their problems with the image or ideal of folk music as an ‘artless art’, which could be performed by without formal training.) In both cases the presence of an alien power stimulated and provoked. For Sharp, the enemy was the principal challenger to late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial dominance: Germany. For the Second Revival, America was the ‘other’ presence, but the relationship between the British scene and American culture was more complex. American culture might be contested, it might be emulated or it might be celebrated; America could be rival, partner or model. When celebrated, the intensity of concentration on an imagined, mythical and largely black America is remarkable.
In the 1950s, two factors met: a fascination with American modernity and a longing for English traditional culture. From this fusion was created the folk music of the Second Revival, embodied in the new institution of the folk club.
This paper has argued that it is these features which, in effect, defined the folk music of the Second Folk Revival. Formalistic concerns about ‘source’ material and its legitimate interpretation or reproduction were, in truth, less important in creating effective understandings of what constituted folk music than the modes by which the culture was reproduced. Finally, the development of electronically-amplified folk-rock groups created a new context within which both Sharp’s and Lloyd’s understandings of folk music seemed less relevant.
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