I will confess at the beginning of this post that I am not really a folkie; although I have hung around the folk scene on and off my entire life. I have an annual refresher dose at the Warwick Folk Festival each summer and this has prompted these reflections.
I grew up with Dylan and Baez singing passionately about the issues of the day and the latter also singing traditional American folk ballads. Like many of my generation I used their songs to learn to play the guitar. Through the electric folk bands of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention in the early seventies I was led into the more mainstream traditional English folk to which I was able to contribute on recorders. It is obvious however that there is a radical difference between these two nations’ folk music tradition. Baez singing about Joe hill feels like last week’s news when placed next to the English songs about press gangs and the Napoleonic wars. Joan Baez was, and is, able to move seamlessly from the 19th century and earlier up to the civil rights movement of the sixties. Most of the English folk tradition is able to move seamlessly from the early 19th century to the late 19th century: at which point it essentially stops.
At this point I really need to give a definition of what I mean by folk music. There are clearly lots of people in the singer song writer, man or woman with a guitar, genre in both England and America. These belong with Dylan as poets capturing something of their experiences of life; and many of them are great songs. But where is the music of the English folk which reflects their lives in the way the old folk songs did? Songs in narrative style, accessible and singable by anyone and dealing with the issues of the day? This is not achieved by a song delivered unaccompanied in nasal tone in Aeolian mode along the lines of
As I was walking one morning in June
To Asda for to buy me some sausages and beans
and a lottery ticket, and fags for the week
And there I did spy a fair pretty maid
All dressed in lime green at the checkout that day …
Etc
No one sings like this – except folkies preserving an extinct folk tradition. It is a situation similar to churches which refuse to accept hymns written after 1900 and refuse to accept church music in a rock idiom.
The English have somehow, somewhere along the line, managed to lose their musical heritage as it has become fossilised in nasal renditions of 19th century songs. I do mean English here. Ireland, Scotland and Wales have far more successfully maintained their traditions and identity.
Much Folk music is about the nobility of the lower classes struggling against the oppression of their circumstances. I am unconvinced there is much nobility today in the contemporary lower classes in Britain. Anyone born much after 1970 has lived essentially in a Britain devoid of traditional industries without any awareness of any tradition or community. Both the bedrock of folk music. Gone are the mill workers, miners, steelworkers, shipbuilders, fishermen, farmers etc – working men and women of nobility. Writing new folk music is therefore increasingly difficult. English folk music is increasingly therefore going to be not only nostalgia – but a nostalgia that is so far removed from the current generation that they simply cannot identify with it. My father’s generation are the last lot to have ‘gone off to war’ in any significant numbers – how much can that idea continue? Will there be folk songs about going to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq?
America in contrast to England has managed to preserve a folk tradition. It has a national dress which is immediately recognizable as American, and is clearly rooted in a genuine ‘of the folk’ clothing of the past: denim jeans or skirt, ‘cowboy’ hat and boots, waistcoat and driving the inevitable pickup truck. This costume would be recognizable to Americans of 40, 80, 100 and 140 years ago – different but still recognizable as what Americans wear. Similarly with ‘Country’ – both Music and dancing: there is a simple step by step evolution back to the 19th century. America has therefore managed to maintain its folk tradition in country music. It uses a musical style and instrumentation which has seamlessly evolved over the past 120 years or so. Along with the music are the dancing and clothes which again have seamlessly evolved over the decades uniting several generations in the same broad tradition. Bruce Springsteen has managed to take this narrative folk style lyrics into mainstream rock and uses it to tell the stories of the ordinary factory workers of small town America in the present day.
Presumably there are people writing narrative lyric songs about hoping to win the lottery, sitting at home longing to be on X factor or working in a call centre; but it is way off the mainstream even on the folk circuit. Any posts suggesting music I should listen to and so prove my analysis incorrect would be appreciated.
Comments