Against The Grain: George Rayner-Law on folk revivals and the idea of continuity
February 2025
Peggy Seeger (with Appalachian dulcimer) and Ewan MacColl, Bradford, mid-1960s
In The Wire 493, George Rayner-Law argues that as interest in English folk song grows once again, practitioners, critics and listeners should consider carefully the ideological currents beneath the surface
There is growing interest in contemporary English folk music. London based groups such as Shovel Dance Collective and Goblin Band are frequently discussed in music criticism as innovating the folk idiom through expanded instrumentation, production techniques and collectivist politics, while staying in continuity with the folk tradition. However, an unbroken English folk music continuity does not exist in any historicisable form; instead, ‘folk music’ should be considered a product of modernity, with any tradition that does ostensibly exist in England traceable to the 1950s.
Folk song collecting in England is generally considered as an act of preservation, conservation of at-risk popular culture against the onslaught of modernity. Since at least American folklorist Francis James Child’s time, collecting itself is better understood as a modern, empiricist project. The analysis of Marxist academic David Harker has demonstrated that folk song collectors in the 19th century routinely discarded industrial songs, pub songs and previously published work from their collections. In this way, they were essentially constructing folk song as a category out of a broader pool of popular song.
This process of re-ordering of the world reflected contemporary concerns around the loss of ‘traditional’ culture. As outlined by British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the collating, ordering and invention of folk traditions and corpuses out of raw custom was a key part of romantic nationalist projects in 19th century Europe – in his words, “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition”. But romantic nationalism is fraught when it comes to England, as Englishness became entangled rapidly with Britishness following the 1707 Act of Union. Writer Alex Niven recently argued that due to this elision, Englishness is essentially an empty vessel lacking positive attributes, and that any emancipatory politics in this country would need to move beyond the idea of England in order to effect positive change.
The contemporary folk idiom in England is rooted in the work of figures such as Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Albert Lloyd in the early 50s. The work of this group in performance, documentation, debate, songwriting and dramaturgy cemented modern folk performance and instrumentation forms. That this group were guided by Marxist politics is unquestionable: MacColl and Lloyd were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When ‘reviving’ folk, one of their key motivations was to fight what they saw as the saturation of British popular culture by American corporate products. This, arguably, is another example of folksong and folk corpus as raw material used anew to reflect new concerns in a contemporary moment, rather than furthering a continuous tradition. Simultaneously, Lloyd’s work developing a catalogue of coal mining songs for the National Coal Board and, later, Workers Music Association widened the scope of what counted as threatened cultural heritage in an era of slow industrial decline.
Beyond the social form of folk music, some of the above were also involved in developing field recording as a concept. Field recording as a term and practice emerges from the work done for the Archive of American Folk Song in the 30s and 40s by collectors including John Lomax, Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax. ‘Field’ originally referred to the anthropological ‘field’, as they were employed to document the songs of rural America. Later, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger developed the radio ballad format with Charles Parker, which mixed field recording, music and the human voice for radio documentary, with field recordings on tape played live in the studio. Field recording practices are another example of new intellectual technologies employed to understand and contextualise the periods in which they were developed, and have been part of this idiom since its early days.
It’s odd that many reviews of Shovel Dance Collective’s releases – notably The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore – discuss the integration of field recording with folk song as a novel approach. A similarly dehistoricised appraisal of Goblin Band focuses on their engagement with early music and their integration of it with folk idiom, particularly in relation to Come Slack Your Horse. Early music as a category, codified by David Munrow in the mid-60s, is another modern classification developed to make sense of the raw material of the past. Munrow, of course, collaborated with the Collins sisters on 1969’s Anthems In Eden, which points to at least 55 years of cross-pollination between these two musical lenses.
Ideas of continuity are one of the most powerful ways to establish narrative frameworks for the world one lives in. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the experience of living in contemporary modernity as liquid: undefined, uncertain and characterised by fleeting experiences and relationships. The desire for something solid to grasp hold of – that can allow one to exist outside of, or even counter to, modernity – is understandably appealing. The comforting idea of folksong as a strand of continuity attached to the premodern world, or more specifically premodern England, can offer a sense of rootedness in one’s surroundings and wider culture.
Narratives of unrecorded histories and culture from below are susceptible to overextension when it comes to the idea of folk song as popular history. This can lead to a framework where things are ‘as if’ or ‘almost’ the same; unbroken, if only one can mentally bridge the gap. When one fills those gaps, one does so through a contemporary perspective, reflecting contemporary concerns and needs, and sometimes without historiographical rigour. In a ‘liquid’ era, this reorganising of historiography and memory can fuel a more ideological desire to understand one’s self in continuity with those whose histories are lost or unrecorded, a line between the unmoored figures of the past and oneself as the unmoored figure – or even victim – of the present. There is nothing inherently wrong with these situating narratives, as long as they are acknowledged, and there is nothing wrong with the joy derived from partaking in this English folk idiom as a player or listener as long as it is historiographically situated.
This essay, the first in a new opinion column called Against The Grain, appears in The Wire 493. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the essay in our online magazine library.
Comments
It is hard to read A L Lloyd's 1967 Folk Song in England without realizing that you a reading a very 1960's Marxist analysis. Steve Roud's 2017 book with the same title (deliberately?) adopts a much wider perspective. Both acknowledge the selection process of the early collectors but without them how many of the sons they did collect would we have today?
The term 'field recording' may have originated with the Lomaxes but I believe Percy Grainger was using the new technology of wax cylinder recording to collect songs in 1906.
Barry Edwards
This opinion piece seems quite muddled - it meanders around several different complicated issues without fully exploring or meaningfully resolving any of them, which is a shame to anyone who genuinely has a deeper interest in the subjects being discussed. It strikes me that this piece would be a great starting point for an interview that the bands themselves could expand on, rather than quite a short piece of criticism with too broad a scope of inquiry for such a limited word count.
Goblin Band and Shovel Dance both explicitly articulate themselves within broader political and ideological struggles that are inherently products of modernity; both bands are also explicitly queer, which this piece entirely fails to explore or expand on, which is a shame.
The crux of this article seems to be (?) that audiences/critics/folk musicians themselves should be aware of the often-fraught histories/historiography of both folk music as an academic subject and as an extension of it’s relationship to various notions (past and present) of ‘Englishness’, but it has to be said that it comes across as a bit finger-wagging/patronising, especially when it’s own conclusions are often slightly wrong and/or limited. (As an example: field recordings of folk music stem back to the late 19th century, rather than only emerging in the 30’s, and Shovel Dance’s ‘novel approach to field recording’ is novel because ‘The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore’ reintegrates avant-garde ambient environmental recordings of the [modern/much-changed] locations that the historic songs themselves are set in into a tangible auditory layer of the actual music as it is then presented to the listener, which IS both new and interesting, particularly within trad folk projects. Critics aren’t just suggesting that nobody has combined field-recording/folk together before, which the article suggests...)
The author posits that ‘any emancipatory politics in this country would need to move beyond the idea of England in order to effect positive change’, which seems a moot point to raise when both bands (and more broadly, the trad folk scene in the U.K.) are very vocal about their relationships to ‘Englishness’ and ‘folk’ as inherently fractured, tense, subversive and in flux, and that their audiences are for the large part explicitly aware of this - particularly when so many gigs take place within explicitly de-colonial/queer/politically radical venues, performed by (and amongst audiences of) the same marginalised people who have historically been excluded from ‘folk narratives/englishness’. This in itself is a relevant factor, which this piece of criticism seems to have missed entirely.
Aine Rowe
At the start of the article, his issue appears to be with the notion of “continuity with the folk tradition”. His point being that “continuity with the folk tradition” is impossible, as there is no real English folk tradition to have continuity with.
He does qualify this as a notion promulgated by “music criticism” rather than the specific musicians he cites; this is in itself problematic as we don’t know whether he’s referring to specialist, informed music criticism that should know better, or just the deadline-focused reviewese of music PR or The Guardian etc.
He also qualifies “tradition” with “unbroken” – begging the question of whether a tradition needs to be unbroken in order to have value – and does acknowledge that a “historicisable” English tradition could be said to exist if it dated from the 1950s.
From there, things get a lot more dense and opaque and I’m not entirely sure what some of the points are and how they relate. However, the overall tenor of the article seems to be about discontinuity; a listing of things that evidence a lack of continuity within an overall ‘folk music’ project in England.
There is an anomaly to the word “tradition”, in that traditions evolve over time. They are like words in a language. Where the author sees a lack of continuity, one seemingly existentially problematic for the notion of folk music, I just see a living, evolving tradition. (As it happens, I don’t see discontinuity as a problem anyway.) Many of the things cited here as existential problems for the notion of folk song strike me as simply change over time.
So different folksong collectors had different priorities and predilections at different times: this is no different to the agencies of any people involved in any cultural activities. I don’t see how a tradition could be anything other than a contested tussle between those involved in it and their priorities.
Likewise, the Marxism of the 1950s revival (MacColl, Lomax et al): they followed their own agenda, one informed by the times they lived in; and others followed where they found things in common (and didn’t where they didn’t). There’s some truth that they ‘cemented’ trad folk as it is today, but there’s plenty of testimony that they weren’t the only show in town back in the 1950s and 60s. They were a moment in time, and subsequent waves of folk musicians were reacted against it, or were influenced by them to go in other directions.
It’s also worth noting that MacColl, Lomax and Seeger provided a platform for plenty of ageing ‘source singers’ to perform (unaccompanied song) to contemporary audiences. To state the obvious, these sources pre-existed the impulse to find them (as with the sources for the Victorian song collectors): whatever their motivations may have been, the musicians and their repertoire they revived were real and vital.
Ditto the use of recording technology in field recording. Discontinuity? It’s simply a different way of doing things. It seems to me as if the author wants to have their cake and eat it when it comes to what they consider continuous or discontinuous (not that it ultimately matters).
At one point he appears to be suggesting there’s nothing new in what Shovel Dance or Goblin Band are doing, pointing out their precedents in early music etc… so that’ll be continuity there, right?
I think this sentence sums up, for me, what’s wrong with this essay: “another example of folksong and folk corpus as raw material used anew to reflect new concerns in a contemporary moment, rather than furthering a continuous tradition.”
The point is that the subjects of those two clauses are not mutually exclusive: they can be one and the same. A continuous tradition will happily “use material anew to reflect new concerns in a contemporary moment”. That’s what keeps it going. It’s not evidence for lack of continuity: the renewal is the continuity.
matt milton
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