Folk Music Revival - England

Topic: Folk-Music Revival
"Kumbaya" became well known through the commercial folk-music revival in the 1960s. Fans of the popular music style have an agreed upon history that it began with Pete Seeger [1] in the 1940s and spread through popular groups like The Weavers [2] and Kingston Trio in the 1950s. It flourished in the 1960s with soloists like Joan Baez [3] and Bob Dylan only to die from a combination of political fatigue and changes in adolescent taste marked by the appearance of The Beatles. [4]

That chronology is accurate in that it highlights the artists who were most popular. What it fails to do is explain why the movement arose in the first place because it only documents the contributions of Seeger. In fact, the commercial folk music revival drew together many musical currents that each was the product of an earlier folk revival.

They all were political, since the mere acknowledgment society is stratified is controversial. Historians of medieval Europe used "folk" and "popular" as interchangeable labels for the arts of commoners in a two-tiered, agrarian society dominated by courts, manors, and churches. When urban areas emerged, the word "popular" was reallocated to merchants and skilled tradesmen. Folklore remained the domain of rural peoples. [5] Perhaps populaire or vernacular [6] would be a better term today since popular has become synonymous with mass media sales.

The beatification of the folk occurred in the nineteenth century with modernization that took the form of industrialism in England and political unification in central and eastern Europe. Some intellectuals reacted by positing an idyllic past that could be used as a paradigm for addressing then contemporary conditions.

Thomas Percy published the defining English collection in 1765 during the reign of George III. People still were coming to terms with the 1707 Act of Union that eliminated the Scots parliament. [7] Then, when Anne died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts was replaced with the German-speaking Hanovers.

James MacPherson had threatened to reignite the Jacobite conflicts in 1760 when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry. [8] He claimed he had collected Gaelic ballads in the Scots highlands [9] written by Ossian, a third-century poet. [10] This implied Celts were the first great artists of the United Kingdom. Most important, they thrived before the Romans conquered the island. [11]

Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [12] included both Scots and English ballads, but emphasized their age. They came from the period when Henry VII established the Tudors in 1485. [13] Popular knowledge of the middle ages was scant in the mid-1700s, and the term Gothic was used. Kenneth Clark noted the term implied both the flowering of medieval arts and the Goths [14] who sacked Rome in 410. [15]

Neither MacPherson nor Percy were purists; each revised their ballads for publication, and MacPherson probably created much of his material. As Danni Glover noted, both were writing for a newly emerging upper middle class market with readers who wanted "romantic wildness" presented in "a smooth, elegant style." [16]

Both excited the imagination of other writers. Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder were influenced by MacPherson. [17] Walter Scott published his The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after reading Percy. [18]

At the time the two men were writing, the idea of an imagined story like a novel had not yet emerged. Each gave their works the illusion of history by claiming they were based on old manuscripts. [19] Percy made his available. MacPherson did not. [20]

Demands for textual purity came in the nineteenth century when scholars began collecting what they assumed were relics of the past. They began defining the traits that made the texts and tunes unique to the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, they exhumed musical forms like pentatonic scales that existed before post-Bachian musical styles were introduced by Händel in the court of George I and by Haydn during the reign of George III. [21]

Francis James Child went farther. The Harvard professor set out to publish "every valuable copy of every known ballad" from English and Scots tradition, including manuscript versions, and variants from Germany and Scandinavia. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [22] became the new master corpus.

As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, Child’s major impact in this country began in 1917 when Cecil Sharp found versions of old ballads still being sung in the Southern Appalachians. [23] That stimulated collectors to begin searching for what they still believed were survivals of some defunct tradition.

When Baez recorded "Kumbaya" on her first album in 1962, [24] she also performed three Child ballads: "Matty Groves" (Child 81), "Geordie" (209), and the "House Carpenter" (243). Percy noted the first was "ancient, and has been popular; we find it quoted in many old plays." [25] He did not mention the other two, though both were reported from Scotland and England according to Child. [26]

End Notes
1. Seeger will be discussed in a future post.
2. The Weavers were discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
3. Baez was discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.

4. Wikipedia. "American Folk-Music Revival." This is as good a quick summary as exists online.

5. Modern folklorists have changed their focus from traditional art forms and anthropology to the study of communication and sociology, and changed the name of their field to folkloristics.

6. This term was used by Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014.

7. Steve Newman. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 44.

8. James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.

9. Wikipedia. "Ossian" and "James Macpherson."
10. "Fragments of Ossian, an Invented Early Scots Epic Poem." British Museum website.

11. Danni Glover. "Studies in Language Change in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. MPhil thesis. University of Glasgow, 2014. 15.

12. Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.

13. Stephanie Barczewski. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 100.

14. Kenneth Clark. The Gothic Revival. London: Constable and Company, 1928; 1964 Penguin edition. 24–25. "in 1750 the middle age was still one dark welter from which the Goths alone emerged with a convenient name" (page 24.)

15. Wikipedia. "Goths."
16. Glover. 17.
17. Wikipedia, Ossian.

18. Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 edition. 271.

19. Glover. 38. She was discussing the work of Ian Watts. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.

20. MacPherson’s use of verisimilitude led to charges that his work was a forgery, rather than a piece of creative writing like what is now called historical fiction.

21. This was discussed in more detail in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

22. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-1898. Quotation from "Advertisement to Part I," 1:vii (five volume edition).

23. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.

24. Joan Baez. Joan Baez in Concert. Vanguard VRS9112. 1962.

25. Thomas Percy. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: Trübner, 1867–1868. Quotation from Child 2:243 (five volume edition).

26. Both appeared in volume four of the five volume edition of Child.