Friday, September 21, 2007

Capturing and Preserving Tradition

Back to the initial literature review. This is Part 3, following my August 27 blog.

Music as folklore
As Pegg has indicated, much of the research effort into British folk music, from the late 19th century to the present day, has been directed to the collection of songs, tunes and dances for the purposes of preservation, education and social history. Child’s extensive work on the ballad traditions of England and Scotland (2005) provided an impetus for the 20th century folk revivals (see Cheesman & Rieuwarts 1997), although earlier collections of popular songs, for example by Thomas Percy (1729-1811) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), were already in the public domain.

Sharp’s comprehensive study (1907) stimulated renewed interest in English folklore although his seemingly heroic rescue of almost-forgotten songs from obscurity was not without its critics. Boyes (1993) comments an inherently conservative view of folklore epitomised by Sharp and reinforced by the establishment of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1932 through the merger of the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society, formed by Sharp in 1911 (Schofield undated, online). Sutton records accusations by Sharp’s contemporary, Mary Neal of inaccurate collecting, pedantry and obstruction of mass participation in the folk movement (Sutton 2000 online).

Nevertheless, Sharp’s work revealed the existence of a wide range of sources of ‘folk’ material. His contemporary, Percy Grainger introduced a revolutionary means of collecting songs in the first decade of the 20th century, by recording performances of folk singers on a phonograph (Yates 1982). Collections, which helped fuel the post-war folk revival, included Vaughan Williams and Lloyd (1959), (1960), Lloyd (1967), Raven, J. (1971 and 1977),* Raven, M. (1974) and the prolific collections of Roy Palmer (1974, 1986, 1998)**.

Historiographies of folklore are critiqued by Harker (1980 and 1985) who, along with Boyes (1993), represents a ‘revisionist’ approach to the study of revivalism in folk music (Atkinson 2006: 6-8). Harker observes that the preservation of folk songs was effectively a form of ‘mediation’ reflecting ‘assumptions, attitudes, likes and dislikes’ (Harker 1985:xiii). He argues:
…unless we are prepared to learn to cope with cultural products, like songs, which derive from workers’ culture, then history will continue to be written from the ‘top’ down...
(Harker 1985:255)

Returning to Brocken, concerns on the mediating role on folk ‘tradition’ by bourgeois collectors and archivists have resonance in today’s folk club performances, which:
…can (and do) reek of … musical virtuosity and elitism. Sessions and singarounds do not belong to the common musical parlance of young people of the twenty-first century and do not relate to their social mores or everyday social interactions.
(Brocken 2003:130)

He levels a similar criticism at Britain’s biggest-selling folk magazine, F-Roots, which, he argues: ‘continues to present folk music as an anodyne substance soaked in the values and mores of its largely middle-class clientele’ (op cit: 140).

* Raven, J., 1971, Kate of Coalbrookdale: Songs from Broadsheets of the 18th and 19th Century, London: Robbins Music; Raven, J., 1977, The Urban and Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham, Wolverhampton: Broadside
** Palmer, R. (ed.), 1974, A Touch on the Times: Songs of Social Change 1770-1914, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Palmer, R. (ed.), 1986, Everyman’s Book of English Country Songs, London: Omnibus Press (reprint of 1979 edition by London: Dent); Palmer, R. (ed.), 1998, A Book of British Ballads, Felinfach: Llanerch (reprint of 1980 edition of Everyman’s Book of British Ballads by London: Dent)

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