Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folksong 1700 to the Present Day

by Harker

Paperback

Published June 1, 1985

Reviews

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this important book Dave Harker goes against the folk establishment to to show a long historical process of bowdlerisation of indigenous song from the oral culture. It seemed natural for middle class people interested in rural culture and especially in its quainter forms to collect and publish. There was a tendency to make rural conditions picturesque within the purview of a fictional 'Merrie Englande'. Songs were transcribed and changed to standard English with four letter words removed and even narratives changed to not challenge the gentle readers. In this change everything that gave our oral cultures vitality was ironed out and given a veneer of bourgeois aesthetics. So songs where given harmonic keys and a piano accompaniment when the original may have been nothing like that. A recent interest in sea shanties accompanied by droning instruments has seen return to what may have been a more authentic aesthetic. See Lankum’s ‘Go Dig My Grave’ 2023.

This resulted in a national ‘tradition’ of Folk Song that was not the real thing at all.

That all changed to some extent when field audio recording became available, but by then a mind-set on national culture had been made up and set in type in many published books of song collections. Some of which became fed into the new national schools system (c1900 - 1970)

I had had an intuition about the alienation of working class culture and this this detailed the history in terms of song. It became a key element in my Conspiracy of Good Taste book.
Here is a section of that based on Harker.

“Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was published in 1802 and presented a biased view of Scottish history mainly focusing on chiefs and nobility. Ordinary people appeared only in the entourage of the powerful, or as soldiers or victims of violence. It avoided any sympathy with democratic causes, and helped to reconstruct history to fit in with the most conservative of bourgeois attitudes. Scott wasn't just looking for good songs from the people; they had to come from 'tradition'. So, the penny pamphleteers, broadsides and chapbooks, the germ of a working- class literature, were derided as vulgar and paltry.”

“Before Scott died, he admitted that perhaps he was wrong to 'improve the poetry' at the expense of its 'simplicity'. The mother of Hogg, one of his main lower-class collaborators, told him to his face:
Ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin' an' no for readin'; but ye hae broken the charm noo, an' they'll bever be sung mair. An' the worst thing of a', they're nouther richt spell'd nor richt setten down. Harker (1985)70
I particularly like this quote from Harker’s book because it gives the rare insight that working-class people were quite aware of what was going on.”

“The English Folk Song Society, with which Cecil Sharp was to become synonymous, was formed in 1898. Based in London’s Mayfair, it attracted leading musical luminaries of the day including the composers Elgar, Dvorak and Grieg. Urban culture was seen as nothing but common rowdyism and sordid vulgarity. Sharp’s ‘Folksong’ was contrasted to the ‘glitter, sham and vulgarity’ of music hall. It was idealised as unsophisticated, primitive and authentic - simple beauty with common emotion.”

For more see:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...