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Folk Song in England
Longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book PrizeEngland was once dubbed 'the land without music', but in the early twentieth century collectors and enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger discovered a vital heritage of folk song, vibrant and alive among working men and women. Yet after more than a century of collecting, publishing and performing songs, there are still many things we don't know about England's traditional music. Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, and where, when and why? Why did some songs thrive, and did the collectors' passions and prejudices determine what was preserved, and what was lost?In answer to these questions, acclaimed folklorist Steve Roud has drawn on an unprecedented range of sources to present an intricate social history of folk song through the ages, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It is an absorbing and impeccably researched account that gives a sonorous voice to England's past.
764 pages, Paperback
First published August 17, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 21, 2018
I must admit that I only read this weighty tome because it was a Christmas present - I used to listen to quite a lot of vaguely traditional music when I was younger but don't so much now. I am also a little wary of the academic approach to what is essentially organic subject matter.
For all those reservations, I am glad I gave it a chance - Roud's knowledge and research is extensive and although the scope of the book ends before the 50s revivalists, his argument, that the tradition has always been inclusive and that the distinctions made by earlier collectors between true traditional songs and old popular songs is so blurred as to be almost meaningless, is convincing.
The book takes several approaches to discussing the tradition in turn. The first part focuses on song collectors and their legacies, the second attempts to describe what is known about the music in each century back to the 16th, and the final part is arranged different categories of song (for example types of work).
For all those reservations, I am glad I gave it a chance - Roud's knowledge and research is extensive and although the scope of the book ends before the 50s revivalists, his argument, that the tradition has always been inclusive and that the distinctions made by earlier collectors between true traditional songs and old popular songs is so blurred as to be almost meaningless, is convincing.
The book takes several approaches to discussing the tradition in turn. The first part focuses on song collectors and their legacies, the second attempts to describe what is known about the music in each century back to the 16th, and the final part is arranged different categories of song (for example types of work).
August 23, 2017
Note : I know only about 0.000001% of you are interested in English folk music but this review which is rather loooooong is for my friend Raymond's folk mag Stirrings. But it's a review, so of course it goes in Goodreads too!
***************
First, let it be said that this is the book on folk music you have been waiting for, and is essential for any folk fan. You won’t love every one of its 671 pages plus another 100 of bibliography, notes and index, you may even skip a chapter here and there, but mostly you will be delighted and/or deliciously outraged by Steve Roud’s tell-it-like-it-was forthrightness and his vorpal-bladed willingness slay all previous nonsense spouted about the folk and their songs.
But there’s always a but. You may not find out what you thought you wished to find out and you may find out that which in retrospect you would have been glad not to have known.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
Is a detailed consideration of the songs themselves, their merits, their themes, what they were about. Steve Roud gives us the social history of the songs, the singers, and the song collectors. How the folk got to sing what they did and where they did it and why and how and who took any notice of them.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS
Is stuffed with great quotes from many places. Here is the composer of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, the reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in 1885 of the problems of collecting songs from one singer:
There is an old grandmother on Dartmoor… she sings ancient ballads. She cannot be induced to sit down and sing – then her memory fails, but she will sing whilst engaged in kneading bread, washing, driving the geese out of the room, feeding the pigs : naturally, this makes it a matter of difficulty to note her melodies. One has to run after her, from the kitchen to the pig-sty, or to the well-head and back, pencil and note-book in hand.
THE ETERNAL INCONCLUSIVE WHIRLPOOL OF FOLKISH DESPAIR
How refreshing it is to listen with delight to a song like “Polly on the Shore” or “When Spring Comes On”; how simple the pleasure as through the open channel of your vestibulocochlear nerve the tender words and plangent melodies gambol and twirl. Dear reader, you may wish to leave it at that, for should you ponder where these beautiful songs and tunes come from and how they did so come you will find yourself very quickly in the Dread Forest of Tangled Theories which leads to the Morass of Imponderables and the Eternal Inconclusive Whirlpool of Folkish Despair. Even Steve Roud’s mighty labours cannot clear up that much. What he can say, quite categorically, is that, mostly, we don’t know.
For instance, when and where did the folk do their singing, and how did they come by their repertoires? Let Steve disappoint you :
We are in the bizarre situation of investigating a part of life which was so ordinary that it must have happened countless times, all over the country, every day throughout history. People were hearing, writing, learning, adapting, singing, forgetting and discarding songs all the time – and yet we can complain that we do not have enough evidence to really document what was going on.
And furthermore:
Whatever the characteristics of an “oral” tradition may be, its undeniable failing for historical enquiry is its almost complete lack of a datable evidence trail, and the temptation this offers for wishful speculation on the part of commentators is enormous.
And not only do we not know that much, everything we do know is bitterly disputed, contested and contradicted. Actually, if you even say the words “folk song” to some people, they will quack back “you mean FAKE song, you bourgeois dupe!” meaning that this whole folk shebang was invented by a parcel of mimsy aesthetes who should have been catching butterflies instead. Steve says
There is no doubt that this essentially negative perspective became, for a while, the new orthodoxy, both within and without our field, and is only now showing signs of losing its grip
THE LAST GASPED BALLADS
Steve begins by reviewing the personalities and activities of the major folk song collectors from Thomas Percy in 1765 to Bert Lloyd in the 1940s. Of the famous Victorian and Edwardian collectors, he issues this stern warning :
It should be made clear, however, that in their genuine desire to bring these songs to a wider audience, these enthusiasts did not endeavour to replicate the singing styles of traditional singers, but arranged the songs for piano, for performance in middle-class homes and on the professional concert platform… apart from the tunes themselves, and sometimes the words, these performances bore almost no relation to how the songs had sounded or functioned in their traditional sphere.
These polite gentlemen and ladies (Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, Percy “Forty Shades” Grainger, and so forth) were seeking to save the music from extinction. First they discovered that folk music existed (who knew? Who knew??) and then they realised it was dying out, more or less at the same time. So - not a moment to lose! They had to bicycle like crazy to try to catch the last gasped ballads from the fading octogenarians of the South Downs. It seems that the younger folk in the villages had already left for London or were busy learning the hokey cokey. They’d already degenerated. They weren’t folk any more.
WHAT DID THEY THINK THEY WERE DOING?
Apart from their intrinsic beauty, folk song was perceived by some of the early collectors as the answer to the question “what is England’s national music?”. And if English people could only be re-connected with this music, why then, let Cecil Sharp explain:
Let the [Board of Education] introduce the genuine traditional song into the schools and I prophesy that within the year the slums of London and other large cities will be flooded with beautiful melodies, before which the raucous, unlovely and vulgarising music hall song will flee as the night mist flees before the rays of the morning sun.
Steve Roud comments
[This] desire to change the course of musical history by improving children’s taste proved naïve, and one of the unintended consequences was that in some quarters it was soon believed that these old-fashioned folk songs were not just suitable for children but were suitable only for children.
It may be worth mentioning here that the major collectors all the way up to Bert Lloyd have always been strongly criticised for editing, bowdlerising, “improving” and generally monkeying with the texts of folk songs. True enough, but let me quote Martin Carthy on the subject of “The Famous Flower of Serving Men” from his sleeve note on the album Waiting for Angels:
There's a fury in those first five verses which sends the same shiver through me as when I first read them in 1970. The parson who sent them to Sir Walter Scott never sent the rest (!) so I glued some bits together and made up chunks to tell a story which is clear and terrifying
To quote Lily Allen, everyone’s at it.
SOME COLD WATER EXPERTLY POURED
Steve disabuses us of some of our vague fond notions about folk and their oral traditions in a robust manner.
There has not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years, and most folk songs owe their continued existence to their regular appearance in print. Most songs which were later recorded as folk songs were not written by ploughboys, milkmaids, miners or weavers but by professional and semi-professional urban songwriters and poets.
How about this
A singer might learn a song from the printed page, or in school, church or a theatre, but as soon as he or she starts to sing it, and others take it up, it becomes “folk”.
Or this on the subject of Child ballads:
a corpus of material which is perhaps 90 per cent 18th or 19th century
Brrrr!
ENGLAND AND AMERICA COMPARED, TO ENGLAND’S DISADVANTAGE
A few collectors in England were quick to use the new invention of the phonograph in the first years after 1900, but the idea was not, strangely, to capture the traditional singers’ actual performances for all time. Instead, the phonograph was used as a (very cumbersome) Dictaphone, to record the tune and the words for future reference. But the use of the phonograph faded away in England. By the 1920s folk song collectors were thinking that they’d completed their task anyway, and there was nothing left to do. AS few variants, maybe but that’s about it. Job done!
By contrast, in America, traditional singers were recorded extensively in field trips by John and Alan Lomax, and more piquantly, by commercial record companies, who were happy to issue such items as “Henry Lee” by Dick Justice in 1932 (a version of Child 62, “Young Hunting”) or “The Fatal Flower Garden” by Nelstone’s Hawaiians in 1929, which is a version of “Sir Hugh”, Child 155. It seems clear that by the time record companies had realised there was a market for folk (and blues) in the USA (around 1925-6) the tradition had become quite defunct in England, so there was no commercial point in recording folk. You wouldn’t have got English people to cough up for a 78 of “Brigg Fair” in 1930 when there was the latest foxtrot “Love is Good for Anything that Ails You” by Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans available. Yet in America the folk were buying folk. This means they have vast amounts of folk (aka hillbilly) recorded, whereas Steve has to report miserably:
It is difficult to comprehend just how little genuine traditional English singing could be heard by the average folk fan up to the 1960s.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, SHIRLEY?
The second revival of English folk which took off in the 1950s and really got going in the 60s was partly fuelled by a leftist agenda of wresting it from the dead hands of the butterfly collectors and giving folk back to the folk; and thereby hopefully helping to create a class conscious cultural core which would – er, I don’t quite know, do something important. The ideology never took, but the music did and it’s still here, just as awkwardly inauthentic as it was in 1717, 1817 and 1917.
As for instance - Steve and his musical collaborator Julia Bishop who writes two technical chapters are very clear - English traditional song was always solo and unaccompanied. Maybe with some singalong chorus stuff in pubs, but that’s it. The revival dispensed immediately with that notion, and the guitar or concertina or melodeon or banjo or Northumbrian pipes were used all the time to provide the accompaniment. Even the hard-core Peter Bellamy took up the concertina.
So the music flows on, now mot because of any political or cultural reason, but just because it’s a beautiful alternative to everything else. It doesn’t have to be like that, it can be like this.
As I walked out one morning in May
The birds did sing and the lambs did play
The birds did sing and the lambs did play
I met an old man, I met an old man
I met an old man by the way.
***************
First, let it be said that this is the book on folk music you have been waiting for, and is essential for any folk fan. You won’t love every one of its 671 pages plus another 100 of bibliography, notes and index, you may even skip a chapter here and there, but mostly you will be delighted and/or deliciously outraged by Steve Roud’s tell-it-like-it-was forthrightness and his vorpal-bladed willingness slay all previous nonsense spouted about the folk and their songs.
But there’s always a but. You may not find out what you thought you wished to find out and you may find out that which in retrospect you would have been glad not to have known.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
Is a detailed consideration of the songs themselves, their merits, their themes, what they were about. Steve Roud gives us the social history of the songs, the singers, and the song collectors. How the folk got to sing what they did and where they did it and why and how and who took any notice of them.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS
Is stuffed with great quotes from many places. Here is the composer of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, the reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in 1885 of the problems of collecting songs from one singer:
There is an old grandmother on Dartmoor… she sings ancient ballads. She cannot be induced to sit down and sing – then her memory fails, but she will sing whilst engaged in kneading bread, washing, driving the geese out of the room, feeding the pigs : naturally, this makes it a matter of difficulty to note her melodies. One has to run after her, from the kitchen to the pig-sty, or to the well-head and back, pencil and note-book in hand.
THE ETERNAL INCONCLUSIVE WHIRLPOOL OF FOLKISH DESPAIR
How refreshing it is to listen with delight to a song like “Polly on the Shore” or “When Spring Comes On”; how simple the pleasure as through the open channel of your vestibulocochlear nerve the tender words and plangent melodies gambol and twirl. Dear reader, you may wish to leave it at that, for should you ponder where these beautiful songs and tunes come from and how they did so come you will find yourself very quickly in the Dread Forest of Tangled Theories which leads to the Morass of Imponderables and the Eternal Inconclusive Whirlpool of Folkish Despair. Even Steve Roud’s mighty labours cannot clear up that much. What he can say, quite categorically, is that, mostly, we don’t know.
For instance, when and where did the folk do their singing, and how did they come by their repertoires? Let Steve disappoint you :
We are in the bizarre situation of investigating a part of life which was so ordinary that it must have happened countless times, all over the country, every day throughout history. People were hearing, writing, learning, adapting, singing, forgetting and discarding songs all the time – and yet we can complain that we do not have enough evidence to really document what was going on.
And furthermore:
Whatever the characteristics of an “oral” tradition may be, its undeniable failing for historical enquiry is its almost complete lack of a datable evidence trail, and the temptation this offers for wishful speculation on the part of commentators is enormous.
And not only do we not know that much, everything we do know is bitterly disputed, contested and contradicted. Actually, if you even say the words “folk song” to some people, they will quack back “you mean FAKE song, you bourgeois dupe!” meaning that this whole folk shebang was invented by a parcel of mimsy aesthetes who should have been catching butterflies instead. Steve says
There is no doubt that this essentially negative perspective became, for a while, the new orthodoxy, both within and without our field, and is only now showing signs of losing its grip
THE LAST GASPED BALLADS
Steve begins by reviewing the personalities and activities of the major folk song collectors from Thomas Percy in 1765 to Bert Lloyd in the 1940s. Of the famous Victorian and Edwardian collectors, he issues this stern warning :
It should be made clear, however, that in their genuine desire to bring these songs to a wider audience, these enthusiasts did not endeavour to replicate the singing styles of traditional singers, but arranged the songs for piano, for performance in middle-class homes and on the professional concert platform… apart from the tunes themselves, and sometimes the words, these performances bore almost no relation to how the songs had sounded or functioned in their traditional sphere.
These polite gentlemen and ladies (Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, Percy “Forty Shades” Grainger, and so forth) were seeking to save the music from extinction. First they discovered that folk music existed (who knew? Who knew??) and then they realised it was dying out, more or less at the same time. So - not a moment to lose! They had to bicycle like crazy to try to catch the last gasped ballads from the fading octogenarians of the South Downs. It seems that the younger folk in the villages had already left for London or were busy learning the hokey cokey. They’d already degenerated. They weren’t folk any more.
WHAT DID THEY THINK THEY WERE DOING?
Apart from their intrinsic beauty, folk song was perceived by some of the early collectors as the answer to the question “what is England’s national music?”. And if English people could only be re-connected with this music, why then, let Cecil Sharp explain:
Let the [Board of Education] introduce the genuine traditional song into the schools and I prophesy that within the year the slums of London and other large cities will be flooded with beautiful melodies, before which the raucous, unlovely and vulgarising music hall song will flee as the night mist flees before the rays of the morning sun.
Steve Roud comments
[This] desire to change the course of musical history by improving children’s taste proved naïve, and one of the unintended consequences was that in some quarters it was soon believed that these old-fashioned folk songs were not just suitable for children but were suitable only for children.
It may be worth mentioning here that the major collectors all the way up to Bert Lloyd have always been strongly criticised for editing, bowdlerising, “improving” and generally monkeying with the texts of folk songs. True enough, but let me quote Martin Carthy on the subject of “The Famous Flower of Serving Men” from his sleeve note on the album Waiting for Angels:
There's a fury in those first five verses which sends the same shiver through me as when I first read them in 1970. The parson who sent them to Sir Walter Scott never sent the rest (!) so I glued some bits together and made up chunks to tell a story which is clear and terrifying
To quote Lily Allen, everyone’s at it.
SOME COLD WATER EXPERTLY POURED
Steve disabuses us of some of our vague fond notions about folk and their oral traditions in a robust manner.
There has not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years, and most folk songs owe their continued existence to their regular appearance in print. Most songs which were later recorded as folk songs were not written by ploughboys, milkmaids, miners or weavers but by professional and semi-professional urban songwriters and poets.
How about this
A singer might learn a song from the printed page, or in school, church or a theatre, but as soon as he or she starts to sing it, and others take it up, it becomes “folk”.
Or this on the subject of Child ballads:
a corpus of material which is perhaps 90 per cent 18th or 19th century
Brrrr!
ENGLAND AND AMERICA COMPARED, TO ENGLAND’S DISADVANTAGE
A few collectors in England were quick to use the new invention of the phonograph in the first years after 1900, but the idea was not, strangely, to capture the traditional singers’ actual performances for all time. Instead, the phonograph was used as a (very cumbersome) Dictaphone, to record the tune and the words for future reference. But the use of the phonograph faded away in England. By the 1920s folk song collectors were thinking that they’d completed their task anyway, and there was nothing left to do. AS few variants, maybe but that’s about it. Job done!
By contrast, in America, traditional singers were recorded extensively in field trips by John and Alan Lomax, and more piquantly, by commercial record companies, who were happy to issue such items as “Henry Lee” by Dick Justice in 1932 (a version of Child 62, “Young Hunting”) or “The Fatal Flower Garden” by Nelstone’s Hawaiians in 1929, which is a version of “Sir Hugh”, Child 155. It seems clear that by the time record companies had realised there was a market for folk (and blues) in the USA (around 1925-6) the tradition had become quite defunct in England, so there was no commercial point in recording folk. You wouldn’t have got English people to cough up for a 78 of “Brigg Fair” in 1930 when there was the latest foxtrot “Love is Good for Anything that Ails You” by Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans available. Yet in America the folk were buying folk. This means they have vast amounts of folk (aka hillbilly) recorded, whereas Steve has to report miserably:
It is difficult to comprehend just how little genuine traditional English singing could be heard by the average folk fan up to the 1960s.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, SHIRLEY?
The second revival of English folk which took off in the 1950s and really got going in the 60s was partly fuelled by a leftist agenda of wresting it from the dead hands of the butterfly collectors and giving folk back to the folk; and thereby hopefully helping to create a class conscious cultural core which would – er, I don’t quite know, do something important. The ideology never took, but the music did and it’s still here, just as awkwardly inauthentic as it was in 1717, 1817 and 1917.
As for instance - Steve and his musical collaborator Julia Bishop who writes two technical chapters are very clear - English traditional song was always solo and unaccompanied. Maybe with some singalong chorus stuff in pubs, but that’s it. The revival dispensed immediately with that notion, and the guitar or concertina or melodeon or banjo or Northumbrian pipes were used all the time to provide the accompaniment. Even the hard-core Peter Bellamy took up the concertina.
So the music flows on, now mot because of any political or cultural reason, but just because it’s a beautiful alternative to everything else. It doesn’t have to be like that, it can be like this.
As I walked out one morning in May
The birds did sing and the lambs did play
The birds did sing and the lambs did play
I met an old man, I met an old man
I met an old man by the way.
January 5, 2025
Roud casts a critical eye over the collectors and conservers of folk tradition, while retaining genuine love of folk as a genre and maintaining that it has plenty of contemporary life and relevance.
Folk song has been manipulated and mythologised in the process of being collected and conserved. Collectors are often opaque about their intentions. There may be nothing new or authentic about idealising the portrayal of local, working class life based on folk songs.
Despite that, in Roud's hands, there is still lots of surprising insights the folk song tradition reveals about urban and rural life, industry, historical events, and the role of music in passing on ideas, humour and moral codes in England. And he encourages readers to question their sensibilities, for example by learning how the full range of modal scales and harmonies that pre-date "equal temperament" tuning play their parts in folk music.
Folk song has been manipulated and mythologised in the process of being collected and conserved. Collectors are often opaque about their intentions. There may be nothing new or authentic about idealising the portrayal of local, working class life based on folk songs.
Despite that, in Roud's hands, there is still lots of surprising insights the folk song tradition reveals about urban and rural life, industry, historical events, and the role of music in passing on ideas, humour and moral codes in England. And he encourages readers to question their sensibilities, for example by learning how the full range of modal scales and harmonies that pre-date "equal temperament" tuning play their parts in folk music.
June 14, 2021
If you are looking for a neat and tidy book of English folk songs… this may not be the book for you.
If your idea of a good time is several hundred pages of discussion about folk song collectors and their motives and methods over the past few centuries, and even more assembling of evidence about the social, cultural, and musical contexts of singing among everyday people in England… and you are the sort of person to pause every third footnote to add to your reading list… and you have absolutely no patience for romanticised myths about people in the past… this is an absolute delight. Meticulous, comprehensive, thoughtful, and extremely readable.
If your idea of a good time is several hundred pages of discussion about folk song collectors and their motives and methods over the past few centuries, and even more assembling of evidence about the social, cultural, and musical contexts of singing among everyday people in England… and you are the sort of person to pause every third footnote to add to your reading list… and you have absolutely no patience for romanticised myths about people in the past… this is an absolute delight. Meticulous, comprehensive, thoughtful, and extremely readable.
June 22, 2018
Loved this book so much. I've been listening to folk music all my life--when I could get it, not so much when I was a kid, which was a long time ago, pre various folk revivals, plus my parents thought classical was the only music that should be permitted to exist. I did know that we *don't* know much that can be relied about the real origins and practice of folk music, so I wasn't bothered by the 'revelations' here, just enjoyed what Roud wanted to tell us. I should add that, first, I have no grounds for comparison, so I just blindly go where Roud leads me and, second, I don't think I've read all 764 pages: Roud is a lively and witty writer and when my head starts spinning with the mess that he cheerfully admits he can't untangle, I just read something else for a bit, preferably something with a proper beginning, development and conclusion. This is a great book for picking up, dipping into, and putting down. Highly recommended.
January 6, 2018
Not Roud’s fault, more the fault of neglect of society in the past and collectors in general to preserve our now largely lost singing heritage, this book really just confirmed what I thought was the situation - that there’s bugger all left from long ago and that most of what is out there is speculative or sanitised for genteel ears. However it did prompt me to buy a few early vinyl recordings by people like the Croppers and Joseph Taylor - so great from that point of view. Handsome tome- will buy the Folk Songs themselves, too.
January 9, 2019
I can hardly recall how I fell down this particular rabbit hole, but late in 2018 I became fascinated with the idea of "where old songs come from," maybe because I was a songwriter and performer myself. This inquiry led me to the Child ballads, and to Steve Roud's research. This book, though sometimes very entertaining and at other times somewhat dry, paints a fascinating picture of almost half a millennium of songwriting, song performance and the notion of song ownership, exposing a history of what you could call pop music stretching back centuries and just as cutthroat and fickle as today.
January 26, 2019
A fascinating yet readable account. My only disappointment was that the focus was on the history and mainly the words and there wasn't much about the tunes/music.
March 24, 2019
Not a book for a generalist reader - some parts were very detailed and quite academic. I enjoyed parts of it but other areas seemed repetitive.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews