The revival, which you are part and parcel of, at its best, is made up of people who recognise the existance of a superb body of songs passed down to us and are prepared to acknowledge and appreciate the contribution made by those who gave it to them/us.


I disagree, Jim. The Revival is made up of people who have made a lot assumptions about the nature of folk song and held their truths to be self-evident thereafter. At its core is a consensus of romantic aestheticism defined by a more savage prescription. It always operates at several very significant removes from its primary sources, and even propagates the notions of hierarchy of authenticity & pure-bloodedness that persist unto this day.

You see this as a wrecking ball - hardly so - it's endemic to the nature of the revival. I've read about it everywhere from The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (the old one; haven't got round to reading the new one yet) to Bob Pegg's Folk, Harker's Fakesong and Boyes The Imagined Village none of which you could call harsh critiques. It's a simple fact of life that Folk is the invention & concern of an social elite - an Intelligentsia - who are very different from the non-elite - a Proletariat - who made and sang the songs in the first place.

But, get this, I appreciate the contribution of the collectors but I'm also under no illusions as to the contradictions inherent in elite members of one (superior) social class collecting the work of another (inferior) social class and subjecting that work to the sort of taxonomy and taxidermy that not only typifies the revival, but is anathema to both the nature of the songs and the people who made and sang them.

No wrecking ball here, Jim - just point of fact: The Revival is a Bourgeois Conceit; the entire concept of Folk likewise. It is born of class condescension and a legacy of feudal deference which it preserves with greater success that the material which it has persistently misrepresented, re-invented and trivialised since Cecil Sharp first made his parlour piano arrangement of The Seeds of Love some 109 years ago (almost to the day) the same day he first heard John England singing it.

I'm as much a product of that as anyone - a part of the revival as you say. There is no alternative, simply because that's the way it is and, in any case, Traditional Folk Song is an extinct species. On the collected evidence, the best we can do is to speculate as to its traditional ecology, but that's all it's going to be - speculation driven by faith and fundamentalism.

My theory? I've said it as many times. Folk Song is the creation of working class masters of their craft shaped by necessity, fashion and usage. The Tradition is a quantifiable musicological idiom, but otherwise it is no different from any other musical idiom. Music is music; language is language; all culture is flux, diversity, and adaptation consequent on the individual & collective creative genius of humanity. And that's the same thing you'll find from Balinese Gamelan to Free Improvisation to Hip-Hop to Death Metal and beyond. Music is Music, and Folk Music (so-called) is no different.

I find it ironic that the 1954 Definition says much the same thing really, as does the Horse Definition. Music is Human; Music is the consequence of Traditional Idioms unique to specific individuals, cultures & communities; things change as they get passed on. No music is any different, and yet all musics are unique. Same could be said of people. We are the music makers - we are the dreamers of dreams.