Returning to Matthew Ord's piece: his title was 'Sound Recording in the British Folk Revival: ideology, discourse and practice 1950 to 1975.

Two of the people whose help he acknowledges feature in the 'discourse' relating to Walter Pardon: Bill Leader and Rod Stradling.


He makes the following statement at the outset, one which chimes with my thinking as I encountered the material that I did encounter and have refenced about Pardon (though his focus is mainly - but not exclusively - on the sound recordings, whereas I have looked at online discussions as well:

"The revival's recording practice took in a range of approaches, and contexts, including radio commentary, commercial studio productions and amateur field recordings. This thesis considers how these practices were mediated by revivalist beliefs and values, how recording was presented in revivalist discourse, and how its semiotic resources were incorporated into multimodal discourses about music, technology and traditional culture."

I hope that anybody who has read the opening piece will see why when I came across this piece, I found it so very interesting.

It would be interesting to discuss how far Ord's ideas apply to the material on Pardon that we have found so far. Maybe more on this later.