Folk Song in England

by Steve Roud

Synopsis:

In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure.

But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding?

This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more.

Steve Roud’s Folk Song in England is monumental, in that if I hit someone with it they’d definitely be knocked out. Joking aside, though, it’s quite the survey of the history of the study of folk songs and the history of folk songs — both of those stories are essentially intertwined, because what we know about folk songs is filtered heavily through the assumptions and practices of the early scholars. We can’t go back in time to get better information, so we have to deal with what we’ve got.

It’s definitely aimed at someone who is very interested in the field, but it’s not difficult to understand at all, just exhaustive. I found the personalities and bickering of folk song collectors fairly entertaining in a dry sort of way; the squabbles and difficult personalities are recognisable and easy to imagine from so far away, but the content of the arguments hardly seems to matter.

A couple of sections are actually written by an expert on the tunes, but most of the narrative is about the words of the songs — the collection of tunes was more sporadic and rare. There are some technical terms and distinctions that didn’t make a lot of sense to me: I have had some vocal training, but I never learned to read music, always learning by ear with half an eye on the sheet music for instructions on timing, volume, etc… and certainly never got into any musical theory, nor ever learned about “modal” music (supposedly folk-specific) and the like.

I would say that I get a certain sense of attitude from Roud about modern folk music: it’s completely excluded from this book, which is fair enough, but… I don’t know. I think mostly it feels like he’d say “folk” is a misnomer, and it’s at best inspired by traditional songs, while bearing little resemblance to them. I’m projecting a little here as he never really talks about it in depth, of course. As a modern folk fan, there’s still plenty here to interest me about the transmission and recording of the traditional material that bands like Bellowhead use. I recognised a lot of the named/referenced songs, and knew a bit about their history in some cases too from poking around online, listening to folk musicians like Fay Hield and Jon Boden talking about the songs they performed, etc, and this added to that knowledge.

It’s quite a hefty book, and a long read, but overall it was worth it to me, albeit dry in places.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)