There are two Michael Brockens at large in this book. One is the academic, rooting his analysis in what he terms “a popular music studies perspective” deriving (mainly) from an amalgam of history, cultural studies, and anthropology. The other is the committed “folkie,” a long-term devotee but also trenchant critic of the folk revival. It is ultimately the second who predominates, and the result often feels more like an extended polemical essay than the detailed history that the title initially suggests.

Brocken covers a lot of ground, much of it already fairly familiar. After brief consideration of the period from the late nineteenth century until the publication of Bert Lloyd's The Singing Englishman in 1944, he then examines the politics, both internal and external, of folk music in the 1950s and 1960s, the impact of skiffle in the late 1950s, and the high point of “folk rock” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before turning to folk music's “retreat” into insularity from that point. All this comes in just 144 pages, with the remaining seventy pages comprising a discography of Topic Records. With all due allowance for the label's importance to the folk revival, it is, at the very least, idiosyncratic to devote a third of the book to a listing that is not really discussed in the body of the work, when so many of the issues raised by the author would have benefited from further consideration. For example, in a short, lively section on the contemporary folk festival as a refreshing force within folk music, Brocken raises a number of interesting questions but moves on before the subject can be aired effectively.

This is not to deny the considerable value of what is offered. The book gains in confidence and focus as it proceeds, and the later chapters, in particular, contain new and useful material. Above all, what gives freshness and distinctiveness even when he is on familiar ground is the liveliness of his engagement with the self-image and assumptions that have governed the folk revival. He posits the emergence of a folk discourse that “has become caught up in a consolidation and a permanence that has relations only to, or with, the images created at its own inception” (124). He argues that, as a result, in both the history it has written for itself and in its practices, the folk world places itself in a false opposition to wider, commercial musical cultures and often restricts the possibility of developing and reaching new, younger audiences. Brocken's contrary insistence on the importance of overlaps and intersections between commercial popular music and the folk movement, as exemplified by his suggestion that performers such as Val Doonican, Bob Lynd, Robin Hall, and Jimmie MacGregor and Dorita y Pepe might have “effected a greater appreciation of folk music than any revivalist connected to the MacColl/Lloyd axis” (81), is extremely refreshing. He also offers some powerful strictures against the rigidities of many folk clubs from the 1970s: “playing has become a striving towards a disturbing perfection, a perfect replication. All potential miasmas have been removed and a perfect prescription of folk remains” (124).

This is engaging stuff, but Brocken's dual personae can be problematic. For those with substantial personal investment in the movement, this book will undoubtedly generate much debate. However, for those with little knowledge of the scene and those who read the work in order to advance their wider scholarly understanding of popular musical culture, it may work less effectively. Because Brocken ultimately sees his target as the body of ideas within the folk scene, there is only limited engagement with existing academic literature, and some opportunities are thus lost. More important, because of the brevity of the text, Brocken does not always offer much hard evidence of the positions and attitudes that he seeks to criticize. He may be absolutely right in his judgments, but what he depicts sometimes seems too homogenous, too compliant, and lacking in exceptions to his rules. Finally, although his argument that folk music is now in a highly marginal position within the wider popular culture can hardly be denied, it may be that an overestimation of its place in the 1960s and early 1970s rather exaggerates the extent of that decline. He argues that by 1970, “it could be stated with some justification that the revival had triumphed. Folk music performance styles were accurately regarded as significant: an intrinsic part of our culture” (113). For all the successes that it had enjoyed, this seems to overplay folk's hand. Its place in the sun was brief indeed, and its retreat may owe as much if not more to an intrinsically limited appeal as to any attempt by “folkies” to close themselves off from other currents. As both an historian of music and a once passionate if now largely lapsed “folkie,” I hope that Brocken will return to some of these issues in further supplements to this thoughtful but overcompressed work.