Twenty years ago, I remember reading and reviewing, revelling in and even raving about, a then new and rather wonderful musical history by the US academic Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde.Footnote ¹ As I began my present engagement with Ross Cole's The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination, I felt as if I was encountering a historic summary of similar scale and ambition, even if the material seemed to be almost the antithesis of the earlier Gendron overview: not a critical contemplation of the flashing blade of the fresh and novel and the groundbreaking, rather an analysis of the role of those wielding the solid shield of history, defending the bedrock of the past from the menacing tremors – spiritual and aesthetic, economic and social – of the present.

Such extended musings on those diametrically different forces at play on the popular music that would become a central pillar in our entertainment, leisure, and pleasure in the twentieth century are both fascinating and vital: those powerful strands woven between, let us say, the rise of Impressionism and the explosion of punk and hip hop a hundred years later. They would feed our understanding of issues of high and low culture, our assessment of the manufactured and authentic, our consideration of mass production and mass consumption, the place of radical art, developing technology and invention, and the vernacular creativity of the grassroots and those fierce debates about authenticity and contrivance that have peppered the well-spiced academic gumbo of the modern and postmodern West.

Cole's book, a developed version of his doctoral submission, considers a focused few decades in Anglo-America – from the 1870s to the 1930s, broadly speaking – and their relationship to folk culture – song and dance, though principally song – and how the meanings of the rustic past in both Britain (particularly parts of England) and the United States were adopted and adapted to suit the political positions of largely middle-class and educated thinkers who identified, within the practices of the previous centuries, an inspirational font so powerful and intriguing that they could tap into its waters to feed ideas across the breadth of the political spectrum, a compelling concept at a time when the extreme wings of left and right were jockeying for an ascendant position in the industrial complexes of North America and Europe.

But the picture was a complicated one. As powerful new philosophies – the ideas of Marx and communism, nationalism and fascism – gained a purchase on various segments of a mobile and volatile society, narratives based on a much older history were being utilized to shape perceptions. Idealized visions, romanticized memories, maybe simply mere imaginings, of those folk art expressions of earlier ages were projected then rekindled as models with which to challenge the rising tides of the modern era: expanding cities, sprawling industry, and a spreading proletariat.

Such resurrected thinking, some might argue elaborate fantasizing, would help to seed some muscular theories of nationhood and race. And, before long, the globe would erupt uncontrollably: the rampaging violence of world wars and revolutions in the opening fifty years of the twentieth century. The associated identity struggles, often at the heart of these raging conflicts, were key drivers in the battle for minds and territories, often premised on a preference for days gone by: a belief that a form of bucolic utopia, whether in rural Britain or rustic Germany or the American backwoods, had existed before the factories rolled and the mills polluted the souls and hearts of man in the expanding urban conurbations of the transatlantic powers.

Yet, I must add, Cole's argument is not just focused on the study of a backward-looking reverence for an older age: if the writer's palette here is principally engaged in painting telling representations of a half-century that has 1900 as its approximate fulcrum, he returns fascinatingly and potently in the book's coda to the current influence of folk ideologies that are still being appropriated and exploited by campaigning activists well into the new millennium.

However, before we start to unpack some of the details of Cole's well-mapped history, it could be instructive to briefly summarize notions of folk revival that come in a variety of forms, initially as the Victorian era fades and then returning in the middle of the century that follows. In the UK, the rejuvenation of interest in matters folk in the 1890s is driven both by individuals – Cecil Sharp, William Morris, Hubert Parry, for example – and by institutions – the Folk-Song Society, the Folk-Lore Society – but there is also an active, if rather niche, press diligently covering the somewhat esoteric and arcane activities and philosophies of these collectors, composers, artists, and groups gathered to discuss the quixotic power of ancient practices and pursuits. Later, in the interwar years in the United States, father and son John and Alan Lomax would begin to accumulate field recordings that became both celebrated and controversial while the academic W. E. B. Du Bois provided a crucial Black perspective on the emancipated slave's relationship to so-called folk traditions.

Furthermore, we can identify a second folk revival from the 1940s into the 1950s in both the United Kingdom and the United States, which would witness figures such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in America and Ewan MacColl in Britain becoming the standard bearers of this impressive rebirth. As the 1960s unfurled, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, Donovan and Martin Carthy, to name but a small few, carried forward a once strictly acoustic legacy which, by the end of that swinging decade, had spawned a near-heretical electric version of the music, attracting some almost-hysterical critiques from certain musicians and journalists, fans and musicologists, associated with this vocal and often partisan community. We might even propose that once The Band had made their escape to the country and upstate New York in 1967 to compose and rehearse their seminal debut record Music from Big Pink, the last fifty years or so has seen the multiple folk musics of the United States virtually subsumed into an eclectic marketing category, perhaps even a metagenre, often referred to these days simply as Americana.

But it is the first folk revival that mainly interests our author here and his enquiry surrounding this resurgence is indeed impressively wide-ranging, as he, early on, sets out some of the topics that will be embraced within the bounds of the account: ‘cultures and technologies of collecting … inquiry into non-Western musical practices, the history of the ballad … utopian dreams detailed by novelists such as … William Morris, legacies of race thinking and Atlantic slavery, literary modernism, early jazz, Cecil J Sharp's activities in Somerset and the Appalachian Mountains’ (5). So there is much concentrated investigation within the volume's just-over 170 pages of text.

In the opening forays of the thesis, it is clear that the motivations to promote and secure a revival in interest in folk activities might be regarded, on the one hand, as a field of quasi-scientific enquiry or a twee and genteel concern of an aspiring stratum of society or even the seed of a more dubious exercise in political indoctrination. Cole believes that the intellectual landscape of that end-of-century moment ‘offered up the possibility of locating folk tradition as one of the deepest wellsprings of European or even Aryan musical heritage and thus as a potentially restorative course’ (12). As we have suggested, such concepts were difficult to disconnect from contested questions such as race, cultural allegiance, and nationhood, so, we can see in retrospect, the danger lights were flashing for the next era to come, even if most of the revivalist participants of this time perhaps had little sense at all of the powder keg they were stacking and the dangerous sparks of ethnic and racial division they would eventually play a role in fostering.

Then again, the opening exchanges make the point strongly that if the idea of folk was theorized by those interested parties at the height of the British empire as a piece of reasonable and reasoned scholarship and a substantial foundation on which to move forward a fresh ideological position, there were doubters even then – such as Joseph Jacobs who, in a contemporary essay entitled ‘The Folk’ of 1893, stated: ‘When we come to realise what we mean by saying a custom, a tale, a myth arose from the Folk, I feel we must come to the conclusion that the said Folk is a fraud, a delusion, a myth’ (47) – and certainly subsequently. The role of those sceptics who felt the whole edifice was built on patchy research was a significant counter to an emerging orthodoxy. They felt that many opinions valorizing folk's status were underpinned by class and racial prejudice. Here was a sector that adopted a particular interpretation of terms such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ (whether they were assigned to the agricultural communities of the British homeland or the far-flung islands of the exotic Pacific) because they associated those adjectives with forms of expression that might well be naïve and lacking in literate sophistication but possessed instead a natural and untainted purity.

Cole cites Charles Keil, the great US cultural anthropologist, blues scholar, and historian, who much, much later, in 1978, laid down his serious doubts about this whole philosophical construction. He wrote:

It is this critical tension between the believers and non-believers that makes this particular study of the folk phenomenon so fascinating: is this a powerful, almost mystical, ethos or is it a desperate con, a vacuous sham? Note the pertinent phrase ‘political imagination’ (more fanciful imagining than grounded politics perhaps) applied in the very title of the book.

But, if the folk revivalists’ possibly concocted sociohistorical framework lacked a certain academic substance, raising questions about its value and veracity, there is little doubt that the principal demon of many of the movement's adherents was the predominance of a new kind of popular music, spreading like wildfire in the cities, a development that provided a magnetic rallying point and an obvious aesthetic adversary, providing the nostalgic battalions with something tangible to strike at. As Cole tells us, for composer Hubert Parry ‘the chief agent of decay in this profligate world of commercialism was urban popular music – a symptom of the exponential growth in retail, leisure and mass entertainment industries during the late nineteenth century driven by a small but significant rise in working-class wages, this growth encompassed everything from music hall variety theatre to cheap sensationalist newspapers, penny novels, soccer and gambling’ (57). Furthermore, Parry is directly quoted on this pressing topic, saying:

This celebrated creator of the musical setting for William Blake's ‘Jerusalem’ – as close to an Anglo substitute for the Union's national anthem as ever existed – was hardly alone in fearing the musical fare that rolled off the conveyor belt of music halls, variety theatres, and pub singalongs. Critical big hitters of the twentieth century from the left, such as Theodor Adorno and Richard Hoggart, and those hewn of conservatism, such as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, would echo much of his chorus in the decades to come.

Yet it is worth emphasizing that Parry was by no means a conservative protector of the status quo. Rather, he was of the radical school, a disciple of William Morris, whose dedication to traditional crafts and the notion of harmonious communal and integrated working methods had been inspired in part by the writings of Marx and Engels. But Morris also tapped into the mythology of the past and incorporated speculations on the future to feed his 1890 utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere. For his friend and follower Parry, folk music was a form of bastion against the tawdry tunes of the city ‘characteristic of the race, of the quiet reticence of our country folk, courageous and content’ (58).

But it was Cecil Sharp who would become the prime mover and shaker in the establishment of a folk orthodoxy in the opening decades of the next century. And his conservatism – he was against women's suffrage, for example – and his approach to ideas of anthropology – his evolutionary theories would be controversial – would mark him as less radical and more as a figure lodged in a speedily receding past. Initially, he pursues his field studies into folk practices in the county of Somerset and then proceeds to devise some arguably over-generalized conclusions that he extends to the wider rural scene of the whole country in his volume English Folk Song, first published in 1907. It certainly confirmed his reputation and, within a decade, he was carrying out similar surveys in the United States on collecting trips to the Appalachian Mountains, for example. Here, Sharp, according to a companion, found the ‘England of his dreams’, a utopian enclave where a population descended from the English folk had been isolated from the hazards of modernity.

But Cole draws attention to the crucial fact that if Sharp had built an almost dominating stature as a respected folk collector, his attitudes possessed many disreputable features. He held ‘openly racist opinions about African Americans … and was deeply insensitive to the history of slavery, disenfranchisement and white supremacy’ (144). So, these enquiries he undertook into northeastern American pre-modern, pre-industrial song were plainly not without dangerous political agendas or worrying ideological inflections at the very least.

Then there were other layers upon layers as we hear how John Lomax conducted his own surveys of African-American music, setting out on a significant trip in summer 1933 in a bid to record songs by that community. Travelling through a string of Southern states – including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee – ‘Lomax claims to have “interrogated nearly 10,000 Negro convicts” and “groups of Negroes living in remote communities”’ (108). His aim was to make physical recordings of the African-American folk songs, ‘“songs that in musical phrasing and poetic content are most unlike those of the white race, the least contaminated by white influence or by the modern Negro jazz”’ (108). Lomax also claimed that one of his intentions was ‘to help save the native American ballad from extinction’, though not the Native American ballad, of course, an irony both delicious and tragic.

Yet there were other significant counter narratives to the perspectives forged by influential activists such as Sharp and Lomax in the opening decades of the twentieth century, whether they were rejecting or appraising particular kinds of African-American folk song; for example, a legendary singing group such as the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, Nashville, performing from a Black Christian repertoire and songs from the plantation in both the United States and Europe from the 1870s onwards. Cole points out that in their case terms such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ were entirely absent from the press reviews of the day. Instead, the Fisk singers were ‘positioned as archetypes of grace, dignity and talent’ (118).

The esteemed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was able to bring a Black voice to bear on the conversation in his account The Souls of Black Folk, which initially appeared in 1903. Du Bois writes about the kind of spirituals – which he refers to as ‘Sorrow Songs’ – that would have featured in a Jubilee Singers’ programme echoing with ‘haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past’ (120). Says Cole:

There really are so many strands and stories to this richly informed investigation that we can only cover so much in a review such as this – for instance, Thoreau and Transcendentalism, the Harlem Renaissance, Sharp's belief in Aryan supremacy and its relationship to the rise of fascist thought, and the Nazis’ embrace of Volksgemeinschaft, ‘a mythical commune founded on racialised exclusion that offered a counter to communist visions of a classless society’ (153) and so on. But it is in the closing chapter, which largely focuses on a contemporary balladeer Paddy Tarleton, that Cole pinpoints the role that folk is still playing today as an effective medium to disseminate ideas of the alt-right of the 2010s and beyond. Songs such as ‘Charlottesville Ballad (War Is Coming)’ and ‘The Battle of Sacramento’, which draw on traditional musical formats to mythologize recent and high-profile street conflicts, show that the enduring bugle call of history continues to stir when matters of nation, race, and identity appear to be at stake.

To sign off, however, perhaps though there is something of the idealism, however misguided, of Sharp, Parry, and Lomax that resists the dismissive pragmatism of Jacobs and Keil in the words of a thinking US rock star of the 1980s and 1990s. Interviewed in his home city of Athens, Georgia, in June 1985, Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM, one of the biggest bands of the day despite their commitment to independent principles and artistic autonomy, remarked: ‘I'm real saddened by what's happened to the century, to the world. America's become like a dumping ground. Its culture is dying and when the culture dies, so does the country. I guess that's why I am drawn to these romantic ideas of traditions being passed down by way of storytelling, by way of folk music, country music, hillbilly music, the music of the people. Somehow, that has to be preserved.’Footnote ²