Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation contains selected papers from a 1998 conference held at England’s University of Sheffield to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Folk-Song Society’s founding in London. The conference organizer, Ian Russell (now Director of the University of Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute), and his co-editor, David Atkinson (editor of Folk Music Journal), are two of the finest present-day scholars of English-language folksong traditions, and the volume’s taut and error-free editing, as well as the lucid, thorough, and splendidly unifying introduction (by Russell) along with a framing essay, “Revival: Genuine or Spurious?” (by Atkinson), reflects this excellence. For North American folklorists not familiar with him, David Atkinson today fills the preeminent role in the interpretation of virtually any facet of British folksong that David Buchan did in Scottish ballad scholarship over the 1970s and 1980s, as did D.K. Wilgus in general Anglo-American folksong scholarship during the 1950s and 1960s.
Since the 500+ page volume contains thirty-five essays in addition to Russell’s introduction, no review could hope to be thorough in its coverage. Given the original Folk-Song Society’s emphasis on oral tradition and on Englishness, therefore, I think it permissible to skip over here the essays that treat topics too distant from that pair—for example, the two on Korean material; the three on Northern European traditions (Finnish, Lithuanian, and Russian); the one on the publications of valuable broadside collections—Roxburghe, Bagford—undertaken by the Ballad Society (1868-98); and the handful that treat professional, semi-professional, and quasi-professional song activities which, though from English-language cultures, are keyed less to strategies for living everyday domestic and community life than to entertainment, consciousness-raising, careerism, commerce, and the like. Readers interested in this last category (which takes in such diverse matters as British folk-rock, iconic revival singer Ewan MacColl, the 1997 Smithsonian reissue of the 1952 Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music LP, and a cassette of topical and short-lived songs protesting a 1997 runway addition at England’s Manchester Airport, among others) will find several worthwhile essays, mostly in the first of the volume’s three sections, Reviving and Re-Creating Folk Traditions. Co-editor Atkinson’s aforementioned paper, “Revival: Genuine or Spurious,” which ends this first section, provides an astute and epistemologically-aware conceptual matrix for the reader’s understanding and appreciation of these kinds of topics and scholarly concerns.
It is the essays devoted to the title’s Tradition concept that most resonate with the Folk-Song Society’s charter and with the work its members produced over its thirty-four years of existence as an independent body (it merged with the English Folk Dance Society in 1932). These essays dominate the volume and comprise most of the book’s remaining two sections, one of which contains essays on collectors (subdivided by gender), the other on either singer-informants or their songs. The first phase of folksong collecting in Britain—which began after Bishop Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, was concerned mostly with Scotland, dealt overwhelmingly with ballads of the Child type, and had pretty much run its course by the 1850s—is the subject of only one essay, John Wesley Barker’s on the Telfer Manuscript of Northern England border ballads and their tunes. What might (arguably) be identified as the third phase of English-language folksong collecting—which dated from the early 1950s and is in a sense still ongoing, took place throughout the British Isles as well as anglo-North America, treated not just the Child ballad but traditional songs of all genres, routinely employed sound recording devices so that both words and music were obtained, and gathered substantial biographical data about informants—is represented by two essays, Margaret Steiner’s on Canadian collector and festival organizer Louise Manny and E. David Gregory’s on English collector Peter Kennedy, whose folklorist genes were of the highest order (he was son of Douglas Kennedy, co-founder of the English Folk Dance Society, and nephew of Maud Karpeles, who accompanied Sharp on his Appalachian field trips and later worked on her own in Newfoundland). A third essay by Tom Munnelly on the making of the Irish Folklore Commission collection (or at least a portion of it) spans the second and third song-collecting phases, beginning its survey in 1935 and ending it in 1970.
As one would expect, it is that second (or “great”) phase of English-language song collecting which inspired most of the essays on Those Who Made It Happen, as this section on collectors is called. The “great” phase can be conveniently dated from the 1890s to the 1930s in Britain and from 1907 (when Texas’ John Avery Lomax began collecting cowboy songs by mail) to the late 1940s in the U.S. and Canada. This phase two shared most of the features of phrase three, save that, with some notable exceptions (Percy Grainger and James Madison Carpenter in England, for example, John Lomax and Helen Hartness Flanders in the U.S.), pencil-and-notebook rather than acoustic recording machines constituted the main method of data-gathering.
Given the theme, purpose, and locale of the 1998 conference at which these papers were originally presented, English collectors understandably dominate the essays’ subjects: Martin Graebe suggests reasons for the consistent inaccuracies in Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s characterization of singers and transcriptions of what they sang; John Francmanis argues that Frank Kidson passed off informants who were in fact mostly middle class as working class; Lucy Broadwood and her work are justly lauded by Lewis Jones, as is Broadwood’s close colleague and equally superb folksong scholar Ann G. Gilchrist by Catherine A. Shoupe; Martin Lovelace shows Maud Karpeles’ subjective selectivity at work in her recognition of what constituted “folksong” during a seven-week field trip to Newfoundland in 1929; and E. Wyn James tells about Englishwoman Ruth Herbert’s song-collecting in Wales (she was one of the few phase-two collectors to use a recording machine—and this was in 1910!). The best-known Scottish collector from this phase, Gavin Greig, and his correspondence with William Walker of Aberdeen (who a decade earlier had assisted Child) are the subject of the paper by Robert Thomson, whose own University of Florida houses the letters in question, while American fieldworker Annabel Morris Buchanan—who like some of the early English phase-two collectors such as Cecil J. Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams was not just a dispassionately empirical documenter but believed that the songs she collected could be used for “applied” purposes—is the subject of Lyn Wolz’s contribution. The efforts of some of these ancestral pioneers are discussed and evaluated in Vic Gammon’s “One Hundred Years of the Folk-Song Society,” which comes immediately after editor Russell’s introduction. Gammon contextualizes the work of these early figures in what he judges to be a pervasively denigrating attitude toward native traditional song commonly found among folksong pundits—commentators, educationalists, and heritage cognoscenti. In its oral form, Gammon’s talk, which opened the conference as a keynote address, set a reasoned, fair-minded, but at the same time passionate and engaged tone for the ensuing two days, and its written form does the same for these published proceedings.
Because of its topic, Singers and Songs, the volume’s third and final section should be the most interesting of the three. This promise is less borne out in the five essays that treat songs than it is in the seven that treat singers. As far as the former group is concerned, two essays give us genetic mappings of individual songs: Andrew King’s subject is “The Bitter Withy,” a ballad/carol versifying a legend of the boy Jesus, while Fenella Crowe’s is from Celtic tradition (virtually unrepresented in the conference papers), the song “Mylecharaine” as it evolved into an unofficial anthem of Manx cultural and political identity. Steve Gardham argues that the B text of Child 295, “The Brown Girl,” probably constituted a collation by its contributor—Sabine Baring-Gould again—of an eighteenth-century garland version (which itself provided Child’s A text) and a broadside of Laws P9, “Sally and Billy,” that tells virtually the same story as the Child ballad. Simon Furey establishes the strong similarity between the tune to which the English “Spencer the Rover” is invariably sung and a traditional Catalan song accompanying Easter and Christmastime quétes, or house-visits. He suspects that an Irishman with Yorkshire associations serving in Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War may have made the autobiographical words and set it to a quéte tune he had encountered in Catalonia. Bridging this section’s two topics, Andrew C. Rouse interprets Hogarth’s frequent depictions in his popular prints (at one shilling a copy, meant for middle-class buyers and viewers) of street singers, musicians, and broadside sellers as well as of song words and themes.
To my mind, the seven essays on Singers are more engaging, not necessarily because the authors are more insightful or ambitious, but because the subjects are of greater intrinsic interest. Who, for example, could resist the charm of a whole essay (by Ruaridh Greig) on Joseph Taylor, whom Percy Grainger first sound-recorded in 1907? I certainly can’t, not least because the Lincolnshire farm bailiff’s 1908 rendition of Laws N11, “William Taylor,” is one of my very favorite recordings of a traditional British singer. The same goes for Christopher Heppa’s description of Sam Howard, by the 1990s the only surviving member of the wonderful group of East Norfolk singers that flourished between the Wars, the best-known member of which was Harry Cox. Heppa tells an engrossing tale of his modern-day fieldwork not only with the octogenarian Howard (who died in 2000) but with many descendants of his fellow community singers, some of whom the second-phase collector E. J. Moeran recorded in the 1920s, the third-phase Peter Kenney in the 1950s.
Scottish women singers constitute the topics of essays by Julia C. Bishop and Sheila Douglas. Bishop’s “Bell Duncan: ‘The Greatest Ballad Singer of All Time’” concentrates on the Child ballads in Bell Duncan’s extensive song repertoire of 128 distinct items and tests the collector James Madison Carpenter’s assessment of his informant’s greatness. Carpenter, who did his fieldwork in the British Isles over an extensive seven-year period (1928–1935), was a second-phase collector in most respects, but like Lomax and Grainger and a few others from the early years of the century (including, as we now know, Ruth Herbert), he employed an audio-recording device (in his case, a dictaphone). Sheila Douglas’ “Belle Stewart, ‘the Queen Amang the Heather,’” also treats a singer from the tradition-strong northeast of Scotland, but one who differed from her older-generation countrywoman Bell Duncan by belonging to a “traveling” culture, by having a less Child-ballad rich repertoire, and by flourishing during the post-1950 third phase of collecting, with the result that many folklorists alive today met Belle Stewart, heard her sing, and recorded her with advanced technology that preserved the quality of her singing far, far better than Carpenter was able to do for Bell Duncan. Douglas’ essay is both portrait and tribute.
The remaining essay in this section on singers that treats anglophone bearers of tradition is about New Hampshire’s Clyde Covill. Member of an extended family of multi-generational singers (Vermont-based collectors Helen Hartness Flanders and Marguerite Olney had recorded his mother and uncle in the 1940s), Covill was still alive in the late 1980s when Middlebury College’s Jennifer C. Post collected from him. Post, a present-day fieldworker, gathered not only songs but also as much cultural and historical information as she could from Covill and with those memories tries as best she can to contextualize the community’s traditional singing customs in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, periods within her informant’s memory that predate the “great collectors”—the Flanderses and the Olneys—whose publications willy-nilly fed back into and influenced not only the tradition itself but tradition-bearers’ memories of it.
Apart from Atkinson’s framing “Revival: Genuine or Spurious?” essay, the reader of Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation will find few if any dazzling theoretical or analytical insights to the nature of anglophone folksong, but he or she will find a satisfyingly varied and wide-ranging amount of information on individual songs, singers, collectors, and even contexts. For the investment of a modest twenty-five pounds, the volume provides excellent returns.
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[Review length: 2004 words • Review posted on November 21, 2006]