ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Jeremy Gilbert on Folk Music

Episode Date: May 8, 2021

Jeremy Gilbert hits the road for a musical microdose accompanying the #ACFM Trip on Folk. Connecting different strands of folk music with their various political tendencies, Jeremy looks at the communism of Woody Guthrie and the singers of the Dust Bowl era, the Vietnam protest music of Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village scene, and […]

This is Acid Man. Hello everyone. This is Gem, Jeremy Gilbert for ACFM. This is a microdose in theory. It's probably going to be more like a macro dose by the time we're finished. and it's about folk music. This is just going to be me solo for a change. And this is really to accompany our main episode on folk, which we released a few weeks ago.

And the producers thought it would be a good idea for me to do a whole show talking about the history of folk music. And this seems like an easy idea when it was first suggested and it's turned out to be really hard because it needed a lot of thinking about. And because to do it properly, I'd need about 100 hours. But I'm going to have a go anyway. I've made a load of notes. Here we go. First, some disclaimers. I'm not really going to be talking much about blues or about country. I'm going to miss out loads of stuff that people will think is important. Please don't at me on Twitter. I know the stuff is missing. And even if I don't know, I've done as much work on this as I've got time for. And there's bound to be stuff left out. I will mention in the course of the show a few things I really feel. feel like I don't know enough about and would like to know more about. But apart from that,

I'm sorry that this won't be as complete as some people would definitely like. Okay, folk music. Well, as I'll explain in a bit, I think the concept of folk music, as we think of it today, really gets consolidated around the 1940s for reasons I'll explain. Obviously, there is traditional music, there is the concept of the folk and folk culture, sort of developing it over the course of the 19th century. There's traditional music, you know, which is much older than that. Obviously, I'm really only going to be talking about Britain and the United States in this show, again, for lack of any time to talk about anything else.

And if you're talking about both British or American, actually, folk music, then one thing you can't get away from is the importance of Irish music. Now, there's lots of debates about where Irish music came from, whether it's influenced by music from other parts of the world. To what extent it really was this sort of indigenous tradition which survived in ways musical traditions didn't survive much on mainland Britain and certainly in England. But the standard story, which I don't really have time to interrogate here,

is that indeed this is what happened. There was an Irish musical tradition, which is a sort of indigenous musical tradition, which avoids being sort of disrupted or captured. or distorted by the processes of industrialisation, by the growth of a particular set of musical norms with the development of what we think of as classical orchestral music in Western Europe and also commercial forms that kind of evolve in tandem with it over the 18th and 19th centuries. Irish music seems to have maintained this sort of relative independence from all that,

much like other musics from the European periphery did, say Spanish and Portuguese music, other southern European musics, for example. And a lot of these musics have some fairly similar qualities. They tend to be very rhythmic. There tends to be a lot of music, which is either played with quite simple instruments in a kind of not exactly improvised way, but in a sort of, you know, according to kind of extemporising on well-known cyclical patterns. rather than using written scores

and also a lot of kind of very plaintive often unaccompanied vocal ballads and these are all features you find in Irish music going back several hundred years insofar as it's documented and as far as we know going back much further and the survival of this kind of music making an island I think has a big impact on the way

in which people think about how folk music calls a sound once folk music you know old ballads and songs and dances start to be collected and published in Britain. First in the second half of the 19th century and then with the advent of audio recording, people like Cecil Sharp start actually collecting field recordings around the beginning of the 20th century. And I think one of the impacts of Irish music is it sort of provides a template. People think, well, this is what old music sounds like. So presumably this is how these sort of songs that we're collecting and

writing down, but we don't really know how they sounded, how they were. ought to sound. So it really influences how what people think folk music ought to sound like generally by the sort of early 20th century. An idea of folk music as this sort of organic production of the community is really important to people who were involved into collecting folk songs and documenting supposedly traditional musics, as I say, from the mid-19th really through to the early 20th century. And by the early 20th century, it starts to become possible to start recording musics that people are making that seems to have been handed down all relief through many generations in many cases. And I mentioned Cecil Sharp. He's really a, I mean,

he's really a sort of Victorian figure, although he lived into the 1920s. In the 20th century, I mean, the towering figure in the kind of field recording and collection and dissemination and popularisation, both of old blues and of kind of American folk music as it would come to be understood was Alan Lomax, hugely important figure in the collection, documentation and popularisation of what would come to be called folk music. Lomax is born in 1915, lived right through to 2002, he's sort of active from the 30s onwards. And what? what Lomax is probably best known for collecting and documenting. I suppose he's equally well known for collecting and documenting

kind of old classic blues. But he's also very well known for having collected and documented the music of the Appalachian people. People living in the Appalachian Mountains in the very remote parts of the United States. People who seem to have kind of musical traditions and dance traditions, which seem to be traceable right back to Irish and Scottish traditions, which their ancestors would have brought with them from the old world.

A lot of this music is quite distinctive in character. If you will, I think it's been interesting to hear some examples, kind of older and more recent examples of what's still referred to as appellation music or blue grass or mountain music. what used to just be called old-timey music sometimes. And so one of the oldest, one of the first kind of recordings of that, which I know of was, is Emery Arthur's, Emery Arthur's recording of Man of Constant Sorrow, which dates back to the 1920s. And it is still a very powerful kind of recording.

So we could hear a bit of that. And that kind of constant sorrow I have been trouble all my day. And that kind of music, that really carries on, you know, being quite popular and increasingly widely disseminated through recordings in the States over the course of the 30s, 40s, 50s. A good example would be from the 1950s maybe, would be the Stanley Brothers, East Virginia Blues. I was born in East Virginia,

North Carolina and it go. And I called if I am lady but her age I do not know. And then another great example would be Jean Ritchie singing and accompanying herself

on the dulcimer, one of the traditional instruments of the Appalachian music. And singing the song called Hangman. This is a recording from 1961, and this is really sort of extraordinary to me. Hang man, hangman slack up your rope. Oh, slack it for a while. I look down yonder, and I've seen Paul coming.

He's walked for a many long mile. Oh, Paul. Say, Paul, have you brought me any gold to pay my fee? Or have you walked these many long miles, see me on the hanging tree? So that song from 1961, a recording from 1961 is of a song which supposedly was handed down generation after generation in those mountain communities and can be traced back to the British Isles like several hundred years ago. I mean, I don't know how true that is, but I don't claim any expertise on the historical authenticity of any of this stuff. if you're interested in that music and the way in which people were thinking about it at the time when it at the time when that was recorded to the early 60s then there's a really invaluable documentary which you can just see all of on YouTube now it was made in 1965 by the American filmmaker David Hoffman it's called Bluegrass Roots Roots O-O-U-T-E-S and that's really something. something else. Lots of musical highlights in there. I think my favourite is probably Frieda Lunsford

singing, again, singing her version of East Virginia blues and accompanying herself on the guitar. And what you hear there, what you hear in the recordings of people like the Stanley brothers, is as well as this very affecting kind of vocal music. So you also hear some really extraordinary virtuosity on the banjo, on the fiddle, on the dulcimer, really sort of extraordinary, like almost sort of jazz levels of virtuosity. And some historians and ethno-musicologists will claim that that's because these musicians were actually very heavily influenced by African-American musicians. Others will say, well, no, they don't know.

They didn't have to be influenced by them because they had their own traditions going back hundreds of years. And some people have even argued that those like Irish traditions were themselves influenced by people from Africa and other people who have said, Well, again, they wouldn't really have to be because people have made rhythmic and kind of semi-improvisational music all around the world forever. In fact, that's what human music usually sounds like. So, and I don't know, I don't know the answer to those questions. What I do know is it does have an kind of extraordinary sort of sonic power, some of this stuff.

So it's this kind of music, it's this bluegrass, which really is one of the key sources, which goes into the idea of sort of capital F folk music once it starts. to really become consolidated towards the end of the 30s. But there are other key sources which feed into that from the early 20th century. Now, the mountain music has a real appeal for people, partly because it seems to be the unvarnished expression of the experience and lives of people from certain kinds of working class communities, far away from the great urban and coastal centres in the United States. But there's another key source for folk music, which is much more explicitly political,

much more derived from the industrial heartlands and also the sort of industrial peripheries, really, and from the political struggles which were going on there in the early 20th century. And this is the political music, the kind of protest and more than protest, kind of revolutionary music, which was disseminated by the wobblies, the members of the IWW, the industrial workers, of the world, the great syndicalist organisation, which was so important to radical labour agitation and organisation in the United States in the early 20th century. The great hero, the iconic hero of the IWW, or one of them anyway, is the legendary organiser Joe Hill, not just an organiser,

but a writer and famously a songwriter. Joe Hill contributed plenty of radical songs to the IWWW's little red song books, which they would publish. And, you know, Joe Hill was kind of tragically shot by a firing squad in Utah, you know, you know, as punishment for his aditating activities in 1915. And I think it was only a few weeks before that. I think he was in the, you know, he was in prison, you know, waiting trial or execution. I think when he wrote this song, this was a song dedicated to his friend and comrade Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who was a radical agitator

and among other things was a founding member of the ACLU the American Civil Liberties Union and the song is called Rebel Girl it was published in the IWW Little Red Songbook in 1916 there's been various different recordings of it

you look on YouTube for people singing Rebel Girl your song find some very kind of remarkable and moving music. I think maybe the best-known recording is this one that was recorded in a bluegrass idiom by Hazel Dickens in 1990.

She's a rebel girl, a rebel girl, she's a working class, the strength of this world. From Maine to Georgia, you'll see her fighting for you and for me. Yes, she's there by you. With her courage and pride, she's unequal anywhere.

Joe Hill will be known to many people best from the song, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night. That's based on a poem that was written in 1930 by Alfred Hayes called I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night. And then in 36, it was set to music. Set to music by Earl Robinson. I think just for some, it was for some, you know, New York. youth camp. And it was very quickly popularized, especially because it was frequently sung by

Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson, the great African-American singer, a huge world star at that time, and also, you know, a committed communist. And, I mean, we should probably hear a bit of Robeson singing. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night. as you and me, says I, but Joe, you're ten years dead. I never died, says he. I never died, says he. But what are some of the other sources going into sort of folk music

once it starts to become a recognisable form or set of forms in the 40s. Well, one other key source is the kind of classic tradition of work songs, especially railroad songs, going back to the 19th century, songs that were kind of inspired by or were actually examples of the singing of work gangs. The most famous of those in America is obviously the song John Henry. I'm sure we can get a recording of John Henry, possibly Bart Simpson's, legendary rendition thereof. Da-da-da-da-da-da, wow, they took Bart Simpson to the graveyard, and they buried him in the sand,

oh, yeah, and every locomotive they come roaring by, said their lies in steam like a man. Okay, so all of these different elements, the old-time bluegrass, the radical songs of the IWW, the work songs, the traditional Irish music, these all feed to some extent, you know, in its own right. These all feed into the emergence and sort of consolidation of folk music as a recognisable idiom in the 40s, really at the end of the 30s and into the 40s. And it's important to understand that to a large extent this is a very, this is a deliberate project. It's a deliberate project on the part of key actors like Lomax and like various artists who are mentioned, who are all to varying degrees committed, you know, either

members or supporters or sympathises with fellow travellers of the Communist Party and the communist movement. And it's the communist movement itself really embraces and celebrates the idea of folk music, especially during this period as part of a part of the popular front strategy to build very broad-based social and popular coalitions against fascism. I mean, now this is not entirely, it's not entirely for good reasons. It's partly because the communist, you know, the international communist movement, I mean, Stalin is rejecting and turning away from the kinds of radical modernism and avant-gardeism that were more associated with communism in the 20s. And that's partly because

Stalinism is becoming increasingly anti-intellectual and authoritarian and small-sea conservative in its advocacy for socialist realism in the arts and submission to the authority of the party and its leadership within the movement. But it's not the same. not to say that nothing good came out of all this. And one of the most interesting things that comes out of that moment of communist politics is the active support for and engagement with folk music as an idea. So when folk music really starts to get going and come together as an idea in the late 30s and 40s, what are some of the key elements of it and who are some of the key people practicing it. Well, the first best dimension, the most obvious, historically in many

ways, the most influential is Woody Guthrie. I'm sure most people listening to this will have heard of Woody Guthrie before. Guthrie comes from Oklahoma. He's a singer. He plays guitar and writes and singers songs. And to some extent, the sort of modern idea of the capital S, capital S singer-songwriter is essentially based on the persona of Woody Guthrie. There may be people before that, especially blues singers, who you could say preceded him, but the kind of image of the travelling troubadour with just his guitar, singing simple songs about contemporary life, love and politics. It's Guthrie who sort of popularises that image, at least with certain audiences. So, I mean, where do we start with playing music by Woody Guthrie?

I imagine most people will know his song, This Land, is, your land, you know, in the States, that is still really understood to be the progressive national anthem. I mean, I did fourth and fifth grade at elementary school in the States, you know, many years ago, and we sang this land is your land in school. And there was a really strong sense that, you know, there was this suite of patriotic songs, which included the national anthem, and, you know, America the beautiful, and my country, tis of thee, and this land is your land and like this land is your land is the one that it was like the concession being made to the kind of radical progressive tradition in the states that if you didn't feel comfortable singing

all those songs about war or you know the majesty of the mountains you could at least sing this land is your land it's been covered by many many people the greatest recording of it is of course that by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings which we might have played on the show before I'm not sure songs we I think we should should play a clips of, definitely. I think I'll pick, I'm going to pick three. I hope we've got room for them. So, three of my favourites. Do Ray Me, this is a song about leaving the dust bowl, leaving the parts of the country, like the Midwest and parts of the south and southwest that have been devastated by drought and by the economic effects of the Great

depression, going, looking for work, looking for a future in the urban or coastal regions and above all in the highly prosperous emerging state of California. And being told, look, go home. You know, we don't want you here by the kind of all, by the authorities. If you don't have the Doree me, then California isn't such a garden of Eden, the song says. Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas. Oklahoma, Kansas. Georgia, Tennessee California is a garden of Eden A paradise to live in or see

But believe it or not You won't find it so hot If you ain't got the Doree me Okay another song Really great song to know Is very simple Is this great anti-fascist anthem All You Fascists Bound to Lose.

I love this Well, I'm going to tell you fascists You may be surprised People in this world Are getting organized You're bound to lose You fascist bound to lose And of course

All you fascist bound to lose That's really You know, that was to be sung on the radio Woody Guthrella I mean Woody Guthrie was getting a lot of public exposure On public radio in the 40s

because he was really, he was part of the broad effort by the progressive movement to support the New Deal project and also to counter right-wing propaganda to counter the rise of authoritarian fascism as well as to counter general bourgeois and capitalist propaganda at the time and also part of the propaganda effort to whip up support for a war effort in Europe against the fascist powers. So all your fascist is bound to lose, you know, was a good example of Woody Guthrie's music really being in line with the political agenda of the New Deal administration, which is one reason he got so much public exposure during this period. And finally, just because it's one of my favorites, it'd be great to hear a bit of Columbus Stockade.

in your heart you love another leave me darling not oh mine okay that's Woody Guthrie who else to talk about from this period well one of the few black singers who gets categorised at this time as a folk singer rather than a pure blue singer

although he is also a really important blue singer is Huddy William Ledbetter otherwise known as Leadbelly probably most famous for the song good night irene but another really famous one which I love for obvious reasons is the bourgeois blues and this is lead belly singing about finding himself stuck and alienated in a bourgeois town be my sweet wives and miss bonica run all over that town everywhere they're going up here they will join us down lord and a bushwar town

I got a wishbar blues I'm going to bed and you're all around. Okay, so we've all been there. Another key figure, really fascinating figure from a contemporary historical perspective is Merle Travis, a singer from Kentucky. He's very well known for his song, Dark as a Dungeon, a song about the subjective experience of a minor. But I think in some ways, his most radical song was the, whose 1947 hit 16 tons. You dig 16 tons and what do you get another year older and deeper in debt? Fantastic.

And it's worth reflecting. I mean, this is 1947. By 52, 53, you try releasing records with such an explicitly anti-capitalist message. You're going to get in big trouble. You load 16 tons and what do you get? You get another day lower and deeper and bed. St. Peter, don't you call me? because I can't go.

I owe my soul to the company store. But of all these figures who emerged to prominence in the 40s, probably the most important in terms of kind of organising and articulating the idea of folk music is Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger, who lived a really long life, he only died a few years ago, hugely an influential figure. you know, an organiser of festivals, a collector of songs, an artist, a performer, a card-carrying communist. Seagher's band The Weavers really helped to popularise folk as a sort of popular

commercial idiom in the 40s and then were blacklisted for their communist allegiances and their battle with the blacklist is told in a great book by A Friend of the Show, Jesse Jarno, in a book called Wasn't That a Time? The Weavers, the blacklist and the battle for the soul of america great book and one of the most famous recordings by the weavers one a song they helped to make really famous was a it was a performance of a lead belly song which is sort of based on in the style of an old railroad song and it is called the rock island line so we could hear a bit of that It is a mighty good road.

And the Rock Island Line was covered famously in Britain by Lonnie Donegan. And it became maybe the biggest hit. I think this is around 56, the biggest hit of the Skiffle movement. And Skiffle was a sort of, I guess it was sort of folk music. It was sort of proto rock and roll, a sort of variation of bluegrass that became popular. I mean, it had the presence in the States, but I know it best as a kind of musical craze in Britain in the mid-50s. It involved groups of young people forming bands with homemade instruments, It's been notoriously the famous double basses made from tea chest

and washboards used as percussion instruments. And blowing on jugs. I mean, it was kind of jug band. The idea of the jug band was related to the idea of the skiffle band. And the most famous hit of the Schiffle movement was Lonnie Donegan's version of the Rock Island line. Oh, well, a Rock Island line is a road to ride it. A Rock Island line is a mighty good road.

And if you won't, it got to riding like I find you get your ticket at the station But maybe of more lasting importance than the Skiffle movement, although the Skiffle movement was important because the Beatles kind of first started out trying to play Skiffle before they got more into rock and roll. I mean, before they were the Beatles. But probably more important was, in terms of the history of folk music, around the same time, was the activities of Ewan McColl. Ewan McColl is really the British Pete Seeger. In fact, he ended up marrying Pete Seeger's sister Peggy. And Ewan McColl

come from Manchester, you know, he's an actor, a writer, a folk music collector, a singer. And he's really active, both as a collector and as a performer. And he really is the key figure of the so-called folk revival of the early 50s in Britain

and through into the early 60s, really. This phrase the folk revival is often used, although if you think about some of the history we've talked about already. It's not clear exactly what was being revived. It's not clear there is a sort of, you know, there's a history of topical songs and topical ballads. There's a history of traditional musics of various kinds. It's not clear that any of them, that they constituted a sort of coherent thing you could refer to as folk that could then be revived. But part of the sort of discourse of folk was this projecting back onto the past, a degree of

consistent and coherence. Although, I mean, that's a criticism that's often, made of folk. And I think in itself it's a bit of a naive criticism, actually. It's not like Ewan McColl didn't know that there weren't actually sort of, you know, the equivalent of folk clubs in the 19th century at which people would play, you know, Irish traditional music and topical ballads and what have you. I mean, he knew that perfectly well. Beat Sieger knew that perfectly well. They knew they were sort of creating something as well as recovering certain things. Anyway, Ewan McColl, I think probably the first really famous song. that he popularised is Scarborough Affair. So there's a recording of him singing Scarborough

Affair was released in 1947, I think. Scarborough Affair will be best known to most people in the version recorded decades later by Simon and Garfunkel. Various of commercial, very heavily produced, arguably quite saccharine kind of sound. This, the Ewe and McColl recording is very different. And McCall actually peak her. selected this song directly from a retired minor in County Durham who sang him the song and that he had had had that song passed out to him by older people and nobody really knows how old it is. You know, it might go back a very long way. So it'd be good to hear a bit of that, Ewan McColl's Scarborough Fair.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Time. remember me to one that lives there for once she was a true love of mine and then the Ewe and McConnell in 1950 launches topic records to to release British folk music he popularizes a whole bunch of songs several of which we talked about on the main episode of ACFM about first folk until which this episode is a sort of supplement. I think you're trying to think of a song we didn't talk about on that episode. One of the songs he popularised that I'm really fond of is the

leaving of Liverpool. And leaving of Liverpool, obviously really popular for the past few decades in the Liverpool area, but that's not where it comes from. It was collected from American sailors a few decades before it was popularised by McCollum and loads of other singers. Fare you well, the princess land in stage, River, Mersey, Fare you well. I'm off to California, a place I know right well. And McColl was involved with things like the documentary, movement, the movement in cinema in filmmaking and broadcasting to try to document the lives of ordinary people, which it was obviously allied to the project of, in some ways, to the

project of socialist realism and to a general democratic idea about what culture and what contemporary media should be about and should be used for. One of his most famous songs coming out of that experience is a song called The Shoals of Herring. And the Sholes of Herring, it sounds like it could be a really old sailor's song, a fisherman's song. It's not, it's a song that he wrote after sort of interviewing intensively a retired fisherman about his life. It's a very moving piece of music. It would be good to hear a bit of that as well, the Shoals of Herring. Oh, it was a fine and a pleasant day out of Yarmouth, Arbor I was Feren as a cabin by on a sailing lager for to go and hunt the shows of herring.

So by sort of 1960, it's pretty clear that when you're talking about folk music, you're talking about music which doesn't include many black performers, if any. It's sort of a white music. And from a contemporary vantage point, you know, looking back from 20, it can seem quite odd, quite strange, that this is the case. And, yeah, one can wonder what's going on here. But I think it's important to understand that all of the people I've mentioned, all of these guys that I've mentioned so far, these key contributors to folk music, were at certain times in their lives, and often for a period of decades, they were all either directly involved with anti-racist politics, or they were at least members of

organisations and supporters of organisations. directly involved in anti-racist politics. And of course in the US, by the turn of the 60s, folk music and the folk music scene was becoming directly associated with the civil rights movement. In the UK, the equivalent would have been the association with the anti-nuclear movement, the nuclear movement of a nuclear disarmament. And in the early 60s, you get the development of this famous coffee house scene and they're really, really coming into public prominence of this scene

that's been developing in Greenwich Village, in particular, over the past decade, whereby singers, often singing explicitly political songs, often singing traditional songs, often singing a mixture of the two. They play to audiences in these cafes, where otherwise people might be listening mostly to jazz. And this scene is really heavily associated with the emerging new left, the emerging student movement and the participation of members of the white middle class in the civil rights movement.

And I think it is important to stress that there was genuine participation. So the people who become the sort of stars of that Greenwich Village coffee house scene, people like Joan Baez, people like Phil Oaks, OCHS, Phil Oaks, and most famously Bob Dylan. I mean, most of them did actually go and spend time, you know, on free. freedom rides on demonstrations down in the southern states. So my mum, who was, you know, in her early to mid-teens at the time living in Atlanta, Georgia, her family were all involved in the civil rights movement.

You know, she met Phil Oaks on one of these occasions, for example. Key figures from that moment, as I've already mentioned, would be Joan Baez. We've heard so many men so far on this show that I think we would be good. to hear something by Joan Baez. famous person to come out of that scene, although Dylan gets tired of being a protesting or a folk singer, you know, he becomes fascinated by the mass popularity of the Beatles and the formal musical possibilities of rock and evolves into quite a different kind of artist. Probably the most sort of radical politically and militant of these figures is the aforementioned Phil Oaks. He's most

famous for his song, I ain't marching anymore. We should probably hear a bit of that. the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the early British wars. A young land started growing, the young blood started flowing, but I ain't a merchant anymore. There's a growing kind of relationship here between folk music and what was sometimes just called protest music. And there is a, and there is a sort of, I think, I think it's interesting to think about the concept of protest here. The protest music as it emerges as an idiom, especially around this moment, it's a bit different from

say the songs of people like Woody Guthrie and his contemporaries. You know, those guys are really communists. Those guys are basically calling upon their fellow workers to engage in struggle against their class enemies. The thing about the idiom of folk music, in particular, to be honest, like, you know, the lyrics of people like Dylan, is that it's not really in that vein, although Dylan was seen as completely modelling himself on Woody Guthrie, you know, Dylan's songs are basically appeals to an imagined moral community of liberal America, you know, and an appeal to them to, you know, to be horrified, to be sufficiently horrified by the injustices to which songs like, like Masters of War or the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

or various other protest songs he produces, you know, want to draw attention to. And I think it's worth thinking about that. It's worth holding on to that notion for a minute. Because I think, as I'll say later, to some extent the idea of folk music, as radical music, sort of dies at the moment when the concept of protest really stops making any sense,

especially to young people, because they no longer believe that, you know, they do inhabit the same moral universe as, you know, members of the political class, for example. And I'd say it's probably around sort of 1990 that that shift finally occurs, occurs. So that's what's going on in the States. What's going on back in Britain in the first half of the 60s?

Well, really what's happening with people like Dylan, Oaks, is they're sort of extending to some extent the possibilities of the singer-songwriter model developed by Woody Guthrie. What's going on with folk music, music in Britain is in some ways sort of sonically more radical, kind of more dramatic. So probably the most significant development from the first half of the 60s would be the release of the first album by the Watersons. This is an album called Fire and Ice, released in 1965. It was awarded Melody Maker, the leading music paper of the time. They awarded

its album of the year. For what is mostly an album, it's mostly unaccompanied. vocal singing. And the Water Centre are a group from Hull in Yorkshire. I think they are literally mostly related to each other. And they do this incredible sort of close harmony singing or unaccompanied solo singing in some cases, which at least the claim that seems to be being made by them and their music is that this is a style of music which is ancient. This is a style of music which has been handed down over generations, which goes back into the midst of time, which might be very similar to the kinds of music you would have heard sort of, you know, hundreds of years ago. Those claims have been disputed. I don't really know enough about even the debates around them to comment on

them. I mean, what I know is certainly that's the kind of effect it has on a modern listener, the effect that it had on listeners at the time when this music was released was, well, here is music that sounds like it comes from a time, a place, a world, outside the domain of capitalism, outside the domain of commodity circulation. This is music. People just make for each other, not for money, not for profit, in a way that has been done for hundreds of years

before the capitalist mode of production even really became into existence. So there's a couple of tracks worth hearing from this album, I mean, the whole thing's worth hearing, really. One track would be a really characteristic and famous truck from this album is their rendition of the Hoddy Bears' Berry. kind of medieval Christmas song.

The oldie and the ivy when they are bought full grown of all the trees that are in the wood while the only tree bears a crown. And then one of the most powerful tracks on this album is it's Mike Waterson singing solo, I think. It's a song called John Bardicorne.

And John Bardycorn is a song that evokes the idea of the barley, like the most important grain in many parts of Britain, as a kind of animist spirit. It's a song that evokes the idea that folk traditions carry with them the traces, the collective memory of pre-Christian, you know, pagan ideas about fertility and death and rebirth and ritual. Really kind of powerful and haunting piece of music. their fortunes for to try and these three men made a solemn vowed young barley corn should die so and the next track I'm going to play is something for the year after that from the States and this is a track by the birds the birds are in the mid-60s are developing this very characteristic

folk rock sound synthesizing the kind of music they're hearing in the folk clubs, music they're hearing by people like Dylan, with a kind of rock sound in order to create a very distinctive kind of music. And this is one of those characteristic examples.

This is from their album, Fifth Dimension. This is their recording of the Wild Mountain Time, which was already established as a folk club classic by the time they recorded it. If you will not go with me, I will surely find another to pull wild mountain tide all across the purple heather when you go last year.

Wild Mounted Times a song. It was first recorded, I think, by an Irish singer in the 50s. It seems to be a song that has a history of having been arranged and rearranged from particular elements over the previous century. It's derived from some poetry that was written at the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th century. So it's not like an ancient ballad lost in the midst of time, but it does count, I think, as a piece of traditional music. And as I say, It was established as a folk club favourite by the time the Byrdge recorded it. You know, it's incredibly popular. It's a kind of folk anthem in Scotland, the Wild Mountain Time,

and it's a beautiful song. I used to sing it to my daughters when they were little as a lullaby. So back in Britain, just a year later, you get the release of the first album by the Incredible String Band, a Scottish band, producing a unique sort of psychics. psychedelic folk music. And really this is the moment, I think, when folk music starts to move away from its kind of rootedness in some idea of proletarian struggle or even pre-poletarian peasant struggle. And instead, it starts to explore its kind of psychedelic connotations. You know, I mean, literally, you know, people are starting to get really into psychedelics. People are going out into the countryside. Pastoral imagery is taking on a whole new meaning for people. Whereas the pastoral is associated with the past, with purity and simplicity. You know, once the countryside becomes the place where kind of art students go to trip,

it takes on a whole different set of connotations. It becomes a place of weirdness, a place of magic, a place that's sort of re-enchanted by the psychedelic experience. And the incredible string band are one of the bands that really sort of give voice to that. They use all these musical elements. they use Scottish Reels and Jigs. They use elements from other music around the world. They have this very kind of psychedelic vibe. On their later albums, especially their most famous album,

1968's The Hangman's Most Beautiful Daughter. They get really heavily psychedelic. I think we should hear an album, a track from that first album, The Incredible String Band from 67, a track called The Tree. Then one day, when the world had put me in its two. and my life was just an empty room I went to my tree and I sat there in my gloom and the light was fading dimly

and the sky was crying something else to listen to from 67 from America will be a bit of music from the influential picking guitarist John Farhay And John Farhay is a really fascinating figure, records dozens of albums, influences lots of people. Is he doing folk music? He's doing a kind of modern instrumental guitar music. He draws heavily on Indian Raga, he draws on jazz.

But he's extending and elaborating a finger-picking steel string guitar style, which does come directly out of things like Appalachian music. And he's often kind of considered a sort of folk musician. But it's also there's something very psychedelic about those influences and about the way he extend and elaborate the form. So a good example will be this 1967 track called Night Train and Valhalla. And another long term, kind of over the long terms of influential exponent of psychedelic folk who I kind of put alongside the incredible string band and Fahey would be Vashti Bunyan. Her 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, is one of those records that, you know, not that many people

listened to when it was first released, but it came to be considered very influential on later generations of songwriters and kind of weird folk exponents. The title track from that album has a very kind of ethereal quality and it has this in deliberately self-infantilizing childlike quality which a lot of the British psychedelia does at this time. You think of people like Sid Barrett and this is a really good example of that. Just another diamond day, just a blade of crows. Just another beer of hay and the horse's purse. Okay, but also in the late 60s, or in 1969, 1970, there's two bands release.

Probably they're most kind of influential albums. who are really defining a sort of British folk rock sound. Perhaps most famously, Fairport Convention. There's two albums, both from 1969, on which Fairport Convention really define a kind of British folk rock. They're doing a similar thing to the birds, but they're using multiple British forms, they're using more traditional music, some really old ballads,

to inform the music they're producing. And, of course, Fairport Convention are graced with, the vocal genius of Sandy Denny, one of the great British vocalists. I mean, for me, she's almost like the British Aretha Franklin. She has a really tremendously affecting and powerful voice, a really tragic figure. You know, she didn't survive the 70s. You'll be good to hear the Sandy Denny song from Fairport Convention's album Un Half Bricking called Who Knows Where the Time Goes, a really haunting piece of music, which has a really happy lyric, but like almost everything then he sings it has this very sad and melancholy air about it.

And then it would be good to hear a couple of tracks from Fairport Convention's most famous album, the one that came after this in the same year, Liege and Leif. So one track is, it would be Tamlin. Tamlin is a Scottish medieval ballad about sex and murder, which they use by kind of electrifying the fiddle and adding a kind of rock beat. They turn into this really kind of energetic track, which has this long instrumental stretch at the end, instrumental stretch at the end, which is really, you know, kind of danceable. It's really powerful piece of music, Tamlin. sound out track from that album is this short, very sweet, very sad, but it's an incredibly emotional

piece of music called Farewell, Farewell. So there we go, Sandy Denny, just this incredible sort of liqueen voice. And the other band, alongside Febill Convention, defining what some officinados say is not a folk sound, but an electric folk sound, Steeleispan. So I think we should hear a couple of tracks from Steele Ispan's first album, Hark the Village Weight. And the first. And the first would be a song which really shows off the talents of their vocalist, the great Maddie Pryor, and it's a song called All Things Are Quite Silent. And they use a lot of the old ballads collected by James Child in the

late 19th century, a lot of these really old banners that I do have this very sort of haunting some otherworldly quality, especially when they're sort of partially electrified in the way that the band do. Then this other track I want to hear from that Stelisband album from 1970 is one which is far less ethereal and one which makes their political commitments very clear indeed. This is the Blacklegger minor. The level is a terrible place I rub wet clay in the blackleg space and around the heaps

I run a foot race to catch the black leg miner and divan gang near the cycle mine across the way they stretch your line to catch the throat and break of the spine and the dirty black like a fine man The black leg miner there

A song about hating scabs Absolutely fantastic stuff Then also from the early 70s, from 1972, probably the other great British folk rock album. Lanham Mike Waterson from the Watersons released this very unique, very intriguing record called Bright Phoebus. And the title track from that is a really kind of interesting piece of music. It's using this sort of Nashville sounding slide guitar and this kind of folk and rock elements in a really This is a unique way. It's a lovely bit of music. Bright Phoebus. So what happens in the first half of the 70s with folk music? Well, one of the key developments will be the emergence of the

singer-songwriter as a kind of distinct type of musical performer who isn't really connected that much anymore to any sort of folk music scene or tradition. You could think about people like Van Morrison, Nick Drake, Jackson Brown in the States, Richard and Linda Thompson, after Richard Thompson's left Fairport Convention, are doing kind of very potent kind of British kind of singer-songwriter music. They have a hit with this track called Bright Light in 74. is always worth hearing. But the most important of all these figures would be Joni Mitchell.

I'm not even sure if we should play Joni Mitchell because I'm not sure she ever was really a folk singer, but the extent to which the singer-songwriter as a concept sort of emerges from the folk scene means I think it is legitimate to listen to her, even though even by sort of 71, certainly on later recordings, she's more a jazz singer than a folk singer

in any meaningful sense. But I think kind of audiences really came to her with the idea that she was somehow operating in a phogey idiom. But you can see how far she's sort of going on beyond that, even on this 1971 track. This would be River, a track from her seminal album, Blue. I wish I had a river so long.

I would teach my feet to fly. Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on. Just incredibly potent stuff there. And certainly by the mid-70s, by an album like The Hissing of Summer Lawns, you know, a fantastic record. I mean, all the records she makes in that period and probably all period are fantastic. But by the 75, she's clearly really a jazz singer. but I always want to take the opportunity to talk about Joni Mitchell because I think she's a figure

I mean everybody knows her and everybody knows she's sort of important but I think if you think about her importance you think about how important especially for female musicians and performers the idea of singer-songwriter in has been and still is to this day and you think about how significant she is in really defining that as a distinctive genre and also the fact that no one has it has really come close to doing it as well as her. She's a titanic figure in modern music. She is up there with the Lennon and McCartney's, the James Browns. But she doesn't get talked about in that way nearly as often as she deserves. Why? Well, we all know why, because she's a woman. So other stuff that's going on in the 70s? Well, one thing I've been thinking about,

and one thing I haven't really been able to get a real handle on historically, is this question. And this is something I would like anybody to give any information about they can. And that is, at what point did say the Irish rebel songs really start becoming part of the folk club repertoire? I don't really know the answer to that. What I know is that Irish music's been really important throughout this period for folk music and folk club music. And I know that the Irish rebel songs, songs which mostly have their origins in the struggle for independence from Britain and the civil war that followed in the wake of that in the 1920s, you know, they were sung by people, certainly people in Ireland and Irish

people elsewhere over the course of the 20th century. I haven't seen much evidence that those rebel songs were, say, part of the repertoire of people like Ewan McCall or people in the folk clubs in the 50s or the early 60s, I might just not have seen the evidence. They might have been completely part of that repertoire for all that I know. I also know that there's a growing revival of interest in traditional music, in dance music, in folk music, and in new music using folk and traditional idioms in Ireland and in Scotland during this time,

you know, from the 50s through to the 60s and 70s. There's a growing kind of folk club circuit in Scotland. You know, Billy Connolly starts off life as a folk club singer. And the, but certainly there seems to be a kind of a sense, certainly I have a sense that the Irish rebel songs become more and more important as part of that repertoire. There's some, there seems to be a sort of interchange between the kind of music you might hear in an Irish pub and the kind of music you might hear in an Irish pub and the kind of music you

you might hear in a folk club in places like Britain over this time. And so by the early 70s is a moment when people are really hearing some of these, you know, by that point, fairly traditional kind of Irish rebel songs. And obviously this is connected to the start of the troubles, to the growing kind of tension between our Irish Republicans and the British state and also the political opponents in Ireland, etc. And so one mark of that is the fact that the Wolf Tones, a band named after Wolf Tone, a hero of the Irish National Struggle, had a kind of hit record in 1972 with their recording of Come Out E Black and Tans. The Black and Tans, you know, they were, you know, they were the state police, the kind of imperial police.

And it's a song that goes back to the 1920s to the Civil War. And it's, you know, calling someone a black and tan was to accuse them of being, you know, literally or in spirit, a member of the kind of British occupying force, all those elements of the Irish state, which were collaborating with them during the Civil War. So, you know, this, I mean, this goes back to the period, which is depicted in the Ken Loach film, the wind that shakes the barley, the period when essentially left wing. kind of socialist and communist republicans are fighting sort of bourgeois nationalists and just straightforward sympathises with british unionism for the for the future of ireland and it's a song that evokes explicitly the similarities between the struggles of other colonised peoples around the world and the struggle of the irish against the british empire Come out, chivalagon's hands

Come out and fight me like a man Show your white power you want metal Stout and Flanders Star Al-Ear-Ley-R-A Major run like Calaway From the green and lovely veins I'll kill a shangra

And an interesting figure When we're thinking about music That was popular in the folk clubs Popular in Scotland and Ireland In the folk clubs That occupied an interesting place In the sort of, you know, emerging musical universe.

Interesting figure to mention is this guy Eric Bogle. He was an Australian singer and songwriter of Scottish origin, who wrote a few songs that became real kind of folk club standards. And then later were recorded by people like the Poe's in the 1980s. So the most famous song of his, I think, is a song he would have recorded in 76 called No Man's Land. It's also called The Greenfields of France. And it's a song invoking the horrors of the First World War As a way of making a critique of militarism in general

I see by your gravestone you were only 19 When you joined the glory's fallen in 1916 Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean are a well aim of what I was it slow and have seen okay now there might have been lots of other interesting stuff going on in the late early 70s I don't really know much about it though if there was so I'm going to move on to talking about some things in the 1980s I'm sure I'm skipping over loads of stuff that's important to lots of people

and I'm really sorry but like I said I've only got a limited amount of time that this is increasingly going to become now sort of subjective as well in terms of stuff I remember hearing during my lifetime. So, really important figure to mention. And in some ways, the last figure in a certain kind of lineage of, you know, guitar strumming, political and protesting as it goes back to Woody Guthrie, is Dagenham's finest, Billy Bragg. Billy Bragg, when he released this record between the wars in 1984, it really, seemed to be incredibly distinctive in the kind of soundscape of fat to right pop that dominated

the charts during that year. And yeah, it's an incredible piece of music, an incredibly powerful song about, you know, and it's an incredible that in 1984 of the year of the minor strike, but also a year when, you know, pop music was mostly, not entirely, but mostly kind of becoming increasingly apolitical and increasingly commercial, this, you know, was the top 20 hit records. Really extraordinary. It's also one of very few songs I can sing all the way through and we'll do if I'm sufficiently drunk. I kept the faith and I kept bulging not for the iron fish but for the helping and for there's is a land

with a wall around it and mine is a faith in my fellow man Billy Bragg between the wars I've always felt guilty for making a snide remark about Billy Bragg in the first academic journal article I ever published

I felt guilty I had bad dreams you know I basically made the point that there was something very naive about the implied politics of work like that of Billy Bragg because I was seeing it as kind of protest music in the terms I was describing earlier. Although, you know, that wasn't really a fair critique anyway

because Billy Bragg, you know, he's not a sort of protest singer in the vein of Dylan or even the vein of like the Smiths. You know, most of the Smith songs in the 80s as sort of social protests, they're sort of vaguely complaining about certain aspects of modern existence. You know, Billy Bragg was more self-consciously in the tradition of somebody like Woody Guthr, He's calling on us to engage in struggle against our oppressors.

And there's a similar energy animating the next bit of music I want to hear. And this is from the Pogues. So we mentioned the Pogues, we played them on the main show. The Pogues are kind of extremely unlikely phenomenon of the mid-80s, essentially a punk band but using Irish traditional instrumentation and using a lot of kind of rebel song imagery. tones in their songs were kind of surprisingly successful for a few years in the 1980s and were the first band I ever went to see. And this is my favourite song of theirs from their

album, Rum Sodominy in the Last, is the sickbed of Kuhulan. Kuhunan is a hero of kind of Irish, kind of ancient, epic literature. But in this song Kuhunan is recast as a kind of old-time veteran of the struggles between the wars again, actually, like the heroes of Billy Baggs song. You know, the standout verse from this song for me is always, Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid and you decked some fucking black shirt who was cursing all the years.

The implication is that this is probably someone, probably a Republican soldier who was down fighting in the international brigade in Spain, and then, you know, getting into punch-ups with fascists in Madrid. and the song is a kind of celebration of the kind of the life of that kind of individual it is really striking with both the Billy Bragg song and the Pogue song that at this moment in the mid-80s the moment of the great catastrophic defeats of the left and the Labour movement globally and very strikingly in Britain

that is powerful nostalgia for the heroism of those struggles which produced people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in this. the first place. there's a wave of fairly quite popular kind of singer-songwriters coming out of the States, people like Suzanne Vega, most strikingly Tracy Chapman. And Tracy Chapman is a really sort of intriguing phenomenon.

So her big year is really, I think, 87, 88. She sells huge numbers of records, this African-American woman singing the style of music, which hasn't really been associated that much with black performers. You know, she's strumming an acoustic guitar and she's singing songs, some sort of personal, some political,

this very sort of powerful voice, I'd say, so emotionally powerful. And her most memorable song, you know, the one we should hear a bit of is talking about a revolution, which is just, the chorus is just poor people are going to rise up and take what's theirs. I mean, this is just, you know,

this is explicitly communist sort of anthem. And it's, this is, it's nice. 1988, it's America. It's the absolute high point of Reaganism. You know, George Bush is about to win the election. I guess one way of understanding what's going on at that moment, of course, is that in a certain ways and in ways that have quite, you know, been forgotten by a lot of people now. That year, that moment in the state is a kind of high point for a certain kind of politics. The high point for the politics of the Rainbow Coalition behind Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic nomination. is the closest to get to getting the nomination. And so on a certain scale, in a certain way, actually it's a kind of high point of convergence for politics which draws on the black radical tradition, which draws on the politics of the new left,

which is trying to make that politics popular, is trying to bring it into the mainstream. But as much as it seems in some ways, the music and persona and popularity of Tracy Chapman seems like the kind of culmination of a certain kind of history at that moment. It also feels like its end. I mean, at the time to me, you know, living in Thatcher's Britain in 1988 and seeing hearings of Tracy Chapman on the radio and seeing her on the TV, it all just seemed really unreal. I mean, I spent quite a bit of time in

the States around then as well. And I just, I couldn't connect with it. I guess maybe if I'd been going to places like New York or, you know, Philadelphia or some of the big cities, maybe I would been able to kind of understand what was producing that popularity of, you know, politically very radical music in this folk idiom. But I couldn't really, I still find it very sort of mysterious in some ways. And I guess, as I've just said, it was the culmination of something for some people, but that something was already over for many of us. And it was going to be over for everybody pretty soon. And people are going to rise up and take what are people going to rise up when you can say that

that folk music or music in the folk idiom seems to have this spontaneous politicality. It seems to convey a sense of radicalism and it seems to be a sort of bads of radical identity. And I think there's a few reasons why that all changes around the end of the 80s and the turn of the 90s. There's several reasons.

Well, one is just the changing political climate. The establishment of neoliberal hegemony, if you like, really creates a context in which, on the one hand the idea of sort of protest music just comes to seem pointless I mean to my generation I think it

you know we wanted to go out raving we didn't want to have songs about what was wrong with society because we knew what was wrong with society we saw it happening every day and we were completely convinced that nobody was listening to the songs complaining about it

or no one who could do anything about it was the forces that might have been able to respond to a revolutionary call like Tracy Chapman's were in the process of being defeated and dispersed by neoliberalism, by de-industrialisation, by the defeat of communism in the Soviet Union, by all of these forces converging. So there was just not much point either to protest music or to revolutionary rallying cause. And without being able to fulfil either of those

functions, the kind of radical vocation of folk music ends up being very difficult to fulfil. I think there's something else going on as well that's quite difficult to put our finger on exactly to do with the sort of changing racial and ethnic dynamics of music and music culture. So Tracy Chapman's a really striking figure partly because he's one of very few of black figures in that singer-songwriter tradition, that kind of folk idiom tradition. And I realised I didn't quite get to the point of my analysis earlier of how it was that people doing the seemingly very white music were also the people who were very, very committed to anti-racist struggle, say, in the early 60s. And speculatively, I'd suggest that part of what

was going on at that moment was that exactly these people who were very committed to anti-racist struggle probably had a kind of sensitivity to the fact that what was going on in the wider culture was a great act of cultural appropriation. What was going on was the Rolling Stones were becoming massive stars and were about to become millionaires on the back of ripping off the sound of muddy waters who was never going to become a millionaire. And I think there was a kind of instinctive revulsion and instinctive turning away from those processes, which led people who were themselves very anti-racist to occupy a kind of musical cultural niche in which they were drawing on their own musical traditions, or those of their own communities, rather than just

drawing directly on the widely, the sort of available resource of African-American culture. As by the end of the 80s, the general kind of cultural ecology that everybody's living in, the growth of multiculturalism, the growing sense of the hybridity of contemporary culture, means that that kind of a response, that kind of a response to, the racial dynamics of music and musicals, it doesn't make as much sense. And I guess the sort of, you know, the popularity of Tracy Chapman in a way, you know, marks a moment where all of those dynamics are changing, where people are kind of moving back and forth between different musical idioms much more freely.

Of course, they always had to an extent, you know, there had always been great white jazz musicians. Rock and roll was itself a hybrid form of, you know, honky tonne country and rhythm and blues. but the processes of hybridisation, the sense that the new and innovative kinds of music that were emerging, especially by the early 90s, were all ones which were drawing on a wide range of different traditions. It was techno, which was drawing on the synthetic whiteness of Kraftwerk and the funk of George Clinton. It was drum and bass jungle in Britain, really the first very self-consciously formerly hybrid music. I mean, people on the

the jungle scene were very, very proud of the idea that it was, it wasn't black music, it wasn't white music, it was self-consciously mixing things up. Of course, the two-tone movement about 10 years earlier had tried to do something similar in a very contrived and self-conscious way, but this was something much more organic. And at the same time, there's another element to think about with regard to the sort of changing ethnic dynamics of culture and with regard to some of the issues that we talked about. I've referred several times to the way in which Irish music and Irish politics and Irish struggle to some extent are always nearby and informing the folk music tradition. Now it's important to understand

that up until the early 90s, in Britain in particular, Irishness is a kind of marginalised identity. Irish racism is deeply ingrained in mainstream culture, in political culture, in police culture. You know, there's that line from the novel and film The Commitments the Irish of the Blacks of Europe. I mean, that's really what it was like. And, you know, I remember, you know, Irish friends would be subject to police harassment in the same way that black people were when I was first in London at the beginning of the 90s. All of this changes really dramatically in the first half of the 90s for a bunch of reasons. The Celtic Tiger phenomenon, the growth of the Irish economy, with its adoption of a kind of high-tech.

neoliberal model means that Irish people have got money, they've got jobs. Ireland, in fact, is becoming a place people might even be moving to for work rather than a place people are moving away from, as had been the habitual situation for generations and generations. At the same time, and this is a bit more speculative, this isn't something I can really prove, is right or wrong. I think Irishness starts to take on a symbolic place in the British cultural Imagineary in the first half of the 1990s, which is very different from almost the reverse of what it had occupied previously. In an increasingly visibly multicultural Britain in the first half of the 90s, Irishness becomes the kind of final repository of authentic pure whiteness.

You look at the imagery of the marketing campaigns for Irish chain pubs for kind of Celtic Celtic Musac and things like this. In the first half of the 90s, the image, the image imagery is all these very, very white people with red hair, completely no danger there's any element of black or Asian identity to them. And, you know, Ireland becomes, in the British Imagineery, the westernmost outpost of Europe, like the whitest place in the world. I think, you know, it's really striking a phenomenon and, you know, it's almost forgotten about now in some ways, but there's a huge boom in the first half of the 90s and even a bit later in Britain in these Irish theme chain pubs. Now Irish pubs had always been a phenomenon in Britain,

but Irish pubs up until the 1990s were places where Irish people and their families congregated. There were people you would go and you would hear Irish rebel songs being sung. There would be collections for the IRA. You know, they were not kind of respectable places that nice English people went to. And then the Irish pub gets marketed as like the key sort of high street retail leisure concept of the first half of the 90s, you've got to ask, well, what is it? What is it people want from this kind of imaginary vision of Irishness? Well, it certainly isn't a kind of experience of actual multicultural urban Britain. It's a kind of escape from it. And so I think for younger people, especially people younger than me, people who would have been too young to

go out to hear the pose in the second half of the 80s, I imagine, I haven't asked anyone, But I imagine, you know, you're growing up in the 90s, Irish music, if it means anything to you, it's this incredibly saccharine kind of version of Irish music that you would hear on adverts and you might hear being played in these incredibly plastic theme pumps. So a whole kind of musical tradition, which to some extent has relied upon Irish influence and Irish sources and the kind of, you know, history of Irish radicalism to give it a sense of radicalism, you know, the folk tradition, the British folk tradition, just can't really draw on that in the same way anymore. We can't have the same valency. So this isn't to say that from 1990 onwards, there aren't

radical folk musicians, there isn't great folk music being produced. Of course there is. There's all kinds of great music, great singers and great work. But I think it's what it's sort of significance changes. It doesn't, it no longer seems to be kind of spontaneously recognisable as, you know, a kind of authentically radical musical form. And one of the responses to that, I think, is that is that musicians working one way or another in a folk idiom who want to do something, which is sort of formerly radical, increasingly what they have to do is to accentuate the weird elements of folk, the imaginary elements or the psychedelic elements that people like the incredible string band had accentuated in their work in the late 60s. And in fact, it's arguably

the incredible string band Vashti Bunyan, John Fahey, people like that. And to some extent, the kind of weirder elements of people like Steli Spam that end up being the resource which radical musicians

working in a folk musician are drawing on by the end of the 90s. So at the end of the 90s and the early 2000s, there's the emergence of terms like free folk or freak folk. Dave Keenan, a Scottish music journalist, it's a famous article in the wire,

talking about the new weird America. One of the things he's talking about is the emergence of a so-called free folk scene in the States. Now, a lot of the music that we're talking about here, I mean, it's only folk to the extent that it sort of uses some acoustic instruments and some traditional American instruments. Mostly it's better understood as kind of drone-based psychedelic rock and sort of psychedelic post-rock, most of it. So I don't think we're going to play much of it here.

It's only very tangentially conceivable as folk music. Thinking about people like Animal Collective and Sunburnt Hand of the Man who were cited as kind of key examples at one time. I do think I want us to listen to some bits of music from the past of 20 years ago that coming out of that tradition, coming out of that moment, which are maybe more recognizably drawing on, and playing with the sorts of folk idioms,

but are also, at least in two cases, at least tangentially or directly connected to that free folk, weird folk movement. So one interesting song to listen to would be Joanna Newsom's song from her first album. The song is called The Sprout and the Bean. And Newsom's is harpist. She's very much in the tradition of somebody like Vashti Bunyan, although actually in terms of the...

In terms of the sort of sophistication of the lyrics and some of the arrangements and imagery, you know, she's also obviously influenced as more by people like Janie Mitchell, I think. But it definitely has this kind of child, deliberately childlike quality of somebody like Vashti Bunyan. So that's from 2004, The Sprout and the Bean. the sprout and a bean it is a golden ring it is a twisted string then another track worth listening to much more conventional

not at all weird folk just a kind of modern folk and really just evidence that people are still doing it the british singer bella hardy i think in 2011 she recorded this track It's a track called The Herring Girl. And it is really a deliberate and explicit callback to the tradition of work songs and songs that celebrate working class life and work.

And of course, Herring is inescapability an allusion to Ewan McCall and the shoulders of Herring. But it's still, you know, it's a moving and powerful piece of work. It's from 2011. All you who look down on me with that judgment in your eyes while the jury picks its fate for me I'd have you save your size as a child with no family

I was begging on the street when great fortune came and made me a herring girl And then finally, a really recent track I think this is from 2020 Heather Lee, who was an artist I think she began life mainly as a slight guitarist And she began her career on the kind of free folk circuit.

The stuff she's doing now is, again, you know, would be as much, would be as much describable as kind of ambient music as any kind of folk. But you can still hear in the kind of sonorities and the textures and the voice, the extent to which is to some extent drawing on this folk idiom, but again, in a very psychedelic sort of way. I guess we'll trace my babe.

I guess we can't finish this episode about folk music without making some reference to the the existence of the kind of heinous phenomenon which is Mumford and Sons and various kind of derivative copying artists. I guess Mumford and Sons are really symptomatic of the wider phenomenon of the gentrification of festival culture, to some extent the gentrification of folk, the gentrification of a whole number of things that were once considered to be in some way radical. And maybe this is kind of evidence for another one of the reasons why.

folks sort of stops being in an intrinsically radical form around the early 90s. Because, of course, it's around the early 90s. It's with the election of Bill Clinton as president. That the same generation of people whose political vanguard marched for civil rights against the Vietnam War, they listened to Phil Oaks and Joan Baez, they hung out in coffee shops and strummed acoustic guitars, the professional classes of the baby boomer generation with Bill Clinton become the key figures of the emerging neoliberal technocratic political class. So of course their music is not going to retain the same sense of avant-garde radicality

that it might have had decades previously. And that in some ways the logical conclusion of that process is just festival culture, folk culture, becoming domesticated, sanitised, depoliticised to the point where Mumford and Sons become a plausible possibility. I mean, it really would have just seemed incredible to me when I was a kid in the mid-80s that you'd have a band playing those kind of instruments

that could be so apolitical, in fact, based on the pronouncements of some of their members recently, pretty right-wing. But there we go. This isn't something which is specific or intrinsic to folk music. This is something which is just typical of advanced capitalist culture. Almost everything can get appropriate.

and neutralised. You can think about a figure like Bob Marley and how incredibly kind of mainstream and domesticated he's become in many contexts. So I would say, you know, what remains of folk music, now what remains of folk music's radicalism in kind of contemporary music,

I think it's probably best exemplified by that Heller Lee track. It's kind of weirdness, it's psychedelic, a potential. It still, you know, is really a kind of fascinating contemporary manifestation of that weird enchantment

which artists from, really from the sort of watersons onwards have been playing with. But at the same time, I think that earlier iteration of folk, that classic 1940s iteration of folk, you know, it still retained an incredible power to inspire us,

to remind us of the important of the legacies of struggle which those guys were engaged in and which they sung about. And I think artists like Billy Bragg, who today mainly make it their job to sing those kind of songs and to help us remember that history are still playing a very important role. I think folk music, you know, and the folk music tradition, I think for that

reason, if for no whether it remained an incredibly powerful resource for us to draw on a resource for inspiration, a resource for self-education. I think it's one that's going to retain that radical power and that capacity to inspire us for a long time to come. And that's the end. If you like that, you might want to check out the new podcast I'm doing with Tim Lawrence, also produced by Matt Huxley, which is about the history of music, dance, counterculture. In fact, in an episode we recorded recently, we talked quite a bit about that early 60s New York coffee house scene. So check that out. Hi, guys, this is Matt. Jim forgot to say the name of the show.

It's called Love is a Message. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Thanks, everyone. Thanks to Matt for editing this episode, which will have been quite a lot of work. And I'll see you next time.