DC Share Revival: Evolution of Genré: The Second British Folk Revival

The Second British Folk Revival, spanning roughly 1950 to 1970, repositioned folk music from a static archival relic toward a living expression of working-class identity, regional life, and socialist politics. In 1950, at age 42, A. L. Lloyd—born Albert Lancaster Lloyd on 29 February 1908 in Wandsworth—launched a renewed vision of folk after his celebrated books and fieldwork; he deliberately reframed folk tradition to include industrial labour songs, sea shanties, and miners’ ballads, declaring that Cecil Sharp’s rural antiquarian ideal no longer sufficed. Lloyd’s assertion that industrial songs were now the genuine voice of the people underpinned the movement’s ethos; he once asserted that “more than folklore” his work taught him the class struggle itself.

A watershed occurred in 1950, when Ewan MacColl, formerly of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, was introduced by Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist exiled from McCarthy-era USA. Lomax brought not only archival rigor but a philosophy rooted in international fieldwork; he influenced MacColl’s view of folk not as antiquity but as contemporary solidarity. MacColl began to record for Topic Records—founded in 1939 by the Workers’ Music Association—and in the early 1950s released pieces such as “The Asphalter’s Song,” signaling a new political folk approach.

Peggy Seeger, arriving in London in 1956, became MacColl’s partner in life and revival. Her composition “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (1957) later became a global hit via Roberta Flack. Seeger’s virtuosity on instruments such as the concertina and autoharp combined with her radical feminist politics shaped the revival’s blend of musical depth and activism. Her collaboration with MacColl and Charles Parker produced the revolutionary Radio Ballads (1958–1964), eight BBC documentary–songs including The Ballad of John Axon (1958), Song of a Road (1959), Singing the Fishing (1960), The Big Hewer (1961)—each blending real workers’ testimony with original folk songs. Singing the Fishing earned the Prix Italia in October 1960, affirming the form’s international breakthrough.

From 1964 to 1972, MacColl and Seeger led The Critics Group in Beckenham with Charles Parker. Members such as Frankie Armstrong, Sandra Kerr, Jack Warshaw, Bob Blair and Brian Pearson met weekly for rigorous critique of folk performance, using techniques drawn from Stanislavski and Laban to fuse drama and song. Their annual Festival of Fools pub revues and broadcasts like the Off Limits series to North Vietnamese troops reflected a fusion of art, politics, and song as praxis.

By the mid-1960s, folk clubs multiplied dramatically—from an estimated 36 in 1961 to circa 300 by 1965, reaching “several thousand in the early 1970s” and “one folk club (or more) in every town” by the late 1960s. MacColl noted: “A revival needs a mass base and must involve more than the activities of a few specialists.” Peggy Seeger remembered clubs “springing up and sinking down like mushrooms.” These clubs, often run by committees in pub backrooms, offered egalitarian performance spaces where amateurs and professionals intermingled, and where repertory and storytelling thrived across regional dialects.

Topic Records became the movement’s sonic archive and ideological anchor. Founded in 1939 and operating under socialist auspices, it became financially independent in 1960, thanks to the success of the LP The Iron Muse (1963), a curated panorama of industrial folk songs compiled by Lloyd. Topic’s roster included Shirley Collins, Louis Killen, Ray & Archie Fisher, Frankie Armstrong, Bob Davenport, Anne Briggs, The Watersons, with the Watersons’ debut album Frost & Fire (1965)—produced with Lloyd’s encouragement—becoming a landmark in ritual song revival. Gerry Sharp ran the label’s business until his death in 1972, succeeded by Tony Engle, who guided Topic into the CD era, releasing box sets like Three Score & Ten in 2009 to celebrate its 70th anniversary.

Stylistically, the revival’s early phase featured bare vocals and minimal accompaniment—solo guitar, banjo, concertina—emphasizing lyrical clarity and narrative. From the mid-1960s, innovators like Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, John Renbourn introduced complex fingerstyle tunings, modal jazz influences, and world music textures, coining the term “baroque folk.” While MacColl’s inner circle resisted these experiments as inauthentic, commercial folk-rock outfits such as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle, The Incredible String Band swiftly incorporated these innovations. Critics like Michael Brocken later argued that the revival’s purist ideological rigidity limited its broader cultural reach, even as those hybrid strands expanded folk’s sonic vocabulary.

The revival respected and recorded authentic tradition-bearers from rural England, including Sam Larner (fisherman, 1878–1965), Harry Cox (farmworker, 1885–1971), Fred Jordan, Walter Pardon, and Frank Hinchliffe, who were revered for preserving oral song traditions with minimal external influence—it was they who exemplified the idea of interlocutive, oral authenticity, contrasting sharply with revivalist reinterpretations.

At its ideological heart, the revival framed folk music as class-conscious and regionally rooted. Sharif Gemie observed that revivalists advanced a “patchwork of local communities” singing in their own accents and landscapes, challenging the monolithic English nationalism of earlier revivalism. Lloyd, MacColl, and others prioritized narratives from Lancashire’s coalfields, Yorkshire’s mills, coastal fishing towns, dockworkers in Merseyside, and South Wales, all sung in vernacular that emphasized place-based identity over sanitized folkloric abstraction.

The Second British Folk Revival became far more than music. It was a movement where A. L. Lloyd’s industrial folk scholarship, Ewan MacColl’s theatrical-politicized practice, Peggy Seeger’s feminist musical activism, Charles Parker’s documentary realism, and the grassroots network of hundreds of folk clubs across Britain forged an enduring folk coalitional infrastructure. It generated iconic recordings, formalized critique through The Critics Group, broadcast working people’s voices nationally with Radio Ballads, developed stylistic hybridity through “folk baroque”, and institutionalized folk’s political potential via Topic Records. The Revival’s Heritage extended well beyond its core period: Topic remained active into the 21st century, children-of-the-revival artists like Eliza Carthy, June Tabor, and Waterson:Carthy sustained its spirit, and major festivals—Sidmouth Folk Festival (est. 1955), numerous club scenes—continued to propagate its blend of tradition and radicality. In essence, folk became not relic but resistance, not rural myth but regional memory, not museum piece but mobilizing power—and remains so to this day.

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Evolution of Genré: The Second British Folk Revival

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