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The British Folk Revival, 1944-2002. By Michael Brocken. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xii, 236 p. ISBN O7546-3282-2. $29.95 pbk.] Discography, bibliography, index.
The folk music revival following World War II has come under considerable scrutiny in the last few years. Monographs by Robert Cantwell ( When We Were Good: The Folk Revival [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]) and Ronald D. Cohen (Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 [Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002] ) chronicle the American experience, but not until Michael Brocken's The British Folk Revival, 1944-2002, has there been a similar broad view of the second British folk music revival.
From the very beginning, Brocken makes his prejudices and point of view quite clear. As a youngster in the 1960s, he found himself drawn towards the music of Americans Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and the folk-rock band, the Byrds. But upon his increased involvement with the British scene of the time, he immediately found himself confronted in the 1960s British folk clubs by the dichotomy between the popularized and admittedly commercial folk style he had come to treasure, and the severe authentic approach which required that all folk music of value be strictly British, or political in nature, or from the past. This ultimately leads to Brocken's thesis, which simply stated is this: "The needless polarisation that opposes the authentic to the commercial has stultified growth [in the British Folk Revival] in all but the most progressive areas of the folk commercial sector."
Brocken's argument begins by discussing the early revivalists, Cecil Sharp in particular, noting that Sharp made a clear distinction between popular music and folk music while at the same time working to popularize traditional British folk music through published arrangements, or "recontextualizing"-suggesting that from the very beginning, the British folk music revival had perhaps done something dishonest. Brocken places Sharp's work along with efforts by Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and George Butterworth in a larger nationalist context where the interest in folk music played a role in both patriotic and anti-urban movements. After World War II, the revival, still based on the conservative view of folk music as an inherited tradition, turns more political. Here, Brocken...