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The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs Ed. by Steve Roud and Julia Bishop. London: Penguin, 2012. lxi + 542 pp. Bibliog. Discog. Indexes. ISBN 978-0-141-19461-5. £25.00.
It is fifty-three years since The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs first appeared and - no doubt reasoning that the publisher is unlikely to be demanding yet another follow-up in half a century's time - Steve Roud and Julia Bishop have taken this opportunity to supply, not merely a songbook, but a definitive review of the subject. Their aim is to illustrate current thinking on traditional singing and repertoire with a selection of songs that were widely performed by ordinary people. The fact that a book of songs that folk actually sang is a near-revolutionary concept says a lot about previously published collections: popularity in its usual sense was never a qualifier for Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads·, Cecil Sharp applied powerful filters to his published material; A. L. Lloyd and Ralph Vaughan Williams, editing that first, influential Penguin collection, chose, among many classic songs, more than a few that were scarcely visible in tradition and occasionally downright eccentric. There's no such capriciousness here. Roud and Bishop have judged their songs' popularity by the number of discrete citations in Roud's indispensable Folk Song Index and, having identified the top three hundred, whittled those down to 151. The songs are prefaced by fifty pages of introduction and followed by almost 150 pages of notes on the historical, textual, and musical characteristics of each song, heavy on detail but written with a light touch. This is a substantial work.
Having paused to admire the striking design, a lowering equestrian woodcut printed directly on to the board covers, the reader will search the Contents page in vain for a list of songs - a flaw the editors have acknowledged. Roud's General Introduction is an excellent summary of the characteristics and social history of the kind of songs presented here, coupled with an account of the early collectors, and the role of the 'second revival' in blurring the concept of 'folk song' so as to render it virtually useless. He attempts, nonetheless, to provide a workable definition based on face-to-face transmission down generations, quoting without major demur...