The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945-1980 (review)

This book is part of the new Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series, which, as Derek Scott points out in the General Editor's Preface, is intended to expand the literature on popular music, as well as to recognize the study of such music as a vital part of academic scholarship. Importantly, the series acknowledges multiple methodologies inspired by current theoretical work in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology, and sociology. Focusing on popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Scott explains that the series will be wide ranging in its scope, embracing music that is 'high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional'.

The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945-1980 follows this mandate in its emphasis on music in social and cultural contexts, blended with historical trends in the middle of the twentieth century. In the book's Introduction, Gillian Mitchell raises a number of crucial issues related to the folk music revival movement, which, we are told in the first sentence, arose 'essentially' in the 1940s and reached an 'apex' in the mid-1960s (p. 1). Mitchell's contention that the folk music revival has been a continuing source of fascination for scholars and musicians is true, especially given the extensive and varied attention to historical, social, and musical perspectives of folk music in the second half of the last century. Such retrospective studies often seem to be motivated by personal experience: 'being there', or at least being in a position to talk to individuals who were 'there', enables performers and authors, including this one, to enrich folk music narratives.

Other important issues raised in the Introduction are related to embedded difficulties involved in comparing the United States and Canada: these include notions of history with emphases on theories of nation and nationalism, historic and current understandings of folk music, and the processes of folk music as a construct of different kinds of identity. In tandem with aspects of the book's critical apparatus set out in the Introduction, the author follows what is essentially a historical trajectory in her discussion of the folk music revival in North America. The dual focus of the book—the folk music revival in the United States and Canada—is one of the book's strengths, but it also presents problems, some of which are articulated by Mitchell at various points throughout her text.

In the first chapter, 'Defining the People's Songs: National Identity and the Origins of the North American Folk Music Revival to 1958', Mitchell examines the origins of the folk music revival, focusing on the contributions of a selection of important well-known sources, such as Francis James Child, John Lomax, Benjamin Botkin, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Pete Seeger (all USA), and Helen Creighton, Marius Barbeau, and John Murray Gibbon (all Canada). Mitchell emphasizes that this background coalesced around certain social, cultural, and musical notions of the Folk, including ideas of 'Regional America' (i.e. the South and Midwest) and the 'Urban Left', leading to a 'Great Boom' in the 1950s.

This chapter contains important historical information and sets the stage for what comes later in the book. That said, there are some shortcomings on the Canadian side of this part of the story. For example, the interpretation of Helen Creighton's work as ultra-conservative and Child-driven with respect to interpretations of authenticity in folk music, a position articulated by the historian Ian McKay in his oft-cited book (The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montréal and Kingston, 1994)), could be balanced with other interpretations of Creighton's work, notably that of the folklorist Clary Croft (a performing musician and disciple of Creighton), who wrote...