The Left and Folk Song

For much of the twentieth century ‘folk music’ was the music of the left in Britain and North America. The most obvious manifestations were (and are) to be found in overtly political song, from the ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ of Woody Guthrie in the 1930s to the Critics Group of 1960s Britain and up to ‘The Imagined Village’ today, fronted by Billy Bragg and Martin and Liza Carthy. These were songs which celebrated the life and struggles of working men and women, although at their best they moved way beyond simple hagiography. They were politically unproblematic, at times simplistic. Their celebration of the working class fitted with the politics of the left, and was reassuring to the usually converted audiences who listened to them.

However, the relationship of the left to ‘folk music’ in general (or traditional or ‘vernacular’ song) is more complex.¹ Folk song has not always been the possession of the left. More normally, especially in mainland Europe, it has grown out of political nationalism. This was also to a degree the case in England. Some historians have argued for a close relationship between new nationalist and imperialist impulses in England in the period 1890–1914 and the collection and publication of folk song as the basis for a new ‘national’ music.² Although this view has been criticized in more recent work, it still has a good deal of point to it.

Nor did the content of much traditional music and song necessarily lend itself to a ‘left’ perspective. A small portion would be offensive to modern ears. A sea-shanty with the lines ‘Who’s been here since I bin gone, but a big buck nigger with his sea boots on’ could still be sung in a English folk club in the 1960s. And it took the women’s movement in the 1970s to show many singers (including me) just how dubious were the sentiments expressed in many innocent-sounding love-songs. But beyond that, the subject matter of most traditional or vernacular songs had nothing at all to do with politics. The ‘big ballads’, the supreme examples of story-telling in the Anglophone repertoire, were more likely to be based on ideas of courtly love, of nobility and even the mystical rather than any concern with the struggles of the poor.

Further as Vic Gammon demonstrates in his extremely interesting and important collection of essays, Drink, Death and Desire, careful examination of song texts within contexts of performance and composition can show many levels of meaning. For example, songs about sexuality are often taken to support a view that plebeian life was sexually uninhibited, at least before the nineteenth century. This view was strongly held by Ewan MacColl along with many other leftist singers and theorists, women as well as men, and is supported by A.L. Lloyd’s hugely influential study Folksong in England (1967).³ However, as Gammon points out, such songs ‘worked in the realm of ideology. Their job was to voice tensions, to work over the contradictions of human life, to mediate, to naturalize . . . but most important, to pass on, often at unrecognised level, messages about appropriate roles in society’.⁴ One does not need to agree absolutely with this argument to appreciate its importance.

The ‘second folk song revival’, which was politically left-wing to start with at least, raised these problems and Ewan MacColl, the subject of Ben Harker’s wonderful ‘life and times’, Class Act, was a central figure not only in that revival but in the attempts to create a theory and a practice which brought together the broad spectrum of vernacular and traditional song with the political ends of creating a ‘people’s culture’.

Ewan MacColl was born Jimmie Miller in Salford in 1915. His childhood was marked by poverty, although no...