Folk Music and Modern Sound

Electric Folk Music in Britain

Electric Folk Music in Britian A. L. Lloyd FROM NATCHEZ to New Guinea, all over the world, it seems to be the destiny of folksong to be changing from a domestic and ceremonial music for insiders into a public performance music for an audience including outsiders, perhaps comprised entirely of outsiders. Technological change means changes in society, and that means changes in culture, too, including folksong. So the function of folksongalters;some bits become redundant and get lost, especially the ceremonial songs and those accompanying obsolescent work processes. Other bits assume a dominance they didn't have before, especially the shorter lyrical songs, love songs and such, dealing with private emotions. A folksong repertoire comprises an assembly of tunes and texts performed in certain styles and in conditions of change it seems that it's the styles that are the most fragile, the most open to transformation. When you talk to people obsessed with notions of authenticity you find, more often than not, it's really style that they're talking about. In countries where folksong traditions survive best among rural communities, industrialization means a crisis in what 14 Electric Folk Music in Britain 15 outsiders consider as the authentic. Old ways of performance become unsatisfactory to communities whose lives are taking on new shapes and new tempos. It's a venerable process, in fact. We forget that folk music has its own history as surely as art music has. Folksongs have been changing all the while. Otherwise in the Anglo-Saxon world we'd still be singingmelodies based on a 3-note scale and banging a couple of sticks together as an accompaniment. Innovation is nothing new. We all know those folksong purists, and if they'd been on the go 2000 years or more ago, imagine their consternation when the bagpipe first appeared on the scene—two voices from one instrument; they'd have said "Unauthentic! A violation of tradition!" So traditions have been changing all the time. The only difference between then and now is that nowadays the changes are more drastic and they happen faster. It's a process that involves pluses and minuses, like most changes. As folksong becomes more and more a matter of public performance, it tends to gain in surface brilliance and to lose in true emotional depth. It's a dilemma that's worried the minds of many people caught up in the folksong revival, described by Kenny Goldstein a short time ago, when a sizeable proportion, especially of young people, feel that the panic and emptiness of so much pop music is, in the long run, poor fare, and they look to the values of the old folksong tradition for a bit more nourishment . But in present-day circumstances, when music is made specifically for listening to instead of as a means of getting things done, the question of style, of presentation, comes to the forefront. Some revivalists, not wantingto upset things too much, opt for a style that closely resembles, even imitates the style of past societies. At the other end of the spectrum, some bold spirits feel that modern electronic treatments allow songs to speak more clearly to present-day audiences: firstly, because electric music is the popular prestige music of the day, to which the musical ear of millions is tuned; and secondly, because amplification means that it is within the power of a 16 T H E A N G L O C O N N E C T I O N mere quartet or quintet of good musicians to convey a degree of elation or terror that's far beyond the power of most symphony orchestras, and to do so without takingthe music away from the social class that created and carried that music in the past. It's a hazardous venture, of course. But in Britain it was our good fortune that severalmusicianswho were tempted into the electric field were people who, through their experiences in the more modest regions of the folksongrevival, had acquired a genuine respect for the melody and poetry of traditional folksong. The tendency to transport folksong lock, stock, and barrel into the world of electronics really began during the latter part of the 1960s, and the first big "all-electric, all-folksong" concert was presented in London in 1969 by the FairportConvention Band, led by a gnomelike and somewhat gnomicfiddler , Dave Swarbrick, with a sweet, plump lady...