Compiling the Tradition: Topic Records' The Voice of the People

The Voice of the People (vols 1-20), 1998. Topic Records CDs (20) TSCD 651-670. Notes by Reg Hall.

In my last set of reviews for the Journal of American Folklore (Winick 1997), I argued that the English folk label Topic Records was participating in a revival of the 1960s and 1970s British folk revival by reissuing on CD many classic recordings of that period. I also mentioned another Topic project, then a plan for the future, now a reality. Entitled The Voice of the People (see discography for complete listing), this set of CDs can be seen as part of a different but related process. Since the folk revival of the 1960s and the tradition from which it grew were both, by the last years of the twentieth century, historically distant creative movements, both were subject to being reimagined for the digital age. Just as revival products could be reissued as classic individual releases or compiled into sweeping summaries of the revival itself, so too with products of the tradition. The Voice of the People, intended as a representative sample of field recordings of British and Irish folk music, is Topic's most ambitious project of reissues featuring traditional performers.

According to Topic Records President Tony Engle, the idea for The Voice of the People came about when Topic was denied permission to reissue the Caedmon LP set The Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales on compact disc (Engle 1996). (These influential LPs had originally been released on the Caedmon label in the United States and licensed to Topic Records for release in Britain.) Engle conceptualized The Voice of the People realizing that, with the resources of its own back catalogue and its contacts in the community of collectors, Topic was in a position to create a better and more representative series. Like the Caedmon set, it would present some of the greatest singers and performances of the tradition; it would be organized by theme, richly annotated, and lovingly produced. But it would be larger in scope and more thorough in its coverage.

Released in 1998, The Voice of the People met many of Engle's goals. It is surely the best, most significant, and most complete CD anthology of traditional English, Irish, and Scottish music on the market, easily surpassing the three British and Irish discs in Rounder's World Library of Folk and Primitive Music on many counts, and also eclipsing the old Caedmon LP set, of which Rounder has so far reissued three volumes. Other available anthologies (like Topic's own excellent Hidden English) are mostly single-disc affairs that can't compete in scope. Still, The Voice of the People is not without shortcomings, and below I will touch on its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

The Voice of the People is startlingly large: twenty CDs and over five hundred tracks. It is hard to make generalizations about this much music. A frame for understanding it is the booklet's statement, written by series compiler Reg Hall, on the tradition and this anthology's attempt to represent it. The essay boils down to this: Hall tried to pick the best available recordings of singers and musicians he considered traditional, and to arrange them in an interesting way. The most important step in understanding what this anthology includes, then, is learning what Hall considers "traditional."

The biography of Hall in the booklet mentions his "radical views" on folk music, so we might expect something iconoclastic. Instead, we get something tried and true. Sensibly cautious of sweeping generalizations, Hall identifies the main population to which traditional musicians belong (the rural working class) and the main method by which they learn songs and tunes (by ear) in exactly the way an academic folklorist would—today or thirty years ago. Hall's more radical views, too, are essentially standard for today's folklorists: boundaries between traditional and...