FOLK SONG IN CUMBRIA: A DISTINCTIVE REGIONAL REPERTOIRE (original) (raw)
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Traditional songs are deeply rooted in place; those which they describe and those in which they exist and live. Folk song can define and make sense of their surroundings in highly personalised ways as singers use geographic associations and identifications to express feelings and beliefs about places and what happens in them. Specific places may be cited as evidence of the perceived authenticity of a song, while a sense of locality, of belonging to a place, can bestow legitimacy on a singer. However, folk song can also be a vehicle for expressing dispossession and displacement. This is complicated further by past collectors and scholars’ uneasy relationships with landscapes and origins, rural and urban spaces. Drawing upon seasonal songs, ballads, songs of exile and singers’ testimonies, this paper will examine how folk song’s perceived authenticity is intricately yet troublingly bound up with landscapes and localities.
Context and Loss in Scottish Ballad Tradition
Western Folklore, 1986
Field research undertaken since the 1950s into the singing traditions of Scottish travelling people (also known as tinkers, and sometimes associated with gypsies) has confirmed the complexity of oral/literary relations while affirming the omnipresence of creativity in ballad singing. I argue for a 'freeze/thaw' theory of ballad transmission that emphasizes the creative role of the individual singer in absorbing and remaking the materials of a prior tradition. The article is accompanied by a response by folksong scholar Eleanor R. Long. A revised version of the article was reworked as chapter 6 ('Context and Loss') of my 1999 book 'Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature'.
Folk for Art's Sake: English Folk Music in the Mainstream Milieu
2009
The English folk arts are currently undergoing a considerable resurgence; practices of folk music, dance and drama that explicitly identify themselves as English are the subjects of increasing public interest throughout England. The past five years have seen a manifold increase in the number of professional musical acts that foreground their Englishness; for the first time since the last 'revival period' of the 1950s and 60s, it is easier for folk music agents to secure bookings for these English acts in England than Scottish and Irish (Celtic) bands. Folk festivals in England are experiencing greatly increased popularity, and the profile of the genre has also grown substantially beyond the boundaries of the conventional 'folk scene' contexts: Seth Lakeman received a Mercury Music Awards nomination in 2006 for his album Kitty Jay; Jim Moray supported Will Young’s 2003 UK tour, and his album Sweet England appeared in the Independent’s ‘Cult Classics’ series in 2007; i...
The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts
2014
Preface xv singers sometimes experience in recalling words in the absence of a tune (and there is some evidence from neuroscience for the synergy of the two things in human memory)-there is still an absence of a critical vocabulary that would convincingly facilitate the discussion of an integrated whole. Ballad words belong ultimately to the domain of language, and ballad melodies to the domain of music, yet it remains unclear to what extent those two domains really can be thought of as precisely equivalent-as both belonging, as it were, to a single grand domain of Saussurean langue. Versions of some of these chapters have been aired as published articles or as presentations, but all have been rewritten for this volume in order to integrate them into the book, to bring them up to date, and, as far as possible, to avoid unnecessary repetition. Versions of chapters one, five, six, and seven, respectively, appeared in the journals Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture, Twentieth-Century Music, Variants, and Folklore, and I am very grateful to their editors and copyright holders for permission to reuse the material (full bibliographic details are cited at the beginning of the respective chapters). A version of chapter four was to have been published in Estudos de Literatura Oral but has not appeared at the time of writing. I am especially grateful for the insights and enthusiasms of members of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, the Folklore Society, the Kommission für Volksdichtung, the Traditional Song Forum, and the Editorial Board of Folk Music Journal, who have all indirectly contributed to this volume. Likewise the readers for Open Book Publishers, who made some valuable suggestions which I have incorporated. This is the place, too, to thank Alessandra Tosi and Bianca Gualandi at Open Book Publishers for their professionalism and enthusiasm. Special thanks go to the J. M. Carpenter project team-Julia Bishop, Elaine Bradtke, Eddie Cass, Tom McKean, and Bob Walser; Malcolm Taylor and everyone at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library; my co-editor on Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America, Steve Roud; and Brian Peters, for the late nights and ballad discussions. It is a privilege and pleasure to work in a field where people still uphold the human values of friendship and cooperation. All of them have done their best to keep me from straying too far from the scholarly straight and narrow. All errors that remain are, of course, my own stupid fault.
ON 14 MARCH 2005, THE BRITISH MP DAVID BLUNKETT delivered a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research entitled 'A New England: An English Identity within Britain'. As indicated by the title, the theme was the necessity of negotiating a place in which English people could maintain pride in their cultural institutions without running foul of the multicultural cosmopolitanism that forms such an integral part of the contemporary social climate in Britain. Besides extolling the expected virtues of football, pastoral scenes, and even fox hunting, Blunkett listed music as an institution in which the English should demonstrate great satisfaction:
Traditiones, 2009
This essay considers how the song culture of South West Scotland is influenced by that of Ireland. The author's sources include the observations of modern cultural experts Phyllis and Billy Martin, and Nick Spencer. These are set alongside quotations from nineteenth century broadside ballads, which offer historical context. The author reviews social and economic connections between the two areas, and attempts to identify musical influences from Ireland on South West Scotland, from the 1950s onwards. In addition, she discusses ethnic stereotyping as it features in the area's song culture.
Identifying the English: essentialism and multiculturalism in contemporary English folk music
Ethnomusicology Forum
Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a growing concern with indigeneity. A conceptual alternative to the discipline's long-standing preoccupations with diaspora, indigeneity is frequently characterised through a narrative in which 'native' groups assert their identity in opposition to an invading-historical or contemporary-oppressor. The recent explosion of interest in the expression of an English identity within contemporary, multicultural Britain offers a very different narrative. Amid wider public celebrations of Englishness, and popular concerns about immigration, UK devolution, EU federalisation and US-led globalization, a resurgence has taken place in the profile of specifically English folk music and dance since around 2000. The last ten years have seen an emerging movement to reclaim Englishness by the political left, yet the folk arts pose specific problems for such a project-namely, the reification of nostalgia for a rurality that is necessarily pre-multicultural. Through examining some case studies of the current English folk resurgence, this paper will discuss how contemporary English folk artists (the majority of whom share left-of-centre politics) attempt to negotiate Englishness in relation to their multicultural and multinational British context.
The Aural and Moral Idylls of “Englishness” and Folk Music
Symbolic Interaction, 2017
The idea of "Englishness" is explored as an historical social construction that is subject to ongoing negotiation. Important features of "Englishness" are embedded in the sacralized symbolism of the "rural idyll," which represents traditional English values. "Landscapes" and "soundscapes" are utilized to construct personal and national identities in periods of "revivalism." By viewing English folk music through an interactionist framework, responses to the music build upon earlier collective works that have shaped traditional song. "Englishness" is problematized as either an inclusive, or exclusive, identity. Ideational artifacts thus provide a foundation for social action.