Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England, 1945-65

Julia Mitchell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350071230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

The English folk revival cannot be understood when divorced from the history of post-war England, yet the existing scholarship fails to fully engage with its role in the social and political fabric of the nation. Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England is the first study to interweave the story of a gentrifying folk revival with the socio-political tensions inherent in England's postwar transition from austerity to affluence. Julia Mitchell skillfully situates the English folk revival in the context of the rise of the new left, the decline of heavy industry, the rise of local, regional and national identities, the 'Americanisation' of English culture and the development of mass culture. In doing so, she demonstrates that the success of the English folk revival derived from its sense of authenticity and its engagement with topical social and political issues, such as the conflicted legacy of the Welfare State, the fight for nuclear disarmament and the fallout of nationalization. In addition, she shrewdly compares the US and British revival to identify the links but also what was distinctive about the movement in Britain. Drawing on primary sources from folk archives, the BBC, the music press and interviews with participants, this is a theoretically engaged and sophisticated analysis of how postwar culture shaped the folk revival in England.

1

The Pub and the Beeb: Structural Foundations of the English Folk Revival

Introduction

Grassroots cultural movements rarely occur in a vacuum; they require effective organization and support at the local, regional and national levels to succeed. The English folk revival was no exception; it was driven and supported by a vast framework of ‘folk institutions’. These were the primary social structures of a locally and regionally vibrant movement, but they also, significantly, provided the essential means of connection between the English revival and its American counterpart – as artists, critics and fans shared music, news and debates back and forth across the Atlantic. Through dedicated networks of individuals, societies and media outlets, a folk community was created and nurtured in England, self-consciously conceived separately from the corruptive cultural influence of mainstream popular music.⁶⁷ Clubs, festivals, record labels, radio programmes, magazines and periodicals, local folk centres and societies – all provided an important foundation for the English folk movement during the postwar period. American journalist Robert Shelton remarked on a visit to Britain in 1966 that the country had seen ‘a great increase in total audience as well as a concomitant rise in the number of recordings, periodicals, clubs and radio-television shows devoted to the shades of folk song. British folk fans are disputatious on how the music is to be performed and enjoyed, and their debates about traditional versus pop-style range freely but with a stronger base in philosophy than generally encountered in the United States’.⁶⁸

This chapter will examine how the English revival created its own pseudo-socialist ‘public sphere’, focused on amalgamated ideologies of cultural community, left-wing politics and ‘working-class values’, no longer located in the bourgeois Salons of Jürgen Habermas’s famous study, but in the local pub, working men’s clubs and the converted music halls more closely associated with Richard Hoggart’s.⁶⁹ It will establish the organizational and infrastructural elements of the English folk revival, introducing and analysing many of the underlying ideological and philosophical tenets of the movement as it grew and developed.

The folk club

The English folk revival was heavily dependent on, and strongly identified with, a vast system of folk clubs and societies, located in communities large and small throughout the country; these provided the foundation, the literal building blocks, of the movement. English folk clubs were often located in the back or upstairs rooms of a local pub, which helped to maintain the revival’s small-scale, communal character, even as an ascendant commercial interest in folk music threatened to squash the grassroots feel. Historians and folk singers Frankie Armstrong and Brian Pearson have emphasized the fundamental importance of these clubs to the success – and unique atmosphere – of the revival in England:

For its physical base [the revival] developed the folk club, an institution unique to these islands, housed almost without exception in the back room of a pub. Run by enthusiasts with no thought of commercial profit, the folk club concept has proved very durable, filling an empty niche in what is traditionally a key social meeting place for the community. The pub room has given the revival a secure base from which to operate, available at minimal cost and located just where people customarily go to relax. It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of the pub, for good or ill, in shaping the British revival. The absence of a comparable institution in the USA, for example, accounts for many of the differences in the history of the folksong movement in the two countries.⁷⁰

As Armstrong and Pearson have suggested here, there was no real equivalent in the American case to the English pub-based folk club, a fact often noted by English folk revivalists in an attempt to distinguish the movement from its American cousin. Singer Joe Boyd noted that ‘[t]he clubs in England were completely different to folk venues in America – pub assembly rooms rather than coffee houses. They were not run on a professional basis, there was no PA at all and no stages in most of the rooms.’⁷¹

In the United States, the postwar folk movement had been born in the ‘coffee shops’ of Greenwich Village, and spread eventually to Boston’s Cambridge Square before moving on to the West Coast.⁷² Like the folk clubs in England, these establishments provided a local framework for a national movement, but the coffee shop phenomenon, as it related to folk music, was more of an ephemeral development than the English clubs – which were housed in established local pubs, places which had existed long before and which would likely remain long after, the folk boom. In the United States, businesses grew around the popularity of folk music, in locations that were not necessarily already part of the local community, and – many English revivalists suspected – were far more focused on profiteering than providing a showcase for song traditions.

At the time, and subsequently, folk musicians in England have emphasized the fundamental importance of the public-housed folk club to the uniqueness and longevity of their revival, stressing the significance of maintaining a true community spirit – implicitly differentiated from the commercially enterprising American folk club-coffee houses. English folk singer and Melody Maker contributor Steve Benbow argued in 1964, ‘The strength (or weakness) of the British folk song movement is that it doesn’t care if there is a commercial boom or not. Its roots are local rather than national; its strength is in the folk song clubs, not the hit parade.’⁷³ Meanwhile, Shelton noted how the pub-based folk club contributed to the strength of the English revival despite the movement’s relatively small size, writing,

The extent of the British folk-music revival may seem minuscule in comparison with the American boom because of the country’s smaller population and area. But there are other actors which make the British revival seem even deeper than the American … The clubs meet weekly, often in a room adjoining a pub and the meetings have an atmosphere of sociability and mutual learning that few American folk cabarets or coffeehouses enjoy.⁷⁴

Because pubs were already integral to communities large and small throughout England, they were the natural focal points for a burgeoning grassroots movement.

Many primary incarnations of later folk clubs had pre-dated large-scale interest in folk music, often previously housing skiffle or jazz clubs; the growth of new folk clubs within public houses came out of necessity – economically, spatially and ideologically. The folk clubs offered the opportunity for audience members to sing alongside other amateur singers and professionals. Here we have a telling detail which illuminates a significant distinction between the concurrent revivals in England and the United States, not least in the minds of the English revivalists: the English revivalists were much more interested in – and were even at times quite militant about – maintaining a local, amateur, grassroots quality to their movement.

Despite underlying anxieties about the size and scope of the movement, from the late 1950s onwards, the folk club scene in England developed exponentially. By the early 1960s, it was an undeniable phenomenon. Melody Maker noted the recent, sharp increase in folk clubs in a March 1963 issue: ‘This is getting to be serious. New clubs at Hull (Folk Studio One), Matlock Training College, the Club Baltica, Manor Park, Kirkcaldy, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, Twickenham – where the Singers’ have opened up on Wednesdays.’⁷⁵ Louis Killen, a member of the folk group the High Level Ranters, and founder of the Newcastle Folk Club, also commented on the meteoric rise of folk clubs in the late 1950s and early ’60s: ‘When I started Folk Song and Ballad in Newcastle in 1958 there weren’t twenty folk clubs in the whole country, and when I left for the States [in 1966] there were maybe three hundred.’⁷⁶ By 1962, A. L. Lloyd was observing with satisfaction that there had been a ‘huge growth of evening folk song clubs, several with memberships running into the thousands’; he noted further that these clubs were often committed to promoting traditional folk styles, where ‘[a]uthentic folk singers (let’s avoid such patronizing labels as “ethnic” or “field” singers)’ could be introduced to audiences throughout the country.⁷⁷

The January 1962 issue of Sing magazine featured an evocative illustration of the burgeoning folk club scene in one particular region, Tyneside, with the Ranters’ Folksong and Ballad club front and centre: ‘Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’s folksong club, which meets every Thursday night in the city’s Liberal Club – Folksong and Ballad – is unique among clubs which form the backbone of the folksong scene in this country. It is a club formed and run by revivalists in a part of the country where the tradition is still very much alive.’⁷⁸ Singer Anthea Joseph argued that the richness of the tradition on Tyneside had given the Folksong and Ballad club ‘a pretty wide scope, for not only is the native Northumbrian tradition around them but there are large numbers of Irish and Scots, and even a sprinkling of Southerners, who have settled in the industrial belt along the “coaly Tyne.”’⁷⁹ Joseph also emphasized the club’s commitment to presenting local talent, noting that guests had recently included the Elliott family of Birtley (a mining village located approximately 10 km Southeast of Newcastle), ‘who took over the club for half an evening with their songs, games, and stories’; they were joined by Foster Charlton and Colin Caisley, two Northumbrian pipers. She described these guests as ‘all local people’, claiming that ‘there are plenty more around to draw upon, though the club hopes to bring to Newcastle some of the best singers from outside the area.’⁸⁰ In fact, many of the key groups and figures within the revival established their own clubs: apart from Ewan MacColl’s Ballads and Blues Club, for instance, the Spinners of Liverpool had also established their own, very successful, folk club at Gregson’s Well; from the biggest centres and groups to the most humble, this pattern was repeated throughout the country.

A tiny advertisement in the September 1962 issue of Sing promoted the Elliott family’s new club in Birtley, highlighting its very local flavour: ‘the Elliott family … have set up the Birtley Folk Song and Ballad Club, at the Red Lion Inn on Wednesdays. Anyone who has heard the record and read [Ewan] MacColl and [Peggy] Seeger’s account of collecting in that area will not be surprised to hear that the whole membership is the “talent” and the “residents.” Folk fans are invited to spend an evening with the Elliotts and their friends. The club’s secretary is Doreen Henderson (nee Elliott) who lives at 1 The Avenue, Birtley.’⁸¹ The previous April, an excellent account of the founding of another regional folk club, this time in Southampton, appeared in Sing, written by local journalist John Mann: ‘A few friends and their friends turned up to constitute the public supporting the local folk song revival. As for performers, those interested numbered two: one a middle-aged housewife who knew the name Burl Ives and had sung Greensleeves in the local Women’s Institute Choir, the other a girl with a guitar who didn’t like singing on licenced premises.’⁸² After this fairly inauspicious start, then, these two ex-skifflers – Dave Williams and Vic Wilton – returned home to ‘a remote inn called the Bold Forester, where the septuagenarian landlord kept his change in his waistcoat pockets (he thought tills were new-fangled) and could sing, if asked, The Unfortunate Young Rake. Dave and Vic also appeared at another rustic retreat, the Traveller’s Rest, and gradually their fame began to spread.’⁸³ Finally, the club grew to the point where Mann observed, ‘Shoe-horns were soon routine equipment for a trip to hear the singers at the Bold and the Travellers and comparisons with sardines were often made.’⁸⁴ The first guest was Bob Davenport, and from then came the likes of Stan Kelly, Cyril Tawney, Alex Campbell, Cyril Davies – and eventually Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, signalling the club’s firm establishment on both the local entertainment scene and the national folk scene.

Pubs offered the ideal locations for folk clubs because of their relaxed atmosphere, and licensing laws that allowed underage folk fans to enter and participate with their of-age compatriots.⁸⁵ Admission costs were kept low, ranging usually between 40 and 70p, although the amount fluctuated depending on the performer or performers – sometimes entry was even free.⁸⁶ A club with an audience of fifty, each paying 50p, could gross £25 on an average folk night. If the room had to be paid for, and if there were publicity charges, then these would have to be met before the artist could be paid.⁸⁷ Woods likened the postwar folk clubs to the music halls or working men’s clubs of the early twentieth century, in terms of their function in fostering a community spirit around songs and singing. He wrote that the ‘self-organised, participatory, community activity of a folk club is extremely close to the original working men’s clubs in both atmosphere and achievement. Both can be classed as sub-cultural activities, closely related to the community, but not of official status; and both protect and foster a popular art form.’⁸⁸ As an institution, the folk club aspired to be a progressive and broadly egalitarian enterprise, unconcerned with profit; Michael Pickering and Tony Green have argued that the ‘semi-professional’ performers were paid through ‘break-even collections staffed by volunteers’.⁸⁹ Indeed, at their most earnest, English folk clubs aspired and adhered to this pseudo-socialist artistic practice, where local and itinerant professionals and semi-professionals were gathered together along with amateur ‘worker-performers’ – the ‘true folk’; ‘authentic’ singers. However, in many ways this was no more than an ideal; in reality the cooperative coexistence of amateur and professional performers throughout the revival was fraught with financial and creative tension, as the ideal of a folk community at times gave way to ideological difference over the nature and function of folk m...