"Free of the taint of manufacture" – that phrase, in particular, is heavily loaded with the
ideology of what the Victorian socialist William Morris called the "anti-scrape", or an
anticapitalist conservationism (not conservatism) that solaced itself with the vision of a
preindustrial golden age. In Britain, folk may often appear a cosy, fossilised form, but when you look more closely, the idea of folk – who has the right to sing it, dance it, invoke it, collect it, belong to it or appropriate it for political or cultural ends – has always been contested territory. . . .
In our own time, though, the word "folk" . . . has achieved the rare distinction of occupying
fashionable and unfashionable status simultaneously. Just as the effusive floral prints of the
radical William Morris now cover genteel sofas, so the revolutionary intentions of many folk
historians and revivalists have led to music that is commonly regarded as parochial and
conservative. And yet – as newspaper columns periodically rejoice – folk is hip again,
influencing artists, clothing and furniture designers, celebrated at music festivals, awards
ceremonies and on TV, reissued on countless record labels. Folk is a sonic "shabby chic",
containing elements of the uncanny and eerie, as well as an antique veneer, a whiff of Britain's heathen dark ages. The very obscurity and anonymity of folk music's origins open up space for rampant imaginative fancies. . . .
[Cecil Sharp, who wrote about this subject, believed that] folk songs existed in constant
transformation, a living example of an art form in a perpetual state of renewal. "One man sings
a song, and then others sing it after him, changing what they do not like" is the most concise
summary of his conclusions on its origins. He compared each rendition of a ballad to an acorn
falling from an oak tree; every subsequent iteration sows the song anew. But there is tension in newness. In the late 1960s, purists were suspicious of folk songs recast in rock idioms.
Electrification, however, comes in many forms. For the early-20th-century composers such as
Vaughan Williams and Holst, there were thunderbolts of inspiration from oriental mysticism,
angular modernism and the body blow of the first world war, as well as input from the
rediscovered folk tradition itself.
For the second wave of folk revivalists, such as Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, starting in the 40s, the vital spark was communism's dream of a post-revolutionary New Jerusalem. For their
younger successors in the 60s, who thronged the folk clubs set up by the old guard, the lyrical
freedom of Dylan and the unchained melodies of psychedelia created the conditions for
folkrock's own golden age, a brief Indian summer that lasted from about 1969 to 1971. . . . Four decades on, even that progressive period has become just one more era ripe for fashionable emulation and pastiche. The idea of a folk tradition being exclusively confined to oral transmission has become a much looser, less severely guarded concept. Recorded music and television, for today's metropolitan generation, are where the equivalent of folk memories are seeded. . . .