English organization, formed in 1932 by the amalgamation of the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society.
The Folk-Song Society was founded in London in 1898 by a group of leading musicians in order to direct ‘the collection and preservation of Folk Songs, Ballads and Tunes and the publication of such of these as may be advisable’. Between 1899 and 1931 the society published a journal (JFSS); its 31 issues constitute a major source of English folksong transcriptions and associated scholarship, contributed by pioneers in the field such as Lucy Broadwood, Anne Gilchrist, Percy Grainger, Maud Karpeles, Frank Kidson, E.J. Moeran, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although concerned primarily with English folksong, the journal also included Gaelic songs.
The English Folk Dance Society was founded by Cecil Sharp in 1911 ‘with the object of preserving and promoting the practice of English folk-dances in their true traditional form’. Using dances collected by Sharp and others as a basis, the society concentrated initially on performance and educational activities rather than publication, offering classes, courses, displays and lectures, training teachers, and granting certificates of proficiency; it also fostered country dancing as a social activity. Local branches, under the supervision of the central headquarters, were established throughout England and (from 1915) in America. Six issues of the Journal of the English Folk Dance Society were published between 1914 and 1931.
After Sharp’s death in 1924 the leadership passed on to Douglas Kennedy, who went on to direct the English Folk Dance and Song Society after the amalgamation of 1932; he retired in 1961. The scope of activities broadened considerably during this period. From 1925 the annual ‘All-England’ festival brought to London folk dancers from all over the country to perform together in public. In 1935 the society held an International Folk Dance Conference and Festival, which led eventually to the formation of the International Folk Music Council (now the International Council for Traditional Music). In June 1930 the society moved into Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town, London, purpose-built headquarters which the organization continues to occupy. The library, built up around Sharp’s personal collection, is now a major research centre (in 1958, on the death of Vaughan Williams, then president of the society, it became the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library). In the years following World War II there were significant changes in the society’s policies, most notably a shift in emphasis away from instruction towards social activities, and a growing decentralization, both precipitated in part by the widespread revival of popular interest in folksong; the society has continued to enlarge its scope to keep pace with contemporary developments. It publishes an annual journal; the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (JEFDSS), founded at the time of the amalgamation, has since 1965 appeared under the broader title of Folk Music Journal.
Both the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the two older organizations that merged to form it brought into focus some highly significant cultural trends of early 20th-century Britain; in addition they were the initial driving engines for a broadly-based folk revival that has left a permanent impression on the English-speaking (especially Anglo-American) world. About the turn of the century social anxieties, generated by rapid urbanization, industrialization and imperial expansion, prompted a widespread idealization of rural life and its values as an antidote to social fragmentation and the key to strong national identity. Folk music was a potent agent in this ruralist movement; yet while the founder members of the Folk-Song Society included such giants of Victorian music as Sir Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford, it was not until the emergence of a younger cohort, animated by missionary zeal, that the movement began to gather real momentum. In this the most promiment figures were Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who in 1904 led a campaign that galvanized the largely stagnant Folk-Song Society, and shifted its emphasis from antiquarianism to popular revival; this process was not without controversy, some of it acrimonious, but Sharp eventually emerged as the leader of the revival (Vaughan Williams remained influential as an organizer, but his name became more strongly associated with the compositional use of folksong). From 1905 the Board of Education gave increasing recognition to the value of folk music in school life, culminating in 1919 with the appointment of Sharp as an Occasional Inspector of Training Colleges in Folk Song and Dancing. He was brought in by H.A.L. Fisher, then President of the Board of Education, who became closely involved with the direction of the English Folk Dance Society, eventually serving on its National Advisory Council: such connections indicate how far (and how swiftly) the folk revival had penetrated the cultural establishment. This influence was extended into the English-speaking world overseas with the founding in 1915 of North American branches of the Folk-Dance Society, which added folk music to an increasingly important nexus of transatlantic ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ ties.
The movement further broadened its scope and activities in the inter-war years. In the post-1945 era, however, because it had become associated with the ‘Establishment’, the English Folk Dance and Song Society became a target of social revisionism. Matters were also complicated by the emergence of a second phase to the folk revival, more spontaneous and eventually more genuinely popular, which, heavily influenced by developments in America, saw folk music as a living art, linked with political and social protest and the modern industrial world, rather than a pristine relic of undiluted rural culture. Yet in many ways the tensions of the postwar era merely brought into the open contradictions which had been inherent all along. Recent scholars have accused the middle- and upper-class folklorists who dominated the movement of appropriating folk music as bourgeois entertainment, and of imposing patriarchal assumptions about what is good for the lower orders, ignoring the working classes’ own clear preference for music-hall and other popular urban repertories. It has also been suggested that the collectors exploited their human sources, especially in terms of publication royalties, which went to collectors and not singers. Marxist critics have viewed with suspicion the gradualistic socialism espoused by Sharp and other leading figures; likewise, Sharp’s hostility to Mary Neal’s ‘Espérance’ organization, which had connections with the suffragette movement, has drawn fire from feminist historians. More profoundly, scholars have questioned the philosophical fundaments of the revival, including the notion of folksongs and folkdances as collectable and reproducible artefacts rather than unique performative acts inseparable from complex social processes, the rigid separation of rural and urban musics, and the whole concept of ‘the folk’. The methods of the early collectors have been challenged, on the grounds that they made unwarranted assumptions about modality and rhythm, slighted the variational complexity entailed in individual performances and took a cavalier attitude towards recording the words of songs. Finally, in blunt contradiction of the movement’s nationalist impetus, it has been argued that many of the songs and dances collected cannot justifiably be classified as ‘English’ in origin, given complex historical interactions with other folk repertories, especially that of Ireland.
Yet it can be argued that the revisionists themselves fall into political distortion at times, failing to acknowledge the complexity of the impulses that drove the collectors on with such industry and zeal, and the genuine interest and concern that many showed towards their human sources. And however misleading the notated folk music we now have may be as a record of the social and musical processes in which it originated, it is nevertheless in most cases all that now remains of these rich interactions. Above all, it has generated musical experiences in which millions of performers, listeners, and composers have discovered a distinctive beauty and value – and without the collectors we would have nothing.
C.J. Sharp: English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (London, 1907, 3/1954)
M. Karpeles: Cecil Sharp: his Life and Work (London, 1967)
A.L. Lloyd: Folk Song in England (London, 1967)
D. Harker: Fakesong: the Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985)
J. Porter: ‘Muddying the Crystal Spring: from Idealism and Realism to Marxism in the Study of English and American Folk Song’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 113–30
G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)
J. Onderdonk: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society (diss., New York U., 1998)
MAUD KARPELES/ALAIN FROGLEY (1), ALAIN FROGLEY (2)