(b London, 29 Feb 1908; d London, 29 Sept 1982). English ethnomusicologist and folksinger. At the age of 15 he went to Australia as an assisted migrant, working on sheep stations for nine years. There he learnt bush songs from fellow workers and educated himself in music and the arts. Returning to England in the early 1930s, he associated with the left-wing London artistic set and became a founder member of the Artists International Association (1935). Needing money he signed on as a labourer on a factory ship for the 1937–8 Antarctic whaling season. The trip provided few folksongs, as the crew tended to sing hymns and popular hits. On his return he worked as a BBC scriptwriter and as a journalist on Picture Post. A self-taught ethnomusicologist, he owed much to the work of Brăiloiu and Katsarova. Influenced by A.L. Morton’s A People’s History of England (1938) he wrote The Singing Englishman (1944), a colourful, if largely unsubstantiated, polemical Marxist history of English folksong. From 1950 he worked as a freelance folklorist, concentrating mainly on south-east Europe. During the 1960s he was a visiting lecturer in ethnomusicology at various American and Australian universities. As a folksinger he made numerous recordings of English and Australian song, and was, with Ewan MacColl, one of the architects of the postwar British folk music revival. During the Cold War his Marxist credentials allowed him unique access to Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and their folklore institutes. Here he acquired many recordings of ‘peasant’ music but failed to acknowledge its subjection to communist cultural management and manipulation. From 1952 he broadcast on radio and television on different aspects of folk music, including virtuosity, polyphony, ritual, epic song, coal mining, and Bartók as a folklorist. His book Folk Song in England (1967) attempts to trace ‘folksong’ development (or erosion) from some idealized agrarian past to the urban industrial present, though is flawed by its scanty historical evidence. He remains an influential, if controversial, figure in British and Australian folk music performance and scholarship.
The Singing Englishman: an Introduction to Folksong (London, 1944)
‘The Music of Rumanian Gypsies’, PRMA, xc (1963–4), 15–26
ed., with I. Aretz: Folk Songs of the Americas (London, 1965)
Folk Song in England (London, 1967)
‘Folklore and Australia’, Overland [Melbourne], xlv (1970), 17
‘The Sophisticated Savage’, Music and Musicians, xx/9 (1971–2), 26–9
Problems of Ethnomusicology (Cambridge, 1984) [trans. of C. Brăiloiu: Problèmes d’ethnomusicologie (Paris, 1959)]
Come all ye Bold Miners: Songs and Ballads of the Coalfields (London, 1952, enlarged 1978)
with R. Vaughan Williams: The Penguin Book of English Folk Song (Harmondsworth, 1959)
D. Harker: Fakesong: the Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1770 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985)
G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Cultural Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)
Singer, Song and Scholar: Sheffield 1982 and Leeds 1984 [incl. L. Shepard: ‘A.L. Lloyd: a Personal View’, 125–32; R. Palmer: ‘A.L. Lloyd and Industrial Song’, 133–44; V. Gammon: ‘A.L. Lloyd and History: a Reconsideration of Aspects of Folk Song in England and some of his Other Writings’, 147–64; D. Arthur: ‘A.L. Lloyd 1908–82: an Interim Bibliography’, 165–77]
M. Brocken: ‘The British Folk Revival’, Musical Traditions 〈www.mustrad.org.uk〉
DAVE ARTHUR