The folk revivals of the 20th century in the USA and UK involved the performance of traditional songs and dances by young singers and instrumentalists in coffee houses, clubs, concert halls and at special folk festivals. In addition, a number of ‘source singers’ were identified and brought into the revival.
The US Folk Revival dates from the late 1940s when the considerable commercial success of recordings by the Weavers was the catalyst for the formation of numerous folk groups among which were the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio. The revival also included solo singers who sang ballads as well as their own compositions (Joan Baez, Caroline Hester and Judy Collins), blues players (Dave Van Ronk and Alexis Korner, Ray and Glover), source singers (Fred McDowell and Son House) and exponents of ‘old time’ white rural music (the New Lost City Ramblers).
The revival was founded on song collecting and field recordings undertaken in the first decades of the 20th century by such figures as Carl Sandburg, John and Alan Lomax, and on the extensive musical repertory of such key source singers as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, along with early revivalists including Oscar Brand, Burl Ives and John Jacob Niles. Particularly in the field of rural blues, the revivalists ‘rediscovered’ recording artists from pre-1939, including Son House and Mississippi John Hurt.
The backdrop to the contemporaneous Folk Music Revival in England and Scotland (see England, §II) was the work of song collectors in Britain stemming from the period of the formation of the English Folk Song Society in 1898 and associated primarily with Cecil Sharp. The hundreds of songs collected and published at this period were initially used in schools and as inspiration for compositions by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Grainger and others.
Half a century later, these songs, plus those codified by Francis James Child and those which continued to be performed by rural singers, provided much of the repertory for the British revivalists. Source singers in England included Fred Jordan (Shropshire), Walter Pardon (Norfolk) and Bob Copper (Sussex; of the Copper family), who was both the heir to a family folk singing tradition and a song collector for the BBC. In Scotland, the ceilidhs organized at the Edinburgh Festival in the early 1950s by the collector Hamish Henderson and others were attended by such major source singers as Jeannie Robertson and Jimmy Macbeath. In Ireland the piper Seamus Ennis was also a song collector. The songwriter and singer Ewan MacColl was a leading figure in the revival, providing an influential if controversial definition of what constituted the correct procedure for a revivalist singer.
The younger generation attracted to the Folk Music Revival in both sides of the Atlantic often had a more flexible attitude to issues of repertory. The revival spawned a large number of singer-songwriters who accompanied themselves on the acoustic guitar but had little in common with those concerned primarily to bear witness to the tradition. In this category were Paul Simon, Donovan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell and, above all, Bob Dylan. In the UK, revivalists such as Martin Carthy and his daughter Eliza typify much stronger traditional links. The end of the 20th century saw folk revivals in many European countries.
See also Folk music.
B. Groom: The Blues Revival (London, 1971)
D. Laing and others: The Electric Muse: the Story of Folk into Rock (London, 1975)
G. Boyes: The Imagined Village (Manchester, 1995)
R. Cantwell: When We Were Good: the Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA, 1996)
DAVE LAING