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English traditional music has for many years been the victim of a severe case of cultural cringe. Ridiculed and stereotyped by the mainstream media in its own country as being the province of bearded men in cardigans singing with their fingers in their ears, the English tradition has spent the last few decades lurking in the shadows as an ‘underground’ movement.
This is in stark contrast to England’s near neighbours Scotland, Ireland and Wales, who have long accepted and celebrated their own indigenous music as a vibrant symbol of their nationhood (or at least the struggle to achieve nationhood). The reasons for this difference are many and arguable but probably have something to do with the confusion between ‘English-ness’ and ‘British-ness’. As the ‘junior partners’ in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales have had a greater need to assert their separate cultural identities, and this counts double for the Irish, whose traditional music is strongly interwoven with the struggle for independence.
Chumbawamba, photo: Barbara Mürdter
Nevertheless, there have been moments when English folk music has come out of the shadows to bask in the sunlight of mainstream attention. In the 1960s, many US musicians (such as Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Peggy Seeger, Judy Collins and Joan Baez) started championing English traditional music. They were drawn to the tradition by its honest simplicity and dark, difficult, lyrical concerns. This had a knock-on effect back in England where local performers like Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, The Watersons, Ewan McColl and The Copper Family began to be taken seriously by the music industry. At a grass-roots level, folk clubs started up in almost every English town and the music found a new social relevance. This period was known as the folk revival.
From 1968, with the emergence of the folk-rock movement, bands such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span produced some genuinely sublime music such as Fairport‘s classic Liege & Leif album, but by the late 1970s the genre had degenerated into self-parody — a strange mongrel genre that had neither the grittiness of traditional music or the passionate street cred of rock.
The 1970s could have been an interesting synergy between punk and the more authentic traditional English music but no English folk-rockers managed to equal the success of Irish band The Pogues in bringing traditional material to a punk audience. Both punk and traditional music had in common dark anti-authoritarian lyrics and a do-it-yourself approach to music making. Many traditional musicians applauded the emerging punk scene, and many punk musicians later came to include English traditional music in their repertoire including Billy Bragg, The Mekons, Chumbawamba, Jah Wobble and Lu Edmunds from Public Image Ltd (Lu also played with The Damned).
Kathryn Tickell, photo: Derek Maxwell©
In the last five years there's been a surge of popularity and interest in English traditional music, as children and grandchildren of the folk revival musicians come of age. Young musicians such as Eliza Carthy, Tim van Eyken, Jim Moray, Nancy Kerr and James Fagan, Kate Rusby, and Kathryn Tickell are a new breed of musicians who are making English traditional music ‘young and sexy’ again.
Of course, there are parts of England where traditional music has continued as a rich unbroken tradition, immune to the ups and downs of popularity found elsewhere. In Northumberland, in the north-east of the country, traditional music is, and always has been, a regular part of everyday life in rural communities, much as it is in the west of Ireland.
