British folk rock
British folk rock | |
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Stylistic origins |
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Cultural origins | 1960s, United Kingdom |
Subgenres | |
Medieval folk rock | |
Fusion genres | |
British folk rock is a form of
British folk rock was taken up and developed in the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, to produce Celtic rock and its derivatives, and has been influential in countries with close cultural connections to Britain. It gave rise to the genre of folk punk. By the 1980s the genre was in steep decline in popularity, but survived and revived in significance, partly merging with the rock music and folk music cultures from which it originated. Some commentators have found a distinction in some British folk rock, where the musicians are playing traditional folk music with electric instruments rather than merging rock and folk music, and they distinguish this form of playing by calling it "electric folk".
History
Origins
Though the merging of folk and rock music came from several sources, it is widely regarded that the success of "The House of the Rising Sun" by British band the Animals in 1964 was a catalyst, prompting Bob Dylan to go electric.[1] In the same year, the Beatles began incorporating overt folk influences into their music, most noticeably on the song "I'm a Loser" from their Beatles for Sale album.[2] The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, in turn, influenced the Californian band the Byrds, who began playing folk-influenced material and Bob Dylan compositions with rock instrumentation.[2] The Byrds' recording of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" was released in April 1965 and reached #1 on the U.S. and UK singles charts, setting off the mid-1960s folk rock movement.[3][4][5] The Beatles' late 1965 album, Rubber Soul, contained a number of songs influenced by the American folk rock boom, such as "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone".[6][7] During this period, a number of electric bands began to play rock versions of folk songs and folk musicians used electric musical instruments to play their own songs, including Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965.[8]
Folk rock became an important genre among emerging English bands, particularly those in the London club scene towards the end of the 1960s. The
The first English folk music revival had seen a huge effort to record and archive traditional English music by figures such as
A number of groups who were part of the folk revival experimented with electrification in the mid-1960s. These included the unrecorded efforts of Sweeney's Men from Ireland,[15] the jazz folk group Pentangle, who moved from purely acoustic instrumentation to introducing electric guitar on their later albums, Eclection, who released one album in 1968,[16] and the Strawbs who developed from a bluegrass band into a "progressive Byrds" band by 1967.[17] However, none provided a sustained or much emulated effort in this direction.[18] Also products of the folk club circuit were Sandy Denny who joined Fairport Convention as a singer in 1968 and Dave Swarbrick, a fiddle player and session musician who reacted positively to the electric music he encountered while working with Fairport in 1969.[19] The result was an extended interpretation of the song "A Sailor's Life", which was released on their album Unhalfbricking. This encounter sparked the interest of Ashley Hutchings who began research in the English Folk Dance and Song Society's library; the result was the band's seminal Liege & Lief (1969) which combined traditional songs and tunes with some written by members of the band in a similar style, all played on a combination of electric instruments including Swarbrick's amplified fiddle, setting the template for British folk rock.[20]
Heyday 1969–76
The rapid expansion of British folk rock that followed in the wake of Liege & Lief in the 1970s came mainly from three sources. First were existing folk performers who now 'electrified', including Mr. Fox, formed around the acoustic duo Bob and Carole Pegg, and Pentangle, who having previously recorded largely without electrification, produced a fourth album of entirely traditional material, Cruel Sister, in 1970, performed very much in the British folk rock mould.[21] Similarly, Swarbrick's former playing partner, Martin Carthy, joined Steeleye Span in 1971 to the astonishment of many in the folk music world.[22] Five Hand Reel, a band formed out of the remnants of Spencer's Feat, proved to be one of the more successful and influential folk rock bands. Releasing four albums with Topic/RCA records, they were popular in Europe, where they gave most of their performances. Unlike the 'English' genre of folk tunes prevalent in the other popular bands, Five Hand Reel performed Scots and Irish songs and won Melody Maker's "Folk Album of the Year" in 1975.[citation needed]
Second were groupings created directly by the members or former members of Fairport Convention, which can be seen as the nexus from which a family of organisations or performers emerged.
A much smaller group of English bands were formed in emulation of existing folk rock bands. Most often the model seems to have been Steeleye Span, as it was for the Cambridge group
Decline and survival 1977–85
For a time electric folk threatened to break through to the mainstream, peaking in the early-to-mid-1970s when Steeleye Span had a Christmas Top 20 hit single ("Gaudete") in 1973 and another Top 5 hit in 1975 ("All Around My Hat"). The album of the same name was their most commercially successful, reaching no. 5 in the UK album chart in the same year.[28] By comparison Fairport Convention released few singles and made very little impact on the British charts, although their albums sold well in the early 1970s. Liege & Lief reached no. 17 in 1969 and a later album, Angel Delight made the Top 10 in 1971.[29] Most of their career, from that point until they initially disbanded in 1979, was one of declining profile and sales.
The same was generally true of other electric folk outfits. The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time to either abandon the genre or fight a losing struggle for survival. The reason is often said to be the rise of
Resurgence 1985–present
In the later 1980s, things began to look much more positive for the genre. Despite formally disbanding in 1979, Fairport Convention staged what were initially called "reunion" concerts annually from 1980, which eventually evolved into the
The Albion Band survived initially by becoming involved in theatre productions and, from 1993, by downsizing to a smaller acoustic outfit that could play the still extensive network of folk clubs and other smaller venues. This move was also significant in indicating the way in which electric folk personnel had become assimilated into the folk revival. Almost all the members of Fairport Convention have toured the folk club circuit solo or in smaller units and the line up at Cropredy includes as many acoustic acts as electric.[33]
In 1980, Steeleye Span's Sails of Silver took a decisive move away from traditional songs. It was a commercial failure and their last album for six years as they became a part-time touring band. However, in 1986 they produced Back in Line and since then, despite several line-up changes, they have continued to perform and have recorded eight more albums.[34]
Some bands like Stone Angel and Jack the Lad, who had disbanded in the 1970s, had reformed and resumed a recording or touring career.[35]
Timeline
This section possibly contains original research. (September 2017) |
Impact on English rock music
Hard rock and progressive rock bands such as
As Led Zeppelin moved away from electric folk, another long term survivor of the
Electric and progressive folk
The advent of electric folk had profound effects on this developing strand of the folk genre. First, many existing acts, having avoided the American model of folk rock electrification from about 1965 now adopted it, most obviously Pentangle, Strawbs and acoustic duo Tyrannosaurus Rex which became the electric combo T-Rex. It also pushed progressive folk towards more traditional material. Acoustic performers Dando Shaft and Amazing Blondel, both beginning about this time, are examples of this trend.[42]
Examples of bands that remained firmly on the border between progressive folk and progressive rock are the short lived Comus and, more successfully, Renaissance, who combined folk and rock with elements of classical music.[43]
While progressive folk as a genre continued into the late 1960s, it was overshadowed by electric folk and progressive rock, arguably, later to emerge in a new form.
Derivatives
Medieval folk rock
From about 1970 a number of performers inspired by electric folk, particularly in England, Germany and Brittany, adopted
Celtic rock
Initially Celtic rock replicated electric folk, but naturally replaced the element of English traditional music with its own folk music. It was rapidly evident in all areas of the Celtic nations and regions surrounding England, as Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany all saw the adoption and adaptation of the electric folk model.[48] Through at least the first half of the 1970s, as Celtic rock held close to folk roots, with its repertoire drawing heavily on traditional Celtic fiddle and harp tunes and even traditional vocal styles, but making use of rock band levels of amplification and percussion it can be considered part of the electric folk movement. However, as it developed into new derivatives and hybrids, including Celtic punk, Celtic metal, and other sorts of Celtic fusion, the initial electric folk pattern began to dissipate.
Folk punk
In the mid-1980s a new rebirth of English folk began, this time fusing folk forms with energy and political aggression derived from punk rock. Leaders included The Men They Couldn't Hang, Oysterband, Billy Bragg and The Pogues. Folk dance music also became popular in the 1980s, with the English Country Blues Band and Tiger Moth. The decade later saw the use of reggae with English folk music by the band Edward II & the Red Hot Polkas, especially on their seminal Let's Polkasteady from 1987.
Folk metal
In a process strikingly similar to the origins of electric folk in the 1960s, the English
Festivals
Fairport's Cropredy Convention (previously Cropredy Festival) has been held every year since 1980 near Cropredy, a village five miles north of Banbury, Oxfordshire and attracts up to 20,000 fans. It remains one of the key events in the UK folk festival calendar.
After holding a successful open-air concert at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk in 2005, Steeleye Span decided to hold their own annual festival, known as Spanfest.
Other, more traditional, folk festivals (Shrewsbury, Towersey, Cambridge and Sidmouth, to name but four) now routinely host performances by exponents of the folk-rock genre.
Electric folk
This section is written like an essay or lecture that expounds a personal theory not in line with mainstream thinking or that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.(September 2017) |
When English bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s defined themselves as 'electric folk' they were making a distinction with the already existing 'folk rock'. Folk rock was (to them) what they had already been producing: American or American style singer-songwriter material played on rock instruments, as undertaken by
The result of this hybridisation was an exchange of specific features drawn from traditional music and rock music. These have been defined as including:[50]
- Lyrics
- Tunes (including ornamentation)
- The drone (cf. bagpipes), but usually on a guitar or bass
- Use of some acoustic instruments
- Use of traditional rhythms; for example, an eight-beat rhythm of 3+3+2 with the stress on the first, fourth, and seventh beats, as in Led Zeppelin's "The Battle of Evermore", while not unusual precludes the standard rock backbeat.
- Blending of multiple songs in the traditional music style: often a short instrumental piece is inserted as an instrumental in a longer lyrical piece (i.e. a piece with vocals), both in traditional music and Electric folk
- Rhythm (specifically the backbeat)
- The hook
- Ostinati (plural of ostinato), a melodic and/or rhythmic figure that is persistently repeated throughout a piece or a section of a piece
- Use of some electric instrument
- The tempo of some songs may be altered well beyond the traditional boundaries
- Key changes may be added
Not all of these features are found in every song. For example, electric folk groups, while predominantly using traditional material as their source for lyrics and tunes, occasionally write their own (much as traditional musicians do).
See also
References
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- ^ B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 84 and 135.
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