English underground

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For the 1960s counter-culture, see UK underground.

The English underground is a branch in England's history of art, especially the

folk song, as that tradition has been passed down through the generations, often without any formal conveyance. It was first identified by the neo-romantic historian E. P. Thompson in 1963, in his The Making of the English Working Class:[1]

We must remember the 'underground' of the ballad singer and the fairground which handed on traditions to the nineteenth century (to the music hall, or Dickens' circus folk or Hardy's pedlars and showmen); for in these ways the 'inarticulate' [masses of people] conserve certain values - a spontaneity and capacity for enjoyment and mutual loyalties - despite the inhibiting pressures of magistrates, mill-owners, and Methodists.[2]

The phrase was used, in a wider cultural sense, in

counter-culture that often drew on carnivalesque and music hall
traditions and styles.

The term is now often used among educated music fans, to identify a songwriting tradition which is usually taken to have arisen in the past fifty years, via the work of

post-industrial music of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93 and others, calling it "a shadowy scene whose work accents peculiarities of Englishness through the links and affinities they've forged with earlier generations of the island's marginals and outsiders".[4]

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-14-013603-6
    .
  2. ^ Stephen Keady. "Working Class Culture and Work : Thesis" (PDF). Diposit.ub.edu. p. 87. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
  3. ISBN 978-0712666657
    .
  4. ^ "England's Hidden Reverse - David Keenan (Paperback)". Raru.co.za. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
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