This article is about the genre of industrial folk music from the eighteenth century onwards. For the contemporary genre of industrial folk or post-industrial folk, see Neofolk.
Industrial folk music
Stylistic origins
work songs
, and adapt them to their new experiences and circumstances. They also developed in France and the US as these countries began to industrialise.
The genre declined in the twentieth century, but were popularised as part of the
. Because of their political content they have been adapted by rock musicians.
Origins
Industrial folk song emerged in Britain, the first nation to
Saint-Simon noted the rise of 'Chansons Industrielles' among clothworkers in the early 19th century, and in the USA where industrialisation expanded rapidly after the Civil War.[3]
Definitions and characteristics
working class culture unaffected by outside class or media influences, which is at variance with what we know of the spread of ideas and new forms of media from the late 19th century.[4]
Lloyd also pointed to various types of song, including chants of labour, love and erotic occupational songs and industrial protest songs, which included narratives of disasters (particularly among miners), laments for conditions, as well as overtly political strike ballads.[1] He also noted the existence of songs about heroic and mythical figures of industrial work, like the coal miners the 'Big Hewer' or 'Big Isaac' Lewis.[1] This tendency was even more marked in early American industrial songs, where representative heroes like Casey Jones and John Henry were eulogised in blues ballads from the 19th century.[5]
The first wave of folk song revival in Britain and America the later 19th century and early 20th century was largely unconcerned with recording industrial songs. It tended to focus on the rural and agricultural and has been criticised as being obsessed with a rural idyll.
In Britain the leading proponent of, and commentator on, industrial folk music was A. L. Lloyd. His Come All Ye Bold Miners: Ballads and Songs from the Coalfields, a collection of mining songs was published in 1952. Of his own recordings the most influential were his arrangement of various industrial songs on the LP The Iron Muse: a Panorama of Industrial Folk Song (1963).
Radio Ballads, of MacColl and Peggy Seeger, many of which focused on work, including rail workers, road building, fishing and coal mining.[13] However, many of the songs in the Radio Ballads were written by MacColl himself in the style of the songs that he, Lloyd and others had collected e.g. 'Shoals of Herring'. In the British folk rock movement of the 1970s industrial folk music was less prominent than traditional ballads, but largely accepted as part of folk music, with songs like 'Blackleg Miner' being recorded beside medieval ballads by leading bands of the genre like Steeleye Span.[14]
Decline and survival
Industrial folk song overlapped with other forms of music from the late 19th century, such as
Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields (2007), a two CD compilation and booklet of mining songs.[18]
Notes
^ abcdefghA. L. Lloyd, Folk song in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), pp. 323-28.
^J. Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music, vol. 1: Media, Industry and Society (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), p. 251.
^E. J. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976), pp. 431-5 and Simon J. Bronner, Folk nation: folklore in the creation of American tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), p. 142.
^A. Edgar, Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 128.
^N. Cohen and D. Cohen, Long Steel Rail: the Railroad in American Folksong (University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 126.
^ abcM. Brocken, The British Folk Revival 1944-2002 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003), p. 64.
^B. Nettl and P. Vilas Bohlman, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 117.
^ abM. Halliwell, American culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 129.
^A. Lomax, W. Guthrie and P. Seeger, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (1967, University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
^B. L. Cooper and W. S. Haney, Rock Music in American Popular Culture: Rock 'n' Roll Resources (Philadelphia, PA: Haworth Press, 1995), p. 315.
^W. C. Malone, Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 43.
^D. Harker, Fake Song: the Manufacture of British Folksong' 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p. 297.
^T. Strangleman and T. Warren, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 92.
^B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 59.
^E. Lee, Folksong and Music Hall (London: Routledge, 1982).
^P. Buckley, The Rough Guide to Rock (London: Rough Guides, 2003), p. 195 and M. Willhardt, 'Available rebels and folk authenticities: Michelle Shocked and Billy Bragg' in I. Peddie, ed., The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 30-48.
^B. K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 241.