The Folk

Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination

Ross Cole

• Editorial: University of California Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520383753
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Música folk

Who are "the folk" in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range of scholarship, The Folk examines the political dimensions of a recurrent longing for folk culture and how it was called upon for radical and reactionary ends at the apex of empire. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, nationality, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Ross Cole provides us with a biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination, and the archaeology of a landscape directing flows of global populism to this day.

CHAPTER 1

Collecting Culture

Science, Technology, & Reification

If you were interested in collecting during the late nineteenth century, there were plenty of things that might have caught your eye, and plenty of advice on offer. One volume of the American periodical The Art Amateur from June 1880, for instance, contained articles on a wide range of options from butterflies’ wings and ferns to prints from the British Museum—with one feature reminding its readers that along with the immediate “pleasure in collecting rare books, fine paintings, old coins, and other treasures” there were often lucrative rewards in the long run that might save your family from financial ruin.¹ Other handbooks or gazettes offered instructions on taxidermy or how to collect birds’ nests and eggs, china, fossil plants, shells, orchids, insects, hunting specimens, and fleshy fungi. The late Victorian era, of course, was also the era of the great public museums—the Smithsonian Institution (founded in 1846 but expanded in the 1880s), London’s Natural History Museum (opened in 1881), the South Kensington Museum (opened in 1857 and renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899), and Oxford’s extraordinary Pitt Rivers Museum (founded in 1884).² Both these civic and individual modes of collecting attest to the process that Jean Baudrillard characterizes as an “abstractive operation” in which an object is “divested of its function and made relative to a subject.”³ Collecting, in short, is about a particular kind of possession or “abstract mastery” in which things are drawn into a relationship not only with subjectivity but also narrative and meaning.⁴

This chapter delves into the world of collecting around the fin de siècle, looking in detail at a defining feature of the folk revivalist project that has often escaped due attention: the compulsion to own, accumulate, and display. Collecting, as we shall see, was not unique to the folk revivalist mentality but was a phenomenon manifest across society and tied up in complex ways with cultural memory, scientific inquiry, and newly emergent technologies. Two of the most intriguing developments in this regard were the phonograph and the mass-produced camera—both were used to document and collect folk materials alongside the more familiar field notebook, leaving us with wax recordings of performances and (through the work of Cecil Sharp) photographs of singers themselves. A decade after his book English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions, Sharp was still insisting—to an audience in New York City—about “the importance of collecting songs & dances before it was too late.”⁵ This sense of urgency pervades the folkloric imagination. At whatever moment it occurs, collecting always seems to come too late, providing a glimpse of something on the brink of extinction. Such eternal belatedness was the primary reason for the folk’s allure—a people only ever observed in their final days, fading and receding into the obscurity of history perhaps to be forgotten entirely. This was the feeling that animated the revivalist imagination, spurring enthusiasts on to collect before the shifting tides of modernity washed away the past and with it the nation’s memory of a more noble time. We can see these cultures of collecting along a line from Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, with its lovingly framed “totems of obsession,” to the more disturbing extremes of abduction and control explored by John Fowles in The Collector—attempts to restrict and suffocate the objects of adoration.⁶

In the introduction to English Folk-Song in 1907, Sharp describes his initial forays into collecting, noting that this valuable work, “on any comprehensive scale, has only just begun,” largely as a result of his own personal endeavors:

It is eight years ago since I began, at first desultorily, to note down and collect English traditional music. During the last half of that period I have spent every available moment of my leisure in country lanes, fields and villages, in the quest of folk-singers and folk-dancers. Chance, in the first instance, guided my footsteps into Somerset, to which county my labours for the past four years have been almost exclusively confined. I have, so far, deliberately resisted the temptation to stray farther afield, because I believe that by concentrating my energies upon a limited area, instead of spreading them out over a wider one, I shall acquire information of especial value, and thus, perhaps, gain a deeper insight into the subject.⁷

There are notable resonances in this passage with what was referred to at the time as the “romance of book collecting”—the “book-hunter” (or “book-fancier,” in a less intrepid appellation) setting off on their quest for “lucky discoveries . . . to be met with casually, and by the merest of accidents.”⁸ These figures, J. H. Slater notes, were “naturally anxious to obtain the credit and still more the solid advantages of a startling discovery” to such an extent that “charity in matters that relate to their pursuit is dead.”⁹ Sharp likewise portrays his work as the “unexpected discovery of an immense mass of melody” that he alone was able to locate, with many “great surprises” surely in store if collecting were to be extended further.¹⁰ Tellingly, Sharp makes use of the term hunting to describe his explorations of Exmoor, where he had collected a number of “exquisite melodies” from a certain “old man, eighty-six years of age.”¹¹ We can feel in his excitement what Percy Fitzgerald described as a “romantic interest” in “the rare old edition, the old printer . . . and the stray survivor of a whole edition, by some miracle preserved to our time.”¹² The collecting of these old tomes, Fitzgerald notes, had seen a revival in the decades before Sharp began his work.

This particular trip served to remind Sharp that folk collecting was a vital pursuit given the apparently dire state of popular culture in England:

In the evening of the same day, my peace was rudely disturbed by the raucous notes of coarse music-hall songs, shouted out, at the tops of their voices, by the young men of the village, who were spending the evening in the bar of my hotel. The contrast between the old-fashioned songs and kindly manners of my friend the old parish clerk, who lived hard by, and the songs and uncouth behaviour of the present occupants of the bar, struck me very forcibly, and threw into strong relief the deplorable deterioration that, in the last 30 years or so, has taken place in the manners and amusements of the country villagers.¹³

As we shall explore more fully in the next chapter, Sharp is here referring to the dramatic expansion of the commercial music hall at the turn of the century, a business that had developed into a rationalized and highly profitable enterprise spanning the country.¹⁴ For Sharp, “noxious weeds” such as music-hall songs that “flourish so luxuriantly” in the modern world would not have been able to grow in the first place if the country had managed to hold onto its native folk traditions.¹⁵ In his attempts to salvage every last remnant of folk material he could lay his hands on in the service of resisting this dreadful deterioration, Sharp shows himself to have been a special kind of collector symptomatic of the folkloric mentality. Such collectors, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal argue, are akin to the biblical figure of Noah, the “ur-collector” imperiled by a flood and desperate to salvage that which would otherwise be lost forever.¹⁶ Noah’s vocation, much like the folklorist’s, was “in the service of a higher cause”—a calling that takes the form of “collection as salvation.”¹⁷

Like Noah, Sharp seems to have been overcome by what Elsner and Cardinal term the “pathology of completeness” in his crusade to preserve what was left of a more venerable people’s culture—describing his anticipation of an “exhaustive treatise” that would eventually be produced when “every scrap of the existing material has been recovered.”¹⁸ Tellingly and typically for the collector, it is material that is to be recovered and preserved, not culture, practice, or individual experience. As objects to be amassed, folk songs were like handsome rare books waiting to be unearthed in the country’s villages and fields, hidden away invisible to the untrained eye in the mouths and minds of the folk. Out there, it appeared, was an entire library of precious heritage at risk of passing away undiscovered, succumbing to the blight of time if not rescued and properly conserved—an invaluable bastion of virtue set against the marauding hoards of a volatile popular mass. Here we find the distinctive mode of nostalgic, Manichean thinking at the core of every new moral panic.

Hence, what is saved through the folkloric process, we should remember, is not living custom, but tokens, written texts, and fragments brought together as a well-ordered collection. The mania of the collector is a mania of cohesion and authority, of command over the material traces of the past. The excitement of collecting is in discovering and gathering this material—once obscured and dispersed, secreted or neglected—into a coherent whole. This hunt is undertaken only ever on the terms of the collector and routinely at odds with the milieux from which they collect. It is the collector who holds the power to establish relationships between these precious, isolated things, deciding what is collectable and what is not, what survives and what should be left to rot. According to Francis James Child, for instance, certain old ballads were truly “popular” (i.e., of the people, here a synonym for the folk), whereas others represented something else entirely. Discussing the enormous collections of Broadside ballads amassed by Samuel Pepys and John Ker, Duke of Roxburghe, he remarks in a notorious letter to the Danish scholar Svend Grundtvig that they “doubtless contain some ballads which we should at once declare to possess the popular character” and yet on the whole are “veritable dung-hills, in which, only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel.”¹⁹ For the collector, this scavenging is the price one pays for jewels—their allure all the more exhilarating on account of a stark contrast between treasured object and worthless waste. Prior ballad enthusiasts such as Joseph Ritson and Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, relished this challenge of slumming through the slurry and stench of popular culture to stumble upon the relics of ancient English poetry.

Indeed, generations of British antiquarians had preceded Sharp’s amateur ethnography of Somerset. In 1891, Frank Kidson subtitled his volume of Traditional Tunes “a collection of ballad airs.” The book, he writes demurely in the third person, was “the outcome of much pleasant labour” driven by a similar impulse to Sharp:

The compiler’s wish has been to at least temporarily rescue from oblivion some few of the old airs, which, passing from mouth to mouth for generations, are fast disappearing before the modern effusions of the music hall and concert room. He believes that many of the airs here noted down are excellent specimens of melody, and as such, are worthy of preservation; that they have a peculiar quaintness, a sweetness, and a tenderness of expression, absent in the music of the present day, which it is impossible to successfully imitate. . . . They are now seldom or never sung, but rather remembered, by old people.²⁰

Without the collector, this fragile mausoleum of melodies would have been buried under the ever-changing vistas of modernity. Setting these songs down “with utmost fidelity,” he notes, was essential to securing “the antiquarian value of the whole.”²¹ Here was a “collection” of pleasing tunes—a scrupulously edited compendium attained through scholarly investigation. These were songs that had “made history,” songs of solace no longer passed down like heirlooms from older to younger rural inhabitants, who, owing to “cheap trips to the larger towns,” were now able “to compete with the town’s boys in his knowledge of popular musical favourites.”²² Although “popular” is the same term Child employed with such veneration, here it is loaded with its opposite meaning—a Jekyll and Hyde expression that could, in different contexts, resound paradoxically with positive (as in folk, democracy, resistance) or negative (as in mass, industry, sedition) overtones.²³

We can find, for instance, William Chappell using the term in direct contrast to Kidson, titling his 1855 magnum opus The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time. O...