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T

he editor of another maga- zine was once overheard at one of those international showcase conferences

expressing complete puzzlement about fRoots. “Why would they put them on the cover? Nobody’s heard of them. And why do they publish such long features? I mean, who wants to read anything that’s three or four thousand words long?”

Well, here at fRoots we love to give good space to newer or rela- tively unknown artists and musics – because we can, and because it’s obviously what you readers like. This was brought home to us in a massive lightbulb moment back at the beginning of this century when we had a major famous rock god on the cover of one issue and a totally unknown new English folkperson on the next, and sold virtu- ally the same number of copies of each. Oh!

0 0 0 0 So we have a fabulous (and fabulously obscure) band on

this issue’s cover but also something of a historical flavour within, looking back at a couple of fine artists – one living, one sadly dead – from a time when the current generation of performers were barely being born, and at scenes from half a century ago. “You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from,” etc.

I had another lightbulb moment recently when sorting out those pieces on New York’s Folk City and the UK’s folk scene of the late 1950s and ’60s. In both cases, those times are widely known as the ‘folk revival’, so widely that we don’t ever think about those terms and the implications carried within them. But is that really what they were?

In the USA, probably yes. American rural folk music had been widely documented on commercial recordings in the 1920s and ’30s, partly as a way to sell gramophones. So had the political song movements of the pre- and immediately post-war years. With the legendary Harry Smith anthology and Pete Seeger’s circle as catalysts, a lot of what happened in the USA was indeed a straightforward revival of and evolu- tion from those earlier forms. And achieved massive success.

But in the UK? We had hardly any equivalent repertoire of commercial recordings to reproduce and develop. We had not really had a topical song tradition since the days of broadside ballads a century earlier. Yes, some people set out to become clones of the remaining elderly unaccompanied traditional singers, but few caught the public’s imagination.

The key instrument of the British folk movement of the late 1950s and ’60s, the guitar, hadn’t been part of any folk tradition here at all. Far from reviving anything, the English had to invent something new. People like Davy Graham and Martin Carthy had to create local ways of playing that worked (and, like the English people, were mongrels). Others evolved original and uniquely English ways of playing Ameri- can music – sometimes accidentally, by conspicuous failure to copy their sources. Even the Rolling Stones did that.

True, old songs and tunes were rediscovered but the way they were performed began from year zero. It was actually a complete folk re-imagining, a re-invention. Perhaps we should get in the habit of calling it that, rather than a folk revival.

Ian Anderson

Photo: Judith Burrows