The Imagined Village

Pleased to see that Georgina Boyes' seminal book The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival has been re-issued. Very interesting stuff (if still showing the scars of being based on a PhD thesis...). This book developes some of the earlier ideas put forward by Dave Harker's book Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folk Song, 1700 to the Present Day, which critiqued the Sharpian folk-song revival of the early 20th century, arguing that it was essentially that the notion of a 'folk tradition' was a creation of a bourgeois group of middle class collectors. To quote from the blurb from The Imagined Village "Alongside this, however, runs the analysis that The Folk” themselves were a convenient fiction. They and their culture were created and used in the cause of conflicting ideologies – including the Women’s Suffrage movement and British Fascism. Issues of Englishness, class and creativity are all dealt with in this fascinating and controversial history of the Folk, who existed only to sing and dance in an Imagined Village." Ut is worth pointing out that this critique has itself been subjected to a more recent critique- a good review of the debate can be found here

Folky stuff on the web

A couple of folky discoveries on the internet. First, the British Library has a fantastic collection of ethnographic field recordings of world music- much of which is on-line. In general, there is more Africa and Asian material than European music. However, its great to see a good collection of traditional music and song from England – for example, there are some good field recordings of Oxfordshire morris, particularly from Bampton. Its not all just English material; for example, there is good stuff from the Irish immigrant communities, particularly from London, such as this version of Matt Molloy’s Reel and other tunes, recorded in The Favourite in Holloway. Nor is it very ‘trad’ stuff- I like the recording of ex-POWs singing ‘Abdul Abubbul Amir’

I’ve also been meaning to mention Jon Boden’s new project A Folk Song A Day, which as the name suggests is a blog providing a new recording of a traditional song every day for a year- its only been running since the end of July and there is already some cracking stuff on it, such as good version of Polly Vaughan (though I do like Jim Moray’s recent version) and a nice video of Bold Sir Rylas and Canadee-I-o (which most people will know best through the music of Nic Jones)

Museums and the CONDEMS

Last week David Cameron gave a lovely heart-felt speech all about how the UK has been not promoting its touristic charms effectively. He argues that the significance of England’s heritage had been underplayed by the previous administration: “"The last government underplayed our tourist industry. There were eight different ministers with responsibility for tourism in just 13 years. They just didn't get our heritage. They raided the national lottery, taking money from heritage because it didn't go with their image of 'cool Britannia'," (which is quite a fair point). Certainly museums and galleries boosted the UK's economy by £1bn last year. However, the irony is that not that long before making this speech Cameron’s “bonfire of the Quango’s” saw the abolition of the Museum, Libraries and Archive council by 2012; with the Culture Minister considering a review of the role and remit of English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.. The DCMS is also heading for major redundancies () - and more recently we’ve seen potential plans for the hiving off of nature reserves to private management. There have also been increased calls by the government for museum funding to be funded through philanthropy – along with Cameron’s wider call for a volunteering ethos as part of his “Big Society” idea (if we can call it an ‘idea’).

In many ways there is relatively little which is particularly controversial- if there are going to be spending cuts (and I’ll skip the whole cuts v tax rise debate) then I have no problem with the arts and heritage taking some of the pain; equally, I have no problem with people giving up their time to help museums (let’s face it, outside the nationals and major regional museums, most museums rely on huge amounts of volunteer support already). I’m equally relaxed with wealthy people giving museums huge bags of filthy lucre.

I don’t particularly want to get drawn into some of the wider discussions about the importance of museum and heritage in general – not surprisingly, as a professional archaeologist, I am of the opinion that these things are generally a ‘good thing’ and should be encouraged and promoted. I have very little sympathy for the more instrumentalist view of heritage (i.e it's not the intrinsic value of heritage itself that counts but the wider impact it can have on society - such as engagement with the National Curriculum, promotion of literacy/numeracy, as well as ‘softer’ functions, such as promoting social cohesion; and most importantly heritage as a creator of wealth) – although I’ve not been above seizing the instrumentalist agenda when it comes to writing proposals for grants and funding for my own work. What currently gets my goat is that in a fairly typical case of doublethink, the new government is busy promoting British heritage as a source of income and prosperity through its intimate links with the tourism industry, whilst simultaneously hacking at the roots of the sector in other ways.

If the queues outside the National Railway Museum, just round the corner from me, are anything to go by, then the national museums aren’t going to have too much problem surviving. They have the internationally important collections and high profiles which will make it relatively easy for them to attract personal and commercial sponsorship, and have the high visitor numbers that will make it possible for then to weather minor drops in footfall. However, it’s the smaller, local museums that are more likely to suffer from attacks on the support infrastructure. As I noted above, they already rely heavily on volunteers to support them. Whilst there is undoubtedly much to criticise about the MLA, they do provide some of the professional expertise (security, collections management, conservation, interpretation) that smaller museums don’t have on tap. On a purely personal level, it is visiting local museums as a child that triggered by interest in the past (a brief roll of honour would have to include Reading Museum; the Museum of English Rural Life; Deal Maritime and Local History Museum amongst many others). If the government are really committed to an instrumental heritage agenda and promoting tourism, it would be good to see more commitment to supporting these kind of local institutions, as these, as much as the nationals, have potential for feeding the tourism industry. It's worrying,although not surprising, to see a complete lack of the 'joined-up thinking' that governments of all political stripes are so keen on connected to this issue. Sadly, its going to be the local and small museums that have less capacity and less ability to weather financial storms that are going to suffer (and don't even get me started on the way the HLF has been raided to support the Olympics.....)

Folk and Industry

I’ m looking forward to reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music. As the review in today’s Guardian notes, the historiography of the British folk revival has been relatively limited (although in addition to the few examples noted in the review, there is also Georgina Boyes’ Imagined Village and the BBC 4 series from a few years ago Folk Britannia. It’s clear that Young’s project is to draw out the pastoral neo-Romantic aspect to the folk revival- with its origins in the folk collectors (Vaughan-Williams, Cecil Sharpe etc) of the late 19th and early 20th century through to the 1960s trad folk and ‘hippy’ revivals through into the pastoral noodlings of Kate Bush and potentially even Goldfrapps’ relatively recent excursion into LSD folk. This is clearly a strong line of inheritance, with the rural idyll closely tied into a British radical anti-industrial political tradition which can be traced from William Morris to the modern Green movement. British (particularly English) folk music is often unfairly decried for its rose-tinted view of a rural past (have a listen to Show of Hands’s Country Life or Imagined Village’s Hard Times of Old England as an impassioned rejoinder to this).

What I suspect Young’s book will not bring out (and as ever, it might have been a good idea if I’d actually read it before writing this), is the strong tradition of folk music derived from urban and industrial contexts. Traditional music was obviously most heavily embedded in the working culture of maritime world (shanties etc), but also other industries gave birth to rich traditions of song and dance. For example, the coalfields of the North-East developed and refined an existing tradition of long-sword dancing and saw an outpouring of vernacular songwriting and poetry. These alternative threads have also long been closely entwined in the folk revival. Figures such as Ewan McColl early identified the close link between folk song and the industrial working class, and collected and popularized many traditional songs about working life. He, along with Charles Parker, was also responsible for the creation of the Radio Ballads, a series of radio documentaries about industrial and other communities that integrated interviews and oral history with new music written in a traditional idiom. This industrial dimension to the current folk tradition is an important one. In recent years there’s been a new set of Radio Ballads written, and bands, such as Chumbawamba, who have come from very different musical backgrounds have embraced this aspect of the tradition.

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

It's one hundred years since the first performance of Vaughan William's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. This has become part of the canon of British (or should that be English) popular classics (voted number 3 in its Hall of Fame by Classic FM listeners). An interesting article in last weekends Guardian contextualises the piece. What I think the article brings out is the role classical music played in the Neo-Romantic project. For me, the movement really flowers in the post-WWI period, as a direct reaction to the slaughter in Flanders and the twin perceived threats of fascism and communism. One of its key characteristics is the engagement in a metaphorical archaeology, digging into the past for powerful images and juxtaposing them, often anachronistically, with a more modern symbolic repertoire or stylistic techniques. A good example of this is Eric Ravilious' series of pictures of chalk hill figures seen from or next to railways. The Guardian article shows how in the first decade of the 20th century a series of British composers were carrying out musical antiquarianism. They were not only rescuing the rich tradition of Tudor church music (Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Taverner, Dowland), but also refashioning and using it, along side folk song, in new compositions. I find it interesting that most of the traditional narratives about the rise of Neo-Romanticism tend to sideline music focusing mainly on visual arts and to a lesser extent literature.

The Making of the British Landscape

I'm now going to do that most difficult and irresponsible of things, comment on a book I haven't read. Once can't help but think of home-county vicars getting outraged by alleged smut on BBC drama series they haven't actually seen, but what the hell, you only live once. Francis Pryor's Making of the British Landscape was reviewed in The Guardian last week. As the review notes, the title is a riff on Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape; I'd be interested to find out how much it really is truely British in scope (don't worry I promise I'll read it to find out). Raeding between the lines it clearly takes a much longer perspective than Hoskins. The latter's work barely grazed prehistory, whereas Pryor made his name as a prehistorian work on the important site at Flag Fen. Pryor's previous popular archaeological publications have always been far stronger in his home territory of the pre-Roman world and noticeably weeker once he hits the first millennium AD. This is by the by however; what has piqued by need to comment on this blog is the fact that according to the reviewer

He worries that landscape history is on the cusp of retreating entirely into academia, taking its findings and its insights with it. As a result, ordinary people – the kind who tramp the footpaths of Britain at the weekend for no other reason than they love to – will be thrown back on to a fuzzy subjectivism untethered to real knowledge.

Certainly, Hoskin's book was one of the few academic volumes that was both accessible and made a break through into the wider public perception and indeed made a television series based on his book. However, the high point of its popularity was probably the 1960s and 1970s and Hoskin's is no longer any kind of household name, and inevitably the tide of new research and discoveries made in the half-century since its initial publication have rendered its modern importance primarily historiographical. Nonetheless, I'm not sure I see landscape history 'retreating into academia', if anything its hard to go to National Park Visitor's centre, National Trust shop or Tourist Information Centre without being able to pick up dozens of pamphlets and leaflets about walks packed with information about the landscape through which they pass.

I wonder if Pryor is instead worried about the decrease in university extra-mural teaching. The popularising of Hoskin's work coincide with a highpoint in extra-mural/workers eduational/evening classes; he himself I believe was very involved in this kind of outreach. Much local research (parochial in the best sense)was carried out by groups which had their origin in such groups. Undoubtedly there has been a massive retreat in this kind of non-vocational adult education, due to recent government's heavily instrumental approach to adult learning, i.e. if it won't help you get a job its not worth funding. This has seen over the last ten years far fewer universities offering extra-mural learning, whilst the rise of educational bureaucracy (such as the joys of Aims, Objectives and Learning Outcomes) has meant that there are far fewer individuals willing to tackle all the paperwork required to offer this kind of learning experience. This has been a real tragedy.

However, I think, that limiting our views of the relationship between academic and popular archaeology to the world of evening classes is wrong. At the same time that there has been a decline in evening classes we've seen a massive rise in 'community' heritage projects mainly funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund; just taking my own area as an example, the Northumberlan National Park has its Coquetdale Community Archaeology project, the North Pennines AONB has just launched a new community archaeology initiative called Altogether Archaeology and there was a major joint project on recording prehistoric rock art run out of Durham and Northumberland county councils. All these projects have been fundamentally based on a large-scale community involvement, and have resulted in a large number of enthusiastic individuals in the region with a commitment to and good understanding of, archaeology in the landscape. Maybe things aren't quite as gloomy as Pryor suggests

Blackbeard's Tea Party

I had the rare opportunity of an evening out last night and headed down to Fibbers (one of York’s most palatial and salubrious night spots) to see Blackbeard’s Tea Party. Anyone who lives in York will probably have seen them busking in town; but this was one of the first chances to see them headlining– also to see them wired up rather than entirely acoustic. After a couple of support act (some drumming gubbins and a bloke and a guitar) they hit the ground running with British Man of War. One of the great things was that this was a proper gig with a proper atmosphere. Much as I like folk music, occasionally the atmosphere can be a bit ‘Sunday school teaparty’ – I remember once being told off for talking during a Dhol Foundation gig at the Beverley Folk Festival- apparently I should have been sitting down quietly. Anyhoo, it was their usual mix of songs and tunes (often with a nautical theme) with electric guitar and bass adding a bit of oomph (as did the sousaphone). Highlights for me were Rolling Down the River and I Can Hew. All in all, a good night out – looking at their MySpace page they appear to be putting in an appearance at the Beverley Folk Festival this year and they’ve already been played on the BBC2 Folk programme with Mike Harding. Now if Fibbers can only do something about the price of their beer….
(In the interests of full disclosure I should say that Laura from BBTP is my fiddle teacher )