Decline and Survival
Industrial folk song overlapped with other forms of music from the late 19th century, such as Music hall and popular music and began to disappear as a genre from the mid-20th century as different forms of song provided alternatives and the decline of major industries began to undermine it. However, because of its political associations it has been revived, particularly in times of political and social upheaval such as the 1980s, when anarchist punk band Chumbawamba included several industrial work and protest songs on their English Rebel Songs 1381-1914 album (1988) and the tradition was taken up by folk artists like Billy Bragg. In the United States, arguably the most successful inheritor of the tradition is Bruce Springsteen, often focusing more on industrial decline in songs like "Youngstown" on his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad. Songs from the tradition continue to be recorded, as in the Grammy nominated Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields (2007), a two CD compilation and booklet of mining songs.
Read more about this topic: Industrial Folk Music
Famous quotes containing the words decline and, decline and/or survival:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)