Industrial Folk Music - The Folk Revival

The Folk Revival

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. As a result, industrial songs tended to be seen as a threat to traditional forms of music, rather than a development from them. In the second wave of revival, which was much more influenced by progressive or labour politics and as a result tended to show a much greater interest in the lives of working people and their music. This movement was evident first in the USA where George Korson followed John Lomax's collection of the work songs of Cowboys with investigations of coal miner's songs, particularly from the Appalachians, from 1927. Despite reservations about these songs, whose authors were often known and so they did not fit into the mould of traditional music, after World War II folklorists largely accepted this music as folk song. Pete Seeger's Folkways LP American Industrial Ballads (1956) was an early survey of this kind of song. The American song collection of over 200 songs in Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax in the 1940s (not published till 1967), explored worker's song further. The work of labour historian Archie Green, which included the production of recordings of labour and work songs, provided a wider context for understanding industrial folk song within a wider field of 'labor lore'. Songs written by Seeger and Guthrie, were also important in continuing the tradition and moving it into progressive folk music. Among the most successful of these composed industrial songs was Merle Travis' Sixteen Tons, first recorded in 1946, but made probably the most commercially successful industrial song when it was a major hit for 'Tennessee' Ernie Ford in 1955.

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). A. L. Lloyd wrote in the 1965 Encyclopædia Britannica a paragraph on 'Industrial Song', part his broader entry on 'Folk Music' and his Folk Song in England (1967) concluded with a chapter titled 'Industrial Folk Song', which popularised the term. Subsequently David Harker criticised Lloyd for his romanticisation of industrial workers. The other major figure of the second British folk revival, Ewan MacColl also played a significant part in popularising British Industrial folk song, making Shuttle and Cage a 10" LP with Peggy Seeger for Topic Records in 1958 and alone an LP for Stinson in 1963 called British Industrial Folk Songs. From 1957 to 1964 probably the widest audience for British work songs was achieved through the Radio Ballads, of MacColl and Peggy Seeger, many of which focused on work, including rail workers, road building, fishing and coal mining. 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 electric folk 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.