The Folk Voice

Abstract

To understand the nature of the performative articulation of class within popular music, it seems appropriate to explore exactly where the valorization of working-class experience has come from. This chapter will explore the development of the British folk voice from the English folk tradition, through the urbanized music of the working-class music halls, and ultimately through to the advent of rock ‘n’ roll and popular music as we are more familiar with it. This folk voice is not, as may be surmised, a style of singing or even a particular style of music (although there may be musical motifs and styles that unite various different styles of music that utilize it), but rather a strain that has run throughout popular music in Britain for the last 200 years. It is a voice that claims to speak in the vernacular, in the everyday, a voice that articulates the concerns of the working man (and sometimes the working woman too) and acts as an authentic arena within which class preoccupations are often evident. The focus of this chapter, as with the book as a whole, is Anglocentric; however, it is not difficult to discern a similar folk voice in the popular music of the United States. Of particular significance here are the activities of archivists such as Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, collectors of American roots music that had a significant impact upon the development of American popular music from the 1960s onwards.¹ Where appropriate I will use the evolution of popular music in the States, particularly the post-depression period, to further outline the implications of the existence of the folk voice within the mass medium of popular music. However, the British strain provides us with ample material to account for the prioritization of working-class experience within popular music discourse, and that will be this chapter’s focus.