One day you wake up and find that your
minority cult has mushroomed. It may be your politics, or your anti-
politics, it may be a place, it may be some activity, a sport, a music. Do you rejoice at the arrival of the
millennium? No, the chances are you don’t. More likely you feel resentment, perhaps you move on further out, trek into the wilderness and restore your minority cult—until the crowd follows on.
There is an intrinsic selfishness in most enthusiasms—you may preach, spread the good word, but always there is a part of you that takes pleasure in the very condition of cliquishness. Thus, where a cult
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suddenly ceases to be a cult and turns into something more like a crusade, there is resentment. It is partly a quite understandable and justifiable pleasure in having things on the human, personal scale. Pleasure in knowing what is going on, who is who—and also in forming part of a movement or group, in which there is only rudimentary development of organisational barriers—of barriers between audience and performer, between those whose tastes tend one way and those whose tastes tend the other.
As things get bigger, the barriers go up—there is an audience to be entertained, and entertainers to do the job. And the barriers get institutionalised; you get internal segregation developing, clashes of doctrine, almost amounting at times to holy war. Where once ethnik, folknik, popnik and r ’n’ b exponents could all go to the same club, and be aware of what they have in common, now the differences come to the fore.
As the next stage of the boom comes along, the public at large starts to take note—Bob Dylan is heard on Housewives’ Choice—gets a profile in Melody Maker—The Observer starts trying to pontificate on the subject in its customary switched-on (though not plugged-in) manner. Research chemists in the laboratories of Ready Steady Go synthesize an ersatz Dylan. Folk programmes proliferate on TV ranging from the excruciating Hob Derry What-not (why don’t the Welsh Nationalists do something about it; like blowing up the studio) to the remarkably good Folk in Focus. It becomes possible to buy folk-records (some folk-records) in ordinary local record shops. If you are not running a club, you find that you cannot get in any more, and you could not afford to anyway.
The easy reaction is to reel away in horror, shouting “commercialism”, and pointing to the mass of fake-singers who are jumping on the bandwagon, and the fake-folk that is being pushed, Catch the Wind, or I’ll Never Find Another You. (N.B. I say fake-folk, not because the songs are not traditional, but because they are not honest songs.)
And there is, of course, reason in this reaction—the big money is more likely to go, for the most part, to the sweetened, smoothed-up imitators, who are moving in now, rather than to the singers who have been around so long without the bait of big money. But though this is unfair, the fringe pickings that go to the people who built up the club scene are at any rate bigger than they were.
And actually of course, the present boom is very largely not a native thing at all, but an American import. It’s the clubs, and the native scene, oddly enough, that are in a sense parasitic, profiting from the interest that spreads over from the imports. Similarly with television. That is the way it’s been for a long time, in a less extreme form. I’d hazard a guess that nine out of ten folk enthusiasts, even the most austere ethniks, had their taste for folk aroused in the first place by American songs (or by songs in American style—e.g. most CND songs). And that includes many of those who hail from a still comparatively living folk tradition. Many is the Scot or the Irishman who hardly thought of singing a Scots or Irish song until he came to England or America and had his taste aroused by American material. And the folk scene as it has existed for the last few years was predominantly composed of ex-skifflers.
The danger with an enthusiasm is that it can blind you to waht lies outside its limits. You build walls round your garden, and the walls become the garden, and it is only a flower if ti grows within the walls. So a purist might listen to Bob Dylan, say “It’s not Folk”, and ignore the truth that perhaps it’s better than much that is folk. Or he might listen to a folk-influenced pop-record, and denounce it as a corruption, dismissing the truth that it may have its own special and distinct merits. Or he may cry “entertainer” at, for example, Alex Campbell, as if this were an insult (and as if he were making a fortune out of it instead of a pittance).
The funny thing is that of all types of cultural activity, folk-music is perhaps the one least suited to this kind of cultism. An acceptable capsule definition might be “The popular music of another time and/or place, together with songs, etc., written in imitation or under the influence of this”. Even this is too narrow a definition if it is to include a number of songs rightly accepted in any club. But the point is the emphasis on other times and places is only relevant where your own contemporary tradition is dead. And this need not be so.
There are two distinct elements running like separate threads through the folk revival, since its earliest days (which I suppose one could say were some time in the 18th century—Bishop Percy, Robert Burns, etc.—revival is not perhaps the best word, but it is current). There is an antiquarian element, and a refugee element. Or, less elliptically, you may be interested primarily in preserving something that is in danger of being lost, or you may be a fugitive from some aspect of mainstream culture, finding in folk-song, or music, something that you are unable to find in the culture that you flee. And the culture you are fleeing may be high, low, pop, or the lot. And what you are after is a culture with a greater degree of relevance—and freedom; one which is not in itself clique-directed, but rather, at least in its origins, directed towards the community as a whole, not just the intellectuals or the fans; songs which are not restricted in subject, language or form in the way that pop songs are, and which are relevant, as mainstream poetry so rarely is.
The antiquarian aspect is of course important, but it is secondary. The reason it is important to preserve something is because what is preserved is in itself important, and in some way irreplaceable. And so far as the refugee aspect is concerned, what is most important about excursions into the culture of other times or places is what you bring back, and what you do with it. Otherwise it’s just escapism, and essentially sterile. It’s possible to take folk-
song in this way, and much good may it do you; sing
sea shanties in order to feel tough and identify
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with the men who made them, sing rebel songs and save yourself the trouble of rebelling, sing love songs and save yourself the effort of loving. Whereas the
purpose of a shanty is to help you keep on working, a rebel song is to get you rebelling, and a love song is typically to get her (or him) feeling sorry for you, or help you feel better if that’s no good. And the relevance of traditional songs to us is closely tied up with their original function. By which I am not trying to say that entertainment as such is out, which would obviously be absurd. But if you think primarily in terms of entertainment as a goal in itself (instead of an indication that the goal has been reached), then you’re going to miss an awful lot.
