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The History of Folk
From the name it is easy to conclude that Folk music is the music of the regular people. For centuries songs have been created, telling the tales (often of hardships) of the regular Joe. Some have become popular and have been modified for broader audiences, but most of them just became folk tunes. Some folk melodies were derived from the period’s popular dances, while others just took shape over time.
During the last days of the nineteenth century when the British population had moved mainly into the towns and cities, many traditional songs were lost or about to go extinct. A US Professor by the name of Francis Child had accumulated and released several volumes filled with English songs, but they did not attract much attention and the volumes were largely unnoticed.
All this came to an end when a man called Cecil Sharp started to tour cross country in 1899, collecting local songs, dances and melodies, everywhere he went. Not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States of America where he travelled to in 1915. He played a major role in the founding of the English Folk Song and Dance society, founded in order to preserve local customs and traditions. Sharp was not the only one to collect the Folk songs, as many followed his example to collect the tunes, dances and songs. Unfortunately it was at that time World War One broke out, and with the deaths of many people during that war the interest in the music of the people also died.
Folk would remain obscure until the latter days of the fifties, when The United Kingdom restored itself once again from the devastating effects of the Second World War. This time a man by the name of James Miller from Lancashire, who had changed his name into Ewan MacColl, took the task upon himself to make another attempt to revive the traditional folk song and dance. Being an actor who adored music, he collected and recorded traditional songs. Not only a performer, but also a skilled songwriter he created several traditional oriented songs, and together with his partner he promoted a musical in the genre, while assembling a following of like minded people.
An interest in folk music rose all across the nation, when young people caught on to it, and for a short time there was a rise in specific clubs for the genre that functioned as a stage for artists like Louis Killen and Martin Carthy. Interest in the genre came to a halt with the arrival of the Beatles.
Interest in the genre was rekindled, when a rock band called Fairport Convention took the folk genre and incorporated it into their sound. With the release of their Liege and Lief album in 1969 the first folk rock album saw the light of day and attracted a whole new generation to rediscover folk music.
The folk influences of the band came from two members: Sandy Denny, who was the singer of the band, but especially their bass player Ashley Hutchings, who researched old traditional songs and tunes. Later on Hutchings went on to found Steeleye Span, a band that played similar tunes.
After the success of Fairport Convention, others followed suit and the folk genre became mildly popular. This continued into the eighties, where popular bands kept mixing folk into their sound, translating the traditional tunes into electrical ones. The original artists from the fifties, who had kept on playing folk, became the authorities of the genre.
During the nineties, the popularity of folk music took a turn for the better once again, mainly due to the aging of the children of the ones that had revived it before. Most prominent in this was Eliza Carthy, who played the fiddle and was also a singer, but she was far from alone, there were many more like the Lakeman Brothers and Kate Rusby, and many others who had matured during the folk revival and had learned to play the genre on a higher musical level.
During that period the festivals of the genre grew explosively, providing the artists with a much larger audience than before. To this day folk influences have been incorporated into many other styles, ranging from big bands and jazz, to rock, and even the extremer version, heavy metal. A good example of that would be Skyclad, a British metal band that plays what they refer to as folk metal. They were popular during the nineties and helped greatly in spreading folk into musical areas it had not been before. To date the band still exists, but lost much of its popularity due to the departure of their singer and songwriter Martin Walkyer, but since then many extreme metal bands have risen to take over where Skyclad left off and they are gaining in popularity.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, folk has gained in popularity with help from artists like Bob Dylan and Donovan during the sixties, creating a following for the genre, which led it into the eighties where it spread out to influence practically every popular music genre.
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