Two Revivals, One Impulse

British folk music has been "revived" at least twice, and the two movements share a single conviction: that ordinary people made these songs, and that ordinary people can still sing them. The first revival ran from roughly the 1890s to the First World War, when collectors travelled into Somerset, Norfolk, Sussex and the Scottish bothies with notebooks and, later, wax cylinders. The second began in the 1950s and gathered pace through the following decade, in the upstairs rooms of pubs, in cramped folk clubs, and on records that sold in modest but stubborn numbers.

The first revival was largely a rescue operation. The second was a performance movement. Between them they changed what a folk song was thought to be, who was entitled to sing it, and how it should sound.

What the Collectors Were After

Cecil Sharp began noting down songs in Somerset in 1903, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maud Karpeles and dozens of others followed. Their aim was preservation, and their method was transcription: a tune written into a manuscript book, words taken down by hand. This had an obvious flaw. A sung tradition is a tradition of variation, in which every singer shapes a song slightly differently and no version is final. Ink freezes what the voice keeps moving.

What the collectors did capture, often brilliantly, was repertoire: ballads of murder and shipwreck, harvest and courtship songs, carols sung at the pub rather than the church. They also created the idea of the "source singer" — a Harry Cox in Norfolk, a Sam Larner in Norfolk, the Copper Family of Rottingdean, who sang unaccompanied in harmonies handed down through generations of the same family. When portable tape recorders arrived after the war, collectors could finally hold on to the ornament, the dialect and the timing that notation had flattened.

The Folk Club as a Workshop

The post-war revival organised itself around the folk club: a room, a resident compere, a floor of singers, and a paid guest on a Saturday night. The etiquette was specific and still recognisable. You listened rather than chatted. You sang one song, not four. You learned the words properly before you performed them. The club treated singing as a skill to be practised rather than a talent to be displayed, and that practical, participatory instinct is the revival's most durable legacy.

Its guiding figures — Ewan MacColl, Bert Lloyd and a network of organisers and club hosts — argued that the tradition belonged to working people and should be sung in a working voice, not a trained concert one. This produced magnificent unaccompanied singing. It also produced the "finger in the ear" caricature, a fair complaint about a style that could become a mannerism.

The Sound of the Revival

Instrumentally, the revival borrowed widely: guitar, five-string banjo, tin whistle, concertina, melodeon and fiddle, with arrangements worked out in kitchens and rehearsal rooms. Purists and experimenters tugged against each other constantly. The sharpest argument came at a festival in 1969, when a leading folk-rock group appeared with electric instruments and the room divided over whether amplification was renewal or betrayal. Both sides had a point. Plugging in brought new audiences; it also risked turning songs into backing tracks for somebody else's voice.

Out of that tension came the revival's most useful idea: that a traditional song can be arranged, reharmonised and reinterpreted without being owned. The song outlives the arrangement.

Singing It Yourself

If the revival has a practical lesson, it is that you do not need permission to start.

• Learn from recordings, not just printed books. Listen for phrasing, breath and dialect, then copy by ear until the song sits comfortably in your own accent.
• Begin unaccompanied. A song carried by the voice alone teaches you timing and confidence faster than any accompaniment.
• Join a local singaround or session. Singarounds expect songs; sessions expect tunes. Both are usually far more welcoming than newcomers fear.
• Learn one song thoroughly rather than five roughly. Repertoire is built slowly and holds better that way.
• Ask who you learned it from, and pass that on. Naming your source is the tradition's own form of credit.

Schools, county archives and local dance and song groups now run workshops and education programmes, which means the revival's teaching instincts have moved beyond the pub back room.

What the Revival Left Behind

Unresolved arguments remain: who owns a song, how much credit arrangers deserve, whether "authenticity" is a useful standard or a cage. But the achievement is straightforward and audible. Songs that were heading out of living memory are now sung every week in halls, pubs and kitchens across Britain, by people who never met the singer the collector met. The revival did not preserve folk music in aspic. It handed it back to the room, which is where it started.