History is bunk. That’s one of the slogans put forward by the ruler of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Nothing of the past, at least not before the coming of Henry Ford and his motorcars, has any value.
In a very roundabout way, I was reminded of this quote through my current reading, the (so far) brilliant, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. It’s a wonderfully researched, thought-provoking journey through British folk and folk-inspired music from the late 19th century onwards, from Vaughan William and Gustav Holst to Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, and beyond—and I’m barely a third of the way through it. Electric Eden was first published in 2010 and has sat on my bookshelf, practically untouched, since not long after. But like a meme doing the rounds at the moment says, bookshelves are better thought of as wine cellars than guilt-ridden to-read piles—you pick out the right book for the right moment, even if it means leaving it to mature for a few years. And with my current work-in-progress (a book on the history of Birmingham’s music) starting with early folk music and industrial ballads, I’ve got far more from coming to Electric Eden now than I could have done at any time in the 12 or so years it has waited patiently on bookshelves in various rooms of various flats and houses. A key theme I’ve taken from it so far is that Britain does have its own indigenous music. It stretches back centuries and links us, however obscurely, to our pre-Christian pagan past. It’s haunting and unusual, and it sounds like almost nothing in contemporary music. It’s also very, very uncool. One of the reasons for this is that, post-2020, we—the British—are in the process of re-examining the Empire. This clearly needs to be done, but like any kind of reaction in the social-media age, the more extreme, least nuanced voices have become the most amplified. In this specific instance, this can make it feel on the one hand like Britain/England has nothing to apologise for and anyone who thinks we do is a hateful leftie wokemonger. On the other hand, though, it can make it feel like everything that happened during the Empire’s existence (and before) is tainted by it. Nothing good happened back then. Nothing was invented, only stolen. British history is bunk and every white British person should be thoroughly ashamed of their murderous, culture-less nation. In this context, trying to make a case for British folk music, the stuff that existed before blues and rock’n’roll were imported from America, has to be done very carefully, with lots of acknowledgement of the harm the British Empire caused during its 400-plus year existence. Also, because we live in a culture where the absolute majority of popular music can be traced, however obscurely, back to the black American jazz and blues music of the late 19th and early 20th century, the idea that not only did Britain have a musical tradition before that but that said tradition also still has value, that it can connect us to the roots/history/culture of this island, and that learning about it and celebrating it would be beneficial in finding a pre-20th century British culture that we can all freely share in without self-flagellation, seems bizarre, if not downright unhinged. I disagree with the band Sea Power (formerly British Sea Power), who dropped the ‘British’ because they felt the very word had become tainted with post-Brexit racism. My argument is that by shying away from being British (which is what you are if you’re born here), you let the racists and the xenophobes win. You cede the ground, the stuff that really matters, for the sake of clambering up onto some Twitter-fuelled moral high ground (I refuse to call it X). In other words, Britain, and yes, even England, has a fascinating folk culture that may well involve maypoles and may well have happened at the same time as some appalling crimes overseas. But nevertheless, it deserves to be venerated as much as the enriching parts of other cultures that have become more recently been woven into the British fabric. Not all of this island’s history is innately evil, or bunk. One of the most interesting things I’ve gained from Electric Eden so far is that when, in the 1950s, the likes of Marxist singer Ewan MacColl tried to keep British folk music pure by encouraging artists to perform only songs from the area they were from or were familiar with (i.e. not sing songs from other cultures because it would be what we’d now call appropriation), it ultimately backfired because it came across as regressive and exclusive—exactly the kind of attitude that MacColl et al had been rebelling against in the first place (folk music having become a largely middle-class preserve during the early 20th century). For folk music to remain relevant and to progress, it had to merge with other things that emerging artists were interested in. I see a vague parallel with the militant approach to cultural appropriation today. Yes, there have been and still are times when things are unacceptably stolen without the correct credit, but art will always tend towards cross-pollination. That doesn’t mean that everything should become one dull mass; there can still be purist examples, but you cannot keep everything separate in the quest for cultural or ideological purity. That, I would argue, is a far more dangerous path. This all sounds a bit vague, but my allotted blog-writing time for this week is over. I hope I’ve got across the tightrope of making a very quick introductory case for British/English folk history. See you next week for more crazy escapades!
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AuthorI'm a writer and editor from Birmingham. Nothing fancy about that! Archives
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