ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain put aside the ballad as a category separate from other songs. Turning away from texts altogether, such scholars as Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson, and Cecil Sharp collected and studied popular tunes connected with both songs and dances, seeing this music as a valuable and threatened national inheritance. More recently, British scholars have turned Marxist theory to this wider subject of folk music, some of them condemning on ideological grounds the entire enterprise of folksong study from Addison and Percy through Sharp. Michael Pickering’s recommendation here for “a social and historical understanding” of popular “song and music” develops out of this intellectual context. He rejects a “generalized category of the folk,” “romantic generalizations,” and “ideological notions of eternal verities” and urges the historicizing of “the notion of folksong itself.” At the same time, Pickering argues, like Wilgus, for the study of particular songs in history, emphasizing in his approach to the songs their community function and the material conditions of their production and consumption. These interrelationships are set within a model of social organization as class opposition. Seeing tradition in pointedly unromantic terms, Pickering looks at the song to ask “who is involved in what and on what basis at any one time and in any one place.” An influential harbinger of Pickering’s emphasis on class politics is A.L. Lloyd’s Folk Song in England (New York: International Publishers, 1967; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967). For a survey of the discussion of context in American folklore scholarship, see Dan Ben-Amos, “‘Context’ in Context,” Western Folklore, 52 (1993), 209–26.
