ABSTRACT
The epistemological upheaval that has shaken social sciences in the last 30 years has found in popular music studies a fertile ground for application. Being something new, popular music appeared from the beginning as a true experimental laboratory for those analytical criteria that, in other domains, had to begin by unhinging and dissolving intact and consolidated interpretative practices. Apart from the ‘thorny’ Adorno, popular music was possibly a tabula rasa, an extraordinary occasion for the building up of a new intellectual cadre within a new cultural context: a context characterized by a meditation on the concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘essence’, by the growing importance of the idea of ‘discourse’, by the relativism in which music genres were now put and by the discredit into which the ‘grand narratives’ had fallen (including musicological and ethnomusicological ones). If these were the premises, then figures like Ewan MacColl and others who had drawn up the British folk music revival were bound to become easy targets. From earlier books such as Dave Harker’s One from the Money (1980), to the most recent, Michael Brocken’s The British Folk Revival (2003), MacColl, Alan Lomax and A.L. Lloyd are described as arrogant and hypocritical leaders, authoritarian, conservative, producers of cultural mystifications and of substantial harm to the free and creative reuse of the British folk music repertoire by new generations.
