ABSTRACT
Research on England’s folk revival has, since the late 1960s, gravitated towards either nation-based or class-based interpretations of folk music’s cultural significance. For scholars of the nationalist position, the folk revivalists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras performed a service to the English people by restoring a precious musical heritage. By contrast, those who regard folk music as belonging specifically to the working-class have tended to adopt a more critical stance towards the revivalists, often regarding them as expropriators of working-class culture or as purveyors of bourgeois nationalist ideology. At their best, researchers on both side of this divide have made valuable insights into the history and significance of folk music in England, but the nature of the opposition is such that both positions are prone to dogmatism. This chapter argues that the principle of identity underpins both nation-based and class-based interpretations of folk music’s cultural significance. Although they appear to be diametrically opposed, both positions are founded on the premise that the identity of a cultural group is infused with the music that the group produces through oral tradition. Understanding and valuing traditional music outside of the epistemology of identity is a challenge to both nationalist and class-based positions in this field, but it also represents an opportunity to escape a tired debate, which does more to polarize researchers according to their a priori political convictions than it does to expand or refine knowledge of music, history and culture.
