A selective consideration of folk literature in relation to the first edition of The British Folk Revival

This chapter contains only a ‘selective’ consideration of folk literature: materials that this writer has found influential and/or problematic in the aforementioned literary sense. Some texts are drawn to the reader’s attention because they are considered, via their own contextual reliability, extremely important in relation to the social and historical trajectory of the revival. One lingering consequence of the oppositional binarism is that a great deal of folk music-related literature remains partial in two senses of the word: first, as a direct consequence of political and/or class-based prejudices only a small part of the history of people’s musical taste cultures can ever be presented via folk music ‘histories’. The dialectic materialist historical hypothesis concerned how radical change was the key component in class-based historiography. Also that ‘the law of the transformation of quality into quantity and vice versa’, a cornerstone of Marxist philosophy, little discussed in recent years yet seemingly of great importance to English communists of earlier generations.