ABSTRACT
Throwing matters forward almost a half century, by the outbreak of war in 1939 both the tenor and trajectory of the revival had altered dramatically from Sharp’s dichotomy of the ‘real’. With the seemingly unstoppable onward march of mass movements and their accompanying ideologies, a philosophical split had taken place between folk music revivalists. Via the split, the adoption of folk song and dance traditions as political factotums helped sever one side from the other. Yet what both of these two opposing yet connected schools of thought failed to recognise were insights from another related discipline: that of social anthropology. The object world of agricultural misery, stark rural poverty and back-breaking toil was either stylised or completely ignored for the sake of nostalgic images of village greens, hay wains and forgotten worthies encased in mostly nationalist rather than folkloric narratives. The politically motivated also jumped on the mythic countryside bandwagon, in the process turning such aesthetic notions into quasi-political thought.
