ABSTRACT
Bert Lloyd (1908-82) brought a stimulating set of influences to the revival but they were highly subjective and contextual. Between 1945 and 1950 he was gainfully employed by the Picture Post as a journalist, but left in an act of solidarity concerning his editor Tom Hopkinson. During 1950 he was asked by the National Coal Board to run a competition to unearth mining songs for the Festival of Britain celebrations the following year. This was a seminal moment for Lloyd and he soon teamed up with like-minded individuals Ewan MacColl and Alan Lomax to dominate the folk scene for at least the remainder of the decade. However, Lloyd was primarily interested in the purveying of politically inspired historical concepts created by him about those performances. The monumental hypocrisy of Lloyd, Lomax, MacColl and Seeger was their claim on incipient realism. When MacColl decided to travel the country collecting and performing in 1956-57 he argued that his policy had worked.
