British folk rock
British folk rock is a form of folk rock which developed in the United Kingdom from the mid 1960s, and was at its most significant in the 1970s. Though the merging of folk and rock music came from several sources, it is widely regarded that the success of "The House of the Rising Sun" by British band the Animals in 1964 was a catalyst, prompting Bob Dylan to "go electric", in which, like the Animals, he brought folk and rock music together, from which other musicians followed. In the same year, the Beatles began incorporating overt folk influences into their music, most noticeably on their Beatles for Sale album. The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, in turn, influenced the American band the Byrds, who released their recording of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in April 1965, setting off the mid-1960s American folk rock movement. A number of British groups, usually those associated with the British folk revival, moved into folk rock in the mid-1960s, including the Strawbs, Pentangle, and Fairport Convention.
British folk rock was taken up and developed in the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, to produce Celtic rock and its derivatives, and has been influential in countries with close cultural connections to Britain. It gave rise to the genre of folk punk. By the 1980s the genre was in steep decline in popularity, but survived and revived in significance, partly merging with the rock music and folk music cultures from which it originated. Some commentators have found a distinction in some British folk rock, where the musicians are playing traditional folk music with electric instruments rather than merging rock and folk music, and they distinguish this form of playing by calling it "electric folk".
History
Origins
Though the merging of folk and rock music came from several sources, it is widely regarded that the success of "The House of the Rising Sun" by British band the Animals in 1964 was a catalyst, prompting Bob Dylan to go electric. In the same year, the Beatles began incorporating overt folk influences into their music, most noticeably on the song "I'm a Loser" from their Beatles for Sale album. The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, in turn, influenced the Californian band the Byrds, who began playing folk-influenced material and Bob Dylan compositions with rock instrumentation. The Byrds' recording of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" was released in April 1965 and reached #1 on the U.S. and UK singles charts, setting off the mid-1960s folk rock movement. The Beatles' late 1965 album, Rubber Soul, contained a number of songs influenced by the American folk rock boom, such as "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone". During this period, a number of electric bands began to play rock versions of folk songs and folk musicians used electric musical instruments to play their own songs, including Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965.Folk rock became an important genre among emerging English bands, particularly those in the London club scene towards the end of the 1960s. The skiffle movement, to which many English musicians, including the Beatles, owed their origins as performers, meant that they were already familiar with American folk music As they emulated the guitar and drum based format that had crystallised as the norm for rock music, these groups often turned to American folk and folk rock as the focus of their sound and inspiration. Among these groups from 1967 were Fairport Convention, who had enjoyed some modest mainstream success with three albums of material that was largely American in origin or style, before a radical change of direction in 1969 with their album Liege & Lief, which came out of the encounter between American inspired folk rock and the products of the English folk revival.
The first English folk music revival had seen a huge effort to record and archive traditional English music by figures such as Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second revival in the period after the Second World War, built on this work and followed a similar movement in America, to which it was connected by individuals like Alan Lomax, who had fled to England in the era of McCarthyism. Like the American revival, it was often overtly left wing in its politics, but, led by such figures as Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd from the early 1950s, it also attempted to produce a distinctively English music that was an alternative to the American dominance of popular culture, which was, as they saw it, displacing the traditional music of an increasingly urbanised and industrialised working class. Most important among their responses were the foundation of folk clubs in major towns, starting with London where MacColl began the Ballads and Blues Club in 1953. These clubs were usually urban in location, but the songs sung in them often hearkened back to a rural pre-industrial past. In many ways this was the adoption of abandoned popular music by the middle classes. By the mid-1960s there were probably over 300 folk clubs in Britain, providing an important circuit for acts that performed traditional songs and tunes acoustically, where they could sustain a living by playing to a small but committed audience. This meant that there were, by the later 1960s, a group of performers with musical skill and knowledge of a wide variety of traditional songs and tunes.
A number of groups who were part of the folk revival experimented with electrification in the mid-1960s. These included the unrecorded efforts of Sweeney's Men from Ireland, the jazz folk group Pentangle, who moved from purely acoustic instrumentation to introducing electric guitar on their later albums, Eclection, who released one album in 1968, and the Strawbs who developed from a bluegrass band into a "progressive Byrds" band by 1967. However, none provided a sustained or much emulated effort in this direction. Also products of the folk club circuit were Sandy Denny who joined Fairport Convention as a singer in 1968 and Dave Swarbrick, a fiddle player and session musician who reacted positively to the electric music he encountered while working with Fairport in 1969. The result was an extended interpretation of the song "A Sailor's Life", which was released on their album Unhalfbricking. This encounter sparked the interest of Ashley Hutchings who began research in the English Folk Dance and Song Society's library; the result was the band's seminal Liege & Lief which combined traditional songs and tunes with some written by members of the band in a similar style, all played on a combination of electric instruments including Swarbrick's amplified fiddle, setting the template for British folk rock.
Heyday 1969–76
The rapid expansion of British folk rock that followed in the wake of Liege & Lief in the 1970s came mainly from three sources. First were existing folk performers who now 'electrified', including Mr. Fox, formed around the acoustic duo Bob and Carole Pegg, and Pentangle, who having previously recorded largely without electrification, produced a fourth album of entirely traditional material, Cruel Sister, in 1970, performed very much in the British folk rock mould. Similarly, Swarbrick's former playing partner, Martin Carthy, joined Steeleye Span in 1971 to the astonishment of many in the folk music world. Five Hand Reel, a band formed out of the remnants of Spencer's Feat, proved to be one of the more successful and influential folk rock bands. Releasing four albums with Topic/RCA records, they were popular in Europe, where they gave most of their performances. Unlike the 'English' genre of folk tunes prevalent in the other popular bands, Five Hand Reel performed Scots and Irish songs and won Melody Makers "Folk Album of the Year" in 1975.Second were groupings created directly by the members or former members of Fairport Convention, which can be seen as the nexus from which a family of organisations or performers emerged. Sandy Denny's short-lived group Fotheringay was one of these and Steeleye Span was another, the latter formed as a traditionally focussed, but essentially electric outfit, by Ashley Hutchings after his departure from Fairport in late 1969. He left Steeleye Span after three albums and eventually formed the Albion Country Band, later the Albion Band, which broke up in 2002. The Albion Band in turn spawned one of the most musically talented British folk rock groups of the 1980s Home Service, whose third album Alright Jack is often seen as representing another artistic highpoint for the genre.
A much smaller group of English bands were formed in emulation of existing folk rock bands. Most often the model seems to have been Steeleye Span, as it was for the Cambridge group Spriguns of Tolgus, the Northumbrian band Hedgehog Pie and the Oyster Band, who started as the unpromising Fiddler's Dram in 1978. Fiddler's Dram were often dismissed as "one hit wonders" for their single "Day Trip to Bangor", which peaked at no 3 in the UK and for their clear status as "Steeleye Span soundalikes". What was remarkable is that they proved to have a singer-songwriter of genuine talent in Cathy Lesurf, and after she had left for the Albion Band in 1980 the remaining members regrouped as the Oyster Band, an increasingly heavy and politically aware folk rock unit who produced some of the best work in the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, merging into the developing folk punk and independent scenes.
Decline and survival 1977–85
For a time electric folk threatened to break through to the mainstream, peaking in the early-to-mid-1970s when Steeleye Span had a Christmas Top 20 hit single in 1973 and another Top 5 hit in 1975. The album of the same name was their most commercially successful, reaching no. 5 in the UK album chart in the same year. By comparison Fairport Convention released few singles and made very little impact on the British charts, although their albums sold well in the early 1970s. Liege & Lief reached no. 17 in 1969 and a later album, Angel Delight made the Top 10 in 1971. Most of their career, from that point until they initially disbanded in 1979, was one of declining profile and sales.The same was generally true of other electric folk outfits. The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time to either abandon the genre or fight a losing struggle for survival. The reason is often said to be the rise of punk rock, which reached a peak in 1977. It changed the ethos of popular music, overturning certainties about musicianship and songwriting and had no greater target than the old fashioned folk musicians of the preceding generation. All popular music trends have a generational problem as their audiences grow and might not be replaced, but for folk rock the discontinuity was very acute. One result was a further hybridisation with the development of folk punk among younger acts in the later 1970s, some of which, like the Pogues and The Levellers, achieved some mainstream success. The early 1980s were the nadir of electric folk, when, in contrast to the mid-1970s only the Albion Band and the Oysterband remained as major exponents of the genre and this was perhaps their least productive period, although in part, at least, this was due to lack of major record company interest in the genre. Folk-rock has never been a major revenue earner for record companies, even in its 1970s heyday. As a consequence of this lack of interest the three Home Service albums released between 1984 and 1986 came out on three different independent labels, which further dented their commercial prospects.