English Folk Revival

The English folk revival refers to two waves of activity: a first revival in the early twentieth century, led by collectors like Cecil Sharp who transcribed thousands of rural songs into print, and a second revival in the 1950s and 60s, in which singers like Ewan MacColl, Martin Carthy and the Watersons performed those songs in folk clubs across England. The repertoire centres on the Child Ballads catalogue and English regional songs. A third strand, folk-rock, emerged with Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief (1969), which electrified traditional material with kit drums, bass and electric guitar.

Cecil Sharp's early-twentieth-century song-collecting fieldwork in Somerset and the Appalachians produced the foundational archive (English Folk Song Society, 1898; English Folk Dance Society, 1911 — later merged as the EFDSS). The second-wave folk clubs of the 1950s and 60s, in particular Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Singers Club in London, set the performance template. Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle and the Albion Country Band built folk-rock; later figures like June Tabor, Eliza Carthy and the Watersons family extended the tradition into the present.

Listen for the modal melodies — many English folk tunes use Dorian, Mixolydian or Aeolian modes rather than major or minor, producing the slightly archaic harmonic flavour. Vocal style in the second revival favours straight, unornamented delivery in the style of Ewan MacColl, though traditional singers from the Copper Family and other source-singer lineages used more sustained-note phrasing. Folk-rock arrangements add drums and electric guitars but typically keep the modal melodies intact.

Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief (1969) is the canonical folk-rock entry. For traditional revival singing, Martin Carthy's Crown of Horn (1976) and the Watersons' Frost and Fire (1965) cover the acoustic side.

Cecil Sharp collected nearly 5,000 English folk songs in the first quarter of the twentieth century — without his work most of the second-revival repertoire would not have existed in printed form, and the entire English folk revival of the 1960s is in that sense an indirect consequence of Edwardian-era fieldwork.