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As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.

In order to discuss modern revival and fusion processes from a broader perspective, this chapter presents the case study of the New St. George, an American English electric folk band. The interview with band leader Jennifer Cutting adds a relativizing angle to the specific situation of a hybrid music band, such as the musical selection process, the performance situation, and the business side. As the specifically marginal situation of American English bands reveals, hybrid bands often have to work with compromises much stronger than the dominant “Celtic” scenes, which can fall back on a much broader local and global network. While thus appearing as a highly specific genre, English electric folk is nevertheless also being revealed as a highly influential genre — be it with regard to the more successful “Celtic” branch — yet also with regard to folk rock approaches in neighboring countries like Scandinavia.

A hybrid revival genre like electric folk illustrates the difficulty of a strict separation of art, folk, and popular music. This is also corroborated by a deeper analysis of the relationship between electric folk and traditional English music. This chapter starts out with a picture of traditional music as depicted by the collectors of the First Revival, Cecil Sharp in particular, whose definition was also adapted by the International Folk Music Council in 1954. Issues discussed here include: the ideal of a “pure” English folk music tradition, the separation of traditional music from popular/commercial music, the disappearance of the tradition, exclusiveness of oral transmission, the ideal of unaccompanied singing, editorial changes and notational aspects. Discussing several modern controversial perspectives on the relationship of traditional and popular music, including Dave Harker, Karl Dallas, Alan Lomax, and Simon Frith, the chapter argues for more a flexible application of the various concepts.

This chapter discusses the second folk revival, which occurred in the midcentury. Unlike the first, it has largely been studied as a music revival, but it transformed dance as well as song. Moreover, it did so with surprisingly different effects on English Country Dance on each side of the Atlantic. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, commentary on the distinct styles and trajectories of the country dance on either side of the Atlantic had become commonplace in public dance forums and within each community. The chapter examines the origins of this ironic history in the overlapping but distinct sounds, styles, repertoires, and legacies that emerged out of the differing experience of the second revival in England and the United States.

This chapter discusses memory and context in very short songs. Whenever a song is very short, the question of the failing memory of the source singer is always considered an issue. Instead of pondering the question of what is complete or not, the discussion considers singers and their milieu. One section looks at ‘re-memory’ in two Finnish ballads, while short songs in the folk revival are discussed in another section.

This chapter offers an overview of the post-1990s tarantella revitalization in Italy, particularly of the much-popularized pizzica subgenre from the Salento area, by looking at the local and national festival scene, as well as music and video production, while also exploring the increasing visibility of tarantella within Italian popular and mainstream culture. Moreover, it explores national and international scholarly debates regarding this revitalization phenomenon and situates these debates within the current scholarship on the Italian Southern Question. Finally, the chapter juxtaposes the current revival of Southern Italian folk music with the 1970s folk music revival in Italy, particularly in relation to its left-wing ideology and as a foray into changing revival dynamics at play within Italian folk revival context.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the major debates and issues about folk/roots music, and its meaning and place as a genre, identified by the collectors and authorities who both preserved the historical musical record and at the same time posed the questions of meaning and authenticity that were to become a major feature of “revivals” of both folk and blues music in later years. That such questions were important can be seen in the disappearance (from academic memory and discourse at least) of African American performers such as Florence Mills who were enormously popular in the 1930s and 1940s and yet did not easily fit the descriptions of blues or jazz performers. The chapter also addresses the causes of folk/blues revivals and attempts to place them historically before returning again to the fundamental question of definition and meaning.

This final chapter focuses on Joe Heaney's work and legacy during the folk revival in America, particularly the ways in which he became a folk hero to many of his audience members. His symbolism of 19th-century Ireland in particular is an aspect of his persona—Irish-speaking, with a deep bass voice and craggy features—that led to his rejection by some Irish Americans. These people saw him as too close to the poverty-stricken past that they had attempted to leave behind. Other audience members regarded him and his identity as representation of Ireland itself; not the Ireland of their imaginations, but the authentic Ireland that he was readily capable of presenting to them. This authenticity was drawn directly from his own living memory, but he also carefully chose the ways in which he wanted to present it in performance to Americans.

This chapter explores the field recordings, films, and photographs John Cohen made in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. It discusses Cohen’s connection to the era’s folk music revival and how his documentary work in the region represented both a break with his predecessors and a continuation of the tradition’s dominant themes. Cohen was motivated by personal desire and aesthetic interests rather than reformism or politics. Under the influence of the modern folk revival, Beat culture, Abstract Expressionism, and existentialism, Cohen created a new documentary ethos and methodology. Yet, he also presented Holcomb and southern Appalachia in a familiar manner. In his photographs, on records such as Mountain Music of Kentucky, and in his film, The High Lonesome Sound, they represented pure tradition, symbols of folk authenticity in an increasingly standardized and commercialized America. This chapter also addresses how Holcomb, and some members of his family, challenged Cohen’s vision of their culture and home, and how Holcomb himself, despite his friendship with Cohen, occasionally resisted Cohen’s attempts to represent his private life for a public audience.

This chapter introduces some of the major threads that weave together to provide the complex fabric that is the history of English Country Dance (ECD) in the twentieth century. After a review of the material conditions in the industrial city at the end of the nineteenth century, in which calls for revival echoed, the chapter moves between themes that interweave at different stages in the history, and often to different effect. The discussion moves from discourses on the body to histories of reform to the folk revival, but one theme is never far from another. Concerns voiced by Progressive reformers over dangers from and to gendered bodies cross with interests in social control and cultural amelioration. And the romantic views of peasants and the folk mix with Anglo-Saxon and white imperial ambitions to revitalize the “race.”

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

This chapter details American efforts to visit England in search of folk dance roots. These people encountered an exciting movement, but they were sometimes unwittingly the subject of disputes and sometimes appeared deliberately to aggravate the conflict. The most profound and earliest dispute involved the two people who took the lead in the revival in England, Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp. The English folk dance revival may properly be said to have begun with Mary Neal, a woman every bit as imposing and outspoken as Sharp. It was Neal's success with folk dance that reawakened his interest in dance in 1905. However, Neal's and Sharp's differences had a bearing on the history of the dance movement, most especially in the style and spirit of the dance. In both cases, Sharp would eventually proceed as the dance patriarch.

During the 1960s the music of the counterculture was transformed rapidly and repeatedly. This chapter traces these changes from the folk revival through the British invasion, Blues rock, psychedelia, etc., looking at the impact of key figures including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. It argues that the anti-modernist impulses of the early 1960s were replaced by an obsession with new technology and a corporate structure in which artists were able to hide their economic ambitions through the separation of musician and manager.

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1957 to 1958. It discusses the emergence of the Kingston Trio that energized the folk revival; folk festivals and recordings; the continued popularity of skiffle in Great Britain; magazines the covered the folk music scene, including Sing Out! and Caravan; and Alan Lomax's return to the United States after seven years of folk-song collecting across Europe. According to Greenwich Village musician Dave Van Ronk, “the last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village.” “It was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it.” What was happening in Greenwich Village was rapidly spreading around the country. Folk music, broadly defined, appeared to have a bright future, while spanning the Atlantic Ocean.

This book has explored how the meanings of folk cultural revivals in contemporary Yan'an are woven together by multiple actors and various political, economic, and social forces and initiatives. It has used the term “hyper-folk” to refer to the production and consumption of folk revival discourses and cultural practices in post-2000 Yan'an in order to highlight the distance between what is celebrated today as “Chinese folk tradition” and what was understood as exclusively peasant culture in the past. It has demonstrated how the cultural logic of late socialism converges political, social, economic, and communal forces and relations and, at the same time, makes their meanings and practices flexible and malleable to fit in various purposes and occasions. Finally, it has used “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.

Chapter 4 discusses the Slovak folk revival of the 1990s–2000s with a case study of the musical group Banda. In Slovakia, audiences continued to enjoy styles of staged folklore from the communist era, but revivalists opposed these older styles and were outspoken in rejecting them. The chapter describes how revival folklorism is part of a movement to rediscover and reimagine Slovakia that sprang up in the 1990s; revivalists wanted to expand styles of rural music-making that existed outside communist-era folklore performance. The chapter discusses the mediation of neighboring Hungary’s dance house movement in Slovakia, and outlines the historical conditions that made it challenging to sustain dance house activity. The chapter argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century, revivalists managed artistic tensions and strengthened their reform efforts by becoming skilled neoliberal actors; making the transition from revivalism to a world-music fusion style allowed the musicians of Banda to be independent creatively and economically.

This chapter delves into the musical community associated with old-time music and its beginnings within the American folk music revival of the 1950s. From the start, this was an intentional community largely urban based and focused on recreating music many of its adherents viewed as embodying a simpler time, and representing vaguely defined notions of tradition. Various influential musicians are profiled, all of who contributed to the popularity of this music especially among college aged, predominantly white individuals. These include the New Lost City Ramblers, Hollow Rock String Band, Fuzzy Mountain String Band and Highwoods String Band. The interest in this music during the revival era also inspired the first small-scale banjo builders who became important participants in this process by making instruments available at a time when the major instrument manufacturers were ignoring this phenomenon. Several of these makers are profiled and their contributions discussed: Chuck Ogsbury (Ode banjos); Art Gariepy; Kate Spencer (A.E. Smith banjos); Bart Reiter.